Death's Half Acre by Margaret Maron Read Free Book Online

and I nudged Daddy. “Isn’t that G. Hooks Talbert?”
    He didn’t bother to follow my eyes. “Yeah. I seen him when we come in.”
    “What’s Talbert doing here, you reckon?”
    “The stump dump probably,” said Minnie. “It would affect Grayson Village, too.”
    The meeting was supposed to start at seven, but while three or four of the commissioners paid court to Talbert, there was no sign of Candace Bradshaw. At seven-fifteen, when she still hadn’t arrived, the vice chair, Thad Hamilton, called us to order. Half a lifetime ago, Thad tried to put the moves on me after I dumped his cousin. He’s porked up a bit since then, but he still looks good in a white-hair/florid-face Ted Kennedy sort of way. He first ran for the board as a Democrat, lost, changed his registration, and is now into his second term as a county commissioner. The Hamiltons were always comfortably well-off, but the family’s building supply business has made so much money these past fifteen years that there’s talk they’re going to back him for the state assembly.
    To my dismay, instead of addressing the stump dump issue first, Thad announced that they would listen to arguments for and against the planning board’s second recommendation. Hands went up all around the courtroom when he asked who wanted to speak and eleven names were put on the speaker list.
    “In accordance with our usual procedures, we’ll limit the discussion to one hour,” Thad said. “If my math is right, that means y’all each have five and a half minutes. Be warned right now though that if you try to go over that, I’ll cut you off in mid-sentence, okay?”
    The planning board’s core recommendation was for no more than fifty houses per hundred acres, the lots to be configured however the developer wished within the minimal guidelines already set. Those fifty houses could be built on third-or quarter-acre lots and the other seventy-five or eighty acres could become athletic fields or garden allotments or left natural. That was up to the builders.
    Three of the speakers would probably oppose the continuation of unmanaged growth, while the rest were from the building trades and real estate industry and would no doubt argue for the county to keep hands off their honeypot.
    Both sides were eloquent in their positions. The three who wanted the commissioners to put a few brakes on the runaway developments spoke of vanishing farms, the disappearance of open land, the pressures put on wildlife and wetlands, and the continual need for more multilane roads, schools, and hospitals, which would entail more and more bonds and higher taxes. They asked for impact fees and transfer taxes and adoption of the planning board’s recommendation for better land use, none of which they were likely to get from this particular board.
    Seven of the eight speakers for unmanaged growth shed crocodile tears for all the poor working-class people who would never be able to afford the American dream of a home of one’s own in a bucolic setting if building lots had to average two acres. Crocodile tears because all seven of those speakers were either building or selling houses that sat on a quarter-acre and started at $400,000. They spoke of jobs and the larger tax base. They also spoke of a farmer’s right to sell his land to whoever came along with the highest offer because “farmers don’t have a 401(k) to fall back on.”
    “Yeah,” said another. “And what if the farmer has only two acres and three kids. You gonna tell him he can’t give building lots to all three of his children?”
    I wanted to jump up and ask that real estate dealer to name a single Colleton County farm that consisted of only two acres, but except for some under-the-breath muttering to Minnie, I held my tongue.
    They spoke of all the paychecks they were keeping right here in the county. No mention that most of the construction crews consisted of Latinos who were sending the bulk of their paychecks home to their