“There’s one person who will probably apply, but a nationwide search is the only way to do things fairly and be certain we have the best candidate. Either way, it has to wait until this GrandGoods thing is settled. Now go ahead and spit out whatever it is you came here to say about it.”
Cam kept his face impassive.
“Don’t take that innocent face with me, young man. It didn’t work when you were five and it won’t work now. I’m sure you and Norah came up with something to make my life difficult during your powwow last night.”
No, the difficulty Norah presented the night before had nothing to do with his mother.
“We are not out to make your life difficult, Mom.”
“You’re going to put me in a position to play referee between you and Vick Burgess, even though I technically agree with you, because I have to be the mayor, not your mother, if I want the decision to be accepted by the public. That makes my life difficult.”
Too restless to sit, Cam stood and began moving around her office. “If Norah’s plan works, the public is going to be on our side and this isn’t going to come down to a brawl—metaphoric or otherwise—between me and Vick.”
Sandra gave a wary look. “And what exactly is her plan?”
“Garner public support for a ‘no’ vote by educating them on the true impact of big box stores.”
“And you think people will listen to her as an outsider?”
He picked up the photo of the old Hoka Theater in Oxford and put it back again. “She’s less outsider than this representative from GrandGoods. A lot of people know her through Miranda, since she’s been coming here so many years. You’ve met her. What do you think?”
“I look at her and I see her father.”
Whatever he’d expected her to say, that wasn’t it. “You know her dad?”
“By reputation. Her father was a fraternity brother of your dad’s.”
Cam jolted at that. Having lived his entire l
ife in Mississippi, he knew the whole state was one big small town, and there were seldom more than a couple of degrees of separation between people. But a connection between Norah’s dad and his own? That was…unexpected.
“What was he like?”
“Joseph Burke was a shooting star. I’ve known very few people as brilliant, driven, or unyieldingly competitive. He was the guy everybody knew on campus, partly because he was student body president, and partly because that’s just who he was. He spoke and people listened. He’s a gifted orator. Once he left Ole Miss, he went on to Harvard Law.”
Exactly the kind of man his father would envy.
“Norah’s very like him in a lot of ways.”
Cam couldn’t argue with that description, and yet he saw so much more in her than that. And judging by the tilt of his mother’s head, as if she hadn’t quite finished her thought, she saw something else too.
“I sense a ‘but’ in there.”
“But, I don’t think he’d do what she’s doing.”
“Which part? Working pro bono?”
“Working on this at all. Everything Joseph did was to get the hell out of Mississippi. He was never satisfied being a big fish in a small pond. He wanted to be a big fish in an ocean. The kind of man who wanted to save the world—and get credit for it.”
Perhaps Norah’s dad had more in common with Cam’s after all.
“From what she’s said about him, he’s been exceptionally successful at that. But Norah’s not like that.”
“No, I don’t think she is. I don’t think she’d have stayed friends with Miranda, kept coming back here all these years if she was.”
“She has no financial stake in the decision, so less reason to be biased. I think that’s in our favor.”
“She seemed pretty biased to me.”