The loss had stung, but the dinner theater – barely profitable productions put on by a local amateur group, with food prepared by Mac and April – would continue to be his life. Or so he’d thought, until a neighboring farmer had offered to lease Mac’s Linder County land and buildings. He’d offered a premium buck, almost double what Mac was making on the dinner theater.
More money than he’d been making, and all he’d had to do was move.
And he’d just heard of a roadhouse restaurant for sale in Grand Point, in neighboring Peering County.
‘Are you frickin’ nuts? Run a restaurant?’ April had said.
‘We’ve been serving food for years.’
‘That’s different, and you know it.’
‘It’s a great opportunity. I can smell it.’
‘You don’t do well with opportunity,’ she’d said, offering up the towing company, the insurance agency, the mini-golf park, the auto repair shop and the dozen other schemes they’d lost money at before they got divorced.
‘This is different. Besides, there’ll be rent money coming in from the farm.’
‘I don’t like it,’ she’d said, but had offered to go look at the Wren House with him. The place had been half-full that night. They’d learned later that half was as full as it ever got.
‘I don’t like it,’ April had said as they drove back, because her instincts were good, and it was what April always said, anyway.
‘We can do things: karaoke, theme nights, dinner theater.’
‘Have you ever given up on anything once you started obsessing on it?’
‘Let me think.’
‘Never mind.’ She’d lit a cigarette, blown smoke at the car window she hadn’t bothered to open, and said, ‘What the hell, I’m in.’ She almost always said that, too. Blonde, beautiful and blunt, she was a hell of an ex-wife.
And so, at what seemed now to have been at warp speed, they’d bought the restaurant in Grand Point the month after he lost his bid for reelection to the Linder County Board.
A niggling detail had remained: he’d had seven months left on his term as a Linder County trustee. He’d gone to the board chairman, to resign. But the board chairman had talked him out of it, saying Mac’s resignation would unnecessarily inconvenience everyone. Serve out the term, the chairman said; it’s only seven months.
Mac had stayed on the board. He’d spent his mornings clearing out of his farm and his afternoons and evenings refurbishing the restaurant he was going to reopen as the Bird’s Nest. Seven days a week he’d made the commute from Linder County to Grand Point, except sometimes when he was simply too tired to drive home. He’d joked about that at his last meetings on the Linder County Board – how he sometimes slept like a homeless busboy on a fold-away cot behind the tables in his new restaurant. It was funny, open and upfront.
One man, Ryerson Wainwright, had had to force his laugh. A more than occasional invitee, he’d been Linder County’s new State’s Attorney. Slender and middle-aged, he’d had an appreciation for fine things and had quickly demonstrated a fondness for gilt-edged, dollar-a-page official stationery; a four-thousand-dollar leather desk chair, and other extravagances that belonged nowhere on a public official’s expense report.
As head of the judiciary committee, it had been Mac’s responsibility to review the new state’s attorney’s expenditures. Since a reporter from Linder County’s largest newspaper routinely attended the meetings, Mac’s challenges to Wainwright’s excesses had been reported, along with the board’s directives that he return what he could and personally reimburse the county for what he couldn’t. Wainwright had stopped his indulgent spending, but the damage done to his political career was fatal.
Linder County, like all counties in Illinois, had a residency rule: its trustees must live within the borders of the county. To live elsewhere, while drawing even the few hundred dollars that trustees were paid for expenses, was against the law.
The more times Ryerson Wainwright heard Mac Bassett joke about having to spend yet another back-breaking night sleeping in his restaurant, the more notes he remembered to make.
It had only been in the last month of his term as a Linder County trustee that Mac had bought a cottage in Grand Point. He hadn’t moved until the day after his term on the Linder County Board ended.
Ryerson Wainwright hadn’t been in a rush. In fact, he’d probably thought it was better to wait until Mac Bassett became more entrenched in his new community. Things had developed better than Wainwright hoped.
Three months after Mac moved to his new home, the then-mayor of Grand Point had decided he needed Mac Bassett’s parking lot to widen the southernmost intersection of the town. He’d had the city attorney file a suit to seize the land. It was only coincidence, the mayor had said, that property he himself owned, a field kitty-corner from Mac’s newly reopened restaurant, would become much more marketable if it faced a widened intersection.
Mac had been outraged at the bald arrogance of the play. He’d fought back, garnering local support by petitions circulated in the Bird’s Nest. Enough people backed the new restaurateur that the city council dropped its lawsuit. Mac’s parking lot would stay intact. He’d won.
But to everyone’s surprise, except April’s, Mac Bassett wasn’t done. He’d announced he was going to run for mayor.
‘Are you frickin’ nuts?’ she’d asked. ‘We just moved here. Running for mayor will convince people you’re a lunatic.’ She’d grinned. ‘Except me, of course. I don’t need more convincing.’
‘A committee of townspeople came by today. They see me as Abraham Lincoln.’
‘He was ridiculously impulsive and struggled to run a restaurant, too?’
‘They said I’m precisely the sort of man to bring honesty to the mayor’s office.’
‘Ah, hell, I’m in,’ April had said.
Ryerson Wainwright, watching from Linder County, would have voted for Mac if he’d been allowed. He could only delight at the heightening of his target’s profile.
The election turnout was low. Mac had won, shocking himself, and shocking April. And as Mac had been about to learn, positively thrilling Ryerson Wainwright.
‘Politics ain’t beanbag,’ some ancient Chicago pol had croaked, a hundred years before. And so it went well west of there, too. Ryerson Wainwright had hardly been able to contain himself before holding a news conference: Mac Bassett had violated the conditions of his Linder County trusteeship. He’d been living in Peering County while still drawing expense pay as a Linder County trustee. As state’s attorney, Wainwright was required to send the matter to a grand jury.
Mac’s first reaction had been disbelief; surely a few nights spent sleeping in his restaurant did not constitute living in Grand Point. His second had been to hire an attorney, Jim Rogenet, who’d told him that in the spirit of the law, the charges were preposterous: the trustee expense reimbursements were barely over a hundred dollars a month; Mac had gone to the board chairman, intending to resign but had been persuaded to remain; Mac had been upfront and open about the occasional nights he’d slept in Grand Point, and that they’d been few of them.
‘Very, very few, right, Mac?’ Rogenet had asked, pressing the question.
‘My back couldn’t tolerate many nights on a folding cot.’
‘You must assemble a calendar of all the nights you spent at your home in Linder County, just in case.’
‘Just in case?’
‘Find gasoline receipts, landline telephone charges, appointments for doctors, dentists… anything in your business diary that will show your ongoing presence at your home in Linder county.’
‘You think they’re going to indict me?’
‘I think I want to be prepared.’
The grand jury had indicted Mac Bassett in April, one month after he’d been elected mayor of Grand Point, Illinois.