The Real MacAw by Donna Andrews Page B

down at our house. The distance seemed to soften the edges and help me forget all the chores that swarmed into my mind up close. Or down to Caerphilly Creek, to listen to the water babble and check on the eagles’ nest.
    Or when time was short, as it was now, I could walk just over the hill to commune with our llamas and gaze down on the edge of my parents’ farm. Dad was letting Rose Noire use the field next to our property for her herbs, and had leased the rest of the fields to an organic farmer who was raising buffalo, belted Galloway cows, and free-range chickens. My spirits always rose when I gazed across the gently waving fields of herbs and saw the majestic bison peacefully grazing, or ambling slowly toward the creek. And it was April already, which meant that any day now we’d start seeing the buffalo calves. And surely by now some of Rose Noire’s herbs would be beginning to bloom and perfume the hillside.
    I reached the hilltop, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath.
    Then I opened my eyes, and instead of the majestic bison, I saw a pair of surveyors. One, wearing an orange safety vest and an orange hard hat, was holding up the stick while the other, in khaki with a white hard hat, was bending over and peering through the scope. The llamas, who were always fascinated by human activity, hovered nearby, two at each surveyor’s elbow. Not for the first time, I wondered if we could possibly train the llamas to deal with trespassers. Not to hurt them, of course, just to loom menacingly and spit at them a few times until they left the premises.
    I strode toward the trespassers.
    “What are you doing here?” I said, when I got close enough. I cringed when I realized how much like my mother I sounded. Then again, sounding like Mother had its uses. Both men snapped to attention.
    “You must be Ms. Harrison from corporate,” Orange Hat said.
    I wasn’t about to tell a direct lie, but it occurred to me that they might be more forthcoming if they thought I was this Ms. Harrison. So I did my best to look corporate.
    “I said, what are you doing here?” Faint accent on the “here,” as if I had expected to find them somewhere else. And I tapped my foot in irritation. I didn’t have to fake the irritation—they were trespassing.
    “We already finished surveying the condo site down by the river,” White Hat said. “We thought we’d get a head start on the golf course location.”
    “Golf course location?”
    “See that run-down old farmhouse up there?” White Hat was pointing at our house. “That’s the proposed clubhouse location.”
    I closed my eyes and counted to ten. I wasn’t sure which made me angrier, the fact that they’d just applied the word “run-down” to the house we’d spent so much money renovating, or that some corporation thought they could tear it down to build a clubhouse.
    And you couldn’t have a clubhouse without a golf course surrounding it, of course. I had no idea how large a golf course was, but I figured you’d probably need at least a hundred acres, and that meant they also had designs either on Mother and Dad’s farm behind us or Seth Early’s across the road. Maybe both. And I didn’t think either property owner would take kindly to the idea of turning those acres of rich, prime farmland into a golf course.
    “Ma’am? Are you all right?”
    I’d counted well past ten and it hadn’t helped much, so I opened my eyes and glared at the two of them.
    “Get off my property,” I said. I didn’t raise my voice, but something in my tone made the surveyors flinch, and all the llamas took a step or two back.
    “Ma’am?”
    “That run-down old farmhouse is my home, and this is my land, and I want you to get the hell off my property,” I said. “Go back and tell whoever sent you that they’re wasting your time and their money. There’s no way in hell we’re selling our land to build a golf course, and they have a lot of nerve sending someone to survey the land