Trouble in a Big Box (A Kelly O'Connell Mystery) by Judy Alter

why is that important?”
    “Because you’re an important voice for this community.”
    Contrary to traditional wisdom, Tom, flattery won’t get you anywhere.
    He couldn’t contain his excitement, so we spread the plans out on the desk that once belonged to my ex-husband and was now bare and empty—I liked it that way. Just as I feared, the grocery store sat at the center back of a very large parking lot—really huge. The parking lot was broken into areas by plantings—trees, bushes, pampas grass—anything to break up the bare concrete. Smaller stores, with head-in parking, ringed the lot in front of the grocery store. To the side of the store was a structure labeled “Storage.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Oh, refrigerated storage. We’ll disguise it with landscaping.”
    “I don’t know any groceries that have adjacent cold storage facilities.”
    His enthusiasm made him seem boyish for a minute. “That’s what so great about this, Kelly. Everything will be really fresh.” He changed the subject. “See how neat the plantings are?”
    “Yeah, they’ve really tried, Tom. But it’s still a huge parking lot.”
    “Well, look at the stores on the side—we’ve got interest from a liquor store….”
    I wanted to shout. “Oh, swell!” but I kept my mouth firmly shut.
    “Then there’s a shoe store, a local beauty salon—that should please folks, a local business, a well-known clothing chain. We’ll get others.”
    “Except for the beauty salon, they’re all national chains. What happens to the independent store owners who now operate on that property, like Otto Martin and his clock shop?”
    “That old guy? Surely you can’t be worried about him. Everything in his shop is so dusty, I bet he hasn’t sold anything for a year. Besides he threatened me.”
    “Did you know he lives behind his store and has no other property? If you force him out, he’ll be homeless.” I looked for compassion; instead I got indignation.
    “Lives behind his store? There ought to be a law against that! I bet that’s grounds to take over his building.”
    “Tom, we’re through here. Take your tacos and your beer and eat lunch somewhere else. I’m not interested in a shopping center, and I like Otto Martin a lot.”
    “Kelly, you can’t be serious. Otto Martin threatened to kill me.”
    I was proud of my resolve. “Yeah, Tom, I’m very serious. And I told Otto not to say that aloud again.”
    He rolled up the plans, put a rubber band around them, said, “Keep your damn tacos,” and fled.
    I threw all the tacos, his and mine, in a wastebasket. I had no stomach for food.
    The morning’s meeting and Tom’s plans made me want to visit my neighborhood. I drove down Magnolia to see firsthand the stores that would be affected by the development. One of the blocks he proposed to tear down had a two-level sidewalk—about halfway down the block, you had to climb an old set of concrete steps with a rickety iron pipe railing. They didn’t build things like that anymore. I’d forgotten the beauty shop where they still back-combed hair and sprayed it stiff. A small irony: my company owned that building, and the beauty operator, a woman at least in her sixties with shoe-polish black hair, paid her rent faithfully the first of every month. Next door was the new yoga studio run by the young single mother—I had come to like Tanya. Was I supposed to put those two hard-working women out on the street? And one of the last old-fashioned shoe repair shops I knew about. I guess these days shoes are disposable: you just throw them out and buy a new pair.
    Then I wandered through the neighborhood, looking at the houses—some Craftsman in good repair, other four-square Craftsman homes with beautiful gardens reaching out to the curb, a few brick homes, still other frame houses that seemed to need propping up, and a few with plywood nailed over the windows and doors. I looked at street signs and drove by one of the two elementary