Impervious (City of Eldrich Book 1) by Laura Kirwan

it,” Natalie said, venom in her voice.
    “Good. Based on the look on your face when you say her name, I’m betting she’s a great big pain in the ass?”
    Natalie snorted with laughter. “That’s what Matthew used to call her. He always made her come up here. Totally pissed her off.”
    “But it makes a point. Anything else I need to know about? What about lunch?”
    “The mayor will probably offer to take you out. We’d do it ourselves, but we wanted to wait until you got settled a little and Jamie’s around all day.”
    “What’s the mayor like?”
    Natalie sighed. “You want tactful or honest?”
    Meaghan raised an eyebrow. “Let me hear honest.”
    “Everyone calls him Mayor McCheese.”
    Meaghan laughed so hard she almost spit out the sip of coffee in her mouth. “Oh, hell. That’s funny. Sad but funny. So, let me guess. Oily but kind of hapless?”
    “Yup. He’s not a bad guy, just a schmoozy booster type. You know. Lots of rah-rah with the chamber of commerce but not enough spine to stand up to the council.”
    “To Emily, you mean. Natalie, if you’ve got nowhere to be right now, shut the door, sit down, and give me the dirt.”
    Natalie smiled and shut the door.
     

Chapter 12
    E mily had worked for the city for more than twenty years. She’d started out as a part-time secretary for a council member and ended up running the show. Why a city the size of Eldrich even needed professional staff for its council members was never mentioned.
    Emily built her empire with deliberation and care, and now, under the guise of separation of powers, was accountable to no one, except the council members whose egos she stroked and whose secrets she kept. She controlled the flow of information in and out of the council offices with an iron hand and tolerated no dissent. All contact between council members and the rest of the city had to go through her. Council members who balked found themselves, through some electoral alchemy they didn’t understand, serving only one term.
    “She even used city funds to buy a high-end coffee maker to keep the council members from going over to Eldrich Brew before meetings so she can keep an eye on them,” Natalie said. “She’s that much of a control freak.”
    When Matthew was city solicitor, he kept Emily in check. Her reign of terror extended only to the council members, her tiny administrative staff, and the occasional new, low-ranking city employee who made the mistake of thinking Emily was bound by the same rules as everybody else.
    Emily hated Matthew. He was impervious—that was the word Natalie used—to Emily’s machinations. And so a fragile detente emerged. Matthew talked with the council members any time he damn well pleased and Emily stayed out of his way. In return, Matthew didn’t actively lobby the council to fire her.
    Then Matthew retired and without his monolithic presence on the third floor to thwart her, Emily made her power grab. The two successive city solicitors hired following Matthew’s retirement had been terrified of her, particularly Bob, Meaghan’s immediate predecessor.
    Bob was a former partner in a large Manhattan law firm. He’d left his wife of twenty years for a gorgeous trophy wife. The trophy wife decided she wanted to make artisan goat cheese in the country and that’s how they got Bob.
    He was a good lawyer but a weak manager, with no government experience, and no match for Emily. Despite Natalie’s and Jamie’s attempts to bolster him, Emily pinned Bob squarely under her thumb.
    Jamie took the brunt of it. Despite being a young attorney, with only a few years of experience, Jamie got dumped with every project Bob feared might somehow anger Emily. Instead of protecting Jamie, Bob threw him to the council, like raw meat, then shrugged and smiled and hemmed and hawed, while Jamie was savaged for trying to do his job.
    The more local the politics were, Meaghan had learned over the years, the more brutal and dirtier the