Curse of the PTA (22 page)

“You called?”

She dragged her fingers through her wet hair. “Ow. I guess I called a few times. Here
and at your house, too. I’m really sorry. You probably thought I was a stalker or
something. You know, like that woman who was after my dad.”

The world, which had been moving at a rapid clip complete with sounds, smells, and
textures, came to a sudden and very quiet stop. “What woman?”

“Dad—” A small noise came out of her, a tiny whimper of pain. I started to move toward
her, to offer what comfort I could, but she shook her head and stepped back. “I’m
good. It’s okay, thanks. Dad said some woman kept bugging him. He thought it was funny,
I think.”

“Bugging him about what?”

She shrugged. “He never said. Because of client confidentiality maybe? Not sure. But
I don’t think he took her very seriously. He said any woman who wore that much jewelry
wasn’t to be trusted. And then he’d laugh.” Her smile came and went so fast, I wasn’t
sure I’d even seen it.

“Did you tell the police about this woman?”

“Well, no. There wasn’t anything I could tell them, not really.” She blotted the ends
of her hair with the towel. “Do you think I should?”

“You never know what will be important in a police investigation.” Then, because that
had sounded far too Richard-like, I added, “If you want, I could talk to Chief Eiseley.
Tell him what you said and ask him if he thinks you should talk to the sheriff’s office.”

“Really? You’d do that for me?” Staci’s eyes looked moist. “After what I said?”

I handed her a plaid towel. “Here, your hair still looks wet.” Surely no one could
cry with a plaid towel on her head. “That’s nothing compared to what my kids put me
through every day.”

What might have been a sob was swallowed up by a laugh. “Ain’t that the truth. And
my mom says I’m the one who turned her hair gray, so I guess what goes around comes
around.”

I was pretty sure it had been my sister Darlene who’d been the cause of my mother’s
hair change, with some blame laid at the feet of my sister Kathy, and a little bit
at my brother Tim’s door. I’d been the quiet kid, the good kid, and I couldn’t remember
doing a thing that would have cost my parents any sleep. Well, except for the time
in high school when I snuck out to go to
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
. That might have worried them a little. And there was the time that—

“So I just wanted to say I’m sorry,” Staci said. “And I hope you’ll forgive me both
for making a scene at the visitation and for scaring the crap out of you.”

I bowed. “Lady Staci of the Yost, thou art forgiven.”

She curtsied in return. “Thank you, Lady Beth of the Kennedys. Your kindness is deep
and boundless and you set a shining example as our PTA’s president.”

I smiled. She was sweet. Misguided, deluded, and wrong, but sweet. I shooed her off
home and swore on a stack of Hunger Games books that I wouldn’t mention the incident
to a soul. But as I got into my car and started home, there was a
click
in my head. Staci had been the hang-up caller, but tonight was the first time she’d
come to talk to me in person.

Whose footsteps, then, had I heard last Saturday?

•   •   •

The next morning was Thursday, the day before the tell-your-husband-and-Gus-or-I-will
deadline I’d given Summer, and I’d spent more time than I should have wondering if
I’d done the right thing. Had I been too hard on her? Auntie May thought I hadn’t
been hard enough. Did such a thing as a happy medium really exist?

Half an hour before the store opened, I was sitting at my desk, drumming my fingers
on a stack of invoices, thinking about footsteps and dogs and gunshots and the reasons
behind murder. Sure, TV and newspapers and radio were heavy with reports of people
committing murder for horribly banal reasons, but that all seemed far removed from
Rynwood, Wisconsin. No one in my town would kill for something so trivial as a pair
of sneakers.

At least that’s what I wanted to think, and until I was proved wrong I’d continue
to think that way.

Then, before my brain could talk my hand out of it, I picked up the phone and dialed
Summer’s number. After the standard good-morning-how-are-you’s, I girded my mental
loins. “Have you had a chance to talk to your husband?” I asked. “I need to see Gus
today, and I could give him a heads-up on your situation.”

“Um, about that,” she said. “Brett’s been really busy. There hasn’t been a good time
to talk to him.”

I rested my head against the back of the chair. “Okay, but don’t forget that you promised
you’d tell him about the casino by Friday noon. That gives you the rest of today and
all tonight to find time.”

“Sure, but he’s got this big presentation at work Friday morning, and I don’t want
to bug him with anything until that’s done. He’ll be up late working on it, and I
don’t want to distract him. If this presentation goes well it could mean a big promotion.”

“Summer . . .”

“This weekend,” she said quickly. “I’ll do it this weekend. We’ll have lots of quiet
time on Sunday. His parents are taking the kids to the zoo and we’ll have all afternoon.”

I sighed. I should tell her that every day she delayed telling Brett about her trip
with Destiny would be a day filled with unnecessary anxiety. Instead, I said, “I’m
calling Gus on Monday, even if you haven’t told your husband.”

“Sunday afternoon,” Summer promised. “I’ll sit him down and tell him all about it.”

And since I wanted to believe her, I did.

“Hey, have you heard the rumors about a curse on the PTA?” she asked. “About how there’s
all these deaths, that it’s turning dangerous to be in it. That maybe it’s time to
dissolve the group, or something. Makes you wonder, you know?”

When I didn’t say anything, she gave a short giggle. “You don’t think there’s anything
to this curse thing, do you?”

“No,” I said shortly. “I don’t.” And I hung up. After I said good-bye, of course.
There’s no excuse for rudeness.

Later that morning, when I was getting a headache-by-invoice, the phone rang. Paoze’s
voice called out, “I will get it, Mrs. Kennedy,” but a moment later he appeared in
the office doorway. “It is a Dr. Jefferson. Would you like to take the call?”

I snatched up the phone. “Millie, how are you this morning?”

“As fine as caffeine can make me,” she said. “Do you have a minute?”

I shoved aside the papers, catalogs, and files on my desk and reached for pen and
paper. “All the time in the world.”

“Spoken like a good parent. Now. Oliver and I had a nice chat yesterday.”

“And?”

“And he’s a very nice and polite young man. You have good reason to be proud of your
son.”

On the days when I wasn’t worried sick about him, yes.

“Something is definitely troubling him,” she went on, “but it’s too soon to say what.”

“Oh.” I deflated. “How long do you think?”

“Beth,” she said, “this isn’t like going to the emergency room.”

“I know, it’s just . . .” But I couldn’t say what I wanted to say. It would sound
too stupid.

Millie filled in the gap. “It’s just that you’re worried about your child and you
want to fix everything and make it all better as soon as possible.”

Exactly. “A little unrealistic, I suppose.”

“But understandable,” Millie said. “You said your ex-husband hasn’t been able to get
Oliver to confide in him, correct? Is there another man that he’s close to? A grandfather
or an uncle?”

“Well,” I said slowly, “there’s a friend of the family who might help out.”

“See if you can get them together,” Millie advised. “Ask him not to force a conversation,
but to open the door for communication, if you see what I mean.”

Open the door? I’d burst it wide open with a bulldozer, if that’s what it took to
help my son.

•   •   •

The rest of the day passed uneventfully, and I spent the evening helping the kids
with homework, doing the laundry I’d put off for too long, and worrying about Oliver.
Friday morning, I opened my office e-mail and found a message from Marina. “Kyle is
the killer,” it said. “You know that tie he wore at the lecture? You should see the
rest of them. No way could an innocent man have a tie collection like that. None.”

I rolled my eyes. No way could Marina know what Kyle Burkhardt had in his closet.
None.

But the e-mail was serving as a reminder that I hadn’t done a lick of research on
scary Elsa Stinson. I fired up my new favorite research tool and got to work.

At lunchtime, Marina called. “You didn’t waste any time looking up stuff about Elsa
the Horrible, did you? Kyle’s the killer, I tell you.”

“You just like the alliteration.”

“It is fun, yes, but this time I’m right about who did it.”

“There’s a first time for everything,” I said. “And please tell me that your e-mail
about his tie collection was pure imagination?”

“Nope,” she said cheerfully.

“You went into his house?” My heart suddenly felt too big for my chest. “How?”

“Easy. I made up some business cards and rang his front doorbell. Said I was a home
organizer and that I was giving free advice on closets.”

“You did what?” I shrieked.

“Quit with the yelling, already. I was perfectly safe. Zach was waiting in the car
with a cell phone and instructions to call 911 if I didn’t come out in ten minutes.
Plus Kyle’s wife was home.”

I groaned. Her idea of perfectly safe and mine were not on the same page. Not even
in the same chapter.

“Anyway,” she said, “that’s that. I’d say no more proof is needed.”

“What if I told you Elsa Stinson was in the army and spent two tours of duty overseas
in the military police?”

“An MP? Wow, girls really can do anything, can’t they?”

“After she left the army, in which she won numerous shooting awards, she spent four
years with the Milwaukee Police Department. She wrote a book called
The Girl’s Guide to Army Life,
and now she’s a private investigator for one of the largest firms in Wisconsin.”

“Good heavens,” Marina said faintly. “How did you learn all this?”

“You wouldn’t believe what people put on Facebook.” And LinkedIn and Pinterest. Send
a friendly invitation, and bingo bango bongo, you have a new friend. I felt a little
guilty about the deception, but I doubted I’d lose sleep over it. Not much, anyway.

“Gotcha,” Marina said. “Remind me to warn my children about the dangers.”

It was too late—I’d looked up her older offspring months ago—but I’d decided to save
that conversation for another time. Like when the world froze over.

“So she knows how to handle a gun,” Marina mused. “Interesting.”

“And as a private investigator, she knows how to find people. She has all the skills
the killer has.”

“Okay, you got me there. But Kyle is a gun guy. There was one of those big gun safes
in the corner of the bedroom. And he had dead deer heads mounted all over the living
room.”

So we still had two suspects. Both had the skills and weaponry required; either one
could have killed Dennis. The what, where, when, and how questions were answered,
and we were closing in on the who part.

Which left the biggest question of all:
Why?

Chapter 16

O
liver and I huddled together against the cold of the Agnes Mephisto Memorial Ice Arena.
Huddled in a general sense, anyway. We were both sitting on the same aluminum bleacher,
on the same folded-up blanket, and our laps were covered with the same green-and-gold
Green Bay Packers blanket, but we might as well have been at opposite ends of the
arena for all the closeness I was getting from him.

I looked at my son, perched there on the far end of the blanket, and wondered what
I was doing wrong. Was this the price I was paying for the divorce? Sure, that had
happened three years ago, but maybe the full reality of the situation was finally
hitting my son. Or maybe this was a reaction to my breakup with Evan? That had been
months ago, but—

“Go! Go!” The crowd of parents, stepparents, siblings, and friends were on their feet.
Oliver and I rose with them. “Go!” A girl from Jenna’s team had broken away from the
rest of the players and was skating for all she was worth down the ice. Blades scraping
hard, head up, stick flashing left and right keeping the puck in line. Close to the
net now, she pulled her stick back and slammed a shot straight at the net.

The goalie flung herself onto the puck and stopped it cold.

“Ohh . . .” Half the crowd dropped back to their chilly seats. “Nice save!” shouted
the other half.

“Where’s Mrs. Neff?” Oliver asked. “She almost always comes to Jenna’s games.”

Marina enjoyed the rough and tumble of hockey, but even more she enjoyed what happened
after the game. What she really liked was watching girls, who twenty minutes before
had been outfitted in skates and helmets and hockey pads, come out of the locker room
dressed in purple and pink.

The contrast tickled her, and if she couldn’t attend the entire game, she tried at
least to see the last period. This Saturday, however, Marina had been obligated to
attend the college homecoming activities of her second-youngest offspring. I told
Oliver this, but he didn’t look overly interested. He didn’t even ask what homecoming
was.

My son, my son. What is wrong? Why won’t you talk to me?

I sighed, snuck an inch closer to Oliver, and tried to concentrate on the game.

This time it was the bad guys who had the puck. Number two—who, under all her equipment
had the cutest freckles and the most adorable pointed chin ever—snuck around the back
of the right defenseman and skated toward the goalie. Toward Jenna.

My darling daughter lunged toward the puck, and the freckled pixie instantly whipped
her stick the other way and slapped a shot toward the goal, sending the puck flying
through the air, right toward the exposed part of the net.

But Jenna hadn’t committed herself; her action had been a feint. Quick as a wink,
she dug her skates into the ice and pushed herself in the opposite direction, arm
outstretched, glove open . . . and caught the puck smack in the middle of her palm.

The parents around me leapt to their feet, cheering my daughter.

But I just sat there. Jenna’s first move had been a feint. A fake. A ploy. A ruse.
A gambit.

What if the murderer was doing the same thing? What if I’d been thinking about the
incident with Flossie and the dogs all wrong? What if that didn’t have anything to
do with the murder?

•   •   •

I took the kids to Sabatini’s for a victory pizza, where Jenna relived each of the
twenty-two saves she’d made, complete with NHL-style commentating and slow-motion
replays with Oliver gladly playing the part of the puck. Thanks to precedent set at
other victory pizza lunches, I’d asked the hostess to seat us in a corner, distant
from any other diners. Far better to let Jenna work off her post-game excitement in
a commercial establishment built for abuse than at home, where I’d spoil her stories
with mom-admonishments.

Back home, while Jenna was unpacking her hockey bag in the laundry room and Oliver
was out with Spot in the yard, I made the phone call. “Ready,” I said.

“Give me ten minutes,” he said.

“Ready for what?” Oliver asked as he and Spot came in the back door.

I slid my cell phone into my purse and smiled brightly. “For anything,” I said. “What
would you like to do this afternoon? Climb every mountain? Pick a pocket or two? Row,
row, row your boat?”

Usually my nonsense made him giggle. Today, though . . .

He shrugged.

A vision of the future struck me cold. If Oliver was this uncommunicative when he
had a problem at age nine, what would he be like at thirteen? Seventeen?

I shook away the image. No. It would be fine. It had to be.

Soon, the front doorbell rang. In the olden days, Jenna and Oliver had fought over
whose turn it was to answer the door. Today, no kid went flying, so I went myself.

I opened the door to see Pete Peterson and his young niece, Alison, standing on the
front porch. “Hi, Pete,” I said. “Thanks for doing this.”

“Hey, not a problem. Anything I can do, you know?”

“Hello, Alison.” I smiled at the eight-year-old standing next to him. “What have you
been doing today?”

She held up a plastic shopping bag. “Mommy and me went to the dollar store.”

“That sounds like fun. Why don’t you go inside and find Jenna; then we’ll look through
your bag together. And could you please tell Oliver that I need him? Thank you.”

Pete and I watched as she scampered inside, her dark blond curls bobbing. “She’s a
little sweetheart,” I said. He made a noncommittal guy noise, but his smile belied
his pride. I knew that Pete’s sister, Wendy, had been through a bad divorce and that
Alison rarely saw her dad. Not many men would have stepped up to become the father
figure for a young girl, especially not many single men. I was about to say so when
Oliver came up behind me.

“Hi, Mr. Peterson.”

“Oliver, you are just the man I need,” Pete said.

My son stared at him. “I am?”

“What I need is some help at my house. Some guy help.” He winked broadly. “Well, not
in the house, exactly. The garage. It needs cleaning like crazy, and I could do with
an extra pair of hands.”

Oliver pulled his hands out of his pockets and eyed them. “I’m not that strong,” he
muttered. “Or very big.”

“Ah, big is overrated,” Pete said. “I’m not what you’d call tall, and I make out okay.
And I bet you’re strong enough to move paint cans around, aren’t you?”

“Um, I think so.”

“Scraps of wood? Piles of newspapers? Boxes of nuts and bolts that don’t fit anything
I own?”

By now, Oliver was grinning. “I can do all of that.” He looked at me. “Can I, Mom?
Go with Mr. Peterson, I mean?”

I put on a frown. “Seems like you should do that in your own garage first.”

“Pleeeeeaase!” He gripped his hands tight together and held them up to me. “I’ll help
clean our garage next weekend. And I’ll be able to do a better job if I help with
Mr. Peterson’s garage first. I’ll learn how to do things.”

I looked at Pete, trying not to smile. “Well, I suppose it’ll be all right. You’re
sure he won’t get in the way?”

“Oliver?” Pete asked. “He wouldn’t know how.”

Beaming, Oliver nodded vigorously. I shooed them out, telling them to be back by six
thirty for hamburgers and hot dogs. I found Alison and my tomboy daughter at the kitchen
table, their heads together as they examined the dollar store purchases.

“This one’s all glittery,” Alison said. “And pink. I think it’s my favorite. Which
one do you like best?”

“Um . . .” Jenna sounded uncharacteristically indecisive. “I’ve never done this before.”

“Let’s see.” Alison squinted at Jenna, peered at the purchases, squinted at Jenna.
“I think this color would be good on you.” She picked up a bottle of purple fingernail
polish and held it next to my daughter’s face.

I stifled a snorting giggle. The day Jenna tried fingernail polish would be the day—

“Okay,” my daughter said.

—would be today. I stared at Alison. How had she done that?

“Mrs. Kennedy, what color do you want to try?” the pint-sized pied piper asked.

“Color? Me?” I started to back away. “Oh, sweetie, I have a number of things I have
to do this afternoon. Why don’t you and Jenna work together and I’ll view the beautiful
results.”

Alison grabbed a bottle and jumped to her feet. “This color. Here, see?” She thrust
a bottle of dark red polish at me. “You’ll look gorgeous. Just like Sandra Bullock.”

“Yeah, Mom.” Jenna grinned at me. “Just like.”

I looked from one face to the other, both of them full of youth and enthusiasm and
fun, and I felt my own face spread wide in a smile. “Well,” I said, “if you’re sure
about the Sandra Bullock thing . . .”

In answer, Alison grabbed my hand and pulled me to the table. “We’ll do Jenna first,
okay? If she doesn’t like the color, we can take it off and try again. Or maybe we
should do a bunch of different colors, just to see.”

Their happy chatter drowned out my plans for the afternoon. No laundry was going to
get done, the kitchen floor was going to remain unmopped, and the upstairs bathtub
was going to stay slightly gunky.

But I didn’t care. At all.

•   •   •

Late that night, after the dishes were washed and put away, after the card game, and
after the good-byes and the bedtime stories and the good-night kisses, I prowled around
the house, tidying and thinking.

During dinner cleanup operations, Pete had pulled me aside and told me that Oliver
had been an excellent assistant and that he’d seemed to have a good time, but that
no confidences had been forthcoming.

“Thanks for trying,” I said. Realistically, it had been too much to hope for. Some
days I wasn’t overly fond of realism.

Pete scratched his head. “There was a time or two when it seemed like he wanted to
say something. Once he asked if I could keep a secret. And when we were sweeping up
at the end, he asked if I’d ever done anything really bad.”

Fear clutched at me. What had Oliver done? “What did you tell him?”

He shrugged. “That, sure, I could keep a secret. My mom still doesn’t know how the
front window got broken that one time. And I said I’ve done a couple of sort of bad
things, but that it always helps to talk about it.”

Bless the man. I looked at him, smiling. “Sort of bad? How bad were they?”

“Now, see,” he said, “that’s where keeping secrets comes in handy.”

I’d laughed, the kids had come rushing in with two decks of cards, and the evening
had moved on. Now I stood in the family room, folding the blanket that had fallen
off the back of the couch, wondering. How could Oliver be thinking he’d done something
bad? His teacher wasn’t aware of anything. Marina didn’t know of anything. The mothers
of his friends didn’t know. His father didn’t know. I didn’t know. What could—

The ringing of the phone interrupted my circling thoughts. I picked up the handset
of the old princess phone, the family room phone, the one manufactured decades ago
when phones were still built to take physical abuse. “Kennedy residence, Beth speaking.”

There was an odd tinkling noise, a sharp intake of breath, and the single hoarse word,
“Don’t!”

The line went dead.

Slowly, mechanically, I hung up the phone.

For the next couple of hours, and once every hour after that until morning, I checked
and rechecked that the doors and windows were locked. Front door, garage door, back
door. Upstairs windows, first-floor windows, tiny basement windows. Locked solid,
every time, yet the compulsion to make sure drove me around the house, over and over
again.

A hundred times I reached out to call Gus; a hundred times I pulled back.

Monday. I’d promised Summer I’d wait until Monday. I could wait that long. After all,
even though it was still dark, it was already Sunday, with church and Sunday school
and choir and a Sunday dinner to cook and homework to oversee, and Sundays weren’t
appropriate, really, to tell Gus what needed to be said.

But maybe I needed to. Maybe it was time to tell him everything. About Flossie and
the dogs and the note and how it might be a feint and the footsteps in the alley and
Elsa and Kyle and the hang-up calls. I could tell him all that, couldn’t I?

Yes, I could. And then he’d ask, “Is there anything else?” and I’d think about Summer
and the casino and say, “No, that’s it,” and Gus would hear the lie in my voice and
press me to tell him and I’d resist but he’d keep pressing and I’d end up telling
him.

No. I’d promised. And why was I so scared, anyway? Someone had called, said “Don’t,”
and then hung up. Not exactly worthy of a police car visit, lights spinning and siren
blaring.

But still . . .

Monday. It couldn’t come soon enough.