Curse of the PTA (4 page)

Quotes from one of my top-ten favorite movies of all time,
The Princess Bride,
flashed through my head, and I began to feel a little less desolate. I told Gus about
tonight’s PTA meeting, about me calling for a break. How Marina and I hadn’t left
the room, so I didn’t know who was where when. How people were coming back into the
room when the gun went off. How Nick and I ran down the hall. How Nick chased what
we assumed to be the gunman. How I found Dennis. How someone had called 911. And Gus
had been there for the rest of it.

“Okay.” He wrote and wrote, then finally stopped. “Now comes the hard part. Who was
in the room with you and Marina when you heard the shot?”

“Nick and Carol Casassa,” I said promptly. “And Randy Jarvis. Tina Heller wasn’t in
the room, but she was just outside the door. Um . . .” I closed my eyes, thinking,
and gave him the name of two other PTA parents. “Those I’m sure about. Anyone else,
I can’t say.”

“Keep your eyes closed,” Gus said, “and see the room again, just before the gun went
off, when you and Marina were arguing about what’s secret and what’s not.”

“We weren’t arguing,” I said. “We were . . . talking.”

“Think about the room just before the gun went off,” he said. “You were at the table.
Marina was on the other side of it. Randy Jarvis was sitting down. Nick and Carol
were standing behind the back row of desks. Lynn Snider was talking to Rachel Helmstetter.
Do you see anyone else?”

“Whitney Heer,” I said, surprised. “I’d forgotten. Whitney and a friend of Natalie
Barnes. I don’t know her name, but I can get it.”

Gus made a satisfied noise. “Good job.”

I glowed a little. Getting praise from Gus was like getting a pat on the back from
a much older brother. After our falling-out in the spring, I hadn’t been sure our
relationship would ever return to its former solid friendship. But after a few weeks
of prickly choir practices, he’d asked, in an unusually diffident way, if I’d mind
having breakfast with him at the Green Tractor.

I’d hesitated, but had eventually agreed. The meal had started off more awkward than
a blind date between two freshly divorced people. We’d sat. Ordered. Sipped coffee
(Gus) and tea (me). Studied a menu we both knew better than our social security numbers.
It was Ruthie, owner of the Green Tractor, who’d made things right.

“Here.” She’d shoved aside our napkins and silverware and slapped new paper place
mats on top of the bright green ones we’d already had. Kid place mats, with line drawings
for coloring in with crayons. A kitty-cat and puppy-dog place mat for me, a truck
and car place mat for Gus. She’d dropped a handful of crayons on the booth’s table.
“If you two are going to act like children, I’m going to treat you that way.” She
stomped off, paused, then stomped back and surveyed us, hands on her hips. “And if
I hear any fighting over the sky-blue crayon, you’re both grounded for a month.” She
stomped off to the back of the restaurant.

I looked at the pile of crayons. “There’s not even a sky-blue one in here,” I muttered.

For some reason, that made Gus burst out laughing. Full-throat, belly-hurting laughter.
Still laughing, he stood and went behind the counter. Came back with Ruthie’s big
bowl of crayons, fished out a sky-blue crayon and handed it to me. “No more fighting.”

I’d smiled and taken the crayon. “No more,” I agreed, because it was only fair that
I take my share of the blame.

Now Gus tapped his pen to his notebook. “Any idea where Summer Lang was? No? How about
Claudia Wolff?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. But neither one of them could have been the shooter.
Both Nick and I saw that door shut, and Summer and Claudia were in the crowd that
came from the other way just a little afterward. There was no way either one of them
could have run around the building that fast.”

Gus made a noncommittal noise. “Did you see anyone else in the building tonight?”

“No. But really, anyone could have walked in.” Hope surged in me. “The building was
unlocked, right? It didn’t have to be someone at the meeting. It probably wasn’t,
right? Harry never locks the school down until the meeting is over, so anyone could
have walked in. It’s not like we have to show our ID to a security guard at the door,
or anything, to get into a PTA meeting. It could have been anyone. And the killer
ran off. Both Nick and I saw him run out the door at the end of the hallway. That’s
what Nick said, too, right?”

I was in babble mode. This happened when I was tired, or embarrassed, or uncomfortable,
or frightened. It was worst when I was a combination of all four. On I went.

“So, really, there’s no need to look at us PTA members. You should probably see if
Dennis had any enemies. Find out if he was divorced or was having an affair or . . .
or cheered for the Minnesota Vikings instead of the Packers like he should. That can
get people really riled up, you know. And you never know, maybe he’d cut someone off
in traffic and—”

Gus flipped his notebook shut. “Beth,” he said gently, “you know I won’t be investigating
this murder. The sheriff’s office will be taking over. Their forensic team will be
here first thing in the morning.”

I sighed. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. You’ve had a hard night.” He smiled. “I wish I could have seen you banging
that gavel. Did you really say you were going to whack everyone over the head with
it if they didn’t shut up?”

“What? Of course not! Who told you that?”

He chuckled, stood, and held out his hand to help me to my feet. “You look dead tired.
Get your kids and go home. If you think of anything else that might help, let me know
in the morning.”

I picked up my purse. “Gus, do you . . .” I stopped. Not wanting to say it out loud,
not wanting to make the words real.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Ask. You won’t sleep right until you do.”

Sometimes it was a pain in the hind end to know the chief of police in your town.
“Do you really think someone from the PTA killed Dennis?”

“It could have been,” Gus said. “You know I can’t tell any details, but yes, it could
have been.”

I worried the straps of my purse. Classic Gus, handing you the truth when you least
wanted it.

“Then again,” he said, “it might not have been. That’s why we have what we in law
enforcement call a murder investigation.”

I continued to toy with the straps of my purse, twisting the faux leather around and
around. “I don’t want it to be anyone in the PTA,” I said. “I really, really don’t.”

Gus slid his notebook into his pocket. “Go home. Get some sleep.” He patted my shoulder
on his way out of the room.

Slowly, I followed after him, carefully not looking in the direction of where . . .
of the ongoing investigation. The hallways, silent now except for the distant voices
of Gus and his officers, were a little creepy in their emptiness. Surely I’d been
in the school at night by myself before, but I couldn’t remember a single instance.

A voice came at me. “Mrs. Kennedy?”

I gasped and backed away fast, my purse to my chest, then saw who it was and relaxed
“Harry. You startled me.”

The janitor stepped halfway out of a doorway I’d never noticed before. Which was probably
the exact effect someone had been after when they’d painted the door the same colors
as the walls. “Sorry, ma’am. For scaring you, I mean. I just wanted to ask you something.”
When I nodded, he shuffled forward, large knobby hands at his sides. “Do they know
who done it? Who killed that guy?”

If they did, they weren’t saying. “No, I don’t think so.”

He nodded, as if that was the answer he’d been expecting. “Not like a TV show, is
it?”

It never was. “They’ll find him,” I said. “Don’t worry about that.”

“Him?” He looked up. “So they know it was a guy and not a girl?”

“Oh. Well.” Given my own disinclination for firearms, I’d awarded my entire gender
the same aversion. Which wasn’t accurate by any means. Where I’d done most of my growing
up, in northern lower Michigan, it wasn’t at all uncommon for girls to go out hunting.
And I knew a number of adult women who enjoyed target shooting. Knew a couple who
had licenses to carry concealed handguns. Had heard of one who enjoyed going to gun
shows. “I’m not sure, Harry. I suppose it could have been a woman.”

“I don’t like it,” he said. “Why did he have to be killed in the school? It’s going
to bother the kids. When Mr. Helmstetter was killed, at least that was in the parking
lot. Not in here. Not in the school.” He looked left and right, seeing the hallways,
but not seeing them.

The pain on his face was clear to see, and my slow-moving brain made a quick hard
turn and started to see things from Harry’s point of view.

Tarver Elementary was his responsibility. Its care and maintenance were his job and
his pride. And as de facto security guard, the safety of its inhabitants was also
his responsibility. This atrocity had happened on his watch, and the weight was sitting
hard on his shoulders.

Poor Harry. None of this was his fault in any way, shape, or form, yet here he was,
twisting himself into knots.

Harry reached out and rubbed an invisible speck of dirt off the wall. “Do they think
it was someone in the PTA who done it?”

“I don’t know.” And I didn’t. I didn’t want to know the killer, didn’t want to know
someone who could fire a bullet straight into the heart of a human being, didn’t want
to have attended bake sales and worked father-daughter dances and sat through committee
meetings with a murderer. “I hope not.”

He nodded. “Have a good night, Mrs. Kennedy.”

But . . . where had Claudia been? Not that she would have killed anyone, in spite
of her evil temper, of course not, but why had Gus asked about her specifically? And
Summer. Why had she been singled out?

I shook my head, doing my best to toss the ideas out of my skull. No. No one from
the PTA had killed Dennis. The idea was too silly to consider.

Ridiculous.

Beyond ridiculous.

But all the way home, while I picked up the kids, while I got them to bed, and after
I got myself into bed and covered myself with a big purring black George cat, I wondered.

Was the idea silly?

Was it?

Chapter 4

T
he morning after the murder of Dennis Halpern, I sat down at the breakfast table with
the kids.

This was such an unusual occurrence that both children stopped reading the backs of
their cereal boxes and looked at me. I wasn’t too concerned about Jenna since she
was in middle school, but Oliver’s classroom was right down the hall from where . . .
from the murder scene.

“Are you eating breakfast with us?” Oliver pushed his box of Froot Loops my way.

“She won’t want to eat that sugary stuff.” Jenna gave her box of Cheerios a shove.
“Here, Mom. You like these, don’t you?”

“Thanks, but I have an apple and a banana in my purse.”

“Are you sure that’s enough breakfast?” Oliver frowned. “My teacher says breakfast
is the most important meal of the day.”

Oliver’s fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Sullivan, was a frequent customer at my children’s
bookstore, and I’d been pleased as punch when we got the letter announcing that Oliver
would be in her classroom. With more than twenty years in teaching, she knew how to
keep kids focused, yet her natural good humor made it easy for the kids to have fun.

“Mrs. Sullivan is exactly right,” I said. “But people your age”—I reached left and
right and tapped them both on the nose—“and people my age have different nutritional
needs.” As in, they burned off food like little power plants burning coal, but in
me food transformed instantly to thigh dimples. I’d worked hard to lose weight the
last few months, and I wasn’t going to let Froot Loops be the thing that led me back
to the dark side. Chocolate, maybe. My friend Alice’s cookies, possibly. But breakfast
cereal? Not a chance.

“Is that why you don’t eat toast and jam in the morning?” Jenna slathered a knifeful
of the strawberry variety on a thick slice.

“Yup.” Her eating habits would change too, someday, but I didn’t tell her that. And
maybe I’d be wrong. Jenna, my hockey goalie–playing daughter, was as athletic as kids
came. Who knew? Maybe she’d grow up to be one of those women who stayed toned and
fit their entire lives.

“You’re doing it again,” Jenna said.

“What’s that?” I asked, smiling, my head mostly full of an adult Jenna who’d just
won the Chicago marathon.

She exchanged a look with Oliver. “She’s imagining what her grandchildren will be
like.”

Last month I’d made the tactical error of answering Jenna truthfully when she’d asked
me what I was thinking about. I’d been daydreaming about spoiling the next generation
of Kennedys by gifting them with wonderful children’s books every week. The book of
the week club, for Beth Kennedy’s grandchildren only. My daughter had been appalled.

I’m not sure if it was the thought of getting married and having babies that troubled
her or the shadowy concept that I could possibly want more children in my life. Either
way, the expression on her face had been priceless. I’d hugged her hard and told her
it was just a silly daydream and not to worry about it. Her concern had subsided,
especially after she’d told Oliver. My son’s reaction had been sheer hilarity, which
made everything easier.

Now Oliver bounced in his seat. “Fat babies in diapers with spit-up all down their
chins.”

Jenna grinned. “Babies crying so loud, it hurts your ears.”

“Babies with goofy smiles.” Oliver tried one on.

“Cute,” I said, rolling my eyes. He was, but that kind of behavior didn’t need to
be encouraged. “Finish your breakfast, please. And I have something to tell you.”

Both of them stopped, their spoons halfway to their mouths.

“Last time you had something to tell us at breakfast,” Jenna said, “was when Grandma
Emmerling had to go to the hospital.”

“And the time before that was when Mr. Helmstetter was killed,” Oliver said.

Hmm. Every once in a while, I should sit down with my children at breakfast and give
them some good news. I tried to imagine what might be newsworthy enough to rate a
breakfast-table announcement but came up dry. One more item to add to the list of
things I needed to work on.

“Something happened last night at the PTA meeting,” I said.

“Something bad?” Oliver asked, milk dripping off the side of his spoon.

I nodded. “Very bad. I’d invited a man to talk to us and he . . . he’s dead.”

“Like a heart attack or something?” Jenna asked.

“Not exactly.” I pushed away the image of Dr. Lynn kneeling over Dennis, bright red
blood splotching his shirt and spreading over her hands. “I’m afraid he was killed.”

“Whacked over the head dead?” Oliver’s face was maybe a touch pale, but his eyes sparked
with interest.

“Strangled?” Jenna asked.

“Maybe he was poisoned.” Oliver looked at his spoonful of cereal and wolfed it down,
grinning as a drop of milk ran out the corner of his mouth.

“Or maybe he was stabbed to death.”

I looked from my beautiful young daughter to my endearingly cute son. Their ghoulish
interest was natural, I supposed. They didn’t know Dennis, and they had no idea how
much sorrow would ensue from the events of last night.

“Chief Eiseley will catch the bad guy, won’t he?” Oliver asked. “Like before?”

Jenna snorted. “He only came in the end. Mom did most of the work.” She looked at
me, excitement giving her face a lively glow. “Who did it, do you know? Have you fingered
him yet?”

Fingered him? Where had she picked up that term? And her excitement was a little troubling.
A man was dead, after all.

“Yeah, Mom.” Oliver bounced in his seat. “Did you finger him? Are you going to be
in the newspapers again?”

“When you go to school today,” I told him, “there will be yellow strips of plastic
taping off the men’s restroom down the hall from your room. You know what that means,
right?”

“Sure. It means a crime was committed there.”

Ah, television. “It means you’re not to go in there. And if there are policemen or
policewomen working, you’re not to bother them. They have a job to do, and they won’t
have time to answer your questions.”

Suddenly, I had a vision of the forensics team, heads down, working through evidence
while being peppered with questions from a hundred small children. “What’s that for?”
“What you doing?” “Have you ever killed anybody?” “Have you caught the guy who did
it?” “Do you carry a gun? Can I see it?”

Those poor people. I battened down my smile and focused on Oliver. “Stay out of their
way, okay? They need to do their jobs. Leave them alone and they’ll be able to catch
the bad guy faster.”

Oliver looked at me “Won’t you be—”

There was a slight shuffle under the table. Jenna had kicked her brother, but it must
have been a message-delivered-message-received kind of kick, because he didn’t yelp.
I studied my children, trying to get inside their heads.

“Chief Eiseley,” I finally said, “is handing over the murder investigation to the
county sheriff’s office. There is no reason for me to have anything to do with this.”

Jenna kept her face still and nodded. Oliver, after watching his sister, did the same
thing.

“I’m glad you two understand,” I said. “Finish up. We leave for school in five minutes.”

I stood and went into the study to get my purse and briefcase, pleased they’d understood
so quickly that I wouldn’t be involved with this investigation, congratulating myself
on the maturity of my children.

Then I heard their giggles.

•   •   •

After I dropped Oliver off at Tarver and Jenna at the middle school, I drove through
the mid-September morning to my bookstore, the Children’s Bookshelf. Downtown Rynwood
had remained remarkably prosperous through the last few years of economic hardship,
a fact I’d puzzled over until my store manager, Lois, had laughed and pointed out
the front window.

“Look at this place,” she said. “It’s like Mayberry out there. Downtown has everything
you need. A diner, a grill, a fancy restaurant. Shoe store, department store, pharmacy,
bank, insurance agency, flower shop, newspaper. We even have a grocery store. How
many downtowns still have one of those?”

She was right. Rynwood had managed to maintain the core businesses that make a downtown
stable. But that didn’t answer the question of
why
it had stayed stable.

Sometimes I thought it was the distance between the buildings. Wide enough to allow
angle parking on both sides of the street but still close enough that it was easy
to chat with someone on the opposite sidewalk.

Or sometimes I thought the stability was due to the town’s comfortable architecture.
It was a happy mixture: two – and three-story brick buildings combined with a few
wooden clapboard buildings, combined with a couple of oddments like Randy Jarvis’s
corner gas station and convenience store covered with smooth blue fiberglass siding
that had faded to an unusual purple color. They were all connected by brick paver
sidewalks and wide flower boxes, and it somehow made one big happy downtown.

Then again, sometimes I thought it was because of the store owners. We all lived in
Rynwood, and that alone can make a huge difference to the success of a business. Plus
we were a diverse group, male and female, old and young, outlandish and staid. That,
too, was probably a factor.

But most often I tried not to think about it at all. As Marina had told me ad infinitum,
think too much and you forget to have fun. And the corollary, think too much and you’ll
find something to worry about. If I was worrying, I wasn’t having fun. If I wasn’t
having fun, my children were less likely to have fun, and I wanted them to grow up
knowing that you could be a grown-up and still go outside to play, that being an adult
wasn’t all working and paying bills. That life was there to be enjoyed.

I’d come to that not-so-profound conclusion on my last birthday. Better late than
never, Marina had said, rolling her eyes. I’d stuck my tongue out at her, which always
made her laugh, and promptly blown out all the candles on my birthday cake in one
blow.

Now, though, the magic of downtown Rynwood seemed to have dimmed. Sure, the sky was
blue and the sun was bright and the birds were singing, but the shining happiness
I’d been wallowing in the last few months had lost its luster.

I parked in the alley behind the store, as per usual, and unlocked the back door.
My normal morning chores of list making and tea brewing held no appeal. Odd, for me.
I decided what I needed was a talk with Flossie.

After relocking the back door, I slipped out the front and walked across and down
the street. Flossie Untermayer, a former professional ballet dancer who had traveled
all over the world with a Chicago-based troupe, had grown up in Rynwood, stocking
shelves and running the register at her parents’ grocery store. When she’d retired
from dancing, she’d come back to Rynwood to take over the family business, leaving
the world of dance behind forever.

I’d often wondered if there was a story behind that abrupt move, but it had happened
almost two decades before I’d moved to Rynwood, and I’d never felt comfortable asking.
And there was another thing. Though she spent a lot of time with a certain Mr. Brinkley,
she’d never married. Flossie, now eightyish and more limber than I’d ever been, was
a wise and wonderful person, but there was something about her that didn’t invite
questions into her past.

Sure, I could have asked Lois, who was a lifelong Rynwoodite, but that would have
felt disloyal. No, either I’d buck up and ask Flossie myself, or I’d just never know.

I pushed open the glass front door of Rynwood grocery—no new-fangled automatic entry
doors here—and went in search of Flossie.

A young man in his late twenties was cleaning the register checkout belts. “Morning,
Patrick.”

“Hey, Mrs. Kennedy. What’s up?” Patrick, Flossie’s great-nephew and heir apparent
to the store, smiled at me. “Did you pick up some of that hamburger yet? It’s only
on sale through the end of the week.”

“I’ll try and remember to buy some before I head home today. Is your aunt around?”

He pointed his chin toward the rear of the store. “She’s out back, doing the garbage.”

I laughed. “Haven’t been able to take that chore away from her yet?”

“Stubborn old woman,” he said. “I keep saying that I’m here to make her life easier,
and she keeps saying that if I make life too easy for her, she’ll turn into a rocking-chair-sitting,
baby-bootie-knitting old woman who just takes up space on the planet and might as
well be put out on an ice floe to die.”

“Does she even know how to knit?”

He shook his head. “She couldn’t sew on a button if her life depended on it.”

Smiling, I walked through the baking supplies aisle, cut between the meat case and
the dairy case, stepped off the cheery white-and-green linoleum tile and onto the
plain concrete that delineated the storage area, and pushed open the back door.

Flossie was not, as one might have expected, heaving piles of cardboard into the recycling
bin or tossing black garbage bags into the Dumpster. Instead, she was sitting on top
of the low retaining wall separating the store from the insurance agency next door,
face up to the blue sky, smiling.

I shut the door and walked over to sit next to her.

She didn’t look at me, just kept her gaze on the new day.

For a long moment, we sat together in silence. Enjoying the cool morning, enjoying
the companionship, enjoying life.

The moment stretched long and deep. It wasn’t until a muffler-challenged car tore
through the alley that we began to talk.

“It’s mornings like this,” Flossie said, “that make me glad I’m still alive and kicking.”

I looked at her fondly. “You say that every morning. When it’s ten below with a thirty-mile-an-hour
wind, you say that. When it’s gray and dreary and dripping rain for ten days straight,
you say that. When it’s pushing eighty degrees at eight a.m., that’s what you say.”

“And true every time.” She nodded, her short, silvery curls bobbing. “Mornings are
made for appreciation, don’t you think?”