Death of a PTA Goddess (18 page)

“Let me just give you some names right now. Do you want to see a marriage counselor, or a personal therapist?”

A phone recommendation would do me no good. “Um, a marriage counselor. The thing is, though, I’m really not sure whether Jim would . . . go for this, or what type of counselor he’d feel comfortable with. But this is . . . something of an emergency. Maybe I could stop by your office today just for a minute or two. Would that work?”

Again she hesitated, but then said, “That would be fine, Molly, if that would help you. My last appointment of the day is waiting for me now. Why don’t you come here afterward, at six p.m. We’ll work up some suggestions for you then. All right?”

Now her voice sounded so soothing that I began to suspect she thought I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Who knows? Maybe I
was
. In any case, I played along and got her office address, thanking her profusely.

I stared at my phone in its cradle. Shouldn’t my mention of her menopause group have reminded her of the question she’d supposedly needed to ask me about my cartoon?

Therapists were trained not to give their reactions and to modulate their voices. My question about Lucinda’s might have signaled her that she was all but caught, and so her only hope was to lure me to her office and make me her second victim. Yikes! On the other hand, if she was completely innocent and simply trying to help me out of a dark period in my life, I would never forgive myself for calling the cops on her . . . telling Tommy now that I had reason to suspect her, so please send police to her office to watch over me.

Inwardly cursing at myself for getting myself into this jam in the first place, I called Jim. He answered with a cheerful, “Hi, sweetie,” having Caller ID on his work phone.

“Hi. Is it still true that you’d rather join me in my investigations than try to stop me?”

He paused. “I would always rather you stopped. It’s just that, short of tying you in a chair, that hasn’t been possible.”

“Okay, so you’d rather go with me to a quickee appointment with Emily Crown than have me go by myself, right?”

“That would depend on what type of an appointment this was. What does she do? She isn’t a proctologist, is she?”

“She’s a marriage counselor.”

There was a long pause. “I think I’d rather see a proctologist. Are you trying to tell me something?”

“Not about our marriage, no. I’ll explain it all when you come pick me up. I have to be there at six p.m. tonight. Can you make that?”

“What else would I rather do on a Friday evening than go to a marriage counselor?”

The moment I got into Jim’s car to drive us to Emily’s office, Jim asked, “Okay, Molly, what are you up to?”

I flew into an explanation of Denise Goodman and the three women under extra suspicion as a result. Our discussion became heated, however, when I went on to explain about the note in my pocket and why Emily could have been the one to leave it there. As Jim pointed out, I’d neglected to tell him about that particular incident.

“You were asleep when I got home from the police station, Jim. I didn’t want to wake you, and the next morning, it slipped my mind.”

“You got a second death threat, and it
slipped your
mind
?! Maybe we do need to see a marriage counselor!” He braked a little harder than strictly necessary at the traffic light.

“Whether or not that’s the case, the idea here is for me to get a handwritten list of referrals.”

He smacked the heels of both hands on the steering wheel. “This is ridiculous! The police can just
ask
Emily for a writing sample!”

“Sure, but this way she won’t know what it’s for and won’t be disguising her handwriting.”

Jim just made a “gaa” sound and looked at me as though I were the biggest idiot in the world.

“I didn’t get us into this meeting with Emily with the intention of getting a writing sample. It just seemed like the opportunity was presenting itself to me, so I went for it.”

Jim growled, “And what are you going to do if she tries to print the referrals from her computer database? Fling her keyboard out the window?”

“I don’t know, but I told her I’d lost my reading glasses and needed her to write it down for me in large print. Besides, I doubt she’ll have information about her competitors on her database.”

Jim let out a derisive laugh. “This is not going to work, Molly! If she
is
the one who wrote you that death threat, and you go to great lengths to get her handwriting, she’s going to know what’s going on!”

“She might already know,” I mumbled, silently acknowledging Jim’s point. I could probably snatch some handwriting sample from her office when she wasn’t looking, though.

“Come again?” Jim asked through clenched teeth.

“She might be expecting me to come alone and want to get rid of me before I turn evidence over to the police that points at her.”

“
What
evidence?”

“That’s just it. I don’t have any yet, but if she is the killer, she might not realize that. Due to the fact that I called her and expressly asked her if she’d eaten at Lucinda’s.”

“Wait. You expect me to possibly have to defend you from some armed woman intent on killing you?”

He spoke with such anger that I asked, “Do you mean you
wouldn’t
defend me against a possible murderer?”

Jim said nothing, but worked the muscles in his jaw. A vein in his forehead looked primed to burst.

“She’s not going to make an attempt on my life with you there, Jim. It’d be impossible to explain how we both wound up dead in her office.”

“Not impossible. Off the top of my head, I can think of a couple possible scenarios.”

We pulled into a space in the parking lot, shut off the engine, and sat still, glowering through the windshield.

“Well, Jim. On the bright side, we’re not going to have any trouble playing the part of a squabbling couple.”

Chapter 17

Roller-Skating with Buffaloes

We were both smoldering as we entered Emily’s waiting room. In the self-righteous argument that was running through my head, I shouted to Jim: You tell me you want to help me with my investigations, then you get all huffy at me when it doesn’t go smoothly! If I had that much control over things, we wouldn’t be here at all, because Patty would never have been murdered!

Emily opened the door to her inner office.

“Hello, Molly.” She shifted her vision to Jim and, before I could introduce him, held out her hand. If she was surprised to see him, she masked it. “You must be Jim Masters. I’m Emily Crown.” They shook hands, and Emily ushered us into her small-but-pleasant office. I checked for a reachable writing sample on her desk or in her trash can, but found none.

“Thanks for seeing us,” Jim said.

“My pleasure.”

Jim and I exchanged glares as the three of us took seats in a semicircle in front of her desk. Emily had either spoken with automatic graciousness, or she was the only one of the three of us who could find any “pleasure” in this visit.

Looking smart and at ease in her gray skirt and pale yellow silk blouse, Emily crossed her legs at her ankles. “As Molly has no doubt told you, we’re going to try to identify a few issues tonight and possibly look into an appropriate referral. Molly seems to feel that she would like to see a marriage counselor. Jim, how do you feel about the idea?”

He looked at me, then back at Emily. Through a tight jaw, he answered, “Whatever she thinks is fine.”

Emily waited a moment, but as I could have told her, that was as much as Jim was going to say unprompted. “Do you think your marriage could benefit from seeing a counselor?”

He paused as if giving the question tremendous thought, and I had to bite my tongue to keep quiet. Inwardly I urged him to say either yes or no, but not to make us sit through this long silence. “If Molly thinks so, then yes.”

“Do you often find yourself deferring to your wife’s judgment in order to keep the peace?”

He gave the little half smile that always signaled he was fuming but was determined to keep a lid on his anger. “All the time.”

“Good for you, Jim. That’s exactly what keeps a lot of marriages going.” She smiled. “I read a research report—quite extensive, actually—that showed that all these communication exercises we counselors have relied on for so long—‘When you do
X
, I feel
Y
,’ or, ‘I heard you say
X
, and my reaction to that is
Y
’— are overrated. What really works is just the husband’s willingness to listen to his wife and go along with her suggestions.”

That
, I thought, was because we wives were the ones who made the suggestions, as opposed to sitting around with a tight jaw, and more often than not came up with excellent suggestions—present circumstances excepted. Generously, however, I asked, “Isn’t the same true in reverse? For the wife to go along with the husband’s suggestions?”

“Not typically. Women tend to articulate their feelings so much more naturally than men do that we’re the more natural navigators. Men are best behind the wheel, keeping things going.”

“That’s because we women can ask for directions.”

“Right, whereas the men feel that they should always know precisely how to get where they want to go.” Again, she shifted her attention to Jim. “If there were one thing about your marriage you’d want a counselor to assist you with, what would it be?”

He looked at me, and I gave him a slight nod, hoping he wouldn’t miss this opportunity to “steer” the conversation in the direction I’d preselected. He said, “I’d like her to stop always making every murder case her own personal vendetta.”

Emily raised an eyebrow and looked at me. “Do you do that?”

“I’m afraid so, but it isn’t because I have a death wish or anything. It’s just that . . . I want to help out Kelly Birch. She’s a friend of my son’s, and I don’t see how she can even begin to heal until her mother’s killer is behind bars. I mean, don’t you agree that Kelly needs that to happen?”

“Absolutely, though the police are better suited to seeing to it that someone is arrested than any of us civilians are.”

Jim snorted and nodded, but I said, largely for his benefit, “Not necessarily. For example, this case might have been long solved if the police saw fit to collect all of the outtakes that the girls recorded.”

Emily replied, “I didn’t realize that they’d lost evidence. But let’s get back to the two of you, Molly.”

“That’s okay. We’re not really seeing this as an actual session, anyway.”

She blinked, but otherwise acted as though she hadn’t heard me. “Same question I asked of Jim. If there was one thing that you’d like a counselor’s help with, what would it be?”

“At the moment, I’d like help with knowing who killed Patty.”

“Okay,” Emily said slowly. “I’m sure that’s true. The subject now is a marriage counselor, however.”

“But this
is
affecting my marriage. Right, Jim?”

“You can say that again,” Jim grumbled.

“But that would be redundant,” I snapped.

In that therapeutic voice of hers, Emily said, “All of us like to feel in control. That’s part of human nature. When someone we know dies, let alone at someone else’s hand, that’s unsettling. It can affect all aspects of our lives, our relationships.”

“Right. So, for example, Patty Birch could have been killed in a fit of passion, by a jealous wife who’d found out that Patty and her husband were having an affair.”

Emily looked at me. “Yes, but do you see what you’re doing here, Molly? How you’re diverting attention away from your marriage and your spouse?”

“I take it you think that’s bad?”

Emily gave a casual gesture. “We try not to use such judgmental terms as ‘bad.’ ”

Clearly, I was not going to get a telling reaction from Emily as to whether she was guilty or innocent. Might as well try to get a handwriting sample and get out of here. “Sweetie? Would you rather we go to see a man or a woman counselor?”

“Or, if you’d prefer,” Emily interjected, “there is a married couple I can recommend who have a therapy practice that they run together.”

Jim avoided my gaze and said to Emily, “I need time to think about this. Could you please give us recommendations for two male and two female counselors?”

“Certainly.” Emily rose and went to her desk. “I anticipated that request and printed these out for you.”

Jim shot me a nonverbal “I told you so,” and I countered with a silent, “Well, Jeez! I’m not the boss of her!”

She grabbed a sheet of paper from the top of one drawer and handed it to me. Everything was neatly typed, though in big block letters. We’d wasted our time. Couldn’t my stupid ideas
ever
turn out to be smart, after all? Jim and I stood up.

In a last-ditch effort, I said to Emily, “I think we’ll probably go with this first guy on the list, but I’ve never heard of the street he’s on.”

“It’s just three streets north from here,” Emily said.

Jim, a.k.a. Mr. Won’t Ask for Directions, was trying to get a look at the address in question, which would ruin my plan for getting Emily to write them down.

While practically throwing an elbow to block Jim from grabbing the sheet from me, I asked Emily, “Could you possibly draw me a map of how to get there from here?”

Emily smiled patiently. “Of course.” She took the sheet back and drew me a map, complete with street names. In block letters. Ha! She returned it to me.

Jim held out his hand to Emily. “Thanks for your time, Ms. Crown. This has been helpful and very insightful.”

She furrowed her brow a little, but shook his hand and said good-bye to us graciously.

We left the building in silence and headed across the parking lot to our car. “Well,” I said, “I managed to get a writing sample, but the whole thing made me feel like a total moron.”

Jim patted my back. “Welcome to my world. Now let’s get the writing sample to Tommy Newton.”

I tossed and turned most of the night, struggling to unravel what seemed to be a hopeless tangle of partial clues. The only good thing that had come of the evening was that Tommy hadn’t been in his office, so I didn’t have to suffer through his repeating my husband’s lecture about how flawed my logic had been to think that a writing sample from Emily might be helpful. I instead left him a note with the sample, stating the three reasons that Emily was a prime suspect: the rumor about Lucinda’s, Emily’s having gone to look for me right when the note could have been shoved into my pocket, and that she or Jane had heatedly argued with Patty shortly before Patty’s murder.

With Jim still half asleep the next morning—Saturday being his only day to sleep in—I told him that I was going to the arts and crafts fair before it opened to offer my help with setting up. My goal was to bump into Jane Daly. As an employee of the major sponsor of the fair, in years past she’d been one of the volunteers to oversee the site. If the opportunity presented itself, I could casually mention Lucinda’s.

The fair itself was taking place in an abandoned one-story building a couple of miles outside of town. The building had originally been a feed store when Carlton was more rural, but had housed more than one failed business in the interim.

Already the parking lot was nearly half full and abuzz with activity as exhibitors brought in their works. To my good fortune, Jane Daly was standing sentry outside by the front door. Over her denim coat and broomstick skirt, she wore a green vest that identified her as a volunteer. Her dark blond hair was in a haphazard bun.

She gave me a big smile, at least by her standards, when I walked up to her. “Morning, Molly. We’re not open to the public for another hour.”

“I know, but I thought I’d see if you could use an extra pair of hands.”

“Not really. But thanks. Everything seems to be going surprisingly smoothly.”

“Oh, good.”

“Aren’t you judging again this year?” Jane asked.

“Yes, but just the youth division. Did you enter anything yourself?”

“Oh, sure. It’s pretty much expected of me. The crafts store wouldn’t sponsor this event in the first place if it weren’t such a cash cow. Wouldn’t do to not even have their own employees care to exhibit their wares.”

“Don’t they consider that a conflict of interest, though?”

She shrugged. “We employees aren’t allowed to be judges, so I guess the owner believes that protects us from accusations of impropriety. Last year I suggested switching that around—having us employees judge and not be allowed to enter the contest—but my boss wouldn’t hear of it. He was worried we’d be accused of selecting winners that had obviously used expensive materials purchased from our store.”

“I guess I can see the logic. I’m supposed to come and judge tonight after you close your doors to the public, right?”

“Right. Between eight and ten p.m.”

That was close enough to an opening to discuss restaurants, I decided. “Okay. We’ll just have to eat earlier than usual tonight. Speaking of which, Jim and I are trying to find a new restaurant to try. We thought we’d go to that new place, Lucinda’s.”

She showed no reaction to the name. “Oh?”

“Provided we can find the place, that is. You wouldn’t happen to know where it is, or if the food’s any good, would you?”

“I haven’t even heard of it. Aaron and I don’t go out to dinner much, I’m afraid.”

Just then a couple of girls ran up to Jane to ask for directions to the bathroom. She and I said quick good-byes, then I returned to my car and headed home. Neither Jane, nor Susan, nor Emily had shown the slightest uneasiness on the topic of Lucinda’s Restaurant. Maybe the whole thing was indeed a dead end. For some reason, the concept of a “dead end” reminded me that my new parabolic skis were supposed to be ready today.

“Molly, you’re picking up your new skis!” Amber said. I’d found her in the skiwear department.

“Yes, though I hope I’m not making a mistake. So far, I haven’t had any serious injuries skiing. That’s going to catch up with me sooner or later.”

She said with a smile, “Provided you stay away from snowboarding, there’s no reason to think that you’re going to get injured on the slopes.”

“No reason except my aging body and lack of training and athletic ability.”

“Seriously, Molly, you’re in fine shape for someone your age.”

I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t even know how to respond to that.”

“All you really need to do is make sure your muscles are warmed up before you hit the slopes. Let me show you the pre-skiing stretches you need to go through.”

She went effortlessly through a series of Gumby-like positions, which made me feel all the older and out-of-shape to watch. I kept up a steady patter of “Okays” and “I sees,” but in fact had not listened to her instructions. Next thing I knew, she ambushed me by uttering a cheerful, “Now you try it, Molly.”

“Oh, there’s no point in my stretching now. I won’t be going skiing till next weekend, at the earliest. No sense in getting all limber just to walk across your parking lot.”

“Don’t be embarrassed. There’s nobody looking. Just stand with your feet a little more than shoulder-width apart and bend at the waist. I want to make certain you know how to do these exercises. Sometimes people rush things and do more harm than good by bouncing.”

“I won’t bounce, I promise.”

She said nothing and looked at me expectantly.

Grudgingly I did as asked and bent down as far as I could.

“That’s as far as you can stretch?” she asked incredulously.

“That’s it.”

“My God. I’ve seen overweight, sixty-year-old men who were more flexible than you.”

“Maybe so, but I’ll bet they ‘bounce’ more than I did.”

“Do yourself a favor and, every morning, do those simple stretches I showed you.”

“To be honest, Amber, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’ll never be limber. But it doesn’t matter all that much, because I’m not a skier like you, or even into dancing, like half of the entire Carlton PTA.”