Poison at the PTA (24 page)

“Not a chance.”

He said it calmly, which gave me the willies because how could anyone sound so normal when holding a gun practically to someone’s head? How could he sound normal when he was obviously planning to kill us?

I shook my head. “No, this is much worse. With a good attorney, you could have passed off Cookie’s death as an accident. It’s hard to see how bullet wounds in people with their hands tied behind their backs could be anything except murder.”

Claudia squeaked again.

“If you’re not stupid,” Kirk said, “there won’t be any bullets in anybody.”

“She’s the stupid one.” Claudia moved her head around to glare at me. “If it wasn’t for her, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

How she figured that, exactly, I wasn’t sure. So much for the solidarity of sisterhood in the face of danger. “I like the idea of no bullets, but I like the idea of living even more.”

“Sorry about that,” Kirk said, chuckling.

“Are you sure? We can’t negotiate on this?” I tied a square knot and made a show of looking for something to cut the string with. “Surely we can work out some sort of arrangement,” I said, reaching for the scissors. “It’s always worthwhile to talk, don’t you think?”

Kirk snatched the scissors away from the tips of my fingers. “Women,” he growled. “Always talking when it’s the doing that’s important.” He brandished the scissors and opened and closed the blades with a loud
snick
. “Like Cookie. If she’d kept her mouth shut, none of this would have happened.” He snipped the string, put the scissors back on the shelf, and grabbed the ball of string from my hand.

“Turn around,” he ordered, giving me a shove of encouragement.

Always eager to oblige someone holding a gun, I turned around. Claudia was staring at me, eyes wide, face pale. I tried to give her a smile of encouragement, but all I could manage was a pathetic, trembling effort that wouldn’t have fooled a two-year-old.

I winced as Kirk wound the string around my own wrists. “What did Cookie say?” I asked. “What didn’t she keep quiet about?”

“Like you don’t know.” He tied a knot in the string, wrenching it so tight that my fingers were already tingling. “She comes to me for investment advice, and then she’s too stupid to take it. Not what you’d call an ideal client. She kept wanting to invest in funds that were
meaningful.”
He snorted. “A nosy nut case, that’s what she was. And you’re following in her nosy footsteps.”

Some of this made sense . . . but not really. “What are you talking about? I barely knew Cookie.”

“But you have her insurance.”

“Her . . . what?”

Kirk jerked my hands up and backward. I did my best to keep from crying out in pain. Didn’t do a very good job.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know about the box.” His voice bounced off the hard floor and walls, pounding my ears with words I didn’t want to hear. “I know you have her box. She told me about it, said it was her protection against people like me, said if anything happened to her, it would go to someone who would know what to do with it.”

Stupid. I was truly stupid. Why hadn’t I studied the box more thoroughly? Why had I let myself be creeped out by its contents instead of using it as a tool to find Cookie’s killer? “You don’t know that she was talking about me.”

Kirk used his size and weight to push Claudia and me into the far corner of the basement, back where the furnace lived. “Right. Everybody knows how you’re the one who figured out who killed Agnes Mephisto. And Sam Helmstetter. And all those others. You were the obvious choice, so I’ve been keeping a watch on you.”

My insides went wavery. He’d been watching me? Eww.

He kicked at the backs of our knees and forced us to collapse to the floor. He hauled us around so Claudia and I were back-to-back, and started wrapping the string around our bodies. Then he cursed. I turned my head just enough to see that he’d run out of string. Hallelujah! With nothing left to tie us up with, he’d have to—

“Got it,” he muttered, destroying my surging hopes. He took two fast steps to a shelf that held a long length of inch-wide webbed strap. After he’d attached it to the furnace and around our upper bodies, he grunted, and said, “When I saw what’s her name, that girl who drives the UPS truck, stop and hand you a box that obviously wasn’t heavy with books, I had a feeling. So I flagged her down and made up some story about expecting a box just that size, and was she sure it wasn’t for me from a Van Doorne, and she said I had the right return name, but it was for Beth Kennedy.”

Truth. If I told him the truth, surely he’d believe me and let us go. “Kirk, honestly, I don’t know what’s in it. I mean, I opened it, but what’s inside doesn’t make any sense.”

“Don’t lie to me!” he shouted. “It’s not in your house. I know it’s not because I looked, so it must be in your store. If you hadn’t installed that stupid alarm, I would’ve got hold of the box days ago. It’s your own fault you’re in this mess.” He loomed over me. “Where is it?” he demanded, pointing the gun at my chest. “In your office, isn’t it?”

Fear beat at me with a hot, searing breath. I didn’t want to tell him the truth, yet I was such a horrible liar that I couldn’t lie and be believed. On the other hand, there was a partial truth that could work. “Yes,” I whispered.

“What’s the security code?”

I swallowed and told him.

Claudia, who’d been uncharacteristically silent, let out a shriek that came near to piercing my eardrums. “You have to let us go!”

He crouched down and grinned at her. “Actually, I don’t.” Whistling, he stood and fiddled with the furnace.

“What are you doing?” Claudia asked, her voice pinched and high. “Beth, don’t elbow me. I want to know what he’s going to do.”

He chuckled. “Beth knows. Don’t you, Beth?”

I’d known ever since he dragged us to this side of the room. “It’s a gas furnace,” I said tonelessly. “He’s going to let the gas escape into the basement.”

Ten percent, I’d read. All it took was ten percent of the air in a building to be replaced with a combustible fuel and it would be at the explosion point. “When . . .” My mouth was too dry to talk. I worked up some moisture and tried again. “When the furnace turns on again, there will be a spark, and the spark will combust the gas.”

“Bingo!” Kirk laughed. “Turns out that it’s true what they say, that no knowledge is ever wasted. Here I thought all those summers my dad made me work for his heating-and-cooling company were pointless, but by golly, I was wrong.”

He made a few rattling noises, whistling all the while. “Well, I think that will do it.” Then, hands in his pockets, he stood there, looking down on us. “With you out of the way, it’ll be easy enough to get that box. Get rid of that and I’ll be home free.”

A smile lit his face. “Happy landings, ladies,” he said, winking. “Thanks for making this so easy for me.”

Then he left.

W
e listened to his heavy footsteps climb the creaky stairs, cross the kitchen, and leave the house. A thousand thoughts rushed into my tiny brain, thoughts that ranged from concern about the tingling in my fingers to a far-from-idle curiosity about the psi in the gas service line.

Claudia shifted in a way that tightened the string around my wrists, immediately changing the tingling to numbness. “What does ‘combust’ mean?” she asked.

New thought: Claudia Wolff was not the person I would have chosen to be tied up with. “Explode,” I said.

She gasped. “You mean we might blow up?”

“There’s no ‘might’ about it,” I said, “not if we don’t figure a way out of this.”

“But I don’t want to die. And I shouldn’t be here anyway. This is all your fault, Beth Kennedy, I hope you know that.”

Of course it was. Nothing bad that happened to Claudia was ever her fault. I hitched myself around to try to add some play to the bonds that connected us and only succeeded in making them cut into me even more.

Claudia began to weep. Noisily. “I don’t want to die.”

I didn’t, either. Maybe someday I’d be ready for the inevitable, but not today, not with so many things left to do. Not with my children still young and needing me, not when a happy future with Pete was waiting.

My companion’s tears turned into shuddering sobs. “I’m not ready to die. My boys need me. I don’t want to die, not here, not in a basement, not with you.”

I stopped my efforts to untie the strap Kirk had wound around us. “What do you mean, ‘not with me’? There’re worse people in the world you could be tied up with, you know.”

“Because . . .” Claudia hiccupped out a sob. “Because you hate me! I don’t want to die next to someone who hates me.”

Oh, for Pete’s sake.
“I don’t hate you.”

“Well, you sure don’t seem to like me.”

I looked at the furnace. This would be an excellent time to find a sharp corner. Unfortunately, all I could see were the rounded corners of an energy-efficient furnace. Too bad we weren’t tied up to an old octopus-style plant—one of those surely would have had something sharp to cut the string around our wrists. “I’d say the feeling is mutual.”

“I knew it,” she sobbed. “I knew you didn’t like me.”

What I didn’t like was the idea of my children being left without a mother. Especially after I’d sworn off investigating to prevent that very thing. “Claudia—”

“Of course you don’t like me. You’re so smart and so together and you’re not afraid of anything. No matter what I do, I can’t be as good as you at . . . at anything.” She dissolved into fresh tears.

I stared across the room, seeing the distant tubs of cookie cutters, but seeing nothing.

All these years, I’d taken Claudia’s snide remarks and rude behavior as a commentary on my inability to work well with others, on my shyness, on my reluctance to engage in confrontation, on any number of my personal flaws and failings. All these years I’d been wrong. Beth, the myopic non–Wonder Woman.

“I always thought you were the one who hated me,” I said. “When I hired Yvonne, you picketed my store. For a couple of weeks, I thought I was going to go out of business.”

“That bookstore is my favorite place ever. All I ever wanted is to own that store, but you bought it out from underneath me.” She sniffed. “I hated to see you run it into the ground, making all those bad decisions. It made me so mad that I had to do something.”

My head might explode ahead of the basement. “You didn’t like the Story Project idea. You fought me tooth and nail every step of the way.”

“I know,” she wailed. “I wanted to see you fail at something. Anything! Everything you touch turns to gold. Everything you try just . . . just works out.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

She shook her head. Or at least that’s what it felt like. Back-to-back as we were, it was hard to know for sure. “Look at you. Everybody likes you. You’re president of the PTA. All your project ideas make more money than Fort Knox. You could have had that hottie, Evan Garrett. Your kids are smart. The bookstore is doing great. You have a new boyfriend. You even solve murders!”

As she listed my few successes, I thought about all my failures. Then, instead of just thinking about them, I started reciting them. “I have a failed marriage. My relationship with my mother is strained at best. Dust bunnies live under my bed. I can’t bake bread to save my life, and I haven’t the foggiest idea how to change the ring tone on my cell phone.”

More sniffs. “Really?”

“And I’m scared of pretty much everything.”

Sniff.
“You? No way.”

“Every hour of every day,” I said honestly. “And my sense of humor is always getting me into trouble. I have all these funny things going on in my head, but they’re too stupid to say out loud.”

“Huh.” There was a long moment of silence. “So it’s not like you’re laughing at me on the inside?”

I shook my head. “More like I don’t want you laughing at me.”

A large sigh gusted out of her. “I wish I’d known this a long time ago.”

“Yeah, well.”

Inside the furnace, there was a loud
click!

Claudia went still as stone. “What was that?”

Fear slithered around my neck, choking me so tight that I couldn’t get the words out. “The thermostat,” I finally managed to say. “It’s . . . the furnace is going to turn on.”

“Nooo!”
Claudia screamed.

I shut my eyes.
I love you, Jenna. I love you, Oliver. Oh, Pete . . .

And the furnace roared to life.

•   •   •

The metal against my shoulder rumbled. Hot air blew through the furnace, through the ductwork and out into the house.

Where was the ka-boom?

I opened my eyes. There should have been an earth-shattering ka-boom, but all that was happening was a normal heating cycle. My face went wide in a huge smile. Not dead. We were definitely not dead yet and wouldn’t be for years and years. All we needed was to loosen the strap that held us together, break the string that was cutting off the circulation to my hands, stop Kirk’s gas leak, and get out of the house without creating a spark.

“Aren’t we going to blow up?” Claudia asked.

“Not yet.” I sniffed. “Smell that? The gas is leaking, but there’s not enough in the room yet to hit the combustion point. We have time.”

“How long?” Her voice quavered.

No idea, is what truth demanded I tell. However, telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth doesn’t necessarily get the best results. I pushed my mind away from the philosophical question of convenient morality, and said, projecting as much confidence as I could, “Long enough.”

“How do you know?”

“Because . . .” Because thinking we didn’t have enough time to escape would render me a helpless puddle of tears, and that wouldn’t do anyone any good. “Because the psi—that’s pounds per square inch—of gas flow hasn’t yet reached the saturation point. We’re okay until the next time the furnace cycles on.”

“Really?” Claudia asked.

Actually, I had no idea what I was talking about, not for sure, but having two of us being teary puddles was pointless. “Sure. The furnace won’t spark again for . . . for quite some time.”

Claudia squirmed. “Ow. That string hurts. How are we going to get out of here?”

“That’s an excellent question.”

“You don’t have a plan?”

“Not yet.” I had some inklings of something that might work, but a full-fledged plan? Not even close. “Do you?”

“Me?” She sounded surprised. “I thought . . . I mean . . . I figured you would, that’s all.”

“Sorry. I got nothing.”

There was an odd sort of heaving at my back. “Claudia, are you okay?” Which was a stupid question, but I didn’t know what else to ask.

“You, you . . .”

More heaving. I frowned and tried to look over my shoulder. “Are you laughing?”

Her muted giggles became outright laughter. “Yes,” she gasped. “I shouldn’t be. We might die any second, and I know what you said about having lots of time was to keep me from being too scared, but I just assumed you’d have it all figured out.”

“Well.” I strained against what now felt like wire around my wrists. “You know what assuming can do.”

Her laugh faded into a snort. “When we get out of this, we don’t need to tell anybody how dumb we were, do we?”

When
we got out, she’d said. Maybe being tied up with Claudia wasn’t going to be the death of me. “I won’t if you won’t.”

“And I won’t if you won’t.” She giggled. “We should pinkie-swear.”

I wriggled my hands around as best I could. “Can you reach?”

“Almost.” She gave an
oomph
of effort. “There. Is that your pinkie?”

My throat was too dry to talk. I coughed, then said, “I don’t know. I can’t feel my fingers anymore.”

“But I can. Why can’t . . . ?” Then she remembered. “You tied me. Kirk tied you.”

“Yeah. Well.” Neither one of us stated the obvious fact that Kirk had tied me up a lot tighter than I’d tied Claudia. “Is there any chance you can wriggle your hands loose?”

She struggled, grunted, struggled some more. Panting, she said, “I loosened it a little but I can’t get free.”

Not a huge surprise, but it would have been stupid not to try. I looked longingly at the faraway scissors. “I don’t suppose you carry a pocketknife, do you?” I felt the shake of her head. “Scissors?” Lots of moms carried scissors in their purses. You never knew when you’d need to cut bubble gum out of someone’s hair.

“In my purse,” Claudia said. “But it’s in my car.”

“That’s where mine is, too. Along with my cell phone.” I was definitely not prepared for an evening of escape.

“We could try and, well, kind of muscle ourselves free.” Claudia started rocking back and forth. “Maybe we could break something that will—”

“Stop,” I said sharply. “Doing anything like that might make sparks.”

She stopped abruptly. “Right. Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

And that somehow reminded me that Claudia hadn’t heard me put all the pieces together. “This is all because Kirk has been embezzling from his company. Cookie must have figured it out because she was his regular teller at the bank. She must have seen all the deposits he was making into his account.”

“He was the worst broker in the business,” Claudia said. “Everybody in town knew that. Why didn’t Cookie tell the police if she thought he was stealing?”

“I don’t know.” What I suspected was that Cookie believed more in the eye-for-an-eye-and-a-tooth-for-a-tooth style of punishment. That she preferred her own style of justice to what the court system could hand out.

Behind me, I felt Claudia’s shoulders sag. “Okay, then,” I asked briskly. “There are two primary issues we need to deal with. One is that we’re tied up here with no one to rescue us and no one to hear us even if we scream all night. Two is that gas is leaking into this basement, and if we don’t escape, we’ll succumb to either gas fumes or the impending explosion.”

Claudia gave what sounded like a small snort. “That’s what you do when you’re scared, isn’t it? Talk in long sentences and use big college words.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t mean to sound snotty. It’s just something I do to distance myself from difficult situations.”

“You’re still doing it,” Claudia said, with a slight giggle. “And you don’t have to apologize. It’s kind of cute, in a weird and geeky sort of way. Now that I know why you do it, I mean. I always thought you were just showing off.”

Claudia Wolff was telling me not to apologize? Surely the world was indeed coming to an end.

But I didn’t want to think about that.

“Do you have anything in your pockets?” I asked. “Pants pockets, coat pockets?”

“Nothing that will help us. How about you?”

“A couple of tissues.” I thought a moment. “And there might be a peppermint.”

“Come to think of it,” Claudia said, “there might be a pen in one of my pockets.”

“If I stretch,” I said, “maybe I can reach into your pocket and get it.”

“What good is a pen going to do us?”

“I only tied one knot in the string around your wrists.” Unlike Kirk, who had tied numerous knots in my string. “All we need to do is break one of those strands and your hands will be free.”

“That makes sense,” she said in a dubious tone. “But still, how is a pen going to help?”

“No idea. But I’ve lost almost all feeling in my fingers, so if I don’t try soon, I won’t be able to try at all.”

There was a short silence, punctuated by rhythmic blowing noises from the furnace and the thumping of my own increasingly frightened heart. “Okay.” Her voice was small.

She guided me with her voice. “A little to the right . . . No, the other right. That’s it. Keep going, you’re almost there . . . Okay, that’s it. Is there a pen?”

My fingers were so lifeless that if there’d been a live mouse in Claudia’s coat pocket I wouldn’t have felt it. “I’m not sure.” I hitched myself closer. But there was nothing in her pocket to be found.