by Dave Cravens
Holly shook her head. “No, we’ve tried that before. You’re just asking parents to spend more money in a shorter amount of time. They don’t like to do that. It’s better to spread it out.”
“Even if you built it around some crazy cool event?”
“Like what?”
Parker was shooting from her hip right now. “Like a rock concert. Or a carnival. Or a casino night. Or a carnival rock concert casino night. You get some cool rides, some fun entertainment for people, throw in your raffles, auctions, whatever, sell tickets in advance – if it’s a big enough event you can find sponsors. Local businesses would want to advertise in it. I know you guys do this on a smaller scale, but I’m saying scale it up. Like, on a Bezos or Elon Musk scale.”
Holly winced. “I don’t know.”
Parker leaned forward to fold her hands on the table. “It’s worth running the numbers. If you have some more time this morning, we can work together to find out if we’re even in the ballpark.”
Holly dropped her shoulders. “I suppose it’s worth a shot.”
47.
To Parker’s own amazement…
the next several hours flew by as Parker and Holly brainstormed ideas, reviewed ledgers from years past, and researched vendor web pages. Tackling such a tangible problem that could actually make a difference in her kids’ lives, let alone the community, energized Parker with a euphoria she hadn’t felt in years. Soon, a framework plan of a Halloween themed carnival event that incorporated all of the school’s fundraisers took shape. When she tallied up the initial budget numbers, Holly’s smile wasn’t the forced toothy face devouring Joker’s grin she’d first greeted Parker with, it was a genuine expression of joy and hope.
“This might actually work,” Holly gasped in astonishment.
The school bell rang and snapped both Holly and Parker out of their daze.
School bell?
Parker looked at the time on her phone. “Holy shit, we’ve been at this all day.”
“I guess so,” answered Holly. “I’m suddenly hungry. We didn’t even have lunch! And no word from Heller?”
Parker doubled checked her phone. No new texts had come in. “No.” Fuck Heller. “But you know what? If we move fast, we could probably run this by Mendez to see what she thought.”
Holly agreed, and the two them gathered their things to race out of the PTA storage closet to the hallway. Outside, the bustle of kids dismissed from their lines could be heard as the pair made their way to the front office, catching Mendez just as she was shutting her office door.
“Principal Mendez, could we show you something? Quickly?” asked Holly.
Mendez let out a heavy sigh, clearly anxious to get on with her weekend. “This really can’t wait until Monday?”
Holly looked to the floor. “Well, I suppose it could—”
Parker jumped in. “Sure, if you’re not interested at all in how we can triple your school’s fundraising power in one night. We only skipped lunch to volunteer to work on the thing the entire day.” Parker thrust a mess of papers at Mendez. “But, if your school’s budget isn’t important to you, that’s okay.”
Mendez frowned. “Really? Triple?” She took the handful of papers and began to examine them. “A carnival?” she hemmed. “Sounds like an insurance nightmare waiting to happen.”
“I checked, the school’s insurance will cover it,” informed Parker. “We just need to up the liability coverage for that particular day, which Holly has already budgeted for in our expenses.” Suck it.
Mendez looked harder at the numbers. She folded the top page back and forth to check more figures. “I’m going to need to look at this more closely.” At first Parker wondered if Mendez meant on Monday, but Mendez swiftly reached for her office door knob to open it. “Do either of you mind waiting another fifteen minutes or so?”
Both Parker’s and Holly’s eyes popped. “Oh, you mean now? Great! Yeah, sure!” Parker spoke for the both of them.
“It’s not a problem,” added Holly. “Ginger knows if she doesn’t see me on the playground to come to the front office.”
“Ginger?”
“My third grader.”
Shit. “Right, my kids don’t have that protocol.” Or the wherewithal, thought Parker. “Lemme go find them while you two look things over.”
It didn’t take long for Parker to find Drew and Maddy on the emptying playground. When Parker explained the situation, Maddy met it with her usual display of disdain.
“Can we just wait in the minivan?” groaned Maddy. She held out her hand to accept the keys.
“Sure.” Parker dug in her purse to find the car keys and slapped them onto Maddy’s hand. “I promise I won’t be long.”
“Whatever.”
As Parker parted ways with her kids to make her way back to the front office, her phone buzzed again.
I’m here.
Parker rolled her eyes. “Well, will wonders never cease?”
48.
Heller’s going to think the tongue lashing I gave her at PTA was a bubble bath.
Parker marched into Mendez’s office with a fresh spring in her step. To Parker’s surprise, only Holly sat across the desk from Mendez, with a young blonde girl sitting in a chair near the wall that Parker could only assume was Ginger. The rest of the room was empty, as was the lobby. Fox must have left for the day.
Holly and Mendez looked up from their papers. “You’re back,” stated Mendez. “Great, I have some questions about some of these numbers.”
“Where is she?” blasted Parker.
“Who?”
“Heller.” Parker held out her phone. “She said she was here.”
Both Holly and Mendez looked to each other in bewilderment. “We haven’t seen her.”
Just then, Drew waltzed into the office behind Parker, his backpack in tow. “Mom, can I have the keys?” he asked.
Parker spun around to look past her son to the empty lobby. Still no sign of Heller. “I gave you the keys.”
“We need the right keys.”
Parker frowned at her own mistake. I must have given them the Highlander keys by accident. Parker dug into her purse to give Drew the minivan rental keys. She handed the new keys to Drew. “Sorry. Now go. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
Drew ran off as Parker’s phone buzzed again.
Where are you?
“Is that Heller?” asked Mendez. She stood up from her desk.
Parker frowned. “Yes,” she growled as she angrily typed her response.
In the front office. Where the hell are YOU?
The phone buzzed with an answer.
Waiting.
“What the fuck is this woman’s problem?” Parker stormed out into the lobby and looked down each empty corridor. There was no sign of anyone, other than Drew who walked back into the lobby.
“So, we just want to make sure that you want us to use the minivan,” greeted Drew.
“What?” Parker snapped. “Of course, I want you to use the minivan! What is going on out there? How is this so complicated?”
“We thought you might want us to use the Highlander.”
“The Highlander is gone, Drew!” Parker found herself almost yelling now.
Drew hunched. “No, it’s not. It’s in the parking lot.”
Parker shook her head. “There are a gazillion Highlanders in the world. It probably just looks like ours.”
“Okay,” Drew sighed as he turned to walk out the door. “She says use the minivan!” he shouted to Maddy across the parking lot.
Parker’s phone buzzed again. Only this time, the words scraped at Parker’s heart.
Still waiting.
Mendez looked over Parker’s shoulder to read the same text. “What does she mean by that?”
The texting all day and night. The Highlander getting stolen. All of this was connected in a very, very bad way. Parker pushed out the front door into the parking lot. She caught Drew walking toward Maddy who stood in the
center of the lot between two cars parked opposite of each other – the rental minivan, and a filthy silver Highlander that looked hauntingly familiar. Maddy played with one set of keys to unlock the minivan, as signified by its blinking hazard lights.
Drew shouted to his sister. “Mom said, just go to the minivan!”
“No, but see, the keys work!” Maddy shouted back. She pressed the keys to the Highlander, and sure enough the hazard lights flickered on and off. “It’s our car! I knew it! I found our car!”
“Maddy, stay where you are!” Parker yelled.
Maddy rolled her eyes. “It’s fine, Mom, it’s our car!” She walked toward the Highlander.
“Maddy!” Parker screamed as she sprinted toward her daughter. “I said stop!”
Maddy squinted as she neared the Highlander, ignoring her mother’s command. “It smells kinda bad. There’s something in the back.”
“What is it?” asked Drew.
“Drew!” Parker pointed at her son. “Go back to the school! Now!” Drew quickly obeyed as Parker reached Maddy ten feet from the car. “Maddy, god damnit, I said stop! You need to listen!” She yanked Maddy by the arm to pull her away, but it was too late. Maddy had already pressed the remote button to open the Highlander’s back gate.
“Stop yelling at me!” Maddy cried.
The Highlander emitted a series of loud beeps as its hydraulics whirred to open the back gate, letting a foul cloud of stench to hit Maddy and Parker. Parker watched helplessly as her daughter’s face contorted into an expression of abject horror. Maddy screamed. Parker pulled her daughter’s face to her chest to shield her from the sight, but it was too late. All Maddy had already seen the contorted body of an old woman stuffed into a plastic trash bag, her feet high above her own head as if some mannequin folded in half. The dead woman’s face that peeked just above the bag’s line was gaunt, discolored and sporting an infested hole where the left eye socket should be, and a dried eye rolled back in the other.
Karen Heller had returned to the school after all.
49.
An hour later…
red and blue gumball lights flashed in every corner of the school’s parking lot that wasn’t already cordoned off with yellow “crime scene” tape. A sizeable crowd of onlookers stood in the park and on sidewalks nearby, whispering to each other as they pointed to Parker’s Highlander and the first responders and deputies that surrounded it. Sheriff Bill watched closely as his CSI team carefully inspected every inch of the SUV, checking for prints on the door handles and steering wheel. Occasionally they would look to one another, then to Bill for an instruction as to what to do next. “Take pictures,” Bill would remind them. “Take lots of pictures. I want every inch of that minivan documented!”
Good thing I’d already taken my own pictures before you got here, thought Parker. She sighed as she watched a deputy nearly trip over his colleague. These guys have obviously never covered a murder scene before. In fact, Parker couldn’t recall if a murder had ever happened in the city of Oak Creek when she was growing up. In Chicago one seemed to happen every other day. Regardless, Oak Creek’s finest did their best to project an air of security and professionalism as two of them lifted the trash bag that contained Heller and put it on a gurney.
One of the deputies looked back to Bill again. “Uh, Sheriff? We don’t need a body bag, do we? I mean, she kind of came with her own.” The deputy poked at one of Heller’s feet next to her forehead. “And she’s been stuck in this position for so long. It might take some doing to flatten her out, you know?”
Bill scratched his head, hyper aware that Parker watched him in smug judgment. He cleared his throat. “The bag is evidence,” pronounced Bill. He couldn’t help but wince at his own statement. “Just cover her with a blanket. We’ll let the morgue sort it out, okay? Now get going.” Bill shooed his deputies onward, then looked back to Parker. “What?”
“Nothing,” said Parker. She tugged at the warm but itchy blanket that the first responders had thrown around her earlier. No matter what the crisis, a first responder’s first response always seemed to provide warm blankets. She and Bill watched as his deputies rolled the gurney away.
Bill turned back to the Highlander. “We’re going to have impound your car – again. It’s evidence too.”
“Keep it,” said Parker. “There is no way my kids are going to want to climb into that thing now.”
“Riiiiiight,” Bill grimaced. “How is your daughter doing?”
Parker glanced over to the school entrance, where Maddy sat on a folding chair with a similar heavy blanket wrapped around her. The school counselor, a middle-aged woman named Rebecca Buck whose large lips reminded Parker of a duck, patted Maddy’s arm as though she were some kind of injured animal. “Maddy’s going to need some time to process this.” Along with a shit ton of therapy.
Drew sat in a chair next to his sister, also wearing a blanket as first responders continued to look him over. Parker hated to leave her kids in the care of strangers, but Mendez insisted that they and Holly’s daughter be evaluated right away. Holly had done a better job of shielding her child from the scene and insisted she take her home immediately. Parker had to stick around to make her statement to the police. Parker couldn’t help but note that Mendez appeared to have little interest in working with the kids herself, yet she always stood within the earshot of the crime scene. Even now, she planted herself about ten feet away from where the sheriff stood, talking on the phone with someone Parker guessed was an insurance agent. Always worried about the liability, aren’t you, Mendez?
Parker kept close to her Highlander. She wanted to absorb every detail about the crime scene in case Bill’s team screwed something up.
Bill reviewed his notepad. “So, um,” he couldn’t look Parker in the eyes. “I’m also going to need your phone.”
Parker didn’t even bother looking at Bill. “Nope.”
Bill pulled up on his belt buckle. “The texts you received from Heller’s phone. You know, the ones you didn’t bother to tell me about until after a dead body showed up in your car? That’s evidence, Parker. You know that.”
“Oh, but Sheriff, just yesterday you were convinced that it was Heller, herself, who was innocently sending those texts.”
“Well, clearly it was not!”
“I don’t want to say I told you so--” Parker poked her finger into Bill’s chest. “But-I-told-you-so! Maybe now you’ll listen to me when I say there’s weird shit going on in this town. I’ll supply you a copy of the texts. With time stamps. But you’re not taking my phone.”
Bill pulled Parker way from the Highlander and the prying eyes of his deputies. He spoke in a hushed voice. “Listen, you gotta at least look like you’re playing ball, here. Do you read me? People are already talking--”
“It’s been an hour!”
Bill raised his hands to hint for Parker to keep her voice down. “I don’t control the internet! Word is spreading!”
“Yeah? What are they saying? What are you saying?” Parker frowned. “Are you saying – I’m a suspect?”
Bill coughed. “Not officially. Maybe. Kind of? The public expects me to look at this from all angles—"
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
Bill pointed to the Highlander. “Heller’s dead body was found in the back of your Highlander!”
“My stolen Highlander! And I was the one who found Heller and reported it!”
“A roomful of PTA moms heard you threaten her with both barrels the other night!”
“I was talking about my boobs!” Parker glared at Bill, who despite his height, never appeared so small as he did right then. “Bill, do you really think I killed Karen Heller?”
“No, of course not, it’s just—these are facts, okay? And people are going to distort these facts and they are going to run with them! I’ve seen it before.”
Parker closed her eyes. “Yes, I know, it looks bad, but you’ve got other leads, right?”
Bill’s s
ilence was deafening.
Parker looked to Bill. “You don’t have any other leads, do you?”
“I’ve got a working theory.” Bill fumbled his notepad open. “It needs some tweaking. But I think this might be related to some kind of gang initiation. There’s been an uptick in Los Zetas activity, and we’re only an hour from the border.”
Parker felt her jaw straining. “Uh huh. That’s not – entirely horrible. Go on.”
“To gain admittance to the gang, members have to prove themselves. Steal a car, for instance. Execute a rival. You get the picture. Sometimes victims are randomly selected. Heller could have been one of them.”
Parker nodded slowly. “Nice work, Sheriff.”
“Thank you.”
“That would explain just about everything that’s happened.”
“Not bad, huh?”
“Except that’s not what happened.”
50.
“You don’t know that,” Bill folded his arms.
He paused and swiveled his head around to see if his deputies were still watching. They weren’t. “Okay, how do you know that?”
Parker spoke in a moaning voice. “I don’t know, can you trust the word of an alleged murderer?”
“Cut that out.”
“I might be trying to lead you astray.”
“You’re hilarious.”
Parker’s eyes widened. She tapped Bill in the chest. “Oh shit, you know what I should do? To really mess with you? I’ll apply for a private detective license!”
“Please don’t do that.”
“I can see it now, a single mother, wrongfully accused of murder—”
“You’re not wrongfully accused.”
“So, I’m rightfully accused?”
“Just stop.”
“--wrongfully accused of murder, she becomes a private detective and then hires herself to clear her own name!”
The Sheriff stomped his foot. “Are you going to tell me or what?”
Parker dropped her theatrics and stared at Bill intensely. “Come on, it’s so obvious. Heller is wearing the same outfit she did the night of the PTA meeting, which confirms she never went home. Remember, I saw her drive in the opposite direction of her house. She was clearly going to meet someone that night, someone she knew, and I think that person is the person who shot her. Heller knew her killer.”