Poison at the PTA

by Laura Alden

  “Well, no.” I frowned. Who needed decorations for an event like this?

  “Hmm. Leave it to me.” Mary Margaret slapped the folder shut. “I’ll take care of everything. Any phone call you get about the event, just send it on, okay?”

  There was an abyss to my left, a deep and dark one that I could easily step into, one that would let me drown in self-pity and let me feel useless and incompetent and—

  Voices broke into my attack of self-pity.

  “You don’t know everything, Lois Nielson, and I’m not afraid to say so.”

  “Yeah, well, you don’t scare me, Flossie Untermayer. Just because you lived in fancy-pants Chicago for all those years doesn’t mean you know everything, either.”

  I jumped out of my chair and hurried out of my office. Flossie and Lois were fighting? Not once had I ever heard Flossie raise her voice. Lois, sure, but not Flossie.

  “What is going on out here?” I called. The two women were toe-to-toe in the Young Adult section, both with their hands on their hips, jaws jutting. At the sound of my voice, both instantly relaxed into a friendly pose.

  “Why, nothing, dear Beth,” Flossie said, a smile in her voice.

  Lois laughed. “Just a friendly discussion.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Didn’t sound very friendly.”

  “Well.” Lois laughed again. “You know how we booksellers can get when we talk about books.”

  “Is that so?” I leaned against the early reader nonfiction. “What books were you discussing?”

  Flossie said, “Those graphic novels she’s always going on about.”

  Lois’s head bobbed rapidly. “That’s right. I’ve finally gotten her to appreciate that they’re more than just comic books.”

  Flossie looked as if she’d bitten a toad. “I said I might appreciate it.”

  “Whatever.” Lois waved a hand. “That’s a lot closer than you’ve ever been before.”

  I didn’t believe a word of their story, but it was obviously the one they were sticking to. “Well,” I said, “if you’re going to argue like that again, take it outside, okay? I don’t like it when the books hear us shout at each other.”

  While what I’d said was fanciful, there was some truth involved and we all knew it. I patted a shelf of dinosaur books—“There, there, it’s all over now”—and went back to work.

  • • •

  That was Friday, the start of a weekend that the kids spent with their father. It was a makeup weekend, so to speak, because of a weekend in November that Richard had been out of town helping his parents move to an assisted living facility. Easy enough to switch weekends, for a reason like that. Friday night, Marina and I ordered out pizza and watched James Bond movies. So Friday was a good day. Saturday, not so much.

  Saturday morning started off with Claudia Wolff thumping her snowy feet into the store. “Wow, it’s getting cold out there. Global warming is a bunch of hooey, I tell you what.” She gave one more thump, then looked about with a frown as she pushed her frizzy hair behind her ears. “Where’s all the Christmas stuff? Don’t tell me it’s gone already.”

  I smiled politely at my fellow PTA board member. The vice president, to be exact. “Sorry, Claudia, but we got rid of the last Christmas item a week ago.

  “It’s barely January!”

  It was almost the middle of January, but I wasn’t going to quibble with Claudia. She and I had never seen eye to eye on much of anything, and since none of my New Year’s resolutions mentioned Claudia, I didn’t anticipate that fact changing anytime soon.

  “I’ve talked to that Mary Margaret of yours,” she went on, unzipping her coat and revealing hips that had put on more than their fair share of holiday pounds. “Quite the go-getter, isn’t she?”

  I made a noncommittal nod. Mary Margaret had called multiple times already, clarifying and questioning.

  “But it sounds like she’s really charging ahead with these plans. It’s all going perfectly smooth, from what I hear.” Claudia flashed me a full-wattage smile. “It’s almost like you’re not needed at all.” She laughed, tootled a wave, and left.

  “Was that Mrs. Wolff?” Paoze asked. Brown-skinned and brown-eyed with impossibly white teeth, Paoze had been born in Laos and moved to the United States with his parents when he was still a young pup. Now he was an English major with the goal of writing his people’s history. The original intent had been to write his family’s history, but somehow the manuscript was expanding to be a Michener-length epic, and I wasn’t sure when he’d be able to stop.

  “Yes,” I said, “that was Mrs. Wolff.”

  He looked at the snow she’d left on the carpet, and, since his mother had clearly taught him that if you couldn’t say anything nice you shouldn’t say it at all, he kept quiet. Instead, he asked, “Have you chosen a code?”

  One of the results of the previous September was my vow to get a store security system. Gus had recommended a local company, and by the middle of October, the electronic system was in place. The installer had gravely walked me through the steps of arming and disarming the system, and who to call if anyone accidentally set it off.

  “Here’s the code,” he’d said, handing me a piece of paper with four numbers. “You should change it today. And please, please don’t write the new code into instructions you post by the back door. You wouldn’t believe how many people do that. Sure, it’s easier, but you might as well hand a car thief your car keys.”

  I’d taken his words to heart and drilled my staff until we could all run the system without a second thought. Then, after reading up on security issues, I went a step further. It was easy enough to find an Internet application for a random number generator, and almost as easy to change the code once a week on random days. There was a small amount of Lois-led grumbling at the annoyance, but I was firm and we’d soon become accustomed to learning a new set of four numbers once a week.

  After getting the new code to Paoze, I wandered around the store, straightening books and checking book alphabetization. It was Saturday. Two days since the intervention. Two nights in a row that I hadn’t had to cook. Winnie had vacuumed my house on Friday and washed the kitchen floor. Mary Margaret had taken away anything I needed to do for next week’s PTA in Review. The kids were with Richard this weekend. I felt rested and relaxed and ready to tackle the world.

  Two days had been enough and it was time to release me from that silly promise. Six weeks? Please.

  • • •

  As soon as I flipped the store’s OPEN sign to CLOSED, I moved into high gear. There wasn’t much time. I shooed Paoze and Yvonne out the door, rushed through tallying the cash register, gave a cursory glance to the status of the store, pulled on boots and hat, set the store alarm, and left.

  I parked in Marina’s driveway. Made it! Marina’s DH and youngest son, Zach, had made a new habit of bowling on Saturday afternoons, and they hadn’t returned. I knocked on Marina’s kitchen door and walked in.

  “It’s me,” I announced to Marina, who was sitting at the kitchen table. I stood on the mat just inside the door and leaned down to pull off my boots. “It’s been two days and I have to say thanks because I feel much better but it’s been two days and I feel great, so can we call off the intervention dogs?” Boots off, I stood up straight. “So now let me get back to . . .” I stopped.

  There had been signs that something was off, but I’d been full of myself and hadn’t been paying attention. Marina hadn’t greeted me, hadn’t said anything, hadn’t even waved. She was sniffling, and her head was down on the kitchen table, her right hand clutching the cordless phone to the point of white knuckledom.

  I sat in a chair next to her and took the phone from her hand. Phones. I’d never really liked them. Book covers, at least, gave you a clue to their contents. When a phone rang, you never knew if it would be good news or bad.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked softly. The cowardly part of me, the biggest part, didn’t want to know. I’d never seen her like this. Whate
ver it was, it had to be bad. “Is it Zach? The DH?” Bowling accident, car crash, random kidnappings . . . my thoughts flashed on all sorts of horrible possibilities. “One of the older kids? Are they okay?” Zach had been a surprise baby; he had three older siblings in various stages of college and postcollege activities.

  Marina grabbed my hand. “Fine,” she said through her sobs. “They’re fine.”

  Okay, her immediate family was fine. “And the rest of your family?”

  “What?” She sat up and pushed at her face with the heels of her hands. “Everyone’s fine. What makes you think there’s anything wrong?” A grimace of a smile appeared on her face.

  I pulled a small package of tissues from my coat pocket, drew one out, and handed it to her. “Because you’re sitting here at the kitchen table with the phone in your hand, crying your heart out.”

  She honked her nose into the tissue. “Do you have another one?” Wordlessly, I handed her a fresh piece. Another honk, another tissue to dry her eyes; then she said, “On the phone just now, it was a wrong number.”

  “A wrong number,” I said slowly.

  “Sure.” She dabbed at her eyes. “And it made me sad. All those people out there calling numbers that are wrong, and who knows if they’ll ever reach the person they really want to talk to?”

  It was making me a little sad, too, but I wasn’t bawling my head off over it. “And that’s what made your eyes so red?”

  She squinched them shut, then opened them again. “I needed a good cry. Haven’t had one in a while.”

  I studied her. She was lying. “You’re sure that’s all it was?”

  Her smile was a horrible fake. “Why would I lie? Now, what was it you wanted? Oh, yes. You want off your six weeks of taking it easy. No way. I don’t care how good you feel, you agreed to six weeks and that’s what you’re going to get.”

  She talked on, but I was still considering the question that she herself had posed: why would she lie?

  I didn’t know, but Marina was my best friend. Something was troubling her, and I was going to find out what.

  • • •

  That evening, Pete stood in the doorway, holding out a bouquet of brightly colored daisies. “For you,” he said.

  “They’re beautiful!” I took the flowers and ushered him in out of the cold. “What’s the occasion?” In the few months we’d been seeing each other, Pete had brought us pizza, an amazing knowledge of card games, and a laugh that warmed us all, but never once had he brought flowers.

  He grinned. “Figured they’d help if you were mad about the other day.”

  The other day . . . ah. “The intervention, you mean? Not mad, exactly,” I said, thinking through my emotions of the last two days. “Disconcerted, sure. Unsettled. Thrown off balance. Flustered, even. But I don’t think I’m mad.”

  “Well, good.” He held out his arms and I went into them gladly. “We’re just trying to help,” he said. “You know that, right?”

  Into his shoulder, I said, “Yes, and I appreciate it.” But that seemed incomplete, and therefore not totally honest, so I added one more word. “Mostly.”

  Pete laughed. “I can imagine.” He gave me a hard squeeze, then released me. “You see the upside, though, don’t you?”

  “Well, not cooking is okay. And Winnie’s promise to do some of the heavier cleaning is a huge bonus.”

  He was shaking his head. “That’s all good, but the best thing is you get to be guilt-free for six weeks. If we’re not letting you do anything except what you have to, there’s no need to feel guilty about not doing everything else.” He smiled, obviously proud of his reasoning.

  I wanted to pat him on the head. Such a nice man, yet so clueless about women. “Let me get these flowers in some water,” I said, kissing him on the cheek. “Come on back to the kitchen and we can talk about what we’re going to do tonight.”

  “What do you say to dinner at Ian’s Place, then an eight o’clock showtime?” He reached into his inside coat pocket and pulled out two tickets. “A client gave them to me: two seats for that traveling Broadway show you’ve been talking about. It’s in Madison for a couple weeks, I guess.”

  My eyes went wide. “You have tickets for Wicked?”

  He squinted at the small printing. “Yeah, that’s it. This, uh, is okay with you, right? I mean, if you’re tired we don’t have to use them. We can stay in and order out—”

  I flung my arms around his neck. “Pete Peterson, you are the most wonderful man in the entire world!” A meal at Rynwood’s newest restaurant and a show I’d been wanting to see for years—maybe this intervention thing wasn’t so bad after all.

  The only cloud on the horizon was Marina and the phone call that had spurred her to tears. Tomorrow. I’d work on that tomorrow.

  Chapter 3

  But by Wednesday, the night of the PTA in Review, I was no closer to finding out what Marina’s phone call had been about than I’d been on Saturday afternoon. Up until now, her life had been an open book to me. If anything, I knew more than I really needed to about her hot flashes and digestive issues. This, however, was different.

  “It was a wrong number,” she said again as we walked into the school. “How many times are you going to ask me? Because it’s been about a hundred times already.”

  Until you tell me the truth, I thought. Then I decided what the heck? and said it out loud. “Until you tell me the truth.”

  “Well, it’s getting a little old.” Her voice was tight. “If I was going to say anything different, I would have said it already, okay?” She hurried ahead of me, waving at a couple down the hall. “Hey, Carol. Nick. Cold enough for you out there?”

  I stared after her, troubled.

  “There you are!” Mary Margaret seized my arm. “Let me show you what we’ve done.” Her eyes sparkled with excitement as we neared the entrance to the gymnasium.

  “You’re going to love it. I just know you are.”

  I hated it when people said that. It inevitably resulted in me disliking or being ambivalent about whatever it was, and, knowing that I was expected to like it, I would have to be very careful with my reactions.

  We stepped into the gym and my mouth actually dropped open.

  “Pretty good, eh?” Mary Margaret jabbed me lightly in the ribs.

  “This is . . . fabulous.” My wondering gaze drifted from the small trees in large pots flanking the stage, small white lights strung through the branches, to the vases of flowers lining the front of the stage, to the twig wreaths twined with white lights hanging on the walls, to the array of ferns in the back corners by the open window to the kitchen.

  The decorations transformed the room from a slightly dumpy and decades-old elementary school gym to a show hall. It was gorgeous. For fifteen seconds, I appreciated the transformation. Then the left side of my brain kicked into gear. “How much—”

  “Did it cost?” Mary Margaret chuckled. “Not one thin dime. The flowers up there were all headed for the trash at Faye’s Flowers. I offered to take them off her hands, and by golly, she ended up letting us borrow those trees and the ferns, too. The wreaths are from our store; we had them up at Christmas. I just stripped them down, tossed some lights on them, and shazam!” She smiled proudly.

  “You’ve done a marvelous job,” I said, giving her a quick hug. Decorating the gym for this event had never occurred to me. And how she’d convinced the cranky Faye of Faye’s Flowers to do anything for the PTA was a minor miracle.

  “Aw, it was nothing,” Mary Margaret said, blushing.

  “Maybe it was nothing for you, but I never could have done it,” I told her honestly. “Have you ever thought about running for the PTA presidency?”

  Grinning, she made a cross of her index fingers and backed away. “I’m a worker bee, not a policy person. You take that back right now.”

  I was a policy person? What an odd thought. I’d never imagined myself as anything but a slightly inept forty-two-year-old woman trying to bumble her way
through life with as few mistakes as possible. Funny, what other people thought about you.

  “We’re open for business!” called a voice from the kitchen. Immediately, the twenty or so people in the gym moved en masse to the back of the room.

  I frowned. “Refreshments beforehand?”

  “Yeah,” Mary Margaret said. “We talked about it the other day at our last committee meeting. I figured what the heck, let’s try it and see what happens.”

  “Try what?” I asked cautiously.

  “See that?” She pointed to the end of the long counter that lined the opening to the kitchen. “A money jar.”

  “You’re charging for refreshments?”

  “Ah, don’t look so horrified.” She grinned. “We’re asking for donations, is all. We made a few extra goodies and we’re having tea and lemonade, plus the regular coffee. And we’re going to have a short break between every decade where people can get more stuff. Maybe we’ll make a few bucks, eh?”

  It would also make for a very long evening. But it never hurt to try new methods of making money. And, anyway, if people drank a lot of coffee now, they’d need the breaks to hit the restroom.

  The chairs in the gym were slowly filling up. In the crowd were current PTA members, past PTA members, a few Tarver teachers, the new vice principal, and some people who, as far as I knew, had no connection to the PTA whatsoever. Alan Barnhart, for instance, was a retired teacher, but not from Tarver. He did, however, own the antiques mall downtown, so perhaps it was a sense of history that drew him here.

  At ten to seven, Isabel Olsen, a member of the event committee, encouraged me to take my place on the stage. “If we get everybody up there and ready beforehand,” she said, “maybe we can start this on time.”

  I climbed the stairs to the stage and joined the other presenters. May Werner, known to all as Auntie May, was ninety-two years old and the terror of Rynwood. Her most potent weapon was her rock-solid memory of every embarrassing incident in every Rynwood resident’s life.