Poison at the PTA

by Laura Alden

  I was rearranging the items by shape when Lois burst into the room.

  “Beth!” she shrieked, flapping her arms.

  Oh, dear. Fluttering arms meant Lois was in full panic mode, something that happened maybe once a year. “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  She tugged at her hair. “It’s almost time for that preschool class to show up. I forgot all about it. Fifteen little kids will be wanting to spend their money on stickers and we’re short on dollar bills and dimes and I need to restock the sticker rolls and the stencil books and Flossie’s helping, but—”

  I was already sweeping my new desk decorations back into their box. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll go to the bank.”

  “You will? Really? Oh, bless you.” She threw me an air kiss. “Mmm-wha! You’re the best boss ever.” She hurried out of my office, leaving an invisible trail of angst in her wake.

  In an hour, Lois would be ashamed of her panic attack and try to convince us it had never happened. She was lucky Paoze wasn’t working this morning; he would have been able to recite her babble word for word.

  I put on my coat, then took a bank bag and stuffed some bills from the cash register into it. Looked inside, and stuffed a few more in. Little kids were the only people in the country who could be relied upon to pay for their purchases in cash.

  Outside, the gray of early morning was progressing into a gray midmorning, and judging from the sky, it was going to be a gray noon, a gray afternoon, and a gray evening. A gray night, too, though it would be harder to tell at night what the clouds were—

  “Hey, Beth.”

  I stopped looking at the sky and looked at the person standing in front of me. “Deirdre. How are you this morning?”

  Cookie’s neighbor glanced at the sky. “So far, so good, but I hear there’s a storm coming.”

  “Headed anywhere exciting?” I nodded at the adjacent storefront, the one travel agency left in Rynwood.

  She looked puzzled, and then her face cleared. “No, I came out of there.” She nodded at the local stockbroker’s office. “I have an account here, but I might be switching. Can you recommend anyone?”

  Clearly, Deirdre didn’t know how much money children’s bookstore owners made. Or, more accurately, didn’t make. The store was doing well, but I wasn’t ever going to make enough money to think about putting it into anything even remotely risky. “Sorry. Can’t help you with that.”

  We chatted a little more, then started the good-bye phrases that polite people use. “Well,” I said, “it was nice to—” I stopped cold. The box. “Did anyone else know that you sent me Cookie’s box? Did you mention it to anyone?”

  Deirdre shook her head. “No, I . . . Wait. Hang on. The day I got back from Chicago, I dropped the receipt in the grocery store. I was getting milk and eggs before I headed home. That new vice principal picked it up and handed it back to me. I could have said it was for you from Cookie. Sorry. I really don’t remember.”

  I might have mumbled a good-bye, but I might not. Probably not. I don’t see how I could have, because my brain was too busy with the unwelcome knowledge that Oliver’s Ms. Stephanie had abruptly moved to the very tippy top of the potential killers list.

  • • •

  The century-old bank lobby echoed with too many voices. If the building’s designer had intended to create an impressive space, he had succeeded, but at a price. Every employee in, and customer of, the marble-floored, plaster-ceilinged, many-pillared, granite-countertopped, wood-walled bank suffered from auditory overload just by walking in the door. The acoustics were such that, if you had a mind to, you could overhear every conversation in the room.

  It seemed odd, in a bank, not to have even a semblance of privacy while conducting financial transactions, but maybe that hadn’t mattered when the building was built.

  Thinking about it, I unzipped my coat. Back in those days, coats had been buttoned. Back then, women and men alike had worn hats when in public. Back then, ladies had worn gloves. I did a little mental math. If Cookie had started working at the bank when she was, say, twenty-five, she would have started working here in the late seventies. Back in the days of bell-bottoms and—

  “. . . Van Doorne.”

  I whipped my head around. Who . . . ? Then I recognized Mrs. Tolliver. Auntie May without any of the humor, Lois had told me years ago, and she was right.

  Over near the high counter where people filled out deposit and withdrawal slips, the elderly and very upright Mrs. Tolliver was once again speaking her mind. “Not to speak ill of the dead,” she said, “but that woman didn’t have the gift of friendship. She didn’t have friends as a girl and she never managed to gain more as an adult. I ask you, what kind of woman doesn’t have a single good friend?”

  She paused, waiting for a response. Her companion stood behind a pillar, invisible to me, and spoke too quietly for me to hear anything more than a low voice. A male voice.

  I edged closer.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Mrs. Tolliver’s chin went up. “I know everyone in this town. If Cookie had had a friend, I would have known.”

  Deirdre. She didn’t know Deirdre.

  “Well, perhaps not every single solitary person,” she said. “But I know everyone who counts, and Cookie wasn’t on friendship terms with any of them. And how can you, of all people, defend her?” Mrs. Tolliver demanded. “After what she did to you? You can’t tell me you shed a tear when she died.”

  I edged even closer.

  “She was doing what she thought was right,” Alan Barnhart said quietly. “No, I didn’t grieve when she passed, but I can respect her actions. She had great courage, born of her convictions, and wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all had that kind of passion?”

  “Passion.” Mrs. Tolliver thinned her lips. “There is no dignity in passion. Without dignity, there is no self-respect, and without self-respect, there is no honor. Honor is what’s important. It’s the only thing that ever has been.”

  A bank teller called. “Mrs. Tolliver? I can help you now.”

  “Honor,” she repeated, and walked away, head erect.

  With his back to me, Alan watched her go. I could almost see his mental shrug and knew exactly what it meant. It was far easier to agree to win an argument with Mrs. Tolliver when she wasn’t in the same room.

  Another teller opened up her window. “Good morning, Alan,” she said, smiling. “What do you need today?” He said something I couldn’t hear. “A safe-deposit box?” she asked. “Easy enough.” She told him the annual fee and slid a piece of paper across the counter to him. “Other than the fee, all you have to do is fill out this form.”

  I watched Alan nod, then take the pen offered to him. He held the pen at an odd angle, and an old memory pinged. As Alan wrote, the top of the pen wobbled. It wobbled wider and wider, then fell with a clatter. Alan laid his hands flat on the counter. He stared at the fingers that had betrayed him, not hearing the concerned questions of the teller.

  You didn’t kill her, I thought. Only I must not have simply thought it, I must have said it out loud, because Alan turned to me, his eyebrows raised.

  I smiled. “How about a quick cup of coffee at the Green Tractor?”

  • • •

  Ten minutes later, we were in the diner’s back booth, warm mugs in hand.

  “You seriously suspected me of killing Cookie?” Alan’s raised eyebrows created lines in his forehead.

  “Not really.” I wrapped my hands around the mug of tea Ruthie had set in front of me. “But since you were helping out in the kitchen that night, your name had to go on the suspect list.”

  “You know that Gus talked to me,” Alan said.

  I hadn’t known, but since I hadn’t heard anything from Gus since he’d gotten sick, I wasn’t surprised.

  “So how do you know I didn’t do it?” Alan asked. “After all, you could be wrong. You could be sitting here with a murderer.”

  But I was shaking my head. “Nothing Cookie
did made any real difference to you. She didn’t get you fired, and her whispering campaign about your store didn’t hurt your business, not on a permanent basis. You overturned everything she did. And you defended her to Mrs. Tolliver.”

  Over his raised mug, he studied me. “Maybe I was just doing that to deflect suspicion.”

  “Maybe.” I studied him right back. “But you couldn’t have opened that pill bottle, not with your arthritis. You can barely hold that mug right now, can you? And in the store the other day, it was arthritis that made you drop that plate, wasn’t it? That’s why Alice was so worried—it wasn’t the cut so much as the disease.”

  His wife was worried about him; she was worried about what was going to happen to him, about how his life was going to be changing, that soon he might not be able to do the things he loved to do. Just as my father hadn’t been able to go fishing by himself in the years before he passed away.

  “Alice could have opened the bottle for me,” Alan pointed out.

  I came back to the here and now. “Yes, but she didn’t. You wouldn’t have asked her to do something like that.”

  “But, anyway,” Alan said, “we’re aspirin people. Maybe some ibuprofen every once in a while, but not acetaminophen. We haven’t had any in the house since Alice read an article about how dangerous it is.”

  I smiled. That sounded like Alice.

  And that was the end of Alan being a suspect.

  • • •

  When I got back to a store crowded with preschoolers, a harried Lois gave me a look that could kill. Luckily my winter coat had magical powers and the blow bounced off me and fell to the floor along with the snow that had fallen on me while I was walking back from the Green Tractor.

  “Where have you been?” she whispered fiercely as she yanked the bank bag out of my hand.

  I would have told her, but I could tell she wouldn’t be a receptive audience for my story, so I pulled off my coat and got to work.

  • • •

  When Jenna and I stopped at Marina’s that evening to pick up Oliver, she was on the phone with what sounded like, from Marina’s end of the conversation, a very uncooperative customer service representative from her credit card company.

  I mouthed, Call me.

  She nodded at me while saying, “But I’ve never been to Boca Raton. How could I possibly have purchased over seven hundred dollars’ worth of lingerie at a Nordstrom? I mean, sure, I would like to, but I have four kids and the last time I bought a fancy bra was in 1987.”

  Two hours later, when I was in the study balancing the checkbook and the kids were in the family room arguing over what DVD to watch, Marina knocked and came in, stomping snow off her boots and making shivering noises. “Snowy and blowy and cold. Looks like we’re actually going to get that storm they forecasted.”

  “I thought you were going to call.”

  “Not after Zach and the DH decided this was the perfect night to start repainting his bedroom. You know what the smell of primer does to me.”

  Five minutes in an unvented room and she’d get a splitting headache. Ten minutes and she’d start zoning out. Fifteen and her speech would be slurred. I didn’t know what would happen at twenty because she’d never lasted that long, but there was no way it would be pretty.

  I turned on the teakettle. “Did you get your new lingerie straightened out?”

  “My . . . ? Oh, right. The stuff I didn’t buy. All taken care of, thanks. Now, what was it you wanted to talk about?”

  “We have to cross Isabel and Alan off the suspect list,” I told her.

  “Ooo, you have information!” Marina’s face lit up. She scraped back one of the chairs from the kitchen table and plopped down into it. “Spill, my friend, spill!”

  So I told her about the bank and Mrs. Tolliver and Alan and how he’d defended Cookie and how he’d been dropping things and his arthritis and how he’d fought Cookie’s efforts and won.

  Marina went into Southern belle mode, her fallback persona. “Ah do declare, the man is a saint, bless his heart. Is theah anyone else who could be so kind as to defend his tormentor?”

  “Unlikely.”

  “And what about deah Isabel? Ah’m glad to hear that sweet thing is not a murderah, but why do we know so?”

  Since Lois and Flossie and I had promised Isabel that we wouldn’t spread the news about her pregnancy, I needed a cover story for her innocence that would satisfy Marina. Unfortunately, I hadn’t come up with anything. “It’s a secret,” I said lamely. “Next week I’ll be able to tell you, but not right now.”

  I’d expected her to protest and wheedle and beg. Instead, she nodded. “Okay. But you’ll tell me as soon as you can?”

  Who was this woman sitting at my kitchen table and what had she done with my best friend? “Well, sure.” I stared at her and might have gone on staring for quite some time, but the teakettle started its shrill whistle and turned my attention away from the alien who’d taken up residence in Marina’s body.

  I bustled about, brewing up mugs of decaffeinated tea, and by the time I brought the drinks to the kitchen table and sat down, we were talking about the budding storm and what the chances were of the school superintendent calling off school the next day.

  Then I knew I had to tell her what I didn’t want to think about. “There’s something else,” I said in a low voice. Jenna and Oliver were down the hall and in another room, but kids’ ears have an amazing capacity to overhear whatever part of a conversation interests them.

  Marina laid her arms on the table and leaned close. “Can I guess?” she asked in an equally low voice.

  “No,” I said, and talked over the top of her pouting protest. “Remember I told you about a box I got from Cookie, the one with all the odd things inside it?”

  “Yeah, what’s that all about, anyway?”

  “Haven’t a clue.”

  “No, I mean why did Cookie send it to you in the first place? You hardly knew the woman.”

  I’d been wondering the same thing. “When I took her home that night of the PTA in Review, she went on and on about all the murders I’d helped solve. Yes, you helped, too,” I quickly added, “but you weren’t in the car, so it was just me. From her letter, it didn’t sound as if she had a lot of confidence in the police, so maybe she sent me the box thinking it would help me figure out her killer.”

  Marina squinted. “Sounds like something Cookie would think. Matter of fact, sounds like something I’d think if people were after me.” She grinned.

  I rolled my eyes. “This morning I ran into Deirdre Gale, Cookie’s neighbor, the woman who sent me the box.”

  “Deirdre did it!” Marina thumped the table. “She and Cookie were fighting over . . . over a fence line and—”

  “And she was in Alaska when Cookie was poisoned.”

  Marina’s face lost its animation. “Really? Dang. I mean . . . you know.”

  I did know. Each person on our short list of suspects was someone we’d known for years. The thought that the person who’d murdered Cookie might be a relative stranger was a much more comfortable thought.

  “You sure she was in Alaska?” Marina asked. “Maybe she sneaked into the kitchen when no one was looking. Maybe she’s stealthlike in her movements and . . .”

  I was shaking my head. “She works for a big Madison engineering firm. I called, said I was from the airline and needed to check on some flight dates for one of their employees regarding a baggage claim. She was in Alaska.”

  Marina grinned. “Clever you, thinking up a story like that. Say, did your ears turn red? I mean, it was kind of a lie, you know.”

  My ears had burned for an hour afterward, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. “So when I saw Deirdre today, I asked her if anyone else knew that she sent me the box.” I sighed. “And it turns out that Stephanie Pesch probably knew.”

  “Stephanie?” Marina’s voice was loud with surprise.

  I made frantic shushing gestures. “Shhh,” I said, and gav
e her the details.

  “Huh.” Marina stared into her tea. “Our new vice principal just went to the top of the People Who Might Have Killed Cookie list. I don’t like this, not one little bit.”

  “You’re not alone.” We talked over what I’d learned about Stephanie, about how Cookie had driven away her own daughter, and about how the argument at the bank showed how much Stephanie still hated Cookie.

  Marina sighed. “Are you sure Deirdre couldn’t have done it?”

  “No possible way. There’s not—” I stopped and looked down the hall. Once again my children were arguing, but this particular argument carried a different tone.

  A crash! reverberated through the house.

  Marina’s eyes went wide. “What was what?”

  But I was already on my feet and hurrying down the hall. “The front door,” I called over my shoulder. Although why the door should have banged open, I had no idea. Then, as I went past the empty family room, I realized I had no idea where my children were. “Jenna? Oliver?”

  I rounded the corner and went into the living room, where a cold rush of air was sweeping through the entryway and snaking its frigid way into the rest of the house. I grabbed the door handle and had started to slam it closed when I saw my daughter’s dim figure disappearing into the dark white of an evening snowstorm.

  “Jenna!” I called. “Come back!”

  Either she didn’t hear or she didn’t pay attention. One step more, two, and then she was gone into the night.

  Marina was at my side. “What on earth? Where’s she going?”

  I didn’t know, but I was going to find out. I ran to the kitchen for my coat, for Jenna’s coat, because she was out in that storm without it—oh, Jenna!—for my cell phone. “Oliver? Oliver!” I shouted.

  But he was gone, too.

  Chapter 17