Poison at the PTA

by Laura Alden

  She apologized all the way to the cash register and as I rang up the sale and only stopped when I started to put it in a bag. “Don’t bother,” she said. “I only live a few blocks away. There’s enough light from the streetlights that I can read while I walk.”

  I laughed. “A woman after my own heart. Just don’t forget to look both ways before you cross the street.” I came around the counter and unlocked the front door to let her out.

  “Come back when you’re done reading. That author has written a number of books.” Smiling, I waved her good night and closed the door as she waved back, the expression on her face thick with something that looked close to joy.

  It didn’t take long to do the closing-up chores. I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes until Marina was going to show up for our no-kids-allowed night.

  Twenty minutes wasn’t very long, but it would have to be enough.

  I grabbed my coat, let myself out the front door, locked it behind me, and hurried down the sidewalk.

  • • •

  “Wow,” I said. “You look horrible.”

  Gus glared at me. Or what would have been a glare if it hadn’t been interrupted by his sudden need to take care of a nose that was starting to drip indiscriminately. When he was done blowing, he said in a voice so hoarse it was almost unrecognizable, “Why, thank you, Beth, I’m feeling much better.”

  “Uh-huh.” Uninvited, I sat down. “Is that what Winnie says?”

  “My wife and I have come to an agreement.”

  Sort of, I added silently. Both Winnie and Gus were very good friends of mine, and no way was I going to choose a side in that dogfight. “Well, it’s nice to see you back in the office.”

  He blew his nose again. “Even if I look like something the cat dragged in?”

  I bared my teeth and made dragging motions with my head. This made him laugh, which was what it was intended to do, and I smiled, very glad indeed that Gus was feeling well enough to be back at work, even though he probably shouldn’t have been.

  “So, what’s up?” He pulled out a lower drawer of his desk, leaned back, and put his feet up on the drawer. “Winnie’s going to drag me out of here in fifteen minutes, so you’d better talk fast.”

  Perfect.

  I told him everything I could remember. About Isabel’s pregnancy, about Alan’s arthritis and his ways of coping, about Stephanie and her allergy to acetaminophen. About Oliver’s crush, how he’d overheard Marina and me talking and how he’d run out into a winter storm to warn Ms. Stephanie. About how Jenna had followed him. About how I’d come far too close to losing both of them.

  When I stopped, Gus didn’t say anything. He just looked at me and waited.

  “So,” I said. “I’m done. No more investigating, no more poking around into things that aren’t any of my business, no more doing what law enforcement has been trained to do.”

  Gus sighed. “Yeah,” he said. “Glad the kids are okay, and I’m sorry to lose your eyes and ears, but I understand. Cookie had no business asking for your help, anyway. That’s what we’re here to do.” He tapped his gold-colored badge.

  In spite of my determination to walk away from all this, I felt a pang when Gus mentioned Cookie’s request. “Right,” I said lamely. “So . . . I guess I’ll go.”

  “You and me both.” Gus dropped his feet to the floor. “Winnie’s going to have my . . . er, she’s going to chew me out if I’m not at the back door in”—he glanced at his watch—“in negative two minutes.”

  I laughed and got to my feet. “See you at church on Sunday?”

  “Count on it.”

  Outside, the cold air snapped my brain awake. Not that it had been sleeping, exactly, but it must have turned a little dozy inside the police station because I’d forgotten to tell Gus about the box. I should have plopped it on his desk as a kind of “Sorry I’m quitting on you, but here’s this” gift. And I’d neglected to give him the one name Marina and I hadn’t crossed off the list. “I forgot,” I said out loud. I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, ignoring the odd looks of the passersby.

  I turned around and headed back, but a hand grabbed at my arm and held it fast.

  “Oh, no you don’t.”

  Marina looped her arm through mine. Using her weight advantage, she steered me around in a half circle and started walking us away from the police station. “No going back to wherever you were going. It’s our official no-kids-allowed night and we don’t even have half a plan for what we’re going to do.”

  I tried to pull away. “Just give me five minutes. I need to tell Gus something.”

  She gestured to a battered minivan passing us on the street. “That Gus?” Through the side window, we could clearly see Gus as passenger and Winnie as driver, both of them waving. “When did he come back to work?” Marina asked. “Gotta tell you. He still doesn’t look that good. Did you see that pansy wave he gave us?”

  I watched the van tail off into the dusky evening. Tomorrow. I’d call Gus tomorrow morning. And if he wasn’t in his office . . . well, this could wait until Monday. It was important, but it wasn’t worth risking Gus’s health.

  Marina was still talking. “It’s freezing out here. Let’s get back to the bookstore and figure out what’s on for tonight.”

  By the time we’d walked into the store’s warmth, she’d already proposed hanging out in an airport bar, buying me an entirely new—and much more fun—wardrobe, driving to Chicago for pizza, and flying to the Bahamas.

  I rejected all of her suggestions.

  “Huh.” She put on a thoughtful look. “Okay, if the Bahamas are out, how about Cancún? You and me, kid, in lounge chairs, umbrella drinks in our hands, sun on our faces, toes in the sand. What do you say?”

  On the surface her tone was casually light, but I could hear the tension that lay underneath. You can’t hide much from someone who’s been your best friend for years. I opened my mouth to ask what was wrong, to tell her that I wasn’t going anywhere until she told me what was bothering her, but then I remembered her vow about Mother’s Day, a date I’d picked out of the air.

  “Stupid air,” I muttered. Why hadn’t it told me to choose St. Patrick’s Day? Or better yet, Valentine’s Day, because if she’d agreed to that I’d already know what was wrong and we’d be dealing with the problem instead of doing our best to ignore it.

  “What was that?” Marina asked.

  “Stupid hair.” I pushed back my flyaway strands. “I need to try a new conditioner, I think.”

  Her narrowed eyes were a definite indication that she didn’t believe me, but before she could call me on the lie, there was a pounding at the front door.

  “It’s Claudia Wolff,” Marina whispered loudly. “Hide!”

  “Too late. She’s already seen us.”

  “We can pretend we didn’t hear her.” Marina talked fast, tugging at my coat sleeve. “We can pretend we didn’t see her. We didn’t turn on any lights. We can plead complete ignorance. Plausible deniability, right?”

  “Deniability is for weenies,” I said, moving toward the door. “Buck up.”

  “But I don’t want to talk to Claudia.”

  I stopped and stared at her. “Was that a whine?” Marina was many things, a number of which were annoying, but the one thing she wasn’t was a whiner. “Are you feeling okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she almost snapped. “I just don’t want to talk to Claudia. She’s bound to say something that will ruin the mood for our entire evening. Don’t do it, Beth. Just don’t.”

  But my ingrained be-nice reaction was already kicking in. “I’m sure it won’t take long. I won’t even open the door all the way.” With a twist of the wrist, I unlocked the front door and cracked it open. “Hey, Claudia, you know we’re closed, right? Marina and I are just— Ow!”

  The door hit my hand, which, in the classic “For every action there is a reaction,” was shoved back and hit my face. It startled me more than hurt me, but Claudia showed no concern about which it mig
ht have been.

  She burst through the door, her breath going in and out in fast puffs. “Do you know what I heard?”

  For years I’d believed the old teacher’s mantra, that there are no stupid questions. Tonight could be the night I changed my mind. I locked the door. Again. “Why, no, I don’t, Claudia. Why don’t you tell us?”

  She ignored, or didn’t hear, my sarcasm. “I was at Sabatini’s just now, right? My family had dinner, and I was heading out to get some shopping done while my husband took the boys home. I went to the restroom before I left, and you’ll never guess what I heard.”

  “You’re right,” Marina said. “We’ll never guess. You win, we lose. See you later, Claudia. Have a good—”

  “It was Kirk Olsen.” Claudia’s face was flushed, and I suddenly realized it wasn’t from the cold. “He was talking to what’s his name—the guy who owns Sabatini’s.”

  “Joe,” I murmured. Joe Pigg, actually, but if she didn’t already know that fun fact, I wasn’t going to spread it around.

  “Yeah, Joe, that’s it. Anyway, they were in—oh, what do you call it?—back there where the entrance to the men’s bathrooms are in that little space. Ah, what is it?” She frowned, the narrative halted for want of the right word.

  “Alcove,” I supplied.

  “That’s it,” she said. “They were in that alcove, yucking it up about something, and that’s when Kirk said what he said.” She looked from me to Marina and back, clearly waiting for one of us to beg her to go on. When she couldn’t stand the wait any longer, she rushed back into the story. “Kirk said that with Cookie dead, the town’s safe for men who know what they want.”

  A tingle ran up my back, ending in a knot of tension at the base of my neck.

  Claudia’s cheeks were now stained bright red. “Don’t you see? Kirk must have killed Cookie! Why else would he say stuff like that?”

  Marina sniffed. “If you’re so sure Kirk did it, why haven’t you called the police?”

  “I’m on my way to the police station,” she said. “But then I saw you and Beth in here, and I had to stop to say that you’re not the only crime solver in this town.” She put on a triumphant smile. “I can catch killers, too, and I figured this one out first. All by myself.”

  She went on, but I stopped listening.

  It really was Kirk.

  Our short list, the list we’d joked about and not taken very seriously, the list we hadn’t wanted to be right, it had been right all along.

  Kirk had poisoned Cookie.

  He’d added acetaminophen to her coffee and let her go home to die.

  I wanted to close my eyes against the reality. I didn’t want to know this awful truth. I wanted things to go back to the way they’d been, with Cookie a slightly annoying acquaintance and Kirk a slightly overbearing PTA member who thought a little too highly of himself and enjoyed bragging about his cars and vacations a little too much.

  But though I certainly didn’t want Kirk to be a murderer, too many signs were pointing straight at him. But . . . why was he? Why on earth would he have done such a thing? What could have driven him to such a horrible crime? Why would he have killed a woman, a mostly mild-mannered bank teller who—

  The “why” suddenly clicked into place.

  Stockbrokers make money on commission. Deirdre said he wasn’t that great a stockbroker. Kirk couldn’t have been making much money, yet he’d been buying cars and trips and country club memberships.

  He’d been stealing from someone. And Cookie had found out.

  I tuned back in to my surroundings. Marina and Claudia were in a face-off, neither one brooking any opposition.

  “It was poison,” Marina said loudly. “That means the killer is most likely a woman and—”

  Claudia leaned forward. “I don’t care about most likely. I know what I heard and—”

  “And you think just because of that one conversation, you know what’s really going on?” Marina snorted. “Please. Finding a killer takes a lot more than eavesdropping. It takes courage and smarts and . . . and all sorts of things. And what it really takes is knowing your suspects. Your suspect is a man and just that alone makes you wrong, right, Beth?”

  I didn’t want to say she was wrong, not in front of Claudia. “We don’t know anything, not for sure.”

  “Come on, Beth,” Marina scoffed. “Tell her that the killer is a female. Tell her she’s wrong.”

  Claudia put her chin up. “Tell her she’s wrong. Tell her I’m right about Kirk.”

  “Oh, please.” Marina laughed. “There is no way that you’re right. No way at all. Right, Beth?”

  I suddenly felt like a referee in a hockey game, trying to keep apart two players who, more than anything else in the world, wanted to rip each other’s arms off.

  “Tell her, Beth.” Marina stood, hands on hips, a small smile on her face, sure of me.

  The small ache in my heart grew five sizes. “I think . . . you’re wrong.”

  She frowned. “You mean Claudia’s wrong.”

  I shook my head slowly. “No, I’m sorry, but I think she’s right.”

  Marina went very, very still. “You can’t mean that.”

  “Kirk Olsen is the last one on the list,” I said. “He’s the only one left who could have killed Cookie. And I think he did it because—”

  She wasn’t listening. She was too busy buttoning up her coat buttons and pulling on her gloves. “Fine. If you want to team up with Claudia here, you go right ahead. I’ll be busy having fun instead of messing around with things that should be left to the police. Have a good time.”

  “Marina, don’t—”

  She walked away from my words, unlocking the front door with a twist of her wrist, and headed off into the dark night.

  “Well.” Claudia smirked. “You and Marina having a little tiff. I never thought I’d see the day.”

  It wasn’t a tiff—it was more like the end of an era.

  I blinked back tears. “Anyway.” The word came out weak and soggy. I coughed and started over. “I think you’re right. I think Kirk Olsen is Cookie’s murderer.”

  Claudia crossed her arms and smiled. “I knew you’d see it my way.”

  Not what I was thinking, but whatever. “Kirk may be the murderer, but you need more proof than an overheard scrap of conversation that could be interpreted in many different ways.” Claudia glowered, but I kept going. “Plus, what you have is all hearsay. What you need is evidence. If you can find even one piece, the police will listen to you. Without it, there’s no proof of anything.”

  “But—”

  “The police can’t arrest anyone without solid evidence,” I said firmly.

  She pouted, something I rarely found attractive in children, let alone grown women. “Then we need to find some,” she said.

  “We”? There was no “we” in this scenario. I was done investigating; I’d hung up my hat not half an hour ago.

  “Yeah,” Claudia said eagerly. “We can do this. I’m sure of it. With my know-how and a little of your experience, we can tie up Kirk Olsen in knots and hand him over to the cops with a bow on top.”

  I got a visual and immediately tried to erase it out of my head. “Claudia, I’m not investigating anything. I have a store to run, a PTA to lead, and, most of all, two children to mother.”

  “What about all those other times?” she demanded. “So you’ll hunt down killers with Marina, but not with me? Is that what you’re saying?”

  I sighed. “What I’m saying is leave it to the police. That’s what they do.”

  “In Rynwood?” She snorted. “When’s the last time they solved a murder without outside help?”

  “They’ll figure it out just fine,” I said.

  “And what am I going to do in the meantime?” Claudia asked. “Now that I know this about Kirk, I have to do something with it.” She eyed me. “I bet you know something about Kirk that you’re not sharing. Don’t shake your head at me, I can tell you’re holding bac
k. If it’s not about Kirk, then it’s about Cookie.”

  I was still shaking my head. “I don’t know anything, really I don’t. Nothing except . . .”

  The box.

  Chapter 19

  “What box?” Claudia asked.

  Why is it that the things I most wanted to keep to myself, I often gave away? It couldn’t be a Freudian slip because there was nothing subconscious about my wish to keep quiet about the box, but there was bound to be some name for what I’d just done. Though “stupidity” covered it nicely, perhaps there was a multisyllabic term that was a bit more precise and—

  “What box?” Claudia asked again, this time with heat in her voice.

  I looked at her. If it had been Marina, I might have sent up a distraction that she would have recognized as a distraction in a heartbeat, but she would have let it go because she understood that sometimes you just don’t push, that respecting someone else’s wishes is more important than satisfying your own curiosity, that—

  “Beth Kennedy, if you don’t tell me what box you’re talking about I’m going to . . . to . . .”

  To what? To make my life miserable? She’d already done that at least a dozen times over the years. What was one more?

  “. . . to start a petition to have you kicked out as PTA president.” She put her nose in the air and smiled triumphantly.

  I laughed out loud. “Go right ahead. Being president isn’t nearly as much fun as you think it is.”

  “But you wouldn’t like it taken away, now, would you?” I wouldn’t, and she saw it plain on my face. “You like being in charge and you like having things go your way and—”

  I’d had enough. “And I don’t give in to blackmail.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “What are you talking about? I’m not blackmailing you. I wouldn’t do such a thing. How could you think I’d do something like that? Just because you would doesn’t mean I would. I can’t believe you!”

  I sighed. Again. “Maybe blackmail wasn’t the best word. How about coercion?”