Foul Play at the PTA

by Laura Alden

“Sam?” Erica called. “Are you all right? Sam!” She grabbed the door handle and lifted it.

  I stabbed at the second number. One.

  Erica yanked the door open. “Sam? Are you—” Her question ended in a gasping shriek. Sam fell toward her, his scarf too tight around his neck. There was no life in his slumped body and his open eyes were seeing nothing but death. “Sam!” Erica screamed. She jerked off her gloves and felt for a pulse, then dragged Sam’s body out of the SUV and onto the cold ground. As she started the pointless job of CPR, I pushed the last button. One.

  There was a single ring. Then: “Dane County dispatch. What is your emergency?”

  Chapter 3

  Gus Eiseley, Rynwood’s chief of police, looked at me. “I hear you have the perfect alibi.”

  “It’s all my fault.” I clutched a cup of coffee as if it might be the rock that would sustain me. It wasn’t, of course. It was a blistering hot liquid that, thanks to its caffeine, would keep me awake most of the night, but after seeing poor Sam like that, it wasn’t likely that I’d be able to sleep anyway. I blew at the coffee, making small ripples.

  “Your fault.” Gus turned a chair around and sat, putting his arms on the back and looking as comfortable as he looked in his living room. “Are you ready to make a confession?”

  I shook my head and almost slopped coffee over the side of the foam cup. “It’s my fault that Sam’s dead.”

  Gus propped his chin on his hands. “This, I can’t wait to hear.”

  The coffee’s temperature had dropped to merely scalding. I took one sip, then another, as I tried to think out a way to say what I had to say without sounding like a complete idiot. No matter what, Gus would be kind and understanding because that’s the way he was, but he would also poke me in the back at the next church choir rehearsal and make fun of me.

  I took another sip of coffee. “It’s my fault because if it hadn’t been for me, he would have been home tonight.”

  “And you think that would have made a difference?”

  “Well, yes.” I took another swallow. My drink of choice was tea, but Gus didn’t believe in anything brewed from leaves. “If he’d been home maybe his wife would have seen the signs and called 911 before he died.” Even though we were inside the school, I could see the revolving lights of the ambulance that arrived much too late to save Sam’s life. Around and around they went.

  “Signs?” Gus asked.

  I gestured with my cup. “Of a heart attack, or whatever it was. PTA meetings are always on Wednesdays. It was because of me that we met tonight.” Me and my dumb story session idea. I’d wanted the project approved, I’d wanted to get going on plans, I’d wanted to—

  “He didn’t die from a heart attack,” Gus said.

  “Oh.” I stole a look at my watch. Barely an hour had passed since I’d called 911. How Gus could know cause of death already, I wasn’t sure, but maybe forensic conclusions really did happen as fast as they did on television. “Um, stroke?”

  Gus spoke softly. “Sam was murdered, Beth.”

  I heard the words, but they didn’t make sense. “No, he wasn’t. He must have had one of those silent diseases they talk about. Scary, to think every one of us could be walking around with a little alarm clock inside, and one day the alarm will go off but we won’t hear it. All we’ll do is not wake up the next morning.” I was babbling. This is what I did when nervous, scared, or uncomfortable. When I was all three, like now, the effect expanded geometrically. “Back in college there was this professor who died of an aneurysm. Here one day, gone the next. You just never know, do you? And I once knew a—”

  “Beth.” Gus interrupted my steady flow of words. “Sam was murdered. There’s no question about it.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Everyone made mistakes. I made them every day. I even did dumb things in my dreams. “Shouldn’t a coroner or a medical examiner or a doctor or somebody be the one to say?” Not another murder, I pleaded silently; my children had only recently recovered from the last murder in town. Oliver was sleeping with only one stuffed animal instead of a bedful, and Jenna hadn’t woken in the middle of the night, shrieking, in weeks. “Are you certain? I mean . . .”

  “Am I qualified to say how anyone died?” A smile came and went on his weather-worn face. “Normally I wouldn’t. But in this particular case the signs are clear.”

  I shut my eyes. Sam’s wife would be devastated. And the poor children. To lose your father to disease was bad enough, but to have him taken away from you by another human being? I looked at Gus. “You’re absolutely sure?”

  “Classic signs of strangulation. They were so obvious even I could figure it out. The scarf around his neck helped.”

  Shame filled me. “Gus, I didn’t mean—”

  He patted my arm. “You’re not questioning my skills; you just don’t want there to be another murder in Rynwood.”

  I nodded thankfully.

  “You’re not alone in wanting Sam’s death to be from natural causes, believe you me. But facts are facts.” His demeanor shifted from normal, friendly Gus to that of a law enforcement officer at the scene of a crime. “Now. I’ll need to ask you a few questions.”

  I opened my mouth, but he was ahead of me.

  “Just like last time,” he said, “the Dane County Sheriff’s Department will be taking over the case. But that hasn’t happened yet, and until it does I’m in charge of the investigation.”

  I wondered when the sheriff’s department would show up. Tonight? Tomorrow? And would Deputy Sharon Wheeler be in charge of the investigation? She’d headed things up when Agnes died, and, while she and I hadn’t been outright enemies, we weren’t kindred spirits, either. But Dane County was big, and so was the sheriff’s department. The chances of Deputy Wheeler being assigned to this particular matter were—

  “Good evening, Chief Eiseley.”

  —were apparently quite good. Deputy Wheeler strode into the room, trim and fit in her brown and tan uniform. Even the bulky brown coat flattered her figure. The deputy shook hands with Gus, who’d stood to greet her, and looked at me. “Mrs. . . . Kennedy.” She dragged my name out of a year-old memory, something that would have taken me fifteen minutes of hemming and hawing. “How are you?”

  Tired, sad, scared, and filled with a need to hug my children. “Fine, thanks. Yourself?”

  She gave a short nod, then turned to Gus. They started talking about crime-scene contamination and estimated time of death.

  I sat in my chair, trying not to hear what they said, trying to make myself small. If I were really small, they would forget I was there. They’d leave the vacant office Gus had commandeered and I’d be able to pick up the kids and go home. I probably shouldn’t have been listening to their conversation, anyway, as it might have been privileged police information. The thought must have occurred to Gus and Deputy Wheeler at the same moment, because they both swung around to look at me. Under their steady gazes I felt like a butterfly stuck onto an insect collection.

  “What time did you and Erica leave the building?” Gus asked.

  “After seven. The meeting started at six and lasted until . . .” Suddenly I remembered my secretarial role. “Hang on.” I sorted through the contents of the diaper bag, pulled out my yellow legal pad, and scanned my notes. “Here it is. Meeting adjourned at six forty-seven p.m.”

  “Six forty-seven exactly?” Deputy Wheeler sounded amused.

  “According to my watch, yes.” Even at the time I’d thought writing down the exact minute was silly, but it had been 6:47, and rounding either up or down didn’t seem right. The time was the time and, thanks to my stickler-for-accuracy son, our household set clocks and watches a minimum of once a week.

  “And Mr. Helmstetter stayed the length of the meeting?”

  “Yes. No, hang on.” I thought back. “He left at one point, then came back.”

  “Cell phone call?” Gus asked.

  I frowned, trying to remember. “I don’t recall hearing a phone
ring.” At the beginning of every meeting Erica asked everyone to turn phones off or to vibrate. Most of the time it worked, but every so often we’d get someone with a new phone and the meeting would be interrupted by the digital notes of Beethoven’s Fifth, or the University of Wisconsin fight song, or (my personal favorite of the year) “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

  “But he might have had his phone set to vibrate,” I said. “Tina Heller was sitting next to him. Maybe she’d know.”

  Deputy Wheeler scratched some notes on a pad. “Thank you, Mrs. Kennedy. A couple of more questions and we’ll let you go for the night. Did you see anyone in the parking lot when you and Mrs. Hale walked out? A person, a car, anything?”

  “We were the last ones to leave the building. Well, except for—” I came to a screeching halt.

  “Except for Harry?” Gus asked.

  I blew out a small sigh of relief. He already knew about Harry. I didn’t have to worry about being a tattletale on the only other person I knew who understood the importance of the Selke Trophy.

  “Harry clocked out at six thirty,” Gus said, “and was standing in line at Sabatini’s, waiting for his pizza, at six forty-five. He met up with a friend who came in at six fifty, and they sat down in the restaurant to eat.”

  “Good,” I said, but I was wondering who Harry’s friend was. Last I knew, the only real friend he had was the late Agnes Mephisto. “Fast work.” I looked from city police officer to sheriff’s deputy, not sure where to aim the compliment.

  Gus shrugged. “Not really. Harry came back a few minutes ago to check the doors and to make sure a classroom floor was drying okay. Some kid’s lunch hadn’t sat right and it went all across the floor.” He made a sweeping motion with his arm. Deputy Wheeler and I winced simultaneously.

  “One more question, Mrs. Kennedy,” the deputy said. “Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to kill Sam Helmstetter?”

  Any lightheartedness that had slid back into me disappeared. “No. I can’t.”

  “No one?”

  I shook my head, and the weight felt too heavy. My neck wasn’t big enough to support the leaden thoughts inside. Poor Sam. His poor family. All their lives they’d have this sadness hanging over them. “No one.” I looked up at her. “We call him the Nicest Guy on the Planet. Everybody likes Sam. No one could possibly want to kill him.”

  Deputy Wheeler slid her notebook into the pocket of her coat and didn’t say a word. She didn’t have to. “Same phone number as before, Mrs. Kennedy?” I nodded, and she headed over to the next office to talk to Erica.

  It had been Erica’s suggestion that the two of us split up. “It’ll make things easier for all of us,” she’d said. All of us, except for me. I hadn’t liked sitting alone in the empty office of the former school psychologist. As I looked at walls once covered with photos of wildflowers and baby birds and lambs and chicks, I wondered who we’d get next. Good school psychologists were worth their weight in five-year-old cheddar; the search had been going on since June.

  And now we had another murder in our midst and no one to help the kids deal with it.

  “Tired?”

  Somehow I’d forgotten Gus was in the room. “Why do you ask? Do I look tired?” I pushed my eyelids apart. “Wide open, see?”

  “Keep doing that and your eyeballs will dry up and fall right out of your head.”

  I smiled, but didn’t laugh. Couldn’t, really. I released my eyelids and blinked away the sandpapery dryness. “Gus, why would anyone kill Sam?” I desperately wanted an answer to my plaintive question. Please give me a reason. Please put some order back into this tragic night. Please give me a world that makes sense.

  But I should have known better. Gus and I had known each other a long time, and never once in all those years had he dusted sugar coating onto any truth.

  “I don’t know, Beth. Tonight there are a lot more questions than we have answers. But what I do know is that he didn’t deserve to die.” Gus’s lips were set in a straight, firm line. “Not so young, and not that way.”

  I shied away from the reality of murder. “They’ll find out who killed him, won’t they?”

  “It’s not my case.” He put up a hand to stop my protest. “It’s not my case,” he repeated. “But Sam was one of Rynwood’s own. None of us will rest until his killer is put where he belongs.”

  “Promise?” I held up my right hand in the Girl Scout salute, palm out, thumb holding down my little finger, three middle fingers standing straight. Scouting was another thing Gus and I shared.

  Gus returned the salute. “I promise.”

  And, oddly enough, I felt better.

  The night Sam was killed, I lay staring at the bedroom ceiling far more than I slept. Every time I started to drift away, I’d jerk awake with unwelcome images. Sam’s scarf. The SUV, forever lonely. A wife, bereft of her lifelong helpmeet. Crying children.

  When the alarm clock beeped, fatigue hung on me like a heavy overcoat. Then I made the mistake of working out how much sleep I’d had. “Four hours,” I said out loud, thumping downstairs in the only clean clothes I could find: a pair of khaki pants coated with black cat and brown dog hair, and a bright green sweater given to me by my mother.

  Until now I’d worn it only when St. Patrick’s Day fell on a day I didn’t have to leave the house. My mother’s choice of clothing gifts always made me look sallow and slightly jaundiced. My personal rule for unsuitable clothing gifts was to wear the article a minimum of six times before giving it away, but Mom’s gifts were an exception. Three times, tops.

  “Passing on the right!”

  Jenna clattered down the stairs ahead of me, her long hair bouncing against her back. The sight normally would have made me smile, but today . . .

  “Jenna! Did you comb your hair?”

  My daughter stopped at the bottom of the stairs, one hand on the newel post. Without looking back, she said, “Sure. What’s for breakfast?”

  “Did you comb out your hair this morning?”

  “You mean like comb comb?”

  “What other kind is there? Back upstairs, young lady, and bring that comb to the kitchen. I want to see it slide through your hair from roots to ends without stopping.”

  I didn’t want to scold her. I wanted to be compassionate and thoughtful; I wanted to be the mother we all dreamed of having. But my dreams last night had been bad and today’s mothering was headed the same way.

  Jenna’s bright face soured. She stomped back up the stairs, each footfall making the house shudder.

  I wanted to call her back, to say I didn’t mean to be this way, that I hadn’t slept well, that I was sad about Sam, that I was confused and scared and needed a hug to make my scary thoughts go away.

  Instead, I went into the kitchen and hauled out bowls and boxes of cereal.

  Oliver skipped into the room and slid into his chair. “What’s Jenna so mad about?”

  Her pathetic excuse for a mother. “That’s Jenna’s business,” I said, “not yours.”

  His eyes went wide and, for the second time in five minutes, I wanted to take back what I’d said. This was not shaping up to be a good day. Don’t make that a self-fulfilling prophecy, I told myself. Dream your day and live into it.

  As long as the dreams weren’t like last night’s.

  “Jenna,” I told Oliver, “is angry with me.”

  “For how long?”

  I put bowl and spoon in front of him. “Not very, I hope.”

  “Like only until after breakfast?” His face was a mixture of curiosity, hope, anticipation, and wariness.

  Jenna clumped into the room, brandishing a comb. “Is this good enough?” She inserted the comb into her hair, then dragged it all the way through with a flourish that would have done Liberace proud.

  Oliver gave me a look. This one was much easier to interpret. It said, “You’ve made Jenna mad so I’m going to be mad at you, too.” The entire situation was all my fault, which made three of us who were angry at me.r />
  But I was the grown-up in the room, so I had to make at least a pretense of knowing what I was doing. I didn’t, of course—never had and probably never would—but it wouldn’t do to let my children know that. Not now, anyway. Maybe when they were older. Like when they turned thirty.

  “Jenna,” I said, “I’m sorry for snapping at you about your hair.”

  She halted, comb halfway through her second demonstration, and looked at me sideways.

  Another breath. “I didn’t sleep well last night and I’m still very tired. Sometimes when you’re tired it’s easy to get mad and scold lovely daughters when they don’t deserve it.”

  Jenna dropped into her chair and crossed her arms, tapping the comb against her upper arm. “Well . . . okay.” She flashed me a bright smile.

  “You should have a glass of warm milk tonight,” Oliver said seriously. “That’s supposed to help people sleep.”

  The thought of drinking warm milk was about as appealing as the thought of eating pea soup. Ick. I smiled at my son. “What a nice idea. Thank you.”

  Jenna poured a stream of cornflakes into her bowl. “Why couldn’t you sleep?”

  I pushed the pitcher of milk her way. Jenna asking about my personal welfare? This was a first. She was a kind and sunny child, but she’d never been inclined to put herself into someone else’s shoes. Could part of her growing up and growing away include a growing empathy with others?

  “Thank you for asking, sweetie. That’s very thoughtful.”

  She shrugged and poured about half a gallon of milk on her cereal.

  Last night they’d both been on the verge of sleep when I’d picked them up from Marina’s, and I hadn’t said anything about Sam’s death. I’d told two people: Marina, via shocked whispers in the kitchen; and Evan, via a phone call after the kids were in bed.

  I considered what to tell them, couldn’t think of anything very good, then just started talking. If I kept at it long enough, maybe I’d eventually figure out the right thing to say. Last year at the breakfast table I’d told them about the murder of their principal. A year and change later, here I was doing it again. This was turning into a macabre tradition and it needed to stop immediately. “Do either of you know Blake or Mia Helmstetter?”