Foul Play at the PTA

by Laura Alden

  “The Blake who plays the piano?” Jenna asked. Once upon a time she’d taken piano lessons, but soccer and now hockey had left no time for lessons, let alone practice.

  “The Mia with the yellow hair?” Oliver asked. His sister and I both stared at him. Never once had Oliver commented on a girl’s appearance.

  Jenna opened her mouth, but I cut her off. “Yes, that Mia and that Blake. They probably won’t be in school today.”

  “Are they sick?” Jenna asked.

  Sick at heart, I wanted to say. “No, their father died last night.”

  My two children looked at each other, communicating a silent message that I couldn’t intercept. Jenna plunged her spoon into the cereal. “Mr. Helmstetter’s dead?” She shoved the flakes into her mouth, and, chewing, asked the question I’d been dreading. “Dead like Mr. Stoltz, or dead like Mrs. Mephisto?”

  Though the murder of Agnes Mephisto had made an impact in their short lives, so had the death of Norman Stoltz, an elderly neighbor who’d had a killing heart attack. I took one of her hands and one of Oliver’s in my own, stroking their knuckles gently with my thumbs, trying to rub my love into them. “Like Mrs. Mephisto.”

  “Killed dead?” Oliver’s eyelids opened wide enough to show white all around his blue irises.

  I let go of his hand and reached out to put my arm around his bony shoulders. “Chief Eiseley told me himself. The police will find out who killed Mr. Helmstetter. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  “So there’s a new bad guy.” Jenna pulled her hand out from under mine and went back to eating breakfast.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Oliver looked up at me, his long eyelashes curling in perfect arcs. “How many bad guys are there?”

  How was I supposed to answer that? Option one: Tell him evil lurked everywhere and it would be best to lock the doors and never venture outside. Option two: Tell him that there were only a couple of bad guys out there, that one was already in jail, that the other one would be soon, and that after that he wouldn’t have to worry about bad guys ever again.

  I rubbed Oliver’s back and waited for an option three to come along.

  “Are there lots of them?” His voice quavered and he edged up onto my lap. Eight years old was still young enough to want to be on Mommy’s lap when monsters threatened.

  Option three, where are you?

  “No, there aren’t,” I said firmly. “Most people are very nice. It’s kind of like”—Bingo!—“like dogs. There are big dogs and little dogs. Yellow and brown and white and short-haired and long-haired dogs.”

  He nodded into my armpit.

  “A few of those dogs,” I went on, “are mean ones. Can you think of any?”

  “There’s a big dog by the school soccer fields,” Jenna offered. “He growls at us through the fence.”

  Wonderful. I made a mental note to talk to Gary Kemmerer, Tarver’s principal. “But other than a few nasty ones, most of them are good dogs, right?”

  “Like Spot!” Oliver bounced up and down on my lap. I winced as his weight pounded my thighs. If the kid kept growing at his current rate, my lap was going to be too small by Christmas.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Like Spot.”

  The three of us looked around for our dog. Spanielsized, and as mellow as a dog could come, the solid brown Spot had already been named when we picked him up at the animal shelter a year ago. His name had either been a joke or he’d been named after the puddles he used to leave on the floor.

  Spot was in his bed by the garage door. He looked up at the sound of his name, thumped his shaggy tail, and grinned doggily.

  “He’s a good dog,” Oliver said. “Like most dogs. Only a couple are bad.”

  “Just like people,” I said.

  “Like people,” he repeated and slid to the floor. In seconds he was slurping cereal just quietly enough to keep me from scolding.

  “Should I be extra nice to Blake?” Jenna asked.

  This, apparently, was the day for hard questions. I’d been handed two of them already and it wasn’t even eight o’clock. “How well do you know him?”

  “For a fourth-grader, he’s good at kickball.”

  “How do you think you’d want to be treated if you were him?”

  Jenna looked thoughtful. “Like normal. I wouldn’t want them to treat me any different.”

  My daughter, my child, my heart. She really was growing up. “Then maybe that’s how you should treat Blake.”

  Oliver laid down his spoon. “But I want to be extra nice to Mia. Is that okay?”

  “Being nice is always good,” I said. “Just don’t . . .” My advice hit a dead end.

  “Don’t be a weenie about it.” Jenna reached for the cereal box. “She’ll never like you if you’re a weenie.”

  “Who said I wanted her to like me?” Oliver’s cheeks flushed pink.

  “Look! He’s blushing!” Jenna giggled. “Oliver and Mia sitting in a tree—”

  “Time to scoot.” I got up from the table. “Jenna, it’s your turn to take Spot out. Hurry; we need to leave in ten minutes.”

  “But I don’t have time. I need to call Alexis about our social studies project.” Jenna plopped her bowl and spoon next to the kitchen sink.

  “You could have done that last night. Spot is your responsibility,” I said. “Yours and Oliver’s, and it’s your turn.”

  She grabbed her coat and Spot’s leash from the hooks by the back door. “If I had a cell phone I could take out Spot and call Alexis. It makes sense for me to have a cell phone. So, can I?”

  This was not a hard question. I smiled at her. “Nope.”

  Chapter 4

  After I dropped the kids off at school, I debated about heading home for a nap. The store didn’t open until ten, so there was an hour and a half before I needed to put on my happy bookstore owner face. I sat at the school’s curb in the idling car, undecided, until the parent behind me tapped her horn. “Sorry.” I waved an apology and turned right out of the school, headed downtown.

  Usually the drive through Rynwood made me smile. My adopted hometown was the kind of place that, when you heard the beep of a car horn, you looked around to see who was waving at you. Today, though, downtown, with its warmly red brick buildings, colorful awnings, Victorian streetlights, and quirky window displays, passed by as a faded background.

  Poor Sam. And poor Rachel. How was she going to go on without her beloved husband at her side? How many nights would Blake and Mia cry themselves to sleep? I rubbed at my eyes, thinking about the permanent empty ache Sam’s family was going to have to make room for.

  I parked in the alley and came in the back door, turning on only the minimum of lights, and headed to the tiny kitchenette. It held a small microwave, the hot plate for the teakettle, a cube refrigerator, sink, hooks for our coats, and a door into my office.

  I took my brewed and milked (two percent) tea to my desk. There were a couple of ways to combat fatigue. One was to get some sleep, but since I’d taken that option off the table, I was left with option two. Get busy. I toasted the towering pile of paperwork with my tea mug, put my head down, and got to work.

  When the phone rang, I was engrossed in accounts payable. “Good morning, Children’s Bookshelf. This is—”

  “Beth,” said a sobbing woman. “Is it true? About Sam?”

  I laid down the invoice from Ingram. The voice was too high-pitched for Marina, and besides, I’d told her about Sam last night. Debra O’Conner, in spite of her recent transformation from perfectly smooth to slightly rumpled, would never call without identifying herself. Claudia wouldn’t be asking questions, she’d be demanding answers. “It was on the news this morning,” the woman wailed. “I just can’t believe it. Who would kill Sam? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t—”

  “Who would be so horrible? I thought we were safe here in Rynwood. I thought this was a nice place to live.”

  “Well, I—”
/>   “After Agnes was killed I wanted to move away, but Dan said don’t be silly.”

  Got it. “CeeCee, the police will—”

  CeeCee Daniels gave a high-pitched laugh. “The police? The police didn’t figure it out last time. You did. You and Marina.”

  We should have left well enough alone, and I said as much.

  “But nobody liked Agnes,” CeeCee said. “Everybody likes Sam. He’s so nice. No one would kill him except some nutcase. So there’s a nutcase who’s wandering around free. They say it’s easier the second time.”

  I liked CeeCee, I really did. But when she got worked up, she came across like a bad combination of too many soap operas and too many cop shows.

  “The police will figure it out,” I said. “Marina and I were only a step or two ahead of them last time, and that was mostly luck.” Bad luck, if you asked me, but no one did.

  “Do you realize I was one of the last people to see Sam alive?” CeeCee’s voice shook slightly. “Did you see who left last?”

  So CeeCee had no idea that Erica and I had found Sam. A tension I hadn’t known I’d been holding released in my chest. She didn’t know and I wasn’t about to tell her, as I had zero desire to relive the event.

  I glanced at my watch. Five to ten. “CeeCee, I have to go. I’ll talk to you later, okay?” I put the phone down on her squawking noises and went to open the store.

  At eleven, when the slow trickle of Friday morning customers became a steady stream, I picked my head up and looked around. I was still the sole staff member in the store. Lois wasn’t scheduled until twelve, but where was Marcia? She should have been here long ago. I leapt to the worst conclusions. Stroke or car accident. Accidental fall of grandchild, sudden illness of grandchild, disease symptoms in grandchild so outlandish that an emergency trip to Mayo Clinic was required, fast driving on a dark highway with a sobbing child, or worse, a quiet one. Driving through the night to—

  “Good morning!” Marcia breezed past me, smiling and waving to the customers.

  The cowardly part of my personality wanted to let this go, to forget Marcia’s increasingly tarnished work attendance record, to forget how little I cared for her attitude toward out-of-town customers, to forget the whispering conversations of which the only word I could hear was an indignant “Beth.”

  Most of me wanted to forget all that, but there was a rising tide of ire that was sweeping Spineless Beth off to the side. In her place—at least for now—was Forthright Beth.

  I gave the store a practiced look. Everyone was browsing contentedly. I put my shoulders back and sallied forth to the back of the store. It wouldn’t be completely private, but if we kept our voices down, no one would know my problem employee was getting a dressing-down.

  Marcia was hanging up her coat with one hand and handing me photographs with the other. “Look, isn’t he the cutest thing?”

  I took the pictures and felt my forthrightness slipping away.

  “Just printed these this morning.” She smoothed her overly blond hair. “Mrs. Tolliver is going to stop by today, and last time she was in we were talking about my grandbaby. I took these last night. Isn’t he the most adorable child ever?”

  Marcia’s daughter and her family had moved back to Rynwood last summer, and Marcia had gone from a life of bookstore clerking and bridge club and dinner at the country club to clerking and grandson adoration, with a concentration on the adoration.

  I looked at the photos. The boy was almost three, with blond hair, chubby cheeks, and a big smile. “He’s a good-looking kid.” Just as he had been in the previous thousand photos she’d shown me.

  She snatched the pictures away. “Good-looking doesn’t do him justice. Oh, you’re just poking a little fun. Always the jokester, aren’t you?” She giggled.

  “Marcia, weren’t you supposed to be here at ten?”

  “Oh, that.” She made a tsking noise. “The printer was giving me trouble. It took me forever to print those. Sometimes I wonder if these digital cameras are all they’re cracked up to be. Computers are such a pain in the you-know-what.”

  I tried not to look at my watch. “You were scheduled to be here at ten.” But why shouldn’t I look at my watch? I did so, ostentatiously. “It’s after eleven.”

  “Family is more important than work,” she said, smiling. “You’re a mother, so I know you understand. Did I tell you what he said last week? It was the cutest thing, he—”

  The irritation I’d woken up with came back full force. I tried to tamp it down, but the anger had been building for months and had only needed a night of poor sleep to set it free.

  “Ten o’clock means ten o’clock.” I tapped my watch. “It doesn’t mean whenever you see fit to come in—it means ten o’clock.”

  “Well, I know that.” Marcia had a puzzled look in her eyes. “And I’m always on time, except for once in a while.”

  I held up my hands and started ticking off fingers. “Monday he had a haircut you couldn’t miss. The week before you had to leave early to shop for a new bib. Before that you had to help interview a new babysitter. And the day we had a rainbow you rushed out of here with hardly a word.”

  “He couldn’t miss seeing the rainbow,” she said indignantly. “What kind of grandmother would I be if I let him miss his first rainbow?”

  One who has a job? “Emergencies are understandable and perfectly acceptable reasons for coming in late and leaving early. But the definition of the emergency is ‘urgent necessity,’ and I don’t see that clipping your grandson’s fingernails is a necessity.”

  She picked a stray hair off her sweater. “Oh, look. It’s one of his! See the curl?”

  “Marcia, I need dependable staff. A store can’t function without reliable employees, and reliable doesn’t mean rushing off for things that aren’t important.”

  “Not important!”

  Finally, I had her full attention.

  “How can you say that picking out his first tricycle isn’t important?”

  “It’s no emergency,” I said.

  “Well, when you’re a grandmother, maybe you’ll understand that the definition of emergency changes when there are grandchildren involved.” She smiled tolerantly.

  “I hope I never consider anyone’s bowel movement anything I need to leave work for.”

  Marcia’s eyes thinned to slits.

  Oh. My. I’d said that out loud, hadn’t I? Time to move this conversation elsewhere. “Let’s go into my office.” I took a step to my right, leading the way. “We’ll talk this over and—”

  Marcia stayed rooted in place. “Some things are more important than work,” she said distinctly. “I always thought of you as a sympathetic employer. With children of your own, I thought you would understand.”

  “I do.” I tried to diffuse the ratcheting tempers by trying to relax, trying to smile. “But if you commit to working, you have to put your job at a higher priority than most other things in your life.”

  She gaped at me. “I can’t believe you said that! What kind of mother would put a mere job ahead of her own flesh and blood?”

  A mother with a mortgage, two college educations that needed funding, and a child support check that, though it had once seemed generous, now didn’t seem to cover the needs of two rapidly growing children. “There’s a balance,” I said as evenly as I could.

  “That’s what I’m talking about. And now is as good a time as any.”

  “For what?”

  “I need the week of Thanksgiving off. Plus, I won’t be able to work the week after Christmas, and not the week before. There’s just too much to do!” Marcia wafted off into descriptions of turkeys drawn in the shape of hands and Christmas cookie baking and present wrapping and stocking hanging.

  When she got to marshmallow making (making?) I made a rolling motion with my index fingers. “Wait a minute. Did I hear right?”

  “I don’t know.” Marcia smiled, dimples showing in both cheeks. “Did you hear that I need the week of Th
anksgiving off? And the weeks before and after Christmas?”

  My ears felt as if they were on fire. “I can’t possibly give you that much time off.”

  “Why not? Lois can work a few extra hours. Sara and Paoze will be off school. And look at this place.” She waved a languid hand at the bookshelves. “It’s not like people are packed in here Walmart tight.”

  I chose my next words carefully. “Christmas is our busiest time of the year. Our annual profit depends on doing well in December.”

  “Your annual profit, not mine. All I get is a paycheck.” She shrugged. “A small one, at that. My husband keeps saying I should ask for a raise. I’ve been here longest, other than Lois. So I’ll ask now. Can I have a raise?”

  In the same conversation she was asking for three weeks off smack in the middle of the busiest time of year, she was also asking for a raise. I had a pet theory that, if spontaneous combustion truly existed, it was caused by having too many contradictory points of view in one body. I slid back a few inches, but Marcia didn’t burst into flames.

  “And come to think of it”—she leaned her head to one side—“why don’t I take the first part of January off, too. All we do that week is inventory, and you don’t need me for that.”

  “If you care about this job so little,” I said quietly, “why do you work here at all?”

  “Because I love books.” She gave me an indignant look.

  “I need you to commit to working at least twenty hours a week. Twenty-five between Thanksgiving and Christmas.”

  “Twenty-five hours?” She compressed her lips, making small vertical lines appear all around her mouth. “During the holidays?” she asked. “Weren’t you listening? I need that time off.”

  “And I need you to work twenty-five hours a week.”

  Her mouth moved, but nothing came out for a while. “But I can’t work that much!”

  “Then maybe you should quit.”

  There. I’d said it. Out loud, calmly, coolly, and without too much squeak in my voice.