Foul Play at the PTA

by Laura Alden

  “It’s the restoring that’s fun,” he said. “Going to shows is fine for some people, but I’d rather be in the garage tinkering.”

  It made sense, in a warped and twisted sort of way. Kind of like raising children. You get them to where they might be rational human beings, and zoom! Off they go, to college or the military or the work world or into marriage or—

  “So what can I do for you?” Todd wiped his hands on a rag.

  Right. I wasn’t here to look at cars, I was here to ferret out clues that could lead me to a killer, clear Yvonne’s name, and keep me and my children out of that second-floor apartment.

  “You know I’m secretary of the Tarver PTA? Well, we’re starting a scholarship fund. Mia and Blake are the first two recipients, but if the fund gets big enough, it’ll be endowed, and we can continue to give out scholarships forever.” Unless every dollar contributed was matched by a thousand from the Ezekiel G. Fund, it was unlikely that it would ever grow large enough to be self-perpetuating, but Todd didn’t have to know the whole story.

  “I heard about that,” Todd said. “Caitlin got a sore throat Saturday afternoon, so we didn’t go to the dance.” He fumbled in his back pocket. “Here. Let me see what I can do. Sam’s kids . . . man, that whole thing is rough.”

  He handed over a fifty-dollar bill. After the dance, I’d marveled at the stacks of fifties and hundreds in the cash box. I’d had no idea that men carried that much cash in their wallets. And I still had no idea why they did.

  “I wish they’d find the killer,” I said. “That would help a little.”

  “They’d better catch him soon.” His face was set in hard lines. “Sam and I went way back.”

  “You played baseball together, right?”

  “Since we were this high.” Todd held out his hand at belt level. “T-ball, Little League, heck, everything on up through high school. I started working for my dad the Monday after graduation, so no college ball for me.”

  “Was Sam nice even as a kid?” I asked.

  “He should have been one of those kids that kids love to hate, but everyone liked him. How could you not like a guy who’d take the blame for any trouble we cooked up?” He smiled. “Sam would tell the coach to let the second- and third-stringers play. That it wasn’t fair they had to sit on the bench all the time. And his sister, Megan? She came to practices and he always walked home with her, every time.”

  “No one called him a sissy?”

  “No sissy can knock a fastball into next week.” He got a distant look on his face and I knew he wasn’t seeing me any longer. “Or throw a rope from third to first.”

  Rope? What did a rope have to do with baseball? I made a mental note to Google it later. “What about on the other teams? Sam was such a good baseball player, weren’t some of the other kids jealous?”

  “Oh, sure, but . . .” He stopped and looked at me. “You’re trying to figure out who killed him, aren’t you?”

  It suddenly occurred to me that my feet needed a close inspection, so I bent my head and studied them with great intensity. He was angry. How could he not be, considering I was rooting around in his past, trying to shake out a reason for murder that might have originated decades ago, which didn’t make a lot of sense, really, but I had to try. “Well . . .”

  “You think somebody from baseball hated him enough to kill him?” Incredulity sent his voice high.

  I sighed. “Not really. I mean, how could sports be reason enough for murder?”

  A flicker of something crossed his face. “People can get pretty uptight. Remember what happened at that second hockey game?”

  I winced away from the memory of women whacking each other with their purses. “Your daughter hit my baby girl!”

  “Your baby girl is twenty pounds heavier than my daughter!” Whack. Whack.

  “Sam hasn’t played ball in years,” I said. “Lots of people carry grudges, but this seems a little extreme.”

  “Hmm.” Todd rubbed his chin, leaving behind a small streak of black grease. “There was this one time. The pitcher beaned one of our guys and our guy charged the mound. Everybody was yelling, and before you knew it, the benches were empty and it was a real slugfest. I’m sure Sam got in a few good ones, he had a long reach.”

  “When was this?” My ears perked up.

  He grinned. “I think we were maybe eight.”

  The small spurt of adrenaline faded away. If a bunch of eight-year-olds going at it hammer and tongs was what Lois hadn’t quite remembered, this particular path of investigation was coming to a quick end. “No other fights?” I heard my own hopefulness and backtracked. “Not that I want there to be, but you never know what someone will get angry about.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Todd said, gesturing at the car with a jerk of his thumb. “Who would have thought my wife would get so mad about me spending five thousand dollars on a paint job?”

  If there was ever a question that didn’t need answering, that was it.

  “Other fights, though.” He shook his head. “I can’t remember one.”

  “No grudges?”

  “How could anyone have had a grudge against Sam? It’d be like hating Santa Claus.”

  There was a tiny rip in my heart. Todd had pegged it: In another thirty years, Sam would have made the perfect Santa. By then he’d have had a nice belly, his hair would have turned white, he could have grown a lovely beard, and his laugh . . . oh, his laugh.

  Todd cocked his head. “You can hear it, can’t you? He had that ‘ho, ho, ho’ thing down.”

  “He sure did.”

  We stood there, hearing the last echoes of Sam’s laughter ripple through us, then fade away.

  “If you find out who killed him,” Todd said hoarsely, “you let me know first. Got that? Tell me first.”

  Not in a million years. But I nodded, then said good-bye. At the top of the stairs I glanced back. He was still standing in the middle of the garage, one hand gripping the dirty rag, the other hand holding tight to absolutely nothing.

  The evening had turned from dusk to full dark while I was talking to Todd. Streetlights had popped on everywhere, and I was going to be late picking Jenna and Oliver up from Marina’s. I glanced at my watch. If I hurried I’d be only a little late.

  Mothering instincts satisfied—or at least muffled to a distant throbbing noise that resembled the unceasing noise of the ocean—I walked briskly down the sidewalk and headed to the next name on the list.

  Gerrit Kole leaned back in his high-backed leather chair and shook his head. Gerrit was an attorney and single and ambitious; the only reason he wouldn’t have been at the office at a quarter to six in the evening was because he’d gone to pick up a take-out dinner.

  “There’s no reason,” he said, blowing out a sigh. “No reason at all for anyone to have killed Sam.”

  I sat perched on the edge of a companion chair and tried to keep from sliding off the front. “You’ve thought about this, haven’t you?” I asked. Gerrit’s troubled look was miles away from his typical expression that life was good, and if we all worked as hard as he did, that we, too, could own a BMW convertible for summer, a Cadillac SUV for winter, and a Harley-Davidson just for fun.

  “Sam and I grew up together,” he said, as if that explained it all, and I supposed it did. People didn’t use that phrase lightly—at least people in Wisconsin didn’t—and it often translated as “we were closer than most brothers.”

  “No ideas?” I asked.

  He tapped a pen against his leather blotter. “I’ve spent hours I can’t afford working on this. After I couldn’t think of a provable reason, I looked for something that couldn’t be proved. Nothing.” He stopped midtap. “You talked to Todd Wietzel?”

  “No ideas there, either.”

  Gerrit grunted and went back to tapping. “For a few days, I wanted to think Larry Carter had done it. Larry never got any decent playing time, thanks to Sam. He’s a guy who can hold a grudge, Larry.”

  M
y ears twitched. Was this, could this possibly be, a Clue?

  “But then I went to talk to him,” Gerrit said. “Turns out Larry saw the news about Sam’s murder on a hospital TV. He’d broken his ankle playing hockey the night before. Got three expensive screws in his ankle.”

  I made a mental note to talk Jenna out of playing hockey ever again. “Well, I’m sure the police will find the killer,” I said.

  Gerrit made a noncommittal noise, and I noticed that his hands were clenched into fists so tight that the tendons drew pale across his knuckles. “Not too soon, I hope,” he said quietly. “There’s a debt to be paid.”

  My breath caught and I had to force my lungs back into action. Violence begets violence; it always had. And violence against an innocent begets violence at a geometric rate. There was no use warning Gerrit to leave it alone, no use telling him revenge does no one any good, no use asking him to consider what a course of revenge would do to his career.

  He knew all that. Knew it and didn’t care.

  I rose. “Take care of yourself, Gerrit.”

  But we both knew he wouldn’t.

  Chapter 12

  “Conclusions?” Marina thumped her elbows on her kitchen table and put her chin in her hands. “I got mine. What are yours?”

  Every name on my list was crossed off. Squinting, I studied my notes. “All of the guys I talked to were former teammates of Sam’s. Todd played with him—”

  Marina unstuck one hand from her chin and made rolling motions. “Conclusions, I beg you! Yon youths will waste of hunger ere they get fed if you go through every frigging minute of every conversation.”

  I drew breath to disagree, but looked at her wall clock—a recent present from her Devoted Husband, which had to be one of the most annoying clocks on the planet—and realized she was right. It was almost seven o’clock. If I didn’t get the kids out of there soon I’d have to hear the noise Marina’s DH had programmed: the sound of the kitchen smoke alarm going off. Seven times. One o’clock was the microwave beep. Two o’clock was the garage door going up, then down. Three was three rings of the telephone, etc., etc.

  Marina loved the dreadful thing, and laughed until she cried every time I headed for her microwave at one in the afternoon.

  “All right, conclusions.” I drummed my fingers on the table.

  “Quit that.” Marina slapped at my fingers. “And tell me what’s bugging you.”

  I laid my hands flat. “Someone said . . .”

  “Yeeesss?”

  “That Sam used marijuana.”

  Marina’s eyes bulged. “He what?! That’s nuts. That’s crazy. That’s—” She stopped. “That was Denise, wasn’t it? She tried the same thing on me last week.”

  “It’s not true?”

  “Puh-leeze. End of the summer Denise overheard Rachel talking to a friend about some baseball tournament. College alumni played a team of police officers, and I guess the grass wasn’t cut right and a lot of guys were complaining.”

  I was trying out snippets of conversation. “Sam didn’t like the cut of the grass.” “The grass was bad; the police said it was a crime.” Such a logical explanation, once you knew.

  I relaxed, eked out a smile, and tossed my notepad on the table. “Conclusion number one.”

  Marina held up her index finger. “Ready and waiting.”

  “No one that Sam grew up with, played ball with, or who watched him grow up has the foggiest idea who might have killed him.”

  “I concur.”

  “Conclusion number two,” I said, and Marina’s middle finger went up next to finger number one. “In spite of Sam leading a charmed life, he was too nice to hate. His high school rivals were invited to his graduation party—and they all came. No one, but no one, hated him enough to kill him.”

  “Anything else?”

  The harsh faces came back to me. “There’s a lot of anger out there. Everyone from Flossie to Gerrit Kole is barely holding it in check. If the police find a what-do-they-call-them, a person of interest, I worry about his safety.”

  “You mean like this?” Marina held up an invisible noose, stuck her tongue out and made a choking noise. “Lynch mob,” she croaked out.

  “Put your tongue back in your mouth. You’re creeping me out.”

  She made her eyes bulge.

  “Stop that!”

  Marina dropped the noose and reached across the table to pat my hands. “There, there. I’m sorry for scaring you. How about some milk and cookies to calm your tender nerves?”

  I yanked my hands away. “It’s not my fault my sisters made me watch horror movies when I was only six.”

  “Scarred you for life, poor thing.” Marina’s face was full of sympathy and understanding. “Older sisters are horrible creatures.”

  As she was one, she should know. “Yes, they are.” I cast a glance up at the clock. Time to scamper. “Jenna!” I called. “Oliver! Time to pack up.” I looked at Marina. “I take it your conclusions match mine?”

  “Yup. Each and every one of the people I talked to assumes Sam was killed by a random stranger. All want a piece of said stranger before he gets put away.” She smacked her fist into her palm. “For the health of our fair town, the killer needs to be found and put in jail. If not, the med center is going to be diagnosing a rash of ulcers induced by festering anger.”

  Fester. I shivered. What a nasty-sounding word.

  “What’s the matter?” Marina asked.

  I wasn’t about to admit that a word scared me. “Since Sam wasn’t killed by someone from his past, what’s next? We still don’t have a motive and we still don’t have any suspects.” We had nothing, and nowhere to go.

  “What?” Marina sat up straight. “Do I detect a smidgen of doubt? An ounce of uncertainty? A dram of disbelief?”

  I shook my head sideways. Yes, no, whatever.

  “We know one thing.” Marina raised one eyebrow. “We know this: ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.’ ”

  A direct quote? Julius Caesar, if I remembered correctly. I gave my head a little shake. “Was that—”

  “Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,” she said, “it seems to me most strange that men should fear seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.”

  I looked at her curiously. “Aren’t you scared of dying?”

  “Everybody is. But like old Julius said, it is strange. We’re all going to die; why are we so scared of it?”

  “Easy.” I stood, and as I called again for Jenna and Oliver, the memory of a line in an L. M. Montgomery book came to me. “Because it won’t be what we’re used to. It’s the unknown, and there’s not much scarier than that.”

  A loud beep went off above my head and Pavlov’s reaction kicked into gear. Adrenaline coursed through me instantly. I jumped, sniffed the air for smoke, looked for smoke, looked for flames, noted the closest exits, gauged how long it would take to get the kids out—

  The clock beeped again.

  Seven o’clock.

  Marina laughed. “You knew that was going to happen, and you were still scared.”

  Jenna, followed by Oliver, came into the room. Both were laden with backpacks that looked three sizes too heavy and both were wearing that “Feed me” look.

  “Zip your coats,” I said. “It’s cold outside.”

  “Fraidy cat,” Marina whispered.

  “Better by far to face our fears and conquer them,” I said, “than allow the worms of doubt to eat through our hearts.”

  “What’s that from?” Marina asked, frowning. “It sure sounds like Shakespeare, but I don’t remember seeing it in any of the quote books.” Too late, she slapped her hand over her mouth.

  I smiled. Smugly. I’d known all along that she hadn’t been reading any of the plays. The odds of Marina reading Richard II from beginning to end were not nearly as good as the odds of me going to Jenna’s next hockey game in a low-cut slinky gown and four-inch high h
eels.

  “It’s from ‘Ode to Marina’s Kitchen Clock,’ ” I said, “by Beth Kennedy.” After I shooed the kids out the door I poked my head back into the kitchen. “Call me later, okay? I have an idea.”

  When I woke the next morning, Spot was nestled up against my feet in a warm, furry brown meat loaf shape. George was perched on the back of the nearby chair, one eye opening and closing every so often. I lay there, savoring the quiet calm, then sat up and started planning my day.

  During a long conversation with Marina after the kids were in bed, I’d sat at the computer and made another list. Brainstorming 201, and the central idea was money. Not a very original idea for murder, but things became clichés because they happened so often.

  Somewhere between writing my suggestion of “inheritance?” and Marina’s of “hidden treasure?” something went ping.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “What?” Marina demanded. “You had an idea. I can feel it from over here. You know who the killer is, don’t you? I’m getting an image. Tomorrow you’ll make a citizen’s arrest and save Yvonne from Claudia Wolff and her thundering horde, convene a special meeting of the PTA and have her forcibly removed from the vice-presidency-ship, and when you’re done with all that, find a job for Richard and help him mend relations with Jenna.”

  “Why is your fantasy world so much better than mine?”

  “Because you have an unlimited capacity for guilt. Next question, please.”

  “Why do you have it in for Claudia?”

  “A more pertinent question is why does she have it in for you? One more query. Then we must return to our labors.”

  “Is there really such a thing as a citizen’s arrest?”

  “Just make sure you catch him committing a felony.”

  I held the phone away from my head, stared at it, then put it back to my ear. “Do I want to know why you know that?”

  She sighed dramatically. “Beth, you sooo do not watch enough television.”

  Whatever. “Have you picked up anything from your WisconSINs blog?”