Murder by the Slice

by Livia J. Washburn

  “Some people will steal from anybody,” Phyllis said, “even schools and churches and places like that.”

  Sam nodded. “It’s a mean ol’ world sometimes.”

  The discussion sobered all three of them, so despite the beautiful day they went inside before much longer. Anyway, Phyllis told herself, she had to start thinking about supper.

  And she wished she could get rid of the image in her head that involved Eve, Sam, and a kissing booth… .

  When Phyllis and Carolyn arrived for the Friday morning meeting at Loving Elementary, they didn’t have to ask for directions this time, although they did stop in the office to let the secretary know they would be in the school. The days when people could wander in and out of a school with nobody paying any attention to them were long gone.

  As they walked down the hall toward the conference room, they heard voices—loud, angry voices. Actually, Phyllis realized as they came closer, there was only one voice, and it belonged to Shannon Dunston.

  “… been doing, then, since you obviously haven’t been doing what you were told to?” Shannon was saying. Someone answered her, but Phyllis couldn’t make out the words. She and Carolyn traded frowns of concern. There was still a little tension between the two due to Phyllis entering the snack contest, but that was momentarily forgotten in the face of this new trouble.

  When they reached the open door of the conference room, they saw several of the members of the PTO board sitting at the table. Shannon stood at the head of the table, a fierce glare directed toward Lindsey Gonzales. Kristina Padgett and Irene Vernon sat across the table from Lindsey, who was alone on her side. Marie, Holly Underwood, and Abby Granger weren’t there yet.

  “I’m sorry, Shannon,” Lindsey said. She looked and sounded like she was fighting back tears. “I’ve just been really busy this week.”

  “Those posters should already be collected and put up in the businesses all over town,” Shannon snapped. “People aren’t going to come to the carnival if they don’t even know about it.”

  “Ladies,” Phyllis said, “you might not be aware of it, but we could hear you down the hall.”

  “You mean people might hear that Lindsey can’t even do a simple job?”

  “I’ll do it!” Lindsey burst out. “I’ll do it this afternoon! I swear I will, Shannon.”

  “Never mind,” Shannon said, scorn dripping from her voice. “I’ll take care of it. That’s the president’s job, isn’t it, doing everything that doesn’t get done?” She swept her withering gaze around to the other two board members in the room.

  Phyllis waited to see if Lindsey, Kristina, and Irene were going to get up and walk out. Phyllis would have, if Shannon had attacked her like that. Clearly, Shannon didn’t understand—or didn’t care—that the board members were volunteers. They didn’t have to be here. If they wanted to, the entire board could just quit and dump all the responsibility for the carnival in her lap.

  But no one stood up. The three women just sat there, pointedly looking at the table and not meeting Shannon’s gaze. After a moment of awkward silence, Shannon said, “Where are the others? Can’t anybody be on time?”

  As Phyllis and Carolyn pulled out folding chairs to sit down at the table, the chair legs scraping on the tile floor, Phyllis heard footsteps in the hall. A few seconds later, Marie appeared in the doorway, a smile on her face. That smile vanished quickly as she must have sensed the hostile atmosphere in the room. “Uh-oh,” she said. “What happened?”

  “Lindsey hasn’t collected the posters that the children made for the carnival,” Shannon said. “She was supposed to have taken them around town and put them up in all the businesses by now.”

  “Oh, honey,” Marie said as she looked at Lindsey, “you should have let me know you were having trouble. I would have helped you.”

  “I kept thinking I’d get around to it,” Lindsey said miserably. “I meant to.”

  Shannon said, “You know what they say about good intentions and the road to hell.” She looked at Marie. “Do you know if the others are coming?”

  “Yeah, I saw Holly and Abby pull into the parking lot behind me. They ought to be here any minute.” More footsteps sounded from the hall. Marie looked around and went on, “Here they come now.”

  The other board members entered the conference room a moment later. Everyone sat down. The meeting could get under way now, even though it was obvious it had been going on unofficially even before Phyllis and Carolyn arrived.

  Phyllis knew the sort of posters Shannon had been talking about. Although it wasn’t mandatory, the children designed and illustrated them—often with varying degrees of help from their parents, Phyllis suspected—and then they were taped up in the windows of the businesses around town to publicize the carnival. Each poster had to include the date and time and how much fun it would be. Most of the kids drew simple pictures of the activities that would be going on at the carnival, but others—likely the ones with the most parental involvement—were more creative and downright fancy. But it was all in good fun, and since the goal was to get as many people to attend and spend money as possible, whatever worked was just fine.

  Nothing else was said about the posters and Lindsey’s failure to collect them from the classrooms and post them around town. During the meeting, Shannon called on each of the board members in turn, asking for reports on what they had accomplished since the last meeting. As far as Phyllis could tell, preparations for the carnival were proceeding satisfactorily, but Shannon found some nit to pick with everyone’s reports, some more so than others.

  Since they weren’t members of the board, Shannon turned to Carolyn and Phyllis last. “What about you ladies?” she asked, softening her tone slightly. “Are we ready for the auction and the snack contest? The carnival is a week from tomorrow, you know.”

  “Yes, I know,” Carolyn said. She had brought along a large tote bag this morning, and as she opened it up, Phyllis saw why. Carolyn took out a thick sheaf of papers. “I’d like to put these notices in the teachers’ boxes for them to pass out, so the kids can take them home.”

  “A lot of them will never get there, you know,” Shannon said. “The kids will throw them away or lose them.”

  “Yes, I know, but I’m not sure how else we can get the word out to the parents. Some of them will get to where they need to go.”

  Shannon nodded. “I suppose so. I can get you a list of most of the parents’ e-mail addresses, too, so you can e-mail them directly. The school office has that information.”

  Carolyn looked a little leery of the idea of doing a mass e-mailing like that. Phyllis knew that Carolyn still wasn’t completely comfortable with the computer and at times had trouble retrieving her own e-mail, let alone sending out a few hundred of them at the same time. So she said, “That would be great, Shannon. If you’ll get the addresses for us, we’ll take care of that.” Phyllis thought she could handle the task, and she knew that if she had any trouble, Sam could help her. He was probably the most computer-literate of the four of them who shared the big old house.

  “All right,” Shannon said. “Give me your address, and I’ll have the school secretary save the e-mail list on my jump drive so I can send it to you later.”

  Carolyn just looked more confused. So she pressed on, picking up one of the handouts she had made. “All the information about entering the contest and donating cakes or other baked goods for the auction is on here.” She handed it to Shannon and then passed copies to the rest of the board members, as well as handing one to Phyllis. This was the first time Phyllis had seen what Carolyn came up with. It was strictly functional, done probably in a word-processing rather than a graphics program, but all the necessary information was there, as Carolyn had said. Phyllis could have made it look a little flashier, but this would do the job. She smiled and nodded approvingly as she handed the sheet of paper back to Carolyn.

  The others were satisfied with it, too. Shannon looked around the table and said, “All right
, does anybody have anything else to bring up?”

  No one said anything. Lindsey still didn’t look up from the table. She hadn’t said much during the meeting.

  “I’ll be checking with all of you during the next week,” Shannon went on when it became obvious no one was going to speak up. She picked up her purse. “Now I’ll go get those posters and get started on that, I suppose.” She walked out of the conference room.

  “Would it have killed her to say keep up the good work, or something like that?” Marie said when Shannon’s brisk footsteps had faded away down the hall. She turned to Lindsey. “I’m sorry that happened, sweetie. Shannon was out of line.”

  “No, she wasn’t,” Lindsey said, and Phyllis saw a couple of streaks on the blonde’s face where tears had rolled down her cheeks. “I fell down on the job. It’s all my fault.”

  The others tried to make her feel better, reminding her that in the past they had all been the target of Shannon’s wrath, too. After a minute, Lindsey managed a weak smile. They all got up and left the conference room together, trailed by Phyllis and Carolyn.

  Quietly, Carolyn said, “Thanks for stepping in when Shannon started talking about all that computer stuff. I get lost so easily when it comes to that.”

  “It’s not a problem,” Phyllis assured her. “I’m glad to do whatever I can to help.”

  As they reached the parking lot, Carolyn said, “You know, I was probably too hard on you about entering the contest, Phyllis. I can understand how somebody would agree to something just to get that woman off their back.”

  “I appreciate that,” Phyllis said sincerely. “It’s been bothering me a lot that I upset you.”

  Carolyn shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. Like I said, I understand.” She paused as she opened the passengerside door of Phyllis’s Lincoln. “But don’t think for a minute that I’m not going to beat you.”

  Phyllis returned her friend’s smile and said, “We’ll see about that.”

  Chapter 8

  Phyllis spent the weekend experimenting with the healthy cookie recipe. Now that Carolyn had made peace with her, she was able to throw herself wholeheartedly into getting ready for the upcoming competition without feeling guilty about it. She tried to make the cookie into a giant pizza using coconut and a thin layer of jam for the topping, but the cookie was too soft for this to work, and the jam was overpowering. Phyllis decided it would work better to just make regular-sized cookies. The taste was the most important thing.

  While the last batch of cookies was cooling, Phyllis decided she’d better find out if Carolyn was right about young children and peanut butter. On the Internet, she found out that Carolyn was indeed right: Bobby would have to wait until he was older before he could have anything with peanut butter. It would still make a nice recipe for the carnival. She’d just need to make sure any smaller kids were allowed to eat food with peanuts before letting them sample.

  On Monday Phyllis drove over to Fort Worth, twenty miles to the east, for a doctor’s appointment. Her regular physician, Dr. Walt Lee, practiced in Weatherford, but she also saw an allergist several times a year for help with her hay fever. This was a particularly bad season for it. The pollen levels wouldn’t drop significantly until after the first freeze, and Phyllis’s eyes had begun watering and itching too much for her to wait that long for relief.

  After getting a shot and a prescription for some eyedrops, Phyllis returned to her car and got ready to leave the doctor’s office in southwest Fort Worth. Since she was already over there, she decided she would shop a little, since it was a nice area with a multitude of stores. She didn’t go there very often because the traffic was bad.

  She stopped at the exit of the doctor’s office parking lot to wait for traffic to clear on the busy boulevard. While she was sitting there, she spotted a familiar face in a car that slowed down right in front of her to turn into the next parking lot, which happened to belong to an Applebee’s.

  At first Phyllis wasn’t sure she had seen whom she thought she saw. But then the car slid into a parking space in front of the restaurant and stopped. Sure enough, it was Shannon Dunston who got out, and she was accompanied by a tall, dark-haired man who possessively took her arm as they went inside. The man definitely wasn’t Shannon’s exhusband, Dr. Joel Dunston. Shannon must have started dating again.

  Phyllis couldn’t help but feel a twinge of sympathy for the poor guy.

  Then she told herself she ought to be ashamed for thinking that. Shannon’s social life was none of her business.

  And besides, maybe enjoying a little male companionship would mean that Shannon wouldn’t be quite so cranky in the future.

  Phyllis scolded herself for thinking that, too.

  By the day before the carnival, Phyllis had received all the recipes that would be in the cookbook. Since most of the recipes came through e-mail, all Phyllis had to do with most of them was copy and paste them into her newsletter program. Once she had all the recipes laid out, she needed a cover. She had a digital camera that she bought when Bobby was born. She thought about just taking a picture of the plate of cookies after she made them, but Carolyn would probably be upset if she used her entry for the cover. She could go to the school and take pictures, but then it occurred to her that there might be a picture of Loving Elementary on the school Web site. Sure enough, after she’d connected to the Internet it was short work to go to the Web site, copy the picture of the school, and paste it onto the cover page. Once she was satisfied, she set it up to collate and print one hundred copies. She had a booklet stapler that she had bought when she was a teacher. The printer was fairly fast, so it was printing the booklets about the same speed that Phyllis could straighten and staple them. It really didn’t take as long to get it all done as she had been expecting.

  One of the things Phyllis had discovered with the peanutbutter-and-banana recipe was the fact that the cookies tasted even better the next day. She spent Friday morning at WalMart getting all the needed ingredients for both the cookies and the cake, while doing the rest of the grocery shopping for her and the others in the house. She’d bought bananas earlier in the week, so they would be nice and ripe.

  After she’d put everything away in the cabinets, it was time to make the batch of cookies for the carnival. She slipped a David Sanborn CD into the under-counter CD player and started working to the soft saxophone melody. She put all the ingredients needed on the counter and preheated the oven to 375 degrees.

  Phyllis pulled out two baking sheets from the bottom cabinet. She tore sheets of parchment paper to fit the pans. Parchment paper worked well for this cookie and, since she didn’t have to oil the pan, it cut the fat just a little more.

  In a large mixing bowl, Phyllis measured, mixed, and blended the sugar with the butter and egg with the mixer on medium until it had a nice creamy look. Then, one by one, she measured, added, and mixed the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt until all the ingredients were well blended.

  She took out a small bowl, peeled a brown-speckled banana, and broke the banana into pieces in the bowl. It was easy to mash the banana with a fork.

  She went back to the large mixing bowl, setting the mixer on low. She then proceeded to measure and add the oats, peanut butter, applesauce, and finally the mashed banana. She stopped the mixer just long enough to run a spatula around the sides of the bowl to make sure it was all mixed.

  Using two spoons, she scooped and dropped spoonfuls onto the parchment paper–covered pans. When she had the first pan full, she put it into the oven and set the timer for twelve minutes. While the first pan was baking, she started dropping spoonfuls of the dough onto the second pan so it would be ready to go in as soon as the first pan came out.

  The room filled with the smell of roasting peanuts. It brought back childhood memories of when her father would roast pans of peanuts. This recipe was definitely a winner as far as she was concerned.

  Since she spent Friday afternoon baking the cookies that would ser
ve as her healthy snack entry, she had Saturday morning to make the cake. For a change, she knew beforehand what Carolyn was entering in the contest. She’d seen her muttering and throwing out failed attempts all week. She had been stuck on flavored popcorn for the first part of the week, but finally came up with some nice low-fat pizza rolls. She’d given Phyllis the recipe before most of the other entrants had sent theirs. If Carolyn’s entry won … well, then, more power to her. Phyllis wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it.

  She was actually more concerned with seeing what Carolyn was going to donate to the auction. She hoped her friend wouldn’t embarrass herself by attempting something beyond her abilities.

  The carnival was scheduled to begin at one o’clock Saturday afternoon. Phyllis was up early Saturday morning, baking the cake that she would decorate to look like a jacko’-lantern. She wanted it to be as fresh as possible for the auction.

  During the week, Sam had spent quite a bit of time at the elementary school, helping the custodians with their preparations. Eve had finally settled on working at the ticket booth. It wouldn’t be as much fun as a kissing booth, she said, but at least that way she would get to see just about everyone who attended the carnival.

  So for more than a week, the festivities at Oliver Loving Elementary School had dominated the conversation and thoughts of the four retired teachers, and now that the day was finally upon them, Phyllis was eager to experience the excitement of the children and parents who would be there. Most of the kids had been looking forward to this since the beginning of the school year.

  Phyllis had doubled her old reliable yellow cake recipe, added a little food coloring to make it a light orange, and had baked it in two Bundt pans and two foil cupcake baking cups. Of course, the cupcakes took a lot less time to bake and cool. One cupcake was for the jack-o’-lantern’s stem, and the other was for a taste test. It never hurt to make sure she hadn’t forgotten to put something in the recipe. Even Carolyn made a mistake on one of her flavored popcorn attempts. Phyllis had heard mutterings about vegetable oil when the result made its way into the trash.