Murder at the PTA

by Lee Hollis

  Frances stood up, her arms outstretched, holding the dog at bay, talking to him softly. “Good dog . . . that’s a good dog. . . .”

  The dog was unamused. He kept barking, and from across the street Maya could see the whites of his sharp teeth.

  The porch light snapped on.

  “I’m coming to help,” Maya said, about to leap out of the car.

  “No, I can handle this. Stay where you are,” Frances whispered urgently, still clutching her cell phone with one hand as the dog slowly, almost methodically advanced upon her.

  Maya knew dogs. She had a lot of experience with them and had owned a few. This pit bull was fully ready to attack a pregnant woman. Maya certainly was not going to stay where she was. She had flung open the driver’s side door and was halfway out when Spencer and his wealthy girlfriend rushed outside to see what had upset the dog so much.

  “Remus, down!” the woman shouted.

  The dog instantly stopped barking and sat down on his haunches in a completely docile state.

  Maya could see the woman staring at Frances, and through Frances’s phone, she could faintly hear their conversation.

  “I don’t know you. Do you live in this neighborhood?” the woman demanded to know.

  “Me? No . . . ,” Frances said in the sweetest voice she could possibly muster since her normal personality was the furthest from nice and sweet as you could get.

  “Then what are you doing here? This is private property, and you’re trespassing!” Spencer bellowed.

  Maya rolled her eyes. He was strutting around like a rooster, his chest puffed out, a far cry from the pleading sad sack she had encountered at Maisie Portman’s apartment. This was definitely his way of showing off his manliness in front of his new girlfriend.

  “I’m a representative of Planned Parenthood,” Frances said.

  Maya suppressed a giggle.

  The woman sized up Frances’s protruding belly. “Guess you didn’t plan so well.”

  Spencer cracked up. “You kill me, Katie.”

  She had a name now.

  Katie.

  “What are you doing skulking around my house?” Katie asked, snapping her fingers at her dog, who jumped up and ran to her. She kneeled down to pet him but kept her mistrustful eyes trained on Frances.

  Frances was always the ultimate pro, cool under pressure, able to come up with a believable story on the spot. And tonight she did not disappoint.

  “I’m just here to meet a client. I was here a couple of weeks ago, and we scheduled a follow-up appointment.”

  Katie looked confused. “I live here alone, and for the record, I have no plans to be a parent.”

  “Not yet anyway,” Spencer remarked, grinning.

  Katie ignored him. “You must be at the wrong house.”

  Frances looked at the house. “I swear it was this house. I was definitely here before.”

  “When was your first appointment with this supposed client?” Katie asked, her voice full of suspicion.

  Frances looked at her phone. “Let’s see, I need to scroll back a couple of weeks on my calendar.... Here it is, the sixth of October. That was a Wednesday night.”

  Way to go, Frances.

  She purposely chose the night Maisie Portman was found hanging in her office at the high school.

  Katie thought about the date and then turned to Spencer. “Weren’t you here that night?”

  “Yeah, I think so. You cooked me that awesome casserole and then we . . . ,” he said, chuckling, giving her a conspiratorial wink. “You know . . .”

  Katie nodded and then turned back to Frances. “We were both here that night. All night. There is no way you could have been at this house.”

  Frances glanced at the house number. “Forty-three . . . Yes, I have it right here, Forty-three Blueberry Lane.”

  Katie sighed. “This is Forty-three Strawberry Lane. Blueberry is two streets over.”

  “Oh gosh, I . . . I am so embarrassed,” Frances stammered. “I guess I really do have the wrong house.”

  “I don’t recall a yellow house on Blueberry Lane. What is the name of your client?” Katie said, eyes narrowing.

  “Oh, I couldn’t possibly tell you that. We have a very strict privacy policy at Planned Parenthood.”

  Spencer took a menacing step toward Frances. “What kind of scam are you trying to pull here, lady?”

  Frances suddenly opened her mouth and screamed.

  She screamed so loud the startled pit bull began barking again.

  Spencer and Katie stood frozen in their tracks, not knowing what was going on.

  Maya dropped her phone and reached for her gun in the glove compartment.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Katie yelled, clutching Spencer’s arm as Frances continued screaming.

  “Labor pains. I think my water just broke. I better have my friend take me to the hospital right away!”

  Frances almost broke into a run as she scampered back down the lawn to the street. Katie had to grab her pit bull, Remus, by the collar to stop him from chasing after her. The dog kept barking ferociously as she wrestled him inside the house with Spencer’s help.

  As Frances hurried across the street, her belly bouncing up and down, she gave Maya an excited little wave, impressed by her own acting abilities.

  Her run-in with the happy couple had proven fruitful.

  If Katie was telling Frances the truth, then both she and Spencer had an alibi on the night Maisie Portman was killed either by her own hand or someone else’s. There really wasn’t a reason why either of them would have a reason to lie to a representative from Planned Parenthood.

  So if Chelsea was right and Maisie did not commit suicide, then Maya had to keep digging to find out who would go to such lengths to murder her and make it look like a suicide.

  And as of now, her suspect list was back down to zero.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “You’re the senator’s wife, if I remember correctly,” the detective said, shutting off his desktop computer and leaning back in his rickety old metal chair.

  “Yes,” Sandra said with a bright smile only a politician’s spouse could muster.

  “I didn’t vote for him,” Detective Mateo Reyes seemed to relish adding.

  Sandra refused to give him the satisfaction of reacting. She kept that polite smile plastered on her face. “That’s quite all right. Fortunately enough people did.”

  He studied her for a moment, almost like a wolf sizing up a lost elk.

  “So how can I help you, Mrs. Wallage?”

  “I may have some pertinent information in the Maisie Portman case,” Sandra said, moving slightly closer to him and lowering her voice.

  Detective Reyes took this in and then folded his hands and rested them on his desk. “That case has been closed.”

  “Yes, I know. But I have a feeling Maisie did not commit suicide.”

  “Oh, you do, do you?”

  He couldn’t have sounded more condescending if he tried.

  She hadn’t liked him from the moment she had first seen him at the crime scene and witnessed how he had summarily dismissed that female detective Maya Kendrick.

  “You have a feeling? Like an intuition?”

  Intuition.

  Of course that was a dog whistle for sexism.

  But she wasn’t going to play into his hand.

  She was determined to have him hear her out.

  “Yes, I believe Maisie was murdered.”

  Detective Reyes couldn’t help but crack a smile. She could tell he was humoring her and not taking her seriously. But she plowed ahead anyway. “And I’m afraid I have an idea who might have done it.”

  “Wow,” he exclaimed. “Well, go on. I’m all ears. Don’t keep me in suspense.”

  God, she wanted to slap him across that smug face of his, but she refrained. She was here on a mission, and she was not going to be kicked out before she got everything she had to say off her chest.

  E
ven if at the moment he was actually staring at her chest.

  “Maisie Portman hurt a lot of people with her salacious website, as I’m sure you are fully aware.”

  From the blank look on his face, it was obvious he wasn’t aware at all. Once the case was sufficiently closed, he had clearly lost interest in anything related to Maisie Portman.

  Sandra cleared her throat and continued. “One person in particular told me to my face that if he found out who was behind the Dirty Laundry site, he wouldn’t hesitate to kill him or her . . .”

  “And who is it we’re talking about?”

  “Joel Metcalf. He has a troubled son with a substance-abuse problem, and Maisie exposed it to everyone at the school, even making it out to be worse than it really was. I’ve known Joel for years, and believe me, I have never seen him so angry, so determined to get revenge . . . I’ve gone back and forth on whether I should have spoken to him about this first, but I decided you should know.”

  “I see . . . ,” Detective Reyes said quietly, thinking, going through the motions of at least trying to pretend to be engaged.

  “Maybe he somehow found out Maisie was the one writing those awful things about his son, blatantly and almost gleefully invading his family’s privacy, and he snapped.”

  “Maybe he was just venting to you,” Detective Reyes offered.

  Sandra shook her head. “No, I don’t think it was an empty threat.”

  “It’s an interesting theory, but then again, Maisie Portman hung herself. There was zero evidence of foul play.”

  Sandra decided to keep pressing the point. “I’ve questioned all the teachers at the school, people who have worked with Maisie for years . . .”

  He interrupted her. “You questioned them? Are you a fully licensed PI or just an amateur sleuth on the side when you’re not being a senator’s wife?”

  “I’m president of the PTA,” Sandra said, seething. “I have a responsibility to know what’s going on at the school.”

  “Oh, I see,” he said, almost chuckling.

  “Not one teacher, or student for that matter, not one of them, believes Maisie took her own life.”

  “People who are severely depressed can become quite good at hiding their darker emotions.”

  “I suppose that’s true, but I also saw Maisie arguing with a woman I didn’t recognize outside the school a few days before she died.”

  Detective Reyes stared at her, waiting for more.

  “Well, it got very heated, to the point where I had to intervene. There appeared to be a serious conflict between them. Maisie was quite upset.”

  He didn’t say anything. He just kept looking at her, eyes glazed over, as if he was waiting for her to finally be done.

  “I’m simply suggesting that it might be something you could follow up on as well, in addition to talking to Joel Metcalf.”

  “Okay, Mrs. Wallage, I appreciate you bringing me all this information, and I will definitely look into it. But there is no further need to concern yourself with this any longer. So you can go back to your ladies’ luncheons and visiting orphanages or whatever your duties are as a senator’s wife—”

  Orphanages?

  What is this, a Charles Dickens novel?

  Sandra stood up. “You have absolutely no intention of following up on any of this, do you?”

  He considered his response very carefully, given the fact he was talking to the wife of a very powerful man in the state, but in the end, he couldn’t help himself. “No, I don’t.”

  “May I ask why?”

  He waved at an in-box stacked with folders stuffed with papers. “Because I have a dozen or so cases I still have to deal with today, and probably five more that will be added to my workload before the end of the day, so I don’t have a lot of free time to open up an investigation that has already been closed just because you have a feeling.”

  His self-satisfied expression said it all. His opinion of her had been cemented from the minute she had walked through the door. She was a bored busybody, a privileged U.S. senator’s wife, who got her kicks out of sticking her nose into police business.

  His tone and demeanor were insulting.

  “Thank you for your time,” she said calmly, standing up and marching out of the police station.

  She almost turned around so she could catch him leering at her butt as she left, but again, she was not going to give him the satisfaction of knowing she actually cared.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “I’m sorry, who are you?” Frances asked, a puzzled look on her face.

  “I’m Sandra Wallage.”

  Frances scrunched up her face, now completely confused and glanced at Maya. “The senator’s wife?”

  “Yes, that Sandra Wallage,” Maya confirmed, nodding.

  Frances shrugged, not all that impressed, and turned back to Sandra. “And what are you doing here again?”

  “I wanted to speak to you about one of your cases.”

  Frances pointed to the hours posted next to the office door of their firm as they all huddled outside in the hallway. “As you can plainly see, our office hours are from nine to six daily, and it’s almost seven, so I suggest you come back tomorrow.”

  Sandra frowned but respectfully turned to go away when Maya suddenly stopped her, much to Frances’s surprise.

  “Which case?”

  “I heard you’re investigating Maisie Portman’s death,” Sandra said.

  Maya and Frances exchanged baffled looks.

  “Who told you that?” Maya asked.

  “My son Ryan.”

  “And who told him?”

  “I’m not sure. A friend, maybe. Someone at his school.”

  “How long have you been waiting out here in the hallway?” Maya asked, pulling her office key out of her bag.

  “Not long. A half hour or so. I was just about to leave a note with my phone number when you showed up.”

  “We were on a stakeout,” Maya said.

  Frances raised an eyebrow. “Do you really think she needed to know that?”

  “Something connected to the Maisie Portman case?” Sandra asked, suddenly intrigued.

  “Look, why don’t you come inside?” Maya said, brushing past Sandra to unlock the door to the office.

  “Seriously?” Frances blurted out, somewhat aghast.

  Maya opened the door and ushered Sandra and Frances inside.

  “When’s your due date?” Sandra asked, attempting a little small talk.

  “Not a moment too soon,” Frances barked, snapping on the light and waddling behind her desk to sit down and take a load off her feet.

  “I can make some coffee,” Maya offered.

  “No, thank you. I won’t stay long. I want to offer my help,” Sandra said confidently.

  “Help for what?” Maya asked, curious.

  “The Maisie Portman case.”

  There was a pregnant pause as the pregnant woman behind the desk stared at Sandra before snickering and shaking her head.

  “I have some information that might be important that the police, to be frank, had no interest in hearing about.”

  “Who did you talk to?” Maya asked.

  “Detective Mateo Reyes.”

  “That figures,” Maya grumbled, giving a little side eye to Frances.

  Frances sat up, defensively. “He’s a busy guy, Maya. He doesn’t have time to listen to every gossipy housewife who has a dramatic story to tell. No offense, Mrs. Wallage.”

  “I’d say none taken, but I’d be lying. And as the president of the PTA, I ethically cannot tell a lie.”

  Maya smirked.

  The lady had a sense of humor.

  “Okay,” Frances groaned, wishing to wrap this conversation up sooner rather than later. “What kind of information do you have?”

  Sandra recounted exactly what she had told Detective Reyes at the station. About the mysterious woman arguing with Maisie Portman in the high school parking lot. About Joel Metcalf’s direct threat
to kill whomever turned out to be behind the Dirty Laundry site. Maya jotted down notes as she talked, but Frances just leaned back in her chair behind her desk, hands folded on her large protruding stomach, sighing skeptically.

  “Is that all?” Maya asked quietly.

  “For now, yes, but I was hoping . . .” Sandra let her words trail off as she debated with herself whether she should go on.

  Maya was now even more interested in what she was going to say.

  Sandra glanced at Frances, who stared at her intimidatingly, but then, gathering her courage, she decided to go for it. “I was hoping you would let me help you solve the case. I feel like I could be a valuable asset.”

  “You mean like team up?” Frances asked, incredulous.

  “Yes, you wouldn’t have to pay me. I would work for free. I just want to contribute to finding out what really happened to Maisie.”

  Frances burst out laughing.

  Maya wanted to as well, but she politely refrained because she didn’t want to hurt Mrs. Wallage’s feelings. It was too late. Frances had already done the job.

  Maya could see Sandra getting hot, her face a deep red as she stood up, both angry and embarrassed.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to laugh,” Frances wailed, wiping the tears from her eyes.

  “Oh, I think you do,” Sandra snipped. “You’re just as bad as Detective Reyes.”

  Frances managed to calm herself for a moment. “What, did you expect a more sympathetic ear because we’re women?”

  “I suppose so, I guess, but now I see how foolish that notion was,” Sandra said as she turned and headed for the door.

  Maya stepped forward to intercept her. “Please, don’t be upset. We’re just not in the habit of taking on additional partners to work with us on a case. I’m sure you are a very effective investigator in your own right—”

  Frances snorted and then raised her hands in surrender, unable to contain herself as she began to howl again.

  Sandra took a deep breath and exhaled. “I’m very good at reading people, knowing when they’re telling the truth or not. It’s a skill I developed from a very young age, and it has served me well in my husband’s political career. But I know what I must look like to you, a bored housewife looking for some excitement. Well, that could not be further from the truth. But I respect your decision, and I appreciate you giving me your time. Good night.”