Murder at the PTA (2010) bk-1

by Laura Alden

  Murder at the PTA (2010)

  ( Beth Kennedy - 1 )

  Laura Alden

  A brand-new series in which murder is anything but elementary

  After Tarver Elementary School's unpopular principal is murdered, PTA secretary and mother of two Beth Kennedy puts aside bake sales and class trip fund-raisers to catch a killer. And when members of the PTA become suspects, she realizes solving this murder will not be as easy as ABC...

  One Year Later

  A MOURNING ANNOUCEMENT

  The first pages of my handwritten notes were filled with quotes from concerned parents. Each succeeding page had an increasing number of doodles. Every person talking had said the same thing, over and over, the same thing I’d heard on the phone all day. And I’d probably had dozens of e-mails on the subject, too.

  My own eyes were drooping when I reached the proof-reading stage at one in the morning. Yawning, I printed a hard copy and decided to look at e-mail. After subject lines such as “Tarver Addition,” “Agnes Must Go,” and “Legal Action Called For,” there was a series of e-mails from Marina. “Call me,” said the first one. Then, “Call me—urgent.” There were more with increasing numbers of capital letters and exclamation points. The last message had been sent less than five minutes ago.

  CALL ME!! URGENT!!!!

  “Why didn’t you call me yourself?” Grumbling, I picked up the phone, but there was no dial tone. “Oh . . .

  Thirty seconds after walking in the door, the phone had rung. Carly, mother of Thomas and Victoria, had wanted to know how we were going to stop Agnes. After I’d finished with her, I’d pulled the cord out of the phone jack. Voilà, no more calls.

  I went into the kitchen and dialed Marina. “Sorry. I unplugged the phone. You wouldn’t believe how many people have called. What’s so important?”

  “It’s Agnes.”

  My fear vanished. Annoyance replaced it. “Oh, geez. What’s she done now?”

  Marina breathed into the phone. Short, tension-filled puffs. “She’s dead.”

  To my parents, who gave me life, love, a college education, and a voracious appetite for reading. Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  No book is written in a vacuum, and this book is no exception. My heartfelt gratitude goes to about a zillion people, but I’d like to mention a few by name. Thanks go to Lorraine Bartlett (aka Lorna Barrett) for poking and prodding, and to Peg Herring for Thai lunches and writerly conversation. To my fantastic editor, Jessica Wade, and to my intrepid agent, Jessica Faust. To the Guppies chapter of Sisters in Crime, because if it weren’t for the Guppies, I wouldn’t have persevered. To the Plot Hatchers for plotting and hatching, and to Julie Sitzema for her knowledge of Girl Stuff. To my husband for his expertise in All Things Sports (and for a few other things that I’d list except I don’t want to be responsible for the deaths of so many trees). Thanks, everyone!

  Chapter 1

  “You need to get out more,” Marina said.

  As I was in her backyard, my best friend’s comment was obviously incorrect. “I am out.”

  “Don’t be a putz.” Without turning, she spoke to a five-year-old playing in the nearby sandbox. “Andrew, don’t whack your sister on the head. It’s not good for you, her, or that piece of processed petroleum stamped into a plastic toy shape in China by underpaid employees and brought to this country on a containership undoubtedly carrying illegal aliens.”

  Marina and I stood in the late-September sunshine of Rynwood, Wisconsin, enjoying the warm weather. There wouldn’t be many more days like this before the cold of winter set in, and Marina was a big believer in outside play for the children in her home day care.

  “You know what I mean, Beth,” she said to me. “Socially out.”

  On the inside I was shrieking, No! It hasn’t been long enough! The kids aren’t ready! I’m not ready! On the outside, my lips tightened an infinitesimal fraction of an inch.

  “Now, don’t look like that.” Marina shook her finger at me; she was the only person outside of a sitcom I’d ever seen actually do such a thing. “It’s been a year since the divorce.”

  A year and eight days of sleeping alone, but who was counting?

  “Which makes this a perfect time to get back into action.” A wisp of Marina’s light red hair fell out of her ponytail and across her plump cheek. We looked across the yard to where my ten-year-old daughter, Jenna, had barricaded herself in a tree fort and was dropping bits of maple leaf onto the head of my seven-year-old son. Oliver was red faced and grunting from the effort of trying to reach the lowest branch of the tree.

  Ripping apart their young lives with divorce had been the hardest thing I’d ever done. Jenna had taken it on the chin, but Oliver had started sleeping with a pile of stuffed animals big enough to smother him, and every single one had to be given a kiss good night. Bedtime took forever in our house. I knew I should start weaning him off the animals, just as I knew I should start talking to Jenna about the “wonders of womanhood.” After Christmas, I thought. Why rush things?

  “Know what?” Marina pushed back the stray hairs. More, and then more, would fall out of the ponytail without her noticing, and finally the full glory of her reddish locks would cascade over her shoulders. The hair scrunchie would be on the floor, or in the yard, or in the car, or on the kitchen counter. Marina dropped hair scrunchies like Hansel and Gretel dropped bread crumbs. “I ran into Dave Patterson the other day—” Her extrasensory powers reasserted themselves. “Nathan! Don’t climb the fence.”

  “But my mom’s here!” Young Nathan jumped, trying to swing his legs over the white picket fence.

  “Wait for your mother to open the gate.”

  Nathan jumped again.

  “Gate!” Marina’s sharp command was like a whip. The boy dropped to the ground.

  “Hey, Marina.” A slim blond woman walked up the side yard’s stone path and stood at the gate. “Wonderful day. Oh, hi, Beth. Got a new name for that bookstore yet?” Debra-don’t-call-me-Debbie O’Conner grinned at me.

  If I’d been blessed with quick wit instead of quick alphabetizing skills, I would have come up with something clever enough to silence Nathan’s overly perfect mother. But since I hadn’t come up with anything better than the current “Children’s Bookshelf” since I’d bought the store two years ago, I just shrugged. “Not yet.”

  Debra opened the childproof latch with one hand, a task that took me two hands and a considerable amount of sotto voce cursing. “Let’s go, kiddo,” she said to her son. “See you ladies later. I’d love to stop and chat, but the book club is at our house tonight, and I need to fill the cream puffs I baked last night. Bye!”

  Cream puffs? No one made cream puffs. You bought them from the bakery or thawed them after getting a box out of the grocery store’s freezer. I climbed the stairs to the deck and sat in a plastic green chair, feeling inadequate. Cooking I could do, but baking? The last thing I’d baked from scratch had been cupcakes for Jenna’s birthday—her eighth. It hadn’t gone well.

  “Quit that.” The deck stairs squeaked under Marina’s weight.

  “What?”

  “You have that comparing-apples-and-oranges look. Speaking of which, did you know Debra can’t swim?”

  “Please. Everyone knows how to swim.”

  Marina shook her head. “Can’t swim a stroke. She’s so scared of water, she wears a life jacket around a pool.”

  My childhood bulletin board had been crowded with hockey photos and blue ribbons from summer swim meets. I could do something better than Debra? Inconceivable. She was my opposite in a thousand ways—blond, where I was mousy brown; slim, which I hadn’t been in years; elegant in a way I only dreame
d about. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  “Didn’t know until the other day. Which was the same day I ran into Dave Patterson. We were at the community pool for the ducky swim class, see, and—” Her smile was a little too wide, and she was talking a little too fast, clear indications she was trying to convince me to do something I didn’t want to do.

  “I’m not going to date Dave Patterson.” I didn’t want to date anyone. All I wanted was to raise my children and to run my store. I wanted everything and everyone safe and sound: no traumas; no tragedies; no upsets or upheavals—a peaceful Goodnight Moon existence.

  “He’s not bad looking.” Marina waggled her eyebrows.

  “I don’t care if he’s Apollo reincarnated. I’m not ready to date anyone. Not yet.” Or ever. Men left the toilet seat up and complained about mowing the lawn. Why bother with them?

  “How about—”

  “No,” I said as firmly as I could, which must not have been firmly enough, because she looked ready to offer up another victim. “Maybe in the spring,” I said.

  She looked thoughtful, and I was sorry I hadn’t said a year. Marina’s circle of friends was larger and more varied than mine. We overlapped solely because we’d been neighbors years ago, before Richard had decided to move us into a brand-new pseudo-Victorian house more suitable for his status as CFO of a large insurance company. Maybe living in a ranch house three blocks away from the elementary school didn’t fit Richard’s image, but it worked wonderfully for Marina’s home-day-care business. She watched two children during the day, and three more walked to her house after school.

  “Okay,” she said. “No dating.”

  I slid down a little in my chair. Safe and sound. No pressure. Just the peace and warmth of early fall. Leaves turning yellow, orange, and red against the bright blue sky. A tangy earthy smell in the air—that special autumnal scent that summoned memories of high school football games, trick-or-treating, and scooping wet stringy seeds out of pumpkins. I closed my eyes and breathed in fading images of Jenna in a princess costume and Oliver dressed as his favorite stuffed animal.

  “Then how about being the secretary of the school’s Parent Teacher Association?” Marina ran the words together as fast as an auctioneer trying to unload a box of moldy books.

  I opened my eyes and sat up straight. She couldn’t possibly have said what I thought she’d said.

  “You’d make a great committee secretary. You’re organized. You do what you say you will. You know how to do things. You’re reliable. Responsible. People trust you.” Her smile stretched two feet wide.

  “What makes you think I know how to do things?”

  “You don’t give yourself enough credit. You own a business, for crying out loud. Doing this little secretary thing would be a piece of cake.”

  “If it’s so little, you do it.”

  “My darling,”—“daah-ling”it came out—“think about what you just said.”

  I did. I thought about it, visualized it, and rejected it. Marina, with her big heart and cheer and love and flamboyance, was not what you’d call efficient. Her husband and youngest son got fed on time, and her college-aged children got regular care packages in the mail, but her desk looked like a horizontal wastebasket. Paperwork was not her strength.

  “What happened to the old secretary?” I asked. Though I was a member of the Tarver Elementary PTA, I’d skipped most of last year’s meetings. Raising money for handicapped playground equipment was important, as were most of the causes, but my children had needed me more than the PTA did.

  “You’ll make a great secretary,” Marina repeated. “And you need more social interaction. Running that bookstore doesn’t count.”

  “The kids—”

  “PTA meetings are on Wednesday, and Richard has the kids that night, yes? I bet you’re not doing anything fun with that free time. I bet you do laundry. Maybe sometimes you go wild and balance your checkbook.”

  Chores weren’t my typical Wednesday night, but I wasn’t going to tell even my best friend what I did do.

  Jenna dropped out of the tree and tore across the yard. Oliver gave up his attempt to climb Tree Everest and tore after her, his shrieks joining hers. Marina’s surprise child, nine-year-old Zach, abandoned his pogo stick and followed. In seconds the yard was full of children playing a bizarre variety of tag. My flesh and blood didn’t look at me once.

  A tiny piece of my silly sentimental heart shredded into pieces. My babies were growing up. Maybe it was time for me to grow up, too. “Okay,” I said, sighing. “I’ll run. For secretary. I probably won’t win, but I’ll run.”

  “Hallelujah!” Marina clapped her hands, leaped out of her chair, and pulled me into a hard hug. “Bet you dinner and a movie that you win.”

  “You’re on.”

  A few days later I stopped at Tarver to drop off a box of special orders. Delivering to the local schools was one of the services the Children’s Bookshelf offered. I wasn’t sure it was cost-effective, but it generated a lot of goodwill, and that alone made it worthwhile.

  I handed the box to the school secretary, then turned and almost ran into the wide body of Paul Richey, Jenna’s teacher. Paul was often at the store buying books and stickers for the kids in his classroom. All the purchases were out of his own pocket. Many teachers did the same, and I gave them what discount I could.

  “So you’re going to be the new PTA secretary.” He grinned. “Who talked you into volunteering?”

  Volunteering? I was getting a bad feeling about this. “I’m running, that’s all.”

  “Gotcha.” He nodded sagely. “And because sitting on the PTA committee is such a coveted position, you’ll be competing against dozens of candidates.”

  “There’s bound to be a couple.” I zipped up my coat. “Aren’t there?”

  Paul’s grin got a little bigger. “In a perfect world, sure. But we’re in Rynwood.” He sketched a salute and walked toward his classroom.

  Mother that I am, I desperately wanted to follow him, to peek in the door and see my daughter. Then I wanted to check on Oliver; I wanted to see his tongue stick out in concentration as he worked out math problems.

  But since I also didn’t want to see their faces flush with embarrassment—“Mom, I can’t believe you waved to me in front of my friends!”—I headed back to work and left my children behind.

  Two weeks after Marina’s not-so-subtle push, I sat at a table near the front of a Tarver Elementary classroom. A PTA-approved tape recorder and blank legal pad sat in front of me, a two-page agenda lurked to my right, and a bright blue portable filing system was on the floor next to my feet.

  “Beef Wellington,” Marina said. She sat in the front row of the audience, her grin as bright as a shiny shoe. “And Halloween Two.”

  That dinner-and-a-movie bet wasn’t going away. “The Lion King and pizza from Sabatini’s.”

  She made a gagging motion. “The owner’s connected. You know, the mob? I wouldn’t trust any meat he serves. Grilled steaks and Blazing Saddles.”

  In June I’d blown off my eyebrows trying to light the grill. I hadn’t started the evil thing since, and Marina knew it. She also knew I wasn’t a Mel Brooks fan. “Peanut butter and jelly and Dr. Zhivago.”

  As Marina crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue, a gavel banged down. I jumped and started the tape recorder.

  “This meeting will come to order.” Erica Hale, the PTA’s silver-haired president, peered out at the audience over half glasses. “I’d like everyone to welcome our newly installed secretary, Beth Kennedy.” Polite applause sprinkled through the room, punctuated by Marina’s fist thrust and earsplitting whistle. My cheeks flamed hot, and I shuffled papers that didn’t need shuffling.

  Erica went on. “As some of you might remember, our former secretary and her family moved to Belize, and Beth has graciously agreed to donate her time and services.”

  I blinked and mouthed the word to Marina. “Belize?” I’d heard of people vacationing
in and retiring to Belize, but moving there? With young children? That was far outside my comfort zone—about two thousand miles outside.

  Marina shrugged.

  “With the committee’s permission,” Erica said, “I’d like to rearrange tonight’s agenda. We have a guest who has another commitment, and I’d like to move action item number one to the beginning of the meeting.”

  I glanced at the agenda, but before I could locate the action items, Erica requested a voice vote approving the change. “Ayes?” Erica asked. The other committee members said aye. “Nays?”

  I found the action items. Number three was putting allergy warnings on bake sale goods. Number two was buying an automated snow-day notification system. Number one was . . . “Uh-oh,” I said.

  “Was that a nay vote?” Erica frowned at me.

  “Uh, no.” I picked up a pen, circled the pertinent item, drew an arcing line up to the top of the agenda, and ended it with an arrow. “I’m fine with the change. Sorry.”

  Erica nodded and looked at the back of the room. “Agnes? You have the floor.”

  Twenty-odd members of the PTA were in the audience, and every one of them twitched as Erica said the name “Agnes.” As if choreographed, all heads turned to watch the fiftyish Agnes Mephisto, principal of Tarver Elementary, walk to the front of the room. Topped by a haircut that even I knew had gone out of style years ago, Agnes’s body had an unfortunate resemblance to a fire hydrant. She walked with solid steps and planted herself directly in front of me. I had an excellent view of her back and her long, overpermed hair.

  “Good evening, PTA members!” Agnes’s voice was piercing at a distance. At point-blank range, it was all I could do not to cover my ears. “I have outstanding news for you, for our community, but most of all for the wonderful students of Tarver Elementary.” There was a smile in her voice, and I was just as glad not to see it. Agnes had a weasel-like cast to her face, a resemblance that grew even more pronounced when she smiled. Luckily, that didn’t happen often. “I’m sure,” she said, “that everyone will be as excited about this project as I am.”