Murder at the PTA (2010) bk-1

by Laura Alden

  “Sorry.” He slid his glasses up with his index finger and pinched the bridge of his nose. With a face unlined by aging or sun, he’d always looked about my age. Today, I believed he was the fifty he claimed to be.

  I looked closer. “Did you get any sleep last night?”

  “No. Winnie says it’s the first time since that big pileup on the highway five years ago.” His wife, Winnie, round and red as he was skinny and white, was constitutionally incapable of passing a garage sale. I loved her dearly and didn’t get to see her nearly enough.

  “You’re tired.” I started to rise. “This can wait. It’s probably not that important.”

  “If it’s about Agnes, I need to hear it.”

  I thumped back into the chair. “I don’t know if it is or not.” I fidgeted with my purse. It had taken me all morning to gird up enough gumption to make the short walk to city hall. Twenty minutes ago, my information had seemed as if it might be useful. Now, I wasn’t so sure.

  “Spill it,” Gus said.

  I blew out my cheeks. “Yesterday evening, about six thirty . . .” The story of the stakes on the playground came out bit by gory bit. Gus, far from dismissing the incident, started taking notes almost immediately.

  “And you don’t know the name of Robert’s father?” Gus asked, pen poised.

  “Oliver might.” Or not. Last names weren’t nearly as important as how high you could jump your bike. “I’ll ask him tonight.”

  “No need.” Gus kept scrawling. “I’ll call the school. Claudia Wolff and who else?”

  My older sister’s accusations from years past came back with a slap. You’re nothing but a whiny little tattletale!

  “Beth?”

  I bounced forward thirty years. “Sorry. You’re not going to tell anyone I told, are you?”

  “This is a police investigation.”

  “And that means what?”

  “That privacy isn’t as important as finding a murderer.” Gus sat back, moving into a slanting beam of sunlight.

  I saw, in addition to reddened eyes, weary circles under them. “Right. Of course.” Quickly, I gave him all the names I could remember. “There were a few others I didn’t know.” I fiddled with my coat zipper. “It’s all my fault.”

  “You killed Agnes?”

  I looked up and saw the corners of his mouth twitching. “I thought law-enforcement officers weren’t supposed to have a sense of humor.”

  “Don’t believe everything you read. And if you’re blaming yourself for inciting a riot by making that phone call last night, don’t. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been someone else.”

  “Okay.” I’d never bought that kind of argument. It sat side by side with the but-all-my-friends-are-doing-it reasoning. “Thanks.”

  “Thank you for doing your civic duty. It’s people like you who make our job easier.”

  I shook hands and left, feeling worse than when I’d arrived.

  Tattletale!

  I nodded to the officer at the front desk and walked out. I was head down, which was not the way to play the puck and not the way to walk down a downtown sidewalk, even if the sidewalk in question was in sleepy little Rynwood.

  “Gotcha!” Firm hands gripped my shoulders, and my momentum carried us around in a small circle. “Sorry for grabbing, but you were about to walk straight into that barricade.” Evan Garrett looked down at me, blue eyes bright in a face still summer-tanned.

  Jerk, I reminded myself. Too-handsome men are always jerks. I looked at the orange sawhorses and the gaping hole beyond. “They were supposed to be done with that storm sewer two weeks ago,” I said, “and still there’s a trench that’s deep enough to hide small children.”

  I suddenly realized his hands were warm on my shoulders. “Thanks for saving me.” I stepped back. “I’ll try to keep my head up from now on.”

  “You’re welcome. How about lunch again?”

  “What?”

  “Lunch. The meal traditionally eaten at noon.” He smiled. “You are eating lunch today, aren’t you?”

  “I did yesterday.” What a dumb thing to say. Not that it mattered. He was a jerk, and saying dumb things to jerks didn’t matter.

  “How about now?”

  A “thanks, but no, thanks” was on my lips. I had customers to cajole, invoices to pay, and Christmas books to order. I’d packed a peanut-butter-and-strawberry-freezer-jam sandwich for lunch and had intended to eat it while filling out order forms. And if I didn’t eat the sandwich today, I wouldn’t eat it at all. I hated waste, but I hated soggy PB&J even more.

  As my mouth opened to say no, I noticed how fast the veins at his neck were pulsing. Either Evan Garrett had serious medical issues, or . . . or he was nervous. Which didn’t make any sense, because Beautiful People didn’t get nervous.

  “You’re busy.” His mouth turned down at one corner. “I understand. Maybe some other time.”

  “Wait.” I put out a hand and grabbed the sleeve of his jacket. “Lunch is a great idea. I was just deciding where to go.”

  He flashed a brilliant smile, and I smiled back in return, my heart suddenly and unaccountably light.

  This is not a date, I told myself.

  Evan and I slid into a booth at the Green Tractor—he on one side, I on the other. The waitress started to hand us menus.

  “Thanks, Dorrie, but I don’t need one,” I said. “I’ll have my usual.”

  “How about you, sir?” Dorrie put her pad on the table and leaned down to write my order, giving Evan an excellent view of her cleavage. Dorrie’s claim to fame was that she’d married and divorced the same man multiple times. I wasn’t sure of the current Dorrie/Jim status, but since I’d never seen her write down my order this way before, I’d say if Jim hadn’t been kicked out of the house yet, he was halfway through the door.

  “What are you having?” Evan asked me. He didn’t even glance at the displayed skin.

  “Fish sandwich with coleslaw.” I was in a rut, but it was a nice rut.

  “Is it good?”

  “All our food is good,” Dorrie said. “You look like a hamburger guy to me. We have a half-pound burger that can’t be beat.”

  “You talked me into it,” Evan said. “And fries, too, please.”

  “I’ll get you a big mound of ’em.” With a wink and a swish of her hips, Dorrie sauntered away.

  I straightened the packets of sugar in the wire rack. “How’s it going at the store?”

  “You mean, have I figured out a way to make it turn a profit for the first time in ten years?”

  I started in on the fake sugar packets and tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t be inappropriate. “No one in his right mind would have bought that place” wasn’t going to work. “It’s a nice store,” I said.

  Evan laughed.

  “No, I mean it.” I centered the salt and pepper shakers. “Really. The wood floors and the tin ceiling, and those metal trays filled with nails you buy by the pound, and the smell . . .”

  I was babbling again. What an idiot. I stopped talking and hoped Dorrie would show up with our drinks so I could bury my embarrassment in a mug of bad tea.

  “The smell?” Evan asked, but he didn’t seem to be making fun of me. His voice was quiet and kind. “You mean that multilayered scent of raw wood and machine oil and fresh-cut metal and maybe . . .” He looked at his hands, and I could have sworn I saw a flush over those high cheekbones.

  “The aroma of tradition?” I suggested. “Of wisdom?”

  My palms tingled with an excitement I hadn’t known I could still feel. If I’d said something like that to Richard, he would have said my imagination was going to land me in trouble someday. But this gorgeous man was smiling at me, and I didn’t want him to ever, ever stop.

  “Here you go!” With a double thud, Dorrie plopped tea and soda on the table. “Your food’ll be up in a sec.”

  As mood-breakers go, this one worked like a champ. I remembered that I had two young children,
who had been threatened by the mere mention of another man in my life, and I busied myself with dunking the tea bag.

  “Did you hear about last night’s murder?” I asked.

  Evan sat back against the booth’s cracking vinyl. “All morning,” he said, peeling the paper off the straw Dorrie had left. “Didn’t sound as if anyone was very sorry she was dead.”

  “Well . . .” I held the tea bag above the mug and let it drip.

  He grinned, and my heart did a quick tattoo against my rib cage. “You’re operating under the ‘if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything’ theory, aren’t you?”

  “Is there something wrong with being nice?” I asked.

  “Cutting sarcasm is the trend.”

  “Once I was trendy,” I said, “but it was an accident.”

  His laugh made my breaths flutter fast. Oh, my. Oh, my, my. “It was paint,” I said. “Thanks to my daughter’s artistic talents, I needed to repaint the living room the day before a dinner party. I didn’t have time to go to the paint store, so I mixed up some different cans and slapped it up. Turned out to be the hip color of the month on HGTV.” It was the only time Debra O’Conner had ever given me a look of approval. Not that I cared.

  Dorrie put our plates down. “Can I get you anything else?” She looked at Evan and, I swear, she batted her eyelashes.

  “All set, thanks,” he said.

  “Let me know if you need anything.” A couple more bats, and then she put her hand on her hip and waltzed off.

  Evan reached for the ketchup. “Did you know the woman who was killed?”

  “Not well. She was principal at the elementary school. My daughter and son both go there, but Agnes and I didn’t cross paths much.”

  “Murder makes it different, though.”

  I paused, a forkful of coleslaw halfway to my mouth. “That sounds like the voice of experience.”

  “Just an overactive imagination. My ex-wife always told me it would get me into trouble someday.”

  I wasn’t going to ask, but out it came. “How long have you been divorced?”

  Dorrie returned and did the leaning thing again. “Dessert?” When the answer was no, she slid the bill on the table and winked at Evan. “Have a nice day.”

  Over my protests, Evan placed his big hand over the bill and put it in his shirt pocket. “Five years divorced,” he said. “I waited to leave Chicago until my girls got out of high school. The younger one’s a freshman at Wisconsin.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of Madison. “The older one is in the army, jumping out of perfectly good airplanes.”

  That made the army daughter at least ten years ahead of my Jenna. Maybe he was older than he looked.

  “I married my high school sweetheart a month after graduation,” he said. “I’d say it was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done, but I ended up with two top-notch daughters, so I don’t regret a minute of it.”

  What I needed was a mood-breaking topic. “What did you do in Chicago?” Perfect. No one could talk about their jobs without being boring.

  “Corporate. Talk about boring.” He made a face. “Want the last of these fries?”

  “No, thanks. So you just chucked the whole rat race and came up here?”

  “Pretty much,” he said cheerfully.

  Ah-ha. I knew he was a jerk. Big-time Chicago lawyer playing at being a small-town store owner. He probably saw himself sweeping the sidewalk every morning, popping the awning with a broom handle after a rainstorm to let the water whoosh to the sidewalk. So idyllic. So quaint. Sooo unrealistic.

  “My dad ran a men’s clothing store up in Green Bay,” he said. “It won’t be easy, but I have some ideas that might make it work.”

  I wanted so badly to dislike this man, and he wasn’t making it easy. Clearly, I was going to have to try harder.

  Up at the cash register, Ruthie greeted us. “How was everything?” Her thin face was a map of wrinkles—one for each year she’d run the restaurant, she always said.

  “Excellent.” Evan laid down an unusual credit card that, after a moment, I recognized. No plebeian applications could get you a card like that. For that card you had to receive an invitation from the credit card company. “Best burger I’ve had in a long time,” he said.

  Ruthie lowered her voice and leaned toward us. Our three heads drew together in a conspiratorial huddle. “Sorry about Dorrie,” she said. “Did you hear about Jim? I think it’s really over this time. He left Dorrie for Viv Reilly’s youngest.”

  “Nicole?” I gasped. “You can’t be serious. She’s barely out of high school.”

  Ruthie’s lips firmed, and she shut the cash register drawer with a slam. “Young and pretty and not a brain in her head. Not that Dorrie is going to win a MacArthur Fellowship anytime soon, but she doesn’t deserve that.”

  Poor Dorrie. I instantly felt guilty for my uncharitable thoughts. At least she was fighting back for her self-esteem instead of crawling into a dark closet and crying. Since I had no cleavage to speak of, if something like that happened to me, I was a candidate for the closet.

  Ruthie stood straight, breaking us out of whisper mode. “I assume you heard about Agnes?”

  “Gus says the investigation is proceeding,” I said.

  She made a rude noise in the back of her throat. “Gus Eiseley is a nice man, but running a murder investigation?” Shaking her head she said, “Agnes had a lot of enemies in this town. Did you know her?” She shot a look up at Evan.

  “No. She sounds . . . as if she must have been an interesting woman.”

  Ruthie chuckled. “The man has tact.”

  “Just taking the lessons of my kindergarten teacher to heart,” he said. “Mrs. Pelton-Banes always said, ‘If you don’t have anything nice to say—’” He broke off as he noted the expression on my face. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “Mrs.—Mrs. Pelton-Banes?” I stuttered.

  “I don’t think she had a first name.”

  “Mrs. Pelton-Banes, the kindergarten teacher at Alice A. Black Elementary School? In Illinois? In Peoria , Illinois?”

  He frowned. “How did you know that?”

  “You’re not Evan Garrett. You’re Evan Hill!”

  Chapter 6

  Evan stared at me, his face slack with surprise.

  “You’re Evan Hill,” I repeated. “You made fun of me for reading instead of playing tag. You said I wasn’t old enough to read and to quit acting big.” The ancient insult came back fresh. “Even when I read the book out loud, you didn’t believe me.”

  Evan’s mouth dropped open. He didn’t look like a movie god any longer; he looked like a bigmouthed bass. “Beth Emmerling. You’re Beth Emmerling.” He repeated my name over and over and might have gone on for hours except Ruthie started braying with laughter.

  “You two look like Moses just came down from the mountain. Kindergarten pals, eh? This is a small-world story to beat the band.”

  Evan looked at Ruthie. “I think she’s still angry.”

  They considered me. My hands were on my hips, and my chin was jutting forward.

  “Sure looks like it,” Ruthie said. “You’d think the statute of limitations on things that happened in kindergarten would have expired by now.”

  “Do you think an apology would help?”

  Ruthie pursed her lips, making tiny lines radiate around her mouth. “Couldn’t hurt.”

  “How about if I tell her I just wanted to play with the prettiest girl in class?”

  “Probably not a good idea,” Ruthie said. “She’s not big on flattery.”

  “Stop talking as if I weren’t here.” I took a deep breath, willing away the flashback to a childhood pain. “I was never the prettiest girl in any class, anywhere.”

  “To me you were,” Evan said softly. My gaze met his bright blue one, and the electricity that had connected us over lunch sprang back to life. He took hold of my elbow and ushered me toward the front door. “Come on. There’s a park bench d
own the street that’s waiting for us. Let’s go talk.”

  Lois glanced up as I paused in the retelling of my luncheon events. “So how’d he end up Evan Garrett if his name was Evan Hill? He’s not hiding from the law, is he?”

  I smiled, but she was serious. “Evan’s birth father abandoned his mother when Evan was four.”

  “Oh, the poor woman.” Lois clutched a stack of graphic novels to her chest. “That poor little boy.”

  “She waited a year, then ran out of money and moved back to her parents’ up in Green Bay. She married Ed Garrett two years later.”

  “And Evan’s birth father let Garrett adopt him,” Lois said.

  “Not such a mystery, after all.” As a first grader, I’d wondered why Evan wasn’t in school. The day after kindergarten let out, his mother had packed up the station wagon and driven north to Green Bay, but I hadn’t known that until fifteen minutes ago.

  “Hmm.” Lois shelved the graphic novels. Bendis, Dini, Eisner, Yang. “Seems like fate might be taking a hand in someone’s romantic life.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’ve been divorced only a year. The kids aren’t ready.”

  “Ready for what?” Lois’s smile would have been appropriate on a cat who’d just sneaked her tongue into a bowl of milky cereal. “Jenna could use some help with soccer. And it wouldn’t hurt Oliver to have a strong male presence in the house.”

  “Don’t be silly.” This time I said it so sharply that a blue-haired customer looked up from the rack of stickers. “My children need a stable home environment.”

  “And what could be better than a rich stepfather who has loved their mother since sandbox days?” Lois’s smirk disappeared behind a cardboard display of Stephenie Meyer books, and a flush of embarrassment engulfed me from collarbone to hairline.

  “Hot, are you?” the blue-haired lady inquired kindly.

  “Um, yes.” I fanned my face with the stack of invoices I held. “How are you today, Mrs. Tolliver?”

  “I’d be better if I wasn’t afraid of being murdered in my bed. I saw you coming out of the police station earlier. Has young Gus arrested anyone for killing that Agnes Mephisto?”