Murder at the PTA (2010) bk-1

by Laura Alden

  Sara looked at me critically. “Your pinafore is crooked.”

  For the fortieth time since I’d arrived at the store, I straightened the straps on the apron of my Mother Goose costume. If I’d been better endowed in the chest area, it might have stayed in place. “Next year,” I said, “I’m getting a new costume.”

  Sara herself looked fetching in a Red Riding Hood costume. Lois was the Cat in the Hat, Paoze made a wonderful Robin Hood, and Marcia was the Princess and the Pea.

  “Every year you say you’re going to get a new costume.” Lois plugged in the fog machine. “And every year you wear that Mother Goose outfit that has never fit you properly.”

  “It was my sister’s.” And it had been free, always my favorite price.

  The fog machine hummed, burped out a few clouds of fog, then started spitting out a stream of water.

  “Huh.” Lois frowned at the machine. “That doesn’t seem right.” She gave it a good, swift kick, and the fog came out in a steady flow. “Like my dad always told me,” she said, “if it doesn’t work, get a bigger hammer.”

  “But you did not use a hammer,” Paoze said. “You used your foot.”

  “Paw,” Lois corrected, pointing at her costume’s furry feet. “That’s why it worked. Shoes wouldn’t have done the job at all. If you’re going to kick a machine, you need to use a paw.”

  Paoze plucked the string of the bow slung over his shoulder. “I do not believe you. This is a joke.”

  I laughed and patted him on the shoulder. “You’re catching on, kid.”

  Lois sniffed. “Okay, so that wasn’t my best effort. Next time he won’t see it coming.”

  Sara and Paoze slid a long table over the fog machine. Lois and I unfolded a large black and orange plaid tablecloth, and Marcia started ferrying snacks from the kitchenette. In no time at all the table was covered with goodies and punch. Fog trickled out from the edges of the tablecloth, creating a satisfyingly eerie effect.

  “Let ’em come,” Lois said. “We’re ready!”

  I unlocked the front door and braced myself for the rush. At one, the store had closed for a bare hour. While I was telling the babysitter about the new dog and rushing around putting on my costume, my faithful staff had done the work of setting up games and prizes. I didn’t like shutting the store even for an hour, but logistically it worked out better this way. Lois was convinced it added more attraction to the event, and she might have been right.

  Half an hour later, Sara was organizing a Pin the Tail on the Black Cat game, Paoze was helping kids create their own construction paper masks, Lois was drying the face of a child who’d just bobbed for an apple, and Marcia was reading Erica Silverman’s Big Pumpkin to an enthralled collection of children and parents.

  I was running myself frazzled trying to help customers find books, running the register, and answer questions for anyone who asked.

  “Hey.”

  There was a tug on the lower corner of my apron. I looked down. A kindergarten-sized child was looking up at me. “Hi, there,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Avery Olsen.”

  “Hi, Avery.” My brain went click! Avery was Kirk and Isabel Olsen’s daughter—Kirk of the school bus incident. “Are your mommy and daddy here?”

  “My mommy is over there.” She pointed to Marcia’s reading circle. “My daddy’s gone. But he’s almost home.”

  “I see.” Or not. “What can I do for you, Avery?”

  “Potty.”

  Clearly, Avery was a girl of few words. “I’ll take you there, okay?”

  She nodded solemnly. I put my hand on the back of her head and guided her toward the back of the store. On the way past Isabel and her son, Neal, I tapped Isabel’s shoulder and nodded at Avery, whispering, “Bathroom. Do you want to . . . ?”

  “Go ahead,” she said. “She’ll be fine.”

  That hadn’t been what I meant. I’d meant for her to take responsibility for her daughter; I’d meant to imply that I wasn’t a babysitter and that I had a store to run. “Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

  I shut the bathroom door behind Avery. “Do you need any help?”

  “No.” She stood tall. “I’m a big girl now. I’m five.”

  “That is a big-girl age, isn’t it?”

  “Yup.” She began bathroom preparations and climbed aboard. “My daddy says when I’m big enough, I can go and shoot things with him.”

  “Really?”

  “At first it won’t be real things. Just paper.” She sounded disgusted with the idea. “But when I get biggerer, I can shoot real things.”

  “Oh. How nice.”

  She nodded emphatically. “Neal doesn’t like guns, but I do. I want to go with Daddy next time he goes away. He’s far away now.”

  “He is?”

  “Yup.” She hopped down and finished the job. “But he’ll be back soon. I bet he got lots of real things. He shoots good.” She pushed the toilet’s lever with both hands. “I want to be just like him when I grow up.”

  Job done and hands washed, we went back to the party. Marcia had finished the story and was glowing at the enthusiastic applause. I handed Avery over to Isabel. “Your daughter says Kirk’s out of town. Is he on a hunting trip?”

  Isabel nodded. “A two-week guided hunt in the Canadian Rockies. It’s his thirtieth-birthday present. Everyone chipped in: his parents, his brothers, a bunch of his friends, everybody. You should have seen his face when we told him.”

  I tried to figure out the dates in my head. “So he’s been gone two weeks.” That would put him in Rynwood the day Agnes was murdered.

  “Almost three. He decided to get there early and spend some time getting used to the altitude.” She dug into her purse. “The guide e-mailed me some pictures, and I made lots of copies. Want to see?”

  I called Marina that night and gave her the news. “Kirk Olsen was in Canada on a hunting trip the night Agnes was killed.” I turned on my computer and scanner.

  “Maybe he sneaked home early,” Marina said, “killed Agnes, then sneaked back.”

  “Nope.” I put Isabel’s photo on the scanner and clicked the appropriate buttons. “His wife gave me a date-stamped picture. I’m e-mailing it to you right now.”

  “Hang on . . . Oh, eww,” Marina said. “He’s got a dead thing. A big dead thing.”

  “Male moose weigh more than a thousand pounds.”

  “Hokey Pete.” Marina whistled. “But, say, maybe it’s not a real picture. You said there’s a computer up at that hunting camp. Maybe Kirk Photoshopped it for a perfect alibi.”

  “Are you serious?” Kirk was prodigious in his computer illiteracy. I’d once seen him puzzling over an ATM machine.

  Marina sighed. “Okay. It’s not Kirk Olsen. And I have more bad news. It’s not Dan Daniels, either.”

  “No?”

  “Nope. I was talking to CeeCee, and she said her sainted husband—she didn’t say that, but that’s how she feels about him, you know—has hockey league on Tuesday nights, and he had a late game. Didn’t even get on the ice until eleven.”

  “Lucky,” I muttered.

  “Your time will come, my sweet. Another five years and the kids will be old enough for you to risk life and limb by playing something as silly as hockey.”

  “Hockey isn’t silly.”

  “And neither is my writing the blog.”

  I started to protest, but my computer dinged as an e-mail came in. It was from Marina, and there was a single word in the body of the text: “Hypocrite!”

  Okay, so she had a point.

  “Silly is in the eye of the beholder,” she said. “Put that in my obituary, will you?”

  Thinking about Marina’s obituary was pretty much the last thing I wanted to think about. I’d rather think about writing my own. I was halfway through the second paragraph when Marina interrupted.

  “Who’s left? You know, on The List?” She capitalized the words.

  I pulled the by-now-tattered piece of paper
out of the inside pocket of my purse. “Cindy Irving, Joe Sabatini, Erica, and Harry.”

  “That’s not very many,” she said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You don’t want it to be Erica, do you?” she asked softly.

  Not in the least. I got out my pen and crossed off Kirk and Dan. “What matters is keeping you safe and getting the killer into prison. What I want really doesn’t matter.”

  Seven down, four to go.

  “Did you see WisconSINs this morning?” Lois asked.

  I almost dropped the load of books piled high in my arms. What had Marina done now?

  “You know,” Lois said, rescuing a stack of Magic Tree Houses before they cascaded to the floor, “if you used the book cart, these things wouldn’t happen.”

  “Too far away,” I said vaguely. “What’s on the blog?” I asked. Friday night I’d told Marina that it might be good to take a few days off from blogging. So much for my powers of persuasion. Her identity had become intertwined with that of WisconSINs, and it would take an act of Congress to separate her from the blog.

  “Brand-new suspect for Agnes Mephisto’s murder.” Lois grinned. Today she was wearing a flowing white poet shirt over pale pink wide-legged slacks and black ballet slippers. I didn’t have the figure for the pants, but I coveted the shirt. “If I still had kids at Tarver, I’d probably be hauled down to the police station myself.”

  “What?” Aghast, I stared at her.

  “Not that I’d kill anyone,” Lois said, “unless she was after me or mine, but if she got me all riled up, who knows what might happen?”

  “No, no.” I shook my head impatiently, and another book started sliding. “The blog. What does it say?”

  “You know how it doesn’t name names, but it says the police should look at the mob connections in town.”

  “The mob?”

  “They’re everywhere,” Lois said seriously. “WisconSINs says there’s a restaurant in town that the police should look at. And that’s got to be Sabatini’s. It’s the only place in town even close to Italian.”

  There was a loud banging on the back door. “Could you unlock that?”

  “Sure.” Lois dumped the books she was holding back into my arms and went to flirt with the UPS guy.

  I hurried to my desk, found a semiclear space for the books, and called Marina. “What are you thinking?” I whispered fiercely. “You’re getting death threats, and you’re still putting up posts about the murder? That’s what he said not to do!”

  “Quit worrying,” she said over a background noise of toddler-sized shrieks. “I can only be safe when Agnes’s murderer is locked up and the key thrown away. What better way to speed the process than to help the police? I’m sure they’re reading WisconSINs. Everyone is.”

  I rubbed my forehead. “You read that e-mail Friday night. You were scared. Scared silly. Did you forget about that?”

  “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” she said airily. “If General MacArthur wasn’t afraid, I’m not going to be.”

  “That was Franklin Roosevelt’s quote, and both he and Douglas MacArthur are dead.”

  I banged down the receiver. “This is so stupid,” I muttered. “How can I help her if she’s going to ignore everything I say? Let her stew.”

  “In her own juice?”

  I jumped and looked up—way up—at Evan Garrett. When had he come in? It was just now ten o’clock; I hadn’t even realized we’d unlocked the front door. “Yes,” I said. “In a big pot, in lots of her own juice. A big fire might tenderize her. Make her easier to deal with.”

  “Possible.” He looked thoughtful. “Or she might just get hot. And cranky.”

  Suddenly, though the sky outside was October gray, the day felt bright.

  “What do you say to a coffee break?” Evan asked. “Doughnut included.”

  Lois was nearby, alphabetizing an end cap display of Harry Potter books, something I knew she’d already done.

  “Lois?”

  “Oh!” She gave a very fake jump. “Yes?”

  “I’m going to show Mr. Garrett here the cookies at you-know-where. Would you like anything?”

  In a few short minutes we were seated at a small round wooden table that had lived the best years of its life in the Rynwood Pharmacy. A few years ago new owners had taken out the pharmacy soda fountain, and Alice and Alan, owners of the cleverly named Rynwood Antique Mall, bought the furniture so Alice could sell the cookies she made instead of eating them all. “Getting big as a house,” she’d told me, thumping her hips with her fists. “Time to do something about it.”

  I perched on the front edge of the chair, not wanting to lean against the stunningly uncomfortable wire-backed soda fountain chair.

  Evan was on his second chocolate-chip cookie. I was almost done with my oatmeal and was debating whether to eat raisin next or go for the peanut butter. But I was finding it hard to make a decision because concern for Marina was taking up most of the space in my brain.

  “What’s going on up there?” Evan asked. He tapped my head, just above my ear.

  I twitched away, then smiled, but it was a weak attempt. “Sorry. I’m a little preoccupied these days.”

  “Work? Kids? Parents?” He didn’t seem offended that I’d backed off from his touch.

  “Um, not exactly.” The cookies sat there, getting stale.

  “You’re my oldest friend, Beth.” Evan’s voice was soft. “Let me help.”

  The blue eyes were close enough for me to drown in them. My breaths grew short, and before I fell onto the floor in a hyperventilation faint, I tore my gaze away and grabbed a cookie. “What would you do,” I said around small bits of peanut, “if your really stubborn, um, sister was doing something you considered dangerous?”

  He considered the question. At least he wasn’t laughing out loud. “Can I assume she isn’t listening to the wise counsel of siblings?”

  I waved the last half of the cookie at him. “Assume away.”

  “Is what she doing illegal?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “But dangerous, you said. Dangerous only to her, or will her actions endanger others?”

  The phrase rang oddly in my ear, and I suddenly remembered that, until recently, Evan had been a lawyer—a big-shot lawyer who’d probably charged more per hour than I made in a week. “Right now it’s just Ma . . . my theoretical sister.”

  “But there is a possibility of future endangerment to others.” He made it a statement.

  If the bad guy decided to kidnap Zach, yes. If the bad guy decided to burn down Marina’s house and all who were in it. If, if, if. “I suppose.”

  “How will you feel if you do nothing?” Evan asked.

  “Depends. If nothing happens to her, none of this matters.” I shrugged. “But if something does happen . . .” Friday’s e-mail came back in a rush, with its promise of pain and blood. I looked straight at Evan. “If something does happen, I’ll never forgive myself.”

  “Then you have to do what you can,” he said.

  “Why did I have a feeling you were going to say that?”

  “Because in addition to your being my oldest friend, I’m yours.” He leaned forward. My eyes closed and his lips, feeling soft and warm as an August evening, touched mine.

  The feel of Evan’s kiss lingered long after we went back to our respective stores. I found myself touching my mouth from time to time, reliving the moment, until Lois asked, “Getting chapped lips, huh? Have you tried that Burt’s stuff?”

  I locked the door promptly at closing time and left the banking chores for the next morning. This evening, I had a Thing to Do.

  Hot tomato sauce and garlic scented the parking lot and was positively overwhelming when I opened the door to Sabatini’s. “Hi!” chirped the teenager at the counter. Her plastic name tag gave her the unlikely name of Valley. “I’ll be with you in a sec, okay?” She handed change to a man standing in front of me. “Here you go, sir. Have
a good night.”

  The man picked up his pizza and turned. It took me a long second to come up with his name. Recognizing people out of their normal environment didn’t come easy to me. “Hi, Harry,” I said. “How are you?”

  Tarver’s security guard and janitor looked at me over the top of the cardboard box. “Hello, Mrs. Kennedy.”

  Harry’s eyes looked even darker and more sunken than normal. His hair was longer than I’d ever seen it, and grime was crusted underneath his fingernails. He was the embodiment of grief, sliding ever so slowly into depression. But at least he was eating. That had to be a good sign.

  “The police were asking me if I did it,” he said. “They kept asking and asking, and nothing I told them mattered.”

  Poor Harry. “Didn’t they believe you?”

  “They wanted an alibi, and I was waxing the floors at the school. I usually do it Saturdays, but that Saturday the machine was broken, and I couldn’t do it on Monday because of the meeting, so I did it Tuesday.”

  It was an ironclad alibi. Everyone knew how Harry was about the floors—everybody, that is, except the sheriff’s department.

  “It’ll be okay.” I put a light hand on his arm. “Take care of yourself, Harry.”

  “Yes.” He nodded slowly and left.

  I sighed and turned my attention back to the business at hand.

  “Can I help you?” The clerk looked positively perky.

  I gestured at her name tag. “You’re probably tired of answering this, but . . . Valley?”

  She crossed her eyes. “If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me about my name, I could buy my car instead of making all these stupid payments.” She heaved a world-class sigh. “My mom and dad are big skiers. I was born nine months after a trip to Sun Valley.”

  So original, yet so banal. “At least they didn’t name you Sunny.”

  Her grimace eased. “I never thought of that. At least Valley isn’t, like, gag-me cutesy.”

  “And they didn’t end it with an i.”

  We smiled at each other, rapport established. “I’d like to order a large pizza to go,” I said. “Pepperoni and sausage on half, cheese only on the other half.”