Murder at the PTA (2010) bk-1

by Laura Alden

“The dishwasher is broken,” he said.

  “Eat,” I commanded.

  The top went on the pasta pot with a clatter. “I should eat something,” he said. “Maybe I’ll have that chicken in the broiler and the rice Jo didn’t want.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment and counted to ten. Which wasn’t enough, so I counted to twenty.

  The ostensible head of the house took a clean plate out of my hand, dried it, and filled it with food. Still standing, he started to eat. I left him alone and went on with washing dishes. By the time I’d filled the dish strainer, he’d polished off the entire meal. I found a dish towel. “Joanna says the kids don’t know about sibling number five.” I held out a dry cookie sheet.

  “Really?” He took the offering. “Oh. Well, I suppose they don’t. Maybe I should have them over for Sunday dinner.”

  Past Sunday dinners would have included a roast, mashed potatoes, a vegetable, fresh rolls, a Jell-O salad, and some sort of home-baked dessert—all cooked by Joanna. “Maybe,” I said, “you could have them over on Saturday. Order pizza.”

  “Saturday?” A look of revolted surprise crossed his face. “But it’s always Sunday dinner. Joanna makes—” He stopped, seeing the impossibilities inherent in his assumptions.

  “It’s going to be different,” I said softly.

  He stared at the frying pan I’d just handed over. The shiny bottom reflected a warped view of Mack’s face. “I’m going to be a daddy again,” he said. “At my age. Just think of it.” A slow smile spread across his craggy features.

  I smiled back at him. “Congratulations, Mack.”

  “A daddy,” he said in wonder. He laughed, and I decided to stop worrying about the Vogels. Joanna would eventually tire of being waited on hand and foot, and their children would take one look at the wreck of the house and make sure Mack got some assistance.

  “So,” Mack said, “how can I help you?”

  I carefully dried a wire whisk. Right. I hadn’t stopped by to wash Vogel dishes. I thought back to what Bick had said. “I was wondering if the school board had made any decision about Tarver’s addition.”

  “Is it still going to happen, is the question, correct?” Mack took the whisk. “The board was scheduled to meet yesterday.” He waved the whisk around like a conductor’s baton, convening meetings left, right, and center. “Joanna’s situation delayed the meeting. It is rescheduled for next Tuesday. As a Tarver parent and the secretary for the Tarver PTA, you will no doubt be notified when the decision is made.”

  Yup, Mack was feeling better. Pontification galore. “Do you have any feel for how the vote is going to go?”

  “As superintendent, I am obliged to keep meeting proceedings confidential until the votes have been cast and tallied.”

  A plethora of pontification, but those were just warm-up questions. “Who’s funding the addition?” I asked. “All I ever heard was that it’s an anonymous donor.”

  “Ah.” Mack held the whisk at attention. “That question I can answer. The Ezekiel G. Tarver Foundation has agreed to pay for the entire project.”

  The paring knives I was drying rattled against each other. “Who,” I wondered out loud, “is Ezekiel G. Tarver?”

  Mack looked at me pityingly. “Dear Beth. It’s the proper name of Tarver Elementary. Look at the sign near the front door next time you drop your children off at school.”

  Maybe I didn’t know who Ezekiel was, but I did know it would be silly to insult anyone holding sharp objects. I felt the heft of a wooden handle and thought that maybe Joanna would play the Helpless Pregnant Wife for quite some time.

  Chapter 16

  Lois hummed as she realphabetized the picture books. The songs being hummed had bounced between “Stars and Stripes Forever” and “Take Me Home, Country Roads” for twenty minutes. “Why,” she asked, “do we have five copies of If You Give a Moose a Muffin? Two I can see, even three, but five? Is Marcia doing the ordering again?”

  “No.” I adjusted my legal pad. No sense in letting the sharp gaze of my manager see the list.

  “Have you thought about Christmas books yet?”

  I looked at the crossed-off names. One single solitary name was left. “Not really.” There had to be more names. There just had to be.

  “Are you okay?” Lois squinted at me. “You seem even more distracted than usual. The kids okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “Have you introduced them to that handsome hunk of maleness yet?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “Not since last winter,” I said vaguely. More names. We needed more names. I only wished I knew how to get them. What came next when an investigation was at a dead end? Maybe I should page through some Nancy Drews for some ideas.

  “Lois, do you know who Ezekiel G. Tarver was?”

  “Sure. The school is named after him.”

  “But why is it named after him?” I’d developed all sorts of theories. Maybe he’d been a small-town bad boy but dragged himself out of the slop thanks to a dedicated teacher. Or maybe he was a World War I hero who died while saving his comrades-in-arms. Or maybe—

  “He donated the property.”

  The prosaic reply deflated me. Once again, real life paled in comparison with my imagination.

  “How’s Marina these days?” Lois asked. “I haven’t seen her in ages.”

  “She’s been . . . busy.” The night before we’d talked on the phone about what we should do next. I’d told her that Cindy, Harry, and Joe Sabatini were off the list, I’d told her about the Tarver Foundation putting up the money for the addition, and I had wondered aloud what to do next.

  “Money,” she’d said. “It’s always about money. We need to find out where all Agnes’s money was going. She made good money, but didn’t live like it. Maybe she was being blackmailed. If we got a look at her checkbook, I bet we could figure it out.”

  At that point Spot had bumped his head against my knee, his own personal signal for take-me-out-now-or-I’ll-make-a-mess, and I’d had to hang up.

  Now I was doodling dollar signs on the list and Lois was starting to hum “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” at two in the afternoon.

  Money. Did it make sense that Agnes was killed for money? School principals couldn’t exactly afford charter planes and personal chefs. Not that some people wouldn’t kill for a pair of shoes, but nothing had been taken from her house or the school during the break-in.

  Again, I saw the stain on the living room floor. And again I remembered how Marina had noticed my reaction and pushed me out of the room until she’d done the cleaning herself. No one could ask for a better friend.

  Lois dropped the mail on my desk. “Are you crying?”

  “Don’t be silly.” I sniffed and rubbed my face. “An eyelash fell into my eye.”

  “Of course it did.” She moved away, humming Fleet-wood Mac’s “Little Lies.”

  Erica couldn’t have killed Agnes. She just couldn’t. I started circling dollar signs. If money was the reason for Agnes’s murder, what had happened to it? I didn’t see how money from a foundation could have anything to do with her death.

  An anonymous donor was going to fund the addition, but the donor was the Tarver Foundation. Hmm . . .

  I went to the counter, pulled out the phone book, and dialed.

  “Lakeview Animal Shelter, how may I help you?” a woman asked.

  I introduced myself and asked about the donor who had funded their new building.

  “It was an anonymous donation,” she said. “No one knows who was behind it.”

  “Yes, I understand. But the checks had to come from somewhere.” I tried to sound reasonable. Jovial, even. “Were the checks written by the Tarver Foundation?”

  There was a long pause. “How did you know?”

  I gave a broad and vague answer, then hung up.

  So. Two big projects, one foundation. I didn’t know much about foundations, but I was pretty sure they could be funded by a lar
ge group or they could be created by a single person.

  Somehow Agnes had been involved with the Tarver Foundation. Maybe the money-as-motive theory was workable. I might as well try it out because I didn’t have diddly else to work with. Marina’s blackmail theory seemed about as unlikely as her short-lived theory that Agnes was an embedded FBI agent. No, the only money involved was held by the Tarver (Ezekiel G.) Foundation, and the next step was clear.

  Ick.

  Lois noted my change of expression. “You look pale. Are you sure you’re feeling okay? I know you normally only get sick in January, but I hear the new flu that’s going around is a tough bugger.”

  I felt my cheeks with the back of my hand and was surprised at the chill. “Just hungry.” Which was probably true, but any appetite was gone, because today was Wednesday. Tonight the kids would be with Richard, and I’d be free to do stuff.

  The evening moonlight cast long, creepy shadows. Dry leaves skittered across lawns and down sidewalks. The noise was loud enough to cover my footsteps and, I hoped, had covered the thunk of my car door shutting. Late October; a perfect night to do stupid things and scare myself out of my silly wits.

  With cold, bare fingers I inserted the key into Agnes’s back door. I stepped inside, shut the door, and stood in the kitchen, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. Turning on lights didn’t seem like a good idea. The last thing I wanted was Marina to barge on over here, pound me with questions, then broadcast the answers all over her blog.

  The house smelled stale and empty. I wondered who would live here next. Would the pink bathroom or the Minnesota Wild basement be the first thing to go?

  After a few minutes of imagining new color schemes—warm earth tones in the bathroom, with the obvious choice for the basement being the green and gold of the Green Bay Packers—I could make out the dim outline of kitchen cabinets. Arms spread wide in the dark, I grandpa-shuffled across the linoleum and tripped when the flooring switched to carpet. Rats. Nancy Drew never seemed to run into problems like this. Of course, Nancy never had to go to the bathroom, either.

  I went into the study and shut the door. Agnes had a tall wooden fence in the backyard that would hide any light that escaped around the thick curtains. Wouldn’t it?

  Shuffling again, I went across the hallway, grabbed a blanket that was folded across the guest bed, then spent an awkward couple of minutes in the dark, jamming it over and around the study’s curtain rod.

  When I flicked on the overhead light, the sudden brightness stung my eyes. There was a gap underneath the door, but I decided that not even eagle-eyed Marina could detect that small amount of light from across the street.

  Even so, I turned on the desk light and flicked off the overhead fixture. I put my hand on the back of Agnes’s desk chair, then paused. If there were ghosts, if Agnes was a ghost, would she haunt me for sitting here? I tried to imagine solid, no-nonsense Agnes as a ghost. She looked the same; just transparent.

  I held out my hand, palm up. “Do you mind?” I asked. The imaginary ghost shook her head. Her lips, thin and colorless, moved, but I heard no sound.

  “What’s that?” I tipped my head. Lipreading was not one of my strong suits. Once again she spoke, and again I had no idea what she said. Most people wouldn’t have imagined a ghost they couldn’t manage to communicate with, but then again, most people would never have tried to make a go of a children’s bookstore in a town with a population under ten thousand.

  The imaginary Agnes ghost didn’t look threatening, so I went ahead and sat in the wooden chair. As soon as I landed, the casters rolled fast across the hard plastic chair mat. “Whoops!” I grabbed the edge of the desk.

  In her gravelly voice, my ghost Agnes said, “Just oiled those wheels last month.”

  Agnes had a sense of humor. Who knew? “Gee, thanks.” My voice startled me. There I was, sitting at the desk of a murdered woman, hearing her imaginary ghost, and talking back to it.

  I shook my head. “Get a grip,” I said. There was a reason I’d sneaked back into this house, and frightening myself with made-up ectoplasm wasn’t helping. I was here to snoop.

  The desktop held a few books: two dictionaries; a thesaurus; a world almanac; two foreign-language translation dictionaries—English-Finnish and English-Czech. I puzzled over the foreign dictionaries until I remembered the hockey team’s roster.

  Other than the lamp and books, the only other thing on the desk was a worn leather desk blotter complete with calendar. I hunched down and looked for any indentations in the paper. In old movies, investigators were always finding clues via forceful penmanship, but I didn’t see a thing. I ran my hand flat across the blotter. Still nothing.

  The calendar was tucked into the blotter’s triangular corners. My grandfather had often slid notes into corners like that. I flipped out October back through January.

  Nothing.

  I retucked the calendar corners. So much for doing stuff the easy way. I stared at the desk. The desk stared back. Maybe Agnes’s ghost would help me out. “Don’t suppose you want to just, you know, tell me about the Tarver Foundation?” I asked. “Simple things. I’m sure you have the answers. How old the foundation is, who sits on the board, where the money came from. Any of that would be great.”

  My lunchtime had been spent trolling the Internet, looking for information on the Ezekiel G. Tarver Foundation. Old Ezekiel popped up on a few genealogy Web sites—he was quite the seed-sowing patriarch, and the G stood for Gunther—but I discovered absolutely zero about the foundation. Hence, my bizarre conversation with an Agnes I didn’t believe in.

  “How about it, Agnes?”

  The ghost didn’t reply.

  “Well, how about an office location? That shouldn’t be a secret.”

  Nothing.

  “Did you hear the joke about the Dutchman and the canoe?”

  Either she had and didn’t think it was funny, or she didn’t want to hear it. Not that she was there at all, but if she was . . .

  “Get on with it.”

  “Fine,” I snapped, and yanked open the skinny middle drawer. All the normal supplies were there, collected in tiny cups and lined up in rows—pencils, erasers, pens, paper clips, stapler, stamps. I looked at it with a small heap of jealousy on my shoulder. The closest I came to an orderly desk these days was when I visited the local office-supply store.

  I pulled the drawer out as far as it would go, but the only interesting thing I found was a slide rule. Its leather case opened so easily, I wondered if Agnes actually used the thing. Which made sense—Glass Wax, powdered laundry detergent, slide rule.

  Onward and downward.

  The top drawer on the right held note cards, greeting cards, and stationery. Other right-hand drawers held mailing supplies, packaging tape, and maps of various states and cities.

  It was in the left-hand drawer, the very bottom-left-hand drawer, that I finally found something. In retrospect, I should have looked there first. The only twenty-twenty vision I had was hindsight.

  The bottom-left-hand drawer was a file drawer, crowded with colored folders and black ink with handwritten block letters labeling each one.

  I started reading labels. Red folders were for telephone, water, electricity, garbage. Behind those were yellow folders—plumber, dry cleaning, newspaper, health insurance, life insurance.

  Behind the yellow folders was a set of green ones. I skipped over the listings of checking account and savings account folders and went straight to the pay dirt folder with its hand-printed label, “Tarver Foundation.”

  “Should have looked there first,” Agnes said. Even her ghost was on the outside edge of tactless.

  Imaginary ghost, I amended in my head. The fact gave me courage enough to talk back, something I wouldn’t have done in a million years to the real Agnes.

  I pulled out the Tarver Foundation folder and slapped it on the desk. “Your snide comments aren’t helping, thank you very much.” I flipped open the folder as I talked. “Did you
ever think that maybe your attitude is what got you killed? If you’d been a nicer person, maybe I wouldn’t be pawing through your desk tonight.”

  The top paper was an invoice from Browne and Browne for an eye-popping sum. “What was wrong with you, anyway? Okay, your husband dumped you after a year. So what? You had half a lifetime to get over it.” The second paper was from Bick and outlined the proposed construction schedule. “Are these the papers that are going to tell me who the killer is? I certainly hope so, because—”

  Darkness descended. Before I could think much beyond “Hey!” the dark was followed by a warm, heavy weight. A wide band circled my neck; I couldn’t talk, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. I reached through the blanket to grab away the pressure and felt hands—large and strong ones.

  “Do what I say and you live,” said a low whisper.

  Another option would have been nice, but I didn’t think it was going to be offered.

  “You going to fight?”

  My instincts warred between the atavistic urge to claw at the hands that held me and fear for Jenna and Oliver. If I was killed, what would happen to them?

  “No,” I said aloud, though it sounded more like a croak. The tight collar around my neck made it hard to say anything. “No,” I said again. “No fighting.” I let go of his thick hands.

  “Up,” he commanded.

  Fear banged around in me, knotting my stomach, and shortening my breath. I was used to fear; we mothers know all about how that emotion weasels into the fabric of our life, coloring every action and decision with a rim of red. We’re afraid of getting our kids vaccinated; we’re afraid of not getting them vaccinated. We’re afraid of pushing them too hard, afraid of not pushing them hard enough. We’re afraid of car accidents, bicycle accidents, skateboard accidents. We’re afraid of colds, flu, and every type of cancer that hits the news.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  Going to do with me, is what I really meant. Where was he taking me? Was it going to be unpleasant, painful, and/or cold? Was I going to be shoved into Agnes’s refrigerator and have the door shut on me? “She was alive last time I saw her,” he’d be able to say truthfully.