Kent thanked her, then watched her leave, shaking his head. “The reporters are going to have a field day with this.” Kent stuffed his hands into the pockets of his khakis. Despite the cold climate outside, he was wearing a yellow Izod shirt that showed off his muscular build. At length he turned to Gillian, seated beside him. “What did she say to you?”
“Nothing,” Gillian said nervously. “Who do you mean? The nurse?”
“No, Sylvia. I saw her whisper something in your ear, just before we went to the private meeting.”
“Oh.” Gillian chuckled, as if relieved. “That was nothing. She just said….” She widened her eyes, then let her voice trail away. “It wasn’t important.”
“That is so like you, Gillian,” Carol said from across the room. “By not telling everyone what she said, you make it seem all the more important.”
“Fine, Carol.” Gillian’s brow was so knotted now that she looked shrew-like. “I’ll tell you. She said that it was probably Charlie’s henchman who released the pig. And that it bore a striking resemblance to you.”
Carol clicked her tongue, but straightened and sucked in her stomach a little. “She did not say that. Not that last part, anyway. You made that up to pay me back for my remark about you just now.”
Michelle, who seemed all the prettier when seated beside the plainer and older Carol, rolled her eyes and shook her head. “I can certainly see why you two are on the school board. Never did quite resolve the issue of who gets to go down the playground slide first or be the teacher’s pet, did you?”
“I won’t dignify that remark with a response,” Gillian said through clenched teeth.
Carol, too, objected, “Really, Michelle, you have—”
Kent leapt to his feet and pounded a fist into his palm as if we were slackers on his football team that he was trying to energize at halftime. “Stop this bickering! That woman is in there fighting for her life. And all you people can do is argue with one another.”
“Congratulations,” Stuart said. “You get to be the one to take the moral high road.”
“I meant every word I just said!”
“Of course you did,” Stuart said in a monotone. “We all feel that way. None of us wants to see Sylvia die. But let’s be honest, here. Haven’t each of us thought how nice it would be if this meant that she were on an extended leave of absence? She’s a difficult woman who’s never said a sincere, kind word to anyone in her entire life.”
“Speak for yourself, Stuart,” Kent retorted, reclaiming his seat, but spreading out in his chair to take even more space. “You obviously don’t know the woman the way I do. Yes, she’s got a gruff exterior, and yes, she is determined and ruthless. But she gets things done, however much you might not happen to care for her methods. And underneath it all lays a heart of gold.”
“Who do you think you’re kidding?” Stuart said. The calm monotone was gone. In fact, he was seething. The color in his face had risen so dramatically that even his scalp was beet red and glowed from beneath the long strands of hair he’d combed over the top and plastered into place. “Underneath that gruff exterior lays a gruff interior, and we all know it. Every one of us has experienced the Wrath of Sylvia. If the names for hurricanes ever get as high as the letter S and there’s a Hurricane Sylvia someday, I, for one, am moving into the nearest bomb shelter.”
“You just disliked her because you two never agreed on anything.”
Stuart pointed a finger in Kent’s face. “You’re speaking about her in the past tense, Kent. Is there something you know that the rest of us don’t?”
Much as I disliked Kent’s political views, I respected the fact that even though he was so much Stuart’s physical superior, he stayed seated and didn’t shove Stuart’s hand away. Or bite his finger, as I think I’d have done were our roles reversed.
“I intended no such thing,” Kent said evenly. “I merely meant that in all of your past dealings with Sylvia, you have never understood her position. Perhaps you could profit by taking one of my exercise classes. I teach one for regaining flexibility.”
“You steroidal bastard! What makes you—”
“Gentlemen, that’s enough,” my father interrupted. “Choose a better time and a more private location for your argument.”
Kent snorted, and Stuart said, “Well, Charlie, you’re hardly…” His gaze shifted to me, then he averted his eyes. His voice faded into a feigned—I was certain—coughing attack.
Hardly what? I asked myself silently. The only sentence ending that was compatible with Stuart’s demeanor was: “… in any position to tell us what to do.” Now I regretted the fact that, while we were en route to the hospital, I hadn’t asked my father what had happened in the private meeting of board members. Perhaps Sylvia had come up with some truly scandalous charge that Stuart, at least, believed.
Wanting to divert attention from my father, who was looking utterly embarrassed, I blurted out, “Who was that man who came into your private meeting?”
“Sam Dunlap. He was a private investigator Sylvia had hired,” Dad said solemnly.
Everyone else found something to look at. There was a sudden flurry of rummaging for magazines.
I should have given more thought as to the precise subject matter for my interruption; the mention of the private investigator had not diverted attention from my father at all. Quite the contrary. But it was too late now. “What was he there for?”
“According to Sylvia, he’d uncovered the dark secret from someone’s past, which she was going to have to reveal publicly, unless that person resigned from the board,” Dad answered quietly.
Now all eyes were on us. I was not about to ask my father in front of his peers if Sylvia had said what this secret was. Instead, I said, “Maybe one of us should ask the nurse in admissions for Sylvia’s status.”
My feeble attempt at diversion not working, Gillian let out a haughty laugh reminiscent of someone decades younger. “She meant you, of course, Charlie.”
Dad shook his head. “Just as we were leaving the back room, Sylvia pulled me aside and whispered that she had changed her mind. That the private investigator had recently learned something so much worse about one of you that she’d decided not to act against me.”
“Ha!” Gillian cried. “That’s a convenient story.”
I instantly felt like socking the woman, but Dad said calmly, “It’s the truth.”
“Whom was this supposedly concerning?” Carol asked Dad.
“She didn’t say.”
Unable to contain my curiosity any longer, I asked, “But, Dad, you were all in the meeting room for a good fifteen minutes or more. What did she say?”
Dad rolled his eyes. “Most of the time was taken by an argument regarding the various ramifications of allowing Mr. Dunlap into a private meeting.”
Kent scoffed. “The whole thing was probably another one of Sylvia’s political maneuvers. Sam Dunlap probably isn’t even really an investigator.” Kent scanned the faces of the board members seated along the opposite wall. “He’s probably some actor she hired to play dress-up and try to scare one of you into voting to continue financing sports rather than arts.”
“Come off it, Kent,” Michelle said. “You know full well if this so-called secret had anything to do with one of us in the arts contingent, she’d have revealed it to the entire world. Instead, she sat on the information, probably because it would undermine her support otherwise.”
“What do you mean?” Kent asked.
“That this secret had to do with you. Or Gillian.”
“That’s nonsense,” Kent shot back, with Gillian protesting as well. “If it were one of us, she’d have kept it to herself without making any insinuations whatsoever until after the vote.”
“Oh, she wasn’t as ruthless as all that,” Carol said.
Stuart shook his head as he peered at Carol over his glasses. “Already writing her memorial service, are we?”
Just then, all eyes turned to the door as
Sergeant Tommy Newton stormed into the waiting room. He was probably upset that we “witnesses” had had the chance to compare stories for quite some time now.
Tommy scanned the faces and took his cap off, his thick red hair suffering from a case of hat-head. “Gentlemen. Ladies.” He stared at me for a moment, then added, “Molly.” I couldn’t help giving him a glare for acting as though I fit in neither of the other categories.
“I’m going to have to ask you all to….” He stopped as someone entered the room.
The doctor, a bespectacled man with blond hair, glanced around. We all sat in silence, staring as he asked quietly, “Is one of you Ms. Greene’s next of kin?”
We all turned to look at Gillian, Sylvia’s best friend on the board, who rose. “She’s been divorced for years, and her teenager died in a car accident five years ago.”
The doctor fixed his gaze on Gillian. “We need to contact siblings, parents. Someone.”
“Oh my God. She didn’t make it, did she?” Gillian asked, with a little too much dramatic flair to be sincere.
The doctor shook his head. “We did everything we could, but it was too late. She never regained consciousness.”
I scanned the room. All five of the remaining seven board members—not counting my father—appeared to sigh in relief.
Chapter 3
What’s My Secret?
My father sank his face into his hands. He was visibly more upset than were Gillian or Kent, though they were Sylvia’s advocates and supposed friends on the board. Meanwhile, her adversaries—Stuart, Michelle, and Carol—seemed to have to work at changing their facial expressions of relief to more appropriate looks of solemnity.
“Are you okay, Dad?” I asked him quietly.
He let his hands drop to his lap but kept his face down-turned. His lips were almost white. He shook his head. “This is…” His voice trailed away. He stayed staring at his knees.
Sylvia’s doctor muttered some general condolences, then left the room. It was inconceivable to me that all of this was really happening, that Sylvia Greene had died, essentially right in front of me. She’d become such a galvanizing force over the last couple of years—someone who always made reading the newspaper worthwhile, in an effort to see what infuriating, lame-brained scheme she’d cooked up. Now she was dead.
“I’m gonna need to get everybody’s names and addresses,” Tommy said seriously. He looked tenser than I could recall in the many years we’d known each other. The muscles in his jaw were working. His skin, pale beneath the light dusting of red freckles, was damp with perspiration.
“Why?” Michelle asked gently. “I want to cooperate, of course, but… people collapse and die all the time. Surely by now the doctors know the—”
“What’s the problem, officer?” Kent interrupted.
Tommy didn’t answer, but I began to suspect that he’d already received some damning piece of evidence that we weren’t privy to. If that was the case, perhaps his uneasiness was due to the lack of control he’d had over the investigation to this point. The “murder scene” hadn’t been sealed; the witnesses had talked among themselves at length.
Though Tommy kept his face inscrutable as always, he glanced at my father, and a second possibility occurred to me that made me all but quake in my shoes. Could Tommy suspect my father? Was that why Tommy seemed so shaken by Sylvia’s death?
Just then, a second officer emerged from the hallway. This one, a young, baby-faced man I’d met before but whose name had since deserted me, gestured to Tommy that he needed to speak with him privately.
I craned my neck to watch as they left the waiting room and spoke with a doctor. The doctor who’d given us the news about Sylvia soon joined the three of them. The expressions on all four men’s faces were somber, their demeanors understated. After the doctors headed off together down a corridor, Tommy spoke quietly for a moment to the second officer, who nodded as if Tommy had given him instructions.
While watching this scene play out even with no audio, my instincts concurred with my fear. Something indicated possible foul play in Sylvia’s death. I was certain of it. My heart pounding, I looked again at my father. He had barely moved, his eyes still averted. “Dad? Don’t you think you should—”
I stopped when my father shook his head, still not looking up. I’d meant to ask him if he should take charge, as was his natural way when faced with a group of people lacking direction.
My father’s inertia was scaring me. All of my life, he’d been so capable and decisive, so ready to quickly choose some course of action and charge forth. Now with his bald head glistening with sweat and his downturned features pale and drawn, he had the bearing of a broken and defeated man. It was so painful to see him like this that my insides ached.
Tommy and his colleague returned and scanned the room. The moment they crossed the threshold, my father straightened and watched them. Tommy rocked on his heels. Beside him, the young officer watched us warily as Tommy said, “We’ve got to interview each of you. ‘Fraid I got to ask you all to stop talkin’ to one another in the meantime.”
“Officer,” Kent said gruffly, “that’s simply unacceptable. We’re all very tired, and clearly Sylvia had a heart attack. There’s no point in treating this as if it were some kind of a criminal investigation.”
“Tell you what, Mr. Graham,” Tommy fired back. “I won’t tell you how to run the school board, and you don’t tell me how to investigate suspicious deaths.”
That was more confrontational than Tommy’s normal demeanor. So much so, in fact, that I deliberately averted my eyes when he glanced over in my direction. “Mr. Ackleman, could you come with me, please?”
Stuart cleared his throat and meekly shuffled off after Tommy. Kent watched them leave, then muttered, “Bet that officious son-of-a-gun is now going to make me wait and go last.”
“Sergeant Newton is just doing his job,” the young officer said, sounding as though he’d forced his voice to be a halftone deeper than natural.
“That’s all I was trying to do when all of this happened. And I’m not even getting paid for doing my job.”
Feeling trapped, I headed to the corner, cellphone in hand, anxious to talk to my husband.
“Molly?” the young officer asked. “Who are you calling?”
I was a little startled that the officer knew my name, but reminded myself that we had met before. He probably just had a better memory for names than I did. “My husband. I need to check in with my children and let them know where I am.”
“Me too,” Gillian said, rising. This set off a minor clamor as the other board members leaped to their feet to grab their phones as well.
“Whoa.” The officer held up his palms and shook his head at us as if we were misbehaving children, which was difficult to take from someone so much my junior. “I’m going to have to ask you all to wait until Officer Newton dismisses you.”
“Dismisses us? Who died and made him school principal?” Kent grumbled, but he sat down nonetheless.
Dad patted my shoulder. “Grandma will have called Jim and the kids.”
I nodded and considered how very unimpressed Mom would have been had she overheard her husband referring to her as “Grandma.” At least Dad had recovered enough of his composure to speak to me. He still wouldn’t meet my eyes, however.
Tommy proceeded to interview each school board member one by one, leaving the young officer in the waiting room with us to make sure we didn’t “compare stories.” Tommy had spoken with each of the pro-arts contingent first: Stuart, Carol, and Michelle.
Despite Kent Graham’s pessimism, my dad was the last person to be interviewed. In fact, the others had taken off in their carpools long before he finished. Save for me and the young officer, the waiting room was once again filled with sick patients and their families. I tried hard not to pace, not to stare at the people and play guess-their-medical-emergency games.
Dad was taking forever, more than three times as long as anyone else.
He knew Tommy personally. They lived next door to each other.
“This sure is taking a while,” I said to my young watchman.
“Yeah.”
“Are you sure you’re still supposed to wait here? Everyone else has already gone, you know. I was merely in the audience at the board meeting. I didn’t see anything important. And even if I had, there’s nobody left on the board for me to talk to.”
“I’m under orders to stay with you.”
“Do you mean that you’re under specific orders to stay with me, or just with the last person here?”
“Sergeant Newton said I should keep a close eye on you.”
“Why?”
He shrugged and returned his attention to Sports Illustrated.
“Is it because he suspects my dad?”
He shrugged a second time and flipped the page.
Taking this as a yes, I was now thoroughly ticked off at Tommy. He knew full well that I’d had nothing to do with the murder, but was assuming that I’d interfere with his investigation.
Because Tommy wasn’t here, I decided to vent my frustration on the next best thing. “Is this what you call keeping a close eye on somebody? Reading a sports magazine? If Tommy wants me to be in the company of a man reading sports articles, I can just go home to my husband and save the taxpayers some money.”
The officer tossed the magazine on the table and turned his attention to the small television set suspended near the ceiling in one corner.
“That makes me feel much better,” I grumbled.
I picked up the magazine myself, but did a double-take as a local television news announcer came on the screen to say, “We interrupt our regular programming to bring. you a breaking story. The president of the Carlton school board, Sylvia Greene, collapsed in the auditorium at the Education Center tonight in front of a packed house, as well as thousands of viewers watching the cable broadcast. Ms. Greene died after attempts to revive her at Ellis Hospital failed. Our latest reports are unable to confirm or deny rumors that poisoning is suspected, and that one of the fellow board members could have been involved in Ms. Greene’s death.”
Death on a School Board (Book 5 Molly Masters Mysteries) Page 3