I pictured him, as best I could remember, from the night before. Though a young man, he looked more like a high school teacher than an investigator-slight build, thick glasses, curly light-brown hair. He certainly didn’t strike me as the physical bruiser sort who truly could “take care of himself” in most instances.
“Don’t you think you have a civic duty to share your report with the police?” I asked pointedly.
“I already did. Hey, listen, lady. I’m getting back to work now. I suggest you do the same. And don’t call me again. You got that?”
On that less-than-pleasant note, he hung up.
“Well, that was no fun whatsoever,” I said to Betty, who wagged her stubby tail in response.
While pondering my situation, I gave the dog her breakfast, a half a cup of kibble. Ever hopeful that I was just about to drop a T-bone steak into her bowl, she waited expectantly until I said, “Okay,” then she began to eat.
I wasn’t at all sure that Sam Dunlap was telling the truth about his having gone to the police, but that was something that could be easily double-checked. I made a mental note to tell Tommy about my conversation with Sam the next time the opportunity arose. That meant risking Tommy’s chewing me out for meddling in his investigation, but I was willing to pay that price rather than withhold any information that could vindicate my father.
Like Lauren with her baking, I find solace in my work, creating humorous—at least, one hopes “humorous” is the adjective that leaps to mind—cartoons for my business, Molly’s eCards.
I had been working on a non-occasion card for women (ninety-percent of card purchases are made by women). The card now seemed painfully appropriate. It showed a couple walking along a circular path totally enclosed by a brick wall. They were literally in a rut formed by their own footprints. The man is saying to the woman, “Now, where were we?” as the woman wears a forlorn expression on her face. The caption for the cartoon reads: Do you ever get the feeling that we’re going in circles?
The doorbell rang. Hoping it was my parents, I swung open the door without looking through the peephole. Though naive of me, I wasn’t prepared for the disheartening sight of Stephanie Saunders, holding a casserole dish.
“Hello, Stephanie.” I glanced at my watch and verified that it had only been an hour or so since we spoke. When the woman decides to cook for someone, she doesn’t mess around.
“Molly, you poor thing.”
Michael, her four-year-old with perpetually tousled blond hair and an engaging smile, stepped out from behind her. Not particularly wanting to think of myself as a “poor thing,” I focused my energy on him and said, “Hi there, big guy!”
“Hi. I got new shoes on!” he announced, grabbing onto his mother’s black skirt to lift one foot up and show me its sole.
“Hey, those are cool! Do they make you jump fast and run high?”
“No!” He giggled, rolling his eyes. “I run fast. And I jump high.”
Stephanie broke the pleasant mood by thrusting the casserole dish at me, which I had no choice but to accept, along with her pot holders. “Here you go, dear. Again, I am so deeply, deeply wounded on your behalf.”
I regarded her for a moment, unable to meet her eyes because of the sunglasses she wore, which topped off her black knit dress with matching black jacket. Perhaps she was in full mourning on my behalf, as well as being “deeply, deeply wounded.”
“Really, Steph. You make it sound as if you’ve flung yourself into my line of fire and taken a round of shrapnel for me. But thanks for the casserole.” I couldn’t think of anything else at all pleasant to say, so I opted to return my attention to her son. “How are you today, Michael?”
“I go potty!”
“Good for you. I do, too, sometimes.”
“Want to see?”
Not especially, I thought, but before I could suitably frame my response, Stephanie interjected, “He thinks he needs to use your bathroom. We’re…still in the process of potty training.”
“Oh, I see.” I kept my vision on her son, who, in spite of his genes, was adorable. “That’s a noble pursuit, young man. Let me put your mom’s handiwork in the ‘fridge, and I’ll show you where my bathroom is.”
We started to walk away, Michael eagerly trotting beside me, but Stephanie said firmly, “I need those pot holders back right away, Molly. In fact, would you mind terribly transferring the entire meal to another dish? That’s handcrafted terra-cotta earthenware you’re holding. It’s terribly expensive and one of a kind, and, well, I’d hate to have anything happen to it.”
I forced a smile and turned around. “My goodness. Of course I’ll transfer it right away. Terra cottage, did you say? I’m so impressed. It must be worrisome to put such a piece of…art into your oven.”
She removed her dark glasses and raised a perfectly plucked eyebrow, no doubt realizing I was being sarcastic but unwilling to call me on it. “I’ll take Mikey to the bathroom while you’re transferring containers.”
Stephanie really brought out the worst in me. Here she’d gone through the trouble of cooking a meal for me, and all I could do was be cutting and sarcastic toward her. When her husband had died, shortly before her son’s birth, I’d helped her in other ways, but never thought to bring her food. Why couldn’t I be a little kinder to her?
While silently trying to instruct myself not to let her get my goat, I spooned her spaghetti-based supper into my pseudo-Corning-ware dish and washed out her One-of-a-kind-aren’t-I-oh-so-cultured-terra-whatchamacallit-thingee. Her dish plus her personally-cross-stitched-by-Georgia-O’Keeffe potholders were ready to go home with her by the time she and her son emerged from the bathroom.
It occurred to me that I was not doing a stellar job at putting myself into a kindhearted frame of mind.
“False alarm,” Stephanie said, smiling as she met my eyes.
I winked at Michael, who was clinging to her skirt, and then held out the dish and pot holders to his mother. “It’s all dutifully transferred to another container. Thanks again.”
“I go potty now, Mommy,” Michael said proudly, and promptly began to do so, wetting the front of his pants.
Stephanie’s jaw dropped and she let out a little moan, but grabbed him under the armpits and raced back into the bathroom.
Trying hard not to laugh, I called after her, “Stephanie, I’ll go look in my son’s closet and see if I have any hand-me-downs that are small enough to fit him.”
“Thank you,” she said in a choked voice.
I knew how much it hurt her to say that to me, and I would hate it if our positions were reversed. I went off in search of outgrown children’s wear and, again, tried to search my soul for more generosity. She had jet-setted around and lived the bachelorette’s life since she’d been widowed, and yet she managed to be PTA president, year after year. Surely they awarded a special place in heaven for PTA volunteers. Maybe that was why this particular PTA president was so intent on giving me hell.
After changing her son’s clothes—and remarking snidely told me that she’d “never even heard” of the brand name of my son’s outgrown pants, which was because they were from a low-end department store she’d never visited, Stephanie and son left. I made and enjoyed a quiet lunch by myself.
A couple of hours later, the children, upon arriving home on their respective school buses, greeted me with their customary short-term memory loss when I asked them what they did in school that day.
Determined to drag at least one recollection out of them, I focused my efforts on Karen, knowing she was my best hope. “Did you have any pop quizzes or anything?”
She furrowed her pretty brow, but said only, “Nope.”
“Did anything make you laugh today?”
“No, but Mom? I need new shoes. I hate my sneakers. Everyone else’s are way cooler than mine.”
“But yours are brand new! We just bought them two months ago, and you thought they were cool enough then.”
Here was a disadvantage of
teenagers when compared to four-year-olds: they don’t appreciate their shoes as much.
Karen shrugged and started running up the stairs for the phone in the master bedroom. “Can I go call Rachel?”
“Sure,” I yelled after her, not seeing the point in mentioning that Rachel was the person she’d left only five minutes earlier, and yet she’d had nothing to say to the mother she hadn’t seen in seven hours. Karen, for all of her extraordinary qualities, was on the verge of teendom—more accurately spelled “teen-dumb.” My own experiences as an adolescent were permanently etched into my memory, which was scary now that I was on the parenting side of the equation. However, I could take heart in the knowledge that ten years or so from now, she would realize her mother was both incredibly wise and a wonderful conversationalist.
I sighed and turned my attention to my son. It was time for him to go to soccer practice, where I often saw Gillian Sweet.
We never spoke to each other, both remaining entrenched in our own thoughts on the sidelines, but under the circumstances, maybe she would shed some light on the board’s turmoil. “Get your shin guards and cleats on, Nathan.”
He stared at me with a blank expression on his face.
“You’ve got soccer practice in fifteen minutes.”
“I do?”
He had soccer practice after school every Tuesday and Thursday but had selective memory lapses that allowed him to (a) forget to bring his gear to school in the morning, (b) forget to stay for practice and instead come home on the bus, and (c) plead ignorance of the above twice a week.
“I’ll meet you in the car.”
A minute or two later, Nathan stormed toward the car where, as promised, I was waiting. He flung open the door to the backseat and hurled his ball into the car with so much force that he had to duck as it ricocheted back toward him.
“Is something wrong?” I asked, being attuned to these subtle nuances.
“I don’t want to go to soccer practice! Why can’t I just play in the games without having to practice all the time?”
“You can’t play in the games unless you go to practice. That’s the team rules. Do you want to play this weekend?”
“Yes! But I barely had time to start my homework!”
“I’ll give you a hand with your schoolwork when we get back.”
“I’ll never get it finished! I’m gonna flunk fifth grade. I’m never going to get to college, or get a good job, or get any friends. Nobody’s gonna want to marry me. I’m going to live in a small apartment and have a lonely little life!”
“Nathan, please, sweetie. You’re only ten years old. I promise you, you’re not going to flunk fifth grade. Let’s just get you through soccer practice and tonight’s homework, and we’ll stave off your midlife crisis for a later decade, all right? Please?”
He slumped further back into his seat. His thin arms were crossed on his slender chest. His cheeks blazed beneath the constellation of brown freckles.
My heart felt a pang for him, but if there was anything helpful to say to him, I didn’t know what that was. Heaven knows I’d tried enough variations of aphorisms, to no avail. My son had inherited my pessimism, and was compulsively neat, which, if the latter was also inherited, had skipped a generation. Last month, intending to give him an uplifting lesson about optimism and hope, I had set half a glass of water on the counter and, when he entered the room, asked him whether the glass was half empty or half full. He swept up the glass without answering, stacked it in the sink, and demanded to know why “someone’s always leaving their dirty dishes around the place!”
We arrived at the soccer fields behind the redbrick elementary school. Gillian Sweet had brought one of those handy short-legged folding lawn chairs that I’d often admired, but never seemed to remember to search for when I was at an appropriate store. Realistically, though, even if I were ever to buy one, I would forget to bring it with me. I headed down the sidelines and took a seat on the grass beside her.
“Hello, Gillian. Our sons are on the same soccer team, I see.”
That was about as lame an opening comment as I could possibly make, especially since they’d been on the team together for almost two months now. She merely said, “Yes.”
“That was quite an experience at the board meeting last night.”
“Yes. I still can’t believe it all really happened. School board meetings tend to be draining, but not deadly.”
Surprised at her flippancy, I said, “I’m sure it was upsetting for you. Your friend died.”
“That’s not—” She stopped. Then gave a little laugh and said, “Funny thing, I just can’t seem to remember what I meant to say to you.”
“Oh?” I was having a truly hard time figuring out what was going on with her. For a moment, I even had the fleeting thought that she was acting somewhat drugged out, but wrote it off as paranoia on my part.
She stared out into the distance, where the fifteen or so team members were running sprints. “Ironic, isn’t it, that your son and mine are on a sports team together? They’ll probably want to stay on teams in middle school and high school. That’s one of the things your father’s vote would put an end to.”
“Whenever you revote, that is.”
“Yes. We’ll have to appoint a replacement. I’m almost surprised you haven’t considered running yourself.”
“For the board? No offense, Gillian, but I’d sooner swallow broken glass.”
Gillian nodded, the wrinkles in her forehead making her look old. I hid my own forehead wrinkles behind my bangs.
“That’s wise of you, Molly. There are times when I have to admit, I’ve realized I’ve taken the more torturous route.”
We stopped talking for a while and watched the practice. The boys were doing various calisthenics, which they finished up, then started running passing-and-shooting drills.
All the while, my nerves were starting to give out. An article revealing a family secret was about to hit next morning’s papers, and I had no idea what it would contain. “Gillian, I need to ask you something. Has Sylvia ever revealed to the rest of the board what this supposed secret of my father’s was?”
She looked at me and asked sadly, “Your father didn’t tell you?”
I instantly regretted that, of all of the board members, I’d chosen to ask the one I liked the very least. This was not the person I would have wanted to deliver bad news of a personal nature to me. “I’m just asking for a yes or no here, Gillian.”
She ignored my last comment and said, “I’m really not at liberty to say what went on in private discussions of the board. Even if I were, I’m not comfortable discussing this with you. You need to ask your father. It’s his…secret, after all.”
”But my father doesn’t even know what Sylvia was threatening to divulge.”
“That’s not true.”
“What’s not true?” My pulse raced at the thought that I was about to hear something I didn’t wish to hear about my father.
She looked around. There was nobody within hearing distance, and yet she said under her breath, “Why don’t you follow me to my car so that we can speak privately?”
“Fine.” I gritted my teeth and got to my feet. I was too committed to stop now, but this was horrid enough without my having to play Secret Agent games with her.
Neither of us spoke another word until we were in the front seat of her minivan. Gillian fidgeted for a while, then finally met my eyes. “Molly, I’m afraid that your father knows very well what it was that Sylvia had uncovered about him. She told us all what it was a full week ago, during a conference call that she set up. I just wish that you didn’t have to learn that from me, Molly. He should have told you himself.”
Dad knew a week ago? And yet he’d insisted as we were driving to the board last night that he was utterly in the dark. “I don’t believe you. If this was in a conference call, maybe….” My mind raced to come up with some plausible explanation. “Maybe his phone had disconnected before your conversatio
n was completed. I’ve known my father my whole life. He wouldn’t lie to me.”
“Molly, there were also half a dozen witnesses to an argument Sylvia and Charlie got into in the back room. She told him again exactly what she was going to announce if he didn’t resign. If you don’t believe me, talk to any of the other board members. Or, worse, you can wait to read about it in the papers. You can trust me to keep quiet, but the same can’t be said for some of my less-scrupulous associates.”
“Some…scandalous newspaper article, quoting the board members, wouldn’t convince me of anything. You could all have compared notes after leaving the hospital. This could be a conspiracy—you, Michelle, Carol, Stuart, and Kent, all could have been working together to kill Sylvia and to frame my father.”
Gillian’s eyes flashed in anger and her cheeks reddened. “Molly. Come on, now. Are you listening to yourself? Do you honestly believe the five of us could have cooked up something like this?”
No, in fact, I didn’t believe that. The five of them couldn’t possibly work together well enough to accomplish even the simplest of changes in district policy, let alone pull off a murder together. Nevertheless, I answered honestly, “I would sooner believe that than believe that my father lied to my mother and me.”
“Suit yourself. You can believe whatever fairy tale you wish to. Or you can check with Sam Dunlap, who isn’t a board member.”
I deliberately chose to play innocent, wanting to see how familiar with this private investigator Gillian really was. “The man Sylvia had brought into the back room with all of you?”
“That’s right. He’s a private investigator, as I recall your father telling you last night in the hospital waiting room. Surely you don’t think a professional investigator conspired with the rest of us to do in poor Sylvia?”
The last shred of denial that I’d been clinging to so desperately deserted me. I leaned back against the headrest and stared straight ahead, unwilling and unable now to look at her. “You’ve made your point, Gillian. So just tell me. What was it? What was this terrible secret that Sylvia had discovered?”
Death on a School Board (Book 5 Molly Masters Mysteries) Page 6