Death on a School Board (Book 5 Molly Masters Mysteries)

by Leslie O'Kane

  After a long pause she answered, “Your father’s criminal record.”

  Chapter 6

  You Rearranged the Furniture Again?

  Gillian had been unwilling to elaborate. We maintained distant posts on the sidelines during the remainder of practice. I was still in a daze as I drove Nathan home. He was chattering to me, but I couldn’t listen, and I answered him with no idea of what I might be agreeing to. It must have been something about watching TV, for he went straight to snatch up the remote control the moment we arrived, and immediately answered my objections with “But you said I could!”

  This caused Karen, a much more avid television viewer than her brother, to desert the textbooks she’d spread onto the kitchen table and run to join us in the family room. She was seated on the couch, underneath Betty’s blanket, with Betty on her lap before I could figure out how to phrase my Yes-but-Mommy-wasn’t-listening-at-the-time response to Nathan.

  I decided that I had too much emotional investment in being a daughter at the moment to worry about being a mother, so I grabbed the portable phone. I sat down on the living room stairs, out of earshot from the children, and called my parents.

  Their machine answered with a new message in my mom’s voice: “You have reached the Petersons. If you are someone you wouldn’t wish to talk to if you were in our place, please hang up the phone. Anyone else, please leave a message.”

  Which category would I fit into? I couldn’t decide quickly enough and hung up. Immediately afterward, I realized that I was being silly. Of course my parents wanted to speak with me. We were family. I dialed again, listened through the message a second time, and said, “Mom? Dad? Are you home?” After a brief pause, my father picked up the phone. “Molly. How are you? Is everything all right?”

  “Dad, I need to know what’s going on. I just finished talking to Gillian Sweet, and she tells me that Sylvia revealed you had a criminal record.”

  He said nothing for a moment, which seemed to last for several minutes. “Did she say what kind of a criminal record?” His voice carried a heaviness in tone that imparted to me no surprise or resentment to indicate that Gillian had made up the story.

  “No. She didn’t elaborate, but I’m hoping that you will.”

  “I see.”

  I waited, but he said nothing more. “But I don’t! I don’t ‘see’ at all!”

  “Your mother and I will be over in a few minutes.”

  “Okay. I’ll be here.” I hung up.

  Now my emotions were in such turmoil that I felt nauseated. Dad hadn’t told me not to worry or to calm down, or anything to refute what I’d just learned. This could only mean that Dad did, indeed, have a criminal record, which he’d kept secret. And now he was a murder suspect, and his previous “record” was about to make tomorrow’s headlines. I looked up toward the heavens. Somebody up there, throw me a life preserver!

  To prevent myself from doing what I desperately wanted to do, which was to grab my keys, drive to the Albany airport, and get on the next departing flight regardless of its destination, I snatched up my drawing pad, dropped into what we call “the big chair” in the living room, and started drawing.

  Overwhelmed by the feeling that my very existence was about to be turned on its head, I conceptualized that emotion. I drew a room in which all of the furniture is crudely nailed to the ceiling. A haggard-looking man carrying a briefcase peers at the ceiling mournfully, while a woman with clasped hands smiles at him as he says, “You’ve been rearranging the furniture again, haven’t you, dear?”

  The doorbell rang, and my heart seemed to leap to my throat. This was silly. My fear was running roughshod over my sensibilities. What could he possibly tell me? That “Charlie Peterson” was an alias for Chuck the Knife—a serial killer from years gone by? That my sister and I were black-market babies? That he was the youngest living Nazi war criminal on record?

  Well, okay, all of those possibilities were pretty darned unsettling, but they were also undoubtedly way off the mark. Enough of this self-torture, I scolded myself while making my way to the door. Meanwhile, Karen and Nathan ran into the room. Their television show must have been on a commercial break.

  “Who’s at the door?” Karen asked.

  “It’s just Gramma and Grampa, What happened to your television show?”

  “Stupid repeat,” Nathan said sadly.

  “Cool!” Karen said simultaneously, in response to my answer about our visitors. “I want to show Gramma my penny collection.”

  “There won’t be time for that.” The doorbell rang a second time. “Just a moment,” I called, intent now to get the children out of the room or this agonized waiting would likely never end. “They’re coming over to discuss taxes and insurance policies. Do you want to stay and listen? Otherwise, there are some coins in a green metal box on the bottom shelf of the laundry room that you can go through and add to your collections.”

  “Come on, Nathan. Let’s go look at Mom’s money. Maybe we’ll find an Indian-head nickel!”

  That was about as underhanded a ploy as I’d ever used to get my children out of the room. I should have been ashamed of myself, but I was too busy feeling relieved that it had worked. I knew that all those coins I’d collected from various pockets while doing laundry would come in handy someday.

  Mom and Dad were standing side by side as I opened the door. Dad’s posture was so stooped over that Mom seemed to tower above him. He gave me a small smile. Mom looked embarrassed and gave my hand a squeeze as they stepped through the door. She had to know what Dad was going to say.

  In testimony to how awkward and uncomfortable this felt, I found myself treating my parents as I would regular houseguests and asking them if I could get anything from the kitchen. They both murmured, “No thanks,” and took seats on the couch. I closed my drawing pad and sat down, facing them on the big chair.

  Dad cast a nervous glance at my mother, who patted his knee and said to me, “Molly, this isn’t nearly as bad as what you must think.”

  I nodded, already a bit relieved. Mom was at least as pessimistic as Nathan and me combined, so if anyone could surmise what I “must think,” it would be she.

  “You see, Molly,” Dad began, “after all of this first came up with Sylvia, and I had a couple of days to think about it, I went to see a lawyer. He told me not to tell anybody anything. Not even your mom.” He gave Mom a sheepish smile, then mumbled, “It all dates back to your Uncle Ted.”

  Uncle Ted, my dad’s older brother, had died of leukemia some forty-five years ago, at the age of twenty-two.

  “Go on,” I said, because Dad was now sitting there with this look of befuddlement on his features as if he’d already lost his train of thought.

  “Charlie, for heaven’s sake,” my mom said. “Forget what that idiot lawyer said. It’s all right. Just tell her.”

  Mom was wringing her hands. Dad was looking pale again. It was as if he hadn’t been eating well for the last couple of weeks, too. He looked like a scarecrow, his shirt seeming to hang off his bony shoulders.

  “It was just a youthful indiscretion on my brother’s part, really,” Dad went on. “He and his buddy had been drinking. At the time they were…I don’t know. All of eighteen, I guess. Legally adults. I was fifteen. Still a minor, you see. Plus, he was in the Marines, and he was looking at the possibility of a dishonorable discharge for getting caught. And so I…took the rap for him.”

  “What rap?”

  Dad was working his way slowly around to what these “criminal” charges were, presenting the explanations and excuses before the actual event itself. I struggled to be patient, beginning to relax a little as the ages involved negated some of the most egregious offenses that I’d imagined in my head.

  “Disorderly conduct. Reckless endangerment.” He shrugged. “Ted and his best friend were launching potatoes at cars with this souped-up catapult they’d built. One of the potatoes… hit this elderly lady’s car window.”

  Potatoes? Here I
’d been thinking that my father might have been some kind of war criminal. This was all about pitching some potatoes at a car when he was a teenager?

  “So you claimed you were the one who’d fired the potatoes?” I prompted.

  “Yes. Though it wasn’t true. I was only a witness. In fact, I told them not to do it. Your uncle claimed it was my yelling at him suddenly that… startled him, and he wound up misfiring. The woman driver was so scared, she lost control of her car and caused a terrible accident.”

  “But, even if it’s on your permanent record, you were a minor then. Surely nobody would care about some childish prank that happened…what? Fifty years ago?”

  “There’s more to it than that. You see, the woman…swerved. She drove into the opposite traffic lane, and it caused a head-on collision. She died from her injuries. A little child, a poor little five-year-old, was also badly injured, though I heard he was eventually fine. There was a court case. My brother and his buddy compounded everything. They perjured themselves, testifying that I had done it.”

  “How awful. But still. This was so long ago.” I looked at my mother, whose gaze on my father was unwavering.

  “It set up a web of lies and deceits that never ended.”

  “What was your sentence? They didn’t actually force you to serve time as a juvenile offender, did they?”

  He shook his head. “Community service, mostly. They weren’t going to put a fifteen-year-old kid into jail for hurling a potato at someone. So that would have all blown over, eventually. It should have been the end of the story.” Dad let out a heavy sigh and sat staring at his knees. “Only…unfortunately, my brother felt that he owed me. The day I was to take a college entrance exam, I got really ill. Ted volunteered to go to the test administrators and plead my case to schedule a retake. Only, he posed as me and took the test instead. He got caught. It went on both of our records, but he didn’t have any prior offenses and I did, so I was the one left holding the bag a second time.”

  “The thing is that your uncle wanted to be a lawyer,” Mom said, a bit testily. She made it clear by the tone of her voice how much she resented Dad’s brother for this. “He felt that he couldn’t get his license if he’d had a criminal record.”

  My father was still looking horridly uncomfortable, but said nothing to my mother. “So, Uncle Ted didn’t suffer any consequences for taking your test for you?”

  “He explained that he was only trying to help his sick brother. He got into a bit of trouble, having to apologize and everything, and he did get a reprimand. We both claimed it was my idea. They made me take a test at a different time, under close supervision, but like I said, that went on my record, too.”

  “But…I still don’t understand. Why didn’t you tell me and Mom about this years ago?”

  “Ted found out about his having leukemia just a few months after the cheating incident. He asked me then if I’d keep his role a secret. I gave him my word that, no matter what happened, I would never tell anyone. Ever. I’d been able to keep that promise until the mess with the board came up. I honestly never believed anyone would uncover it. I made my amends long ago. I never tried to hide any of it, except my brother’s role, and it never stopped me from being hired at the university. I thought the whole incident was behind me.”

  “But Sylvia thought that this made you unsuitable for the school board?”

  “She insisted that I was unsuitable to serve as a representative of the schools with a history of having cheated on an exam.”

  “When did she say that? During the meeting, just before she died?”

  “No. Earlier. I’m afraid that…I’ve known for more than a week now that Sylvia knew about the charges leveled against me as a teenager. At last night’s meeting she and I got into an argument about her publicly revealing my past, and the rest of the time was spent with the whole board arguing over whether or not Sylvia had the right to call a private meeting and invite a nonmember. All the private investigator ever got around to saying was his name and that Sylvia had hired him to look into all of our backgrounds.”

  “So Sylvia really brought him into the room to frighten the other board member into resigning… the board member whose secret was so much worse than yours that she’d abandoned the prospect of making you her target.”

  My parents exchanged glances. They seemed to be quite dumbfounded by this suggestion. Apparently they weren’t in the habit of analyzing devious behavior, the way I was.

  “The whole thing backfired, apparently,” I continued, “and Sylvia wound up dead.”

  Dad said slowly, “But how could the killer know in advance to bring the poison?”

  “Sylvia probably warned the person earlier, not realizing how desperate he or she truly was.”

  “That seems out of character, Molly,” Mom said. “From what I’ve seen of Sylvia Greene, that would have meant that she’d been decent enough not to tell the other board members the secret the moment she discovered it herself.”

  Dad said quietly, “Must’ve been one hell of a secret for her to have been that discreet.”

  Or, as someone had postulated last night, this secret, unlike my father’s, concerned one of her two supporters, Kent or Gillian. “Regardless of whatever else you do, Dad, you’ve got to call that Mr. Johnson guy at the paper. Explain what really happened with Uncle Ted and everything. People will understand, once they have the full story.”

  He was already shaking his head. “No! I refuse to besmirch my brother’s memory. I made my decision years ago to take my lumps for this, and that’s what I intend to do. I worked hard to try to convince Sylvia Greene not to proceed. My biggest fear isn’t what might happen to me. It’s that, even after all these years, if this thing gets into the papers, there’s the chance that my brother’s deceit will surface because of some fool hoping to vindicate me.”

  “But Dad…” I let my voice trail away. He had risen and was already heading for the door. I suddenly felt as though I didn’t know my own father.

  Mom looked at me, her expression glum. “I’m sorry we lied to you.” She spoke quietly, looking over her shoulder to test Dad’s reaction. He headed outside without turning. “I didn’t know the truth myself until last night.”

  “Even if it comes out that Dad shot a potato at someone that led to a fatal accident and cheated on an entrance exam, that was so long ago. No one would hold that against him.”

  She nodded. “I think you’re right. But it all depends on how the story is written up in the paper.”

  She shuffled out the door after my father.

  I could only hope that the press would be fair. Unfortunately, though, the journalist in question would be the man who’d quoted me out of context and whom I’d antagonized this morning.

  Feeling hopeless, I headed toward the laundry room to check on the kids’ progress with the coins and to ask that they redirect their energies back toward homework.

  My suggestions were met with the usual grumblings. I decided to hide out in my office for a while, hoping to get my thoughts together. I glanced list of emails and noticed I’d gotten a new one from Ann Anon E. Mouse. I sighed, then dutifully opened it and read:

  Molly-You and your family are in danger. Tell your father that he must resign if he wants you all to stay safe. This won’t stop until a terrible price has been paid.

  A Concerned Citizen

  Chapter 7

  If It Weren’t for Bad Luck…

  I tried to reply to the email but got an error message. I forwarded the email to Tommy at his office. There was little else to be done. I was not about to “tell” my father to resign, even if his doing so might get me and mine out of the killer’s cross hairs.

  I tried to forget about the warning as best I could, and we settled into our typical family evening routine. Jim was late, which was often the case. I was growing more and more anxious waiting for him, which was a pretty obvious clue that my concern over the warning wasn’t buried nearly deeply enough.

 
After feeding BC, the kids and I ate our dinner, courtesy of Stephanie, which was truly delicious—sigh—then Nathan got out his guinea pig, which continually ran away while BC tried to sniff him. The two animals had grown up together, and BC wouldn’t hurt Spots, or vice versa. Racing around the table in this manner was the one way that both of them got some exercise, not unlike a hamster wheel. Nathan found these chases comical and periodically helped Spots by providing a moving human obstacle for BC.

  Our pets’ behavior struck me as no more foolish nor repetitive than my current emotional state. Here I sat, growing ever more resentful toward Jim for not being home with us at a time when I was most worried about my family’s safety. This, in turn, would lead to my snapping at Jim, and to his pointing out how unpleasant coming home to someone who’d snapped at him was, which gave him no motivation for rushing home. I resolved that I would do my utmost to stop the cycle, to be sweet and loving to Jim when he came home.

  Karen, meanwhile, was not interested in getting her guinea pig out as well. She was occupying herself by shrieking in frustration at her inability to press coins into the slots of her newest collector’s packet. That everyone else, including her younger brother, had no problem pushing the pennies into place was making her ready to lash out at the next person or beast to cross her path. At last, I heard the sounds of Jim driving into the garage, and reminded myself not to be snippy.

  “Dad-eeeeee!” Karen whined the minute he stepped in the door. “I can’t do this!”

  Jim, who looked exhausted, sighed and glanced in my direction for support. “Don’t look at me,” I said. “That’s a tone of voice daughters reserve for their fathers because they know full well it doesn’t work on their mothers.”

  Jim patiently showed Karen how to angle the coin into place and then push down with her thumb. This had to be at least the fifteenth time he’d shown her, judging by the number of coins in place minus the ones Nathan and I had inserted.