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

by Leslie O'Kane

  “No need to be surly,” she grumbled as she went back to the hallway.

  I gritted my teeth at the etiquette lesson, reminding myself that this woman had just saved my life, plus she’d taken a conk on the back of her head as a result. I made my way into my “private dressing room” and found to my immense relief that my clothes were still there.

  Hilga returned and handed me both a towel and a hot bedsheet, both of which I used merely to dry myself off somewhat. She watched me dress, then said, “Does this mean you ain’t goin’ for the massage and facial?”

  Wanting to save time and walk with some sense of purpose, I found my own way to the lobby, currently empty except for the receptionist, and demanded that she let me use her phone. I hesitated before dialing 911, considering the grouchy officer who had questioned me after the racetrack, and instead dialed Tommy’s number.

  To his gruff “Sergeant Newton,” I replied, “Tommy, I’ve had an incident at the Jackson Mineral Baths. Someone in a makeshift disguise just tried to drown me.”

  After a silence, he asked, “Is this a public pool or something?”

  “No. A private bath. Semiprivate, anyway. They have a thing about watching you get in and out of the tub. This person—I think it was a woman, but my one witness, who works here, thinks otherwise. Anyway, it was impossible to tell because he or she was wearing a sheet with holes cut out for the eyes. The sheeted person shoved my head under the water and tried to drown me.”

  There was a pause. Meanwhile, the receptionist was staring at me with her mouth ajar.

  “Tommy? Are you still there?”

  “I’m gonna have to develop a separate Molly Masters task-force unit, aren’t I? I’m gonna have to assign a whole team to nothing but following you around.”

  “Tommy, I’m serious! I need your help. I was going to call the Saratoga police, but I thought maybe you’d come help me again. I’ve gotten the impression from Saturday’s police interrogations that they don’t especially care for me out here.”

  “That’s just ‘cause they don’t know you like I do. Course, if they did, they’d’ve banned you from the entire town.”

  He hung up before I could formulate an appropriate response.

  The receptionist rose and said in her still-affected but now decidedly shaken tones, “Ma’am, can I get you anything? Herbal tea, perhaps?”

  “No, thanks.” I began to pace. This couldn’t have been an isolated incident. I didn’t believe that any more than I believed that Stephanie’s partial strangling had been—

  I interrupted my own thoughts. “Stephanie!” She knew I was going to be here at one P.M. She happened to speak to one of the board members about me, and that person happened to be the killer.

  “Ma’am? Perhaps we can find you a private room to use until…”

  While she was speaking, I grabbed the receiver again and dialed, this time hoping for the actual person and not the machine. I got her machine. “Stephanie? It’s Molly,” I said at the sound of the beep. “I have to know if you told anyone on the board about my appointment at the mineral baths today. Call me as soon as—”

  There was a click as she picked up the phone. “Molly, my dear, what possible reason would you have to care about whether or not I happened to mention your trip to the mineral baths?”

  “Someone tried to drown me, that’s what!”.

  “Oh my. Unsuccessfully, I take it?”

  She was playing dumb blond in an attempt to shift my focus. “Stephanie, don’t mess with me. If I were contacting you to seek revenge from my watery grave, I can guarantee you I wouldn’t use the phone. Just answer my question. Did you tell anyone on the school board where I’d be this afternoon?”

  In the meantime, a middle-age couple had entered the lobby, and the receptionist rounded the desk to speak to them. I covered my free ear to better hear Stephanie’s response.

  “Just Gillian Sweet. I happened to bump into her after leaving your place. She was going on a walk and, well, I didn’t think anything of it. She lives right in your neighborhood, after all.”

  Great! Stephanie tells Gillian about my vulnerable location, right after I discover her affair! “Why did you tell her about a thing like that?”

  “It was just on my mind, that’s all. I happened to be chuckling to myself at the thought of you getting a full-body beauty treatment. No offense, Molly, but you’re just the last person I could imagine doing that. And there Gillian was, coming down the block, and you said yourself how I need to try to be more friendly toward my fellow board members.”

  “Did I? What I seem to remember is the fact that you realized that one of those board members is a murderer, so you weren’t going to be speaking to them.” I glanced over my shoulder and noticed that the receptionist and the two customers were gawking at me. I gave them an apologetic smile, the best response I could muster.

  “I…do hope I wasn’t indirectly responsible for what happened to you. But look at the bright side, Molly. We’ve flushed out the killer. It has to be Gillian Sweet, because she’s the only one who knew you were there.”

  “How very clever of you to use me as bait,” I retorted, lowering my voice. “Much as I’d like to take the credit for finding the killer, it was purely by accident. I didn’t intentionally set you up. And I’m merely pointing out to you that you should be happy that we found the killer.”

  “I’m overjoyed, Stephanie.” I slammed the phone down into its cradle.

  The receptionist immediately grabbed my elbow and began ushering me back into what I now could only think of as the bowels of the building. “Let’s just find you a nice, comfortable waiting room, shall we? You’ve obviously had a very rough day.”

  She was using such a patronizing voice that I began to suspect she thought of me as a raving lunatic. “There really was a person in a sheet who tried to drown me. Just ask Hilga.”

  “Oh, I will. But let’s just get you all comfy till the police arrive.”

  I stopped in my tracks when she seemed to be leading me back into the baths. “I’m not going back there again.”

  “Of course not. But there’s a nice office you can have all to yourself, right around the corner.”

  I didn’t trust her, but to my relief, she did indeed deposit me at a rudimentary office. I sat down on the edge of the couch, determined not to let my guard down. The receptionist said, “I’ll bring the police to you the moment they arrive,” and closed the door behind me.

  I mentally replayed my conversation with Stephanie. She was, of course, only partially correct. Whether or not my close call proved that Gillian was the killer depended on whether or not Gillian had shared this information. Farfetched as this scenario was, if Stephanie innocently managed to pass along the less-than-compelling news of a visit to a bath house, Gillian might have done the very same thing.

  What would be tricky was determining whether or not Gillian actually told anyone where I’d be this afternoon. For, if she was in fact the killer, she’d probably have found a way to announce it to everyone and cover her own tracks.

  Twenty minutes later, I was still pondering the matter when Tommy arrived. He was in uniform but holding his cap, which had left the customary band-shaped mark around his red hair. To my utter and unpleasant surprise, I added the final capper to my Sojourn into Humiliation by bursting into tears at the sight of him.

  Having known me for most of my childhood, and even better during the last five years or so, Tommy had to have been at least as surprised by my outburst as I was. Wordlessly, he whipped out a white handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to me, then sat beside me, slowly rotating his cap in his hands while I struggled to collect myself.

  My self-control returned after a minute or two, and after a brief silence, Tommy said quietly, “Molly, I was thinkin’ as I drove here. My first dozen years on the force, I only investigated one, count ‘em, one murder case. Then you moved back to Carlton. Nowadays they might as well call me Detective Death…when I’m not watchin
g you nearly get yourself killed, that is. I’ve been saving up for my sons’ college, not to mention Rachel’s. But I’m thinkin’, why not let ‘em fend for themselves? So, even though you’re indirectly responsible for me ‘n’ Lauren getting together, plus you’re her best friend, and I’m kind of fond of you myself, I’ll give you my entire life savings if you’ll leave town. Permanently.”

  Tommy had a twinkle in his eye that let me know this was just his way of cheering me up. I dried the last of my tears. “How much money are we talking about?”

  “Twelve thousand, give or take a couple bucks.”

  “Right about now, I’d settle for a bus token and a large order of fries.”

  “Deal. I’ll even throw in the handkerchief.” He stood up and prompted, “Come on. I’ll take your statement at the nearest McDonald’s.” He put his arm around my shoulder and escorted me to the door.

  “By the way, have you checked into the cost of a college education lately, Tommy?”

  Chapter 18

  Can’t You Just Draw a Cat?

  Back home, hours later, after having recuperated from my near drowning in my Alka-Seltzer bath and awaiting my husband’s return from work, Lauren came over, very despondent on my behalf. She explained that “the boys,” Tommy’s teenage sons, were home with Rachel, but that she had to apologize in person for the way things turned out.

  “I can’t believe this happened,” she said for the umpteenth time. “How could Stephanie have been so stupid as to tell a suspect that you’d be completely vulnerable, a sitting duck?”

  “In bubbling water, no less.”

  “For all of her faults, she’s normally brighter than that.”

  “She claims she inadvertently blabbed, though she also pointed out that her doing so helped to track down the killer.”

  “How did you happen to tell Stephanie about your mineral bath in the first place?”

  I was saved from having to answer that question when the doorbell rang. I promptly went to answer it. Tommy was still in uniform, though his workday had probably ended. Or else he was on dinner-break.

  “Lauren here?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Come on in.”

  He smoothed his hair as we made our way back to the kitchen. “Just got through chatting with Gillian. To save you the effort of retracing my steps, I’ll just tell you. She says she never mentioned your agenda for this afternoon to anyone.”

  “That’s interesting,” I replied. “Do you think that that makes her look more guilty or less guilty?”

  He frowned and took a seat at the counter, next to his wife. “I just collect the evidence ‘n’ try to determine who could’ve done it. I leave all the postulating about intangibles up to you.”

  I crossed my arms and leaned back against the stove, which of course wasn’t on, or I�d have found a cooler resting place. “‘Postulating about intangibles?’ Sounds like you’ve been scanning a thesaurus. But all right, then. What about the ‘evidence’? Did anyone else on the school board know where I’d be this afternoon?”

  “‘Fraid so. Seems someone who identified himself as your father called the receptionist to ask when you’d be through so he could pick you up on time.”

  “My father? But he wasn’t supposed to pick me up, and he never even knew I’d be there in the first place.”

  “Uh-huh. And your dad said he placed no such call. I asked the receptionist if it could possibly have been a woman deliberately speaking in a low voice. She said no. So all we got to go on now is, it sure appears to be one of the men.”

  “You’ve crossed Superintendent Collins off any list of possible suspects, right? He never had any opportunity to poison Sylvia, did he?”

  “Right. Collins wasn’t with Sylvia till the open meeting. Never touched the water or any of the glasses.”

  I was relieved to hear that. The last thing I wanted to consider was that we had a killer running the district.

  “That means it was Kent or Stuart. And Stuart’s the only viable body type.” Plus the likelier to have been conversing with Gillian this afternoon. “But even if that’s accurate, how could either of them have known where I’d be? The only persons other than myself and Jim who knew were Gillian, Lauren, and Stephanie.”

  “Thank you for your startlin’ insights, Dr. Watson,” Tommy all but snarled at me. “I wasn’t serious about my leaving the postulating up to you. It’s not your job to solve this case. I’m just tellin’ you what I know, to see if it helps you remember something that might turn out to be a clue. Such as another person you told or could have overheard you tellin’ Stephanie.”

  “Tommy, I’ve already staked my life on that one. There wasn’t anyone else.”

  “I didn’t tell anyone,” Lauren said, “and I made the reservation on our private phone, where nobody could have overheard. Not even Rachel.”

  “And if it was Gillian, disguising her voice despite what the receptionist says, she’d be pointing a finger at herself, all but announcing that she did it.”

  Tommy rose, then looked at Lauren. “You comin’ home soon? I’m gonna head back.”

  “I’ll come, too.” Lauren reached out and gave my wrist a squeeze. “Again, Molly, I’m so sorry that my gift backfired.”

  “Don’t give it another thought. Until next year at my fortieth, that is. A trip to Bermuda would compensate nicely.”

  That night, after the children were in bed and I was working on some cartoons, my right wrist hurt a little bit. Maybe it was possible to get carpal tunnel syndrome from drawing too long on a badly positioned notebook. That notion led to my sketching out a truly silly cartoon concept. Four people in a car are emerging from a tunnel and are all crying, “Oww! Oww! My wrist! My wrist!” The caption reads: Carpool Tunnel Syndrome.

  Afterward, I spent some time just staring at my sketch, wondering if my parents had been disappointed whenever they’d first realized that the particular bent of my mind would lead to my cooking up idiosyncratic cartoons instead of, say, formulas for world peace or cancer cures. No, my daughter doesn’t save lives. She creates cartoons about carpool tunnel syndrome!

  That thought pattern led me to drawing yet another cartoon, wherein a toddler with wild hair is scribbling mathematical equations on the wall. With his crayon poised from having written E = MC2, he is looking up at a woman in old-fashioned clothes beside him who laments, “Oh, Albert! Can’t you just draw kitty cats and doggies like normal children?”

  This cartoon made me feel a little better-emotionally, that is. My wrist was now really killing me, and I decided that, yes, I’d developed enough of an equivalent to carpal tunnel that I was going to knock off on the drawing and call it a night. Jim was already in bed. We hadn’t spoken much that night. He’d been less than pleased at learning about my latest mishap in Saratoga.

  He wasn’t asleep, though, for as soon as I’d settled into my half of the bed, he asked, “How are you feeling?”

  “Okay. I’m just…appalled at what is going on with the members of the school board. The more I get to know them, the less I think anyone of them is competent to make decisions that control the fate of our children. Not counting my father, of course.”

  “I meant how you felt physically. If you’ve discovered new bruises.”

  “Oh, that. No, I’m fine. Though my hair still smells like rotten eggs. And I’ll probably be seeing tiny bubbles in my sleep.” I thought more about my father, picturing him in the, midst of the other board members, all of them fairly despicable, in differing degrees. Thinking out loud now, I murmured, “Maybe that’s why they set up him up. Because he was the only sane one, so he didn’t fit in.”

  “Your father, you mean? You think the murder was a conspiracy?”

  “I don’t know.” I paused and considered the question more fully. “No, I don’t. I just think all of the board members had something to hide. And that Sylvia was truly so single-minded in her intentions that she was willing to threaten and coerce anyone and everyone till she got her way.�
��

  “You can’t risk pushing everyone’s buttons the way that you do. Molly, you don’t know which of these people killed Sylvia. You can’t keep risking your life like this.”

  “I know. And I’m also worried about my father’s safety. Maybe it really would be best if he’d just…resign.”

  “Ironic, isn’t it?” Jim murmured. “That’s how all this started. Sylvia’s trying to force him to resign. Now you want that, too.”

  “Don’t tell my parents I said that.”

  “You’ve avoided the issue about how you’re exacerbating the situation.”

  For a moment I was distracted at the word “exacerbating.”

  Jim must have been thumbing through Tommy’s thesaurus. “I’ll try to take up a new hobby and get out of the habit of caring about justice.”

  “Somehow, I doubt you mean that. Good night.”

  The next morning, even after a reasonably full night’s sleep, I couldn’t get past my feeling that the person under that ghostlike sheet had been a woman, not a man. It just hadn’t struck me that the person was all that large or strong. And yet it had been a man who’d called the spa. That could only mean that my energy had to be focused away from Kent Graham, toward the man with a much slighter build: Stuart Ackleman.

  I concurred with Stephanie’s opinion when she said that Stuart had a Massachusetts accent, and if she’d checked into this so-called hometown of his in Connecticut and found he’d never lived there, he probably was covering up for something. Gillian had said that Stuart had been a doctor. Of course, she later turned out to be Stuart’s lover, so maybe this whole doctor thing was a line Stuart had fed her. Still, I needed to start by determining as best I could if Stuart truly was a retired philosophy professor.

  After giving the matter considerable thought, I hit upon a possible litmus test for Stuart and called my mother to get the necessary details. Fortunately, she answered instead of making me listen through her machine’s message. I immediately asked, “Mom, remember that really annoying thing you were always saying to us while we were in junior high and you were taking that philosophy course at SUNY?”