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

by Leslie O'Kane

  Not surprisingly, she gave me the evil eye for that remark. She pursed her lips and said nothing. Thinking of Stuart and Gillian, I said, “I heard the rumor that there were some … strange liaisons on the school board.”

  She furrowed her brow. “I keep mistakenly thinking that people will come to realize that it’s okay for a man and a woman to just be friends. And, to be honest, Kent and I really aren’t even that. He’s too self-absorbed to have friends. I simply find him a pleasant riding companion. Most of the women who board their horses there seem compelled to talk incessantly while we’re trying to ride. I’m quite certain our horses are closer friends than Kent and I are.”

  “To tell you the truth, Michelle, when I heard rumors that there was a romance on the board, I assumed—”

  “The same thing everybody does. That it was Kent and me. Sylvia never did believe that he and I were just friends, so she watched us like a hawk. When rumors of a romance surfaced, everyone assumed that it had to be two of us young board members. That’s exactly wrong.”

  That was a strange comment. Gillian was younger than Kent or Michelle. Nevertheless, I feigned surprise and asked, “You mean Stuart and Gillian are having an affair?”

  “No,” she said, seeming utterly confused. “Stuart and Carol Barr. Why would you think I meant him and Gillian?”

  “Because I stumbled across them the other day and caught them embracing.”

  “You’re kidding! I’ve kept quiet about this, but I’ve caught Stuart and Carol ‘embracing,’ as you say, on more than one occasion.”

  This was really hard to fathom, if Michelle was telling me the truth—and she certainly appeared to be. “So…Stuart has, at one point at least, had a thing going with both women? It’s lucky for him he wasn’t the one to get killed.”

  Michelle, too, seemed disconcerted by the revelation that Gillian and Stuart were also a couple. “Well. There’s no accounting for taste, as they say. Stuart has that gentle, fatherly thing going for him, and Gillian and her husband have been on the skids for a long time now. I guess she was lonely. Still, though…” She shuddered and said slowly, “I never have been able to understand Stuart and Carol’s relationship. Carol’s husband is much better looking than Stuart. And she’s a nice enough woman, of course, but I’m surprised that both of them are attracted to her.”

  “I think she’s not only ‘nice enough’ as you say, but reasonably nice looking.”

  Michelle grimaced a little. “Only when she’s fully dressed. I ran into her at a swimming pool clear down in Albany one day last summer. Her body is terribly disfigured. That’s why she always wears slacks and long-sleeve blouses. She told me she was in a fire when she was a kid. Her house burned down.”

  “Really? That’s so awful.”

  “Yes. But let’s get back to you and your sunroom, shall we?”

  “Yes, let’s,” I said cheerfully, though that was the last thing I really wanted to discuss.

  “Let me just get my calculator and I can run some very preliminary figures for you.” She rummaged through her purse, then stopped, and her eyes suddenly widened as she pulled a palm-size object out of her purse. “That’s odd. I wonder what this is?”

  I rose and looked at what she was holding. “Oh. My son has something similar. If it’s the same thing, it’s a toy tape recorder. You can store a minute or two’s worth of your voice, and play it back.”

  “I wonder who could have put it there?”

  “It’s not yours?” I asked stupidly.

  “No. Someone must have… put it into my purse by mistake, somehow.”

  My thoughts instantly turned to how someone had planted the vial of poison that was in my father’s jacket. “That could be evidence in the murder.” I considered warning her about fingerprints, as well, but decided that any prints would have been smeared with Michelle’s by now. “You were just at Gillian’s house. Were you with any of the other board members lately?”

  She shook her head. “Not since clear back at Proctor’s Theater.”

  “And you’ve been through your purse since then, right?”

  “I…must have been. Sure. I think I’d have discovered this sooner if it had been here all that time.”

  “Can I see it?” I asked. She handed the toy to me.

  Unlike Nathan’s toy, this one had an up and down arrow, and I didn’t know its purpose. I pressed a small button marked “Play.” Though the device seemed to be operating, there was no sound whatsoever on the tape.

  “Huh. There’s nothing recorded on this at all. That’s unusual. Even if you buy one of these brand new, there’s almost always some kid’s voice on the tape who was fiddling with it in the store.” I pressed the record button and held it up to my lips, while pressing the down arrow. I said into its built-in microphone, “I wonder what these arrows do.”

  I pressed the play button a second time, and it played back my short recording. My recorded voice had been drastically lowered. I sounded just like a man.

  Chapter 20

  Is It My Imagination?

  Michelle stared at me. “What’s the matter, Molly? What’s the significance of that little…recorder thing?”

  “It means that I’ve probably been wrong about some things. Michelle, it’s absolutely critical for you to recall when the earliest and the latest time was that this device could have been placed in your purse.”

  “You’re thinking that the killer could have planted it there?”

  “Yes.”

  She rose, apparently disconcerted at having been set up, and began to pace beside my kitchen table. “Like I said, I had my purse with me at Proctor’s Theater. I’m certain that this device couldn’t have been there sooner than that, because I remember searching through all of the compartments to see if I could find any loose change for the parking meters. Then I found out meter money wasn’t needed that late at night. I suppose it’s possible that this…toy has been in the bottom of my purse ever since.”

  I looked again at the recorder. It had a pause button. “I need to test a theory,” I murmured to Michelle. I recorded myself saying, “Hello, I’m Mr. Jones. Could you tell me what time Mrs. Jones will be free?” I waited a moment, then said, “Thank you.” I played the first part back while holding the down arrow, then pressed the pause button, waited for a good thirty seconds or so, then released the pause and pressed the down arrow again. My test worked perfectly. A woman could easily have used this device to make herself sound like a man when she called the spa yesterday, pretending to be my father.

  I returned the little recorder to her. “You need to call Sergeant Newton at the police station right away and give this to him.” I got up. “Thanks for your help, Michelle.”

  “What about the decorating job on your sunroom?”

  “Oh, right. I’ll give that some more thought and get back to you soon.”

  Michelle gave me a half smile as she gathered up her notebooks and purse. “Sure you will. It’s been a pleasure almost working with you, Molly.”

  “Thanks. You too.” My thoughts had me too distracted to formulate a better reply.

  I let Michelle out the front door and watched through the window while she drove off. This could all be a setup, I thought. Michelle could have faked discovering the device, having used it herself, and was now trying to make herself look less suspicious by producing what could be a crucial piece of evidence. She was a tall woman, though, and I didn’t think it could have been her under that sheet. Then again, having been prone in a bathtub at the time, my vantage point certainly could have distorted a person’s height.

  On the other hand, the voice-changer might also have been a last-ditch effort by Stuart to deflect attention from himself, once he realized that yesterday’s phone call to the mineral baths had let all the women on the board off the hook.

  If only the person who tried to drown me hadn’t been wearing those rubber gloves. That alone would have given me a much better idea if it was a man or a woman. For that matter, i
f only someone had seen the person before he or she donned the disguise. But why try to kill me? Did the killer think I knew something, held some key piece of evidence that even I didn’t realize I possessed?

  If so, maybe that was the link. Carol Barr had rummaged through my desk. Was she looking to see if I had damning evidence against her? Was hers the voice arguing with a man I’d assumed was Stuart? It was so hard to tell. If Tommy were to instruct all of the suspects to whisper those same words, maybe I could pick out the voice.

  Or could that argument have been staged? Could someone have intentionally positioned herself so that I, or the next person who happened down that hallway, would overhear an “argument” that was really only between one person and a prerecorded, altered voice? How well would the voice changer work with the up arrow? Would a man sound like a woman?

  Carol searches my desk at home. Or not. Stuart looks through Gillian’s personnel folder. Or not, if Agnes Rockman was the killer and pointing fingers at others. Stephanie gets choked at the theater. Sam Dunlap-cum-Jacobsen calls me to set up a rendezvous and then gets killed. Was I so sure that was really his voice?

  There were too many pieces to this puzzle to put together by myself. I needed a sounding board. Lauren was usually my first choice for such a role, but Stephanie might be the better choice this time. After all, she’d had an encounter with the killer herself. Plus her loose lips had nearly turned me into the third victim. The woman owed me.

  I called her and waited through her machine’s message, then said, “Stephanie. We need to talk. Are you there?”

  Just when I was about to conclude that she wasn’t, she picked up. “Molly, I was just getting Mikey down for his afternoon nap. What do we need to talk about?”

  “The murders. I need to run some thoughts by you. Since your son is napping now, can I come over there?”

  She sighed. “I suppose so.”

  Several minutes later, I pulled into Stephanie’s circular driveway. I reminded myself as I climbed the steps onto her elegant front porch that, despite her attitude on the phone, she wanted to solve this thing, too, now that an attempt had been made on her own precious neck. She was the perfect person to talk to right now: definitely innocent, knowledgeable about all of the suspects, and possessing a devious mind that could easily put her into a criminal’s thoughts.

  She opened the door before I could ring the bell, looking several shades less than thrilled at my having disturbed her. Before she could annoy me into rethinking my visit. I said, “Stephanie, I need your help. Brainstorm this thing with me, would you please? I really think I must know something important that I’m unaware of.”

  She gave my clothing—jeans and T-shirt—a disapproving visual once-over, but stepped aside so that I could enter. “Such as how to dress like a mature woman instead of a twenty-year-old?”

  “Truce, all right?” I shut the door behind me. “Just walk me through this. Here is this person who manages to slip poison into Sylvia’s water glass in the private meeting of board members. So it’s got to be someone Sylvia trusts enough to handle her glass or who manages to create a subtle diversion so that nobody sees that the water’s being contaminated. That person also puts a vial of poison into my dad’s jacket pocket before the police temporarily confiscate the board members’ possessions. Follow?”

  “Go on.”

  “Then this person puts a thumbtack into the stirrup of Michelle’s saddle, succeeding in getting the horse to throw her, though she’s basically uninjured. Then the killer stabs the private investigator, just before he can give me damaging evidence.”

  “Don’t forget how I was nearly choked to death.”

  “Right, but you managed to scream, even so.”

  “It was just a quick thing. I felt his hands on my neck, then they released me, and I screamed.”

  “You said ‘his’ hands. Are you thinking now that it was a man?”

  “Not necessarily. Except that I’m fairly certain it had to be someone roughly my height.”

  The shortest person on my list of suspects was Agnes. “So that lets out Agnes Rockman.”

  “Oh, please,” Stephanie scoffed. “Agnes Rockman? She worshiped Sylvia Greene. She’d never kill her. Although…”

  “What?”

  “My accountant did have an interesting theory about some funds that had disappeared a couple of years ago and then reappeared. He thought Agnes Rockman might have swindled the district, but since the money had been returned, he didn’t feel he had the justification to pursue the matter further.”

  “Huh.” Even if that were true, I couldn’t see how that could be grounds for her to resort to murder. Furthermore, why had someone choked Stephanie? Mistaken identity? Was she supposed to have been me? She was taller, though, especially with those high heels she always wore. The only person she could easily be mistaken for in the dark was Michelle Lacy.

  The thought of Michelle jogged my memory. “You told me on Sunday that there were rumors that Michelle and Kent had been pilfering monies from the school budget. Did your accountant look into that?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. He’s told me that he’s absolutely certain that they were innocent, and the only irregularities could all be traced back to some funds that Agnes had access to and, again, that the money did eventually turn up. He’s going to call me when he has some solid facts about the budget’s overall status. He was talking about how the school’s insurance premiums are just so astronomical that that alone is a huge budget hit.”

  “So I’ve heard. They had that fire a few years ago,” I murmured to myself, thinking.

  “I remember that. The arson case at the high school. They never did solve that. I wouldn’t be half surprised if it was one of those dreadful boys that Tiffany’s former boyfriend used to hang out with.”

  Carol Barr had scars from a fire, which Michelle had seen when they had run into each other clear down in Albany. Could that have been related? Could Carol be a closet arsonist if there was such a thing—and, had Sylvia somehow found out that her scars weren’t from a childhood accident, but rather from that fire at the school? That could be a motive for the attempt on Michelle, and perhaps on Stephanie, too. Still, not much of a motive. What could seeing someone’s scars possibly prove?

  “How long ago was that fire, anyway?”

  Stephanie shrugged and looked at her nails, losing interest in the conversation, now that it had drifted so far away from herself. “Four years ago, I think. Cherokee, Tiffany’s ex-boyfriend, would have been a freshman.”

  And Carol Barr would not have been a member of the school board. In any case, if Carol was an arsonist, who’d gotten caught in her own fire, how had her hands not been injured? Michelle had been the one to tell me about Carol’s scars. If she was the killer, she could have staged that fall from her horse, maybe even lied to me about Carol’s scars to point me in the wrong direction. It wouldn’t be that hard to find out. Surely all I would have to do was ask Agnes. She probably had enough personal knowledge of the board members that she’d know if Carol had been hideously scarred in a childhood fire.

  Stephanie’s phone rang, startling me a little. She must have added a few more phones since I’d last been there, for I could hear at least four separate ring tones from various rooms, one of which was very close at hand. Stephanie excused herself to sweep up a portable phone that was resting, out of its cradle, on an occasional table in the foyer.

  Stephanie looked at me wide-eyed and said into the phone, “Why, Stuart, we were just speaking about you. My, uh, friend Molly invited herself over and was asking if you and my accountant have made any progress in going over the budget.” She paused and smiled. “Of course I would. I can come right away.” She winked at me, then said, “Thank you so much, Stuart. I’ll be right there.”

  She hung up the phone and said, “Ta dah,” while pirouetting and hugging herself.

  “Good news?” I asked in a monotone.

  “Absolutely. The best. I need you to baby
sit.”

  “My, that is good news,” I said sarcastically.

  “On second thought,” she said, returning her attention to her phone and pressing buttons, “I’ll get my neighbor to come over here to watch Mikey. Come with me to the Education Center, Molly. We’re about to bask in the glow of my having saved the day once again.”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  “Superintendent Collins has called a meeting for the school board so that he can make his announcement today.”

  “So we’re going back to the scene of the crime again,” I said, feeling a tad anxious at that thought, especially snow that a second murder had occurred.

  “Yes, and they’re televising the meeting. This means I’ll have my first opportunity to be on camera as one of the board members.”

  Her neighbor must have picked up, for Stephanie said into the phone, “Hello, this is Stephanie. Be with you in just a moment.” Then she held her hand over the mouthpiece, while giving a fashion-model’s gesture with her free hand to indicate the lovely blue dress she was wearing, “This is why I’m always so well dressed, Molly. I think, if you dress as though wonderful things will happen to you, they do indeed happen.”

  I muttered, “In that case, you must have chosen the wrong shade of shoes the night someone tried to choke you,” but she’d already returned her attention to the phone, instantly insistent, because Stephanie had “an absolute dire emergency.” Within minutes, the poor, trusting soul rushed over, and Stephanie promptly gave her instructions on what to do, should Mikey awaken soon. In the meantime, I’d realized that my own children had been home alone for too long now. I called Lauren and explained the situation, who said that she’d either go get them and bring them to her house or bring Rachel over. Stephanie’s neighbor, a pleasant-looking woman in her early thirties or so, had apparently been listening to my conversation with Lauren. She glared at Stephanie and said, “I thought you said that this was a ‘dire emergency’!”

  “There are all kinds of emergencies, my dear,” Stephanie explained as she strode out of the room toward her garage. “This just happens to be a happy one.”