by Sara Rosett
Most of the furniture was going next. Jane said she couldn’t afford to move all the furniture halfway across the country. The only things that were staying were a rocking chair and a small end table that Jane said had belonged to their mother. Jane would take them back with her to Missouri after her next trip back here.
I transferred the box of belongings to the seat of the rocking chair in the living room, where I could keep an eye on it while they loaded the rest of the boxes. After they finished, I had enough time to hike down to the van, go to the nearby sub shop, and have a turkey sandwich before I returned to the school to help with the parties.
Nathan’s party in Mr. Spagnatilli’s room involved lots of frosted cupcakes and the traditional decorating of Mr. Metacarpal, the skeleton, for summer. “It gives the kids something to do—besides run around the room and scream,” Mr. Spagnatilli said.
I thought it was a very clever idea. Each of the kids had brought some contribution. Nathan’s was a beat-up straw hat. By the end of the party, in addition to the hat, the skeleton was decked out in swim shorts, sunglasses, swim flippers, and sunglasses.
A more grown-up atmosphere permeated Livvy’s classroom. There were still cupcakes, but no special activities or games—those were for babies, I was informed—but the kids were allowed to talk among themselves and most of the time was spent signing memory books.
As I left both parties, I promised each of the kids that I would be back as soon as the furniture pickup was over, to sign them out early. I offered to take them with me then—there was no need for the kids to stay for the full day—but they both wanted to spend the last hour with their friends so I went back to the office to sign out.
Since the sign-in computer was in smithereens, a paper on a clipboard had replaced it. Last time I’ll sign out this year, I thought as I wrote the time I was leaving on the line next to my name. I had that funny half-sad feeling that a phase of my life was coming to a close. This was the last year Livvy would be in elementary school. We rush through our days so quickly and have so many little rituals that we do, day in and day out, but then a moment like the last day of school comes along. It’s a milestone that makes a definite break in the continuum and emphasizes that one phase is ending and another beginning.
I waved to get Mrs. Kirk’s attention. She was in her office, but her door was open. “Where’s Marie?” I asked.
“She left early. Before lunch, actually.”
“She left?” I repeated, surprised that she wouldn’t stay for the whole day. “But perfect attendance has always been so important to her.” I saw that the individual touches, like her block calendar, the gnome figurines, and the sweater that was usually draped over the back of her chair, were gone.
Mrs. Kirk smiled. “I guess she figured she could slack off on her last day. She’s retired now.” Mrs. Kirk lowered her voice. “And after these last few weeks, I don’t blame her for wanting to leave early. I would if I could,” she said with a mock grimace. “Anyway, Marie said something about going out of town on a short vacation to celebrate.”
“How nice for her,” I said, then glanced at the clock. “Oh, I’ve got to go.”
I hoofed it back to Klea’s house and turned on one of the window coolers, in case the next pickup was delayed. But the consignment shop people were right on time and began wheeling out furniture as soon as I let them in. It didn’t take long to clear the living room. The dining room was more of a challenge with the large table in such a small area. They took out the table first, then the heavy china cabinet. They removed the top of the china cabinet with the glass doors and carried it out, then returned for the base. As they tilted it on the dolly and moved it carefully out the front door, one of the men said, “Hey, look at this. Hold up.” The other man paused with the dolly balanced at the top of the metal ramp they’d positioned over the porch steps.
“Did you know that was down there?” the first guy asked, pointing to something flat taped to the bottom of the cabinet.
“No,” I said.
He reached down, brushed away some dust, and pried the thing off, then handed it to me. It was an inter-office envelope.
Chapter Twenty-two
The envelope was thick and filled with what felt like paper. It flexed slightly as I handled it. The envelope was so full that the flap barely covered the opening of the envelope, but the red string was tightly wound around the little bracket and held it closed.
“Might be the Declaration of Independence,” the man said with a laugh, putting out his hand to steady the base of the cabinet as the other man backed slowly down the metal ramp.
“I doubt it,” I said. As they loaded the china cabinet in the truck, I unwound the string and peered inside. It contained a thick stack of paper and a leather notebook. I was about to close the flap and tuck the envelope away in the box with Klea’s belongings when a design on the top paper caught my eye. It was the logo for the Hoops for Healthy Hearts event, which was a fundraiser that the students participated in each year. The school had held the event last month, and Livvy and Nathan had both collected pledges for the number of basketball goals they could shoot during the event.
Still standing on the porch, I slid out the paper and scanned it. It was the final accounting form with the figures for the money the school had raised. Marie’s flowing signature was across the bottom of the page, next to the total amount of money raised. My eyebrows shot up as I took in the number with several zeros. I had no idea that the kids had raised that much money. I remembered Mrs. Kirk had praised the kids for doing a good job, but she’d never mentioned a specific amount of money.
These were obviously school records and should be at the school, not Klea’s house. I tipped the leather journal out of the envelope and glanced through it as the men continued to remove the rest of the furniture from the house, wondering if the journal belonged to Klea or if it belonged to the school and should go back with all the papers.
But as I flipped through the book, I saw that the handwriting looked like Marie’s smooth cursive. I’d seen her handwriting so many times in the school office when she signed off on hall passes after I brought the kids back to school after a dentist or doctor appointment.
I fanned the pages of the journal. It contained a long, ledger-like list with dates, a brief description, and then amounts entered in neat, handwritten columns. I skimmed down a random page and recognized most of the descriptions as fundraisers the school had conducted. Besides Hoops for Healthy Hearts, there were entries for the school’s booster club activities, like the Friday Store, where kids could purchase pencils or candy and the profits went toward purchasing more books for the library and upgrades for computers. But there were some entries that I didn’t understand at all, just a row of random numbers and letters.
I reached the end of the pages with handwriting. The last entry caught my eye. It was for Hoops for a Healthy Heart and the date was last month. Like all the other entries, it had two numbers following the description. The first column was more than the second column. It was five hundred dollars higher, in fact.
I looked at the sheet of paper that I’d first taken out of the envelope and checked it again, comparing it to the final fundraising total in the ledger, thinking that I must have misread the numbers. But I hadn’t. The amount reported to Hoops for a Healthy Heart was definitely the lower amount.
“We’re done, ma’am.”
I looked up to find one of the men holding out a paper, the receipt for the items they’d picked up. The other man was in the truck with the engine running, ready to leave.
“Oh. Great. Before you leave, let me check inside the house, okay?” I asked, belatedly remembering I was supposed to be monitoring what the men had taken. I left him holding the receipt and quickly moved through the rooms. Everything looked as it should. The rocking chair, the box of Klea’s belongings, and the side table were still there, but all the other furniture was loaded. I returned to the porch, thanked him for waiting, and took the receipt
.
He climbed in the truck, and it trundled away. I glanced at the school. Parents were already arriving, lining up for the car circle line, but I had some time before the school was out. If what I suspected was true . . . well, I wanted to make sure I was right before I showed any of this to Mrs. Kirk.
I went back in Klea’s house and locked both dead bolts on the front door. I needed somewhere quiet and private to check the ledger and the papers. With the blinds drawn and all the bolts on the doors locked, I felt safe.
I moved the cardboard box out of the rocking chair to the floor and sat down in the rocker. I pulled the entire stack of papers out of the folder and looked through them, comparing the dates on the papers with the dates in the ledger. Many of the pages were like the Hoops for a Healthy Heart form, summary sheets of fundraising totals, and my heart sank as I looked up each one and found a discrepancy between the total on the sheets and the total in the ledger. The total in the first column in the ledger was always higher, sometimes by a couple of hundred dollars, but other times by several thousand, and it was always the smaller amount that was listed on the reporting forms.
Then there were some forms that had the school district name printed at the top, contract work requests and purchase requests. Each request had a number associated with it on the form, and that number was also recorded in the ledger—the seemingly random strings of letters and numbers. When I went through the purchase requests, I found the amounts on the forms requesting money from the district were higher than the amounts in the ledger.
I finally sat back with a thud that set the rocking chair moving. I shook my head while I surveyed the stacks of paper I’d set on the floor as I progressed through the forms. I didn’t want to believe it, but Marie had been skimming money from the school, and not just ten or twenty dollars here or there. She had taken thousands of dollars. Maybe hundreds of thousands. The ledger didn’t have a running total, but the amounts were significant.
I rubbed my hand over my eyes, thinking that it was awful. She had been at the school so long. Everyone trusted her implicitly—even Mrs. Kirk, who must never have suspected anything because she’d let Marie handle the money. And Marie had handled all the money. She collected the cash for the fundraisers and counted it. Obviously, no one else had checked her totals. As the ledger showed, she just kept some of the money and turned in the lower numbers.
I wasn’t completely sure about the requests to the district, but it looked like she’d done the opposite thing there, turning in a higher amount to the district and then paying out a lower amount to the company or contractor and keeping the difference for herself. She must have been doctoring the files as well as the receipts. I suddenly thought of the water damage to the records room and the vandalism.. . . Could Marie be behind those things as well? Was it an effort to cover her tracks completely before she retired?
I closed the ledger, feeling incredibly sad and somewhat betrayed. Someone I thought I knew had been siphoning money from the school. Stealing from kids . . . that was low.
And somehow Klea had figured it out. She must have. She had all the evidence here, even Marie’s ledger. How had she gotten these papers, the fundraising forms and the district purchase requests? Had she found them while she was snooping and gradually built up a stack of evidence that Marie couldn’t deny? And the ledger, how had she gotten that?
I pulled my phone out of my pocket, suddenly nervous. I wasn’t sure how it all fit together, but my gut feeling was that this was why Klea had been killed. Perhaps Peg had committed suicide, but this paper trail went back years and years, and I could imagine Marie killing to keep it a secret.
I was about to dial, but stopped as a thought hit me. Marie couldn’t have killed Klea. Marie had been out of town Wednesday morning, the morning of the fire drill, the morning Klea was killed. Marie had been miles away on Jekyll Island.
Had she really been on Jekyll Island? I pushed my foot against the floor and set the rocking chair in motion as I considered everything. We had only Marie’s word that she had been out of town. Mrs. Kirk had called her cell phone and talked to her that morning. Marie had said she was on the coast of Georgia, but she could have been blocks away or even inside the school.
What if Marie had arrived at the school Wednesday morning and either she’d caught Klea in the act of collecting incriminating papers, or maybe Klea had confronted her? I let the scenario play out in my mind. Vaughn and Mrs. Kirk had seen Klea that morning around seven-thirty. Students would have begun arriving at seven-fifty. If Marie killed Klea, she’d need someplace to stash Klea’s body until she could get it out of the school. What better place than a rarely used storage closet?
And maybe it wasn’t some student prankster who’d set off the fire drill, but Marie. It would be one way to clear the school. While everyone was out front on the grass waiting for the firefighters to arrive, Marie would have had a few minutes to move Klea’s body out of the school. If Klea’s body had been in the rolling trash can, Marie could have easily pushed it through the school and out the back doors of the lobby, then across the blacktop to the woods. It would have been harder to move the trash can over the dirt path, but it was hard-packed earth. It would have taken some effort to move it along the path, but it could have been done. With all the students, teachers, and staff in the front of the school, the building would have shielded her from their view as she moved from the school building to the woods.
Once Marie was in the woods, she could have dumped the trash can, then continued on to the other side of the woods and come out at the street on the far side of the school. The neighborhood was full of walkers and joggers. No one would give her a second glance. Then all she would have had to do would be walk back around to the school and get her car and leave. If she’d even had her car at the school. She lived close by. She’d mentioned that the other day. She could walk the few blocks back to her house and be in her car on the way to the coast to establish her alibi.
I stopped rocking. I had to get these papers to Detective Waraday. I checked my watch, automatically calculating whether I had enough time to drop everything off at the sheriff’s office, but it was too close to dismissal. I certainly didn’t want to be driving around with this stuff in the van when I had the kids with me, and I wasn’t going to take the chance of leaving the papers and the ledger at the school with Mrs. Kirk. I didn’t think she was involved, but . . . well, Marie had worked for her. Mrs. Kirk should have looked over the school’s finances. I suddenly wondered where Marie was right that moment.
With shaking fingers, I sent a text to Abby. Emergency. Can you get the kids for me? I promised I’d get them out of school early, but can’t. I’m still at Klea’s house.
Her text was a quick affirmative reply. I spread some of the pages out and photographed them, then took pictures of the matching pages in the ledger. I attached the images and tapped out a short message to Detective Waraday, saying that I’d found what looked to be some important files at Klea’s house.
After a few minutes, he replied. In your area. I’ll come pick them up.
I texted back that I would wait there. I quickly stacked the pages and the ledger, then returned everything to the envelope. I wound the string around the brad to keep the flap closed and stood up. I hurried across the living room, intending to peek out the blinds so that I could watch for Detective Waraday, but my foot connected with the cardboard box and sent items flying across the room. I’d forgotten that I’d set the box on the floor.
Hand to my heart, I quickly collected the sweater, books, and coffee mugs, tossing them back in the box. I spotted one of the little wooden cubes from the calendar under the rocking chair. I retrieved it and tossed it back in the box, then stopped as a thought struck me.
Slowly, I picked up the second cube of wood with the numbers on each side and looked at it. That elusive fragment of thought that had been teasing at my mind suddenly came to me, blooming into completeness like those time-lapse pictures of flowers that transit
ion from bud to blowsy fullness in seconds. Marie was at the school the Wednesday morning that Klea died.
I traced the number cut into the wooden cube with my finger. On the morning of the Muffins with Mom event, I had left Marie a note, saying that idea of a final fundraiser for the school had been shot down at the PTA meeting. I’d put the sticky note with the news on the two wooden cubes that made up her calendar. They had been positioned so that the numbers one and zero formed the date, the tenth of May.
My mind scrolled back through the many times I had arrived at the office at the same time as Marie. The first thing she did was lean over her desk and arrange the numbers on the wooden cubes so that they reflected the correct date. She did it even before putting her purse away, taking off her jacket, or sitting down at her desk. In fact, she’d arrived late that next Monday after Klea’s body had found. I’d been in the office signing in at the check-in computer when she’d arrived. She’d hurried over to her desk and plucked the sticky note I’d left her from the calendar, then changed the blocks to reflect the new date, her purse still in her hand.
Marie must have arrived at the school Wednesday morning for some reason and then done what she always did first thing, change the date on her calendar. It was a habit—an unconscious rote behavior. She probably didn’t even think about it when she did it.
Marie had been there Wednesday morning, not in Jekyll Island. It wasn’t evidence that Detective Waraday could use. He would say anyone could have changed the date on the calendar, but combined with the evidence in the envelope—
At a whisper of sound, I jerked around. Marie stood in the doorway of the dining room.