Death of a PTA Goddess

by Leslie O'Kane

  She jutted out her chin and murmured, “Heather.” In the time it took me to sit down, her demeanor had shifted from caught-red-handed to defiant.

  “Cutting classes?” I asked.

  “Just study hall,” Heather said with a shrug.

  That was what kids always claimed when caught off-campus during school hours. I nodded and turned toward Skye. “Have the police had any luck catching your burglar?”

  “I dunno,” Skye said through gritted teeth. “I don’t know what you—”

  “Were the original recordings that you girls made of the PTA stolen, or had the police already taken that as evidence?”

  “They were stolen,” Skye said, her voice haughty and derisive. “Along with our camcorder, VCR, and DVD player. Which were, like, worth a lot more than the stupid tapes.”

  Not to the killer, I said to myself. “Mr. Alberti says that you told him you cut the really embarrassing parts that you recorded. Can you describe those sections to me?”

  The girls exchanged glances. “Nothing having to do with you,” Skye answered in a you-are-such-an-idiot tone of voice that was difficult for me to endure.

  “I figured that much, but I’m asking because I think those tapes might have contained a major clue that could identify Patty Birch’s killer.”

  Again, Heather gave a glance to her friend and then replied, “We went over this with the police last night.”

  “You did? Good.”

  “Yeah,” Skye said. “And, anyways, you can ask Adam Embrick. I’m sure you see him all the time. He was the one who wouldn’t let us put in the parts about his mom, the alcoholic.”

  “Did you film her drinking liquor at a school function?” I asked, keeping my voice steady to mask my discomfort at the implication. If the killer had to turn out to be a fellow PTA board member, Susan Embrick would be my very last choice.

  “I dunno.” Skye shrugged. “We axed the stuff about her. I was just trying to be respectful of Adam. A lot of good it did me.”

  “Were there any other deleted scenes?”

  Heather said, “Like we already told the police, we taped that guy with the dumb-looking mustache when he was talking to some other guy about Patty. The mustached guy wanted to know how to, like, make the moves on her ’cuz she wouldn’t give him the time of day.”

  The man with the dumb-looking mustache was obviously Chad Martinez. “What other guy?”

  “I don’t know. It was just some middle-aged guy.”

  “When did this conversation take place?”

  “After school one day, I guess.”

  Strange. Could the second man have been Randy Birch? Chad might have approached him to ask about her. Then again, Randy was not one to come to school very often. “Do you remember what he looked like?”

  “No, and it was nothing, like, major. We just took it out because it was so pathetic . . . one old guy asking another old guy for dating tips. I mean, sheesh!”

  “Anything else?” I asked Heather.

  “No,” Skye said, “and besides, you’re kind of interrupting an important conversation.”

  “Okay, I’ll let you get back to it in a second. I remember a couple of times in the film where Patty seemed to be a bit upset. One time she was kind of . . . glaring at someone. It was right when you both came up to her and asked if you could get on the agenda for the next meeting. Remember?”

  They both stared at me with blank faces and said no.

  “Another time it looked as though one of you had come into a room to speak to Patty just as someone else might have been yelling at her. A door slammed, and Patty said something like, ‘a friendly face at last.’ It was right before she kind of winked at the camera, and you ended the film.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Heather said, as if recalling this for the first time. “That was me. Some woman had been shouting at her. She kind of stormed out just after I came in. I didn’t catch any of it on the camera, though, and I didn’t overhear anything.”

  “Not even a few words?”

  Heather shrugged. “Not that I remember.”

  “Was she a member of the PTA?”

  “Yeah. I’m pretty sure she was one of the ones we taped dissing Patty that time in the cafeteria.”

  Aha! Now I was getting someplace! “Was it Emily Crown or Jane Daly?”

  Again, a blank face, so I prompted, “The one with dark hair who’s a little heavy, or the one with lighter hair . . . who sometimes wears a red knit cap?”

  “I don’t remember. Just that I’m pretty sure it was one of them. I mean, sheesh. It’s not like I knew at the time Patty was gonna get . . . I’m sorry I can’t help you and the police, but nothing we taped you guys saying seemed important enough for me to remember. You know?”

  “Adam helped edit the tape, right? Could he have made a copy or shown it to his mother?”

  “No way,” both girls said in unison. Skye continued, “He just helped us a little in the beginning. But I had all the camcorder cassettes, and I made the final video myself.”

  “There were never any copies of the video?”

  “Just one. I made it and kept it myself. Adam never even saw the tape.”

  That my daughter’s boyfriend wasn’t involved in this PTA-video mess was a relief to me. “Okay. Thanks for your time.” I gave the girls a smile and started to rise.

  “Yeah, right,” Skye mumbled. “Like we had nothing better to do. You can sure tell Karen’s your daughter . . . barging in on other people’s lives.”

  That stopped me in my tracks. I glared at her. Skye was pretty, all right, but she was sadly lacking in social graces. “One last thing, Skye. My daughter’s an eminently capable person and can handle her own problems. But don’t make any more harassing phone calls or visits, because it’s my home, too, and that makes your behavior my problem. I advise you strongly to stop and think how it must look to the guys at Carlton High when they learn how desperate and vindictive you’re acting.” I got up. Skye was now staring at her cup, her cheeks bright red. “It was nice meeting you, Heather.”

  Some of my bravura deserted me during my drive home. Had I only made things worse for Karen? I hoped not. In any case, it was too late to take back my words now.

  Susan Embrick might have been lying through her teeth to me. If Skye truly had seen her imbibing, Susan was unlikely to have been sober as long as she had claimed to be. That, in turn, cast doubt on her tale of Patty’s having slipped her vodka. But why lie about that?

  Come to think of it, of the four girls, Skye never seemed to have been the one to talk to Susan about getting the camera. So then, when exactly had Skye managed to catch Susan drinking? Or was Skye really only referring to the time that Adam was supposedly fooling around with Skye’s camera, and he caught the vodka-in-the-juice incident? Each scenario was perhaps equally likely.

  The girls’ account of the deleted scenes also cast a bit more suspicion on Chad, who’d forever chased Patty in vain. Also, either Emily or Jane had had a serious argument with Patty at the end of the tape. That struck me as potentially significant, because it took place within only a week or two of the murder. But how to find out which of the two women had fought with her? As Tommy would no doubt want to point out to me, if that argument had, in fact, led to murder, the killer was not about to say, “Oh, yes, Molly. Come to think of it, I was telling Patty her days were numbered right when that kid with the camera interrupted us.”

  I decided to let my subconscious work on the problem for a while. Once back home, I dropped into my chair in the living room with BC at my feet and doodled. I started thinking about how the women in Emily’s group had joked about the changes in their physical appearance. I drew an elderly woman trying on a swimsuit, staring over one shoulder at the mirror behind her. She calls over the fitting-room partition, “Mabel, we need to go to the Lost and Found right away. My rear end is missing.”

  After my drawing was complete, I realized that this cartoon could give me an excuse to talk to Emily Crown. Every mon
th, Emily published one of my cartoons in the newsletter that she faxed or e-mailed to members of her menopause group. The deadline for my next cartoon was fast approaching. My usual procedure had been to fax the sample cartoons to Patty, who gave me the okay and brought them to Emily. Because that was no longer an option, it would be reasonable to show this in person to Emily. I called her, and on the fourth ring, just as I was about to hang up, she answered.

  “Hi, Emily. This is Molly Masters. I wasn’t sure you’d be home today. I’d just been thinking that you were probably in your office.”

  “I work irregular hours. How are you?”

  “Fine. After going to your menopause meeting, I thought of a—”

  “The support group,” she corrected. “That’s what we call it. Menopause meeting sounds rather daunting.”

  “Okay.” Not that it seemed at all less daunting to me to have a support group as opposed to a meeting, but whatever. “I have a cartoon for your next newsletter, but I’m not completely sure how well it’ll go over.”

  “Oh?”

  “I wanted to show it to you in person, because I’m not sure if I should scrap this one and try again. Do you have a few minutes free today, by any chance?”

  She said she did and suggested that it would be easiest for her if I just came by her place now. I hopped into the car, with my roughed-out cartoon as my excuse for dropping in on her.

  When I showed her the cartoon, she laughed and said she “couldn’t imagine anyone finding it offensive.” Then she invited me to stay and chat for a while. After a minute of parenting-related conversation, I said in a true anecdote, “Last night I had a nightmare about Karen, that she was the one filming Patty in that last piece of the tape, when Patty revealed that she knew she was being filmed.”

  “You dreamed about it?” Emily asked, leaning forward in her seat on the couch a little.

  “Yes, but it took place in my own living room,” I fibbed. “Where was that conversation actually recorded? Do you remember?”

  “In a room at the high school.”

  “That’s right. I remember now. But what was Patty doing in a room at school by herself?”

  “As of last month, the principal was letting her use a room at the high school that used to be one of the counselors’ rooms. Before the latest budget cut cost us a counselor, that is.”

  “Oh, yeah. I remember Patty telling me that she had her own key to the building.”

  “The room is available for use by all the PTA board members. I’m surprised she didn’t tell you that.”

  “She probably did, but it must have slipped my mind.” Though this conversation felt more forced by the minute, I pressed on. “When exactly do you think that conversation was recorded? I didn’t notice the time stamp on the tape. Did you?”

  “No idea.”

  I waited, but she didn’t go on. Emily was being nowhere near as loquacious as she normally was. “When Stephanie and I first arrived at the . . . support group the other night, you said something about Patty. About how she took credit for other people’s ideas. Remember?”

  She furrowed her brow. “I doubt that was my exact wording.”

  “How would you word it?”

  “That she took credit for my ideas,” she replied with a sarcastic chuckle.

  “Did she really? How infuriating that must have been for you.”

  “Not infuriating, really, just annoying at times. It wasn’t all that important who got the credit, after all, and I truly believe Patty never realized when she did that.”

  “But that would have made it all the worse, in a way. One time someone stole a cartoon of mine and presented it as his own. At least I knew that he knew he’d gotten credit for something of mine. If he’d unknowingly plagiarized it, I wouldn’t have even had that sense of . . . validation.”

  “True, but you thought a whole lot less of this man for his deliberate theft, right? If he’d unknowingly plagiarized your cartoon, you wouldn’t have felt so violated, I’m sure.”

  “True. So that’s how you could still be friends with Patty,” I said, completing the thought for her. “But, knowingly or not, why would she consistently take your ideas?”

  Emily lifted her hand as if to dismiss the matter. “That was Patty. She was a whirlwind of energy, who didn’t always know in which direction she should take that energy.”

  At the support group, Emily had claimed “all” of Patty’s ideas came from her originally. How literal had she been? “What about the idea for Al’s students to make that video? Was that your idea?”

  She froze for a moment. Her cheeks turned red, and she averted her eyes. “Guilty as charged, I’m afraid.”

  “Why did you suggest such a thing? When Patty was taking the heat over her supposedly suggesting it, why didn’t you say it was originally your idea?”

  “Molly, I’ve felt horrible about that. And, I guess I’m glad you’re calling me on the carpet, as they say.”

  She didn’t go on, so I prompted, “So . . . what happened? Did you suggest it to Patty in passing or something?”

  “Yes. Just before school started this year, Patty happened to say that Al’s class had been her son’s favorite in high school. I mentioned, half jokingly, what a great project it would have been for him to have surreptitiously taped our PTA meetings. We got to talking about other things after that, and I never dreamed the results would be that . . . damned tape.”

  I nodded. “Apparently, Patty went directly to Mr. Alberti’s students and suggested the project to them.”

  Emily’s mouth opened slightly in surprise. “She did?”

  “According to Al’s wife. She thought Patty might have done that to show off or something . . . to demonstrate to the kids how cool she still was.”

  Emily’s face fell. “Oh, dear. Poor Patty.”

  “You knew Patty better than I did. Does that make any sense to you?”

  Emily looked truly miserable. “Yes, Patty could be desperately insecure at times. She knew a couple of those camera girls through her son. Helping them out by suggesting a topic for a class assignment would have made her day.”

  “Don’t you think she should have realized that—”

  “Let’s just drop the subject. Okay?”

  “Okay.” She must have not wanted to cast aspersions on her late friend. “Well, I’ve got to say that, of all people, Patty Birch had the least reason of anyone I know to feel insecure. I mean, the woman was nicknamed Perfect Patty, for heaven sakes.”

  Emily furrowed her brow.

  “Sorry. I’m not very good at dropping subjects once I’ve got a good hold on them.”

  “We all have our faults. And none of us enjoy having them exposed for the world to see.”

  I nodded. “I guess, in that respect, we’re all like the joke about the old, ugly stripper . . . in which the crowd starts yelling, ‘Put it back on!’ ”

  She smiled a little, but that quickly turned to a frown. “Molly, everyone knows you’re the self-appointed murder investigator in this town. Do you really think this is the way to go about it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Confronting people like this? Asking them what they were thinking when they made negative comments about Patty? You’re just stirring up trouble, aren’t you?”

  “I suppose so. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that I thought you were guilty of anything. You’ve been really close to Patty, ever since she moved here. Literally, too. You’re all of—what?—two blocks away?” Which also meant that she probably didn’t drive that night, either, I told myself.

  “Yes, we used to go for walks together, every morning. Good prevention for osteoporosis, by the way.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Do you even have the slightest interest in menopause, or did you join the group just to garner evidence against us?”

  “Of course I’m sincerely interested in learning about menopause. What woman in her forties can afford not to be?” I couldn’t resist adding, “Though I came mostly for
Stephanie’s sake.”

  Emily nodded thoughtfully. “She’s got a lot of peri-menopause signs, now that I think about it.” She glanced at her watch, and I took the hint and said that I needed to get going. She walked me to the door, but then stopped and touched my sleeve. When our eyes met, she said gently, “Molly, I’d hate to see you become a second victim. Let the police do their jobs. If I were you, I’d stay out of this entirely.”

  “So would most rational human beings.”

  Too bad I wasn’t one of them, I thought as I stepped outside into the brisk afternoon air.

  Despite some of the things I’d recently heard about Patty, I knew one wonderful thing about her: She was absolutely the type of person who, had it been me instead of her, would have done anything and everything to help my children.

  I also knew beyond any doubt that the only way that I, or anyone else, could help Kelly Birch was to see to it that her mother’s murderer was brought to justice.

  Chapter 14

  Chia Cheese Pets

  After school, Nathan had gone to a friend’s house on the opposite side of our development. Blessed with some extra time on my hands, I gave Karen another driving lesson. She was doing well as we navigated down a congested main road. Up ahead of us was a sign for the highway, and Karen asked, “Can I please go on the Northway? Just for one exit?”

  For some reason my mouth short-circuited my brain, and I heard myself say, “Okay.”

  “Thanks, Mom!”

  Already I was getting a major case of nerves. “We’ll have you stick in the right lane no matter what, and we’ll get off at the next exit. I just hope I’ll be able to remember how to get us home on the back roads.”

  My heart was racing, and I dug my fingers into the armrests. I tried to silently reassure myself. Karen truly had been making great strides in her driving, and there was nothing innately challenging about being on the Northway, except for the high speeds, increased traffic, and additional lanes. “Karen, on second thought . . .” Too late. She’d started to veer onto the ramp.