by Jeff Shelby
Be a mom.
And it worked every time. By mid-afternoon, I was feeling better and normal and didn’t even mind when Brenda called later and asked if I could grab Maddie from cheer practice again.
“Are your kids still sick?”
“No, thank goodness,” she said, breathing an audible sigh of relief. “And I somehow came through unscathed – me and Maddie both. Must have been our hand sanitizer baths that kept us healthy.”
If anyone would actually bathe his or her body in a tubful of hand sanitizer, it was Brenda.
“So we’re all fine,” she said. “Well, Johnny is suffering PTSD from the corn maze team builder. But no one is throwing up. Anyway, we took my car in to the shop this morning and it’s not done yet. And I’m pretty sure their free ride service doesn’t extend to picking my kid up from cheer practice.”
I chuckled. “Probably not. Yeah, no problem. I’ll get her.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I conned the neighbor into taking her but she’s not home. I tried my mom but she’s at the gym. Which is totally weird.”
“It’s no problem,” I said. “It’s ten minutes away.”
“I know. I just feel bad asking. I’ll owe you a plate of cookies or a jug of kombucha or something.”
“We’ll take the cookies,” I told her, not bothering to mention I had a counter full of desserts from my baking spree the previous day.
The kids declined riding along with me to the gym, so I headed over by myself, making sure not to wear the dreaded Moose River sweatshirt.
Greta Mathisen spotted me as soon as I entered the gym. She was dressed in exactly the same clothes as before, save for the red headband around her head. She tracked me to the spot on the bleachers and after she’d brought the girls together in the middle of the gym floor, she headed in my direction.
“Back for more, huh?” she asked.
“Just picking up Maddie again,” I told her.
She smiled as she looked me over. “Better fashion choices this time, I see.”
“I stripped myself of all Moose River references before driving over.”
“Good thinking,” she said, missing my sarcasm. “Will you be at the competition?”
“Uh, I hadn’t really thought about it. I guess we might come to watch Maddie. But my girls aren’t competing. Or in cheerleading of any kind.”
“Well, that’s a shame,” Coach Mathisen said. “Because we are just going to blow the doors off of old Moose River this year.”
I nodded. “Yes. You told me that before.”
“And it doesn’t look like Amanda’s going to be making a reappearance before the competition,” she said, chomping hard on a piece of gum. She grinned. “So that pretty much seals it for us.”
“Might as well not even hold the competition, I guess.”
“Exactly,” she said, then caught herself. “Wait. That was a joke.”
“A small one.”
She made a noise, something between a sigh and a chuckle. “Well, I’m just saying that I don’t think there’s anyone in this part of the state that can beat us now,” she said, watching the girls on the floor. “With my coaching, we’ve really improved. And when your biggest rival is missing their most important cog, it’s almost inevitable.”
“Almost. Yes.”
She glanced at me. “You haven’t heard anything else about Amanda, have you?”
I thought about my conversation with Detective Hanborn. “Nope. Nothing.”
“She hasn’t shown up for your little play or whatever it was?”
I didn’t think the play was any littler than her regional cheer competition. “It’s a production of Snow White. And no. She hasn’t.”
“Good, good,” she said, then caught herself. “I mean, that’s too bad.” Her cheeks flushed. “You know what I mean.”
I waved at Maddie, making sure she saw me waiting. I didn’t want to stick around any longer than we needed to. “Sure.”
“I don’t think she’ll be back,” Coach Mathisen said.
“No?” I turned to look at her, frowning. “And why is that?”
Greta Mathisen’s entire face flooded with color. “Oh, I just mean that I think that if she was coming back, we’d have heard something from her by now. And I haven’t heard of anyone who’s heard from her. So I think she’s going to be well-hidden for the competition.”
“Hidden?” I asked.
Her face colored again. “Poor choice of words. Absent. Not present. Whatever. Anyway. I have to go. Nice to see you, Moose River.”
I watched her walk to the other end of the gym and start up another conversation with several moms waiting on their daughters.
Hidden. It was a strange choice of words. And it occurred to me that if Eleanor and Madison Bandersand had something to gain from Amanda’s disappearance, so did Greta Mathisen.
But I hadn’t mentioned her to Jake or to Detective Hanborn. She hadn’t made my suspect list.
I sighed and reminded myself that I didn’t need to be making a suspect list because no one was interested. Not even the detective assigned to the case. If there was a case. Which Hanborn had made clear there pretty much wasn’t.
“Hey,” Maddie said, smiling at me. Her face was flushed from exertion and her entire body was covered in a fine sheen of sweat. She pulled on her sweatshirt. “Thanks for picking me up.”
“No problem, kiddo,” I told her.
She bent down and retied her shoelaces. “I saw Coach Mathisen talking to you.”
“She was,” I said. “She’s...interesting.”
Maddie laughed. “My mom says she’s crazy.”
I glanced down the gym to wear Mathisen was chatting up the other moms. She was waving her hands, talking animatedly, her eyes wide.
I wondered just how crazy she actually was.
TWENTY SEVEN
“Daisy, I need a word with you,” Eleanor Bandersand said, lifting her chin and looking down her imperious nose at me.
I’d gotten Maddie dropped off and made it home with enough time to throw together a fast dinner before I had to get the two younger girls to their rehearsal. Rather than run back and forth, I brought my laptop with me and decided to work on the program while I sat in the back of the theater for the two-hour practice. Rehearsal was halfway over when Eleanor approached me and asked me to step out in the hall with her. I closed my computer and set it on the empty seat next to the one I’d been sitting in and followed her out of the theater.
Her thumb and forefinger stroked her chubby chin. She looked at me through her false eyelash. “Daisy. Well, this is just somewhat awkward for me.”
“Talking in the hallway?”
She gave me a condescending smile. “Such the...jokester. But, no. I’m very comfortable talking in the hall. I’m actually comfortable talking anywhere. It’s my theater training.”
Of course it was.
“We have... a bit of a situation,” she continued.
“We do?”
“Yes.” She paused. “And it involves you.”
I folded my arms across my chest, my defensive instincts immediately kicking in. “Alright.”
“Let me first state that I am oh so grateful for your willingness to assist with the design and production of our program,” she said. “Joanne Claussen has assured me that your work thus far has been nothing short of spectacular.”
“Joanne might be overselling it.”
“Perhaps,” she said. “But I trust her judgment and she has praised your efforts. So I want you to know how much I appreciate your work.”
“Okay,” I said, still wary. “You’re welcome.”
“Yes, yes,” she said, still stroking her chin, like a professor. “And I’ve very much been charmed by the acting abilities of your two daughters. They are lovely young ladies and we are lucky to have them.”
“Thank you,” I said. Normally, this type of praise would have thrilled me but her words were as hollow as her expression.
“Ye
s, of course,” she said. “But now we have...a situation.”
“So you’ve already said.”
She pursed her lips. “My daughter says that the two of you had a bit of a...run-in recently.”
A tiny knot formed in my stomach. “Okay.”
Eleanor raised her eyebrow. “Can you confirm that?”
I shuffled my feet against the tiled hallway floor. “Yes. We did. I found a backpack she’d left behind in one of the classrooms.”
She nodded. “So you did indeed find her knapsack?”
Knapsack? Who said knapsack?
“I did,” I said. “Joanne and I were here working and she asked me to close up the classrooms. I found it in one of the rooms.”
“I see,” Eleanor said, nodding slowly. “I see. And then what occurred?”
“What occurred?” I shrugged. “She came back to the room. I gave it to her. We left. That’s what occurred.”
She stared at me for a long time. It reminded me of the way I stared at my own kids when I thought they were holding something back or not telling the truth. Eventually, they would cave under my stern gaze and give up whatever they were withholding. Jake sometimes was able to do the same to me.
But there was no way in heck I was going to cave to a condescending pain in the rear end like Eleanor Bandersand.
“That’s what occurred,” she finally said. “That’s what happened?”
I shrugged. “More or less, yes.”
She held her index finger to her lips. “Ah, yes,” she said, tapping her lower lip. “It might be the ‘more’ part I’m interested in.”
“Eleanor?”
“Yes?” she said, leaning in.
“Can you stop talking like you’re on Masterpiece Theater and tell me what exactly we’re talking about?”
She stopped tapping and the corner of her eye twitched and I thought I saw her eyelashes stick together before unclumping themselves.
I waited silently.
She chewed on the inside of her cheek for a moment. Then she cleared her throat. “My daughter informed me that you were rifling through her things,” she said quietly.
I sighed, exasperated. “I wasn’t rifling through anything. I opened the bag in order to see who it belonged to. She and I had this exact same conversation.”
She folded her arms across her ribcage. Because her pants were pulled up so high. “My daughter claims differently.”
“She what?”
“She claims you opened the bag and were going through it,” Eleanor said. “Perhaps to see what was in it, perhaps not. But she says she caught you rifling through her belongings. And that is a problem.”
On cue, Madison came bouncing around the corner, a water bottle tilted to her lips. When she spotted us, she froze, her eyes wide.
“Madison,” I said. “Can you tell me exactly what your mother is upset about? Because I’m pretty sure that you and I settled things after I explained --”
She pulled the bottle from her lips and pointed at me. “She’s a liar, Mom. I told you. A big, giant liar. Whatever she says, she’s lying.”
“Go inside the theater, Madison,” Eleanor commanded. “Now.”
“No,” I said, irritated. “Don’t move. Do you remember the conversation we had?” She shot me a look of horror and I continued. “When you came in? When you started crying?”
She was a bundle of nervous twitches and fidgets, unsure of what to do. She ran her hand through her long blond hair, pulling it toward her face. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was using it as a magic curtain to hide herself.
“Madison,” Eleanor barked. “Inside. Now.”
Madison dropped the handful of hair, glanced at me, then sprinted into the theater.
We stood there, the hallway quiet again. My teeth were locked together, my jaw rigid. My heart hammered inside my chest.
Eleanor took a deep breath, then exhaled. “I think it would be best if you...kept your distance from the production.”
“Kept my distance?” I asked, my voice cracking. “Are you kidding me?”
“I am not kidding you, Daisy,” she said, shaking her head. “Far from it. I’m sorry that it’s come to this, but I can’t have our performers distracted and bothered by...our parents.”
My jaw throbbed. “The only one who is distracted and bothered is your daughter.”
“Who, I might remind you, is now the star of our show,” Eleanor said primly. “And it is vital that she is focused and prepared. Which can only happen if she is not distracted.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“So at this point in time, I have no choice but to ban you from all theater-related activities,” Eleanor said.
I opened my eyes. “Banned?”
“I think that’s where we’re at,” Eleanor said, lifting her chin.
I blinked several times. My jaw ached. My stomach hurt.
Banned.
“You’re going to ban me?” I asked, incredulous. “Because your kid is a liar?”
Eleanor’s eyes widened. “Excuse me? Did you just call my daughter a liar? I beg your pardon!”
“You can beg whatever you want,” I told her. “But your daughter is not telling you the truth. I found her bag. I opened it to see who it belonged to. She came into the room. End of story.”
“This is just embarrassing, Daisy,” she said, holding a hand over her heart. “I’d really prefer not to have a scene. Could you please just gather your things and go?”
My chest heaved. My head hurt. And my fists were rolled into tight little balls, ready to pound Eleanor Bandersand’s face.
I glanced at the theater. I had no idea what game Madison was trying to play, but I didn’t owe her anything. We’d made a deal. I’d agreed to help her, to keep her secret. And now she was telling everyone I was a liar. I didn’t owe that dumb kid anything.
I blinked.
Which is what she was.
A kid.
Under a lot of pressure. Who was making a really poor decision.
She was just a kid.
I took a deep breath and forced my fingers to uncurl from my palms. I turned toward the theater, then walked toward the doors.
“Daisy!” Eleanor said. “Did you not hear me? I’m banning you from the theater. Please don’t make me call security.”
I stopped and turned around. “Eleanor. I’m going back in to get my computer and to get my things. Then I will leave. I will no longer be a distraction or a bother.” I looked her up and down. “And if you so much as mention any of this to my daughters, if you treat them any differently because of this, I will yank those pants all the way over your head until you suffocate.”
TWENTY EIGHT
I set the half-empty beer on the nightstand. “I’ve never been banned from anything.”
Jake sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled off his socks. “Didn’t you get banned from soccer?”
I frowned at him. “No, I was warned. They told me my cheering was too... enthusiastic.”
“Right.”
I’d waited for the girls in the car, the van idling in the parking lot of the high school, the heater running and smoke coming out of my ears. I was angry and embarrassed. My first inclination was to grab the girls and walk, but I didn’t think that was fair to them. I was being banned, not them. My issues with Eleanor and Madison weren’t theirs and I didn’t think they should be penalized for having a mother who failed to get along with the director and her prima donna daughter.
My second inclination was to go back in and tell Eleanor exactly what I’d found in Madison’s bag and how she’d begged me not to tell anyone. But I didn’t see what that would accomplish. Eleanor might not have believed me and even if she had, all it would do was create friction between her and her daughter. It wouldn’t do anything for me, other than give me the chance to prove I wasn’t lying to someone I didn’t really care about. And even though that was a little bit tempting, the whole clear
ing my name thing, I knew it wouldn’t solve anything. Because Eleanor wasn’t going to listen to anyone other than her daughter. And herself.
So, instead of doing those things, I’d waited on Grace and Sophie, put on a fake smile for them when then got in the van, then drove home and stomped around the house like a maniac, which caused the rest of the family to give me a wide berth. Emily had asked Jake for help with her ASL review instead of me, and Will had quickly disappeared into his bedroom. The beer on the nightstand was my second.
I ripped off my jeans and pulled on my pajama pants. “I mean, that kid out and out lied to her mother and I’m the one who’s losing out.”
“I don’t think being banned from rehearsals is all that much of a punishment,” Jake offered. “At least you don’t have to listen to Eleanor screaming.”
“It’s the idea,” I told him, pulling on an old T-shirt and sitting down on the bed. I propped myself up against the headboard. “The idea that I’ve done something wrong. The girls will find out. They’ll hear it from someone else. And it will embarrass them.” I looked at him. “And to be clear, she banned me not from rehearsals, but from the theater. Which I assume means I can’t go to the performances.”
He snorted. “Yeah, well, we’ll see about that. And you know what? Just tell the girls that you and Eleanor aren’t getting along and that you’ve decided to stay away during rehearsal time. If people say anything else to them, you can just tell them it’s gossip.”
“I’m not going to lie to them,” I said, shaking my head. “If they ask, I’m going to tell them: your psycho director has ordered me off the premises because her spoiled brat of a kid lied about me.”
Jake nodded. “Yeah. That should clear things right up for them.”
I reached for the beer. “And I’m not finishing that stupid program. I’m calling Joanne tomorrow and telling her she’s on her own.”
“Alright.”
“I mean, if I’m banned from the theater, then I should be banned from theater projects, too,” I said, taking a sip from the bottle. “They can get someone else to finish it.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Jake said, reaching for the beer. “But you won’t do it.”