Curse of the PTA

by Laura Alden

  “We’re going to take an unscheduled break,” I said. “The meeting will reconvene in ten minutes.” Since I still had the gavel in my hand, I gave it another crack. “Ten minutes,” I repeated, and pushed my chair away from the table.

  I turned to Dennis. “I am so sorry.”

  He smiled. “Don’t be. Meetings are rarely so entertaining.”

  Spoken like a true bystander. “Well, I still apologize. We don’t usually behave like this.”

  He brushed off my apology and asked for directions to the closest restroom. I pointed left for the nearest boys’ room and pointed right for the closest adult-male-sized facility. I watched him walk out the classroom door and turn unhesitatingly right.

  By that time, the room was mostly empty. Other than Natalie’s friend and Whitney Heer, who were huddled together in a back corner, and Randy, still in his seat and opening a bag of cashews, the only other person in the room was Marina.

  “Well, that was fun,” she said, a grin brightening her plump face.

  I looked at her, wondering for the millionth time how we’d ever become best friends.

  “Oh, come on.” She hitched her chair close enough to the front table to rest her elbows on the agenda. “You can’t tell me you didn’t enjoy that at least a little.”

  “Okay, I won’t.”

  “Quit that,” she said. “Where’s a video camera when you need one, anyway? You should have seen yourself up there, whacking that hammer on the table.”

  “Gavel,” I murmured.

  “‘Not the time or place,’” she quoted me. “Ha! ‘A sad way to introduce our guest.’” She threw her head back and laughed. “And the way you stood up and looked at all of us? It was wonderful.”

  “Glad I could bring some pleasure into your life,” I said dryly.

  “Only thing is, you could have let it go a little longer. I really wanted to see who was going to win, Tina or Carol. I had no idea Carol had such a temper. Did you?”

  Randy umphed to his feet. “Carol’s just like her mama,” he said, and walked out.

  Marina and I looked at each other, and for some reason, we burst into laughter. When our giggles subsided, I flicked a glance to the back corner, but the two women were deep in a discussion regarding cupcake recipes.

  “When Tina brought up the topic of how to spend the money,” I said, “I got the feeling that—”

  “That Claudia had loaded her with the question? That Claudia’s obviously fake cough was a cue for her to ask it? Why, yes, Virginia, there was a plot afoot. Clear as the freckles on your pretty little face.”

  “I do not have freckles.”

  “In summer you do. And unless the fall equinox has been moved to a different date, it is still summer. Which doesn’t seem fair, really, since school has started. No child should have to be stuck in a classroom when it’s still summer, is what I say.”

  She rambled on, but I wasn’t really listening. I was busy thinking about the implications of Claudia seeding the audience with her questions. Why on earth would she do that? Why wouldn’t she just ask them herself? What was the advantage to—

  “Earth to Beth.” Marina snapped her fingers in front of my face.

  I lurched back. “I hate it when you do that.”

  “And I hate it when you get that polite look when I’m talking.”

  Fair enough. “What does Earth want with Beth?”

  She looked left, then right, then leaned in close. “What did you do with the ballots?”

  Over her shoulder, I saw Randy stump back into the room. Behind him came Carol and Nick, who were in a friendly argument about what was better, thin-crust or deep-dish pizza. Behind them more PTA members were starting to return. I glanced at the clock. A few more minutes. “For secretary?” I asked.

  “No, the ballots for the 1852 presidential election.” She looked at the ceiling. “How can someone so smart be so stupid? Of course the secretary ballots.”

  “They’re in my bag.”

  “Well, tell me.” She patted her hands on the table in a quiet imitation of a drumroll. “I’m dying to know.”

  “What part of secret ballot don’t you understand?”

  “What I understand is that you know more than I do, and I can’t stand it.”

  “Summer won. And that reminds me.” I reached into my bag and retrieved the ballots. Just out of her reach, I worked on tearing each one into tiny pieces.

  “Aw, you’re such a spoilsport.”

  She made a halfhearted attempt to snatch the ballots out of my hands, but I held them away and kept ripping and ripping until the bits of paper were small enough that it would have taken a team of CSI experts two full episodes to reassemble them.

  “You are no fun.” Marina slumped in her chair. “I hope this president thing isn’t going to your head.”

  “So you’re saying that if I’d still been secretary I would have handed over a pile of secret ballots?”

  She heaved a theatrical sigh. “Your overly developed sense of right and wrong would have kept you from doing that, but you might have squeaked me a little information.”

  I snorted. “Again, what part of ‘secret ballot’ don’t you get?”

  “There’s secret and then there’s, you know, secret.”

  This explanation should be good. “How’s that, exactly?”

  “Sit and listen, my child, and you will learn. Look into my crystal ball. Look closely; look deep.” She adjusted an invisible head scarf and cupped her hands around an imaginary crystal ball. “Listen well. There are three kinds of secrets.”

  “According to . . . ?” I tilted my head.

  “Do you want to hear this or not? Three kinds.” She held up her index finger. “One is the not-very-secret secret. What you’re getting someone for their birthday or Christmas.” Her middle finger went up. “Two is the midlevel secret. Secret enough that it should stay a secret to most people, but not so ultra-important that it can’t be shared with certain responsible people.” She half closed her eyes at me. “That’s what this vote was. A level-two secret.”

  There was a certain logic to this. And maybe in a thousand years I’d tell her so. “Level three?” I asked.

  “Ah, level three.” She hitched a teensy bit closer, making our conversation a little more confidential, a little more . . . secret. “A level-three secret is the secretest kind of secret. It’s the life-and-death kind of secret.”

  In spite of my natural inclination to disbelieve anything Marina said when she was in her new persona as a gypsy storyteller, I found myself leaning forward, pulled in by the spell she was casting.

  “The kind of secret that you’d do anything to keep people from finding out.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “The kind that ruins marriages and ends careers. The kind that makes you leave a town forever. The kind that turns sons against mothers, sisters against sisters, and lifelong friends against each other. A secret that breeds violence and makes you long to wake up from the nightmare your life has become. But you can’t,” she said, drawing out the last word long and dark, “because you are already awake and there’s nothing you can do. Nothing.”

  The skin at the base of my neck prickled. Marina’s new persona was a little too effective for my taste. I’d rather have the Southern belle back. Or Greta Garbo. Or the Shakespearean actor who could never quite remember the lines. Even the cowgirl (who had never quite worked out, somehow) would have been preferable to this.

  “And now”—she crossed her hands in front of her, making the crystal ball vanish—“now we return to the question of the secret ballot. Because now that we know it’s not that much of a secret, I bet you won’t have any problem telling me.”

  “. . . No,” I said, wondering what kind of secret it would take to make me leave Rynwood. To have a secret, you had to do something horrible, didn’t you? I wasn’t the best person in the world by a long shot, but I wasn’t that bad. Of course, if Auntie May, the wheelchair-bound ninety-two-year-old terror of Rynwood foun
d out that I hadn’t cleaned out the freezer properly in three years, I might have to flee in the dark of night.

  But a true level-three secret? I’d never done anything bad enough—or interesting enough—to warrant that kind of secrecy.

  Had I?

  “Beth?” Marina was looking at me uncertainly. “Are you okay? Because you’re getting a funny look on your face. You know I was joking about all that secret stuff, right? I don’t care if you tell me about the vote count. I mean, it’d be fun to know if Tina only got three votes, but—”

  BANG!

  The loud sound slammed into my eardrums, shocking everyone in the room to silence even as the echo bounced down the hallways.

  Marina’s face, normally ruddy with health and good cheer, turned instantly white. “Was that . . . ?”

  “Yes,” I whispered, not wanting it to be true, but knowing it was. The noise had been unmistakable.

  It had been a gunshot.

  Chapter 3

  I was on my feet and running before the gunshot’s echo died away. Marina’s call of “Beth! Wait! You can’t—” fell off my back as I passed a blur of PTA members half settled into their seats and then I was through the door.

  Outside of the classroom, Tina stood stock-still, mouth open wide, staring down the hallway to the right.

  I charged down the hard floor, my flat-soled shoes finding firm purchase, hearing a set of footsteps behind me. One glance over my shoulder and I saw Nick Casassa hot on my heels, a determined look on his face. We passed Mindy Wietzel, who was flat against the wall, fingers spread wide, eyes round.

  Nick caught up to me and, in one simultaneous leap, we jumped over the short flight of stairs that separated the old section of the building from the new. Down here, the building split into two wings.

  I pointed left and right. “Let’s split up,” I panted out.

  “We stay together,” Nick said in short breaths. “Safer.”

  I nodded. For no reason other than right-handedness, I pointed to the wing that went right.

  We ran on. Behind us were footsteps and shouting; ahead was a dimly lit hallway. At its far end was a door that led to the playground. I saw a rectangle of darkness appear, then disappear, and my brain raced ahead of me.

  The shooter was leaving through that door. He was getting away. We should run him down and catch him, we should—

  Then I caught sight of a shoe.

  It was a man’s shoe, lying heel down and toe up, a position that meant a foot was still inside. The shoe was propping open a door.

  I started to shout to Nick, but he was heading for the end of the hallway and putting on a burst of speed that left me far behind. I slowed from my flat-out run by putting my hand on the wall and went to the shoe. Sweating and breathing hard, I pushed open the door labeled TEACHERS’ RESTROOM.

  Inside, lying on the floor, very, very still, was Dennis Halpern.

  I was pushed aside. “Give me room,” said Lynn, a PTA mother who was, to her patients, Dr. Lynn Snider, a general-practice doctor who had spent two years working in the emergency room of Chicago’s busiest hospital.

  Lynn dropped to her knees, checked for a pulse, then put her hands on his chest and started pumping. “Call 911,” she grunted.

  Since I couldn’t, because my cell was in my abandoned purse, I stepped out of the restroom and saw that half the PTA was trotting toward us, cell phones in hand. “Taken care of,” I told Lynn.

  She was pumping away with a steady rhythm that was breaking my heart. I sank to my knees across from her, on the other side of Dennis. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “No,” she said shortly, out of breath from her efforts. “Yes. Direct ambulance. EMTs.”

  I scrambled to my feet and grabbed the first person I could latch on to, who happened to be Tina. “Run out to the parking lot and wait for the ambulance. When they get here—”

  “I’ll bring them.” She nodded and trotted off.

  Nick reappeared, sweat dripping from his forehead. He shook his head. Whether he hadn’t seen the shooter or hadn’t been able to grab hold of him, it didn’t really matter at this point.

  “The rest of you,” I said, “just stay back, okay? They’ll need room.”

  “Who is it?” Summer asked. “Is it . . . ?”

  “Dennis Halpern,” I said heavily. “Our guest.” My guest. The man I’d tried so hard to get to a PTA meeting. The man who—

  Summer swayed, putting her hands out in front of her. “Is he . . . is he going to be all right? He is, right?”

  I turned away without answering. There was no way I was qualified to answer her question. I wasn’t a nurse or a doctor or an EMT or any kind of health professional.

  But I knew. Even without seeing the despairing expression on Lynn’s face, I knew.

  Dennis was dead.

  • • •

  An eternity later, the EMTs slammed shut the back doors of the rescue vehicle. They climbed up into the front seats, and the driver started the engine. The boxy red truck rolled out of the parking lot and down the road, the lights and sirens that had heralded its arrival silent.

  The crowd of onlookers—children too young to understand tragedy, women with crossed arms, men with their hands in their pockets—started to drift into the darkness as soon as the vehicle was out of sight.

  Rynwood’s chief of police, my friend Gus Eiseley, had arrived on the heels of the EMT crew. When he’d arrived, he’d asked everyone to stay until he’d talked to them, then looked around and asked, “Who was first to get to the victim?”

  Before he’d even finished the sentence, I was raising my hand and pointing to myself and Nick. “Why am I not surprised?” he’d asked, and made a note.

  I’d assumed the question was a rhetorical one and didn’t even try to make up an answer. Yes, I’d ended up involved in a couple of other murder investigations . . . okay, three. No, four, depending on how you counted, but did that mean I was necessarily involved in any major crime in Rynwood? No, it did not. It was coincidence, that’s all. I did not attract trouble.

  Did I?

  That uncomfortable thought stayed with me all through the rattling passages of the gurney, both the hurried inward one and the slow, almost stately, outward one.

  Did I?

  Now, with the ambulance gone and the sadness just starting, Gus turned to the PTA. “Ladies, gentlemen, I know you’d like nothing better than to go home to your families, but I need your help first.”

  Dusk was passing fast to darkness, but in the yellow glow cast by the parking lot lights I saw the heads nodding solemnly.

  “Thank you,” Gus said. “Officer Zimmerman and I will take your statements. We should have you out of here in no time. Beth and Nick, if you could wait until the end, I’d appreciate it.” He ran a hand over his short-cropped gray hair.

  Gus was one of those men whose age was hard to guess. Twenty years ago, when I’d first met him in the church choir, he hadn’t looked much different than he did now. A little grayer, maybe, and perhaps a few more lines on his weathered face, but that was about it. Thanks to his wife, Winnie, I knew that he was fifty-two, but if he’d told you he was thirty-five, you’d think, okay, an old-looking thirty-five, but yeah, I’ll believe thirty-five.

  I quietly suggested that Gus talk to the ones with young children first, so they could get the kids home and in bed. “Good idea,” he said. “They’ll be antsy to get going, and I’ll get better answers out of them this way. Thanks, Beth. I appreciate your input.”

  Effusive praise for a minor suggestion. I squinted at him. Very not like Gus. Maybe he’d taken a workshop on new techniques for working with citizens, and I was the guinea pig.

  While we were milling around, waiting, Harry, the school janitor who doubled as daytime security guard, came in to lock up the school. He’d assumed our meeting was over, but one quick explanation and Harry moved to unlock more classrooms for the PTA parents to wait in.

  “Sorry about this, Harry,” I sa
id.

  “Nothing to be sorry about, Mrs. Kennedy.” He unlocked the door to a fourth-grade classroom with a set of jingling keys. “Not your fault.” He hung the keys on the belt that held up the navy blue slacks he always wore. Navy blue pants and light blue dress shirt were all he ever wore while working. The once or twice I’d seen him outside of school, it had taken me a moment to recognize him, in spite of his six feet of incredible thinness.

  “No,” I said, “I suppose it’s not.” But I wasn’t absolutely sure that was true.

  Carol waited with Nick and me as Gus and the much-too-young Officer Zimmerman interviewed the other parents. The three of us made up a very small and uncomfortable group. Gus had cautioned us against talking about the incident, saying he’d like to keep our impressions as clean as possible, so with that topic out of bounds, we talked about our children until Carol wondered out loud if Dennis had had any.

  With that conversation stalled, we went on to talking about the new downtown store, Made in the Midwest. But since I was the only one who’d met the owner or been inside the store, that didn’t go anywhere, either.

  A short sally by Nick for a discussion of the University of Wisconsin football team didn’t get beyond, “What do you think of that freshman tailback the Badgers are starting?” We were reduced to discussing the weather when Gus stepped in. “Carol?” She picked up her purse, squeezed her husband’s hand, and left with Gus.

  Nick and I didn’t even try to talk. We were staring at the air when Gus came in. “Nick?”

  For a very long ten minutes I was left alone with the events of the last two hours. There wasn’t much to be gained in going over and over it, but I couldn’t seem to stop the continuous loop, couldn’t turn it off, couldn’t turn down the gunshot I kept hearing. Over and over and—

  “How are you doing?” Gus dropped into the chair next to me. A full-sized chair, thanks to the kindness of Harry. He’d taken in the drawn looks and pale faces and lugged folding chairs out of some secret janitorial closet.