Curse of the PTA

by Laura Alden

  “Fine,” I said, as brightly as I could.

  “You’re still a horrible liar,” he said, rearranging papers on his clipboard.

  “Maybe I’m such a good liar that you can’t tell that I’m lying about lying.”

  He glanced at me, then went back to his paperwork. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  I sighed. No, it didn’t. “I’m tired, sad, angst-ridden, and depressed about the human condition.”

  A hint of a smile lightened his face. “That’s more like it. You okay with staying a while longer? The kids are all set?”

  “Marina took them to her house.”

  He nodded. “She can be an interfering chatterbox, but her heart is the size of an Oldsmobile.”

  As compliments go, that was as backhanded as any I’d ever heard. There wasn’t a chance I’d pass it on to Marina without a hefty dose of editing. She still hadn’t forgiven Gus for the way he’d treated me last spring, and I didn’t want to make that situation any worse. “They haven’t made Oldsmobiles in years,” I said. “You need to get a new simile.”

  “It’ll last me to retirement.”

  I sat up straight. “You’re thinking about retiring?” Rynwood without Gus as police chief was as unthinkable as . . . as Rynwood without Auntie May. Knowing there was even a slim chance of Auntie May catching you in wrongdoing had kept the entire populace on the straight and narrow for three generations.

  No one, but no one, wanted to hear the rattling cackle that preceded “Caught you, you little sneak” if you so much as forgot to hold the door open for the person behind you. And heaven forbid if you accidentally let a scrap of candy bar wrapper flutter onto the sidewalk. Yes, Auntie May was our conscience and our guide. Guide to what, I wasn’t quite sure, but it was a certainty that we were better off with Auntie May than without her.

  Well, a near certainty.

  “Thinking about retirement,” Gus said, “is a hundred miles from doing it. Besides, if I retired, Winnie would drag me to every garage sale between here and Milwaukee, and I’m not sure our marriage could handle it.”

  “Ha. You two are like one of those salt-and-pepper sets. You know, the kind that snuggle up against each other and look all wrong if they’re by themselves.”

  “I’m not sure I’ll tell Winnie that one.” He clicked his pen. “And now we should get started so we can get you home. Let’s walk through what happened.”

  I looked at my hands, fingers interlaced, thumbs pushing hard against each other. “I don’t want to,” I said in a low voice.

  “Of course you don’t.” Gus’s voice was patient. “No sane person would. But . . .” He left the sentence open, and I filled in the blanks all by myself.

  But . . . it was my civic duty to tell Gus everything I could remember. I owed it to Dennis to describe everything I’d seen. Helping law enforcement set a good example for my children. Plus it was the right thing to do, and that was the truest and best reason of all.

  “Okay.” I watched my thumbs push against each other, their edges turning white. “This whole thing started when I heard that Rynwood was getting a new business downtown, a financial consultant.”

  “Dennis Halpern,” Gus said.

  I nodded. “I’d been thinking about getting Debra O’Conner from the bank to come talk to the PTA about investing, but she recommended Dennis. Said he knew more about investing than she ever would, plus he’d written a book. Summer Lang recommended him, too.”

  “It’s not your fault he was murdered,” Gus said. “Not unless you killed him, I mean.”

  I eked out a small smile. “No, I didn’t kill him. But he was here because I invited him.”

  Gus flipped a page in his notebook and got busy with his pen. “If you want to continue to beat yourself up, go right ahead, but it’s doubtful that he was killed randomly. If it wasn’t random, it was either from circumstance or premeditated. Circumstance also seems unlikely, since that is usually the result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it’s hard to see how using the men’s room in an almost entirely empty elementary school could be the wrong place.”

  “Or the wrong time?”

  “Or the wrong time,” he agreed. “That leaves a murder of premeditation, and that gets you off the hook.”

  I wasn’t so sure that his explanation would hold up to the ugly light of reality, but since all he was doing was trying to make me feel better, I didn’t start slicing great whacking holes in the analysis.

  Instead, I went on to describe how Dennis had agreed to volunteer his time to help the PTA. “He grew up in Rynwood,” I said, “did you know? Went here to elementary school.” We might have been sitting in one of the rooms where Dennis had spent a school year. That desk there might have been where Dennis sat.

  I sighed.

  Stay away from that line of thinking, Beth. It’ll just depress you, and what good will you be to anyone if you’re sunk into a pit of despair?

  Quotes from one of my top-ten favorite movies of all time, The Princess Bride, flashed through my head, and I began to feel a little less desolate. I told Gus about tonight’s PTA meeting, about me calling for a break. How Marina and I hadn’t left the room, so I didn’t know who was where when. How people were coming back into the room when the gun went off. How Nick and I ran down the hall. How Nick chased what we assumed to be the gunman. How I found Dennis. How someone had called 911. And Gus had been there for the rest of it.

  “Okay.” He wrote and wrote, then finally stopped. “Now comes the hard part. Who was in the room with you and Marina when you heard the shot?”

  “Nick and Carol Casassa,” I said promptly. “And Randy Jarvis. Tina Heller wasn’t in the room, but she was just outside the door. Um . . .” I closed my eyes, thinking, and gave him the name of two other PTA parents. “Those I’m sure about. Anyone else, I can’t say.”

  “Keep your eyes closed,” Gus said, “and see the room again, just before the gun went off, when you and Marina were arguing about what’s secret and what’s not.”

  “We weren’t arguing,” I said. “We were . . . talking.”

  “Think about the room just before the gun went off,” he said. “You were at the table. Marina was on the other side of it. Randy Jarvis was sitting down. Nick and Carol were standing behind the back row of desks. Lynn Snider was talking to Rachel Helmstetter. Do you see anyone else?”

  “Whitney Heer,” I said, surprised. “I’d forgotten. Whitney and a friend of Natalie Barnes. I don’t know her name, but I can get it.”

  Gus made a satisfied noise. “Good job.”

  I glowed a little. Getting praise from Gus was like getting a pat on the back from a much older brother. After our falling-out in the spring, I hadn’t been sure our relationship would ever return to its former solid friendship. But after a few weeks of prickly choir practices, he’d asked, in an unusually diffident way, if I’d mind having breakfast with him at the Green Tractor.

  I’d hesitated, but had eventually agreed. The meal had started off more awkward than a blind date between two freshly divorced people. We’d sat. Ordered. Sipped coffee (Gus) and tea (me). Studied a menu we both knew better than our social security numbers. It was Ruthie, owner of the Green Tractor, who’d made things right.

  “Here.” She’d shoved aside our napkins and silverware and slapped new paper place mats on top of the bright green ones we’d already had. Kid place mats, with line drawings for coloring in with crayons. A kitty-cat and puppy-dog place mat for me, a truck and car place mat for Gus. She’d dropped a handful of crayons on the booth’s table. “If you two are going to act like children, I’m going to treat you that way.” She stomped off, paused, then stomped back and surveyed us, hands on her hips. “And if I hear any fighting over the sky-blue crayon, you’re both grounded for a month.” She stomped off to the back of the restaurant.

  I looked at the pile of crayons. “There’s not even a sky-blue one in here,” I muttered.

  For some reason, that made Gus bu
rst out laughing. Full-throat, belly-hurting laughter. Still laughing, he stood and went behind the counter. Came back with Ruthie’s big bowl of crayons, fished out a sky-blue crayon and handed it to me. “No more fighting.”

  I’d smiled and taken the crayon. “No more,” I agreed, because it was only fair that I take my share of the blame.

  Now Gus tapped his pen to his notebook. “Any idea where Summer Lang was? No? How about Claudia Wolff?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. But neither one of them could have been the shooter. Both Nick and I saw that door shut, and Summer and Claudia were in the crowd that came from the other way just a little afterward. There was no way either one of them could have run around the building that fast.”

  Gus made a noncommittal noise. “Did you see anyone else in the building tonight?”

  “No. But really, anyone could have walked in.” Hope surged in me. “The building was unlocked, right? It didn’t have to be someone at the meeting. It probably wasn’t, right? Harry never locks the school down until the meeting is over, so anyone could have walked in. It’s not like we have to show our ID to a security guard at the door, or anything, to get into a PTA meeting. It could have been anyone. And the killer ran off. Both Nick and I saw him run out the door at the end of the hallway. That’s what Nick said, too, right?”

  I was in babble mode. This happened when I was tired, or embarrassed, or uncomfortable, or frightened. It was worst when I was a combination of all four. On I went.

  “So, really, there’s no need to look at us PTA members. You should probably see if Dennis had any enemies. Find out if he was divorced or was having an affair or . . . or cheered for the Minnesota Vikings instead of the Packers like he should. That can get people really riled up, you know. And you never know, maybe he’d cut someone off in traffic and—”

  Gus flipped his notebook shut. “Beth,” he said gently, “you know I won’t be investigating this murder. The sheriff’s office will be taking over. Their forensic team will be here first thing in the morning.”

  I sighed. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. You’ve had a hard night.” He smiled. “I wish I could have seen you banging that gavel. Did you really say you were going to whack everyone over the head with it if they didn’t shut up?”

  “What? Of course not! Who told you that?”

  He chuckled, stood, and held out his hand to help me to my feet. “You look dead tired. Get your kids and go home. If you think of anything else that might help, let me know in the morning.”

  I picked up my purse. “Gus, do you . . .” I stopped. Not wanting to say it out loud, not wanting to make the words real.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Ask. You won’t sleep right until you do.”

  Sometimes it was a pain in the hind end to know the chief of police in your town. “Do you really think someone from the PTA killed Dennis?”

  “It could have been,” Gus said. “You know I can’t tell any details, but yes, it could have been.”

  I worried the straps of my purse. Classic Gus, handing you the truth when you least wanted it.

  “Then again,” he said, “it might not have been. That’s why we have what we in law enforcement call a murder investigation.”

  I continued to toy with the straps of my purse, twisting the faux leather around and around. “I don’t want it to be anyone in the PTA,” I said. “I really, really don’t.”

  Gus slid his notebook into his pocket. “Go home. Get some sleep.” He patted my shoulder on his way out of the room.

  Slowly, I followed after him, carefully not looking in the direction of where . . . of the ongoing investigation. The hallways, silent now except for the distant voices of Gus and his officers, were a little creepy in their emptiness. Surely I’d been in the school at night by myself before, but I couldn’t remember a single instance.

  A voice came at me. “Mrs. Kennedy?”

  I gasped and backed away fast, my purse to my chest, then saw who it was and relaxed “Harry. You startled me.”

  The janitor stepped halfway out of a doorway I’d never noticed before. Which was probably the exact effect someone had been after when they’d painted the door the same colors as the walls. “Sorry, ma’am. For scaring you, I mean. I just wanted to ask you something.” When I nodded, he shuffled forward, large knobby hands at his sides. “Do they know who done it? Who killed that guy?”

  If they did, they weren’t saying. “No, I don’t think so.”

  He nodded, as if that was the answer he’d been expecting. “Not like a TV show, is it?”

  It never was. “They’ll find him,” I said. “Don’t worry about that.”

  “Him?” He looked up. “So they know it was a guy and not a girl?”

  “Oh. Well.” Given my own disinclination for firearms, I’d awarded my entire gender the same aversion. Which wasn’t accurate by any means. Where I’d done most of my growing up, in northern lower Michigan, it wasn’t at all uncommon for girls to go out hunting. And I knew a number of adult women who enjoyed target shooting. Knew a couple who had licenses to carry concealed handguns. Had heard of one who enjoyed going to gun shows. “I’m not sure, Harry. I suppose it could have been a woman.”

  “I don’t like it,” he said. “Why did he have to be killed in the school? It’s going to bother the kids. When Mr. Helmstetter was killed, at least that was in the parking lot. Not in here. Not in the school.” He looked left and right, seeing the hallways, but not seeing them.

  The pain on his face was clear to see, and my slow-moving brain made a quick hard turn and started to see things from Harry’s point of view.

  Tarver Elementary was his responsibility. Its care and maintenance were his job and his pride. And as de facto security guard, the safety of its inhabitants was also his responsibility. This atrocity had happened on his watch, and the weight was sitting hard on his shoulders.

  Poor Harry. None of this was his fault in any way, shape, or form, yet here he was, twisting himself into knots.

  Harry reached out and rubbed an invisible speck of dirt off the wall. “Do they think it was someone in the PTA who done it?”

  “I don’t know.” And I didn’t. I didn’t want to know the killer, didn’t want to know someone who could fire a bullet straight into the heart of a human being, didn’t want to have attended bake sales and worked father-daughter dances and sat through committee meetings with a murderer. “I hope not.”

  He nodded. “Have a good night, Mrs. Kennedy.”

  But . . . where had Claudia been? Not that she would have killed anyone, in spite of her evil temper, of course not, but why had Gus asked about her specifically? And Summer. Why had she been singled out?

  I shook my head, doing my best to toss the ideas out of my skull. No. No one from the PTA had killed Dennis. The idea was too silly to consider.

  Ridiculous.

  Beyond ridiculous.

  But all the way home, while I picked up the kids, while I got them to bed, and after I got myself into bed and covered myself with a big purring black George cat, I wondered.

  Was the idea silly?

  Was it?

  Chapter 4

  The morning after the murder of Dennis Halpern, I sat down at the breakfast table with the kids.

  This was such an unusual occurrence that both children stopped reading the backs of their cereal boxes and looked at me. I wasn’t too concerned about Jenna since she was in middle school, but Oliver’s classroom was right down the hall from where . . . from the murder scene.

  “Are you eating breakfast with us?” Oliver pushed his box of Froot Loops my way.

  “She won’t want to eat that sugary stuff.” Jenna gave her box of Cheerios a shove. “Here, Mom. You like these, don’t you?”

  “Thanks, but I have an apple and a banana in my purse.”

  “Are you sure that’s enough breakfast?” Oliver frowned. “My teacher says breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”

  Oliver’s fourth
-grade teacher, Mrs. Sullivan, was a frequent customer at my children’s bookstore, and I’d been pleased as punch when we got the letter announcing that Oliver would be in her classroom. With more than twenty years in teaching, she knew how to keep kids focused, yet her natural good humor made it easy for the kids to have fun.

  “Mrs. Sullivan is exactly right,” I said. “But people your age”—I reached left and right and tapped them both on the nose—“and people my age have different nutritional needs.” As in, they burned off food like little power plants burning coal, but in me food transformed instantly to thigh dimples. I’d worked hard to lose weight the last few months, and I wasn’t going to let Froot Loops be the thing that led me back to the dark side. Chocolate, maybe. My friend Alice’s cookies, possibly. But breakfast cereal? Not a chance.

  “Is that why you don’t eat toast and jam in the morning?” Jenna slathered a knifeful of the strawberry variety on a thick slice.

  “Yup.” Her eating habits would change too, someday, but I didn’t tell her that. And maybe I’d be wrong. Jenna, my hockey goalie–playing daughter, was as athletic as kids came. Who knew? Maybe she’d grow up to be one of those women who stayed toned and fit their entire lives.

  “You’re doing it again,” Jenna said.

  “What’s that?” I asked, smiling, my head mostly full of an adult Jenna who’d just won the Chicago marathon.

  She exchanged a look with Oliver. “She’s imagining what her grandchildren will be like.”

  Last month I’d made the tactical error of answering Jenna truthfully when she’d asked me what I was thinking about. I’d been daydreaming about spoiling the next generation of Kennedys by gifting them with wonderful children’s books every week. The book of the week club, for Beth Kennedy’s grandchildren only. My daughter had been appalled.

  I’m not sure if it was the thought of getting married and having babies that troubled her or the shadowy concept that I could possibly want more children in my life. Either way, the expression on her face had been priceless. I’d hugged her hard and told her it was just a silly daydream and not to worry about it. Her concern had subsided, especially after she’d told Oliver. My son’s reaction had been sheer hilarity, which made everything easier.