Curse of the PTA

by Laura Alden

  Now Oliver bounced in his seat. “Fat babies in diapers with spit-up all down their chins.”

  Jenna grinned. “Babies crying so loud, it hurts your ears.”

  “Babies with goofy smiles.” Oliver tried one on.

  “Cute,” I said, rolling my eyes. He was, but that kind of behavior didn’t need to be encouraged. “Finish your breakfast, please. And I have something to tell you.”

  Both of them stopped, their spoons halfway to their mouths.

  “Last time you had something to tell us at breakfast,” Jenna said, “was when Grandma Emmerling had to go to the hospital.”

  “And the time before that was when Mr. Helmstetter was killed,” Oliver said.

  Hmm. Every once in a while, I should sit down with my children at breakfast and give them some good news. I tried to imagine what might be newsworthy enough to rate a breakfast-table announcement but came up dry. One more item to add to the list of things I needed to work on.

  “Something happened last night at the PTA meeting,” I said.

  “Something bad?” Oliver asked, milk dripping off the side of his spoon.

  I nodded. “Very bad. I’d invited a man to talk to us and he . . . he’s dead.”

  “Like a heart attack or something?” Jenna asked.

  “Not exactly.” I pushed away the image of Dr. Lynn kneeling over Dennis, bright red blood splotching his shirt and spreading over her hands. “I’m afraid he was killed.”

  “Whacked over the head dead?” Oliver’s face was maybe a touch pale, but his eyes sparked with interest.

  “Strangled?” Jenna asked.

  “Maybe he was poisoned.” Oliver looked at his spoonful of cereal and wolfed it down, grinning as a drop of milk ran out the corner of his mouth.

  “Or maybe he was stabbed to death.”

  I looked from my beautiful young daughter to my endearingly cute son. Their ghoulish interest was natural, I supposed. They didn’t know Dennis, and they had no idea how much sorrow would ensue from the events of last night.

  “Chief Eiseley will catch the bad guy, won’t he?” Oliver asked. “Like before?”

  Jenna snorted. “He only came in the end. Mom did most of the work.” She looked at me, excitement giving her face a lively glow. “Who did it, do you know? Have you fingered him yet?”

  Fingered him? Where had she picked up that term? And her excitement was a little troubling. A man was dead, after all.

  “Yeah, Mom.” Oliver bounced in his seat. “Did you finger him? Are you going to be in the newspapers again?”

  “When you go to school today,” I told him, “there will be yellow strips of plastic taping off the men’s restroom down the hall from your room. You know what that means, right?”

  “Sure. It means a crime was committed there.”

  Ah, television. “It means you’re not to go in there. And if there are policemen or policewomen working, you’re not to bother them. They have a job to do, and they won’t have time to answer your questions.”

  Suddenly, I had a vision of the forensics team, heads down, working through evidence while being peppered with questions from a hundred small children. “What’s that for?” “What you doing?” “Have you ever killed anybody?” “Have you caught the guy who did it?” “Do you carry a gun? Can I see it?”

  Those poor people. I battened down my smile and focused on Oliver. “Stay out of their way, okay? They need to do their jobs. Leave them alone and they’ll be able to catch the bad guy faster.”

  Oliver looked at me “Won’t you be—”

  There was a slight shuffle under the table. Jenna had kicked her brother, but it must have been a message-delivered-message-received kind of kick, because he didn’t yelp. I studied my children, trying to get inside their heads.

  “Chief Eiseley,” I finally said, “is handing over the murder investigation to the county sheriff’s office. There is no reason for me to have anything to do with this.”

  Jenna kept her face still and nodded. Oliver, after watching his sister, did the same thing.

  “I’m glad you two understand,” I said. “Finish up. We leave for school in five minutes.”

  I stood and went into the study to get my purse and briefcase, pleased they’d understood so quickly that I wouldn’t be involved with this investigation, congratulating myself on the maturity of my children.

  Then I heard their giggles.

  • • •

  After I dropped Oliver off at Tarver and Jenna at the middle school, I drove through the mid-September morning to my bookstore, the Children’s Bookshelf. Downtown Rynwood had remained remarkably prosperous through the last few years of economic hardship, a fact I’d puzzled over until my store manager, Lois, had laughed and pointed out the front window.

  “Look at this place,” she said. “It’s like Mayberry out there. Downtown has everything you need. A diner, a grill, a fancy restaurant. Shoe store, department store, pharmacy, bank, insurance agency, flower shop, newspaper. We even have a grocery store. How many downtowns still have one of those?”

  She was right. Rynwood had managed to maintain the core businesses that make a downtown stable. But that didn’t answer the question of why it had stayed stable.

  Sometimes I thought it was the distance between the buildings. Wide enough to allow angle parking on both sides of the street but still close enough that it was easy to chat with someone on the opposite sidewalk.

  Or sometimes I thought the stability was due to the town’s comfortable architecture. It was a happy mixture: two – and three-story brick buildings combined with a few wooden clapboard buildings, combined with a couple of oddments like Randy Jarvis’s corner gas station and convenience store covered with smooth blue fiberglass siding that had faded to an unusual purple color. They were all connected by brick paver sidewalks and wide flower boxes, and it somehow made one big happy downtown.

  Then again, sometimes I thought it was because of the store owners. We all lived in Rynwood, and that alone can make a huge difference to the success of a business. Plus we were a diverse group, male and female, old and young, outlandish and staid. That, too, was probably a factor.

  But most often I tried not to think about it at all. As Marina had told me ad infinitum, think too much and you forget to have fun. And the corollary, think too much and you’ll find something to worry about. If I was worrying, I wasn’t having fun. If I wasn’t having fun, my children were less likely to have fun, and I wanted them to grow up knowing that you could be a grown-up and still go outside to play, that being an adult wasn’t all working and paying bills. That life was there to be enjoyed.

  I’d come to that not-so-profound conclusion on my last birthday. Better late than never, Marina had said, rolling her eyes. I’d stuck my tongue out at her, which always made her laugh, and promptly blown out all the candles on my birthday cake in one blow.

  Now, though, the magic of downtown Rynwood seemed to have dimmed. Sure, the sky was blue and the sun was bright and the birds were singing, but the shining happiness I’d been wallowing in the last few months had lost its luster.

  I parked in the alley behind the store, as per usual, and unlocked the back door. My normal morning chores of list making and tea brewing held no appeal. Odd, for me. I decided what I needed was a talk with Flossie.

  After relocking the back door, I slipped out the front and walked across and down the street. Flossie Untermayer, a former professional ballet dancer who had traveled all over the world with a Chicago-based troupe, had grown up in Rynwood, stocking shelves and running the register at her parents’ grocery store. When she’d retired from dancing, she’d come back to Rynwood to take over the family business, leaving the world of dance behind forever.

  I’d often wondered if there was a story behind that abrupt move, but it had happened almost two decades before I’d moved to Rynwood, and I’d never felt comfortable asking. And there was another thing. Though she spent a lot of time with a certain Mr. Brinkley, she’d never m
arried. Flossie, now eightyish and more limber than I’d ever been, was a wise and wonderful person, but there was something about her that didn’t invite questions into her past.

  Sure, I could have asked Lois, who was a lifelong Rynwoodite, but that would have felt disloyal. No, either I’d buck up and ask Flossie myself, or I’d just never know.

  I pushed open the glass front door of Rynwood grocery—no new-fangled automatic entry doors here—and went in search of Flossie.

  A young man in his late twenties was cleaning the register checkout belts. “Morning, Patrick.”

  “Hey, Mrs. Kennedy. What’s up?” Patrick, Flossie’s great-nephew and heir apparent to the store, smiled at me. “Did you pick up some of that hamburger yet? It’s only on sale through the end of the week.”

  “I’ll try and remember to buy some before I head home today. Is your aunt around?”

  He pointed his chin toward the rear of the store. “She’s out back, doing the garbage.”

  I laughed. “Haven’t been able to take that chore away from her yet?”

  “Stubborn old woman,” he said. “I keep saying that I’m here to make her life easier, and she keeps saying that if I make life too easy for her, she’ll turn into a rocking-chair-sitting, baby-bootie-knitting old woman who just takes up space on the planet and might as well be put out on an ice floe to die.”

  “Does she even know how to knit?”

  He shook his head. “She couldn’t sew on a button if her life depended on it.”

  Smiling, I walked through the baking supplies aisle, cut between the meat case and the dairy case, stepped off the cheery white-and-green linoleum tile and onto the plain concrete that delineated the storage area, and pushed open the back door.

  Flossie was not, as one might have expected, heaving piles of cardboard into the recycling bin or tossing black garbage bags into the Dumpster. Instead, she was sitting on top of the low retaining wall separating the store from the insurance agency next door, face up to the blue sky, smiling.

  I shut the door and walked over to sit next to her.

  She didn’t look at me, just kept her gaze on the new day.

  For a long moment, we sat together in silence. Enjoying the cool morning, enjoying the companionship, enjoying life.

  The moment stretched long and deep. It wasn’t until a muffler-challenged car tore through the alley that we began to talk.

  “It’s mornings like this,” Flossie said, “that make me glad I’m still alive and kicking.”

  I looked at her fondly. “You say that every morning. When it’s ten below with a thirty-mile-an-hour wind, you say that. When it’s gray and dreary and dripping rain for ten days straight, you say that. When it’s pushing eighty degrees at eight a.m., that’s what you say.”

  “And true every time.” She nodded, her short, silvery curls bobbing. “Mornings are made for appreciation, don’t you think?”

  In my house, mornings were made for rushing around like a nutcase, frantically trying to make sure the kids were ready for school, that the dog had been out, and that both my socks were of the same general color.

  But I knew what she meant. And if the calm that radiated from her was the result of appreciating morning, maybe I needed to take my store’s garbage out in the morning instead of doing it at night.

  “So.” Flossie turned to look at me directly. “I hear you tried to be a hero last night.”

  “What? Oh, no. I’m not the hero type.”

  She chuckled. “I heard you and Nick Casassa tried to chase down a gang with automatic weapons and hand grenades.”

  And by tonight, the story would have grown even more ridiculous. “Not exactly.” I told her what happened, then asked, “Did you know Dennis?”

  “Knew of him. He was much younger than me. He had an older sister who dated my babiest brother for a time, but I was gone by then.”

  Gone to Chicago, returning only after her career was over. But Flossie had never sounded regretful about those lost days, so why should I think she was? Then, for one brief second, the politeness that kept me from diving too deeply into her personal life blinked out. “Do you miss it?” I asked. “The dancing, I mean?”

  She kept her gaze on the sky and didn’t say anything.

  Politeness surged back, and I felt heat stain my face. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. Forget I said anything.”

  “I wasn’t ignoring your question,” she said calmly. “I was just trying to decide how to answer.”

  Oh. Well. That was different. I kept my mouth shut and waited.

  “In all the years I’ve been back home, no one has ever asked me if I missed dancing.”

  Any other time or place and I would have said, “Really? You’re kidding.” But sitting here, catching some of the peace that enveloped Flossie, I stayed silent and gave her time to find words.

  “Maybe an analogy would be best,” she said at last. “As I recall, you swam competitively when you were young.”

  “All the way through high school.” Years of training, of competition, and of hair that smelled like chlorine.

  “And when you weren’t on a team any longer, did you miss it?”

  I thought about the luxury of sleeping in instead of getting up in the winter dark for morning practices. I thought about the excitement that had coursed through me when I stepped up onto the starting block. The hugs and cheers and tears of teammates. The long bus rides to other schools. The long meets.

  “Some of it I missed a lot. Some I didn’t.”

  “Do you still?” Flossie asked.

  “. . . No.” Which was surprising, because for years I’d assumed I did. “No, I don’t.” I thought about it some more. “What I miss most, I guess, is . . .” But what did I miss? Something, certainly.

  Flossie filled in the gap. “What you miss is being young,” she said. “Your swimming was a part of your youth, and you miss the energy and the optimism and the sense that the world was out there waiting for you.”

  I looked at her. “And that’s how you feel about dancing?”

  “If I thought only about the dancing, I’d miss it every minute of every day. But it’s never just the dancing. The rivalries, the fussing with the costumes and the costumers, the inability to ever, ever eat what I wanted . . . no. That I do not miss at all.”

  “You’re happy.” I said it as fact, not as a question, and she turned to me with a wide, brilliant smile.

  “Beth, dear, you have no idea how happy I am.”

  “Do you think I have any chance of being like you when I’m your age?”

  She laughed and put one arm around me for a quick hug. “Every chance in the world.”

  • • •

  Thus reassured, I walked back to the store with a light heart. Everything would work out. Jenna and Oliver would grow up to lifelong happiness, I’d grow into Flossie’s wisdom, the store would continue to support me into my old age, and Rynwood would continue to be Rynwood.

  As I opened the front door, I was considering how long I’d stay in the large pseudo-Victorian house my former husband, Richard, and I had purchased when Oliver was born. No need to stay there by myself after the kids went on their own ways. But where would I move? There were some lovely small bungalows a few blocks from downtown. I could walk to work from there and—

  “Well, if it isn’t the Green Lantern.” My manager stood in front of me, hands on her hips.

  Today, the sixty-two-year-old Lois was wearing butter-yellow cropped pants, white sandals, and a fluorescent-green shirt. Both of her wrists were crowded with rubber bracelets. Her necklace might or might not have been pieces of colored macaroni strung on a thread, but her dangling earrings were definitely marbles.

  I ignored the jewelry and gestured at the sandals. “White, after Labor Day? Are you sure you want to flout fashion dictates so flagrantly?”

  She snapped a bright purple rubber band against her wrist. “Did I miss the memo on using words that start with F today? And I’m not exactly w
orried about the fashion police. They’re too busy following Kelly Osbourne around.”

  “Who?”

  “Stop trying to change the subject. What I want to know is why you were trying to run down a killer with nothing but your bare hands.”

  Ah. That explained the Green Lantern comment. Sort of. “At the time, I didn’t know there had been a murder.”

  “Had you or had you not heard a gunshot?”

  “Well, sure, but—”

  “And did you or did you not run pell-mell straight toward the sound of said gunshot?”

  “Yes, but—”

  She rocked back on her heels and crossed her arms. “I rest my case.”

  I raised my hand. “May I present my final argument?”

  “You may.”

  I made a ‘come along with me’ motion, and we walked to the back of the store. As I started the morning routine of tea selection, water heating, and mug choosing, I told Lois what happened the previous night. “The county sheriff’s office is probably in charge of the case already.” I handed Lois a mug that said KEEP CALM, EAT COOKIES and picked up my own, one Jenna had bought me years ago. Why she thought I’d like a mug featuring a yellow smiley face that sported a pair of sunglasses, I didn’t know, but I treasured the cheap ceramic as if it were china made by Royal Doulton.

  When I came to the end of the tale, Lois was looking at me oddly. “What?” I asked.

  “The basic question is still on the table. Why on earth did you run toward a gunshot? Most people would hit the ground, freeze in place, or run in the opposite direction. Not you.” She blew on her tea, making tiny brown ripples, and raised her eyebrows. “Why?”

  “It wasn’t just me. Nick did, too.”

  She made an impatient gesture, as if what I said wasn’t important. And it probably wasn’t. “You weren’t thinking about your own safety. You weren’t thinking about what might happen if you got in the way of bullet number two—and don’t tell me there wasn’t a second bullet, because you had no way of knowing there wouldn’t be one—you just ran straight toward what was likely to be extreme danger. Why?”