Poison at the PTA (15 page)

I dragged a chair around so my back was to the glass and sat down. “Jean McKenna said I should talk to you about Cookie.”

“Can’t believe you went to Jean first. You should have come to me days ago. I been waiting for you, you know.” She sniffed.

Was it possible that I’d hurt Auntie May’s feelings? There were entire socioeconomic groups in Rynwood that fully believed she didn’t have feelings and that her heart had shrunk to the size of a pea. I looked at her closely. “I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings,” I said.

She snorted. “Feelings, schmeelings. Got no time for that kind of crap, and you shouldn’t, either, not if you’re going to . . . ah . . . ah-
chooo
!”

I pulled back fast, but tiny sneeze droplets spewed all across my hands. Ick.

“Darn cold,” Auntie May said, rubbing at her nose with the tissue that was in her hand. “Doctor says I gotta be careful it don’t turn into pneumonia, so he’s not wanting me to go on the casino trips.”

Ah. May lived for the days the facility bus shuttled interested residents to the closest casino. No wonder she was making everyone’s life miserable. I got up, used the hand sanitizer sitting on a nearby table, and came back, rubbing my hands.

“Pansy stuff,” Auntie May said, sneering at the liquid. “In my day we got used to germs.”

I deeply wanted to ask her why she had a cold if she was so tough, but that wasn’t an argument for today. Or probably any day. Auntie May had a tendency to win every battle she fought. The day I figured out how she did that, I’d take notes and write a how-to book that would make me millions.

“Cookie Van Doorne,” I said. “What can you tell me?”

Auntie May cackled and rubbed her palms together. “Hope you don’t got anywhere to go, Bethie. We could be here awhile.”

There was little I wanted to do less than sit and listen to May Werner dish out gossip, but I couldn’t think of any other way to get the information. For a very short moment, I wondered if I could teach Auntie May how to use e-mail and Facebook, but as soon as I visualized the number of e-mails she’d send me every day and the types of things Auntie May was likely to “share” on Facebook, I banished the idea from my brain.

Auntie May squinted a look at me. “What’s in that pretty little head of yours, missy?”

Nothing, absolutely nothing.
“Do you know what Cookie’s real name was?”

“Cookie,” she said promptly.

“You’re joking.”

“Does this look like it’s joking?” She pointed to her lined features, wrinkles crisscrossing wrinkles that crisscrossed wrinkles. “Cookie’s parents had a slew of kids and she came last in the bunch. She didn’t even have a name for a long time, just Baby. Cookie was her first word, and it turned into her real name.”

I gaped at Auntie May. “She didn’t have a name for a year? How can that be? I had to give the hospital my children’s names before we went home.”

May shrugged her bony shoulders. “Things were different back then. We got away with all sorts of stuff you’d get tossed in jail for these days. Like the time Jimmy Stynes got into the—”

I did not want to hear about Jimmy Stynes, who I’d always known as a very nice man who’d died in his sleep at the ripe old age of ninety-five. “What else do you know about Cookie?”

Auntie May harrumphed, made a snarky comment about kids these days, then said, “Cookie was a big tattletale as a kid. One of those creepy little kids who always pops up in places they shouldn’t be.”

By great effort, I held my tongue and did not compare Cookie to Auntie May. “And as an adult?” I asked.

May nodded. “Same thing. Only she got sneakier about it.”

Was “sneakier” a word? I debated the question and reached no conclusion. I’d have to look it up later. “What do you mean?”

Auntie May settled back in her chair. “You want recent stuff or old stuff?”

I didn’t want any of it. “Anything involving people in the PTA.” I listened to what I’d said. “Anything involving anyone in the PTA or from Tarver Elementary,” I amended.

“Hmm.” May rubbed her chin. “Okay, okay. I got something. No, I got two somethings.” She cackled. I winced. “First one.” She rolled her chair closer to mine. “Isabel Klein.”

“You mean Isabel Olsen?”

“How many Isabels you think are running around this town?” The front wheels of her chair bumped up against my boots. “When Isabel was a girl, she wanted a puppy for her birthday. Her mom—that’s Kim—drove up north to look at this litter of puppies. Border collies, sheepdogs, Labs, something like that.” Auntie May flicked the detail away as unimportant. “This place was out on some back road, one of those places where if there are two cars on the road at the same time, it’s a traffic jam.”

I nodded. I’d grown up on a road like that.

“Anyway, Kim was driving down the street and some kid rode his bike straight in front of her. Oh, he wasn’t killed, don’t look like that. Broke his leg, I think. And it wasn’t Kim’s fault at all, but Cookie had never liked Kim.”

May stopped, and for a moment I wondered if she was going to express some sympathy—empathy, even—for Kim or the boy or for Cookie.

“Never did get the goods on the Cookie-Kim story,” she said regretfully. “Anyway, Cookie heard about the accident before most everyone else and got to spin it the way she wanted. By the time Kim got home, Cookie had got the story around town that Kim was a driving menace, that maybe she’d been drinking, that she should be in jail for what she did to that kid on the bike.”

“That’s . . . that’s . . .” I couldn’t think exactly what it was.

“After that, Kim didn’t do well. She got all depressed, ended up losing her job, would have lost her house if her brother hadn’t helped out. She’s better now, but she’s not the same.”

The nasty little story made me want to go wash my face. “Are Isabel and her mom close?”

May smashed her thumb and index finger together. “Like this. Kim’s husband took off when Isabel was still in diapers. Kim raised that girl best she could, but she’s not one of those real capable women and Izzy grew up taking care of Kim as much as Kim took care of her. Close as sisters, those two.”

“What’s the other story?” Maybe this would be a nicer one.

Auntie May grinned. “Stephanie Pesch. She’s hated Cookie for years. Years!”

I looked at my lap, then back up at Auntie May. If I left now, I wouldn’t hear what she had to say about the object of Oliver’s crush. I sighed. “Why did Stephanie have a problem with Cookie?”

“Cookie had a daughter, Deanna.”

I frowned. “Her son was at the funeral, but there wasn’t a daughter.” Although she’d had two children, I remembered.

Auntie May’s cackle grated on my ears. “Deanna. She hadn’t talked to her mother in years. Guess her funeral wasn’t a good enough reason to come back to Rynwood.”

The impossibility of not attending my mother’s funeral rattled around in my head for a while, then rattled on out. “What does Stephanie have to do with that?”

“Stephie and Deanna were best friends from the time they were little kids. Hardly had any other friends, they were so close. Up out of high school, Deanna fell in love with this Darren. Love at first sight.”

May clasped her hands and batted her eyes at me, then snorted. “Like that really exists. Anyway, Cookie didn’t like Darren, didn’t think he was good enough for Deanna. He went up north on a hunting trip, and when he came back, Cookie made sure to tell him Deanna had been seeing someone else when he was gone.”

She shook her head sorrowfully, but I was sure the emotion didn’t go deeper than the hair on her chin.

“He went off mad. Wouldn’t believe Deanna, so he probably wasn’t good enough for her, but that didn’t keep Deanna from blowing up at her mother. She packed up and moved to Hawaii to get as far away from her mother as she could. Voilà!” Auntie May kissed her fingertips and flared out her hand. “Instant hatred! Stephie’s best friend was gone forever and it was all Cookie’s fault.”

Another nasty little tale. “Did Cookie have any redeeming qualities?” I asked.

Auntie May shrugged. “Nice girls don’t hit my radar.”

I thanked May for her time, answered her questions about Pete as obliquely as possible, and headed back to the store.

Could Isabel really have poisoned Cookie? Could Stephanie? Maybe they both disliked Cookie immensely, but the disliking was a long way from murder. Then I wondered if poisoning someone would even feel like murder. Could you convince yourself that poisoning was a solution to a problem, and not a cold-blooded murder?

I watched as my boots made their way down the sidewalk.

I hoped not. I truly hoped not.

•   •   •

When I got back, the store rang with the silence of suspended arguments. I looked from Lois to Paoze, then glanced at my watch. Flossie must have just left for the day.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Lois said. “What makes you think there’s something wrong?”

Her outfit of the day bore a striking resemblance to what female ice skaters might have worn in the early 1900s. Long brown skirt, long button-up sweater over a white shirt with a lace collar, beret worn at a jaunty angle. Instead of skates she wore leather boots that were so old, she must have dug them out of the back of Auntie May’s closet.

“What makes me think so?” I sniffed the air. “Seems to me there is a lingering, yet distinct, odor of unfinished arguments in this room.”

“It’s these boots,” Lois muttered. “I couldn’t get all the mildew off them.”

“Paoze, do you have a minute?” I motioned him to the back of the store. “You’re the tallest one here, and there’s a spiderweb in my office that’s ripe for the picking.”

The gentlemanly young man nodded. “Of course, Mrs. Kennedy.” He rolled up the sleeves of his pristinely white shirt and headed back.

When he got there, he looked around and said, “I do not see a web, Mrs. Kennedy. Could it have fallen down?”

I shut my office door quietly. “There isn’t a spiderweb, Paoze. I want to ask you something, and I don’t want Lois to know.”

He went still. “Have I done something that is wrong? I am sorry, Mrs. Kennedy. Please let me—”

“Don’t be silly.” I waved him to the guest chair and sat in my own. “It’s Lois. Or, more specifically, Lois and Flossie.”

Sitting with a straight spine, he put his hands in his lap. “I am not certain what you are asking.”

I rolled my eyes. “Please. Every time I walk into the room, they switch whatever argument they’re having into a fight about books. I prefer L. M. Montgomery’s Emily books over the Anne books myself, but there’s no way I’d yell at someone over it. And they were working fine together all last fall and even through the holidays. Something happened and neither one of them will tell me what it is.”

Paoze looked at his hands. “I am very sorry, Mrs. Kennedy, but I cannot help you.”

I studied him. I would have preferred to watch his face, but with his head down, all I could see was the top of his head, and the perfectly combed black hair wasn’t much of an indicator of anything except exceptional personal hygiene.

It was obvious that he knew what was going on between Lois and Flossie, but it was just as obvious that he didn’t want to tell me. Which meant he’d been told something in confidence, and I didn’t want to force him to break a promise. I sighed. “Tell Lois you smashed a big hairy spider. That should perk her up a little.”

Paoze stood, opened the door, then hesitated. “Mrs. Kennedy?”

“Yes?”

But he was looking at his hands again. “Nothing. I am sorry to trouble you.”

This time, since I was sitting and he was standing, I could see his face. “Paoze,” I said, “if there’s something troubling you, you can talk to me. Doesn’t matter what it is. I’ll listen. It can be about the store, or school, or your family, or about the horrible play-off season the Green Bay Packers had. I’m here, okay? And you know I can keep a secret.”

“Yes, Mrs. Kennedy.” He spoke so quietly that if I hadn’t seen his lips move, I might have imagined I heard anything. “Thank you, Mrs. Kennedy.”

He left, but I stared after him for a very long time.

I
drove to work the next morning with the express intention of dragging Cookie’s box out from under my desk. No matter how much the thought of the task creeped me out, it was past time. Cookie had had the box sent to me for a reason, and the least I could do was examine its contents.

Well, actually, the least I could do was leave the box where it was, perhaps use it for a footstool, and forget where it had come from, but thanks to the sense of obligation instilled in me by my mother, that was unlikely to happen.

I’m depending on you.

“But I’m just a children’s bookstore owner,” I told the box. “Wouldn’t it be best if I handed you over to the police? Gus is still out sick, but surely this can wait a few days. What’s the hurry?”

Please help me rest in peace.

And that was the kicker. She’d asked for my help and there was no turning away from that fact. With a grunt, I picked up the box and put it on my desk. My tiny and cowardly little mind had long ago shut away the memory of what I’d seen when I first opened the box, so viewing the odd jumble of items was a fresh surprise.

A baby doll?

A Christmas ornament?

I leaned on the desk and stared. “What were you thinking, Cookie?” I murmured. “Maybe to you this looked like a boxful of clues, but to me it looks like—”

“Like a fine morning to play hooky.” Lois walked into my office, followed closely by Pete. “We have plans for you,” she said, “and whatever is in that box isn’t part of them.”

I flapped the box closed and did my best to shove it casually back under the desk. “My plans today include confirming author programming through May, memorize the new security code, putting together the boxes for tomorrow’s school deliveries, and looking at the inventory numbers.”

Given an uninterrupted thirty minutes, my plans also would have included combing through Cookie’s box with the suspects in mind. I could have told this to Lois and Pete since they’d agreed to help with this amateur-hour investigation, but it would have felt like a betrayal of Cookie.

Lois shook her head. “Bzz! You’re not doing any of that.”

My eyes thinned and my mouth started to open.

“At least not this morning,” she added quickly. “Right, Pete?”

He looked at her, at me, then back at her. “Sometimes people feel better if they get their work done first and play later.”

Lois snorted. “This one will just keep finding work to do and never get around to playing.”

I wanted to protest, and even started to, but stopped. She was pretty much right. Okay, she
was
right. Which was why I’d agreed to these six weeks of enforced relative inactivity. “What do you have in mind?” I asked.

Pete picked up my coat and held it out. “If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise, now, would it?”

Lois smiled that smile, the one that always made me a little nervous. Usually she had that expression on her face right before she hit Paoze with a tall tale along the lines of fetching a left-handed shelf from the hardware store. “Excellent. She hates surprises.”

•   •   •

Half an hour later, Pete and I were in the Agnes Mephisto Memorial Ice Arena. Not only were we inside the arena, but we were both on the ice. Wearing skates. And skating. Sort of. Pete was skating smoothly and easily; I was hanging on to the boards and trying to remember the last time I’d been on the ice.

“You’re doing fine.” Pete skated a little ahead of me and flipped around so he was skating backward.

I scowled at him. “You do that backward as well as you do it forward.”

“Backward is my second favorite direction.”

“I’m thinking all my directions are going to be down in a minute.”

“You’re doing fine,” he repeated. “All you have to do is loosen up. Here.” He held his hands out to me.

“Not a chance.” I held the wall with a death-defying grip.

“You’re wearing knee pads and wrist guards, and there’s no one here to see you. What’s going to happen?”

I risked a glance at the stands and ice. Vacant and empty. Still. “Bones break easily when you’re old,” I said darkly.

His voice was soft and warm. “Beth, do you really think I’d let you hurt yourself?”

A ripple of something I couldn’t quite identify went though me. Pete wouldn’t let me fall. He’d catch me before I came even close to hitting the ice. I knew this with as much certainty as I knew that the new security code to the store was . . . was . . .

“Rats,” I muttered.

“What’s that?” Pete asked.

I shook my head. Took one hand off the wall. Didn’t immediately collapse onto the ice. Took my other hand off.

“There you go.” Pete took my mittened hands in his bare ones. “Not so bad, is it?”

“It’s not bad at all,” I said breathlessly. “Do I look as awkward as I feel?”

“You look beautiful,” Pete said. “Now, long, even strokes with your blades. Right, left, that’s it.” His smile made him downright handsome. “You’ve got it!”

And I did. All that ancient muscle memory from winters spent skating on the frozen lake was coming back. Once upon a time I’d loved to go out under the full moon and skate with my brother until Mom called us in. It had been too long since I’d skated. Why had I ever stopped?

Pete released one of my hands and flipped around again so we were skating side by side. “Nice, isn’t it?”

The rhythm was coming back to me. Right, left, right, left. I gave him a quick glance. My strides were more or less even, but they had nowhere near the grace and ease of his. Clearly, this wasn’t his first rodeo. “I didn’t know you skated. You never said.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” he said, smiling.

“Are you going to share?”

He squeezed my hand. “All you have to do is ask.”

Another ripple went through me, but this time I knew what it was.

Happiness.

•   •   •

Less than eight hours later, that happiness was but a fond memory.

“I say we tell the Tarver Foundation to take a hike.” Claudia crossed her arms and stared straight ahead.

“That’s just dumb,” Summer said. “If we want to do all these projects, we need their money.”

“We don’t need it that bad,” Claudia snapped. “We still have book money coming in, and we have our regular fund-raisers, too. All we have to do it save until we have enough.”

“Save?” Summer made a disbelieving noise. “The book money is slowing down and it will take us years to have enough bake sales and dances and school carnivals to make up the rest of that money. It’s nuts to even consider rejecting their offer.”

Yes, it was another PTA meeting that was going nowhere positive. The few people out in the audience looked as bored as I felt. It was probably time for me to intervene, but I’d held out hope that Claudia and Summer could put down their hammers and tongs and come to some sort of solution.

As Summer and Claudia bickered, I spun the gavel in a circle, where it stops no one knows. Like spin the bottle, only not nearly so much fun. Not that I’d know. I’d never been at a party where kids played the game. Did today’s youth even know what it was? So many questions in my head and so few answers. Maybe Pete would know.

“What are you smiling at?” Claudia asked.

After a long pause, I realized she was talking to me. “I think it’s time for a vote.”

“Excuse me?”

Pointedly, I looked at the wall clock. “We’ve been discussing this for almost an hour, and as far as I can tell, we’re no closer to a conclusion. So”—I spun the gavel again—“I move that we accept the Tarver Foundation’s offer to match our funds.” I sensed Claudia’s mouth opening, so I plunged ahead. “And that we accept their matching offer contingent on the foundation accepting that we submit monthly progress reports instead of weekly ones.”

“Second,” Randy said.

I smiled at the gavel. While I wasn’t manipulative enough to have primed Randy to make the second, I was manipulative enough to have asked him (last week) what he objected to most about the foundation’s accountability requests. And since I’d also talked to a representative of the Tarver Foundation that afternoon, I was quite confident they’d accept our mild counteroffer. “All in favor, say aye.”

Three voices said, “Aye.”

“Opposed, say nay.”

“Nay!” Claudia glared at me. “I’m telling you right now that this is a mistake. Please have the secretary put in the minutes that I say you’ll all live to regret this vote.”

“So noted,” I said, nodding at Summer. “This meeting is adjourned.” I gave the gavel a happy bang. The PTA and the Tarver Foundation would be funding four sorely needed projects. New playground equipment, a part-time music teacher, irrigating the soccer field, and starting up a summer arts day camp. Each one was a large undertaking, and the thought of the work ahead made me sway a little, but the results would be well worth it.

“It’s a mistake.” Claudia planted herself in front of me.

“Yes, you said. Excuse me a minute.” I eeled around her and steamed straight for Isabel Olsen. Surely, by the time I reached her, I would have come up with an appropriate question. Something a little less than “Are you a cold-blooded killer?” and a little more than “Say, did you hear about Cookie?”

“Hey, Beth, do you have a minute?” Travis Heer, Whitney’s husband, tapped me on the shoulder. “What do you think about collecting box tops?”

I slowed. “Sure, but can you wait a second? I need to talk to . . .” I looked in Isabel’s direction, but she’d already reached the doorway and was gone. Rats. I stifled a sigh and smiled at the young father. “I’m all yours. Box tops, you said?”

“Yeah.” He launched into a long and detailed explanation of the virtues of box tops. How no other PTA in the area was collecting them, how we could make out like bandits if we put together a collection system, how all the things we could do with the cash we earned would be great. “We could do more of those things on the lists, right?” He was practically bouncing as he talked. “Sports stuff, arts stuff, who cares what kind of stuff as long as it’s for the kids, right? I mean, as long as we can get kids active in something, it’s all good, right?”

I beamed at him. “That’s exactly right. I’ll put it on next month’s agenda. Are you willing to get up and talk about it? Because I’m warning you, if you do, you’re going to get nominated to do all the work of setting up the collection system.”

“Figured as much.” He grinned. “But I’m good with that. For the kids, you know?”

There was nothing like youth and the energy that went with it. “Travis, you are a treasure. Would you like to run for PTA president?”

He backed away, laughing. “What, when you’re doing such a good job?”

Clearly, he thought I was joking. He was wrong. I made a mental note to add him to my short list of potential replacements. Erica, my PTA presidential predecessor, had told me finding a new president was one of my most important jobs. I’d laughed, but she’d been serious.

“If you care about this group, and I know you do, start thinking about it now,” she’d said. So I did, and still was. Travis, I thought. The first male president of the Tarver Elementary PTA. We could do a lot worse.

I looked around the room. Claudia and Tina were clustered in a corner, heads together, sending the occasional ocular dagger in my direction. Carol and Nick Casassa were zipping up their coats and arguing about where they should go over spring break. It sounded as if Carol wanted to take the kids skiing and Nick wanted to go to Arizona to catch the last Milwaukee Brewers spring training game.

When there was a pause in their friendly sparring, I jumped in. “Have you seen Marina?”

Carol pulled on her mittens. “She scooted out after the meeting so fast I wondered if she’d left something in the oven.” She laughed. “If it was those brownies she makes, they won’t be fit for man nor beast. Not even boy beasts.”

“You talking about me?” Nick puffed up his chest. “I have standards. Lots of them.”

“Oh, sure.” Carol lightly bumped his chest with her wool-covered fist. “Like you won’t eat anything that has a sell-by date more than five years old.”

Nick grinned. “Like I said. Standards.”

They left. Claudia and Tina had already gone. I put on my coat and gathered my things.

“Done here, Mrs. Kennedy?” Harry stood in the doorway.

“Yes, Harry. Thanks for staying.”

“Just doing my job.”

I walked out of the room and he shut and locked the classroom door. “Well,” I said, “you’re doing it in an outstanding fashion.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Kennedy. You drive safe home, okay?”

“Yes. Thanks. Have a good night, Harry.” I walked out into the cold, started the car, turned on the headlights, and drove out of the parking lot.

But I didn’t head for home.

•   •   •

I stood there, hands in my coat pockets, hat on my head, and toes warm in my boots, watching the snow falling on Cookie Van Doorne’s dark house. My house was dark, too, since the kids were with their father, and the thought of that emptiness had somehow sent me here.