Poison at the PTA (25 page)

“No pen,” I said.

The smell of gas insinuated itself through my nasal passages, up into my brain, and permeated my thoughts with despair. I sat up straight. No. I was not going to let despair win. I was not going to give up and I was not going to die. Not tonight.

“Your other pocket,” I said. “Let me try. You never know what a mom might have stowed away. You might have something you forgot about in there.”

Claudia shifted around to make my access as easy as possible. “I suppose,” she said listlessly. “But I’m sure it’s empty.” She started to say something more, but her words faded off to silence.

Which worried me, because Claudia always had something to say. A cramp in my shoulder that had formed when reaching for the pen reappeared in a slightly different location, but I timed my grunt of pain with a stretching motion so I wouldn’t scare anyone, including me. “Are my fingers in the right place?” I asked. “It’s hard to tell.”

“A little to the left. Okay, that’s it. Just reach in.”

My fumbling fingers weren’t cooperating in the least, but I shoved them forward, hoping for the best, praying for the best, and tried to distract myself with inane conversation.

“Moms find all sorts of weird things in their pockets. Someone should do a research paper on it. Wonder if I could get a grant.”

“I really smell gas now,” Claudia said.

“Oh, Claudia,” I breathed. “Oh, my dear Claudia.”

“What? What?”

“You have boys. You have three boys.” Named Tyler, Taylor, and Taynor, but I wasn’t going to think about that right now.

“I’m not sure . . .”

My smile, which she couldn’t see, was big and happy. “Thanks to one of your boys, you have a toy car in your coat pocket.” My lifeless fingers hadn’t been able to tell what it was, but when I’d slid it up to the insides of my wrists, my skin had identified the shape.

“It was broken,” Claudia said faintly. “There was a sharp piece. I didn’t want Taynor playing with it. He might have cut himself.”

And in doing so, she’d saved us. “I’m going to pull it out, okay?”

We made the transfer oh so carefully, and Claudia immediately started sawing away at the string around my wrists. “I can’t tell,” she panted, “if I’m using the sharp part.”

“Keep at it,” I said. “It’ll cut. Just keep at it.”

“I can’t,” she said weakly. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. For all I know I’m using the wheel to cut with.”

“You can,” I told her. “You can and you will. Say it after me. ‘I can do this.’”

“Beth—”

“Say it! ‘I can do this.’”

“I can do this,” she said in a monotone.

“Now say it with feeling. Say it three times.”

“I can do this.” She sighed. “I can do this. I can do this.” But on the last one, her voice grew stronger and she kept going. “I can. I
can
do this, can’t I?”

“Yes,” I said. “You can.”

She went back to the sawing. “I can do this.” Each word synchronized with a stroke. “I. Can. Do. This. I. Can—”

My wrists fell apart and my hands dropped to the floor. “You did it,” I whispered. “You did it just fine.”

She whooped. I used the stubs at the ends of my arms—stubs that had once been my hands—to push myself to a half crouch. “Claudia, can you grab the end of my sleeve? If I pull out of my coat . . .”

With
oof
s and grunts and a fair amount of sotto voce cursing, my thick winter coat slithered off my arms and onto the floor. I lifted my arms and started squirming out from underneath the strap Kirk had tied around us.

Inside the furnace, there was a loud
click!

“B
eth?”

I wanted to tell Claudia not to worry, to let her know that it would be okay, to tell her things would be fine in the end.

But there wasn’t time.

There was no time to talk, no time to think; there was only time to act, and I had to act and move fast, faster than I’d ever moved before, because if I didn’t, there would be no time left for either of us.

“Beth!” Claudia shrieked.

In one simultaneous motion that I could never have achieved if pure panic hadn’t been pushing me, I shoved the strap up over my head and propelled myself forward, a sprinter starting the race of her life.

How long ago had that heart-stopping
click
been? One second? Two?

No time . . .

I lunged across the room.

“Beth!”

Abandoning reason and using instinct alone, I launched myself into a full-length horizontal stretch, arms out high above my head, reaching and lengthening every muscle and every joint and every cell in my body.

Have to get there, have to reach, have to make these useless fingers be useful, have to . . . have to . . . have to . . .

With my eyes focused hard on the object of my desire, I extended my hand, reached . . . reached even farther . . . and pulled the furnace’s plug out of the wall with a satisfying
thwip!

I crashed to the floor.

“Beth?” Claudia asked tentatively. “Are you okay? You sounded like you might have hurt yourself. And, um, are we going to be okay?”

No matter how much gas leaked into this room and no matter how low the temperature in the house dropped, without electricity, the furnace would never turn on. “Hang on.”

Carefully, oh so very carefully, I walked to the nearest window. I was wearing rubber-soled boots, but if there were stones lodged in the boot treads, a spark could undo us. I stood below the small window and looked up at the single pane. No crank to wind out a casement window, no side-by-side panes to slide, not even an old thumb latch to open. To open it, I’d have to break the glass.

Gas was heavier than air. Would breaking the window do us any good?

Behind me, Claudia coughed and I realized how strong the gas smell was.

Maybe breaking the window wouldn’t do any good, but it couldn’t hurt. As long as I didn’t create a spark, of course.

I stood on my tiptoes, bent my wrist, and bashed at the glass. Sharp tinkles fell away and fresh air rushed at me as did the lessons from middle school science class.

Gas is heavier than air. Cold air is heavier than warm. The new air would mix with the gas, and if not dissipate the gas completely, it would buy us enough time to get free of the house.

“We’re almost out of here,” I told Claudia. I paused to suck in one long selfish breath, then went to grab the scissors. Just before I picked them up, I stopped short. My fingers were still merely lifeless sausages at the ends of my hands. If I tried to pick up the scissors, I’d drop them on the floor. The metal scissors. On the concrete floor. With a lot of gas still floating around.

Not a good idea.

Hmm.

I looked at the scissors for a long moment. Thought hard. Got a plan.

“Careful,” I muttered to myself. Using my elbow, I slowly slid the scissors off the edge of the shelf. They plopped nicely into the coat pocket I was holding open with the other hand. “Here,” I said, walking over to kneel behind Claudia. “Can you reach into my pocket? If you can get hold of the scissors, you can use the blade to—”

“To slice the string,” she said, reaching backward with her strung-together wrists. She slid her working fingers around one of the scissor handles and pulled it out of my pocket. One, two, and three easy sawing motions later, she’d cut herself free.

“Hallelujah!” She raised the scissors in her hand and hauled back to toss them across the room.

“
No
!” I jumped in front of her upraised arm, only it was too late; she’d started her throwing motion and couldn’t stop.

The pointed blade sliced through my coat, through my sweater, through my shirt, and into my skin. I gasped. Searing red-hot pain. Burning white pain that was turning wet with . . . oh, eww. “Don’t drop the scissors,” I managed to say. “Whatever you do, don’t drop them.”

With one hand, Claudia pushed the strap up over her head and was free. “I cut you! Why did you jump in front of me? You’re bleeding. Oh, Beth, you’re bleeding!” She laid the scissors on the floor and hauled us both to our feet. “We have to get out of here. That gas smell is still way too strong. Come on.”

She put one arm around my waist.

“The scissors,” I said, trying to explain. “The gas. They might have sparked.”

Claudia stopped. Looked back at the innocent household object that had come so close to sending us to kingdom come. Looked back at me. “So you saved us twice,” she said seriously, starting us walking again.

If she’d been Marina, I would have said that I’d really only wanted to save myself, though since she’d been there with me, there hadn’t been much choice. But it was Claudia and she didn’t exactly understand my sense of humor, so I said, “Yeah. Well.”

“Can you make it up the stairs? I’ll help. . . . There you go.” She came up behind me, supporting me, half pushing me, which was completely unnecessary because I could tell my wound wasn’t that deep. “You know,” she said, “when I cut you free and you were moving really fast, I thought, well, I thought you might be running away and leaving me alone.”

I stopped dead, halfway up the stairs. “Oh, Claudia. I never would have done that. Never.”

“Yeah. I should have known better. Um, thanks.”

Hot embarrassment flamed my face. Happily, Claudia was behind me and couldn’t see. “Don’t mention it.” Please don’t. But I knew she would. She’d tell her husband and her children and her friend Tina and her friend CeeCee and . . . I sighed.

“You sure you’re okay?” she asked.

“I will be.” Eventually, I’d be fine.

“So now what?”

“We call Gus.”

•   •   •

After listening to my short but concise explanation of the evening’s events, a hoarse Gus asked me where we were.

“In Claudia’s car,” I said. With the doors locked. Claudia had insisted on looking at my cut before I called. After cleaning up the blood and sticking bandages on me, she’d pronounced that I didn’t need to go to the emergency room. It was nice that we agreed on something.

“And her car is where?” Gus asked.

I frowned. What difference did it make as long as we weren’t in the basement about to die? “In Cookie’s driveway.”

“You need to leave immediately.”

My frowned deepened. “We’re fine. We even have the doors locked.” I forced out a chuckle. “You know, just in case.”

“Get out of there now!”

I blinked. Gus had used the chief of police voice on me. He wouldn’t have done that unless he had a very good reason. “Okay,” I said. “We’ll—”

“Go to the police station. Don’t worry about calling the gas company. I’ll take care of that and the neighborhood evacuation. Just leave. Now!”

He was gone. I handed Claudia the phone. “He wants us to go to the police station.”

“What for?”

And that’s when I remembered what had happened a couple of years ago. How a gas leak in a house had caused an explosion that had flattened the house and taken walls out of the houses surrounding it. How the explosion had caused structural damage to houses in the next outer ring. How people had died.

“It’ll be more comfortable there,” I told her. “This might be a long night.”

•   •   •

The nice Officer Sean Zimmerman greeted us at the door. When we were settled, decaf coffee in hand, he started asking questions. He was still asking questions when I needed to take a bathroom break and he was still asking questions when Gus came in.

“Haven’t you finished yet?” Gus pulled a chair up to the interview table and sat heavily.

“Almost, sir.” Sean scanned his notes, then looked up. “So after you cut the string, disabled the furnace, broke the window, and got out of the house, you called Chief Eiseley from Mrs. Wolff’s car. Is that correct?”

Claudia and I nodded.

Gus put one elbow on the table and rested his chin on the heel of his hand. “Sean, did you ask them why they were there in the first place?”

“Yes, sir, I did. Mrs. Wolff said, and Mrs. Kennedy corroborates, that they were making sure the house was secure. They said . . .” He checked his notes. “They said that they’d been at the bookstore. During a conversation about the PTA, they’d started to worry about Mrs. Van Doorne’s house being empty for so long, and they decided to check on it.”

“Uh-huh.”

Gus didn’t sound convinced. Which wasn’t surprising, since Gus had known me for a long time, but Claudia and I had come up with a story and we were sticking to it. Not a bad story, really, and it was almost true.

Well, it was a little bit true.

“So what happened?” Claudia asked. “Did you get him?”

Gus folded his hands. “Mr. Olsen is in custody and being held at the county jail. Evidence is being collected. Your statements will be of great assistance to the investigation.”

Later, I would learn that Gus and a fellow officer had burst in on Kirk at his stockbroker’s office. Since he hadn’t been able to get into the bookstore—thanks to me giving him last week’s security code—he’d taken out his frustration on an innocent back door by denting it with his fists and feet. When they’d found him in his office, he’d been online, booking a safari trip to Africa.

Later, I would learn that Kirk had embezzled more than two hundred thousand dollars from his clients and from his employer. Later, I would learn that he’d been let go by his previous employer, Glenn Kettunen, because of accounting discrepancies. Later, I’d learn that Kirk had a storage locker full of brand-new golf clubs, new power tools, a new sixty-inch television, and a new boat.

I would learn all that later, and none of it would make me happy, because all I could think about was Isabel. The pregnant Isabel. What was she going to do without her husband? How was she going to manage? How would Neal and Avery and the upcoming baby manage without a father?

“You okay?” Gus asked.

I shook my head. Then nodded. I wasn’t okay, but I would be. I’d feel much better after I got home and snuggled into my own bed with my cat and dog. And I’d feel even better after calling Pete, because more than anything, what I wanted was to hear his voice. “I’m fine. Can we go home?”

“Sure. We’re done for the night.”

I started to stand, then plopped back down. “My car is still parked near Cookie’s house.”

“No problem,” Gus said. “I’ll give you a ride.”

But it was Claudia who stood and held out a hand to help me up. “Let me,” she said, and smiled at me. A real smile that made her look almost like . . . a friend.

•   •   •

The next day was Saturday. I hadn’t been scheduled to work, but after I found myself wandering aimlessly around the house with a dust rag for an hour without having dusted a single thing, I drove to the store.

A wide-eyed Lois and a shocked Flossie listened to my story of What Happened Last Night with only the occasional “Get out of here!” and “Oh, dear” for interruption.

When I finished, Flossie touched my arm. “And you? How are you?”

“I’m . . .” Fine, I almost said. But something held me back. Maybe it was the empathy in her pale eyes, maybe it was the kindness in her voice, and maybe it had something to do with not having called Marina last night. Whatever the reason, instead of the standard “I’m fine,” what I said was “I’m not sure.”

Lois blinked. “But you’re always fine. Now you’re suddenly not?”

“The social ‘I’m fine’ does not equate to truth,” Flossie said. “She says ‘I’m fine’ because that’s what you want to hear.”

“That’s not true.” Lois squared off to face her opponent. “Heck,” she said, “I’d rather hear someone say, ‘Oh, but that looks good on
you
’ than hear Beth tell half a lie. A quarter of a lie. And I’d rather hear someone say—”

But by then I was out the door and walking down the street.

“Thought I’d see you this morning.” Gus waved at his guest chair. “What’s on your agenda today? Catch another killer?”

“I sincerely hope not,” I said, unzipping my coat. Not this morning and, with any luck, not ever again. “And it’s a little disheartening that I’m so predictable.”

“Means you’re reliable. Stolid. Trustworthy.”

“Stuck in a rut. Boring.”

He smiled. “Boring people don’t break into empty houses to try and find a clue to a killer’s identity.” He held up his hands as I started my obligatory protest. “I know, I know. You and Claudia Wolff had a story, and you’re sticking to it. Speaking of which, you and Claudia working together is unexpected. How did that happen to come about?”

“Bad luck, really.” I rolled out the backstory of the previous night, then said, “What I don’t understand is why. Why did Kirk . . . you know.”