Poison at the PTA (9 page)

Cookie hadn’t accidentally overdosed on acetaminophen. Someone had sprinkled the bitter stuff into her coffee.

She’d been poisoned.

She’d been murdered.

I
made sure the other PTA members had left; then while still in the kitchen, still staring at the bottle, I called Gus and told him what I’d found.

“All right,” he said calmly. “I’m on my way. Is anyone else in the building?”

“Harry,” I said. “He came back to make sure the school was locked up.”

“That’s fine. Harry’s a good man. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

I thumbed off my cell and looked at Harry. He was the school janitor, the security guard, and the fixer of all things, but above all, a quiet and usually unnoticed presence. I’d known Harry for years but didn’t know anything about him.

“Chief Eiseley will be here in a few minutes,” I said.

A great conservator of words, Harry just nodded. Sadly, Harry was also a fan of Chicago’s NHL team, the Blackhawks, instead of being the Minnesota Wild fan that he should be, but we’d learned to discuss hockey without coming to blows.

“That girl of yours,” he said. “she’s a good goalie.”

I beamed. “Thank you.” My smile faded as I remembered that she now had competition for the starting spot. I said as much to Harry.

“A test for her,” he said. “If she keeps on, it’ll happen again. Better if she learns now how to deal with it.”

He was right. And if I was smart, I’d remember to pass on his advice to Jenna. Matter of fact, it was such good advice that I wondered how much experience he had in giving it out. “Do you have any children, Harry?” He didn’t wear a wedding band, but not all men did, especially men who, in the course of any given day, could come in contact with everything from thick mud to live wires to leaking pipes.

Instead of answering, he reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. With a flick of the wrist, he flipped it open and held it out for me to see.

I blinked. Blinked again. It was a family photo. A smiling Harry sat shoulder to shoulder with a happy-looking woman. Grouped around them were two young men and three young women. “Your family?” I asked.

“Old picture, though.” He studied it. “Need a new one that has the grandbabies.”

Harry had grandchildren? My mouth flopped open and shut a few times before I could get my vocal cords working. “How many?” I asked.

“Two.” He paused. “For now. Two more on the way.”

I looked again at the picture. “You look very happy. You all do.”

He shrugged. “We get along most days.”

“Do they live around here?”

“Oldest son.” Harry pointed at the photo. “He’s out in Seattle, doing computer stuff for that big company out there.”

“Microsoft?” I asked faintly.

“That’s the one. Oldest girl, she’s career army, about to move up to captain, she says. Next son, he’s teaching history at that college in Indiana. South Bend.”

“Notre Dame?”

“Yuh-huh. Next daughter, she’s not too far away, over in Milwaukee. She and her husband, doctor and doctor.” He chuckled quietly. “Busy folks, those two, always cutting up somebody and putting them back together.”

“Surgeons?”

He nodded. “Our youngest girl, she was in the Peace Corps. Now she’s in Washington, doing flunky work for some senator.” He tucked his wallet back into his pocket. “She’s talking about going to law school. My bride and I, we’re not so sure that’d be the best thing for her, but she’ll do what she’ll do.”

“Kids tend to do that.” I stared at him. How could I not have known any of this? How could I not have known that after decades of marriage, Harry still loved his wife deeply enough to call her his bride? Why on earth hadn’t he ever mentioned the many accomplishments of his children?

“Beth?” Gus walked into the kitchen. “Are you okay? You look a little strange.”

“It’s been . . . a strange evening,” I said.

“Where’s the bottle?” he asked.

I gestured to where it was standing like the cheese all alone on the stainless-steel countertop. “I was cleaning up something I’d spilled and found it down there.” I showed him the small gap. “My fingerprints are all over it. I’m really sorry, but I didn’t know what it was when I picked it up, so I couldn’t help . . .” With great effort, I made myself stop babbling like an idiot.

Gus took a pair of bright purple gloves from his pocket, pulled them on, and studied the bottle and its contents. For a long moment no one said anything. Harry and I watched Gus as he screwed the bottle’s top back on. Police work in action. Gus reached into an inside coat pocket for a paper bag. An evidence bag, I’m sure he would have called it, but to me it looked remarkably like a brown lunch bag.

After using a black marking pen to make some notations, Gus dropped the pill bottle into the bag and extracted a small stapler from his coat pocket to secure it.

He turned to face us, and his expression was as grim as I’d ever seen it. The Gus I’d known for years was a kind man given to buying more cookies from Girl Scouts than was good for anyone’s cholesterol. Right now, however, he looked every inch the hard, weatherworn, experienced police chief that he was.

“I don’t have to tell either of you how important this evidence could be.” He held the brown bag with his index finger and thumb.

“Sorry about the fingerprints,” I said again. “I wouldn’t have touched it if I’d known what it was.”

“Not your fault. But I will ask you to come down to the station tomorrow. We’ll need to fingerprint you for elimination purposes. This could be critical information,” Gus said, tapping the bag, “or it could be nothing. We won’t know for a while. Beth, Harry, I’m asking both of you to keep quiet.”

Harry, the man who had never told anyone about the many accomplishments of his children, wasn’t the one Gus was concerned about. It was the fact that I told Marina pretty much everything and that Marina told everybody everything.

But things were different now. “I promise,” I told Gus.

•   •   •

The short drive home was quiet and dark, which matched the quiet and dark of the empty house. First thing I did after walking in the door was turn on every light in the kitchen. Maybe light would chase away the sadness that was settling in on my shoulder.

I picked up the phone and dialed.

“You’re late,” Richard pointed out.

My former husband had a knack for stating the obvious. “Yes,” I said, and left it at that. If I explained, he’d start lecturing me about getting involved in things I had no business being involved in, I’d get my back up about him lecturing me about anything at all, and we’d devolve to a level of acute politeness that would take weeks to thaw. “Is Oliver still up?” I asked.

“I was about to send him to brush his teeth,” Richard said.

“This won’t take long.”

Richard sighed and put down the phone. A moment later I heard my son’s voice. “Hi, Mom.”

Maybe someday I’d hear those two words and not melt into warm mush. But I hoped not. “Hi, Ollster. What did you do tonight?” I asked.

“I played with that new video game Dad gave us for Christmas.”

Wonderful. “Anything else?” I asked.

“I made up a new song.”

Oliver’s songs were usually composed of roughly two notes and two sentences, but they were my favorite songs in the world. “Can I hear it?”

“It’s not quite done yet, but it goes like this.” He hummed a dah-di-dah sequence, then sang, “Miss Stephanie is pretty as can be. Miss Stephanie has a smile for me. Miss Stephanie is . . .” He stopped. “That’s all I have right now.”

“You can finish it tomorrow,” I said. And maybe tomorrow would be the right time to talk to him about how cute little Mia Helmstetter was looking this year. I sent him a good-night kiss. “What’s your sister doing?”

“Nothing. After supper she shut herself up in her room and hasn’t come out.”

That didn’t sound good. “Knock on her door, please, and tell her I want to say good night.”

I heard his
tap-tap
on the door. “Jenna, Mom wants to talk to you.” There was a pause. “Mom? She says she’s asleep.”

Riiight.
“Okay, sweetheart. Tell her I love her and to sleep tight.”

“And don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

“Not a single chomp.”

He giggled. “Night, Mom.”

After he hung up, I pulled out the phone book and flipped it open. “Coach Doan?” I asked. “This is Beth Kennedy, Jenna’s mother.”

His voice was cautious. “I thought I might hear from you. How’s she taking it?”

Bingo! “Well, that’s the thing. She’s staying with her dad tonight, so I don’t know what’s going on.”

It didn’t take long for him to give me the story I’d already anticipated. “Of course I understand,” I reassured him. “And I’ll do my best to make sure Jenna does.”

“She’s a good kid,” Coach said. “It’ll be fine in the end.”

Fine? Easy for him to say. I wasn’t so sure it would be that simple to find the words to console a young girl who was no longer the starting goalie for her hockey team.

Fatigue was starting to tug at my eyes. It was only nine o’clock, but I was ready for bed. I took Spot out for a short walk and brought George the cat upstairs with me. Five minutes later I had my teeth brushed and my pajamas on. Just as I was crawling under the covers, the phone rang.

Jenna. Maybe she’d felt the need to talk to her mother about the goalie situation. Maybe it was Marina, ready to talk. Maybe it was my mother, ready to move from northern Michigan to Florida.

All that flashed through my head in the time it took my hand to pick up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hey. How are you?”

Smiling, I finished my crawl into bed. “Pete, did you know you’re the only person I really wanted to talk to right now?”

“I was hoping so,” he said.

We talked about his day; then I told him about Oliver’s crush on his vice principal and about Jenna’s displacement from starting goalie. But I didn’t tell him about Marina, and I didn’t tell him about what I’d found in the school kitchen. One would have been a betrayal of a deep friendship; the other would have been a betrayal of the promise I’d made to Gus. Pete wouldn’t talk; as a forensic cleaner he knew better than most how to keep things to himself, but still.

As Pete gave me comforting reassurances about Oliver and said that Jenna would learn how to deal with her new hockey reality, I felt the muscles at the back of my neck start to relax.

“You really think it’s going to be okay?” I asked.

“Everything’s going to be just fine. Sleep tight, sweetheart.”

When he hung up, I held the phone to my chest for a moment, keeping him close. He was right. Everything would be okay. There was no reason to worry and get all worked up about things that wouldn’t happen. Oliver would be fine. Jenna would be fine. Marina and I would find a way back to normal, and . . .

And Cookie was dead. Poisoned by someone who’d been at the PTA in Review night.

I put the phone away and cuddled up to my comfortable cat, but even his loud purrs couldn’t quiet the thoughts that were racing through my head.

Cookie had been poisoned.

She’d been poisoned by someone during the PTA in Review night.

Cookie had been murdered.

By someone I knew.

At some point sleep swept over me, but it was a long time coming.

T
he next morning I presented myself at the police station bright and early. But it was my second stop. First, I’d knocked on the back door of the antiques store until Alice Barnhart let me in.

“It’s not even eight o’clock,” she said, wiping flour from her hands onto her flour-covered apron.

“I know, and I’m sorry for barging in like this when you’re not open, but there are people out there in desperate need of your cookies.”

“These are the only ones out of the oven.” She dropped half a dozen freshly baked M&M cookies into a white bag. “People? You, for instance?”

“Me and everybody else in this town,” I said. “Everybody in the state, if they knew about your cookies. You could franchise and make money hand over fist.”

“And you could do the same thing with your bookstore.”

I squinched my face. “That sounds horrible.”

“For you and me both,” she said cheerfully. “Big money means big headaches. I’m much happier with the money I have and my only headache being getting Alan to the doctor once a year.”

I thanked her for the early sale and she shooed me off. “Don’t worry about it. Now get out of here and let me start the next batch.”

A cold biting wind pushed me down the sidewalk. Light snow swirled around my ankles and dusted the evergreen shrubs with white. With my head down against the blustery weather, I cradled the cookies like a swaddled infant and hurried into the police station.

“And what to my wondering eyes should appear,” said Gus, “but a children’s bookstore owner and a kind offering for a morning snack?”

“Doesn’t scan.” I handed over the bag.

“That’s why I’m a cop and not a poet.” He reached in for a cookie. “Hey, these are still warm. How’d you manage that? Alice isn’t open for another hour.”

“My methods are top secret.”

He led me down the hall not to his office, but to the small lab-type area where the fingerprinting was done. I was mildly disappointed not to have the pads of my fingers stuck on a pad of ink.

“Haven’t done that for years,” he said, rolling my thumb across the glass of what looked like a small copy machine. “Besides, I always got more ink on me than on the people I was fingerprinting.” He studied a small screen and nodded. “One down. If I get the rest done without a redo, do I get another cookie?”

“Maybe I should check with Winnie first.”

He smiled. “My wife trusts me implicitly.”

In most ways, I was sure that Winnie did. In others, I was certain she absolutely did not. After the fingerprinting—which seemed a misnomer to me, since there were no prints, only digital images—we adjourned to Gus’s office, where he waved me to the visitor’s chair, which Winnie had refinished so recently that it still smelled faintly of polyurethane.

Gus sat behind his desk, pulled out a drawer, and propped his feet up. He smiled his not-quite-a-smile, the one that meant I wasn’t going to like what was coming. “You want the good news or the bad news?”

I slid down in the chair. “Bad.” Always best to hear the bad and get it over with.

“Wrong answer,” Gus said. “Because the bad news won’t make sense unless you hear the good news first.”

“Then why did you give me a choice?”

“Just to see how far you’d slide down in that chair. Remember the time you almost fell onto the floor?”

“No. What’s the good news?”

“I talked to the sheriff’s office this morning, and they won’t be taking over the investigation into Cookie Van Doorne’s death.”

“Okay.” Most times murder investigations went straight to the much larger county sheriff’s office with its experienced staff and deeper technological capabilities. “Why?”

“That’s the bad news.” Gus looked at me straight on and I prepared myself for a blow. “They’re not convinced Cookie was murdered.”

I shot up out of the chair. “They
what
?
That’s nuts! Cookie would no more have committed suicide than”—I scrambled for an analogy—“than I would have turned down the corners of a first-edition
Secret Garden
instead of using a bookmark. She hadn’t shown any signs of depression, and someone said she left a knitting project half-finished.”

Wise man that he was, Gus didn’t tell me to calm down, but let me rant and rave as long as my breath held out. When I was done and settled back in the chair, he asked, “Were you good friends with Cookie?”

I slid back into a slouch. Didn’t say anything. His next question was as inevitable as it was unwelcome.

“So,” he said, “if you didn’t know her all that well, how can you say with any credibility that she wouldn’t have committed suicide? And before you get all up in arms, I’m just whistling in the dark. Convince me. You know I’ll listen.”

I thought back to the previous year when I’d kind of sort of not on purpose proved that a death from two decades earlier hadn’t been the suicide so many people had thought it was. It had been murder, but people had seen a reason for suicide and leapt to the wrong conclusion.

“Last May,” I said. “Remember when—”

“Yes. But that was the opposite situation.”

“I’m just saying that you never know what’s in someone’s head. How can anyone really know anything about someone else’s motivations?” Because I wasn’t even sure about my own motivations most of the time. How could I guess at the whys and wherefores of someone I’d hardly known?

“You do realize you’re not convincing me of anything,” Gus said.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said stubbornly. “I’ve heard that pills are the most common form of suicide in women, but that doesn’t prove anything. And why on earth would she do it at a PTA meeting?”

Gus shrugged. “Maybe she was hoping someone would stop her. Maybe it was an impulse. Maybe she was driven to it by having to listen to May Werner for an hour.” He looked at me. “That last one was a joke. It would probably take two hours.”

“Was there an autopsy?” I asked. “Was she sick, otherwise?”

He opened a folder on his desk and flipped through papers. “No sign of substantial heart disease, no sign of any cancer, no sign of anything except an overdose of acetaminophen.”

I let my head drop back and stared at the stained ceiling tiles. “Are you ever going to spend some money on updating this place?”

“Not on my budget. Beth, have you realized that a suicide would be a lot easier to deal with, considering where that pill bottle was found?”

Of course I’d considered it. I’d considered it half the night. Why did he think my eyes were so bleary and why I was too tired to keep my head up? “What is convenient shouldn’t be a consideration,” I said heavily. “What matters is the truth.”

“You know what might happen.”

I knew. If Cookie’s death wasn’t suicide, it was murder. If it was murder, it was committed by someone I knew, even someone I liked. Perhaps someone I trusted and considered a friend.

“Maybe I’m leaping to the wrong conclusion.” I slid down a little farther in the chair.

“But you don’t think so,” Gus said.

“No.” We sat in silence a moment. “Do you?” I asked.

He shut the folder. “There will be an investigation and I will keep an open mind to all possibilities. But there’s something you can do for me,” Gus said. “Let me know if you hear anything.”

“What I hear right now is the wind howling at your window.”

“Listen carefully if you hear anyone talking about Cookie. Pay attention to anyone who is acting out of character. Watch to see if relationships change. You listen,” he said, “and you pay attention. That’s two major skills for law enforcement officers.”

“Last I checked, I was a children’s bookstore owner, not a detective.”

He let his feet drop to the floor and put his elbows on the desk. “Beth. Do you think Cookie was murdered?”

I closed my eyes. Relived the car ride from school to her house. Remembered the phone call. Went through the visit at the hospital and—

“What?” Gus leaned forward. “You’ve remembered something.”

“At the hospital, when I visited her. I’m not sure how I could have forgotten. It was when she said she was being poisoned.”

“What else did she say?” His voice was calm but held an underlying edge. “Keep your eyes closed. Go back to the hospital room and remember what she said. She was lying in the bed and . . .”

“She said that evil walks around with us. She said it’s our duty to make things right.” My eyelids snapped open. “I didn’t take her seriously. You know how she exaggerated, how she took everything so seriously.” My lower lip trembled. “Why didn’t I take her seriously? If I had . . .”

“If you had,” Gus said, “nothing would have changed. By the time she was admitted to the hospital, the damage had been done. There was nothing you could have done to change what was going to happen.”

He was wrong, of course. I could have stayed at the hospital. I could have gone back for another visit. I could have held her hand. I could have believed her.

Gus reached for another cookie. “How’s Pete doing these days? I hear you’re seeing a lot of each other.”

“I haven’t seen him for a few days,” I said as heat rushed around in my head.

Gus grinned. “Your ears are turning pink.”

I snatched the bag of cookies from underneath his outstretched hand. “You’ve already had two. Any more and Winnie gets a phone call.” I picked up my purse, stood, and headed for the door.

“Beth?”

I turned. Warily. “What?”

“My opinion, for what it’s worth. Pete’s a good man.”

The warmth of a spring thaw coursed through my skin and down into my bones. I swallowed once, then twice, but still couldn’t get my voice to work properly. So I went back, tipped the rest of the cookies out onto his desk, and left.

•   •   •

My walk back to the store wasn’t far, but the wind made it feel like a twenty-mile trek. How the wind could have been in my face both walking to and walking from the police station, I wasn’t sure, but my bright red nose attested to the situation’s reality.

With my head down, all I saw were the brick pavers that made up most of the downtown sidewalks. I didn’t see the mishmash of architecture that somehow made the Rynwood storefronts into one lovely whole, I didn’t see Alan Barnhart out sweeping the bricks in front of the antiques store until I almost ran into him, and I didn’t see or hear the SUV roaring past me until the slush it sprayed out splattered all over my pant legs.

I also didn’t see that Lois and Flossie were in the middle of an argument. If I’d been paying attention, I would have seen through the storefront window that they were arguing fiercely. As it was, I didn’t get a clue until I walked in, jingling the front doorbells.

They both flicked me a quick glance, but their voices continued.

“How could anyone think
The Little Princess
is a better book?” Flossie asked fiercely. “That Sara is the definition of insipid.”

Lois glared at her. “She’s kind and considerate, which is more than I can say about some people around here. And I’d rather have my characters be kind and considerate than be like that brat Mary Lennox.”

I could see Flossie’s chin go up and her mouth start to open. Quicker than speech, I made my thumb and middle finger into a circle, put them in my mouth, and blew an earsplitting whistle.

When the echo faded, I gave them both hard looks. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but I want it to stop. Now and forevermore.”

Lois’s face had a mulish expression. Flossie looked abashed. “I’m sorry, Beth,” she said. “We shouldn’t have been arguing in the store, even if it’s empty. It won’t happen again, I promise.”

“Yeah, me, too. Sorry, Beth.” Lois bumped Flossie’s arm. “Next time we’ll go out back in the alley, okay? Say, have you ever read
The Lost Prince
? Now, there’s a classic.”

I didn’t know what was more odd, two grown women arguing about children’s books written a century earlier, or the fact that Lois and Flossie were arguing at all. Before I’d hired Flossie, I’d talked at length with Lois, Yvonne, and Paoze and they’d all been happy at the idea of working with her. What had changed in the last three months?

“Flossie?” I asked. “Would you mind going to the grocery store and getting some milk for the tea? We’re almost out.”

When she was out the door, I turned on Lois. “All right, what were you two really fighting about? And don’t tell me it was about Frances Hodgson Burnett’s books.”

“What makes you think anything is wrong?” Her mulish expression was still there.

“Sara Crewe and Mary Lennox?” I asked dryly. “Come on.”

“Anyone who doesn’t like Sara Crewe needs some serious counseling. There’s nothing wrong that can’t be fixed by making a certain person write a comparison paper between
The Secret Garden
and
The Little Princess.
Mary Lennox. As if.” She huffed and stomped off.

Midstomp, she turned around and pointed at me. “And quit worrying about this kind of stuff. It’s not on your recovery agenda and we’re only halfway in.” She returned to her former program of stomping and made her way to the graphic novel section.