The Class Menagerie jj-4 (10 page)

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Jane leaned forward. "What did you tell her?"

Kathy looked genuinely surprised at the question. "I told her to fuck off. What do you think? I'm not stupid about what I do with my money."

"— and?" Jane prodded.

"And she backed off. But it was temporary. She minced about how embarrassing it would be for everybody to know my real life and how she'd just let me think about it a while and she was certain I'd see the sense in giving her a little help over a rough spot." Kathy had lapsed into imitating Lila's precise, slightly Boston accent with chilling accuracy.

"And then somebody killed the bitch," Kathy added in her own voice.
"
And I'm glad!"

"Kathy, that's a reckless thing to say," Beth warned her.

"It's the truth. And we're having a goddamned sloppy moment of truth here, aren't we? Well — shit! The charade's over. I'm going to take a shower and get out of these dumb clothes."

She dislodged Hector, got up, and stomped off, nearly upsetting Mimi, who was still perched on the arm of the chair. Hector ambled over to the French doors and went back outside.

Beth, Mimi, and Jane looked at each other for a long moment before Beth said softly, "Oh, dear."

Mimi and Jane started giggling from sheer nerves.

But they stopped abruptly when Pooky came into the room, still looking confused and lost. "I'm sorry to interrupt you," she said.

"You're not," Beth said. "What's wrong?"

"Well, I hate to say this, but my room's been ransacked and something's missing," she cast a half-apologetic glance at Jane.

"Ransacked! Well, my cleaning skills aren't too

good, but they're not
that
bad. Besides, I didn't ever get to your room," Jane assured her. "What's missing?"

"It's this antique pen thingie. It's very valuable. One of the guys in our class saw it when he was in my town and he didn't buy it, but then he saw my address in the roster and asked me to bring it to him at the reunion. He sent them a check and I just picked it up. I guess he didn't trust the mail. The price tag was still taped to the bottom. It cost five thousand dollars and now it's missing. I don't know what to do!" She burst into tears, which pulled her poor face in odd directions and made her look not quite human.

"This is going too far!" Mimi said, showing real anger for the first time. "The only people who have left this house today are Jane and Crispy and they couldn't have sneaked it out without the other one noticing." She glanced at Jane. "Not that either of you
would
steal anything. So it's got to be in this house someplace and we're going to find it. Everybody is going to help!"

The "antique pen thingie" turned up, unharmed, in an otherwise empty wastebasket in the utility room, but not before Pooky had full-fledged hysterics and the rest of the searchers came to harsh words several times. Shelley had called a short meeting to deliver a fierce little lecture on the stupidity of playing these jokes and everybody agreed, even though it was obvious that one of them was, in fact, the perpetrator.

Edgar had taken three aspirins and gone upstairs to take a nap to kill his headache. He expressed the opinion that he'd rather kill himself, just at the moment. It was a remark that didn't go over very well. Jane soothed
as
many ruffled feathers as she could and then had gone from room to room collecting glasses, dishes, and dirty ashtrays. She'd just finished washing them when the phone rang. She lunged for it before it could disturb Edgar's much-needed rest.

"Bed and breakfast," she answered.

"Jane? I'm glad you answered."

"Mel?"

"Can you get away for a few minutes? I'm coming over there. But I want to talk to you before I come in."

Jane glanced at her watch and quickly reviewed her schedule. She was due to drive a car pool in fifteen minutes, then she was free until five, when she was coming back to help with dinner. Then she was off again to attend Back-To-School night. "I'm only free for a few minutes if you get here right away."

"I'm just down the street and what I have to tell you will only take a minute."

Jane dashed to let Shelley know she was leaving. She found her friend in the library, slamming folders around and trying to organize the notes of her aborted morning meeting. "Why did you let me do this!" Shelley said coldly.

"Stars in your crown. The Goddess of Entertaining is looking down on you even as we speak and giving you full credit. I'm off. See you at five."

Mel was parked at the far end of the drive by the gates. Jane got in his little red MG and said, "So?"

He took a deep breath. "There were two people in the carriage house. Two different sets of fingerprints."

"Can you identify them?"

"We don't need to. They turned themselves in an hour ago."

"Mel! That's wonderful! It's over. You've solved it. Why do you look like last night's pizza?"

"The beer and cigarettes belonged to two thirteen-year-old boys who'd sneaked out of their houses for a big thrill. They each had a beer and a cigarette and were starting to feel kind of sick before their eyes adjusted to the dark and they realized they were sitting a few feet from a dead body."

"Oh…."

"They came to the station with their parents. They heard about it on the noon news."

"And you believe them?"

Mel sighed. "Jane, one of the poor kids wet his pants right there in my office he was so scared. The mothers were in hysterics. One of the fathers started crying. It was awful! And it's the God's truth, I'd swear to it. I've met a lot of guilty people and a few innocent ones and I'd stake my reputation on the fact that they're innocent. They were terrified. The one kept saying he'd never seen a dead body before, even when his grandmother died. I turned them over to a psychologist. The whole gang of them. Parents, everybody. The lab will do tests on their clothes and so forth, but there's no doubt in my mind."

Jane looked back at the house. She saw a curtain on the third floor twitch. Edgar — or Gordon — watching. "When were they there?"

"About midnight, they think."

"So she was dead by then."

Mel nodded.

"And—?"

He looked straight at her. "And it looks like we're going to have to know a whole lot more about the people staying here."

Jane knew perfectly well what he meant, but she needed to hear him say it. "You don't really think one of those women killed her?"

"Probably," he said bluntly. "I need to know about them."

Jane glanced at her watch. "I don't know much, but there isn't time to tell you what I do know. I have to pick up kids at school."

He took her hand, but it was an absentminded gesture, not an affectionate one. "I didn't mean right now. We've got people doing background checks. What I need to know now is the schedule for this meeting. Nobody thinks they're leaving soon, do they?"

"No. The actual reunion starts tomorrow. Mel, I have to leave. What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to explain this to the owners and guests, give official warnings about not leaving, and set up a watch on the house."

"Mel—"

"Yes?"

"Well, it's just odd…. of all the women attending the meeting, the only one nasty enough to imagine casting as a murderer was the one who got killed. They're nice women, Mel."

"One of them'snot."

11

Jane ran her car pool on autopilot while her mind leaped around the facts and impressions jumbling in her mind. She'd have to organize her recollections before she passed them on to Mel. One thing seemed clear: Lila was a blackmailer. And if she'd tried it out on Kathy, she'd probably tried it out on others. All those nasty little digs she'd made the evening before were probably references to threats she'd already made or was paving the way to make later. The story she'd told suggesting that Avalon had experimented with drugs in high school was probably such an attempt. What else had she said? There had been a remark to Pooky about having a real understanding of the psychology of teenaged boys. What had that been about? Pooky had looked either stricken or confused by it, with the oddities of her facial expression, it was hard to tell which.

"Mom! You forgot to let off Jason," her son Todd said as they pulled into their own driveway.

"Oh, no I didn't," Jane said with a laugh. "I just like Jason so much I wanted to bring him home with us." She backed out and headed for Jason's house. Todd was looking mortally embarrassed by his mother's feeble joke.

When they got home the second time, there was a crisis. Mike had spilled a glass of orange juice all over a stack of his college applications and they had to dash back to school and beat the doors down to get in to acquire duplicates. Back home yet again, Jane had to cope with Katie, whose snit with her friend Jenny had escalated to nasty phone calls and hanging up on each other.

"I'm going to tell everybody everything I know about Jenny!" Katie exclaimed. "Like about how she had to go to the doctor because she wet the bed—"

Jane's patience, already at low ebb, disappeared entirely. "No, you're not!" she said. "You're going to behave like a lady. Those 'are friendship secrets and if the friendship dies, the secrets die with it."

Katie looked stunned at this outburst.

"Katie, I mean it. You'll regret it the rest of your life if you tell Jenny's secrets. Other people might like knowing the secrets, but they won't like you for telling them. And you'll never really, really like
yourself
again."

Katie fidgeted with her hair and looked out the window. "How do you know?"

"Because I'm a grown-up and I'm smarter than you," Jane said, uttering the one phrase she had sworn she would never use. She'd never succumbed to it before today, but she was rattled by the events at the bed and breakfast.

"Look Katie, I'm sorry I said that, but it
is
true. I've had experience in all kinds of things that you haven't yet. And I want to keep you from making big mistakes. It's my job as a mother to make sure you don't harm your opinion of yourself. Do you understand?"

To her astonishment, Katie hugged her hard and ran upstairs without a word.

Jane sat down at the kitchen table, shaking her head.

All those years she'd spent trying to explain, cajole, and gently urge Katie along, and this time a firm order had not only worked, but elicited a rare expression of affection. Why didn't they issue a handbook in the delivery room that explained which approach would work when? And why was it so hard for mothers and daughters to get along? Her boys were easy. They seemed genuinely to like her most of the time and if they disagreed with her rules, they criticized the rules, not her character. It must have to do with hormones, she concluded unhappily.

She threw together a quick dinner for the kids, gave last warnings about house rules while she was gone, and dashed back to the bed and breakfast to help Edgar. He was planning an elaborate dinner that night of glazed ham steaks with raisin/ginger sauce, julienned potatoes fried into tiny baskets with an artichoke heart filling, and a salad with a thousand finely diced ingredients. This was in addition to a raspberry souffle" for dessert and rolls that had to be watched carefully. He and Jane were so busy with the dinner itself that there was little time for chat about anything else. The only reference to murder was when Edgar said, "Would you prepare a tray for what's his name to eat in the library?"

"Which what's his name?"

"The officer they've left here to keep an eye on things." Edgar said this so bitterly that Jane didn't ask any other questions.

When everything was nearly ready to serve, Edgar said, "Gordon will help me take everything in. You run along to your meeting."

Jane glanced at her watch with horror. The Back-To-School night was starting in five minutes and she had to be there on time or she'd be assigned all kinds

of responsibilities she didn't want. It was highly dangerous to miss this night because the nonattendees, as a punishment, were given hideous jobs in their absence.

Jane got off lucky. No driving on field trips, no fund-raising carnival jobs, no baking for PTA meetings. Only assistant room mother for the Christmas — to be politically correct, Winter Break — party. It would be unspeakably horrible, of course, but it was still a couple of months away and the head room mother under whom she would work was a bossy woman who always ran the whole thing herself anyway. Jane even managed to protect Shelley from being voted PTA secretary, for which Shelley would owe her at least another permanent.

When she returned to the bed and breakfast very early the next morning, she discovered that Shelley's personality had come back up to full force the evening Jjefore and she had compelled the other women to tend to the business of having their fund-raising meeting. God only knew how she had done it. Jane suspected it would be generations before the meeting faded from the collective minds of Ewe Lamb history. She told Shelley so.,

Shelley was tidying up the last of her paperwork in the kitchen, packing it away into file folders. "I got a call a while ago about buying the rights to do a Movie of the Week about it. They've run out of diseases and are going into severe personality disorders," she said, collapsing into a chair. "I've never been so tired in my life, Jane."

"This might perk you up. That vicious Elaine person you fell out with over the carnival budget tried to nominate you for secretary of the PTA."

"The bitch!" Shelley said, horrified.

"Don't worry. I put a stick in her spokes. But I couldn't save you from directing the 'Brownies Around the World' program for the Spring Fling."

Shelley waved that away. "Piece of cake. They're all children. It's the adults I can't stand working with. Secretary. The nerve. She'll regret this." She levered herself out of the chair. "I'm through hostessing. I'm going home and take a bath in my own bathroom and a long nap. After beating up someone."

"Anyone in particular?"

"My sister-in-law Constanza."

"The unmarried one who's watching your kids?"

"The unmarried, snoopy one. I locked all our personal papers and my jewelry in that safe I had put in the linen closet last month. She's probably had in locksmiths by now. She loves pawing through our stuff and then making inventories for the rest of Paul's brothers and sisters. She's probably made a list of how many bras I — Oh! How could I forget? Go take a look at the living room."