Curse of the PTA (16 page)

“Summer?” I asked. “You can’t come up with any more ideas?”

“Um, I think one was something about an August . . . no, that can’t be right. We don’t
have PTA events that time of year.” Her voice was strained.

I slid a look at her. Were those tears? “Let’s call it a night,” I said. “We’ve made
a decent start.”

Marina looked at her notepad. “We have?”

“Summer, what do you think about meeting a week from tonight?” I asked.

“Um, sure.” She rubbed her face. “I mean, yeah. Next Monday at seven. That sounds
good.”

I put on my best Erica voice. “And next week we’ll each bring a list of ideas, right,
ladies?”

The three of them blinked at me.

“A long list,” Summer said.

Carol nodded. “Sure. I’ll think of some things.”

“Aye, aye, Cap’n!” Marina saluted.

I crossed my eyes at her. “Then I say this meeting is done. I hope someone brought
treats.”

•   •   •

We walked back to Marina’s through a soft dusk that filtered both light and sound
to a golden hue. The stuff of memories, I thought. Marina was at my right, and Oliver
was at my left, holding my hand. Jenna and Zach were up ahead of us, playing some
sort of tag game with the maple trees that lined the street. The slanting light held
dust motes that sparkled and danced. I watched as Oliver tried to catch one with his
free hand.

My son, my love. What is making your heart sore? Why won’t you talk about it to the
one person who will love you unconditionally the rest of your life and beyond? When
will I see that brilliant smile of yours again, the smile that lights up the world?

I held his hand tight. He looked up at me, question marks in his eyes. I smiled at
him. “How are you doing, Ollster?”

He looked down. “Okay,” he said, then pulled his hand out of mine. “I’m going to play
with those guys, okay?” Without waiting for an answer, he ran ahead.

Marina watched him. “Still no change, is there?”

No change, no hint of what had caused the change, no nothing. “Richard couldn’t get
a word out of him last weekend.”

She hummed a short, tuneless song. “Think it’s girl trouble? And don’t tell me he’s
only nine years old. Zach had girls calling him in kindergarten.”

“I asked him about that, but he said no.”

“What does his teacher say?”

I’d called Mrs. Sullivan this afternoon, but she hadn’t had any insights either. I
told Marina as much. “Weird,” she murmured. “This is not like the kid at all.” We
walked half a block in silence, watching our children circle around maple trees, their
backs to the bark, then dash onward to the next tree and circle the tree trunks with
their fronts to the bark.

“About the meeting,” I said.

“Yeah. Is Summer going to work out as chair? We didn’t get a whole lot done. One idea?
We need a freaking truckload of ideas.” Marina spread her arms wide.

“They’ll come,” I said. “Summer just needs to focus.”

“Good luck with that. Everyone’s still saying that she’s the one who killed Dennis.
Must be driving her nuts, being talked about like that.”

I nodded. Being the object of gossip was an awful thing. I’d run into my share of
it and knew well how the sideways glances, smirks, and choked-off conversations could
sneak into your dreams and ruin your sleep.

“Plus there’s the whole curse thing,” she went on. “I can’t believe anyone’s taking
it seriously, but I keep running into people who ask what horrible thing is going
to happen next. It’s just nuts. This is the twenty-first century, for crying out loud!”

I nodded, agreeing with her wholeheartedly. “What’s with the drums?”

Marina looked about, frowning. “I don’t hear any drums. Maybe you need your hearing
checked. Matter of fact, when was the last time you saw a doctor? Since before the
divorce, I bet. Richard may be as boring as a beach with no water, but at least he
made sure you took care of your health.”

I bypassed the impossibility of calling something a beach if it lacked water. “I’d
like to talk about your insistence that the music teacher be able to teach drums.
Is pushing for that the reason you volunteered for the committee?”

“Moi?” She laid her hand flat on her chest. “Would I do something like that?”

“Just tell me the truth.” I wasn’t in the mood for her game playing.

“You are no fun.” She scuffed at the sidewalk. “Would you believe me if I said being
on the committee was a guaranteed way to spend more time with you?”

“No.”

“Then I guess you’ll have to live without knowing the answer. Say, I’m pretty sure
I know who killed Dennis.”

I gave her a stony stare.

“C’mon, don’t be mad. Guess who I think it was?”

“Claudia.”

Her face fell. “How’d you know?”

“Precedent. You always want it to be Claudia. Every time there’s a death in town,
even if it’s a ninety-five-year-old man who died in his sleep, you want it to be Claudia’s
fault. If some kids spray paint their names on the school wall, you want it to be
because of Claudia. If a baby cries, you figure it’s because Claudia is in the neighborhood.”

“Could be her perfume. Did you smell that stuff at the last meeting?” Marina held
her nose. “Hope it was a gift,” she said nasally.

“Claudia didn’t kill Dennis.”

“And you know that how?”

“She’s too self-centered.”

Marina started to object, so I said, “Claudia thinks too much of herself to mess around
with anything as icky as murder. She wouldn’t go to the trouble, that’s all. She’s
passive-aggressive with a reflex to retreat to passive whenever there’s anything anywhere
close to a confrontation.” Marina didn’t look convinced. “And what happened to your
theory that the clothes tell the tale? Your names of people from the video, remember?
On Friday you said to leave it to you.”

“That’s right, dah-ling, Ah did.” Marina had sashayed straight into Southern-belle
mode in a single step. “And Ah meant every last word of it.”

I counted on my fingers. Four words weren’t very many words to mean.

“Trust me,” she said, threading her arm through mine.

And, strangely enough, I did.

•   •   •

The next day began as one of those mornings in which nothing whatsoever goes right
and you get that tumbling, neck-tightening feeling that the day is going to get worse.
Sure, you know that you’re creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, so for a time you
do your best to fight the pull of negativity, but the evidence continues to pile up
and by midmorning you’ve accepted your unfortunate fate.

This particular Tuesday began with the classic homework argument. We were at the kitchen
table eating a marginally nutritious breakfast of cold cereal and reconstituted orange
juice. “Is your homework packed?” I asked, glancing at the bulging backpacks.

Oliver nodded at his cornflakes. Jenna shrugged. “It’s all done,” she said.

I looked at her. Twelve years old now, she’d measured five feet tall on her birthday
in June. Just five inches shorter than her mother. I flashed on an image of a seventeen-year-old
and six-foot-tall Jenna in front of the goalie net. Six three on skates. No. She wouldn’t
grow that tall. Would she? “I didn’t ask if it was done,” I said. “That I knew last
night. The question was, is it packed?”

She stuffed a large spoonful of Cheerios in her mouth, her go-to stalling technique
since she knew I wouldn’t force her to answer with a mouth full of food. Which led
me to an obvious conclusion. I pulled her bowl out from under her chin. “Jenna, you
know the rule. No breakfast until all your work is packed and ready to go.”

“But I’m hungry!” Small drops of milk splattered across the table.

I pointed to the ceiling. “Go to your room and get your homework. Your hunger can
wait two minutes.”

“But—”

“Go,” I said.

Her lower lip rolled out. “I don’t see why I can’t finish eating.”

“You know the rule.”

“It’s a stupid rule! Why do I have to go by stupid rules?”

For a half second, I considered entering into a debate about the importance of rules
and regulations and laws and ordinances. But since I often had debates with myself
over that very issue, I quickly decided to leave it alone. Maybe when we had more
time. And less preadolescent angst. Which meant we’d talk about this in ten years.

“Go,” I said. “Your breakfast will wait.”

“It’s getting soggy.”

“And whose fault is that?”

I saw her mouth start to form that dangerous word—“Yours”—but luckily for all of us,
she stopped before it got out. “Fine,” she snapped, shoving her chair back. “But if
I’m late to school because of this, I’m going to need a note.”

She stomped off. Oliver and I tracked her movement with our eyes. Up the stairs. Down
the hall. Into her room.

I looked at my son. “Are you going to have any fun in school today?”

He shrugged and aimed an overloaded spoon at his mouth.

Briefly, I wondered why it was that bad habits spread so easily. Good habits, on the
other hand, took root so slowly as to be invisible. Why did it all have to be so hard?

Then I heard an echo of Marina’s voice in my head. “If it was easy to be good, everyone
would be doing it.”

Once again, she was right.

•   •   •

The morning continued to be marked by a series of accumulating annoyances. Stoplights
turning red in front of me, dropped keys at doors with rain dripping down, typos found
in a store flyer after I’d printed five hundred copies, the bottom falling out of
a box of books, sending them thumping onto my toes, and worst of all, sour milk for
the tea.

I took one sniff of the milk and slammed the carton into the small sink. “Can anything
else possibly go wrong today?”

Yvonne glanced over from her self-appointed job of dusting the light fixtures. “What’s
the matter?”

“Oh, nothing.” I rinsed out the carton. “Or everything. Some days it’s hard to tell.”

There was a faint groaning noise as Yvonne stood on her tiptoes, her arms stretched
to their limit. Since I’d done the job myself for years, I knew for a fact that it
was the worst job in the store. If you didn’t use the ladder, you ended up straining
your neck and wearing out your shoulders. If you did use the ladder, you ended up
spending an hour traipsing up and down the ladder’s steps . . . and wearing out your
shoulders. When Yvonne volunteered to take over the dreaded duty, I’d protested halfheartedly,
saying we should rotate the chore. When she’d said she didn’t mind, the rest of us
gave her a standing ovation.

“I think it’s a pretty good day,” Yvonne said cheerfully.

Shame flooded my face. Of course it was. My children were healthy, the rest of my
family was fine, I had good friends, great employees, the store was turning a small
profit, and I was keeping off the weight I’d lost last spring. Why had I let my mood
be colored by things that didn’t matter?

“Thanks, Yvonne,” I said.

“For what?” She stretched to reach the far side of the light fixture. “I didn’t do
anything. Did I?”

I grinned. “Nope.” Nothing, other than kick my priorities back to where they should
be. Nothing, other than show by example that whining never did anyone any good. Nothing,
other than be yourself. “I’m off to get some milk. I’ll be right back.”

Outside, I ran from store awning to store awning, trying to stay out of as much rain
as possible, wishing I’d thought to bring my umbrella. “Dumb,” I told myself. “It
may be only a block, but you’re not that good at dodging raindrops.”

“Excuse me?”

I came to an abrupt halt. It was the salt-and-pepper-haired man who’d caught me talking
to myself last week. “We have to stop meeting like this,” I said, laughing. “And it’s
absolutely not true what they say about people who talk to themselves.”

He looked at me with eyes far too sad for his face. “I’m sure you’re right,” he said
politely, and walked away.

I watched him go. “You know,” I said, “I don’t think he believed me.”

•   •   •

The grocery store was crowded with morning shoppers. In addition to purchasing milk,
I’d wanted to see how Flossie was doing, if she was suffering any ill effects from
the incident with Lou’s dogs. When I walked in, though, she was at the cash register,
ringing up purchases and chatting with customers lined up three deep.

I watched her for a moment, then wandered over to the dairy case, thinking hard as
I checked the sell-by dates. I could discount the dark circles under her eyes as the
result of a night or two of poor sleep. Understandable after a scare like she’d had.
But her shoulders were sloping, and that made her look . . . well, old. Never ever
had I seen her with anything except perfect posture. That alone told me—

My hearing twitched and a prickling went up the back of my neck. Something wasn’t
right. Not right at all. But what was it?

I turned slowly, oh so slowly, and saw nothing but grocery store. Brandishing the
plastic milk jug, I peeked around the end of the cereal aisle. Nothing. I walked softly
to the next aisle and peered through the racks of bread loaves. Nothing.

Huh.

The tension leaked out of me. Once again, I’d given in to my overactive imagination.
I paid Patrick for the milk and walked back to the store, talking to myself all the
way.

“Chill,” I said. “No one’s out to get you. Maybe it’s not paranoia if they really
are out to get you, but there is no ‘they,’ so just cut it out.”

Then again . . .

I started making a mental list. Dennis Halpern was dead. His office lay in smoking
ruins. Flossie had been attacked. Not that those dogs would have done anything more
than cover her with canine saliva, but someone had taken advantage of Flossie’s fear,
and to me that counted as an attack. Lou Spezza was hiding something. And . . .

As I came in the front door, jingling the bells, Lois slammed the phone into its cradle.
“That’s the third time this week,” she growled.