Curse of the PTA (3 page)

“I do not have freckles.”

“In summer you do. And unless the fall equinox has been moved to a different date,
it is still summer. Which doesn’t seem fair, really, since school has started. No
child should have to be stuck in a classroom when it’s still summer, is what I say.”

She rambled on, but I wasn’t really listening. I was busy thinking about the implications
of Claudia seeding the audience with her questions. Why on earth would she do that?
Why wouldn’t she just ask them herself? What was the advantage to—

“Earth to Beth.” Marina snapped her fingers in front of my face.

I lurched back. “I hate it when you do that.”

“And I hate it when you get that polite look when I’m talking.”

Fair enough. “What does Earth want with Beth?”

She looked left, then right, then leaned in close. “What did you do with the ballots?”

Over her shoulder, I saw Randy stump back into the room. Behind him came Carol and
Nick, who were in a friendly argument about what was better, thin-crust or deep-dish
pizza. Behind them more PTA members were starting to return. I glanced at the clock.
A few more minutes. “For secretary?” I asked.

“No, the ballots for the 1852 presidential election.” She looked at the ceiling. “How
can someone so smart be so stupid? Of course the secretary ballots.”

“They’re in my bag.”

“Well, tell me.” She patted her hands on the table in a quiet imitation of a drumroll.
“I’m dying to know.”

“What part of secret ballot don’t you understand?”

“What I understand is that you know more than I do, and I can’t stand it.”

“Summer won. And that reminds me.” I reached into my bag and retrieved the ballots.
Just out of her reach, I worked on tearing each one into tiny pieces.

“Aw, you’re such a spoilsport.”

She made a halfhearted attempt to snatch the ballots out of my hands, but I held them
away and kept ripping and ripping until the bits of paper were small enough that it
would have taken a team of CSI experts two full episodes to reassemble them.

“You are no fun.” Marina slumped in her chair. “I hope this president thing isn’t
going to your head.”

“So you’re saying that if I’d still been secretary I would have handed over a pile
of secret ballots?”

She heaved a theatrical sigh. “Your overly developed sense of right and wrong would
have kept you from doing that, but you might have squeaked me a little information.”

I snorted. “Again, what part of ‘secret ballot’ don’t you get?”

“There’s secret and then there’s, you know, secret.”

This explanation should be good. “How’s that, exactly?”

“Sit and listen, my child, and you will learn. Look into my crystal ball. Look closely;
look deep.” She adjusted an invisible head scarf and cupped her hands around an imaginary
crystal ball. “Listen well. There are three kinds of secrets.”

“According to . . . ?” I tilted my head.

“Do you want to hear this or not? Three kinds.” She held up her index finger. “One
is the not-very-secret secret. What you’re getting someone for their birthday or Christmas.”
Her middle finger went up. “Two is the midlevel secret. Secret enough that it should
stay a secret to most people, but not so ultra-important that it can’t be shared with
certain responsible people.” She half closed her eyes at me. “That’s what this vote
was. A level-two secret.”

There was a certain logic to this. And maybe in a thousand years I’d tell her so.
“Level three?” I asked.

“Ah, level three.” She hitched a teensy bit closer, making our conversation a little
more confidential, a little more . . . secret. “A level-three secret is the secretest
kind of secret. It’s the life-and-death kind of secret.”

In spite of my natural inclination to disbelieve anything Marina said when she was
in her new persona as a gypsy storyteller, I found myself leaning forward, pulled
in by the spell she was casting.

“The kind of secret that you’d do anything to keep people from finding out.” Her voice
dropped to a whisper. “The kind that ruins marriages and ends careers. The kind that
makes you leave a town forever. The kind that turns sons against mothers, sisters
against sisters, and lifelong friends against each other. A secret that breeds violence
and makes you long to wake up from the nightmare your life has become. But you can’t,”
she said, drawing out the last word long and dark, “because you are already awake
and there’s nothing you can do. Nothing.”

The skin at the base of my neck prickled. Marina’s new persona was a little too effective
for my taste. I’d rather have the Southern belle back. Or Greta Garbo. Or the Shakespearean
actor who could never quite remember the lines. Even the cowgirl (who had never quite
worked out, somehow) would have been preferable to this.

“And now”—she crossed her hands in front of her, making the crystal ball vanish—“now
we return to the question of the secret ballot. Because now that we know it’s not
that much of a secret, I bet you won’t have any problem telling me.”

“. . . No,” I said, wondering what kind of secret it would take to make me leave Rynwood.
To have a secret, you had to do something horrible, didn’t you? I wasn’t the best
person in the world by a long shot, but I wasn’t that bad. Of course, if Auntie May,
the wheelchair-bound ninety-two-year-old terror of Rynwood found out that I hadn’t
cleaned out the freezer properly in three years, I might have to flee in the dark
of night.

But a true level-three secret? I’d never done anything bad enough—or interesting enough—to
warrant that kind of secrecy.

Had I?

“Beth?” Marina was looking at me uncertainly. “Are you okay? Because you’re getting
a funny look on your face. You know I was joking about all that secret stuff, right?
I don’t care if you tell me about the vote count. I mean, it’d be fun to know if Tina
only got three votes, but—”

BANG!

The loud sound slammed into my eardrums, shocking everyone in the room to silence
even as the echo bounced down the hallways.

Marina’s face, normally ruddy with health and good cheer, turned instantly white.
“Was that . . . ?”

“Yes,” I whispered, not wanting it to be true, but knowing it was. The noise had been
unmistakable.

It had been a gunshot.

Chapter 3

I
was on my feet and running before the gunshot’s echo died away. Marina’s call of “Beth!
Wait! You can’t—” fell off my back as I passed a blur of PTA members half settled
into their seats and then I was through the door.

Outside of the classroom, Tina stood stock-still, mouth open wide, staring down the
hallway to the right.

I charged down the hard floor, my flat-soled shoes finding firm purchase, hearing
a set of footsteps behind me. One glance over my shoulder and I saw Nick Casassa hot
on my heels, a determined look on his face. We passed Mindy Wietzel, who was flat
against the wall, fingers spread wide, eyes round.

Nick caught up to me and, in one simultaneous leap, we jumped over the short flight
of stairs that separated the old section of the building from the new. Down here,
the building split into two wings.

I pointed left and right. “Let’s split up,” I panted out.

“We stay together,” Nick said in short breaths. “Safer.”

I nodded. For no reason other than right-handedness, I pointed to the wing that went
right.

We ran on. Behind us were footsteps and shouting; ahead was a dimly lit hallway. At
its far end was a door that led to the playground. I saw a rectangle of darkness appear,
then disappear, and my brain raced ahead of me.

The shooter was leaving through that door. He was getting away. We should run him
down and catch him, we should—

Then I caught sight of a shoe.

It was a man’s shoe, lying heel down and toe up, a position that meant a foot was
still inside. The shoe was propping open a door.

I started to shout to Nick, but he was heading for the end of the hallway and putting
on a burst of speed that left me far behind. I slowed from my flat-out run by putting
my hand on the wall and went to the shoe. Sweating and breathing hard, I pushed open
the door labeled
TEACHERS’ RESTROOM
.

Inside, lying on the floor, very, very still, was Dennis Halpern.

I was pushed aside. “Give me room,” said Lynn, a PTA mother who was, to her patients,
Dr. Lynn Snider, a general-practice doctor who had spent two years working in the
emergency room of Chicago’s busiest hospital.

Lynn dropped to her knees, checked for a pulse, then put her hands on his chest and
started pumping. “Call 911,” she grunted.

Since I couldn’t, because my cell was in my abandoned purse, I stepped out of the
restroom and saw that half the PTA was trotting toward us, cell phones in hand. “Taken
care of,” I told Lynn.

She was pumping away with a steady rhythm that was breaking my heart. I sank to my
knees across from her, on the other side of Dennis. “Is there anything I can do?”

“No,” she said shortly, out of breath from her efforts. “Yes. Direct ambulance. EMTs.”

I scrambled to my feet and grabbed the first person I could latch on to, who happened
to be Tina. “Run out to the parking lot and wait for the ambulance. When they get
here—”

“I’ll bring them.” She nodded and trotted off.

Nick reappeared, sweat dripping from his forehead. He shook his head. Whether he hadn’t
seen the shooter or hadn’t been able to grab hold of him, it didn’t really matter
at this point.

“The rest of you,” I said, “just stay back, okay? They’ll need room.”

“Who is it?” Summer asked. “Is it . . . ?”

“Dennis Halpern,” I said heavily. “Our guest.” My guest. The man I’d tried so hard
to get to a PTA meeting. The man who—

Summer swayed, putting her hands out in front of her. “Is he . . . is he going to
be all right? He is, right?”

I turned away without answering. There was no way I was qualified to answer her question.
I wasn’t a nurse or a doctor or an EMT or any kind of health professional.

But I knew. Even without seeing the despairing expression on Lynn’s face, I knew.

Dennis was dead.

•   •   •

An eternity later, the EMTs slammed shut the back doors of the rescue vehicle. They
climbed up into the front seats, and the driver started the engine. The boxy red truck
rolled out of the parking lot and down the road, the lights and sirens that had heralded
its arrival silent.

The crowd of onlookers—children too young to understand tragedy, women with crossed
arms, men with their hands in their pockets—started to drift into the darkness as
soon as the vehicle was out of sight.

Rynwood’s chief of police, my friend Gus Eiseley, had arrived on the heels of the
EMT crew. When he’d arrived, he’d asked everyone to stay until he’d talked to them,
then looked around and asked, “Who was first to get to the victim?”

Before he’d even finished the sentence, I was raising my hand and pointing to myself
and Nick. “Why am I not surprised?” he’d asked, and made a note.

I’d assumed the question was a rhetorical one and didn’t even try to make up an answer.
Yes, I’d ended up involved in a couple of other murder investigations . . . okay,
three. No, four, depending on how you counted, but did that mean I was necessarily
involved in any major crime in Rynwood? No, it did not. It was coincidence, that’s
all. I did not attract trouble.

Did I?

That uncomfortable thought stayed with me all through the rattling passages of the
gurney, both the hurried inward one and the slow, almost stately, outward one.

Did I?

Now, with the ambulance gone and the sadness just starting, Gus turned to the PTA.
“Ladies, gentlemen, I know you’d like nothing better than to go home to your families,
but I need your help first.”

Dusk was passing fast to darkness, but in the yellow glow cast by the parking lot
lights I saw the heads nodding solemnly.

“Thank you,” Gus said. “Officer Zimmerman and I will take your statements. We should
have you out of here in no time. Beth and Nick, if you could wait until the end, I’d
appreciate it.” He ran a hand over his short-cropped gray hair.

Gus was one of those men whose age was hard to guess. Twenty years ago, when I’d first
met him in the church choir, he hadn’t looked much different than he did now. A little
grayer, maybe, and perhaps a few more lines on his weathered face, but that was about
it. Thanks to his wife, Winnie, I knew that he was fifty-two, but if he’d told you
he was thirty-five, you’d think, okay, an old-looking thirty-five, but yeah, I’ll
believe thirty-five.

I quietly suggested that Gus talk to the ones with young children first, so they could
get the kids home and in bed. “Good idea,” he said. “They’ll be antsy to get going,
and I’ll get better answers out of them this way. Thanks, Beth. I appreciate your
input.”

Effusive praise for a minor suggestion. I squinted at him. Very not like Gus. Maybe
he’d taken a workshop on new techniques for working with citizens, and I was the guinea
pig.

While we were milling around, waiting, Harry, the school janitor who doubled as daytime
security guard, came in to lock up the school. He’d assumed our meeting was over,
but one quick explanation and Harry moved to unlock more classrooms for the PTA parents
to wait in.

“Sorry about this, Harry,” I said.

“Nothing to be sorry about, Mrs. Kennedy.” He unlocked the door to a fourth-grade
classroom with a set of jingling keys. “Not your fault.” He hung the keys on the belt
that held up the navy blue slacks he always wore. Navy blue pants and light blue dress
shirt were all he ever wore while working. The once or twice I’d seen him outside
of school, it had taken me a moment to recognize him, in spite of his six feet of
incredible thinness.

“No,” I said, “I suppose it’s not.” But I wasn’t absolutely sure that was true.

Carol waited with Nick and me as Gus and the much-too-young Officer Zimmerman interviewed
the other parents. The three of us made up a very small and uncomfortable group. Gus
had cautioned us against talking about the incident, saying he’d like to keep our
impressions as clean as possible, so with that topic out of bounds, we talked about
our children until Carol wondered out loud if Dennis had had any.

With that conversation stalled, we went on to talking about the new downtown store,
Made in the Midwest. But since I was the only one who’d met the owner or been inside
the store, that didn’t go anywhere, either.

A short sally by Nick for a discussion of the University of Wisconsin football team
didn’t get beyond, “What do you think of that freshman tailback the Badgers are starting?”
We were reduced to discussing the weather when Gus stepped in. “Carol?” She picked
up her purse, squeezed her husband’s hand, and left with Gus.

Nick and I didn’t even try to talk. We were staring at the air when Gus came in. “Nick?”

For a very long ten minutes I was left alone with the events of the last two hours.
There wasn’t much to be gained in going over and over it, but I couldn’t seem to stop
the continuous loop, couldn’t turn it off, couldn’t turn down the gunshot I kept hearing.
Over and over and—

“How are you doing?” Gus dropped into the chair next to me. A full-sized chair, thanks
to the kindness of Harry. He’d taken in the drawn looks and pale faces and lugged
folding chairs out of some secret janitorial closet.

“Fine,” I said, as brightly as I could.

“You’re still a horrible liar,” he said, rearranging papers on his clipboard.

“Maybe I’m such a good liar that you can’t tell that I’m lying about lying.”

He glanced at me, then went back to his paperwork. “That doesn’t make sense.”

I sighed. No, it didn’t. “I’m tired, sad, angst-ridden, and depressed about the human
condition.”

A hint of a smile lightened his face. “That’s more like it. You okay with staying
a while longer? The kids are all set?”

“Marina took them to her house.”

He nodded. “She can be an interfering chatterbox, but her heart is the size of an
Oldsmobile.”

As compliments go, that was as backhanded as any I’d ever heard. There wasn’t a chance
I’d pass it on to Marina without a hefty dose of editing. She still hadn’t forgiven
Gus for the way he’d treated me last spring, and I didn’t want to make that situation
any worse. “They haven’t made Oldsmobiles in years,” I said. “You need to get a new
simile.”

“It’ll last me to retirement.”

I sat up straight. “You’re thinking about retiring?” Rynwood without Gus as police
chief was as unthinkable as . . . as Rynwood without Auntie May. Knowing there was
even a slim chance of Auntie May catching you in wrongdoing had kept the entire populace
on the straight and narrow for three generations.

No one, but no one, wanted to hear the rattling cackle that preceded “Caught you,
you little sneak” if you so much as forgot to hold the door open for the person behind
you. And heaven forbid if you accidentally let a scrap of candy bar wrapper flutter
onto the sidewalk. Yes, Auntie May was our conscience and our guide. Guide to what,
I wasn’t quite sure, but it was a certainty that we were better off with Auntie May
than without her.

Well, a near certainty.

“Thinking about retirement,” Gus said, “is a hundred miles from doing it. Besides,
if I retired, Winnie would drag me to every garage sale between here and Milwaukee,
and I’m not sure our marriage could handle it.”

“Ha. You two are like one of those salt-and-pepper sets. You know, the kind that snuggle
up against each other and look all wrong if they’re by themselves.”

“I’m not sure I’ll tell Winnie that one.” He clicked his pen. “And now we should get
started so we can get you home. Let’s walk through what happened.”

I looked at my hands, fingers interlaced, thumbs pushing hard against each other.
“I don’t want to,” I said in a low voice.

“Of course you don’t.” Gus’s voice was patient. “No sane person would. But . . .”
He left the sentence open, and I filled in the blanks all by myself.

But . . . it was my civic duty to tell Gus everything I could remember. I owed it
to Dennis to describe everything I’d seen. Helping law enforcement set a good example
for my children. Plus it was the right thing to do, and that was the truest and best
reason of all.

“Okay.” I watched my thumbs push against each other, their edges turning white. “This
whole thing started when I heard that Rynwood was getting a new business downtown,
a financial consultant.”

“Dennis Halpern,” Gus said.

I nodded. “I’d been thinking about getting Debra O’Conner from the bank to come talk
to the PTA about investing, but she recommended Dennis. Said he knew more about investing
than she ever would, plus he’d written a book. Summer Lang recommended him, too.”

“It’s not your fault he was murdered,” Gus said. “Not unless you killed him, I mean.”

I eked out a small smile. “No, I didn’t kill him. But he was here because I invited
him.”

Gus flipped a page in his notebook and got busy with his pen. “If you want to continue
to beat yourself up, go right ahead, but it’s doubtful that he was killed randomly.
If it wasn’t random, it was either from circumstance or premeditated. Circumstance
also seems unlikely, since that is usually the result of being in the wrong place
at the wrong time, and it’s hard to see how using the men’s room in an almost entirely
empty elementary school could be the wrong place.”

“Or the wrong time?”

“Or the wrong time,” he agreed. “That leaves a murder of premeditation, and that gets
you off the hook.”

I wasn’t so sure that his explanation would hold up to the ugly light of reality,
but since all he was doing was trying to make me feel better, I didn’t start slicing
great whacking holes in the analysis.

Instead, I went on to describe how Dennis had agreed to volunteer his time to help
the PTA. “He grew up in Rynwood,” I said, “did you know? Went here to elementary school.”
We might have been sitting in one of the rooms where Dennis had spent a school year.
That desk there might have been where Dennis sat.

I sighed.

Stay away from that line of thinking, Beth. It’ll just depress you, and what good
will you be to anyone if you’re sunk into a pit of despair?