Poison at the PTA (3 page)

I’d taken his words to heart and drilled my staff until we could all run the system without a second thought. Then, after reading up on security issues, I went a step further. It was easy enough to find an Internet application for a random number generator, and almost as easy to change the code once a week on random days. There was a small amount of Lois-led grumbling at the annoyance, but I was firm and we’d soon become accustomed to learning a new set of four numbers once a week.

After getting the new code to Paoze, I wandered around the store, straightening books and checking book alphabetization. It was Saturday. Two days since the intervention. Two nights in a row that I hadn’t had to cook. Winnie had vacuumed my house on Friday and washed the kitchen floor. Mary Margaret had taken away anything I needed to do for next week’s PTA in Review. The kids were with Richard this weekend. I felt rested and relaxed and ready to tackle the world.

Two days had been enough and it was time to release me from that silly promise. Six weeks? Please.

•   •   •

As soon as I flipped the store’s
OPEN
sign to
CLOSED
, I moved into high gear. There wasn’t much time. I shooed Paoze and Yvonne out the door, rushed through tallying the cash register, gave a cursory glance to the status of the store, pulled on boots and hat, set the store alarm, and left.

I parked in Marina’s driveway. Made it! Marina’s DH and youngest son, Zach, had made a new habit of bowling on Saturday afternoons, and they hadn’t returned. I knocked on Marina’s kitchen door and walked in.

“It’s me,” I announced to Marina, who was sitting at the kitchen table. I stood on the mat just inside the door and leaned down to pull off my boots. “It’s been two days and I have to say thanks because I feel much better but it’s been two days and I feel great, so can we call off the intervention dogs?” Boots off, I stood up straight. “So now let me get back to . . .” I stopped.

There had been signs that something was off, but I’d been full of myself and hadn’t been paying attention. Marina hadn’t greeted me, hadn’t said anything, hadn’t even waved. She was sniffling, and her head was down on the kitchen table, her right hand clutching the cordless phone to the point of white knuckledom.

I sat in a chair next to her and took the phone from her hand. Phones. I’d never really liked them. Book covers, at least, gave you a clue to their contents. When a phone rang, you never knew if it would be good news or bad.

“What’s wrong?” I asked softly. The cowardly part of me, the biggest part, didn’t want to know. I’d never seen her like this. Whatever it was, it had to be bad. “Is it Zach? The DH?” Bowling accident, car crash, random kidnappings . . . my thoughts flashed on all sorts of horrible possibilities. “One of the older kids? Are they okay?” Zach had been a surprise baby; he had three older siblings in various stages of college and postcollege activities.

Marina grabbed my hand. “Fine,” she said through her sobs. “They’re fine.”

Okay, her immediate family was fine. “And the rest of your family?”

“What?” She sat up and pushed at her face with the heels of her hands. “Everyone’s fine. What makes you think there’s anything wrong?” A grimace of a smile appeared on her face.

I pulled a small package of tissues from my coat pocket, drew one out, and handed it to her. “Because you’re sitting here at the kitchen table with the phone in your hand, crying your heart out.”

She honked her nose into the tissue. “Do you have another one?” Wordlessly, I handed her a fresh piece. Another honk, another tissue to dry her eyes; then she said, “On the phone just now, it was a wrong number.”

“A wrong number,” I said slowly.

“Sure.” She dabbed at her eyes. “And it made me sad. All those people out there calling numbers that are wrong, and who knows if they’ll ever reach the person they really want to talk to?”

It was making me a little sad, too, but I wasn’t bawling my head off over it. “And that’s what made your eyes so red?”

She squinched them shut, then opened them again. “I needed a good cry. Haven’t had one in a while.”

I studied her. She was lying. “You’re sure that’s all it was?”

Her smile was a horrible fake. “Why would I lie? Now, what was it you wanted? Oh, yes. You want off your six weeks of taking it easy. No way. I don’t care how good you feel, you agreed to six weeks and that’s what you’re going to get.”

She talked on, but I was still considering the question that she herself had posed: why would she lie?

I didn’t know, but Marina was my best friend. Something was troubling her, and I was going to find out what.

•   •   •

That evening, Pete stood in the doorway, holding out a bouquet of brightly colored daisies. “For you,” he said.

“They’re beautiful!” I took the flowers and ushered him in out of the cold. “What’s the occasion?” In the few months we’d been seeing each other, Pete had brought us pizza, an amazing knowledge of card games, and a laugh that warmed us all, but never once had he brought flowers.

He grinned. “Figured they’d help if you were mad about the other day.”

The other day . . . ah. “The intervention, you mean? Not mad, exactly,” I said, thinking through my emotions of the last two days. “Disconcerted, sure. Unsettled. Thrown off balance. Flustered, even. But I don’t think I’m mad.”

“Well, good.” He held out his arms and I went into them gladly. “We’re just trying to help,” he said. “You know that, right?”

Into his shoulder, I said, “Yes, and I appreciate it.” But that seemed incomplete, and therefore not totally honest, so I added one more word. “Mostly.”

Pete laughed. “I can imagine.” He gave me a hard squeeze, then released me. “You see the upside, though, don’t you?”

“Well, not cooking is okay. And Winnie’s promise to do some of the heavier cleaning is a huge bonus.”

He was shaking his head. “That’s all good, but the best thing is you get to be guilt-free for six weeks. If we’re not letting you do anything except what you have to, there’s no need to feel guilty about not doing everything else.” He smiled, obviously proud of his reasoning.

I wanted to pat him on the head. Such a nice man, yet so clueless about women. “Let me get these flowers in some water,” I said, kissing him on the cheek. “Come on back to the kitchen and we can talk about what we’re going to do tonight.”

“What do you say to dinner at Ian’s Place, then an eight o’clock showtime?” He reached into his inside coat pocket and pulled out two tickets. “A client gave them to me: two seats for that traveling Broadway show you’ve been talking about. It’s in Madison for a couple weeks, I guess.”

My eyes went wide. “You have tickets for
Wicked
?”

He squinted at the small printing. “Yeah, that’s it. This, uh, is okay with you, right? I mean, if you’re tired we don’t have to use them. We can stay in and order out—”

I flung my arms around his neck. “Pete Peterson, you are the most wonderful man in the entire world!” A meal at Rynwood’s newest restaurant and a show I’d been wanting to see for years—maybe this intervention thing wasn’t so bad after all.

The only cloud on the horizon was Marina and the phone call that had spurred her to tears. Tomorrow. I’d work on that tomorrow.

B
ut by Wednesday, the night of the PTA in Review, I was no closer to finding out what Marina’s phone call had been about than I’d been on Saturday afternoon. Up until now, her life had been an open book to me. If anything, I knew more than I really needed to about her hot flashes and digestive issues. This, however, was different.

“It was a wrong number,” she said again as we walked into the school. “How many times are you going to ask me? Because it’s been about a hundred times already.”

Until you tell me the truth,
I thought. Then I decided what the heck? and said it out loud. “Until you tell me the truth.”

“Well, it’s getting a little old.” Her voice was tight. “If I was going to say anything different, I would have said it already, okay?” She hurried ahead of me, waving at a couple down the hall. “Hey, Carol. Nick. Cold enough for you out there?”

I stared after her, troubled.

“There you are!” Mary Margaret seized my arm. “Let me show you what we’ve done.” Her eyes sparkled with excitement as we neared the entrance to the gymnasium.

“You’re going to love it. I just know you are.”

I hated it when people said that. It inevitably resulted in me disliking or being ambivalent about whatever it was, and, knowing that I was expected to like it, I would have to be very careful with my reactions.

We stepped into the gym and my mouth actually dropped open.

“Pretty good, eh?” Mary Margaret jabbed me lightly in the ribs.

“This is . . . fabulous.” My wondering gaze drifted from the small trees in large pots flanking the stage, small white lights strung through the branches, to the vases of flowers lining the front of the stage, to the twig wreaths twined with white lights hanging on the walls, to the array of ferns in the back corners by the open window to the kitchen.

The decorations transformed the room from a slightly dumpy and decades-old elementary school gym to a show hall. It was gorgeous. For fifteen seconds, I appreciated the transformation. Then the left side of my brain kicked into gear. “How much—”

“Did it cost?” Mary Margaret chuckled. “Not one thin dime. The flowers up there were all headed for the trash at Faye’s Flowers. I offered to take them off her hands, and by golly, she ended up letting us borrow those trees and the ferns, too. The wreaths are from our store; we had them up at Christmas. I just stripped them down, tossed some lights on them, and shazam!” She smiled proudly.

“You’ve done a marvelous job,” I said, giving her a quick hug. Decorating the gym for this event had never occurred to me. And how she’d convinced the cranky Faye of Faye’s Flowers to do anything for the PTA was a minor miracle.

“Aw, it was nothing,” Mary Margaret said, blushing.

“Maybe it was nothing for you, but I never could have done it,” I told her honestly. “Have you ever thought about running for the PTA presidency?”

Grinning, she made a cross of her index fingers and backed away. “I’m a worker bee, not a policy person. You take that back right now.”

I was a policy person? What an odd thought. I’d never imagined myself as anything but a slightly inept forty-two-year-old woman trying to bumble her way through life with as few mistakes as possible. Funny, what other people thought about you.

“We’re open for business!” called a voice from the kitchen. Immediately, the twenty or so people in the gym moved en masse to the back of the room.

I frowned. “Refreshments beforehand?”

“Yeah,” Mary Margaret said. “We talked about it the other day at our last committee meeting. I figured what the heck, let’s try it and see what happens.”

“Try what?” I asked cautiously.

“See that?” She pointed to the end of the long counter that lined the opening to the kitchen. “A money jar.”

“You’re charging for refreshments?”

“Ah, don’t look so horrified.” She grinned. “We’re asking for donations, is all. We made a few extra goodies and we’re having tea and lemonade, plus the regular coffee. And we’re going to have a short break between every decade where people can get more stuff. Maybe we’ll make a few bucks, eh?”

It would also make for a very long evening. But it never hurt to try new methods of making money. And, anyway, if people drank a lot of coffee now, they’d need the breaks to hit the restroom.

The chairs in the gym were slowly filling up. In the crowd were current PTA members, past PTA members, a few Tarver teachers, the new vice principal, and some people who, as far as I knew, had no connection to the PTA whatsoever. Alan Barnhart, for instance, was a retired teacher, but not from Tarver. He did, however, own the antiques mall downtown, so perhaps it was a sense of history that drew him here.

At ten to seven, Isabel Olsen, a member of the event committee, encouraged me to take my place on the stage. “If we get everybody up there and ready beforehand,” she said, “maybe we can start this on time.”

I climbed the stairs to the stage and joined the other presenters. May Werner, known to all as Auntie May, was ninety-two years old and the terror of Rynwood. Her most potent weapon was her rock-solid memory of every embarrassing incident in every Rynwood resident’s life.

Even more terrifying was that her favorite thing in life was to catch people lying. It was the very real possibility of hearing Auntie May’s cackle of “Liar, liar, pants on fire!” that had kept falsehoods in the entire town to a minimum for decades.

It hadn’t been an easy decision to call Sunny Rest Assisted Living and ask Auntie May if she’d talk about the first two decades of the Tarver PTA, but, really, there wasn’t anyone else. Auntie May might be ninety-two, but her mind was sharper than mine.

Two PTA fathers, Todd Wietzel and Kirk Olsen, had carried the bird-light woman and her bright purple wheelchair up onto the stage and she was now circling around the other presenters like a border collie rounding up cattle. “Almost time, chicks. Look at that crowd!” she crowed. “I haven’t had that big an audience since I got up in church at Raymond Pratley’s funeral.”

“Who’s Ray Pratley?” Erica Hale asked. Erica had been the PTA president before me. I knew I could never measure up to what she’d done during her tenure, but she reassured me I was doing just fine.

Auntie May snorted. “Some good-for-nothing lawyer. He was my cousin, died young from not enough fun, if you ask me. He was okay when he was a kid, though.” She smirked. “Want to know what he did under the bleachers with Dolly Duncan in eleventh grade?”

“No,” the rest of us said.

But I had the crawly feeling that Auntie May had told that story at her cousin’s funeral. If she’d done that in a church, what was she going to say tonight? Frantically, I tried to think of a reason to call Todd and Kirk and haul her bodily off the stage. Could I pretend she was sick? Say she’d had a fainting spell? Fake an emergency phone call for her?

“Beth?” Isabel was at my side, a clipboard in her hand. “It’s time to start.”

I approached the podium, tapped the microphone to make sure it was on, and started. Not so very long ago, I wouldn’t have dared to stand in front of a large audience without a word-by-word script to read verbatim. Today, I was fine just winging it. Who would have guessed?

“Good evening,” I said. “If you’re here for the seminar on analytical auditing procedures, you’re in the wrong room.” Smiling, I waited for the chuckles to die down. “We’re here tonight to celebrate the eighty years of the Tarver PTA’s existence. Eighty years, folks. There’s been a PTA in this elementary school for eighty straight years.”

There was a smattering of applause, and I nodded. “It is something to applaud and I’d like to salute all those who came before us.” I turned and looked at the group of women sitting to my left and clapped my hands hard and loud. The audience joined in. Then, in what felt like a single surge, they all got to their feet, giving these women the recognition they deserved.

I sniffled back some unexpected tears and turned back to the podium as the audience sat back down. “Sadly,” I said, “we don’t have anyone who can talk to us about the Tarver PTA’s first decade, but we do have a Rynwood resident who knew women from that first decade. The same woman was a PTA member in its second decade, from the end of World War Two to the boom years when Rynwood almost doubled in size. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Auntie May Werner.”

The audience clapped politely as Auntie May wheeled herself to the podium. I handed her the microphone, sat down, and thought positive thoughts. There was no reason to think Auntie May would spend her allotted twenty minutes—ten minutes per decade—dredging up ancient gossip. I’d told her to stick to PTA agenda items and she’d agreed easily enough. She had no reason to slide sideways from straightforward history to sixty-year-old scandal.

Did she?

“Thanks, Bethie,” Auntie May said. “You’re a sweetie for inviting me. Lots of people wouldn’t, you know. But just because I’m old don’t mean I don’t remember things.”

I tensed. Not the story about catching Flossie’s younger sister running around without any clothes on—please, not that. She’d been all of four years old, and it had been ninety degrees; who could blame her? But the poor woman was still carrying that story around with her.

“Like when the first Tarver PTA came about,” Auntie May went on. “My momma’s friend, Ethel, she’d moved here from out east and brought with her this idea about a group of parents getting together and trying to help the teachers.”

Perfect. I relaxed. This would be fine. At last, Auntie May’s prodigious memory was being put to productive use. Long may it reign.

We listened to Auntie May’s tale of the first bake sale. “Made all of two dollars and thirteen cents and they were happy to get that much.” Listened to her heartbreaking stories of children losing fathers to the war and the PTA doing what they could to help, and her account of the PTA’s growing pains.

I glanced at the clock on the gym wall. She was right at the twenty-minute mark, but it sounded as though she was wrapping it up.

“And that’s how that second PTA decade ended,” Auntie May said. “Not only had Rynwood doubled in size, but Tarver had nearly tripled.”

Assuming she was done, I started to stand so I could introduce the next speaker.

“Which reminds me of a story.” Auntie May cackled, a high, scratchy noise that was nearly inaudible to the human ear. “Did I ever tell any of you about the time Walter Trommler was seeing three girls at the same time? It turns out that—”

I snatched the microphone from her hand. “Thanks for your memories, Auntie May.” Smiling grimly, I gave her wheelchair a gentle push with my free hand. I had no great love for my former employee Marcia Trommler, but she didn’t deserve to have stories about her father running all over town. Light applause followed a glowering Auntie May back to her place at the end of the row.

“We’ll take a short break,” I said, “and ten minutes from now, we’ll have the great pleasure of hearing Maude Hoffman talk to us about the PTA’s third decade.” I clicked off the microphone and immediately entered a staring contest with Auntie May. My chin was up and hers was down, which made the angle difficult, but we were managing nicely.

Mary Margaret saved us from staying frozen like that forever. “Nice job, Auntie May,” she said, leaning on the edge of the stage. “I’d love to hear that story about Walter Trommler. What say I stop by your place tomorrow and hear all about it?”

Auntie May sent me a dagger-laden look. “At least
some
people appreciate my stories.”

Pick your battles,
I told myself, and escaped.

•   •   •

The rest of the speakers didn’t present any problems. We laughed at Maude’s anecdotes about fallen angel food cakes and were moved to tears at her story of the entire student body singing “My Country ’Tis of Thee” to a packed gymnasium—the very room we were in—the Monday after JFK’s assassination.

A woman I didn’t know spoke about the PTA during the end of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. I tried to listen while Cookie Van Doorne, a longtime teller at the local bank, talked about the late seventies and the early eighties, but I spent more time wondering why Cookie and I had never progressed beyond the acquaintance stage. Though I’d known her via the bank for almost twenty years, I knew nothing about her, besides the bare bones of widowed with two children moved out of state. Well, that and the fact that she was rarely more than five feet from a cup of coffee, morning, noon or night.

While I pondered the chemistry that makes up a friendship, other women described the PTA through to the twenty-first century. The always-elegant Erica Hale spoke about the most recent decade, and then it was my turn again.

I named each of the speakers, thanking them one by one. Auntie May grinned and waved, Maude Hoffman blushed prettily, Erica looked as regal as ever . . . but Cookie looked pale and unsteady.

I’d planned on talking about the projects the next eighty years might bring, but I skipped that and finished with “And I can only hope that the next eighty years of the Tarver PTA will be as productive as the last. Thank you and good night.”

The applause was enthusiastic. I nodded, smiling, then went to Cookie’s side. I crouched in front of her. “Are you all right?” I asked softly.