Class Reunions Are Murder

by Libby Klein

  I tried not to choke on the absurdity of his speech, while Kelly took the podium. She wiped invisible tears from her eyes and asked if anyone else wanted to say a few words about Barbie.

  I have a few, I thought, but they’re more like graffiti than a eulogy.

  Joanne approached the front and began to sob. Through gulps of air she said that Barbie was her best friend and an angel sent to earth. I fought the urge to put my finger down my throat and gag.

  Then Missy took a turn and said what a good friend Barbie was, and that her and Athena’s hearts went out to Robert and Tiffany. She encouraged them to stay strong. Then she announced the cheerleading scholarship the PTA had put together in Barbie’s name and how all the cheerleaders could be recipients of said scholarship when the time came. I didn’t hear everything she was saying because an old woman with a cane was gesturing to me from the next room.

  I looked around to see if there was someone behind me she might be calling to but, no, she was calling me over. As I got closer she grabbed my arm, and with a lot of strength for a feeble old woman, she pulled me into the coatrack.

  “Shh! It’s me.”

  “Sawyer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wow. I didn’t recognize you at all.”

  “I had Jimmy Mokey do me up. He does hair and makeup for the community theater. Listen, did you hear about Billy Sommers and his fiancée yet?”

  “Is that who’s missing?”

  “Yes. The police haven’t been able to find either of them for questioning since the reunion.”

  “Do you think something happened to them?”

  “Either that or they’re on the run.”

  “Did you know that Barbie and Billy had been engaged?”

  “Yeah. Everyone knows that.”

  I gave Sawyer a look.

  “Well. Okay, everyone who didn’t move away knows that.”

  “She stood him up at the altar?”

  “Twice. It was all the news fifteen years ago. Hey, that’s probably why they had so much animosity between them.”

  “Ya think?”

  Sawyer gave me a sheepish grin.

  My cell phone buzzed and I fished it out of my purse.

  “Poppy! Poppy! Can you hear me?”

  “Yes, Aunt Ginny, I can hear you. What’s wrong?”

  “They’re all over the house!”

  “What?”

  “I told them to wait until you got home but they ignored me and pushed in anyway!”

  “Who’s all over the house?”

  “The cops! They’re tearing everything up!”

  Amber! That’s why she wasn’t at the memorial. I could feel my heart pounding in my ears.

  “They have a search warrant! Hurry up and get home before they start planting evidence. Young man! Put that—” The phone went dead.

  “I have to go. The cops are searching my house.”

  We exited the coatrack to find a very startled Joanne Junk, who was reaching for a flannel jacket. She looked from Sawyer to me and then her piggy little eyes narrowed to evil slits.

  “What are you two doing here?”

  I didn’t have time to be detained right now. “We’re just paying respects, like you.”

  Joanne pulled out a pink-leopard-clad cell phone from her pocket. “We’ll see what Amber has to say about you two being here.”

  But before she could find Amber’s face on her display, Sawyer walloped Joanne in the shin with her cane. “Oops. So sorry.”

  Joanne went down to one knee, and Sawyer took off running for the door.

  Joanne yelled, “The killers are here!” and a commotion headed my way.

  I calmly backed away from Joanne and slipped into the crowd. I grabbed the funeral director and said, “A lady fell down over by the coatrack. I heard her say something about a lawsuit.” He ran toward Joanne and I slipped out the side door. Kim was waiting with the car running.

  “What happened? I heard Joanne squeal so I knew it was time for the getaway car.”

  “Thank God. Amber has a CSI team tearing up Aunt Ginny’s house as we speak.”

  I took off the blond wig and let my hair out of the bun.

  Kim took the corner on two wheels.

  “Whoa, Danica Patrick.”

  Kim shrugged. “What? All the cops in the county are at your house right now.”

  “That’s a good point. Floor it.”

  “Did you at least get anything good in there?”

  “Billy’s missing.”

  “Get out!”

  “Since the night of the reunion.”

  “Dude.”

  “How about you?”

  “There’s a campaign fundraiser at the Moose Lodge on Friday.”

  “See now, that’s weird. Would you still run for office if your spouse had just been murdered?”

  “If someone I loved had been murdered, I don’t think I could get out of bed for days—let alone kiss babies and shake hands.”

  Kim nodded. “Yeah, something doesn’t add up with that. He should be more distraught. Even Kelly seems far more interested in getting Robert elected than in the death of one of her best friends.”

  “You think maybe they’re in it together?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they killed Barbie to get the insurance money for the campaign.”

  I tried to compute that. “But what would be in it for Kelly after the election?”

  “Maybe Robert is going to give her a job as one of his staff.”

  We turned the corner on Aunt Ginny’s street and saw an entire SWAT team combing the yard. Eight police cars, an officer with a police dog, and seven nosy neighbors were parked at the curb. Before I could get out of the car, Amber was in my face.

  “McAllister! What the hell have you done?!”

  Chapter 28

  “What’s going on here, Amber?”

  She shoved a search warrant in my face. “Item one! I have the authority to seize all cleaning products and items of a chemical nature. You want to tell me how you are the only house in the county that doesn’t have one single chemical! Not even a bottle of Windex! And every cleaning product you have is brand-new and unopened!”

  Jiminy Freaking Great. “We’ve gone completely green. Doctor’s orders. I’ll get you her number so you can ask her yourself.”

  Amber turned a deeper color of rage. “Well, isn’t that convenient. And item two!” She stormed over to the yard waste bags and dumped one out. “I have the authority to search the grounds for organic material of a poisonous nature! And you just happened to tear up the yard and dispose of the evidence, today!”

  Aunt Ginny flew out of the house with a war cry when the clippings hit the grass. “You little gnat!”

  With a leap, I grabbed Aunt Ginny by the waist to keep her from committing a felony against Amber’s head. Through gritted teeth I said, “Aunt Ginny! The neighbors are watching.”

  Kim took Aunt Ginny by the hand and led her back to the house, but not before Aunt Ginny threw her arm out to point a menacing finger and an icy glare in Amber’s direction.

  A uniformed policeman came out of the house carrying my bags of skin care and beauty supplies.

  “No! I just bought those items this morning!” I fished through my purse and pulled out the receipts and shoved them at Amber. “Look at the time stamp.”

  She begrudgingly took the slips and examined them. Her mouth pressed into a thin line. “Take them back in the house, they’re clear!” She thrust the receipts back at me. “Someone has been on a spree.”

  I should have known primping would be the death of me.

  “We’re just living our lives over here. Shopping and doing the yard work had nothing to do with hiding evidence, because we have nothing to hide.”

  Amber gestured to the other cops on search and seizure detail. “Bag and tag it all, and take it back to the lab.”

  The cops started loading the van with the bags of yard clippings. I thought of the foxglove I’d told the l
andscapers to get rid of and said a prayer that God would supernaturally turn it into petunias.

  Amber folded her arms across her chest and shook her head. “You always did get away with everything, didn’t you? Little Miss Goody-Goody. Teacher’s pet. Well, not this time. I will find a way to nail you to the wall for this.”

  I took a step toward Amber. “You have been gunning for me from the start. What is your problem? Haven’t you done enough to hurt me?”

  “What I did to you? That’s how you want to play this? My name’s Poppy McAllister and I’m always a victim. Poor little ol’ me. You gotta lotta nerve.”

  I watched, speechless as she got into the driver’s side of one of the cruisers and pulled away from the curb, lights flashing. What in the world is she talking about? What did I do to her?

  Three sets of eyes were staring at me from the front window. The orange pair saw me look back and flopped over. On the other side of the street, a pack of nosy neighbors began to disperse back to their game shows and weather channels. This incident had given the gossip mill enough fuel to run on for weeks.

  I thought about Aunt Ginny’s hearing and wondered how much this could hurt her case. It was time to find out exactly what the neighbors had been saying to Social Services. I decided that first thing tomorrow morning I was going to find out.

  * * *

  I woke the next day with a determined sense of purpose. Quickly I made the bed and rapid-fired through my yoga postures like a yogini on speed. I locked Figaro out, so as not to have a repeat shakedown like the day before. Then I showered and schmeared on all my new beauty supplies. Only my hair wouldn’t cooperate. I tried to do the same steps Courtney did at the salon, but my hair had a mind of its own and mocked me.

  Then I dressed for my first date in over twenty years. I was terrified. I tried on all my new clothes and nothing worked. Everything that looked so good in the store now made me look like a frumpy cow. Stupid store mirrors! I considered calling Tim and telling him I had terminal acne or the Ebola virus and had to cancel, but I knew if I did there’d be hell to pay with Aunt Ginny. I was finally too exhausted to try anything else on so I went with a short green plaid skirt, a black T-shirt, a pair of black wool tights, and tall black boots with silver buckles up the back.

  Getting Poppy 2.0 ready took considerably longer than the old roll over and fish a cookie out of the couch routine of version 1. Even Figaro was getting impatient and was shk-shk-shk scratching at the door.

  I had decided last night that the best way to soften up the neighbors was to take them muffin baskets. And since there is no way that I have enough self-control to stay out of the muffins once they’re baked, I chose to make muffins that were compliant with my Paleo Diet.

  I fed Figaro another can of the exact same fish goo he refused yesterday and today he dove in like it was his favorite meal ever. Then I put on one of Aunt Ginny’s “Donna Reed” aprons, opened the Paleo cookbook Dr. Melinda had lent me, and turned to the Paleo Blueberry Muffin recipe.

  I got out the almond meal, coconut flour, honey, eggs, blueberries, and other ingredients and preheated the old Magic Chef oven to 350. It felt good to be in the kitchen again. I’m always my most comfortable when I’m baking. It’s my own private therapy. I needed to get my mind off of my date with Tim this afternoon and plan my questions for the neighbors.

  Yesterday I learned that Billy and his fiancée were missing. That seemed like a pretty big red flag that he was either guilty of something or the killer had more than one victim. Yet the cops chose to ransack my house. What could I possibly have done to Amber to make her target me? And what could she be looking for in my yard? Please, dear God, not foxglove. I would be so up the creek if Barbie was killed by digitalis. The cops were looking for something poisonous that grew in the yard, and chemicals in household items. Did that mean the plant item was also in the cleaning supplies? Or was the poison made up of multiple substances?

  I stirred together the batter and gave it a taste. Dr. Melinda’s recipe was good but it needed a pinch of nutmeg.

  And what about motives? Barbie had burned a lot of people in her life and that made narrowing down the suspects tricky. Robert and Kelly had the campaign angle. Joel and Kristen had the adultery angle. Billy had the forefront on revenge. And they were all behaving oddly enough to cast doubt on their innocence. Even Coach Wilcott lied repeatedly about the reunion and his relationship with Barbie. Why? What could he possibly have to gain? Or hide?

  I folded in the blueberries, then gently filled the paper cups and put the tins in the oven. I had fifteen to twenty minutes before the muffins would be ready, so I called Dr. Melinda’s office and left a message for her to call me about the investigation as soon as she could.

  Washing the bowl, I repeated the recipe, this time using strawberries instead of blueberries, and I scraped a vanilla bean into the batter in place of the cinnamon and nutmeg.

  There was still the question about how the killer was able to make the poison. Did they make it in the kitchen or in a lab? Kristen, Joel, and the coach all worked at the school and had access to the chem lab. But I doubted Kristen would be messing around with chemicals in her condition. She wouldn’t want the baby to be born with flippers or six toes. And what about the suspects who didn’t work at the school? How would Billy or Robert cook up a poison and fill a hypodermic needle without a lab? Were syringes that easy to get a hold of? I’d only had mine left over from John’s cancer treatment.

  Wait a minute. Amber never gave me back the needle from my purse. It’s in police custody as evidence. Or is it? A terrifying thought occurred to me. What if Amber was behind all of this? She and Barbie had some kind of falling-out. She was one of the last people to see Barbie alive. And she sure had made it to the crime scene awfully fast. Not to mention how determined she’d been to pin this on me from the start. She wasn’t even looking at other suspects and there were so many blindingly obvious motives out there. She had the alleged murder weapon and could dip that needle into any substance found in Aunt Ginny’s house to frame me.

  I ran to the computer and started searching. I was desperate to find evidence to clear my name before Amber showed up to arrest me again. In the state of New Jersey, you need a doctor’s written prescription to buy a syringe, but there were medical supply stores online that would sell you a hundred of them on the honor system.

  So the killer either had syringes because of a legitimate illness, or bought them online, in which case there should be a record of the sale. I already knew Kristen had access to needles. She had to inject herself with hormones for her in-vitro procedure. Not to mention she was the school nurse. She would be able to order whatever medical supplies she needed without suspicion. I would have to visit her again.

  After the muffins had cooled, and I ate one of each to make sure they were good, then a third one to calm my nerves, I made up the baskets and headed out for the neighbors.

  First I visited Mr. Winston directly across the street. I had seen him and Mrs. Sheinberg pointing at the house the other day when the roses arrived.

  “Hi, Mr. Winston. Remember me? Ginny’s niece, Poppy from across the street?”

  “Of course I remember you. I’m not senile you know.”

  Mr. Winston was in his late seventies with a bushy white mustache, courtesy of Mother Nature, and bushy black hair, courtesy of Just for Men. He was hard of hearing, but he refused to wear a hearing aid so things tended to get lost in translation.

  “I brought you a muffin basket.”

  “No, thanks. I just bought Thin Mints from that shyster down the street.”

  “It’s a gift, Mr. Winston.”

  “A gift! Oh, why didn’t you say so?” He took the basket and headed into the faded, pink Victorian. “Come on in here and set a spell, Little Red.”

  Mr. Winston’s front room could have been featured in Victoria magazine: Home Edition—Pre-Demolition stage. Knickknacks as far as the eye could see lined the faded floral-print walls. I sat o
n the threadbare, pea-green settee next to a stuffed cat on a pillow.

  Mr. Winston unwrapped a blueberry muffin and broke it in half. “Whiskers was the best cat I ever had. Didn’t even scratch up the furniture.”

  I stifled a gasp when I realized that Mr. Whiskers wasn’t a toy stuffed cat, but an actual taxidermist-stuffed, used-to-be-alive-and-climb-trees-and-chase-birds kind of cat. One of Whiskers’s eyes was loose and dangling in my direction. I tried not to look more than twice, but I couldn’t stop myself from glancing his way.

  Mr. Winston wiped the crumbs off his red flannel shirt. “So how is Ginny these days? Lots of doin’s over there lately.”

  “Aunt Ginny is great! You may have noticed that we’ve been sprucing up the place.”

  “Moose? There aren’t any moose for hundreds of miles. They only live up north.”

  “No, not MOOSE. SPRUCE. She’s SPRUCING. The yard is looking beautiful, and the painters come soon.”

  He nodded in understanding. “Sprucin’, huh. I thought about sprucing this ol’ girl, but she’d lose a lot of her charm that way.”

  I looked up at the four cuckoo clocks on the wall across from me. One had a cuckoo permanently ejected and hanging upside down by one claw. “Have you seen much of my aunt lately?”

  “Seen her? Oh, out and about here and there.” He unwrapped a strawberry muffin and took a bite.

  “Have you noticed anything unusual about Aunt Ginny? Like maybe her clothes?”

  He put one foot up on the ship’s wheel coffee table. “If she has a problem with her toes she should get her a pair of these orthotics. Best decision I ever made.”

  Sigh. “No, Mr. Winston. HER CLOTHES. THE WAY SHE DRESSES.” I fluffed my skirt out as a visual aid.

  “Yes, that is a pretty dress. You must get your good taste from your aunt. She’s always been a snappy dresser.” Mr. Winston popped the rest of the strawberry muffin in his mouth and gave me a wink.

  “Mr. Winston, have you talked to anyone from Social Services about Aunt Ginny?”

  “Who?”

  “Social Services?”

  “Who’s that?”