Poison at the PTA

by Laura Alden

  “They’re the same thing. And I can’t believe you’d accuse me of either one. All we’re doing is having a friendly conversation.”

  She went on and on while I considered my next move. Which should come first, grabbing a dictionary and shoving the definition of “coercion” under her stubby nose, or raising my voice to drown out her analysis of my flawed character by giving her a detailed description of her own?

  But since I’d been raised to be a Good Girl, I kept quiet and let her rant. A sneak of a smile slipped out, though, and Claudia stopped abruptly.

  “What’s so funny? What are you smiling about?”

  Since I’d been mentally starting the second page of my outline titled Claudia’s Character, outline item D, Child-Rearing Weaknesses, I cleared the smile off my face and said, “Don’t you have shopping to do?”

  Her eyes narrowed to small slits. “You’re not going to tell me about that box, are you?”

  Spending time with Claudia always ended up with me using my weekly allotment of sighs inside of ten minutes. I tried to stifle this one, but didn’t do a very good job.

  “You’re sighing at me,” she said accusingly. “I hate it when people do that.”

  I bit down on my inclination to say, in that case, maybe she should consider some behavior modification. “Cookie sent the box to me. I have no right to reveal to anyone else what might prove to be some very private belongings.”

  Claudia snorted. “What private things could Cookie have? She was a bank teller.”

  “She was a person,” I said quietly. “And every person deserves respect.”

  “Yeah? Well, I’m a person. Do you respect me?”

  Her question caught at me. I did not respect Claudia. I did not hold her in high regard, did not admire her, and, in a general way, did not appreciate anything she’d ever done.

  “You think I’m an idiot, don’t you?”

  “Of course not,” I said automatically. Narrow-minded, petty, and shortsighted, but an idiot? No.

  “Yes, you do.” Claudia nodded.

  I sighed. There wasn’t much I disliked more than people telling me what I thought. “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do, and you’re sighing again. Do you know how that makes me feel?”

  My best defense against Claudia had always been silence, but tonight that strategy wasn’t doing the trick. “Claudia—”

  “It makes me feel like an idiot, is how it makes me feel!”

  “I’m sorry that you feel that way. I—”

  “Are you really sorry? Or are you just saying that?”

  What I was sorriest about was that we were having this conversation at all. “It’s getting late. Why don’t we—”

  “Oh, sure, cut off the conversation when you’re losing. That’s what you always do, isn’t it? You’re big on stacking the deck in your favor, aren’t you? Setting yourself up for the advantage, you’re really good at that.”

  Maybe someday I’d understand what she was talking about, but I hoped not.

  “You think you’re so smart, don’t you?”

  Clearly, she’d never heard the story about the fax number, either.

  “And there’s that smile again, so superior.” She made a gagging noise. “You’re no smarter than I am. And I’m going to prove it to you and to everyone else in this town. I’m going to prove that Kirk Olsen murdered Cookie. I’ll figure it out all by myself. I mean, if you can find killers, it can’t be that hard.”

  She flounced off, a difficult thing to do in a thick winter coat and heavy boots, and banged through the front door that Marina had left unlocked.

  Marina . . .

  Oh, my friend, what has happened to us? What is happening?

  I stood in the quiet store, listening to nothing, doing nothing, thinking about things I’d said but shouldn’t have, about things I should have said but didn’t, thinking about lost opportunities and missed chances, about who I was and who I wanted to be.

  For the last fifteen minutes I’d been a doormat for Claudia. Was that who I wanted to be? No. Was that anyone I wanted Jenna and Oliver to be? No again, with feeling. Lots of it.

  I zipped up my coat and hurried out the door, pausing only to arm the security system and lock the door. I caught a glimpse of her at the end of the block. “Claudia!” I called, but she reached the corner, walked across the street, and turned left. I trotted down the sidewalk, a rising wind in my face, and when I got to the corner myself, I saw the back end of Claudia flick out of view behind the building.

  It was like chasing a cat, I thought. But at least I had a good idea where she was going, unlike a cat-chasing episode. The only reasonable place Claudia could be headed was the city parking lot.

  “Gotcha,” I muttered, and half walked, half ran through the alley behind the stores until I reached my car. Wherever she was going, I’d follow. Whatever she had to say, I’d talk over her. Maybe she wouldn’t listen—probably she wouldn’t—but at least I’d tell her all those things I’d swallowed over the years in the effort to be polite. From now on, she’d have to find someone else to be rude to. I wasn’t going to roll over for her ever again.

  The very thought made me sit tall in the driver’s seat, shoulders square and chin proud. Maybe all that time my mother had spent telling me to sit up straight would have been better spent telling me how to stand up for myself.

  I drove down the alley and cut straight across the side street and into the parking lot. She had to be here somewhere; surely she couldn’t be gone already. . . . There! On the far side of the lot, turning right.

  Huh. Turning that way meant she wasn’t driving out to the mall and she wasn’t going home. Where . . . ?

  But it didn’t matter where she was going. If she was going to . . . to her mother’s house, I’d follow. If she decided to drive to Milwaukee, I’d follow. If she was going to the moon, I’d follow.

  She drove through downtown, and when an oncoming car lit the interior of her SUV, I could see that she was holding a cell phone to her ear. Talking when driving, Claudia? Not safe, not safe at all. Do you do that when your boys are in the car? Tsk-tsk-tsk.

  With the wind buffeting the car, I followed her into a residential area and was close behind when she turned and then turned again to go around a block-sized neighborhood park, and didn’t let the gap between us widen by a single foot as she barreled down a long street, then made a fast turn and—

  And I suddenly knew where Claudia was going.

  I let off on the gas pedal and took my time turning onto a short side street, then turning right onto a treelined street of older houses. A few ranches, a few two-story homes, and a few Cape Cod houses. Half a block later, I spotted Claudia’s SUV parked exactly where I’d expected to see it.

  Right in the middle of Cookie Van Doorne’s driveway.

  • • •

  I parked on the street and walked up the short driveway, cold wind tugging at me from every direction. What on earth did Claudia think she was going to find out by staring at a vacant house? Yes, I’d done it myself not so long ago, but that had been because I hadn’t wanted to go home to a kidless house, not because I’d thought I’d find something that would prove who killed Cookie.

  The front tires of Claudia’s SUV were deep into a snowdrift. I came around the driver’s side and followed in her footsteps. Unfortunately, Claudia was a little shorter and her feet a little smaller than mine, and using her steps to break trail ended up being more annoying than helpful. When I came around the corner of the house, I saw Claudia crouching at the back door and jiggling the door handle.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  Claudia shrieked, jumped, and whirled around. When she recognized me, the fear that had been on her face turned into a scowl. “What are you doing here? And look what you’ve made me do. I’ve dropped my card. It’s ten bucks for a replacement. If I can’t find it I’m sending you the bill.”

  “What card? A Valentine’s card?” Not that delivering a Vale
ntine’s Day card to a woman who’d been dead for weeks made any sense at all, but who knew what lurked in Claudia’s mind?

  “Don’t be stupid.” She hunkered down and felt around in the snow with both hands. “My credit card. Well, my ATM card, if you want to get technical about it, and I bet you do, don’t you?” She shot me a fast, fierce glare, then turned her attention back to the snow. “It’s more flexible than the credit cards, and flexibility is what you need.”

  I frowned. “Why do you need a flexible card?”

  “Jeez, Beth, are you really that stupid? To get into . . . Ha!” Triumphantly, she held up a small rectangular piece of plastic. “Found it, no thanks to you.” If she’d had laser vision, her gaze would have peeled the flesh off my skin. “I would have been done with this ten minutes ago if you hadn’t come along.”

  The wind kicked up a skirl of snow, almost obscuring Claudia from view. It was a nice moment, in many ways, but when the snow fell back, I saw what she was doing. “Claudia, stop! You can’t do that. That’s breaking and entering. That’s illegal. That’s—”

  With a faint click, the door popped open. Claudia crowed happily, and stood up. “Please. Are you honestly going to tell me you’ve never opened a door with a credit card?”

  Why was it such a bad thing to be good? “I’ve always lived in houses with dead bolts. Credit cards don’t work to open those.”

  “You have to be the most boring person in the world.” She pushed the door open and reached inside to turn on the light. “I’m going in. Call the cops if you want, but you know they won’t get here for at least fifteen minutes, and by then I’ll be gone.”

  “Claudia, you—”

  But she was already inside. A whoosh! of wind pushed me forward a step, then another, and then I was close enough to see into the kitchen, close enough to see Claudia opening drawers and cupboard doors.

  A wave of revulsion passed through me. Cookie would have hated to see someone else pawing through her belongings. I might have logged off from investigating her death, but I wasn’t going to let Claudia rummage through her personal things without supervision. Someone had obviously taken the time to clean up after the house had been broken into the other day. To have things disturbed a second time was just plain wrong.

  I hurried up the back steps, did my best to bang the snow off my boots, went into the kitchen . . . and did a classic double take.

  “Wow . . .” I blinked once. Twice, then three times, but the kitchen still looked the same way it had when I’d walked into the room. There was nothing out of the ordinary about its bones: counters, refrigerator, range, coffeemaker, sink under a window, table with chairs. No, that was all very normal. I supposed with a name like Cookie, you’d get your fair share of cookie-shaped gifts, but this was . . . “Wow,” I said again.

  Cookie-shaped magnets covered the refrigerator. More cookie-shaped magnets covered the range. Framed photos of cookies covered every inch of wall space and the cabinet doors were decoupaged with magazine photos of cookies. The drawer handles were metal cookies. The clock was a large plastic cookie. The wall calendar featured cookie recipes. The table’s place mats were a cookie print.

  Chocolate chip cookies, Oreo cookies, oatmeal cookies, meringue cookies, peanut butter cookies, sugar cookies, chocolate cookies, cutout cookies, no-bake cookies, butter cookies, Snickerdoodles, gingerbread, jam thumbprints, Lebkuchen, Springerle, Russian tea cakes, every cookie I’d ever seen or tasted was represented, plus dozens I didn’t recognize.

  The slam of a shutting drawer woke me from my cookie-induced stupor. Claudia had finished her examination of the silverware and was moving on to the cabinet under the sink. I unzipped my coat in the semiwarm air. Cookie’s son must have left the heat set to around fifty degrees to keep the water pipes from freezing.

  “What do you think you’re going to find?” I asked mildly. Ten minutes ago, my goal had been to tell Claudia that I wasn’t going to let her walk on me ever again. Thanks to her burglary skills, my priorities had shifted for the time being, but I was going to have my say before the night was over.

  “I’ll know it when I see it.” She slammed the cabinet door shut.

  What exactly she might expect to find under there, I wasn’t sure, so I went ahead and asked.

  “It could be anything and it could be anywhere,” she snapped.

  “‘It’?”

  “You know. The smoking gun, the purloined letter, the candlestick. The whatever-it-is that will tie Cookie to Kirk Olsen. You go ahead and find it, if you think you’re so smart.”

  What I thought was that she’d been watching too much television. “Seems to me,” I said, “that the police would already have looked through the house, trying to find that very thing.” If it existed.

  The utensil drawer slammed shut, rattling the spatulas and tongs within. “Well, if they did, it didn’t do them any good, did it? And they’re mostly men, aren’t they? How would they know if there was something in a woman’s house that wasn’t right? Men don’t know spot cleaner from window cleaner.”

  Pete did, but I kept the thought to myself. As Claudia continued to poke through Cookie’s belongings, I tried, and failed, to come up with a scenario that resulted in cleaning supplies providing a link to a killer’s identity. Perhaps I was lacking in imagination. Maybe I needed to watch more television. For all I knew there could be a CSI-type show dedicated entirely to cleaning supply murders.

  “Now what are you smirking about?” Claudia was frowning at me.

  Like I was going to relay that thought out loud. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing, she says.” Claudia sniffed. “Laughing at me again, aren’t you, just like always?” I started to object, but she ran right over my words. “I get so tired of you, I can’t stand it. Well, this time I’m the one having the last laugh!” She swept out of the kitchen.

  Sighing, I followed her into the small dining room. Nothing in the china cabinet must have had Kirk’s name on it, because she was in and out of the room in short order. The only thing in the living room that got any of her attention was the coffee table, which was piled high with cooking magazines.

  Claudia glared at me while she picked up a magazine and flipped through the pages. “Cookie could have written a note, you know. Where better to put a secret note than out in plain view?”

  To me, plain view would have been the middle of the dining table, but what did I know?

  From the living room she went to the tiny study and plopped herself down in the desk chair. “There’s bound to be something in here,” she muttered, opening drawers and pawing through papers. “I should have looked here first.”

  I leaned against the doorjamb. Not so very long ago, in the house of another murder victim, I’d done the very same thing Claudia was doing. If I recalled correctly, I hadn’t found anything of value in the desk. However . . . “Have you seen any photo albums?” I asked. “Those might tell you something.”

  Claudia’s head jerked up. “You leave them alone. I’m doing this myself.” She cast a wild glance around the room, jumped to her feet when she spotted a bookcase, and grabbed a small pile of albums. “Got them! They’re mine!”

  They were Cookie’s, or rather photos of Cookie’s children, but I shrugged. “Have at them.”

  She flicked on the desk light and sat facing me, the pages of the photo album tipped so I couldn’t see the contents.

  Whatever. I shifted, trying to make it a very comfortable doorjamb, and thought about Kirk, and Cookie, and how she might have come to realize he was stealing.

  She was a small-town bank teller, and people tended to walk themselves into ruts without realizing it. Maybe Kirk had taken his deposits and withdrawals to Cookie for years. Maybe she’d seen that he was making largish deposits. Not deposits bigger than that magic ten-thousand-dollar mark that alerted whomever those large deposits alerted, but enough large amounts that she’d grown suspicious. Maybe she’d asked questions. Maybe she’d asked a few too many questions.
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  And maybe that was how Cookie had learned so much about the people she’d hinted at in the hospital, the people who—

  “Nothing.” Claudia slapped the photo album shut. “Just pictures of babies and little kids.” She got up, dumped the albums back onto the bookcase, and shouldered her way past me.

  Next thing I heard was her footsteps tromping up the stairs. Before I could make up my mind to trail after her, she was headed back down.

  “Cold up there,” she muttered. “And it was just her bedroom and the rooms her kids must’ve had. Not that you could tell. They look like guest bedrooms that haven’t been used in forever.”

  “I told you it would be hard to find anything.” I stifled an eye roll. Or so I thought.

  “I’ll figure this out if I have to tear the house apart!”

  “Claudia, I’m not—”

  “Shut up,” she said, pushing past me. “Just shut up.”

  It was time. I stood straight. “Don’t talk to me like that. I don’t deserve to be treated as if—”

  “Yeah, yeah. Save it for later.”

  She thumped back to the kitchen and I came after her. “I will not save it for later,” I said. “For years you’ve assumed the worst of me when all I’m doing is trying to be polite.”

  “Polite?” She snorted. “Those smirks aren’t exactly going to get you the Polite Person of the Year Award. You just think you’re nice. Deep down inside you’re just as mean as anyone else.” She flung open the basement door, hit the light switch, and headed down.

  I was hot on her heels. “What gives you the idea that I think I’m better than you? I’ve never thought that.”

  “Don’t lie to me!”

  My face felt hot, and for once it wasn’t from embarrassment. “Don’t call me a liar.”

  She flounced away from me and started poking around the room. It was a typical old-style basement: unfinished, completely utilitarian, and slightly damp. Three sets of ancient wooden shelving lined one wall, the shelves filled with plastic tubs written with black marker on one end. ST. PATRICK’S DAY COOKIE CUTTERS. EASTER COOKIE CUTTERS. FOURTH OF JULY COOKIE CUTTERS. One shelf held a few tools and laundry detergent for the nearby washer and dryer; otherwise it was all cookie cutters, all the time. I hadn’t realized there were that many different kinds of cookie cutters in the world.