Foul Play at the PTA

by Laura Alden

  I opened the large file drawer on the lower right side of the desk and rifled through its contents. Everything I could read had to do with clients or conferences or shareholders. Everything I couldn’t read was in Spanish.

  “Oh, dear.” The only time I came close to using my three years of high school Spanish was at an ATM when I accidentally pressed the ESPAÑOL button instead of the ENGLISH one.

  I opened the rest of the drawers and found office supplies, a pile of coins, and some empty candy wrappers. “Now what, smarty-pants?” I glanced at the phone. The light was still red, and there was another light winking away, so I ventured deeper into Eric territory.

  The wall behind his desk was lined with bookshelves and cabinetry. The bookshelves were full of textbooks, software documentation, and three-ring binders filled with software coding. Behind the door of cabinet number one were stacks of paper much like the stack I’d put on his desk. Behind door number two was more paper, but also a framed photo of a man and two young girls.

  I looked at the telephone—one red light, two white—and picked up the picture. It was taken on a lakeshore and all three were in swimsuits and life jackets. The man had his arms around the girls and they were all grinning hugely.

  “So that’s Eric Stull,” I said quietly. It was the man at the dance who’d been in line in front of Jenna and me. The man who’d slapped down a hundred-dollar bill and then another fifty. His dark blond hair was cut short and his stomach was flatter than most men’s his age. I studied the photo, trying to look into his head, read his thoughts, and analyze his personality, but all I saw was a father and his daughters after an afternoon of inner tubing.

  As I put the photo back from whence it came, I realized there weren’t any pictures of Rosie, his wife. Strange. Or not?

  “What are you doing?” Devon stood in the doorway. “I thought you weren’t going to touch anything.” There was a note of censure in her voice.

  I put on a reassuring smile and shut the cabinet door. “Just looking for some paper clips. It’ll make sorting those papers easier if I have a way to keep similar topics together. Unless you want me to use a stapler.”

  “No staples. Mr. Stull says so. Paper clips are good, though. I’ll be right back.”

  Mr. Stull had a lot of rules. I sat myself back in the guest chair. To meet my end of the bargain, I had to sort these papers into some semblance of order. I’d convinced Devon of my capabilities when I’d mentioned how much lists helped me organize my life.

  “Mr. Stull loves lists,” she’d said eagerly. “You must think like him. Let’s give this a try.”

  Her confidence in me was heartening, and probably misplaced. But I couldn’t tell her that, so I settled down and was busy sorting papers when she came back with a box of paper clips. She hovered, then went back out front when the phone rang.

  Anything with a lot of numbers went into one pile. Anything in Spanish went into another. Phone notes here, mail there. Junk faxes I tossed into a recycling pile. No possible way could Mr. Stull want to know about a $99 cruise to the Bahamas. Order now for four days and three nights!

  Half an hour later, I’d sorted through the main pile. I got up, stretched, and started in on the stack of numbers. I spread the sheets out across the large desk and tried to make sense of it all. Bills here, statements there. Undecipherable printouts from spreadsheets way over there.

  I looked at it all from the point of view of a business owner and saw nothing out of the ordinary, other than some statements from banks with Spanish names. I tried to see it as a law enforcement officer—suspicious and looking for wrongdoing—and didn’t see anything. But since I wasn’t a member of the police force, maybe I wouldn’t have known suspicious activity if it was in bright red letters.

  Sighing, I paper-clipped the differentiated piles and stacked them to one side.

  When the phone light was red, I got up and turned on Eric’s computer. As I’d expected, it was password protected, and all the combinations I tried got me nowhere but nervous. What if he’d programmed the thing to take surreptitious pictures of someone trying to access his computer? I gave up and shut it down.

  Next was the Spanish pile. Hadn’t I seen . . . yes, there it was. A Spanish-English dictionary. Hooray for Beth’s habit of examining all book titles in a room! With the dictionary and about two weeks of time, I’d be able to decipher every paper in the pile.

  I scanned a few sentences of each sheet, then opened the dictionary and started searching for key words. I soon found out that Eric’s dictionary didn’t contain any of the words I wanted it to.

  “Silly thing,” I told it, and turned to the copyright page: 1989. Which could explain a lot if the words I was trying to translate were software-type words. I tried the same thing with other letters in the pile, and got as far as figuring out that somebody was trying to sell Eric a ranch in a remote location in an undisclosed country.

  “Sure,” I murmured. “I’ll buy, too, if the price is right.”

  On to the phone messages. First I arranged them in chronological order, then I went through them slowly, looking for patterns, names, anything.

  “Eva called.” 10:15 a.m., Wednesday.

  “Eva called.” 11:05 a.m., Wednesday.

  “Eva called.” 11:25 a.m., Wednesday.

  These I set aside. Some unfortunate soul must have been struggling with a tragic software problem. Poor woman.

  I continued to sort. There were messages from computer dealers and messages from clients. There were lots of messages from salespeople, a couple of messages from Rosie, and a couple from the girls, Amelia and Chelsea, and a couple from someone named Chago.

  I repressed an urge to toss all the slips into the air and run away before they landed.

  “There has to be something here,” I said.

  Not true, of course. I just wanted there to be something. I needed something tangible, some slip of proof, some indication of . . . something.

  Fatigue was creeping up my back. I stretched, gazing at the sorted piles of phone messages. There was a secret; Violet had said so. And I had it on good authority— mine—that anything said in the midst of morning sickness was the absolute truth.

  There was a secret here. All I had to do was find it.

  “Right,” I said. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

  “Are you okay?” Devon asked.

  No, I wasn’t. I was hungry, tired of looking at papers, scared for Yvonne, nervous for my finances, and terrified about the future in general. “Fine, thanks.” I glanced at my watch. “If you wanted to run to get some lunch, I’ll pay.”

  “Really?” Her eyes lit up. “Fast food or the Tractor?”

  We settled on the Tractor. Soup and salad for me, burger and fries for her. I handed over a twenty-dollar bill. “Be right back,” she said, and left me in Eric’s office, where I’d be alone for a solid fifteen minutes.

  I stood. If I was a secret, where would I hide? In a locked drawer, probably, but there weren’t any here. Maybe it was a purloined secret, and all I had to do was open my eyes. I swept my gaze over walls, desk, and cabinetry. Nothing. The only thing on the walls were two framed Ansel Adams prints. In the name of being thorough, I looked at the backs of the prints. Nothing. The desk, when I’d arrived, had been empty of everything except a desk blotter–sized calendar.

  Hmm.

  I restacked the papers and exposed the month of November. The first and last weeks had red lines through them with the letters SA written at the left side. The rest of the weekdays were filled with cryptic notes. “NC mtg, 10.” “Cnf cl, 2.” “Stf mtg, 8.”

  Some of those I understood. Conference call. Staff meeting. But NC meeting could be a meeting in North Carolina, or it could be a new client meeting, or it could be a no charge meeting, or it could be a new code meeting for the company’s programmers.

  “Nothing, nothing, nothing,” I muttered, restacking the papers. The breeze my frustration created sent a message twirling to the floor.


  “Got it.” Devon lunged and snatched it one-handed before it hit carpet. “Uh-oh. Purple. I’m supposed to shred all the purple ones.” She set my lunch on the corner of the desk and laid the change on top of the white foam container.

  A clue, Watson, a clue! “What’s so special about the purples?”

  She looked at the paper. “No idea. The whole color thing is goofy, if you ask me.”

  Yesterday she’d mentioned the color coding and I’d forgotten all about it. Bad Beth. “How do you know what color to use? Did Violet leave you directions?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing on paper. Mr. Stull kept saying if I have to write things down, I wasn’t right for the job. But, geez, how am I supposed to keep track of all this stuff?” She threw out her hands. “Red for billing. Black or blue for vendors. Green for . . . oh, shoot, what’s green for? Oh, yeah. Clients. Purple is for people who don’t leave a company name. Brown for nonpaying clients, and orange when anyone from the government calls.”

  “And what colors get shredded?”

  “All of them,” she said promptly. “Just at different times. Red at the end of the month. Green, when they’re a week old. Purple, when they’re older than one day. And I don’t remember for brown and orange, I just don’t.” Her hair was coming down out of its braid. She shoved a strand back behind her ear, but it came right back out. “The last time I put a box out for Mr. Helmstetter, I’m sure some stuff went out that shouldn’t have.” She pushed at her hair. “I was so scared that something really important got shredded that I almost got sick. Mr. Stull seemed really mad until I said it was all stuff in Spanish.”

  My heart thumped hard against my rib cage. “Can you read Spanish?”

  “Mr. Stull asked me that. I don’t know any Spanish other than uno, dos, tres. I thought it might cost me the job, but he seemed okay with it.”

  Devon didn’t read Spanish, but Sam did. Sam had often talked up the benefits of learning a second language. Sam’s minor in college was Spanish. Sam had been featured in the newspaper annually for leading mission trips to Mexico. Everybody in town knew Sam could speak fluent Spanish.

  And now Sam was dead.

  “When is Mr. Stull expected back?” I asked. “According to his calendar he should be here today.”

  But Devon was shaking her head. “That’s just the calendar he figures ahead with. Most of his appointments he doesn’t even write down. Says they’re safer in here.” She tapped her temple with her index finger.

  “Where is he?”

  “At home. He said his wife was sick. And I think they’re going away for Thanksgiving.” She stood there, looking at the piles of papers. “Do you think he’ll be mad at me? There’s an awful lot I’m doing wrong.”

  Welcome to the club.

  “You’re doing your best,” I said. “No one can fault you for trying your hardest.”

  “I am trying.” She brightened a bit. “Really hard.”

  “Then you might as well stop worrying.”

  “Okay.” She grinned. “Worrying doesn’t do any good, anyway. I mean, if you can do something, go ahead and do it, right? If you can’t do anything, what’s the point of making yourself all nuts with worry?” She cocked her head. “Phone. Gotta go.”

  What was the point indeed? Devon was a lot smarter than I was.

  I picked up the purple message she’d left behind. Red, black, blue, green, purple, brown, orange. With a mind empty of ideas, I sorted the messages into piles of colored pens, then spread out the purple ones, one by one.

  Why would purple messages want to be shredded after a day? I closed my eyes and thought of possibilities.

  Because they weren’t important.

  Because they were top secret.

  Because they were important and the calls would have been returned immediately.

  Try as I might, I couldn’t come up with any other reasons. I opened my eyes and looked at the purple names, none of which came with a last name or a company name. Rosie. Chago. Eva. Amelia. Chelsea. Rafael.

  Rosie Stull, Eric’s wife. No reason for her to leave a last name. Amelia and Chelsea, Eric’s daughters. Same thing.

  But who was Eva? And Chago and Rafael?

  None of the slips from Rosie or the girls had a phone number, which made sense. Only one of Eva’s slips had a number, and it had an extra set of digits at the front. An international call then, but since the only foreign country I’d ever set foot in was Canada, the number didn’t mean anything to me.

  Eva, Chago, and Rafael.

  They could be South American clients. But if so, why wouldn’t they leave a company name and a phone number?

  Because they were really good clients and didn’t feel the need?

  I was never going to figure this out. Never.

  “Eat,” I told myself. “Food will help.”

  I slid the change Devon had returned into my purse and flipped up the white lid. A coin I hadn’t noticed rolled off, onto the desk, and down onto the floor. The quarter rolled and rolled and rolled.

  If it had been a penny, I wouldn’t have moved. A nickel probably wouldn’t have inspired me to action, either, or even a dime. But a quarter? That was real money.

  I went down on my hands and knees. Where had the little bugger gone? Ah. There. Waaaay over, directly under the middle of the desk. Naturally.

  I turned to a sitting position, held the edge of the desk with one hand to keep my back off the floor, and stretched as far as my arm would stretch. “The things I’d do for a quarter.” I stretched a little more.

  My hand started to slip off the desk and I made a quick double grab. But instead of solidifying my grip, I latched on to Eric’s calendar and pulled the whole thing onto the top of my head.

  Papers that I’d just carefully organized came cascading down, and the two months left in the calendar fluttered like wings.

  I sat there, papers surrounding me, and thought about joining the circus. Nothing bad ever happened in a circus. I could take tickets. The kids could learn acrobatics. A win-win situation for all.

  “Are you okay?” Devon hurried in. “Oh, my goodness! What happened?”

  “Um, I was reaching for . . .” The quarter, firmly caught between thumb and index finger mere seconds ago, was gone. “For something. And I fell.” I gave her a sheepish smile. “Slid right off the edge of the chair. Silly, huh?”

  Devon was already picking up the loose papers. “I did that once in the middle of biology class. Thought I was going to die of embarrassment.”

  “Everyone has . . .” Between the calendar’s November and December pages, tucked in at the top, was a photo. I whisked it out of view. “Everyone has a moment like that in their life. With any luck you’re already done.”

  “Hope so.” Devon helped me to my feet. “Are you sure you’re okay? You look a little red.” She tapped her cheeks.

  “Embarrassment will do that to you.”

  “Yeah. Give me a yell if you need anything.” She ran off to answer the phone.

  I slid the snapshot out from under the calendar and took a long, slow look at the people in the picture. Looked at the back. “Eva and the boys,” someone had written. I laid the photo down next to Eric’s calendar notes and studied them both. Same handwriting, no question.

  Violet had said there was a secret here. I thought again about the purple message slips. Who wouldn’t bother leaving a last name? A long-term client, a good friend, or a family member.

  But clients were green.

  I spread out the slips from Eva. She’d called every twenty minutes. What good friend would call that often? None. What family member would? Only a wife. A wife . . .

  Eva and the boys.

  “Oh . . .”

  Things went click in my head.

  Click.

  Eric Stull ran an international software company.

  Click.

  The company was doing business in South America.

  Click.

  Eric had a second
family there.

  Click.

  Sam was killed because he could have read about Eric’s South American wife and children.

  Click.

  Eric’s schedule said he was headed to South America next week.

  And one last, solid click.

  “He’s never coming back,” I said out loud.

  Chapter 18

  My fingers were fumbly with cold as I tried to speeddial Marina’s house. “C’mon, fingers, work.” Though my car’s heater was cranked to high, it was going to take a few minutes to combat the thirty-degree temperature. Finally, I pushed the right buttons. As soon as the line opened up I started talking as fast as I could.

  “Marina, don’t talk, just listen. Eric Stull killed Sam. Meet me—”

  “You have reached the Neff household,” Marina’s DH droned. “Please leave a message and we’ll—”

  I clicked him off and pushed at the number for Marina’s cell phone. Voice mail there, too.

  I clutched my phone and yelled at it. “What good are you if I can’t talk to anyone?” The phone made a satisfying clunk when I heaved it onto the passenger seat.

  Now what?

  I held my gloved hands in front of the lukewarm air pouring out of the vent and tried to think.

  Where could Marina possibly be that she wasn’t answering either of her phones? Fear twitched its hairy fingers and I shivered. What if Marina had gone outside for the mail and slipped on the ice? What if she was lying in the driveway, hidden from public view by the shrubbery? What if—

  “You moron,” I said out loud. It was a half day for Tarver. This morning at breakfast the kids had been all bouncy in anticipation of one of Mrs. Neff’s surprise trips. These could range from stone-skipping contests to llama rides. Marina was undoubtedly at this very minute driving my children and the other day-care kids to an adventure they’d never forget. Marina, ultra-responsible while driving, would never answer her cell phone and might not check messages until all were home safe and sound.