She nodded. “I know. That’s Stuart Ackleman for you. Apparently, under his insistence, they have already reviewed a slate of candidates, voted, and are set to make an announcement in half an hour. I can’t believe this! I’m the board’s secretary, and no one even thought to notify me sooner.”
I was very concerned about how my father had held up during this meeting. He had to still be reeling after this morning’s newspaper article on him. A couple of hours later, he’d had to vote on his slain fellow board member’s replacement. “The meeting’s at the Ed Center?” I asked rhetorically, finding this utterly distasteful, considering that a woman had died there not two days ago. “Can people from the general public attend?”
She nodded. “It’s not a closed meeting and Stuart will have alerted the media.” She folded her arms and plopped back down on her chair. “But I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going. They can ask Superintendent Collins’s secretary to fill in for me. At least one of us has to show poor Ms. Greene a measure of respect.”
“I’m going to go, though. I need to support my father.” I collected my purse. Agnes was watching me, squinting from her myopic eyes, literally or figuratively. “Thanks for your graciousness in inviting me to your home and speaking with me.”
“Well, Ms. Masters, all I can say is I hope the police figure out who killed Ms. Greene. I’d have done anything for that woman.” Her lips trembled and her eyes welled with tears.
Her obviously sincere sorrow gave me a new theory. Maybe she hadn’t meant the poison for Sylvia. Could she have slipped poison into someone else’s glass for Sylvia’s sake? A glass which could have accidentally wound up with Sylvia?
By the time I arrived at the Ed Center, I’d all but dismissed that notion. If Agnes had wanted to poison one of the board members, she would have filled that one person’s glass with water, lessening the chances of the tainted glass going to the wrong person. Otherwise, with just the empty glasses and water pitcher, it would have been far too common for the person nearest the pitcher to pour two or three glasses and hand them out at random. No, Agnes Rockman most likely was completely innocent.
I glanced at my watch. The children should be home from school by now, but Karen had her own key. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to leave them home alone for long. I arrived early at the small auditorium, now the scene of the crime. Carol Barr was seated in her appointed spot. Stuart was there, but my father wasn’t nor was Kent or Michelle. As usual, though, Stuart was biding his time, waiting to be the last to be seated.
Several members of the press arrived, including my much-detested Mr. Johnson. He saw me, but averted his eyes, and I decided to avoid a confrontation.
Kent and Michelle appeared within moments of each other. It occurred to me as I sat watching the people arrive that the board’s new appointee might be easy to spot out of such a small group.
My father arrived, accompanied by my ever-supportive mother. I got up and made my way across the room to greet them.
“Hi, Dad. Who’s the new board member?”
The muscles in his jaw were working. “Stuart’s grandstanding and asked us all not to tell anyone. I’m sorry.” Dad had averted his eyes. “Better get this over with,” he murmured, then left Mom’s side to go to the dais.
“How did you know to come here?” Mom asked me. “I was under the impression that this was all put together in a hurry.”
“I happened to be speaking to someone from the Ed Center.”
She nodded. “Let’s just hope that the new board member is someone sensible that your father can work with.”
“Yes.”
“Bet it won’t be, though,” Mom said, ever the optimist.
I kept an eye on the back door while the board members took their seats. I dropped into my seat in shock as I recognized the person who entered. “No,” I said to myself in a quiet whisper. “This can’t be happening!” There had to be another reason for her to be at this meeting.
“Let’s begin,” Stuart said, banging on the gavel with obvious relish. He smiled at his fellow board members, then said, “As the new president of this board, it is my privilege to announce our newest board member. We know that our decision to find a replacement for our fallen comrade might have seemed too swift for some. However, alacrity is something this board has never been accused of to date.” He paused and smiled, as if expecting the audience to laugh. No one did.
Stuart cleared his throat. “As we all know, no one could truly replace Sylvia Greene; however, we were fortunate to have a candidate so obviously qualified and devoted to this school district that there was no reason to delay our decision. The person we’ve chosen has been PTA president for as long as any of us can remember.”
“No,” I said, still whispering, but it was loud enough this time for my mother to elbow me.
Stuart scanned the audience.
As I’d feared but couldn’t quite accept, my all-time archrival, Stephanie Saunders, stepped forward.
Chapter 10
They Said It Couldn’t Be Done. (They Were Right.)
Stephanie, her smile beaming as bright as a spotlight, made her way to the front of the room and shook Stuart’s hand. “I’m honored to serve on the board in this capacity, as tragic as the circumstances may be.” The realization that her facial expression was not registering those “tragic circumstances” seemed to hit her a moment too late, for her cheeks grew pink as she lowered her eyes.
“Thank you. We all know that you’ll do an excellent job.” Stuart nodded at those of us making up the small audience.
Moments later, the meeting was adjourned, and I sat there in a state of shock. Mom patted me on the knee, then got up and made her way to the dais so that she could walk out with my father. Stephanie of course assumed that my mother was there to greet her and stepped between my parents.
“Mrs. Peterson, I’m so honored to be on the board with your husband. How is Molly?”
At the moment, trying hard to swallow her tongue and asphyxiate herself, I silently answered.
“I stopped by yesterday to bring her a hot meal, but she hasn’t told me what she thought of it yet. Did she happen to mention anything about it to you?”
Her obvious ploy for praise rankled me. Granted, I should have called to thank her or written her a note, but only a day had passed, and who’s to say I wouldn’t have gotten around to doing so? Eventually. In any case, she didn’t have to let my mother know of my bad manners, and it was very hard to believe that Stephanie hadn’t already spotted me amid the many empty chairs.
“Molly’s quite capable of speaking for herself.” Mom glanced back at me, and Stephanie followed her gaze.
“Oh, there she is. Hi, Molly.”
I raised my chin in acknowledgment, the best I could do against the tide of anxiety that was threatening to engulf me. Michelle had warned me that she would vote to fund sports. We would now need Stephanie’s vote to ensure that the arts were sufficiently funded.
Stephanie glided down the steps toward me and gave my arm a squeeze. “I’m so looking forward to working on this board with your father.”
“I had no idea you were even interested in serving on the school board.”
“Oh, I wasn’t especially, until I saw how seriously you and your family seem to take all of this school stuff. It’s finally given me the opportunity to even things out between us.”
“‘Even things out?’” I was very confused. Did Stephanie even care how I felt about her? If so, that was news to me. “How could your serving on the board possibly even things out between us? You already gave me a casserole. Which was delicious, by the way. Thank you very much, Stephanie.” I said the last loudly enough so that my mother, who was passing by, could overhear. Mom was oblivious, though, holding onto my father’s arm without a glance in our direction. She’d seemed almost numb during the meeting. All of this trauma focused on my father must have thrown her off balance.
“Oh, I’m so glad you enjoyed the meal. I meant to warn you
before you took it out of my dish to be careful not to ruin the cross-hatching of the spaghetti. But what I meant was…” she paused and gave me a big smile, “we can work together, just like the old days on the school paper.”
“I hated those days.”
She raised her eyebrows and studied my face for a moment. “Oh, that’s right. You did, didn’t you? And yet those are some of my fondest memories from high school. Just goes to show you. It’s crazy, the directions life takes us in, isn’t it?”
“Yes, this is definitely crazy, all right.”
Stephanie returned to the dais to effervesce with the remaining of her newfound peers, and I left, grinding my teeth.
The next morning, after sending Karen and Nathan safely off to school, I went down to my basement office to get some work done. There was a fax in my receiving tray. It had been sent from the Carlton School District’s general fax number with no additional identification. It read:
Sam Dunlap is not who you think he is. He has his own secret past he’s hiding. Check into his family.
Especially his sister.
You might want to read the obituaries.
I read the message three times, trying to get a handle on it. Who was sending me these notes? Maybe it was someone on the school board who was sympathetic to my family’s plight; a friend of my father’s, perhaps. But if that was the case, why give me the information? Why not give an anonymous tip to the police? The fax had to have come from the same person who’d sent the email urging my father to resign. My hunch, having met the woman, was that both notes were from Agnes Rockman.
I checked yesterday’s obituaries, but though Sylvia’s was there, I found nothing in it that struck me as significant. The cause of death was not mentioned, and memorial services were scheduled for the following-week. The fax must be referring to an obituary that ran a while ago.
I needed to ask my father about who might have sent me the fax. I copied it, then called my parents, listened through Mom’s now irritating message to hang up if you weren’t a good guy, then said, “Dad, if you’re there, can you pick up the phone?”
A moment later, he picked up; “Molly?” he asked, sounding so sad that I was instantly worried.
“I was just checking to see if you were home. I’d like to show you something. Are you going to be there for a while?”
“Just reading the paper. Come on over.”
A few minutes later, my father let me in and told me that Mom was out grocery shopping. After a brief explanation, I handed him the fax, and he dropped into his official “reading chair” where his temporarily deserted newspaper lay at the ready.
While he read the fax, I perched on the edge of Mom’s chair nearby. “Would all the members of the board might have access to the school district’s fax machine?”
“Yes. The fax machine is in a small office that we all share at the Ed Center.”
“If no one from the board itself happens to be using it, is it deserted?”
“No, it’s Agnes Rockman’s office. She’s our secretary.”
“I’ll bet this is from her,” I muttered while watching him read it a second time.
He shook his head and handed the fax back to me. “This is probably a prank. Somebody read the article in the morning’s paper identifying Mr. Dunlap, knows who you are, and is playing a nasty trick. Things like this happen all the time. Don’t let it get to you.”
“I got another anonymous note yesterday. It warned that your life was in danger and that you should resign.” Actually, the email had implied that his family’s lives were endangered, but there was no sense in alarming Dad.
He sighed and ran his palm over his bald pate. “Can’t say that I’m surprised. I’m just sorry that you had to deal with it, instead of me.”
“Has anyone given you a similar message?”
“No, not quite. But we were getting all sorts of prank phone calls and hang-ups. That’s why your mom changed the greeting on our answering machine.”
“This is such a nightmare. Are you holding up all right?”
He nodded. “We called your sister last night. Told her everything that’s going on.” He shifted his vision and stared out the window for a long moment, a forlorn expression on his face. “I should have done something. The seeds of this had to have been planted some time ago. I should have seen it coming.”
“You know that wasn’t possible. No one could have predicted Sylvia would be murdered.”
He didn’t even acknowledge that he’d heard me. I silently weighed the board members as suspects against one another and found myself mulling over Dad’s and my earlier conversation, when he first told me about the accident his brother’s potato-launching had caused. He’d said that a five-year-old had been injured. “Dad? Is there any chance that the boy who was badly injured in that accident your brother caused grew up to be Stuart or Kent? Somebody on the board?”
Dad let out a startled laugh. “No, Molly. That’s just…too farfetched. He was ten years younger than me, so he’d be…fifty-eight now. That’s too old for Kent and too young for Stuart.”
I nodded, relieved that the past hadn’t come back to haunt my father to an even greater degree than it already had. “Do you think that Mom’s doing all right?”
“Of course. You know your mom. She’s fine.”
I did know my mom, possibly better than he did when it came to understanding her emotions. “I was just wondering if maybe she felt a little hurt that you hadn’t told her sooner about Uncle Ted.”
“I was just following my lawyer’s advice,” Dad retorted through a tight jaw, facing me once again, now with his arms tightly crossed against his chest. “She understands.”
“Good.” I felt myself bristle at Dad’s defensive attitude. Regardless of the legal issues, it was obviously horrible advice from the family’s perspective. Why couldn’t Dad have seen that? Before I could stop myself, I blurted out, “I’m not sure that I do, though.”
He furrowed his brow. “We didn’t raise you to hold on to hurts and disappointments, Molly. I felt that the promise I’d made to my dying brother was more important than a confession to you or to your mother. I told you I’d done nothing wrong. That was the truth.”
“But it wasn’t the truth when you said during our drive to the Ed Center that you had no skeletons in your closet. You already knew what Sylvia’s upheaval was all about at the time. You’d told Jim a few days earlier. Why didn’t you just tell all of us and ask us to keep it in the family?”
Dad rose and turned his back on me to face the window. “I had paid an expert good money to advise me, and he told me not to.”
“If it were me, as soon as Sylvia first let on that I was under suspicion, I would have warned my family of the likely disclosure, while keeping my brother’s name out of it. And if my lawyer told me to do otherwise, I’d have found another lawyer.”
The muscles in Dad’s jaw were working. “I did the best I could, Molly. I’m sorry if that wasn’t good enough for you.”
His reaction surprised me. Though I deeply regretted bringing up my hurt feelings when he was obviously low, the fact that I felt them at all struck me as justifiable. And I didn’t know how not to “hold on to hurts and disappointments” except to examine them openly. “This isn’t about you…disappointing me, Dad.” My throat was tightening and my voice came out strained. “It’s about me trying to understand why you made the choices you made regarding me.”
He said nothing, his back still turned.
Feeling about as miserable as possible, I left. It was unrealistic of me to have expected Dad to ignore his lawyer’s advice; he was of a generation unlikely to question advice given to him by a doctor, a lawyer, or even an auto mechanic.
There was a time when I believed that my personal heroes, such as my father, were made from stronger, purer stuff than the rest of us. I’d long since discovered that people generally try to do the right thing, but the lines between heroes and cowards are forever shifting, drawn accor
ding to the given set of circumstances and one’s personal vantage point.
I made it home, accompanied only by the sensation that I’d lost something during my short walk—my sense of humor, perhaps. The truth is, I cared so deeply about the people in my life that I had to hide my feelings behind laughter as a means to skirt around the pain.
I cuddled my dog until I managed to shed the vestiges of self-pity, then forced myself to set my mind to examining just what this anonymous fax really meant regarding Sam Dunlap.
More than twenty-four hours had passed since I’d last butted heads with Tommy. If I were to call him to ask what he knew about Sam Dunlap, he wouldn’t answer the question, but I’d feel obligated to tell him about the fax, and he’d tell me to stay out of this, and so on. I decided to forestall that tiresome duet for now.
Determined to find this information the only way I could think of, I went to the Carlton library and started in on our microfiche roll of old newspapers. I worked backward from the present, which meant possibly going through a month’s worth of papers, but at least the obituary listings were short and located on pretty much the same page of every edition. An hour and a half later, I had gone through eight-plus months’ worth of obituaries. I had developed motion sickness as well as a distinct dislike of the color blue from staring at the blue screen.
Just as I was about to admit that my father had been right, that the fax had just been a sick joke, a photograph in the obituary section struck me, because the woman was so pretty and young. Half the time, families had the papers run some reprint of the deceased that was taken forty or fifty years earlier, but this time the dates matched. The woman had been only thirty-six.
The woman’s name was Mary Jacobsen Greene. Was this “Greene” as in Sylvia Greene?
My heartbeat increased when I read the names of the bereaved: Husband, Aaron Greene. Samuel Jacobsen, brother.
The fax had stated that Sam Dunlap wasn’t who he claimed to be; could this “Samuel Jacobsen” and Sam Dunlap be one in the same? And was this Aaron Greene possibly Sylvia’s ex-husband?
Death on a School Board (Book 5 Molly Masters Mysteries) Page 11
