Plotting at the PTA

by Laura Alden

  “Of her.” Faye shut the cash drawer. “Wouldn’t say I knew her.”

  “No? Rynwood’s not that big. I would have thought . . . well. Did you know there’s some question about how she died?”

  “The police said it was an accident.” Faye pushed my bag across the counter.

  “I hear some people think it was suicide.”

  “Not Kelly.” She took a step backward, retreating toward an open doorway through which I could see green tissue paper, white plastic buckets, and shelves of ceramic vases. “She thought too much of herself for that. She’d have assumed Keith would come back. It had to be an accident. Hope you enjoy the soap.”

  And she was gone.

  I went back out into the halfhearted sunshine with three thoughts. One, that Barb had been right: Faye did indeed have a wicked temper. Two, that she’d learned to control it, mostly.

  And three, that she was hiding something.

  Chapter 13

  “How do you know Faye was lying?” Marina asked. “And lying about what, pray tell?”

  I glanced at her expression, but it was one of open interest. I breathed a quiet sigh of relief. Last fall Marina had ventured into Shakespearean territory to add interest to her remarks and I’d spent a few tense weeks trying to sort out true quotes from Marina-manufactured quotes.

  “It wasn’t so much lying, as that she wasn’t telling the whole truth,” I said. “A mom knows this kind of stuff. Do you know when Zach is lying?”

  “Talks to his shoes,” she said promptly.

  “How do you know when the DH is lying?”

  “He mumbles. So you’re saying Faye what’s-her-name was lying because she did what?” She fluttered her fingers in a “come on, tell” gesture.

  “Looks like it’s going to be a big one,” I said idly, watching our offspring. We were in Marina’s spacious backyard and Jenna, Oliver, and Zach were waving their arms at the maple tree, making plans for a tree house. Their grandiose gestures didn’t worry me; Marina’s DH was an engineer who would go to great—and probably expensive—lengths to make sure the structure was safe and sound. “She started off by saying she barely knew Kelly, which I know isn’t true, then made a cruel comment that Kelly wouldn’t have committed suicide because she was too much of a narcissist.”

  Marina put on her Junior Birdman glasses, making a circle of finger and thumb, extending the other fingers, and placing the circles upside down around her eyes with her fingers along her jaw line. “And this is proof of murder?”

  “Stop that. Of course it’s not proof. But the two statements are inconsistent, and—” My cell phone trilled. I fished it out of my purse. “Oh, bother. This will only take a second.” I hoped. “Hello, this is Beth.”

  “Bethie, you figured out whodunit yet?”

  I closed my eyes. Why had I ever given Auntie May my cell phone number? I ran through a quick mental list of what a hassle it would be to get it changed and decided to let it go. After all, Auntie May was ninety-one. She couldn’t possibly live to be more than a hundred and twenty.

  “You haven’t, have you?” Her voice, always piercing, now penetrated my skull as thoroughly as a toddler’s shrieks rattled my molars. “What you been doing, girl? Don’t tell me you’re spending all your time on that story project.”

  I had, in fact, spent more hours than I’d guessed possible on the project, and in the car was another stack of papers I’d gathered from Tarver a bare hour earlier. But it was truly a labor of love and I couldn’t wait to unveil the end product. “These things take time, Auntie May.”

  She made a scoffing noise. Either that, or she was choking. “Time is what you don’t have.”

  So, not choking. Which was good news, but a little bout of coughing might have been nice. Not a big one, of course. Just enough to tire her to the point of having to hang up. I sighed. Bad Beth, for thinking such a thing. “How does time enter into this?” I asked. “Kelly has been dead for years.”

  “And every one has taken a year and a half away from Maudie.”

  I tried to do the math, but gave up quickly. “She isn’t sick, is she?”

  “Sick?” May shrieked. “She’s eighty-three years old, with a poor excuse for a heart and a piece of crap blood pressure. Of course she’s sick! Not that you’d know about her health, with your prancing about town. Oh, I saw you with that pretty Evan Garrett, don’t think I didn’t. Shame on you for waltzing around having a good time when Maudie is suffering so.”

  The unfairness took my breath away. But this happened often to anyone in the presence of Auntie May, so I tried not to take it personally. I’d once heard her lay into the mayor after he’d accidentally dropped a plastic coffee cup cover onto the sidewalk. And not long ago I’d eavesdropped as she flayed the verbal hide off a teenaged girl for wearing clothes more suited to a lingerie show than a public street.

  Her words still hurt, though, more than sticks and more than stones. “I’m trying, Auntie May.”

  “Gritting your teeth, aren’t you?” She chuckled. “I know the sound. Hear it regular.”

  “How sick is Maude?” I asked. “She’s not . . .” I fumbled for the words. “Not in any real danger, is she?”

  “Stop by and see for yourself,” Auntie May snapped.

  The phone went silent.

  “Wipe that look off your face,” Marina said.

  I glanced over. She had slid down in her chair and was tilting her face up to the sun, eyes closed. “Your eyes are shut,” I said. “How do you know?”

  She made a rude noise in the back of her throat and I had a sudden flash of the future starring Marina as the Auntie May of the 2050s. Auntie Marina? Or maybe Grandma Marina? No, I had it: Mammy Marina.

  “The problem with you, mah deah,” Mammy drawled in her best Southern belle accent, “you ah a product of your fe-ahs.”

  “My fears?”

  “Why, yea-ess.” She slid down another inch, looking as relaxed as a cat. “For some reason, you’re afraid that Maude is going to die before you figure out what happened to Kelly and you’re already feeling guilty as all get out. So there’s guilt and worry and the teensiest bit”—she put her thumb and index finger half an inch apart—“the teensiest bit of speculation about what you’re going to do next. But, wait, that bit is growing rapidly, you can see it unfurling as we speak.” Her palms were a foot apart, then two, then her arms were outstretched as far as they could go. “And by now, Beth has a plan. Next thing you know, she’ll be making a list. If we’re lucky she won’t put a title on it, but will we be that lucky? I think not.”

  But I’d stopped paying attention when she’d made the unfurling remark. I leaned over and dug through my purse for a pad of paper and a working pen. I had a list to make. Title: Amy/Kelly Connections.

  * * *

  The next morning I dropped the kids off at school and drove downtown, parking in my normal spot in the alley behind the Children’s Bookshelf. But instead of walking into the store and getting to work, I slung my purse over my shoulder. “Hi ho,” I said. “It’s off to my former employer I go.”

  Three blocks later, I walked in the door of the Rynwood Gazette. Though the old wooden desks and typewriters of yore had been replaced by cubicled computers decades ago, I liked to think a faint scent of ink ribbon and carbon paper lingered, impregnated into the walls and floor and ceiling.

  “Hi.” The young receptionist smiled. “What can I do for you?”

  An instantaneous loss of fifteen pounds from my hip area would have been nice, but instead I asked if I could have a few minutes of Jean McKenna’s time.

  “I can ask, but she’s pretty busy.”

  “Tell her it’s Beth Kennedy.”

  The girl picked up the phone. “Jean? It’s Lana. There’s a Beth Kennedy here to see you.”

  Jean’s strong voice came through the receiver loud enough for me to hear it without straining. “What the heck is she doing here? I have a paper to get out, for crying out loud.”

 
; Lana swung her apologetic gaze up to me. “Okay, I’ll tell her you’re too busy.”

  “Hey!” Jean shouted. “I didn’t say anything of the kind. Tell her to come on back. But ten minutes is all she gets.”

  I told Lana I knew the way and skirted the cubicle maze to get to the rear of the building. The sole window in her office faced north, keeping the room dark and cavelike. I’d said so once, and Jean had blinked, looked at her surroundings, and shrugged.

  I knocked on the door and went on in. “Morning, Jean.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” She was typing furiously at her computer and didn’t look up. All I could see was her graying hair. “You know better than to show up this time of day. What’s wrong with you?”

  I plopped down in the guest chair. “Do you want the list?”

  She glanced up at me over the top of her reading glasses, but didn’t stop typing. “You don’t really have a list of your faults, do you?”

  “Not on paper.”

  She grunted and went back to the computer. “Let me get this paragraph done. Would you believe what they’re doing in the township? At their board meeting last night I thought the trustees were going to start swinging.”

  “For real, or is that wishful thinking?”

  “Wouldn’t that make a great front page? ELECTED OFFICIALS IN FISTICUFFS OVER STREET LIGHTS. Think of the papers that would sell.”

  She whacked at the keyboard hard enough to make it bounce off the desktop at each whack. Jean still hadn’t learned that computer keyboards didn’t require the same impact of a manual typewriter. She went through keyboards like most people went through a roll of paper towels. A few more thumps, a pause while she reread her copy, a muttered “Save, Jean. Don’t forget to save,” then she leaned back, putting her hands behind her head.

  “So what’s up? Please tell me you have a great story. If not, you only have five minutes.”

  “I’m looking for information.”

  “Go to Google, that’s what everybody else does.”

  “I don’t want information from a search engine. I want real information.”

  She sat back, tossing her head to get her too-long bangs off her face. “Two sentences that are music to my ears. What do you want?”

  “Everything you know about Kelly Engel.”

  “Kelly, Kelly, Kelly . . .”

  I let her flip through her mental filing cabinets. She’d get there eventually. Besides, she’d bite my head off if I gave her hints.

  After muttering the name a dozen times, she snapped her fingers. “Kelly Engel. Fair-haired girl wonder. Drowned in Blue Lake twenty years ago. No, a little more than that. Cops said accident, everyone else said suicide. Except her mom, who swore up and down it was murder. She was the only one, though. Well, almost the only one.” Her sardonic gaze went briefly heavenward, then came back down. “You go to church. Is it some kind of sin to speak ill of the dead? Bad luck? Anything?”

  “I just sing in the choir. Someone other than Barb thought Kelly was murdered?”

  She grunted and put her feet up on the edge of the desk. “Woman was obsessed. I hated to see her coming in with that scrapbook.”

  “Scrapbook?”

  “Yeah, a great big thing. One of those monster three-ring binders with those awful photo album pages. You know, that clear peel-back plastic? Put a photo down on that sticky white cardboard and it’s either stuck there forever or it doesn’t stick at all and it slides out onto the floor of your closet behind the shoes you haven’t worn in three years.”

  I nodded.

  “Anyway, she had it filled with newspaper articles of anything even close to what happened to Kelly.”

  “Drownings, you mean?”

  Jean shook her head. “No. Anything called accidental that Amy could figure out a way to be murder.”

  I sat up straight. “Amy? Amy Jacobson?”

  “Well, yeah.” Jean lifted her eyebrows. “Who did you think I was talking about? It was a running joke around here, Amy and her scrapbook. The crime book, she called it. You really didn’t know? Amy talked about you, like you were really good friends. I figured you must have known about it.”

  Now I was the one shaking my head. “I’d never even heard Kelly’s name until after Amy died.”

  “Huh.”

  We sat there, each pondering different things. At least I assumed so, because it was unlikely that Jean was wondering how much longer she could stay in this office without my staff mutinying from want of Alice’s cookies.

  “Amy was a weird one,” Jean mused.

  “She seemed normal enough to me. Other than the not going out during the day thing.”

  Jean scrunched her fifty-five-year-old nose. “And the scrapbook and how she took off for fifteen years without telling even her parents where she was and the goofy way she made a living and that she never cut her hair and how she wouldn’t eat anything that ever swam and that she hated almost everyone in this town and, oh yeah, not going out during the day. But you mentioned that already, didn’t you?”

  I held up two fingers. “Questions.”

  Jean flicked a glance at the wall clock that was ticking away time. “Fast ones.”

  “I thought Amy was scared of everyone, not that she hated them.”

  “Hah. It was Kelly’s death that twisted her up inside. She felt guilty, somehow. I never knew why, but there you go. Turned her mad at all of Rynwood that Kelly was dead and people saying she took her own life. Ate Amy up something fierce, so she left until she had to come back to take care of her parents.”

  I nodded, filing the information away in my mental pocket to pull out for later perusal and cogitation. I folded my middle finger down, leaving my index finger standing.

  Jean turned back to her keyboard. “Better hurry.”

  “What did Amy do for a living?”

  “Wow, you really didn’t know her very well, did you?”

  “No, and no deducting your kibitzing from my answer time.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” She started whacking keyboard keys. “Amy was a graphic novelist. Can’t believe you didn’t know. Your store carries all her books. The author Jake? The Aqua City series?”

  * * *

  There were so many questions bouncing around in my head it was amazing that I was able to walk back to the store.

  Amy was Jake?

  Why had she never said?

  Amy kept a scrapbook?

  Why hadn’t I ever seen it?

  Why hadn’t I known?

  Amy hated most of Rynwood?

  And on and on. After a while, the questions took on a circular route. I’d wonder about her Jake-ness for a while, wonder where she’d come up with the idea for a Victorian urban fantasy set at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, wonder why she’d never said a word to me about her massively successful series, wonder if Kelly’s drowning death had anything to do with Jake’s fantasy world, then I’d circle around to wondering about the scrapbook.

  What, exactly, was in it? Jean had said newspaper articles, but I wondered if Amy had found a pattern that meant anything, wondered if something could be found if someone with a mind open to all possibilities went through it, wondered when she’d started keeping it, wondered where it was, and wondered if she’d kept it up until she died. Which sent me around to thinking about Rynwood.

  If Amy had truly hated the people of Rynwood, I wondered, was that explanation enough for her disinclination to go outside during the day? That way she couldn’t see people and people couldn’t see her. Maybe she’d made up the whole being allergic to sun thing. It didn’t make any rational sense, but my fear of snakes wasn’t exactly rational, either.

  It all jumbled together in my fuzzy brain, thoughts and questions banging into and bouncing off each other. The harder I thought, the faster the banging, and I spent the next couple of days responding to questions with answers that didn’t necessarily fit.

  * * *

  On Wednesday afternoon, I sat at my desk, trying to work through a
stack of returns. Lois had poked her head in and asked a question. I’d given an absent answer and assumed she’d go away, but instead she came in, moved a stack of publisher catalogs from chair to floor, and sat down.

  I glanced at her, saw the serious expression, and pushed away the keyboard. “What’s up?”

  She reached forward and tapped my desk with her index finger. As she was wearing a new-to-her charm bracelet, this made a cheerful jingling noise. She’d found the bracelet at a flea market and I’d been treated to a charm-by-charm recital of each dangling object. Hammer, pliers, saw. Wrench, screwdriver, drill. Why Lois was enchanted by it, I did not know, but the bracelet had inspired a new outfit of denim jumper modified to have front pockets similar to a pair of overalls. She’d belted it with a tape measure, added a pendant plumb bob necklace, and completed her attire with wide-strapped sandals.

  Now, she jingled her charm bracelet with a few more finger taps. “The question is, what’s up with you? And what are you doing back here, anyway?”

  I clicked the computer’s mouse. “Returns.”

  “Now, now. There’s no fooling me. I’m a mother, too, you know. What are you really doing?”

  Though Lois was my manager and friend, she sometimes forgot who signed her paychecks. Not that they were very big ones, and I certainly didn’t want to play overbearing owner, but still. “Why is it you’re not afraid of me? I have the power of hiring and firing, you know.”

  “You have the power to force Jenna to wear dresses to church, too.” She shrugged. “Paoze and Yvonne are worried that you’re worried. Yvonne thinks store sales are down and we’re going to close.”

  The concept that my preoccupation could affect my staff hadn’t entered my head. “Oh. But they’re not. We’re not. We’re doing quite well, really.”

  Lois nodded. “And Paoze thinks you’re going to marry that Evan Garrett, hand the store over to me, and sail off into the sunset.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  She looked at me with a sarcastic “Really?” expression all over her face. “How long have you been dating? A year? Time to fish or cut bait, I’d say.”