Plotting at the PTA

by Laura Alden

  “Sorry.”

  “Makes you wonder where the other one is, doesn’t it?” He stood up. “No notebook. Did you check at the stores? Maybe someone turned it in where you dropped it.”

  “Thanks, I’ll do that.” Or not. Cowards don’t have to do such things. “I have another question. Remember I was asking about Amy Jacobson?”

  “The lady who died a month or two ago. Sure, I remember.”

  “Did you, did the police, take anything from her house?” He started to say something, so I hurried up to keep him from talking. “Because I was talking to Jean, the editor of the paper, and she said Amy was always carrying a three-ring binder.”

  “A . . . binder.”

  I blinked at Sean. He’d sounded just like Gus. Casual and interested, but also reserved. It was a lot to pack into two words, yet he’d managed it easily. Was this something they learned at the police academy? Or was it learned on the job, taught to you after a certain length of time in uniform? “Well, rookie,” the chief would say. “You’ve been on the job six months. Tomorrow we teach you how to talk.” “Yessir!”

  “Yes,” I said. “A binder. Jean says it was filled with newspaper articles about deaths like Kelly Engel’s.”

  “And you think we might have it here?” Sean frowned. “Ms. Jacobson’s death was ruled accidental. We didn’t take anything from her home. Matter of fact . . .” He trailed off.

  “What?”

  He looked at the ceiling, at the doorway to Gus’s office, down at the counter, and finally back at me. “Some relatives contacted us a couple of days ago. Cousins of some kind.”

  “And?”

  The way he studied my face made me want to squirm. Not only had he picked up the law enforcement officer’s tone, he’d also made the jump to the Cop Stare, the one that made you feel guilty even though you hadn’t done anything wrong except for going three miles over the speed limit. Well, that and the time in college I was given an extra fifty cents in change at an expressway fast-food restaurant and didn’t notice until I was a hundred miles away. I’d meant to send it back, I really had.

  “And,” Sean said, “Ms. Jacobson’s cousins will be in town in the next couple of weeks to take care of things.”

  “Take care . . . ?”

  A breeze from an open window rattled some papers. He moved a coffee mug to act as paperweight. “Close up the house. Get it ready to sell, I guess. They called to say they’d be there, if any of the neighbors reported a break-in.”

  Amy was gone, I’d known that for weeks, but cleaning out her house seemed wrong. So permanent. Getting rid of her belongings as if she’d never existed. Life went on, of course it did, but why did cleaning out a house seem like such an . . . an erasure?

  “Mrs. Kennedy, are you all right?”

  I put on an instant smile. “Fine, thanks.”

  “So what I’m saying is if you want to talk to Ms. Jacobson’s relatives about her binder, just wait until next week. I took down their names. Would you like me to get it for you?”

  Wait, wait, and wait some more. All I’d ever done in my entire life was wait. Waited to grow up and graduate from high school. Waited to get out of college and to get married and to get a real job, waited for my children to be born, waited for them to get older, and now I was still waiting.

  I was tired of it.

  * * *

  The next morning the alarm woke me before dawn. I slapped it off and sat up. The windows were a medium shade of gray and it was too dark to tell if it was going to be a sunny day or a cloudy one.

  I nudged the cat. “What do you think? Sunny?”

  George opened his eyes a fraction of an inch. Stared at me—obviously telling me to leave him alone—and shut his eyes again.

  I kissed the top of his head and was rewarded with a purr. I looked down at Spot, who was sitting on the floor next to the bed. “How about you?”

  He put his chin on the edge of the mattress and looked at me with his big brown eyes, as easy to read as Oliver’s when he watched the ice cream truck go past.

  I patted Spot’s furry head. “Don’t worry, you can go with me.” Because even though the Evan-induced promise to always take Spot with me had worn off with our breakup, I’d discovered that I liked having him along.

  Half an hour later I was showered and breakfasted—if you consider a granola bar and a glass of orange juice breakfast, which I did—and Spot and I were on our way.

  I parked the car a couple of blocks away and opened the back door. “Ready, boy?” Spot bounded out of the backseat with his tongue half out of his mouth. I clipped his leash onto his collar and we walked—oh, so casually—to Amy’s house.

  Halfway up the driveway, my cell phone rang.

  “Bethie,” Auntie May said, “Maudie wants to talk to you. Here, Maudie”—her voice went distant—“take the phone. What’s that? It’s too heavy? Okay, I’ll hold it to your ear. Are you strong enough to talk? There you go, honey. Don’t tire yourself out.”

  “Beth?” Maude’s voice was thready. “Are you there, dear?”

  “I’m here.” My dry throat had a hard time with the words. “How are you feeling?”

  “Fine, dear. Just—”

  “Maudie,” said Auntie May’s faint voice. “Don’t give the girl false hope. Remember what that doctor said.”

  “What?” I said loudly. “Maude, what’s the matter?

  “It’s just my heart,” she said. “The doctor said . . .” She broke off and took a few panting breaths. “She said I shouldn’t expect my little old heart to last forever, that’s all.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?” The hairs on the back of my neck were tingling.

  A few more panting breaths. “Well, honey, I’m not quite sure, but when I asked the doctor if I should crochet Christmas ornaments for the great-grandnieces and nephews, she shook her head.”

  “Oh, Maude.” I wanted to sit down.

  “Now, don’t you worry about me, sweetie. I know you’re doing your best to help me with Kelly. You . . . what’s that May, dear? Yes, I—” She coughed. Once. Twice. Then a long jag during which my grip on the phone grew tighter and tighter. “I’m sorry, honey,” she gasped out. “I’m just so tired. So . . . tired . . .”

  “Maude?”

  Short breaths punctuated the murmurings of Auntie May, murmurings that I couldn’t quite make into words.

  “Maude?” I called. “Maude!”

  “She’s asleep,” Auntie May snapped. “No thanks to you. No respect for your elders, that’s what’s wrong with your generation. You don’t care about anyone other than yourself, and sure not for a little old lady in a nursing home who asked for help.”

  “I’m trying,” I said, pleading, begging for understanding. “I’m trying to do my best.”

  Auntie May sniffed. “Not good enough, is it?”

  Her simple statement hit me hard. I bent forward as if I’d been slugged in the stomach. I wanted to say that she was wrong, that I respected her generation very much, that I spent so much time caring for other people that I didn’t know how to care for myself anymore, that I wished I could spend more time at Sunny Rest. But she didn’t want to hear any of that, and wouldn’t have believed me if I’d told her. “Auntie May . . .”

  “Do something.”

  And she was gone.

  I slid my cell phone back into my purse and looked around at the day. Oddly, it was still morning. The sun was just rising, shooting long lines of light through the leaves of the trees. A beautiful morning, all fresh and clean and unspoiled and decorated with dew. From the long grass in Amy’s backyard to the leaves of the trees to the roof of Amy’s house, bright drops of water caught the sun and reflected it back.

  Do something.

  “What do you think, Spot?”

  He looked up at me and wagged his tail.

  “Ready for a little breaking and entering?”

  * * *

  I started my life of crime by knocking on the back door. Maybe th
e cousins had showed up early. Maybe I’d be able to borrow Amy’s notebook. I’ll bring it back tomorrow, I’d say. Thanks so much, see you then.

  But no relatives came to the door. I knocked once more, a third time, then took hold of the doorknob and turned. Locked. “Rats.” I tied Spot’s leash to the white-painted porch post, walked around to the front of the house and tried that door. Also locked.

  I blew out a breath and turned in a circle, thinking. Somewhere I’d heard that over seventy percent of suburban Americans hide a house key somewhere outside. Of course, my source was probably Marina and therefore suspect, but I liked the statistic.

  Under the flowerpot? . . . Nope, nothing there. In one of the window boxes? On top of the door trim? Tucked somewhere under the back porch? No, no, and no.

  I brushed the dirt off my knees. Maybe she didn’t have a key out here. After all, why would you need a key outside if you never left the house?

  “Now what?” I asked no one in particular. “Auntie May doesn’t expect me to break down the door, does she?”

  Actually, she probably did.

  I glanced at the garage. Would Amy have had tools out there? Maybe a crowbar would get the door open without too much damage. I could replace the trim easy enough. Maybe I could talk Evan into helping me and . . .

  No. Not Evan.

  I winced away from that topic. Took one step in the direction of the garage. Stopped.

  Could I do it? Could I really break into Amy’s house? What if one of the neighbors saw me and called the police? What if Gus drove out, siren blaring, and caught me?

  Then again, what if Maude died today?

  I turned back to the house. What if . . .

  The first window I tried was securely locked. So were the second, third, and fourth windows. The fifth window—the smallest one—gave a small screech of protest, then went up.

  I studied the size of the opened window. Looked at the width of my hips. Squinted at the window. It didn’t look like a good fit.

  Time to get inside before the neighbors heard me. I looked around for something to climb on. I also wondered about the time and paperwork it took to get someone committed to a psychiatric hospital.

  “A nice long rest might do me a lot of good,” I told Spot.

  He wagged his tail.

  The porch stood sadly empty of ladders, chairs, and other devices upon which I could have clambered. But behind the garage I found exactly what I needed: milk crates.

  I brushed off the detritus of a dozen autumns and lugged three of them to the side of the house. Two I stacked atop each other, the other I snugged up next to the pile of two. Up one step I went, then up the next, high enough to see into Amy’s downstairs bathroom.

  “Now what?” I muttered. It didn’t sound so hard, climbing in through a window. Unfortunately, I had legs that didn’t bend backward and a head on top of my shoulders.

  One cramped calf muscle and two hard whacks on the back of my skull later, I was standing on the bathroom’s linoleum floor. I turned around to shut the window and saw Thurman, pruners in hand, staring at me blankly.

  “Hi!” I called, waving cheerily. “How are you? Say hello to Lillian for me.” I slid the window shut and locked it. Just making sure the house was secure, Officer. I’ll be going now, if that’s all right with you. Bye-bye!

  The dirt on my hands made me long to wash, but I couldn’t bring myself to use Amy’s towels. I dusted my hands on my pants, hoping my straightlaced and decades-gone grandmother couldn’t see me, and, after peering through the lace curtain for any signs of Thurman, went to open the door for Spot.

  “No getting on the furniture,” I told him. “No chewing of anything, no scratching on anything, and whatever you do, don’t shed.”

  He trotted inside, ignoring everything I said, and stood in the middle of the kitchen, nose twitching as he sniffed the stale air.

  Half a hope rose in me that he could smell Amy’s crime book. “Good dog. Find it, boy.”

  He gave me a tilted-head look.

  Sighing, I patted him. “Don’t worry about it. You would if you could, I’m sure. Dogs always do their best.” And unlike me, a dog’s best was always good enough.

  I shook off my self-pity, told Spot to stay, and started the search.

  Working on the theory that Amy would keep a special book in a special place, I went to the dusty living room. Not on the round coffee table, not on the blond bookshelves, not on the end tables, not under the pale turquoise couch.

  Methodically, I moved to the kitchen. No binder with the cookbooks. No binder in the junk drawer, no binder anywhere.

  “I hate this,” I muttered. This going-through of someone else’s belongings made me feel icky. And it made me want to rush home and clean out my underwear drawer. It wouldn’t do to have anyone else find that ratty pair in the back, not even Marina.

  The binder wasn’t in the guest room or the study where I gaped open-mouthed at Amy’s artwork. Why hadn’t she told me she was a graphic novelist? But before I even finished the thought, I knew the answer. I would have pestered her to do a signing at the store. To give a talk. To attend our author parties. All events that took place outside her house, most of which took place during the day.

  Poor Amy.

  I looked through the living room one last time—two last times—then looked up the narrow wooden stairs to where Amy’s bedroom must be. I didn’t want to go up there, didn’t want to see that most private of places, didn’t want to feel the sorrow that would surely stab at me.

  But up the stairs I went, bleached pine step after bleached pine step. At the top, the white paneled door creaked as I pushed it open. “Oh . . .” I breathed, feeling not grief, but a happy surprise.

  For Amy’s bedroom was filled with light and filled with white. Tall windows facing east and south were welcoming in so much morning sun that turning on the light would have made no difference.

  I blinked at the lush lace at the windows, the lace runner on the dresser, the lace draped over the dresser mirror, the lace-trimmed pillows on the bed, the comforter cover topped with lace, the lace lampshades. Feminine, yes, but more than that, sheer unadulterated gorgeousness.

  Amy must have loved this room. She would have woken to this beauty every morning and fallen asleep in its embrace. No one who’d created this room could have been truly unhappy, no one who slept in this space could have left it without a smile on her face.

  The binder was on the lower shelf of the white wicker nightstand. I removed it from its resting place and went silently down the stairs. I sat at the kitchen table, Spot sat at my feet, and I began to read.

  * * *

  When I finally looked up, my back hurt, my head ached, and my stomach was telling me that lunch would have been a good thing to have.

  The notebook had ended up to be as much journal as crime-oriented notebook.

  In the back were a number of empty notebook pages. I flipped to the back, hesitated, then unsnapped the binder, and removed the pages. “Sorry,” I said out loud. “I’ll replace them.”

  I dug into my purse for a pen and turned back to the first pages of Amy’s notebook. There was the newspaper article that described Kelly’s death. There was Kelly’s obituary. There was the article about her funeral, complete with pictures of the crowd-lined street and the black banners hanging from every window in the high school.

  It seemed a little overkill, perhaps, and my sympathy for Faye went up a small notch.

  I made some notes. Factual ones, having to do with dates and times and places. None of this was more than remotely interesting, but it seemed like something that should be done.

  Between the newspaper articles at the front and the articles at the back came pages and pages of scrawling adolescent script. I read it through a second time and this time I searched the angst for the kernels of information that lay beneath.

  “It’s all my fault,” the young Amy wrote. “I’ll blame myself forever and ever. She never would have died if I
’d really been her best friend. I would have saved her, I never would have let her drown. It’s all my fault, every single bit of it.”

  On and on for pages. I wrote, “Amy feels responsible,” and kept going.

  It wasn’t until the twentieth page of frenzied journaling that I came across the reason for Amy’s guilt.

  “If only I hadn’t gone out on that date. Why, why, did I think that seeing some stupid movie with some stupid guy was better than going to the slumber party?”

  I wrote, “Amy out on date the night of Kelly’s death.” Tapping the pen point to the paper, I wondered if that was the reason Amy had never married. Would guilt have haunted her to that extreme? Could something that happened when you were eighteen cause you to make a decision you stuck to the rest of your life?

  “Well?” I asked the air.

  But there was, of course, no answer.

  I paged through the loopy handwriting, hunting for the names I’d seen before. There. There. And there.

  “Claudia Wolff is such a you-know-what,” Amy had written. “She’s the real reason I didn’t go to the slumber party. Faye’s okay. Tina isn’t so bad, and all Cindy does is talk about either flowers or her chances with Keith now that he’s ditched Kelly. She probably can’t imagine how bad Kelly feels, so she probably called Kelly and asked if she wanted to get back with Keith and maybe that’s why . . . No. I won’t believe it. I won’t won’t WON’T!!!”

  A tear-sized circle blurred the exclamation points, turning them into wavy lines of blue ink.

  Four names went onto my list titled Slumber Party: Faye Lewis, Claudia Wolff, Tina Heller, and Cindy Irving.

  I turned the names around in my head. Cindy, Tina, Claudia, Faye.

  Faye.

  Claudia.

  Tina.

  Cindy.

  Faye, who was so obviously self-confident that the concept of murder to improve her chances of being valedictorian seemed as far-fetched as time travel.

  Claudia, who committed her acts of violence via a poisoned tongue, was too passive-aggressive to dirty her hands with something as ugly as murder.