Death at a Talent Show (Book 6 Molly Masters Mysteries)

by Leslie O'Kane

  While I watched her tight-fisted march toward us, I suddenly felt like a sitting duck. Elsbeth looked more angry than I’d ever seen her—or anyone else for that matter.

  “What do we do?” I asked Lauren through my teeth, forcing a smile for Elsbeth.

  “Remain calm and seated.”

  Elsbeth threw the heavy front door aside as if it were nothing and stormed into the main lobby. With her clenched jaw, her hands fisted, and her arms pumping as she walked, she had the bearing of a freight train. She glanced at me in the office window, took a step toward me, then saw Dave Paxton, who was coming toward us down the hall, and spun around toward him.

  “That does it!” she hollered at him over the general din of students chattering and lockers being opened and slammed shut. “I’ve had it! You lied to me, you bastard! You said you always give your students the grades they deserve, regardless of what you think of their parents.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The report cards came out! You gave my daughter a C! She’s a wonderful artist, and you know it!”

  Dave furrowed his brow. “There must be some mistake. I gave your daughter the A that she deserved. On her own merits.” He spread his hands and held them up in full surrender. He glanced over at Lauren, sitting beside me at the window to the office. “Bring up my grades for my fifth-period ceramics class, would you please, Lauren?”

  She hit a few keys, then rotated the screen toward Dave so that he could read it. He leaned forward, scanned the screen, then pointed. “There. See, Elsbeth? She’s got an A. Which is exactly what she deserved. Someone must have made a…bizarre error when the processing was done.”

  Both Dave and Elsbeth glared at Lauren, who also held up her palms in mock surrender. “Don’t look at me, folks. I just printed out the report cards as stored in the computer and gave them to the teachers.”

  Elsbeth excused herself to find her daughter, and returned shortly with Tamara’s report card, which we compared to the report in the computer file. The printed report card was all As, except for one C in ceramics, which was clearly an A in the computer file. By now Jack Vance joined the three of us.

  “I don’t understand how this happened,” Jack said once he’d been shown the cause of the trouble. “The report cards and the grades in the teachers’ files should be identical. The computer is set up simply to sort by student name in order to print out the report cards.”

  “Unless someone went in and manipulated the grades after the computer had sorted them,” I said. “Maybe someone whom the computer blocked from entering the teacher file, but not the individual report cards.”

  Jack said, “Nobody has the authority to do that on the computer. Except me, of course.”

  “And your former personal secretary?” I asked. An unnecessary question, evidently, for the color was already draining from Jack’s face as he realized the same thing.

  Jack grimaced and looked at Lauren. “Lauren, we’re going to be working late tonight. I’m going to have to get on the intercom and tell the student body that a computer foul-up may have loused up their report cards.”

  “Since my children aren’t even in high school yet, I have no vested interest in this,” I offered. “I can help.” The second bell rang to signal the start of third period.

  “I’m sorry that this happened, Elsbeth. It’s a good thing you brought it to my attention,” Dave said, and left the office.

  “I cannot believe this place,” Elsbeth said under her breath as she started to head toward the door.

  “Let me walk you to your car,” I said.

  She looked at me in surprise, but waited anyway, and we left the building together.

  “What were you talking about earlier, Elsbeth?” I asked quietly. “You said that Dave and you had some sort of agreement about your daughter’s grade.”

  She maintained her steady pace toward her car and didn’t look at me. “That was…nothing. The point is that Tamara earned her A, as always.”

  “But you were afraid at one point that he wouldn’t give her the A she earned?”

  We’d reached her car, which, I noted, had been parked at a haphazard angle in the visitors’ parking spaces. She shook her head, her brow furrowed as she fumbled with her keys. “You’re reading things into it. All I said was that he promised to give her the grade she deserved.”

  “Then why were you accusing him of lying to you?”

  She clicked her tongue and finally met my gaze with a blazing glare. “All right, Molly. You’re right, once again. Congratulations.” She let out a puff of air. “Dave caught me trying to sabotage the show and told me to quit it. I asked him point-blank if he was going to take things out on my Tamara, and he said no.”

  “Meaning when you let the animals out of their cages?”

  “Yes, if you must know. Somebody had to teach that Corinne a lesson. She was a teacher, for God’s sake, and she was having an affair with a student. You saw how upset Danielle was because of what Corinne was doing with her son.”

  “You and Danielle don’t seem especially close. I have a feeling it was more personal than that.”

  Elsbeth flung her car door open with a vengeance. “Well, damn it, Corinne Buldock refused to put my Tamara in her double-honors English literature class. Without those points, she didn’t stand a chance of getting to be valedictorian.” She averted her eyes. “Dave saw me open the birds cages at a rehearsal the week before. He said he’d raise a stink at the next PTA meeting if I kept that up.”

  “And yet you released the birds at the dress rehearsal.”

  She shrugged. “Like I care what the PTA thinks of me? I just wanted to make sure he didn’t hurt Tamara. Nobody saw me open the cages that night, so I blamed Nadine. She deserved to get into trouble. I’m certain that Chester paid her off to give his son an A and my daughter a C.”

  “You lied to the police and to me just to make someone else look guilty of a crime, because you think she tampered with your daughter’s grades?”

  Elsbeth set her jaw and got into her car without a reply.

  I was so exasperated, I couldn’t keep quiet. “Olivia sabotaged Martin’s trick so as to embarrass Stephanie. You set animals loose on stage to make the director look bad. All the while, we had an inept magician and a stupid clown act, not to mention all of the insipid acts that preceded us. Didn’t you people ever stop to realize that we were lousing up the production just fine all on our own?”

  Calmly now, Elsbeth replied, “My only concern was showing Corinne to be the incompetent that she, in fact, was.” She lifted her nose in the air. “It’s hardly my fault that everyone else was a boob as well. That merely made it more difficult to make her look bad in comparison.” She shut her door, but I tapped on her window, and she rolled it down. “Elsbeth, I no longer care if you’re the best piano teacher in the state of New York. I can’t always control who my daughter associates with, but in your case, I can. You’re fired.”

  “You can’t fire me. You’ve already paid through the end of the semester.”

  “Be that as it may, my daughter won’t be coming to the lessons.”

  I returned to the office, but was already second guessing my decision. Karen would be the one to suffer from lack of lessons, and it was impossible to get a teacher mid-semester. Without any teacher for the next three months, she would lose her enthusiasm and stop playing. It would be my fault. My only hope, then, would be to find a pianist who was willing to try his or her hand at giving lessons. Brian Underwood was the best young pianist I’d heard in quite a while. Maybe he could be convinced to teach Karen.

  My piano-teacher situation was less pressing at the moment than the work of verifying student grades. Jack was chatting with Lauren, and they both looked discouraged at the task that lay ahead of them. “Jack, is it true that Olivia Garrett was all but sabotaging her daughter’s ranking?” I asked.

  He sighed. “That’s nothing that I could prove, but it sure seemed that way. When she first transf
erred here, her mother kept coming in and swapping classes, always from the most demanding classes to the lower. She said it was because she didn’t want her daughter to become overly stressed.”

  “Can parents do that? Change their child’s schedule for them? Pick their teachers?”

  “They’re not supposed to, no. We try to explain to parents that part of being in high school is to have children develop the maturity to schedule their own classes, but if we take too hard a line on that, we get in trouble. Joe Junior won’t have enough credits to graduate with his class, and Joe Senior comes in and bangs his fist on my desk and blames the school for not overseeing this, even though we mailed home ten warnings that were ignored.”

  “That’s not really comparable to what Olivia had been doing with her daughter’s course work, though.”

  “It isn’t, but we tried to accommodate, because…well, frankly, she told us Jenny was in therapy. She implied that if the tough classes pushed her daughter over the edge, we’d have a lawsuit on our hands. So we’d make the change, then within days the teachers would be coming into my office, saying Jenny needed to be moved up, that her tests were off the charts and she wasn’t challenged. I’d talk to Jenny, she’d say that, yes, she wanted to be switched into the more challenging classes. A day or two later I’d have Olivia back in my office, telling me that she knew what was best for her daughter. Miserable situation, let me tell you.”

  “Did it work? Is she out of the running for valedictorian?”

  Jack frowned. “There are several solid A students. She’ll finish third or fourth, most likely, behind Chester’s, Elsbeth’s, and Danielle’s kids.”

  Someone opened the door to the office and we all froze and stared. It was Nadine Dahl, wearing sneakers, jeans, and a denim jacket.

  “Hello, everybody,” she said with a smile. “A certain irate mother, whom I won’t identify—” She made a megaphone shape with her hands and whispered, “Elsbeth Young,” then went on in normal tones, “left a message on my machine earlier today. Apparently someone uncovered my grade tampering. I came over to apologize.”

  “That’s rather pointless, isn’t it?” Jack asked through a tight jaw.

  She smiled and shrugged. “Sure, but I figured, why not go in and ‘fess up? What are you going to do? Fire me again?” She was the only one who laughed, apparently unfazed by the cold reception she was receiving from all of us. “I just did this because, like I said, I wanted to get fired. I only changed two students’ grades—Paul Walker’s and Tamara Young’s. Both their parents were checking closely enough that I knew for certain I’d get caught.”

  “Even if that’s true, we have to manually double-check all the students’ grades to be sure.” Jack sighed. “I’ve had the teachers go over each of their. students’ report cards and compare them to their master grade listing.”

  “For what it’s worth,” Nadine said, “I truly am sorry. I’d been hittin’ the sauce a little too hard for a while there. Now that I’ve sobered up, I feel bad about what I did to the grades.” She patted my shoulder. “I figured you’d. be here, playing the Good Soldier after getting me fired.” Nadine reached into her bag. “I’ve got some little gifts for the three of you. Please accept them. I gave a lot of thought to what would be most appropriate for each of you.”

  She gave Jack Vance a ceramic figure of a baseball player, Lauren a doll, and me a clown.

  Lauren held the doll out for Nadine to take back. “I don’t want a gift from you. It hardly makes up for the damage you’ve done to my children’s school.”

  “Then give it to your daughter, or to a charity.” She remained cheerful, our words having no effect on her. “Again, I wish you no ill feelings, and I hope that someday you’ll be able to say the same for me.”

  With a little wave, she spun around and left the building. The three of us looked at one another. Jack said, “I, for one, am going to take this figurine out to the dump, along with my baseball bat, and smash it to pieces.”

  The three of us began the daunting and painstaking task of going over the records, beginning with the senior class. Hours later we verified that out of the 583 students in the Carlton senior class, only one grade besides Tamara’s had been changed. As Nadine had indicated, Chester Walker’s son was indeed the second student, but Nadine’s motives had clearly been monetary, not to get that student’s parent to catch her in the act; she’d raised Paul Walkers grade in Dave Paxton’s class from a C to an A.

  One thing was certain. With a half-dozen students having perfect scores throughout their four years of high school, and despite all of Chester Walker’s efforts to influence things to the contrary, his son would not be the valedictorian.

  Chapter 16

  Play It Again, Sam. I Dozed Off.

  I spotted Brian Underwood during a break between classes and asked if he’d consider giving my daughter piano lessons. He said he’d think about it. At the end of the day he told me he’d like to meet my daughter and have a trial session. With Nathan already scheduled to go to a friend’s house for a couple of hours after school, we decided today would work.

  Somewhat to my surprise, when I told Karen that I’d “fired” Elsbeth, she said, “I thought you would. I already told Rachel that I’d probably had my last lesson with her.”

  She was enthusiastic about the possibility of Brian as her teacher, having remembered how well he played during our brief encounter at Elsbeth’s house. Not at all surprisingly, his mother came to the trial lesson at our house as well.

  Once Karen and Brian had settled at the piano in the living room, Danielle turned to me and said quietly, “Chester tells me there’s a problem with your blinds.”

  “They open the wrong direction—into the doorway instead of away from it.”

  “I must have had my mind on other things when I installed them. Sorry. I’ll take care of that now.”

  She had brought her toolbox with her. I followed her into the room, closing the crooked door behind us. “Mind if I watch?”

  “Not at all. Just don’t talk to me, so I won’t get distracted again, all right?”

  “All you have to do is switch around the six runners, right?”

  With her hands on her hips, she stared up at the runners for what seemed a long time, then said quietly, “This must have been my subconscious playing tricks on me, forcing me to come back here and talk to you.”

  How very flattering, I thought, but held my tongue.

  She pursed her lips and shut her eyes for a moment. “Brian lied to you earlier. I overheard part of what he was saying.”

  “When?”

  “At the funeral service. He was trying to protect me. He was afraid that I…” She met my eyes. “He didn’t get those keys to Dave Paxton’s office from Jenny, he got them from me.”

  Oh, for crying out loud! This was like some game of liar’s poker, gone amok. “And how did you get them?”

  “From Nadine.” As she spoke she started to remove the blinds. “I was desperate to get information I could use against Corinne that would force her to keep her claws away from my son. I thought that maybe she’d have something incriminating in her office, which I knew she shared with Dave. So I broke into her file cabinet, while I was supposedly changing into my clown costume. I was looking for love letters or diaries or anything, but there was nothing. Just her students’ records.”

  She sighed and then spent a few moments in silence as she reversed the positioning of one of the runners. “Later that night, in all the commotion over Corinne’s death, I realized that I’d dropped something, probably in Dave’s office, and since I’d jimmied the lock to Corinne’s file cabinet, it looked really incriminating. So I gave the keys to Brian to retrieve it.”

  “What?”

  “The bulb to the stupid water-squirting flower. I was afraid the police would notice that it was missing from my costume. That if it showed up near Corinne’s file cabinet, they’d assume I had something to do with the murder.”

  The pl
astic bulb I’d found under Dave’s couch! There was no way she could know that I’d seen that. At last I was confident that I was hearing the truth.

  She began working on the next blind. “I told Sergeant Newton all about this yesterday, by the way. He just kept saying ‘Uh-huh,’ though.” As if to herself, she added, “I hope he knows I didn’t kill anybody.”

  “I see,” I murmured, then gestured in the direction of the door. “I think I’ll go listen to the piano lesson.”

  I returned to the living room, smiling at Karen and Brian whenever they looked in my direction, but my thoughts were elsewhere. Brian had concocted this elaborate, believable story about his girlfriend and the keys to protect his mother. What kind of a mother, though, would ask her son to break into a teacher’s office to retrieve potentially incriminating evidence?

  At a few minutes after eight that night, Stephanie called and sounded contrite, which immediately made me sit up and take notice. She made a couple of passing attempts at small talk, then said, “Molly, much as I hate to ask you this, I was wondering. Would you mind terribly coming over? I’d like you to talk to Jenny for a few minutes.”

  “About what?”

  She sighed and said quietly, “Anything. I’d like your opinion about her emotional state. I’m worried about her.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Jim, who’d been listening in, raised an eyebrow. I hung up and said, “That was Stephanie. She says she needs help with Jenny. For Stephanie to have resorted to asking help from me, the situation with Jenny must be truly dire.”

  He nodded. “I guess so. Should I come, too?”

  “No, just stay home with the kids. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Nathan frowned at me from his post at the coffee table, where he was doing his homework. “Where are you going now?” he asked.