Murder by the Slice (6 page)

“Now there’s an idea. I’ll get Marie’s number from Carolyn, and you can call her. I’m sure she could tell you who to talk to about that.”

“I’d appreciate it. Like I said there at Wal-Mart, I never got to be around the carnivals much. Sounds like fun.”

Phyllis went on into the house and found Carolyn and Eve in the kitchen, discussing the meeting at Loving Elementary. Eve turned to Phyllis and asked with a smile, “What were you and Sam talking about out there, dear?”

Phyllis wondered if Eve had an ulterior motive for asking that question. For goodness’ sake, it wasn’t like she and Sam had been out in the garage smooching or anything like that! Eve had no reason to feel jealous.

“Sam wants to help out with the carnival, too,” Phyllis said. “He’s talking about maybe helping build some of the booths.”

“I’m sure he’d be good at it. He’s always building things. He’s very good with his hands, you know.”

Again Phyllis wondered what Eve meant by that. On the surface, at least, it was just an innocent remark. Sam himself had said almost exactly the same thing. Phyllis told herself that she was being too suspicious and trying to read too much into everything. Eve seemed friendly again this morning, as if she had gotten over being miffed at finding Phyllis and Sam sitting together on the kitchen floor.
Be grateful for
that,
Phyllis told herself,
and move on.

“I told him you could give him Marie’s number,” she said to Carolyn.

“Certainly.” Carolyn and Sam hadn’t gotten along all that well when Sam first rented the empty bedroom upstairs, but over the months she had become friendly with him, even though she was still a little reserved around him at times. The reserve had all been on Carolyn’s part. Sam was the sort of man who was friendly with everybody right from the start.

That quality might be tested, Phyllis thought, if Sam ever had to spend much time around Shannon Dunston.

After lunch, Phyllis finally got around to going to the store for the ingredients she would need for her first trial run at the jack-o’-lantern cake. She planned to use a mix for the cake part just to simplify things, although when the time came to bake the one that would actually be in the auction, she would start from scratch. After all, someone would be buying it to eat, not just because it was pretty, and she wanted it to taste as good as possible. And no cake from a mix could ever be as good as one from scratch, at least to Phyllis’s way of thinking.

While she was pushing her cart along the aisles in the food section at Wal-Mart, she heard a voice behind her say, “Mrs. Newsom, isn’t it?”

Phyllis turned and to her surprise saw Shannon Dunston standing there, also with a cart. She shouldn’t have been surprised, she told herself. Everyone had to shop, even unpleasant people.

The really unexpected part was that Shannon was smiling now and seemed quite friendly. She had obviously gotten over her bad mood from that morning.

Or maybe she was manic-depressive, Phyllis thought. That would explain it, too. Then she mentally chided herself for not giving Shannon the benefit of the doubt. Marie had said that Shannon could be pleasant when she wanted to.

“Hello, Mrs. Dunston.”

“Please, call me Shannon,” the younger woman said as she brought her cart alongside Phyllis’s. “I hope you didn’t get the wrong impression from the meeting this morning. I know I can be a little impatient at times. There’s always just
so
much to do, and it seems like I’m running and running and running all the time, and it’s so hard to get people to actually help—” She stopped, shook her head, and smiled again. “But I don’t have to tell you that. You were a teacher. You know. And I know you saw me arguing with my exhusband, too. You couldn’t have missed it.”

“I didn’t really pay any attention… ,” Phyllis began.

“Oh, you don’t have to apologize. Joel is so obnoxious he practically shouts it from the rooftops. Can you believe he wanted to skip some of his child support payments just because he spent too much money remodeling his office? He promised he would catch up later, but that doesn’t do Becca any good now, does it?”

“Becca is your daughter?” Phyllis asked, hoping that would get Shannon off the subject of her hostility toward her ex-husband.

“That’s right. She’s in the fourth grade at Loving.” Shannon glanced in Phyllis’s cart. “I see you have bananas. Are you going to use them in the snack you plan to make for the contest?”

Phyllis gave a guilty little start. She had hesitated when she passed the bananas, but after a moment she had finally given in to temptation and put them in her cart. She already had peanut butter, oatmeal, and applesauce at home. The recipe idea still lingered in the back of her mind, intriguing her with its possibilities. But she wasn’t going to enter it in the contest. She had told Carolyn that she wouldn’t.

She said, “Actually, I don’t think I’ll be competing—”

“What? But you have to! It was your recipe that won everyone over to Mrs. Wilbarger’s idea. It really has to be in the contest.” Shannon got a determined look on her face. “I insist.”

Phyllis didn’t know what to say. She didn’t like being browbeaten, and she had given her word to Carolyn, but Shannon was forceful and clearly accustomed to having people go along with what she wanted.

And the recipe would make a fine healthy snack, too. Good, and good
for
you, as Carolyn had said.

Before Phyllis could decide what to do, she was distracted by a young man who had come up behind Shannon. He wore a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off to reveal several colorful tattoos, and he not only had rings through both earlobes, but his nose was pierced, too, with a silver stud on the left nostril. His head was shaved. Just the sight of him made Phyllis nervous.

And then a surge of outright fear went through her as the young man’s hand reached out, straight toward the purse hanging from Shannon’s shoulder.

Chapter 6

Phyllis opened her mouth to call out a warning to Shannon that the man was about to grab her purse, but before she could say anything, the young man said, “Hey, Mom, can I have a couple bucks? I want to go back to Mickey D’s and get something to eat.”

Shannon turned her head to look at him, and the sharpness and impatience she had demonstrated during the meeting that morning were back again as she said, “You can have something to eat when we get home. Where did you wander off to, anyway?”

The young man shrugged. “Went to look at the CDs.”

“You didn’t take any of them, did you? I don’t want the alarm going off again when we leave the store.”

“No,” he said sullenly. “I didn’t do anything. I just looked at them.”

“Good.” Shannon glanced at Phyllis. Clearly, she didn’t want to introduce the young man to her, but she felt compelled to do so. “Mrs. Newsom, this is my son, Kirk.”

Phyllis nodded. “Hello.”

The young man returned a curt nod and said, ” ‘Sup.”

Phyllis had watched enough TV to think about saying,
Word, dawg,
just to see what his reaction would be, but she thought better of it.

Anyway, Kirk had already turned his attention back to his mother. “I just want to get some fries—”

Shannon didn’t let him finish. “I already said no.”

“Fine, whatever.” Kirk stuck his hands in the pockets of his tattered jeans and wandered on down the aisle.

“I’m sorry about that,” Shannon said to Phyllis. “Obviously, I didn’t discipline Kirk enough when he was a child.”

Phyllis remembered what Lindsey Gonzales had said that morning about Shannon having an older son from her first marriage. She hadn’t thought about the son being that old.

“You don’t look old enough to have a grown child.”

“I had Kirk when I was eighteen. Young and foolish, you know. I’d gotten married right out of high school to my childhood sweetheart. I should have known better. Those things never work out.”

Phyllis wouldn’t have gone so far as to say that. But early marriages
did
take an awful lot of work to make them successful, and often people just weren’t willing to put the effort into it.

“Anyway,” Shannon went on, “what about the contest? You’re going to enter, aren’t you? Of course you are. It’ll be a lot of fun, and it’s all for such a good cause.”

“It
is
for a good cause,” Phyllis had to admit.

“It’s settled, then. I’ll look forward to trying those healthy cookies.”

“All right.” The words were out of Phyllis’s mouth before she could stop them. She would just have to make Carolyn understand what had happened. Shannon had trapped her into agreeing.

“I’ll see you at the meeting Friday.” Shannon smiled and pushed her cart on down the aisle, catching up with her son, who had taken something off one of the shelves to look at it. “Put that down,” Phyllis heard her say. “My God, I can’t leave you alone for a minute.”

Phyllis turned her cart around and went the other way, blowing out her breath in a sigh as she did so. Even though Shannon had been making an effort to be nicer than usual, the encounter was still troubling to Phyllis. Not only had she gotten roped into agreeing to compete in the healthy snacks contest, but she’d had to witness the way Shannon treated her son. Even though Phyllis didn’t care for that whole pierced, tattooed, shaven-headed lifestyle, she couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for the young man. There he was, over eighteen years old, and his mother was still treating him like he was seven or eight.

Phyllis had long since learned, though, that she couldn’t change the way people treated their children, and except in extreme cases such as abuse, she didn’t even have the right to try. Teachers did what they could to help youngsters who had less than ideal home situations, but in the end, most of the time they had to just butt out and learn to live with it. To do otherwise was to risk driving themselves to distraction with worry.

By the time she got back to the house, she thought she had come up with a solution to her problem. She put away the groceries, then found Carolyn in the living room, sitting on the sofa and writing something on a legal pad.

“I’m still working on the handout for the parents,” Carolyn said. “Would you like to read what I have so far?”

“Sure.” Phyllis took the pad and sat down in an armchair to read what Carolyn had written. When she had finished, she handed it back and said, “It sounds fine. You even have the information about turning in the recipes for the cookbook. I think you’ve got it covered.”

“I hope so. Are you sure you don’t mind typing it up and designing it?”

“No, not at all.” Phyllis took a breath. “You know, I ran into Shannon Dunston at Wal-Mart.”

“Really? So you had to deal with her twice in one day. Better you than me.”

“Here’s the strange part,” Phyllis went on. “She was a lot nicer than she was this morning, and she absolutely insisted that I make that cookie recipe for the contest.”

Carolyn looked up sharply. “What? You said you weren’t going to enter the contest.”

“I know, but Shannon was so determined—”

“That you gave in and said you’d do it.” Carolyn’s voice had hardened considerably.

“Well, yes, I said I’d make the cookies, but I was thinking that I wouldn’t actually enter them in the contest. It would just be … an example of a healthy snack, I guess you could say. People could sample it, but they couldn’t vote for it. That way it could go into the cookbook.”

Carolyn looked at her for a moment, and enough time ticked by for Phyllis to start feeling uncomfortable. Then Carolyn said flatly, “No.”

“No what?” Was she forbidding her to enter the contest? That wasn’t right, no matter what they had said earlier about not competing.

“No, if you’re going to use the recipe, you should enter it in the contest. There’s no point in going to that much trouble otherwise.”

“Really, it wouldn’t be any trouble—”

“I insist,” Carolyn said. “If Shannon insists, so can I. Obviously, you
want
to make the cookies, and so you should enter them. There’s nothing else to be said.” She sniffed coldly. “It’s a free country, after all.”

This was turning out all wrong, just as Phyllis had been afraid that it would. “I don’t have to do it if it’s going to bother you.”

“Why should it bother me? I’m certainly not afraid of a little competition, if that’s what you mean! After all, we both know I’ve managed to beat you plenty of times before.”

Phyllis could understand why Carolyn might be a little upset, but she didn’t have to be rude about it. “As Shannon pointed out, it’s all for a good cause—”

“Of course.”

“Anyway, even though she was acting a lot nicer, she was still determined to get her own way.”

“Like someone else,” Carolyn said.

That did it, Phyllis thought. Now
she w
as getting mad.

“You know, this is fine,” Carolyn went on before Phyllis could say anything, “because I was just thinking about coming up with a cake for the auction after all.”

“I thought you said you didn’t like to decorate cakes.”

“Well, we all say things we don’t exactly mean sometimes, don’t we?”

This had gone on long enough. Phyllis was going to put a stop to it before it got out of hand, and she was going to do that by changing the subject. She stood up and reached toward Carolyn. “Give me what you’ve written and I’ll get to work on it.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s necessary anymore. I can do it.”

“You don’t like using the computer—”

“I’m perfectly capable of taking care of it myself.”

“I’m sure you are,” Phyllis said, “but I don’t mind—”

“No thanks.” Carolyn got to her feet and started toward the stairs.

“All right,” Phyllis said after her. She thought but didn’t say,
Be that way.

But as Carolyn went upstairs and Phyllis sank back into the armchair to brood, Phyllis wondered how much of what she felt was really annoyance with Carolyn—and how much was the guilt she felt over breaking her word to her friend.

Thank God for Sam Fletcher,
thought Phyllis. First Eve had been irritated with her, and now Carolyn. But good old dependable Sam was still her friend.