Plotting at the PTA (3 page)

My knuckles were getting sore from knocking. “Amy? Amy!”

She had to be here. Any second now she’d scurry to the door and apologize for making me wait. She’d . . . been in the attic. Sure, that was it. She’d been looking for—

“Looking for Amy?”

I whirled around.

A man stood in front of a long row of lilac bushes; their waving branches on this breezeless morning solid evidence of his passage. Which was a good thing, because in this fairy-tale-ish setting, his small stature and thick white hair gave him a very elfin look.

“Yes,” I said. “She’s not sick, is she?”

He walked to the porch and trotted up the stairs. Somehow the fact that he carried a pair of pruning shears didn’t bother me a bit. Elves just aren’t threatening creatures.

“Thurman Schroeder is the name,” he said. “Selling cars is the game. Or it was, until I retired. Now I clip shrubs and try to pretend I’m useful. My wife says she’ll keep me around as long as I can take out the garbage, but I don’t want to push my luck.”

He grinned and I grinned back.

“You’re not selling anything,” he said. “Not dressed city enough. And you’re not one of those church ladies; not old enough. You’re . . . say, I know.” He snapped his fingers. “The book lady. That’s who you are. Amy liked you, you know.”

“Today’s book delivery day.” I nodded at the box I’d set next to the door. “I can’t believe she’s not here.”

The elf’s cheerful smile turned upside down. “Oh, dear. You haven’t heard.”

“Heard what?”

His next words explained everything; why he felt free to stand on Amy’s back porch, and worst of all, explained his use of past tense.

“She’s dead.”

Chapter 3

W
hen I returned to the store, Lois took one look at my face and sat me in a chair. Two mugs of hot tea later, I was able to talk.

“Thurman said one of the reasons she hardly ever went outside was she was allergic to bee and wasp stings.” Which I’d known, but what I hadn’t realized was the severity of her allergies. To be so allergic that you could die . . . I swallowed and wanted to take back all the thoughts I’d had when Amy said she never went outside without a can of Raid in each hand. Not that I’d ever said anything, but I’d certainly thought that Amy had been overreacting.

Lois handed over the third round of tea and I set it down on my desk. “But for some reason,” I said, “she went out. Thurman and his wife took their dog out for an evening walk and the dog kept whining and tugging on the leash. They found her and called 911, but it was too late.” I stopped.

Lois pushed the mug toward me. I picked it up, wrapped my hands around the heat, and kept going. “She had one of those EpiPens in her hand. You know, those injection things people with bad allergies have? But she hadn’t used it. No one knows why. Too scared, they’re guessing.”

“Poor girl,” Lois said softly.

I felt Amy’s panic rising in my throat. What a dreadful way to die, not being able to breathe, not being able to pull that life-giving air into your lungs, seeing dark spots in front of your eyes, seeing the dark spots grow larger and larger. . . .

“Drink,” Lois commanded.

Obediently, I took a swallow. It felt so good going down that I took another. “I keep thinking that if it hadn’t been for Thurman’s dog, she might have laid there for hours. Days, even.”

I started to lower the mug, but Lois tapped its bottom. “Drink up,” she said. “It didn’t happen, so quit making things worse than they are.”

She was right, but that didn’t make the pictures in my head go away.

“The trick,” she said, “is to keep busy.”

“Trick?” I repeated vaguely. Amy, terrified of bees, swatting them away, trying to run to the safety of her house, trying to—

“Here.” Lois took away the mug. “You’ve had enough. Now it’s time to get to work. Did I tell you we got that new software upgrade? I tried to install it this morning up front, but it made a bunch of weird beeping noises so I just turned the dang thing off.”

“You did what?” I sprang out of my chair. If she’d halted the installation partway, it could have corrupted the store’s book inventory. Worse things could happen to a bookstore, but I couldn’t think of one.

“Oh, it’s fine,” she said airily. Then she frowned. “At least I think so. I suppose there’s a chance that the blue screen it gets every once in a while means I did something wrong.” Her face cleared. “But I’m sure it’s nothing. Computers are pretty tough, right?”

I pushed past her. “Where are the new disks? And the documentation? Don’t put any more sales into the computer until I make sure everything is working.”

“Paper and pencil,” she said. “Nothing wrong with paper and pencil.”

In the middle of my rush to the front counter, I paused. Lois sounded a little too cheerful for what could be a medium-sized disaster. Could she be making up this whole event, just to take my mind off Amy’s death?

I glanced over my shoulder. Lois was frowning at me, her arms crossed and her fingers pulling at her lips.

No, Lois might make up a story for Paoze, but she wouldn’t do that to me.

I put the possibility out of my head and got to work.

* * *

Sitting in a Tarver classroom on Wednesday night, waiting for the PTA meeting to start, I was still trying to absorb the fact that Amy was gone. Bad enough when someone who had lived a long life passed away, so much worse when it was someone relatively young. So wrong for her to be dead, so wrong for all her chances at living to be gone.

Marina was sitting in the half-full room and she raised an eyebrow at my glum face. “How now the down-turned brow?”

“Still thinking about Amy,” I said.

“Yeah.” Marina sighed. “That stinks. I didn’t know her, but what a shame. And what a nasty way to go.”

She started putting her hands to her throat. I knew she was going to start fake-choking herself. “Don’t you dare,” I said. “It would be inappropriate, unkind, and disrespectful to Amy’s memory.”

There may, just may, have been a slight blush that appeared on her cheeks. She dropped her hands to her lap. “You’re such a mom,” she muttered, ignoring the fact that she’d been one for twenty-odd years. Her youngest, Zach, still attended Tarver, but the rest were in or out of college.

Marina brightened. “Say, have you worked out what you’re going to do about losing weight?”

Of course I hadn’t. What I’d done was what I’d done for the last ten years—poke myself in the lumpy thighs, watch my index finger sink deep, and immediately put on some clothes.

“Well, what are you going to do? After all that moaning and groaning last summer when we were trying on bathing suits, don’t tell me you’re not going to do anything, okay? Just don’t.”

Our illustrious PTA president banged the gavel. I’d never been so glad in my life for a meeting to start.

“This meeting of the Tarver Elementary PTA will come to order.”

Erica Hale, a silver-haired woman who could be the definition of chic, was a grandmother of two Tarver students. Her slim elegance always made me feel like an ugly duckling with zero chance of turning into a swan, and she had the enviable ability to say the right thing at the right time. After she’d retired, instead of taking life easy, she’d taken the helm of a floundering PTA and transformed it into a project-oriented powerhouse. She’d also transformed her yard into a gardening showpiece. And she’d started painting in watercolors. If I hadn’t liked her so much, I would have found all sorts of reasons to dislike her intensely.

“Beth?” she asked. “Will you please take the roll?”

I called her name, then the vice president’s name. “Wolff?”

“Present,” Claudia said.

I didn’t look at Claudia and she didn’t look at me. It was best that way. Claudia was efficient and hardworking, but she also spent a lot of time telling people how efficient and hardworking she was. I could have dealt with that particular personality quirk if it hadn’t been for, one, her constant campaign to ruin my reputation, and two, her vocal insistence that I wanted to be the next president of the PTA.

PTA president? I couldn’t think of anything I wanted less. Secretary was more than enough for me.

I made a tick mark next to Claudia’s name and moved on. “Jarvis?”

“Umm-hmm.”

I wasn’t exactly sure what he said, since he’d tried to talk through a mouthful of potato chips, but I marked him down as present. Randy, owner of the downtown gas station and convenience store, had been the PTA’s treasurer for so long that no one remembered why he’d become treasurer in the first place. There must have been a reason, once upon a time, but I’d never heard an explanation and I didn’t want to ask because Randy would be happy to tell me the reason. With footnotes. And graphic aids.

The older Randy got, the longer his stories got, and the bigger his waistline grew. He was in his mid-fifties and if he kept up the trend, by the time he turned seventy he’d have a hard time fitting behind the wheel of his car and his stories would last longer than a four-act play.

“Kennedy,” I said. “Present. We have a quorum.”

“Thank you, Beth.” Erica put on her reading glasses and picked up the agenda. Our PTA president was a big believer in agendas and parliamentary procedure. No point in having a meeting, she said, unless there are decisions to make. No doubt she was right, but going through multiple agenda points while surrounded by construction paper tulips and posters of handwriting examples gave me the silent giggles at least once a meeting.

After we dispensed with the few invoices that needed to be paid, Erica turned to me. “Old business item number one. The senior story project. Beth?”

I bounced a little in my chair. This project was my idea. Now that it was about to start, it was hard to believe I’d been dry-mouthed nervous when I’d proposed it last fall. Silly Beth.

“Okay,” I said. “We’re going to be working with Sunny Rest Assisted Living. Each resident who wants to participate will be paired with a Tarver student who has signed up for the project. The students will meet their matches for the first time next week and start a series of interviews.”

I bounced a little more. This was going to be so very cool. “The kids,” I said, “have a list of questions to help them get started, and they’ll have to take notes. By the middle of May, they’ve promised to turn in a first draft. What we want is the life story of each resident as seen through the eyes of the children. I’ll do the editing, take the stories to Hoefler Publishing, and before the end of school we’ll have softcover books to sell as a moneymaker. Sunny Rest has already asked for two hundred copies.”

Marina let out a low whistle. I grinned at her. Judy, the activities director at Sunny Rest, had given me that number half an hour ago, and I was still a little light-headed.

“Good work,” Erica said.

Glowing, I spun out the details of carting kids to Sunny Rest after school, arranging to have the visits supervised by PTA parents, carting kids home, all the essential things that go into a project of this size. Fifteen minutes later, I crossed the last item off my list and looked up. “That’s it. The matches will be finalized early next week and the first interviews will be Thursday after school.”

“One question,” Erica said. “What’s our profit per book?”

Rats. The one question for which I didn’t have an answer. “It depends on the preorders,” I said. “Until they come in, I just don’t know.”

“What quantity is required to get the deepest discount?” Erica asked.

“A thousand.”

Marina whistled again, long and low. “That’s a lot of books.”

I gave her a look. “If we order a thousand, we stand to make a profit of three dollars a book. Sell them all and we make three thousand dollars.”

The number echoed around the room a few times before it drifted into people’s ears and sifted down into their brains.

“That’s a lot of money,” Summer Lang said. She was new in town and despite our ten-year age gap, we’d become friends.

“Only if we can sell that many.” Claudia tapped her long fingernails on the table. “I say we order the minimum number of books so we can keep the losses small. That’s if we’re actually going through with this, that is. I’m not so sure it’s a good idea.”

I opened my mouth, then shut it. Claudia would do her best to torpedo any of my plans and arguing with her wasn’t going to change a thing.

“The project was approved months ago,” Erica said. “There is no question about carrying it out.”

“We can vote to un-approve it, can’t we?” Claudia asked, her voice loud and piercing. “I can make a motion, right? I can make a motion that we cancel this story project, can’t I?” She slapped the table with the flat of her palm. “That’s what I want to do. I make a motion to cancel this.”

As I did my secretarial duty and wrote her words on my yellow legal pad, I held my breath. No one spoke. Randy opened a second bag of potato chips.

“Is there a second?” Erica took off her reading glasses and looked down the length of the table. “The motion dies for lack of a second. Beth, is there anything else? Let’s move on to new business.”

I let out my breath in a quiet whoosh. We discussed potential projects for next year and Erica used her gavel to bang the meeting adjourned.

I noted the time, turned off the recorder, and reached under the table for the old diaper bag that held my PTA paraphernalia.

Claudia slid into the seat Randy vacated and leaned toward me. “Well, you got your way again, didn’t you?” she asked.

I wanted to beat my head against the table. There was no talking to this woman. I gave her a small and very polite smile, made a sideways sort of nod, and continued to put my things away.

“You may have gotten away with it this time,” she said, “but just you wait. Nominations for next year’s PTA board are coming up soon, and you’re not going to be the only one running for secretary.”

I stopped, my legal pad halfway into the bag. “Oh?”

“That’s right,” Claudia said. “I have big plans for this PTA and none of them include you.”

I imagined a PTA packed with Claudia and her friends. A board that would rubber-stamp every idea Claudia came up with. A board that would happily approve pet visits to kindergarten classrooms without first checking for kids with allergies. A board that would vote to purchase wonderful new playground equipment, but would manage to forget that good equipment cost thousands upon thousands of dollars.

I closed my eyes.

Claudia laughed. “Don’t like your job being taken away, do you? Well, you and Erica will just have to go try and run things somewhere else because you’re on your way out of the Tarver Elementary PTA.” She smiled, showing lipstick-stained teeth, and went off to join her cronies.

Marina and Summer were standing nearby, chatting about summer plans. As Claudia left, Marina turned to me. “What was that all about?”

“Um.” I reran the scene and tried to include my voice in it. Would the outcome have been different? Probably not, as she would have run over anything I’d tried to say. “Nothing.”

I glanced at Claudia, who was now huddled with Tina Heller and CeeCee Daniels. I expected to intercept stares of icy daggers, but they weren’t paying any attention to me.

“Not normal.” CeeCee’s high-pitched voice rose above all others. “Poor thing, dying alone.”

“She was a weird one,” Tina said. “Living back there by herself.”

Claudia made a clucking noise. “She didn’t have to be like that. It was her own fault she didn’t have a friend in the world. The woman had no life. All she had to do was get out more. How hard could that have been?”

“Not hard at all,” Tina said, nodding. “You just decide who you’re going to be, and live into that reality.”

CeeCee frowned. “So she wanted to be lonely?”

“Must have.” Claudia shrugged. “What other explanation is there?”