Grime and Punishment

with the kids around all the time they had become less of a problem. Now that school had started and the regular routine was beginning, would she be subject to them again? Shelley had told her she should see a shrink, something about grief therapy, but she had found therapy of her own.

She closed the door, sat down in the butt-sprung chair, popped a tape of the 1812 Overture into the tiny cassette player she kept in the top drawer, and leaned back with her feet on the desk top. She closed her eyes and let the music take her away. Within a few minutes, she was smiling and directing the orchestra.

Seven

Jane would have had a whole, precious hour of solitude if Shelley hadn't phoned. 'Jane, you are going to that PTA meeting at the junior high this afternoon, aren't you?' she asked briskly.

“Are you crazy?'

“Good. I'm so glad. Early planning for the spring fund-raising carnival is so important.'

“You have gone mad. You can't have forgotten the last one. The time I had to run the cotton candy machine and got that goo in my hair and vowed never to become involved again.'

“I knew you'd feel that way. I'm looking forward to seeing you there. I'd give you a ride, but Paul is dropping me off.'

“I see. Paul's there and you can't say what you mean.'

“Wonderful. Yes, of course. See you then.”

Jane gave some serious thought to the nature of friendship before dragging herself to the junior high. This seemed too high a price to pay. But, if Shelley was desperate enough to attend such a meeting, Jane's curiosity alone was roused to the point of enduring the setting to find out what was up.

She parked at the front of the big circle drive, the better to escape when the opportunity came. She had to sit quite still, getting her nerves under control, before she could enter the building. In Jane's opinion, junior high schools were possibly the worst idea educators had ever come up with. At the age children most needed to have older teens to look up to and younger children to set examples for, the system pulled them out and isolated them to flounder around without guidance. No, not without guidance; they had nearly as many counselors as teachers assigned to the school, but those supposedly trained adults hadn't a fraction of the influence the mere presence of exalted high school kids would have had.

Drawing a deep breath, Jane entered the school. Unfortunately, at that moment, the bell rang for the last class change and she found herself engulfed in a tide of children. A good third of the boys towered over her and half of them tripped over her. She was jostled unmercifully as she struggled to make her way to the art room, where the meeting was to be held. Some of the kids ran into her deliberately, some because they weren't paying attention, and a few because the poor things simply didn't know where all the parts of their rapidly developing bodies were at any given moment. Twice, as she clawed her way forward, a timid voice greeted her by name. She couldn't discern the source either time.

She thought she glimpsed Katie, but made no attempt to get her attention. That would have been asking for a snub. She knew that junior high schoolers always tried to maintain the fiction that they had no parents. They might, if pressed, grudgingly admit to a father for the sake of filling out forms, but not to a mother. And never in public.

She all but fell into the art room when she finally reached it. There were about twenty women present, most of them more or less familiar. Grade-school PTAs consisted of a beleaguered cross section of parents. By junior high, however, only the truly devoted club women were involved. These were the folks they should have called on to bail out Chrysler; they'd have staged international bake sales to boggle the mind. Small knots of conversation were breaking up, and the women were moving (with obscene eagerness, it seemed to Jane) toward desks so the meeting could commence.

“It positively reeks of hormones in this building,' one of them was muttering to her friend.

“It isn't all hormones. It's dirty gym socks and chalk dust too. And cheap perfume,' the friend replied.

Before Jane could contribute her opinion, Shelley appeared and dragged her to the back of the room, where she'd staked out two desks for them. 'Thank God!' Jane exclaimed. 'I thought you'd gotten me here and not shown up yourself. What is it?'

“Remember when Paul's mother died a year ago?' Shelley was talking fast, anxious to convey as much as possible before the group was called to order.

“Huh? Yes, but what on earth—?'

“Well, she left him — not me, mind you, but him — a strand of pearls that belonged to her mother. They're missing.'

“Forgive me, but what in the world are you talking about? A strand of real pearls? But I thought—'

“—that Paul's people were dirt poor. Right. I don't know if the pearls are genuine or not. See, his mother emigrated from Poland just after World War I with her parents. The pearls were supposed to have been given to her folks during the war by some Russian soldier they helped escape a firing squad or some such thing. They were probably trash, but they might have been the result of some high-class looting. For all I know he might have ripped them off Anastasia's neck.'

“You never told me.'

“I never took the story seriously. They looked pretty ratty to me. Kinda discolored and lumpy.It crossed my mind that they were just tightly rolled dough lumps with a little varnish. Anyhow, Paul thought they were the family treasure, and said he was going to take them to New York sometime and have them appraised and cleaned and restrung. In the meantime, he told me to put them in the safe-deposit box.'

“Ladies!let me have your attention…' a woman at the front of the room said, clapping her hands in a very school-teacherish way. She was an angular, hard-featured woman with a belligerent manner. The kid who tried to jostle her in the halls probably came away with serious bruises.

Jane lowered her voice. 'Am I to assume you didn't bother to lock them up?'

“Exactly. I just forgot. They were in an envelope in the drawer with my bras and slips and now they're gone.'

“Now, as you know, the carnival is our primary source of revenue for the purchase of an annual gift. Ladies? In the back! Could I please have your attention?”

Jane and Shelley pretended interest for a few moments, and when the speaker had lost interest in policing them, Jane whispered out of the side of her mouth, 'Why is this a secret? Have you told VanDyne?'

“No. I don't want Paul to know.'

“But, Shelley, the police have to know. It surely has a bearing on the motive for the murder.'

“Maybe…'

“How many of you ladies have worked the annual carnival before?' the speaker was asking.

Jane obediently put her arm up and went on whispering to Shelley. 'So why are you telling me this before you've told them?'

“I just can't have Paul knowing. It might be a mistake. I mean, maybe I did put them in the box at the bank and just forgot.'

“You now better! Have you ever had amnesia before?'

“I can't remember,' Shelley said, smiling feebly.

“I'm serious. You have to tell VanDyne, no matter how upset Paul might get. What's the worst he can do?'

“He won't do anything except be terribly hurt that I was so neglectful of something that meant so much to his whole family. Jane, I think you should—'

“Thank you, Mrs. Jeffry. I knew we could count on you.”

put your arm down.'

“Count on me?' Jane asked, fearing the worst. 'I think you just volunteered to run the cotton candy machine again.'

“Shit!”