threatening you.”
“So he says.”
“Then it’s easy,” I said. “Stop.”
“Why did I know you’d say that?”
“Gee, can’t imagine.” I drummed my fingers on my cheek. “Maybe because I’m right?”
“Daahling.” She tipped ashes off the ghostly cigarette and onto the linoleum.“You could be right of Rush and I’d still love you, but there is another alternative.” Her glance slewed sideways, and the Greta Garbo facade faded.
Ahh. “You have an ulterior motive, don’t you?”
Her mouth opened slightly.
“Yes.” I folded my arms. “You’re about to ask me to do something I don’t want to do. Last time you did that, I ended up as the PTA’s secretary.”
“And you enjoy it.” Marina smirked. “Don’t give me that look. You’re having a good time. You and Erica are getting along like a house afire. Has she stopped by yet to give you landscaping advice?”
Erica had said she’d drop by next weekend, but I wasn’t going to tell Marina that. “Whatever you want, I don’t have the time, I don’t have the money, I don’t know how, and . . . and . . .”
“And you don’t want to help me.” Marina slumped.
“Cut it out. You’re not guilting me into participating in whatever nefarious plan is cooking in that red-haired brain.”
“Nefarious? I’m as law abiding as they come.”
“Sneaky, then.”
She gave me an injured-kitten look. “All I want is a little help.”
“Let the police handle it,” I said.
“I’ll lose the blog.”
I shrugged. “Start another.”
“You don’t understand.”
“You’re right. I don’t. Why on earth would you risk your life over something as trivial as a blog?”
Marina’s forehead started to turn pink, and I knew I’d said the wrong thing.
“Trivial?” she said loudly. “Providing information is trivial? People are starved for this kind of knowledge. I get e-mails almost every day, thanking me for doing the blog.”
That was easy to believe. “Dear Blogger, thanks so much for telling all about Jane Doe. I always knew there was something funny about her, and now I have proof. Can’t wait to tell my neighbor about Jane’s five ex- husbands.”
“It may be gossip to you,” Marina was saying, “but to some people, lots of people, it’s the foundation communities are based on. Everyone has secrets, but the more we share, the more we can understand each other.”
I didn’t quite buy it. “How does knowing that Don Hatcher is getting a hair transplant help me understand him?”
“Because,” Marina said patiently, “now we know to what extremes he’ll go to preserve his vanity.”
I tilted my head to one side and squinted one eye. “What about Carla going to that spa?”
“She’s finally serious about losing weight, and everyone should help her and not sabotage her new diet.”
“Well,” I said slowly, “that’s one way to look at it.”
“Beth finally comes around!” Marina pumped her fist. “Break out the chocolate.”
“Just don’t tell my mother.” I looked left and right. “She doesn’t believe in gossip.”
“And I bet she doesn’t have a single friend to have over for coffee on Monday mornings, let alone someone to go to late on a Sunday night.”
It was true. Mom had a boatload of acquaintances, but she didn’t have anyone to call her best friend. Maybe there was a tie between gossiping and friendship. Maybe talking about other people tightened connections and secured bonds and—
“So you’ll help me, right?”
This was the woman who’d cured my morning sickness; the woman who had shown me how to get gum out of carpet; the woman who had comforted me the night Richard left for good. And all without my asking. If I didn’t help her when she did ask, what kind of friend was I?
“The blog may be silly to you,” she said, “but it’s all I have. You have the store and the kids and the PTA. I have a husband who’s hardly ever home and a son who hasn’t wanted me around since he was five. I need this, Beth.”
I couldn’t stand the entreaty sculpted on her face. “Of course I’ll help you.”
“Really?”
“Sure. Anything you want. Just ask.”
“What?” She put her hands to her face in mock horror. “No caveats? No amendments?”
Though spoken in jest, her words wounded me. I’d always thought of myself as a good friend, but maybe I’d slid into selfishness.
“No limits,” I said. “What do you want me to do?”
The next morning, ignoring the protestations of my manager, I shut myself in my office and fired up the computer. Lois stood outside the door and scolded me. “What are you doing in there? We need to finish planning the Halloween party. We need to figure out the November work schedule. We need to figure out how to shoehorn two author events into December.”
“Later.”
With a pencil and a pad of paper at the ready, I read Marina’s WisconSINs blog archives.
Each posting began the same way: “Good morning, Rynwood!” The only variation was the number of exclamation points. The juicier the gossip, the more punctuation it was awarded.
I waded through the September news about summer vacations (“Thanks to the magic of cell phones with cameras, does anyone think what happened to C.P. in Vegas is going to stay in Vegas?”), college back-to-school parties (“Yet another freshman discovered the joys of Ever-clear. How’s that hangover doing, J.M.?”), and tan lines (“There’s a thin, pale band around the ring finger of D’s left hand. Could this year’s split be the final one for D and J?”), but there wasn’t anything related to Agnes or Tarver Elementary.
With my pad of paper stubbornly blank, I closed out of the September archives and opened October’s.
“WisconSINs applauds anyone who tries new things. While many people resist change, there are those who accept new ventures with a song in their hearts and a smile on their lips. Attitude, my daahlings, it’s all about attitude! Get out of your rut and try something new today. There’s a whole world out there just waiting for you!”
The post’s date was the same day I’d agreed to become the PTA’s secretary. The truly annoying part was she’d been right; I had needed to get out. My rut had been getting deeper and more comfortable on a daily basis. The sharp edge I’d honed in college had dulled to a butter knife. What had happened to me?
I stood up and paced. When had my thirst for learning and knowledge been replaced by complacency and contentment? When had I stopped subscribing to
Silly questions. All that had come to an abrupt halt with the arrival of my daughter. And I didn’t regret it a bit.
I sat back down and picked up the pencil. I wrote a title, “Murder Suspects.” Now the page wasn’t blank. Back at Marina’s blog, the date of Agnes’s murder was fast approaching. The week before, K.O. was mentioned in passing as a contender for a big competition. K.O. Kirk Olsen. I felt a rush of detection and wrote the name: Kirk Olsen, of the school bus incident.
When Agnes had ordered the long-established school bus routes reconfigured, Kirk’s children had ended up with a twenty-five-minute bus ride instead of a ten-minute one. He hadn’t been pleased, and he’d been extremely vocal with his opinions. The rerouting had resulted in fewer stops for the buses, lower gas mileage, and the elimination of one bus altogether, but for a week or two, teachers and staff had kept a sharp watch on the school entrances. Kirk went to deer camp every fall and regularly showed up in the paper as the winner of shooting
