By the end of the day, Lois had thawed to polite conversation. I’d caved by three thirty and gone out for chocolate and tossed in the promise of a new tea variety for the next morning. As the superintendent of schools had said, I was the conciliatory sort. Lois looked up from the cash register drawer she was closing out. “Big plans for the evening?”
“Plans, yes. Big? No.”
Lois raised one eyebrow but turned her attention back to the drawer. “Five, ten, fifteen, twenty. Have fun with your little plans.”
Between the nonconsultation with her on the rearrangements and the fact that I hadn’t shown her the contents of my list, she was still a little annoyed. But how could I tell her the truth about the list? If I told her that Marina, who was the name behind the anonymous WisconSINs blogger, had received a death threat and I was making a list of suspects, the news would be all over Rynwood within hours and I wouldn’t be any help to Marina at all.
“Fun?” I zipped up my coat. “This will be almost as much fun as going to the dentist. And not nearly as much fun as getting a mammogram.”
Chapter 12
“All in all,Beth,she’s done well this marking period, with respect to grades.” Jenna’s teacher, Paul Richey, closed the manila folder. “Did she and Bailey Scharff know each other before this year? Those two have formed a tight friendship.”
“Not very well.”
“Mmm.” Paul drummed his fingers on the folder.
The memory of Evan telling me he had two daughters popped into my head. This was followed by the memory of his elbow brushing my arm and the smell of his skin and—
“Beth?”
I blinked. “Sorry. You were saying?”
Paul was frowning. “Are you all right?”
“What? I’m fine. Just a little distracted. Sorry.” A good mother would be fully present at her daughter’s parent-teacher conference, not daydreaming about a man. Once again, I wouldn’t be a candidate for the Mother of the Year Award. Since Jenna was ten, this would be the tenth year in a row.
“Understandable,” Paul said. “Concentration has been hard for everyone since Agnes was killed.”
“Yes.”
We sat quietly. At the bookstore, Paul had more than once railed against Agnes and her heavy-handed management techniques, her habit of dictating rather than building consensus, and her unwavering belief that her opinions were correct ones. But every Tarver Elementary teacher had the same complaints, and if complaining about the boss made a person a murder suspect, then if I died the police would have to put Lois and Marcia on the list.
Paul sighed. “I can’t say I’m sad she’s gone. But she didn’t deserve to be murdered.”
“No.”
We sat a few moments longer, thinking our own thoughts. Then Paul stirred and advised me that it might be best for Jenna to have more than one friend.
I thanked him, gathered my purse and coat, and walked out of the room. Onward and upward—or at least onward.
“Beth!”
I flinched at the reverberations echoing off the hallway’s hard surfaces. “Oh, Debra. Hi.” If Harry the janitor could see the marks her high heels were leaving on the floor, he’d have a coronary.
“Can I talk to you?”
As always, Debra’s hair looked perfect. With an iron will, I kept my hands still and didn’t check for stray strands. “Sure. But I’m meeting with Oliver’s teacher in a few minutes.”
“It’s about the memorial service,” she said. “You were right. None of us knew Agnes. We were a bunch of hypocrites, pretending we cared, pretending she mattered to us.”
“Oh,” I said faintly. Someone had paid attention? I’d have to be more careful next time I spoke in public. Or here was an even better idea—never again open my mouth in any group of more than four people.
“I sat up most of the night, thinking.” Debra chewed on her lower lip, mussing the perfectly applied lipstick. “There are a lot of hypocritical things in my life. Agnes was just the tip of the iceberg. My career, my house, my car, even my hair.” She tousled the artful coiffure. “Everything I’ve ever done was to impress or please someone. I wouldn’t know a real emotion if it bit me on the hind end.”
I stared at her and couldn’t think of a thing to say.
“So I’m going to change.”
“You are?”
“Yes. Starting tomorrow.” She nodded decisively. “Why wait?”
Good heavens. “Um, big changes are worth a few days of thinking, don’t you think?”
Behind us, a door opened. “Good-bye, Mr. Egoscue, Mrs. Egoscue,” chirped an unbelievably young voice. “Thanks for coming! Oh, good, Mrs. Kennedy. Right on time. Come on in. I’m ready for you.”
I didn’t move. “Debra, let’s go to the Green Tractor. I can meet you there in twenty minutes. We’ll get Ruthie to make us ice-cream sundaes and brew up a pot of decaf.”
“I appreciate the offer,” Debra said, “but I have errands to run. I just wanted to thank you.” She hurried off.
“Mrs. Kennedy?” Lauren Atchinson stood in the classroom door.
What was the right thing to do? Since it was my speechifying that had affected Debra, wasn’t it my responsibility to go after her and offer my help, as little as that might be? On the other hand, I needed to talk to Ms. Atchinson about my son.
“Mrs. Kennedy?”
On the other hand, because of me, Debra might be hurtling onto a path of self-destruction. How could I turn away from her now?
“Mrs. Kennedy, if you need to reschedule, I might have time the week after next.”
But it was no contest. Motherhood trumped everything, every time.
In Oliver’s classroom construction paper pumpkins spattered the concrete block walls, each one decorated with leering grins and a child’s scrawled name. I looked for Oliver’s and finally found it, a lopsided one-toothed visage.
“First off,” Lauren said, “Oliver is a very nice little boy.”
“Thank you.”
“For an older parent, you’re doing a great job of socializing him with peers.”
“A what?” Had she really said what I thought she’d said?
She opened a manila folder. “You can’t have a lot in common with people my age, and I just wanted to say I think you’re doing a great job.”
Responses rushed into my head. They all jammed up together, making an outraged bottleneck, and not a single word made its way out of my open mouth.
“So.” Lauren handed me a sheet of paper. “Here’s a chart of Oliver’s progress.”
Young, I thought. She’s not even twenty-five. She knows not what she does.
I studied the graph. On the left were the titles of Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, Physical Education, and Other. All the titles had a series of horizontal lines extending across the sheet, and on the right was a scale of one to ten for each. Across the sheet’s bottom was a label for each week in the six-week marking period.
“As I’m sure you can see,” Lauren said, “there’s been a falling off.”
She had a gift for understatement. At the beginning of the year, Oliver was scoring between seven and nine for each subject. The lines jiggled a bit until the last two weeks. After that, each line looked like the Dow Jones in 2009.
