Murder at the PTA (2010)

“Ah.” Mack held the whisk at attention. “That question I can answer. The Ezekiel G. Tarver Foundation has agreed to pay for the entire project.”

The paring knives I was drying rattled against each other. “Who,” I wondered out loud, “is Ezekiel G. Tarver?”

Mack looked at me pityingly. “Dear Beth. It’s the proper name of Tarver Elementary. Look at the sign near the front door next time you drop your children off at school.”

Maybe I didn’t know who Ezekiel was, but I did know it would be silly to insult anyone holding sharp objects. I felt the heft of a wooden handle and thought that maybe Joanna would play the Helpless Pregnant Wife for quite some time.

Chapter 16

Lois hummed as she realphabetized the picture books. The songs being hummed had bounced between “Stars and Stripes Forever” and “Take Me Home, Country Roads” for twenty minutes. “Why,” she asked, “do we have five copies of If You Give a Moose a Muffin? Two I can see, even three, but five? Is Marcia doing the ordering again?”

“No.” I adjusted my legal pad. No sense in letting the sharp gaze of my manager see the list.

“Have you thought about Christmas books yet?”

I looked at the crossed-off names. One single solitary name was left. “Not really.” There had to be more names. There just had to be.

“Are you okay?” Lois squinted at me. “You seem even more distracted than usual. The kids okay?”

“Fine.”

“Have you introduced them to that handsome hunk of maleness yet?”

“No.”

“Are you sick?”

“Not since last winter,” I said vaguely. More names. We needed more names. I only wished I knew how to get them. What came next when an investigation was at a dead end? Maybe I should page through some Nancy Drews for some ideas.

“Lois, do you know who Ezekiel G. Tarver was?”

“Sure. The school is named after him.”

“But why is it named after him?” I’d developed all sorts of theories. Maybe he’d been a small-town bad boy but dragged himself out of the slop thanks to a dedicated teacher. Or maybe he was a World War I hero who died while saving his comrades-in-arms. Or maybe—

“He donated the property.”

The prosaic reply deflated me. Once again, real life paled in comparison with my imagination.

“How’s Marina these days?” Lois asked. “I haven’t seen her in ages.”

“She’s been . . . busy.” The night before we’d talked on the phone about what we should do next. I’d told her that Cindy, Harry, and Joe Sabatini were off the list, I’d told her about the Tarver Foundation putting up the money for the addition, and I had wondered aloud what to do next.

“Money,” she’d said. “It’s always about money. We need to find out where all Agnes’s money was going. She made good money, but didn’t live like it. Maybe she was being blackmailed. If we got a look at her checkbook, I bet we could figure it out.”

At that point Spot had bumped his head against my knee, his own personal signal for take-me-out-now-or- I’ll-make-a-mess, and I’d had to hang up.

Now I was doodling dollar signs on the list and Lois was starting to hum “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” at two in the afternoon.

Money. Did it make sense that Agnes was killed for money? School principals couldn’t exactly afford charter planes and personal chefs. Not that some people wouldn’t kill for a pair of shoes, but nothing had been taken from her house or the school during the break-in.

Again, I saw the stain on the living room floor. And again I remembered how Marina had noticed my reaction and pushed me out of the room until she’d done the cleaning herself. No one could ask for a better friend.

Lois dropped the mail on my desk. “Are you crying?”

“Don’t be silly.” I sniffed and rubbed my face. “An eyelash fell into my eye.”

“Of course it did.” She moved away, humming Fleet-wood Mac’s “Little Lies.”

Erica couldn’t have killed Agnes. She just couldn’t. I started circling dollar signs. If money was the reason for Agnes’s murder, what had happened to it? I didn’t see how money from a foundation could have anything to do with her death.

An anonymous donor was going to fund the addition, but the donor was the Tarver Foundation. Hmm . . .

I went to the counter, pulled out the phone book, and dialed.

“Lakeview Animal Shelter, how may I help you?” a woman asked.

I introduced myself and asked about the donor who had funded their new building.

“It was an anonymous donation,” she said. “No one knows who was behind it.”

“Yes, I understand. But the checks had to come from somewhere.” I tried to sound reasonable. Jovial, even. “Were the checks written by the Tarver Foundation?”

There was a long pause. “How did you know?”

I gave a broad and vague answer, then hung up.

So. Two big projects, one foundation. I didn’t know much about foundations, but I was pretty sure they could be funded by a large group or they could be created by a single person.

Somehow Agnes had been involved with the Tarver Foundation. Maybe the money-as-motive theory was workable. I might as well try it out because I didn’t have diddly else to work with. Marina’s blackmail theory seemed about as unlikely as her short-lived theory that Agnes was an embedded FBI agent. No, the only money involved was held by the Tarver (Ezekiel G.) Foundation, and the next step was clear.

Ick.

Lois noted my change of expression. “You look pale. Are you sure you’re feeling okay? I know you normally only get sick in January, but I hear the new flu that’s going around is a tough bugger.”

I felt my cheeks with the back of my hand and was surprised at the chill. “Just hungry.” Which was probably true, but any appetite was gone, because today was Wednesday. Tonight the kids would be with Richard, and I’d be free to do stuff.

The evening moonlight cast long, creepy shadows. Dry leaves skittered across lawns and down sidewalks. The noise was loud enough to cover my footsteps and, I hoped, had covered the thunk of my car door shutting. Late October; a perfect night to do stupid things and scare myself out of my silly wits.

With cold, bare fingers I inserted the key into Agnes’s back door. I stepped inside, shut the door, and stood in the kitchen, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. Turning on lights didn’t seem like a good idea. The last thing I wanted was Marina to barge on over here, pound me with questions, then broadcast the answers all over her blog.

The house smelled stale and empty. I wondered who would live here next. Would the pink bathroom or the Minnesota Wild basement be the first thing to go?

After a few minutes of imagining new color schemes—warm earth tones in the bathroom, with the obvious choice for the basement being the green and gold of the Green Bay Packers—I could make out the dim outline of kitchen cabinets. Arms spread wide in the dark, I grandpa-shuffled across the linoleum and tripped when the flooring switched to carpet. Rats. Nancy Drew never seemed to run into problems like this. Of course, Nancy never had to go to the bathroom, either.

I went into the study and shut the door. Agnes had a tall wooden fence in the backyard that would hide any light that escaped around the thick curtains. Wouldn’t it?

Shuffling again, I went across the hallway, grabbed a blanket that was folded across the guest bed, then spent an awkward couple of minutes in the dark, jamming it over and around the study’s curtain rod.