Murder at the PTA (2010)

When I flicked on the overhead light, the sudden brightness stung my eyes. There was a gap underneath the door, but I decided that not even eagle-eyed Marina could detect that small amount of light from across the street.

Even so, I turned on the desk light and flicked off the overhead fixture. I put my hand on the back of Agnes’s desk chair, then paused. If there were ghosts, if Agnes was a ghost, would she haunt me for sitting here? I tried to imagine solid, no-nonsense Agnes as a ghost. She looked the same; just transparent.

I held out my hand, palm up. “Do you mind?” I asked. The imaginary ghost shook her head. Her lips, thin and colorless, moved, but I heard no sound.

“What’s that?” I tipped my head. Lipreading was not one of my strong suits. Once again she spoke, and again I had no idea what she said. Most people wouldn’t have imagined a ghost they couldn’t manage to communicate with, but then again, most people would never have tried to make a go of a children’s bookstore in a town with a population under ten thousand.

The imaginary Agnes ghost didn’t look threatening, so I went ahead and sat in the wooden chair. As soon as I landed, the casters rolled fast across the hard plastic chair mat. “Whoops!” I grabbed the edge of the desk.

In her gravelly voice, my ghost Agnes said, “Just oiled those wheels last month.”

Agnes had a sense of humor. Who knew? “Gee, thanks.” My voice startled me. There I was, sitting at the desk of a murdered woman, hearing her imaginary ghost, and talking back to it.

I shook my head. “Get a grip,” I said. There was a reason I’d sneaked back into this house, and frightening myself with made-up ectoplasm wasn’t helping. I was here to snoop.

The desktop held a few books: two dictionaries; a thesaurus; a world almanac; two foreign-language translation dictionaries—English-Finnish and English-Czech. I puzzled over the foreign dictionaries until I remembered the hockey team’s roster.

Other than the lamp and books, the only other thing on the desk was a worn leather desk blotter complete with calendar. I hunched down and looked for any indentations in the paper. In old movies, investigators were always finding clues via forceful penmanship, but I didn’t see a thing. I ran my hand flat across the blotter. Still nothing.

The calendar was tucked into the blotter’s triangular corners. My grandfather had often slid notes into corners like that. I flipped out October back through January.

Nothing.

I retucked the calendar corners. So much for doing stuff the easy way. I stared at the desk. The desk stared back. Maybe Agnes’s ghost would help me out. “Don’t suppose you want to just, you know, tell me about the Tarver Foundation?” I asked. “Simple things. I’m sure you have the answers. How old the foundation is, who sits on the board, where the money came from. Any of that would be great.”

My lunchtime had been spent trolling the Internet, looking for information on the Ezekiel G. Tarver Foundation. Old Ezekiel popped up on a few genealogy Web sites—he was quite the seed-sowing patriarch, and the G stood for Gunther—but I discovered absolutely zero about the foundation. Hence, my bizarre conversation with an Agnes I didn’t believe in.

“How about it, Agnes?”

The ghost didn’t reply.

“Well, how about an office location? That shouldn’t be a secret.”

Nothing.

“Did you hear the joke about the Dutchman and the canoe?”

Either she had and didn’t think it was funny, or she didn’t want to hear it. Not that she was there at all, but if she was . . .

“Get on with it.”

“Fine,” I snapped, and yanked open the skinny middle drawer. All the normal supplies were there, collected in tiny cups and lined up in rows—pencils, erasers, pens, paper clips, stapler, stamps. I looked at it with a small heap of jealousy on my shoulder. The closest I came to an orderly desk these days was when I visited the local office- supply store.

I pulled the drawer out as far as it would go, but the only interesting thing I found was a slide rule. Its leather case opened so easily, I wondered if Agnes actually used the thing. Which made sense—Glass Wax, powdered laundry detergent, slide rule.

Onward and downward.

The top drawer on the right held note cards, greeting cards, and stationery. Other right-hand drawers held mailing supplies, packaging tape, and maps of various states and cities.

It was in the left-hand drawer, the very bottom-left-hand drawer, that I finally found something. In retrospect, I should have looked there first. The only twenty-twenty vision I had was hindsight.

The bottom-left-hand drawer was a file drawer, crowded with colored folders and black ink with handwritten block letters labeling each one.

I started reading labels. Red folders were for telephone, water, electricity, garbage. Behind those were yellow folders—plumber, dry cleaning, newspaper, health insurance, life insurance.

Behind the yellow folders was a set of green ones. I skipped over the listings of checking account and savings account folders and went straight to the pay dirt folder with its hand-printed label, “Tarver Foundation.”

“Should have looked there first,” Agnes said. Even her ghost was on the outside edge of tactless.

Imaginary ghost, I amended in my head. The fact gave me courage enough to talk back, something I wouldn’t have done in a million years to the real Agnes.

I pulled out the Tarver Foundation folder and slapped it on the desk. “Your snide comments aren’t helping, thank you very much.” I flipped open the folder as I talked. “Did you ever think that maybe your attitude is what got you killed? If you’d been a nicer person, maybe I wouldn’t be pawing through your desk tonight.”

The top paper was an invoice from Browne and Browne for an eye-popping sum. “What was wrong with you, anyway? Okay, your husband dumped you after a year. So what? You had half a lifetime to get over it.” The second paper was from Bick and outlined the proposed construction schedule. “Are these the papers that are going to tell me who the killer is? I certainly hope so, because—”

Darkness descended. Before I could think much beyond “Hey!” the dark was followed by a warm, heavy weight. A wide band circled my neck; I couldn’t talk, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. I reached through the blanket to grab away the pressure and felt hands—large and strong ones.

“Do what I say and you live,” said a low whisper.

Another option would have been nice, but I didn’t think it was going to be offered.

“You going to fight?”

My instincts warred between the atavistic urge to claw at the hands that held me and fear for Jenna and Oliver. If I was killed, what would happen to them?

“No,” I said aloud, though it sounded more like a croak. The tight collar around my neck made it hard to say anything. “No,” I said again. “No fighting.” I let go of his thick hands.

“Up,” he commanded.

Fear banged around in me, knotting my stomach, and shortening my breath. I was used to fear; we mothers know all about how that emotion weasels into the fabric of our life, coloring every action and decision with a rim of red. We’re afraid of getting our kids vaccinated; we’re afraid of not getting them vaccinated. We’re afraid of pushing them too hard, afraid of not pushing them hard enough. We’re afraid of car accidents, bicycle accidents, skateboard accidents. We’re afraid of colds, flu, and every type of cancer that hits the news.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

Going to do with me, is what I really meant. Where was he taking me? Was it going to be unpleasant, painful, and/or cold? Was I going to be shoved into Agnes’s refrigerator and have the door shut on me? “She was alive last time I saw her,” he’d be able to say truthfully.

“Shut up.” His fierce whisper carried a threat that lifted the hair on my arms. He meant what he said.

I nodded. “Up,” he said again, and this time I stood. So much for all those articles that cautioned against following the orders of an attacker. Point B was always more dangerous than Point A, but in this case Point A