Murder at the PTA Luncheon

  MURDER

  AT THE PTA

  LUNCHEON

  Valerie Wolzien

  © Valerie Wolzien 1988

  Valerie Wolzien has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1988 by Ballantine Books.

  This edition published in 2019 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  To Tom

  Table of Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  ONE

  Nothing is worse than having a nice sex fantasy interrupted by the memory of a murder.

  Well, she just wouldn’t let it happen again.

  Stretching out her stiff back, she felt the skin tighten between her shoulder blades. Time to turn over. No need to get a sunburn; her nervous breakdown would be trouble enough. And that’s what would happen if she didn’t start sleeping through the night or begin relaxing during the day. But, lying on her back and squinting into the glare of the sun, another memory pushed aside her most delicious fantasy, and instead of Robert Redford’s neck, instead of Paul Newman’s eyes, instead of Harrison Ford’s shoulders, she saw a woman’s hands. They were well-manicured and were clutching at a strand of matched pearls circling an unlined neck, wiping away the spittle of saliva drooling from crimson lips.…

  “Enough. I’ve got to stop thinking about it.” In her anger and confusion she had spoken aloud.

  “Sue? Did you say something? Are the kids okay?”

  Susan recognized the sleepy voice coming from the chaise behind her. It was Paula Porter, her friend and the mother of her son’s buddy. Paula had four children and a husband who was a very popular and thus a very busy pediatrician. She frequently dozed off at the pool. Susan knew a detailed answer wouldn’t be necessary.

  “The kids are fine. I think the older ones are still playing poker in the cabana. I was going to get some iced tea. Want some?”

  “No, thanks. I’ve got mine over here. I just haven’t had the energy to touch it yet.

  “God, I’m tired today,” Paula continued. “I’m still losing sleep over Jan’s death. I can’t stop thinking about it. You know, Sue, she must have taken the last canapé from the tray before she died. Does that seem odd to you?”

  “I don’t know,” Susan answered, sighing. “I think about it too.” But she really didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “I’ll check on the kids while I’m up,” she offered, scrounging around under her lounge chair for the chintz beach robe that was just long enough to cover her thighs without, she hoped, being matronly.

  “Don’t worry about the kids. If they think we’re checking up on them, they may decide to come over and pester us. Leave well enough alone.”

  “Agreed.” Flipping a tasseled belt around her waist, Susan left the pool area and headed down the scorching cement to the clubhouse. The shade from the blue-and-white awnings around the building felt good, and once in the bar, she decided to sit at a table and enjoy her drink without the background noise of children splashing in the pool. The lunch rush was over and the large room deserted, except for a few kids who had wheedled permission from their mothers for an early snack and half a dozen teenage girls whispering and giggling in one corner. A calm, typical August afternoon had settled over the Club.

  She leaned back and closed her eyes, willing away the repeating images of death. She was sick of seeing Jan lying dead, her hands clutched at her throat. She tried to remember her alive.

  Susan had met Jan the way she did most of her friends these days: they were involved in the local Parent-Teacher Association. Susan had been active in the PTA for six years, since her older child had entered kindergarten. Each year her involvement had increased. First she had been class mother, then a member of one or two minor committees. Later came chairmanship of a committee and, finally, a place on the governing board of the organization. For Hancock wasn’t a town where apathy was the norm. This small suburb of New York City was active. Volunteers were numerous, and, although unpaid, very professional. Most of the mothers were dedicated to seeing their children get the best education possible and were willing to put in the time, money, and energy to run an organization to carry out their goals. These women were not content to sit home and bake cupcakes for class parties. Their housekeepers would fill needs of that sort. These were women who ran things. They had been class-and student-council presidents in high school. They had run their sororities in college or the local branch of SDS if they were of a more liberal bent. They had organized offices, manned nurses’ stations, and had had careers before becoming mothers. One day they might do all that again. Right now they were running their homes, their families, and the local PTA.

  Jan’s children were younger than Susan’s, but she had risen more quickly in the organization. She was very organized, very capable, definitely destined to lead the group someday if she chose to do so.

  The last time Susan had seen Jan was at the annual PTA spring luncheon: the time when the women stopped raising money, buying computers, judging curriculum, seeing which teachers were to be offered tenure by the Board of Education (an organization itself filled with graduates of the PTA), and they had a party. Jan had died at that party. She had taken the wrong canapé from a silver platter—the one filled with cyanide.

  “Late lunch?”

  Startled, Susan choked on the ice cube she had been munching.

  “Susan! My God, are you all right? Bend over … let me …”

  “I’m fine. I just swallowed some ice the wrong way,” Susan gasped, waving off the other woman’s attempts at lifesaving. After a few coughs and sputters, she mopped her streaming eyes with her sleeve and flopped her forehead down on the table exhausted.

  “My God, Susan! Help! Somebody help!” the frightened voice shrieked to the room. The teenagers in the corner no longer feigned indifference. They rushed over to see what was going on. The waitress from behind the bar dashed over, whether from Samaritan motives or curiosity no one had a chance to find out. There were others streaming in through the open French doors as Susan regained control of herself.

  “I was only choking on an ice cube. Why are you making such a fuss?” she asked.

  “Oh.” The other woman stopped her excited screaming and dropped into another chair. “I thought you were dead,” she whispered. “I thought the same thing had happened to you that happened to Jan. Poisoned,” she mumbled, almost too quietly for Susan to hear.

  “I was choking on some ice,” Susan repeated, this time to the crowd that had gathered.

  “She just choked on some ice,” the waitress repeated more loudly for the edification of people still coming into the room. “Happens all the time. Though not so often in the middle of the day as in the evening, if you know what I mean,” she added in a confidential tone to everyone in the crowd.

  “I was drinking iced tea,” Susan protested. “You know that. You got it for me.”

  Seeing that there was no answer to that, the waitress returned to her station, mumbling about not knowing what certain people might or might not put into their iced tea. She couldn’t be expected to watch everything that went on in the place.

  “Susan, are you okay?” A man’s voice rang out, singular in this weekday environment full of women and children.

  She looked up and smiled at the man who had entere
d the room: Dan Hallard, her obstetrician. “Sure, Dan, I just choked on some ice.” She had said it so many times that now she was beginning to feel that it must not be the truth, that somehow she was protesting too much. “I don’t know why everyone was making such a fuss,” she added.

  “Because the last time I saw someone choking, she died. Remember?”

  “I remember,” Susan replied grimly. “I was thinking about Jan’s death when you came over, Fanny.”

  “You women brood too much about that,” Dan Hallard insisted. “It’s all my wife can talk about these days. She should forget it and so should you. It happened. It’s over.

  “Oh, there goes my foursome,” he added, looking out the door. “I’d better catch up with them before they decide to tee off without me. Glad you’re okay, Susan. Can’t have one of my prize patients dying on me. Just remember everything’s fine.”

  Both women watched him weave his large body around the haphazardly arranged tables and chairs and leave the room.

  “Did he deliver both your kids?” asked the woman Susan had called Fanny.

  “Just Chad. How about yours?”

  “All of them. I hated the way he always said everything was going to be all right every single time something worried me during those long months before the babies came. I always wondered if he said that about everything. Doctors!” Fanny added sarcastically. Her husband was an orthopedist with an impressive Fifth Avenue practice. She watched until the man was out of sight and then turned to Susan. “You were thinking about Jan’s death?”

  “I was thinking about Jan’s murder,” Susan corrected. “I can’t forget it. Not that I wouldn’t like to.”

  “No one seems to be able to forget that day. And you’re right. It was murder. If she’d just died, we would have adjusted by now.

  “I understand the police are asking questions again,” she added. “Guess that’s one of the penalties of living in the suburbs. If this had happened in the city, the police would have gone on to their next murder case by now. Here in Hancock, there just isn’t going to be another one for them to sink their teeth into. I guess they’ll be asking and re-asking the same questions for the next few years or maybe decades or until they all retire or something. Do you mind?” She picked up the remains of her friend’s tea and drained the glass without waiting for an answer.

  “You don’t think they’re going to find out who did it?”

  “No way. They never found Jerry’s ten-speed. Or the jewelry that Connie and Ed had stolen last year. Did they ever tell you the identity of your peeping Tom? How can they be expected to solve the first murder this town has had since Colonial days?”

  “Colonial days?”

  “There was supposed to have been a grocer killed here back in seventeen hundred-something. During the Revolutionary War. Ask one of your kids about it. They study the whole thing in fourth-grade Connecticut history.”

  “Can’t a different police department help out?” Susan asked, interested in more immediate problems.

  “Susan, there’s no Scotland Yard in this country. Maybe the state police can do something, but how much would they know about murder? I don’t know …” She looked out through the open door. “It’s upsetting to think that we may never know why Jan died.” Her voice trailed off and her last question was almost a whisper. “Do you think about it a lot?”

  “All the time.”

  “Me too.”

  “You know what I was thinking when you surprised me? I was thinking that the murderer couldn’t have known that Jan was going to eat that sandwich. So how do we know that it wasn’t meant for someone else?”

  “ ‘It’?”

  “The poison. If it was placed in a sandwich and the sandwich placed on the tray, how could the murderer know that Jan was going to be the one to eat it?”

  “And who put that sandwich on the tray and who put the tray on the table and who arranged the tables and in what order did everyone serve themselves from the buffet, et cetera, et cetera,” was Fanny’s reply. “The police have asked us all that so many times. We could use some female cops in this town. I keep thinking that any woman would understand how lunches like that happen, how they’re organized or disorganized at the last minute.”

  “You’re telling me,” Susan answered. “I remember when I ran the luncheon two years ago. First I made lists of all the PTA members to be invited, then all the teachers and administrators that we sent invitations to. Then I made lists of food and called everyone and told them what to bring. Then—it was going to be held on Connie Buckley’s patio, remember?—but her husband had some sort of business in Paris that Connie had to attend with him—”

  “Why doesn’t Jim ever have business like that? The last place I was needed to go was the wedding of the daughter of the Chief of Surgery. You would think a doctor’s daughter would know how to avoid pregnancy until after the honeymoon. You should have seen her, she—”

  “So then”—Susan raised her voice to drown out Fanny’s complaints—“I had to find another place to have the party, since we couldn’t do it at my house. You remember how the whole backyard was dug up for the new lawn we were putting in that year? And after asking everyone I could think of, Jan volunteered her yard.”

  “You think that has something to do with her murder?”

  “How could it? That was two years ago.” Susan tried to keep the exasperation out of her voice. “The point I’m trying to make is that I worked and worked and I had lists of volunteers to set up the tables and chairs and others to arrange the food—”

  “And no one showed up?”

  “Different people showed up than I had on my list,” she corrected. “Kids get sick, husbands’ plans change, no one knows exactly what they’re going to be doing. But you know our group—they’re responsible. Everything got done but I wasn’t entirely sure by whom. It makes it difficult to write thank-yous afterwards. But the lunches are always a success. Of course, I still don’t know who brought that good French wine we all loved. It really was awfully expensive for a PTA lunch. I’ve always wondered.”

  A shrill scream interrupted their conversation.

  “Just one of the Pritchet twins pushing the other into the pool. Those kids are having a rough time this summer,” Susan said, identifying the sound.

  “No kids have an easy time of their parents’ divorce,” Fanny insisted. “Some just hide their feelings better than others. Poor kids. I can’t believe Harold just up and left them. He always seemed like such a good and caring father.”

  Susan didn’t reply. She had heard that said before. All the fathers who left their families in the suburbs and went off with secretaries, nurses, fellow executives, or whomever were always described as good, caring, and responsible. To her it only proved that being good, caring, and responsible didn’t arm a man against the needs of his midlife crisis or, she admitted grudgingly, against really and truly falling in love.

  “Susan?”

  “Sorry. I seem to be having a hard time concentrating these days.”

  “I understand. You’re thinking about the murder again?”

  “I was wondering …”

  This time the scream didn’t come from a child, overtired and fed up with too much roughhousing. This time the scream was that of a woman, a woman unable to suppress her horror at finding her friend lying dead on the ground. A scream unchecked by even the presence of her own children and those of the dead woman.

  TWO

  Children have to be fed.

  You can braise beef with herbs, and serve a green, a yellow, and a starch. You can pop TV dinners into the microwave. In a pinch, you can pack them all into the car and stand in line with the other tired mothers at Burger King. There are options, but no escape.

  Tonight it was a blessing.

  She had pulled ground round from the freezer that morning, and it was sitting on the kitchen counter, a trail of blood leaking from the freezer paper and dripping down onto the floor. She grabbed a sponge and mopp
ed it up, dumping the squishy mess into a ceramic bowl.

  “No one is to sit down in front of the TV until the swimsuits are off and hanging on the line. Understand?” she called to her two children, who were rushing upstairs to their respective rooms. She could hear the argument going on about whose turn it was to pick the show to watch.

  “There’s a National Geographic special on,” she offered, knowing it would keep down the arguing. They’d shut up when they realized that if they couldn’t make a decision peacefully, she would step in and insist on something educational.

  As she expected, complete silence greeted her suggestion. She shrugged and ripped the paper off the beef, returning it to the bowl before rinsing her hands and going to look in the refrigerator. Good. There were buns and fixings. That and the corn she had picked up at the farm stand on the way home from the Club would make an adequate supper. She hoped her husband hadn’t had a hamburger for lunch. Oh well, not her problem. She had long ago given up trying to balance her dinner against his lunch. One day he’d come home starving after missing lunch, the next he would have had a steak at “21” and really need very little dinner. The problem was that they always seemed to be out of sync: on his hungry nights, she would be on her way to a meeting and offer him Lean Cuisine; on the business-lunch nights, she would have, in a burst of culinary enthusiasm, spent all afternoon and $45 on a rack of lamb, accompanied by a special bottle of wine. He usually appreciated the wine.

  But tonight she wasn’t hungry and the kids would love hamburgers and corn on the cob in front of the TV. She poured herself a large glass of wine from the jug that sat on the shelf in the pantry and started slapping lumps of meat between her hands, turning them into patties. She had only made two when the phone, hung on the wall close to the sink, rang.

  Apprehensive, she reached for a towel to clean off her hands before picking up the receiver. But she knew she was going to have to face this sometime and it might as well be now.