Death of a PTA Goddess Read online

  Maybe Susan Embrick would know. She, at least, knew about her son and my daughter’s second date. I called her and said that I’d like to talk some more about our kids, then offered to take her to lunch at the restaurant of her choice. She agreed and named a place that I’d never heard of but that she said was near her home. Even so, I arrived first. The restaurant was a bit dark and claustrophobic for my tastes, but the menu prices were reasonable. Having plenty of time to read the menu while waiting, I decided to go with the “Lunchtime Classic!” Otherwise known as soup and a sandwich.

  Susan was nicely dressed in a cream-colored blouse and black slacks that matched her hair. She waved at me as she came inside, ordering coffee before she’d even pulled out her chair. The waitress came over with a pot of coffee and poured a cup for Susan, then offered one to me, which I declined. Susan then said she needed a few minutes to look at the menu. Already tapping a cigarette out of her pack, she asked me, “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  I did, but said no, and after a few false starts with her lighter, she took a long, languid drag on her cigarette, which she washed down with coffee. Susan’s hands were shaking so badly that the coffee was sloshing over the lip of her cup as she tried to set it into the saucer.

  As she tamped up the drops with her napkin, she muttered, “God, I hate this.”

  “The coffee?”

  She met my eyes for a moment, but gave no answer. She fanned away the smoke as she speed-read her menu. “The salads here aren’t very good. I’m going to go with the soup-and-sandwich combo.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Which we could have made for ourselves at home for one-tenth the cost.”

  “Yes, but we’re paying for the ambience and the service.”

  She chuckled, managing to breathe smoke out her nostrils and her mouth simultaneously, looking a bit draconian in the process. She glanced around the unexceptional room. “This is nice.”

  We gave the waitress our order. She asked if I’d like anything besides water to drink, which I didn’t. “How about you, ma’am?” she asked, shifting her vision to Susan, who was staring at the small wine list on our table as if mesmerized. The waitress picked up on it and asked, “Something from the bar?”

  “No. Just coffee is fine,” she said with a sigh. The moment the waitress left, Susan asked me, “Has Nathan said anything more to you about his having trouble with Raine?”

  “No, he hasn’t. And he was in a good mood after school yesterday. I’m hoping that, between us, we can help keep it that way.”

  “Absolutely,” Susan replied. “Don’t hesitate to let me know if you think anything could be starting up again. I told Raine this, and I fully intend to stick with it, but if I have to get special permission to shadow him all day, that’s what I’ll do.”

  “You said that you’ve had trouble with him before, right?”

  She nodded. “At his school in Michigan, before we moved. Of course, I was drinking for part of that period, and I assumed he was just acting out.”

  So she had indeed had a problem with alcohol. I’d begun to suspect as much. Asking her to expound on that subject was too nosy, even for me. So I changed subjects slightly and asked, “Were Raine and Kelly Birch friends back in Michigan?”

  “No, they’ve always had very different interests. Even when we’d get them together as toddlers, they could never find something they both wanted to play.”

  “Your two families do go way back, then.” I wondered when Amber had first arrived on the scene. I had visions of her having been their children’s baby-sitter. “Did you know Amber, as well? She must have lived in the same town at some point, too, right?”

  “Randy and Amber met on one of his business trips to Colorado. I didn’t meet her till he and Patty had divorced, and Amber suddenly moved in with him.”

  “That must have caused quite the upset. Talk about grist for the rumor mill . . . Patty’s husband having an affair, Patty moves out, and he remarries.”

  Blowing out another puff of foul-smelling smoke, she shook her head. “It wasn’t like that at all, Molly. Randy hung on far longer than most men could have. You should have known Patty back then. You’d have barely recognized her.”

  “She’d changed that much?”

  Susan nodded. “On the surface, she sure did. It was Patty’s drinking habits that led to Randy’s developing a roaming eye. How would you like to be coming home to a drunk every night? God knows how my husband stuck with me all those years.”

  “Patty was a recovering alcoholic . . . too?”

  “Yes, although not a very good one.” Under her breath, she added, “Not that I’m much of one to talk, though.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “I was doing much better, up until she moved here. With her in the same town as me again . . .” She curled her lip and didn’t complete the thought.

  “I see.”

  “No, you don’t,” she said with a low chuckle. “I’m ashamed of my weakness for the bottle. Part of the reason I joined the PTA three years ago was to keep myself busy. It’s much easier that way . . . keeping your mind occupied with some sort of volunteer effort so you don’t have to remember the horrid things you’ve done to your loved ones. My drinking woes were part of why we left, in fact. To get me a clean start on things.”

  “You’re sober now, though, right?”

  She frowned and shrugged. “For three months and four days. And, before that, six months and eighteen days.”

  She’d slipped up back in mid-December, then. “Patty’s moving here was like your past catching up to you. Is that what you’re saying?”

  She grimaced. “You could call it that, yes. When Randy approached my husband for a job, Mike felt that he couldn’t turn Randy down, though I begged him to. I knew Patty would come, too, and what that would do to me.”

  “You got back into drinking because your old drinking buddy came back into your life?”

  She answered through clenched teeth, “She was the one who pushed me off the wagon. And then threw the wagon into reverse and drove right over my face.”

  “In what sense?”

  Susan gritted her teeth. In barely contained fury, she said, “She slipped a shot of vodka into my orange juice.”

  That was a startling accusation—unfathomable from my perception of the generous, kind-spirited person I’d believed Patty to have been. Was Susan lying to me? “Why? Why would she do that?”

  “She was a very odd person . . . wonderful on the outside—charming, gracious, and giving. But her childhood was no bed of roses. Her mother had been the town drunk, and Patty had been overcompensating all her life. She once told me that what put her over the edge was when she had a miscarriage. She started drinking.”

  “I had a miscarriage myself. It’s definitely hard to endure.”

  “Of course it is,” Susan said in clipped tones. “So are a lot of things.”

  “And hard times are not an excuse or explanation for why she would give you a glass of juice with vodka in it.”

  Susan lifted her hand a little from the table, as if in concurrence. “She denied having done it, of course.”

  “Why do you think Susan spiked your drink? I mean, it’s . . . sick to give a recovering alcoholic a shot of vodka without her knowledge.”

  “She must have thought it would give me loose lips. And she was probably right.”

  “She was plying you with alcohol to get some secret out of you?”

  “She was trying to recruit me to help her get her husband back. My husband is Randy’s boss and makes out his travel assignments. Patty’s plan was to accidentally be at Randy’s next hotel. Her thought was that she lost him to Amber on one of his sales trips. She intended to make herself his next . . . dalliance, so to speak. And since I’m the de facto travel agent for my husband’s department, I’m the one who knew when and where her ex was going.”

  I rubbed at my forehead, wishing this was all making more sense than it was. “Why would she have had to get you drunk to get t
hat information from you? Did she know you wouldn’t have told her of your own volition?”

  “As a general rule, I only give the travel arrangements to my husband and to the travelers themselves. It would be unprofessional of me to do otherwise.”

  Our food arrived, but I’d lost my appetite. I simply did not want to accept this picture of Patty as an underhanded, self-centered woman who would trick a recovering alcoholic into having a shot of vodka to advance her own selfish pursuits. With the waitress once again out of earshot, I asked, “Are you sure it wasn’t an accident? Couldn’t she have given it to you by mistake? That she’d meant to spike her own drink?”

  “That’s what I’d thought, too, till I saw Adam’s tape. He happened to have been fiddling with Skye’s camera at our house that day, and he showed it to me afterward.”

  I did my best to disguise my reaction to this mention of the person I worried might be making my daughter’s life miserable of late. “She’s one of the girls who put that tape together. And his former girlfriend, right?”

  “Yes, and, unbeknownst to me, Adam helped them edit the tape.”

  “He did?”

  She nodded grimly. “He mentioned that to me when he saw me testing our own camcorder the other day, so that I’d be able to film the All-Cultures Day for the junior high on Friday.”

  “You’re taping that?”

  She made a face and nodded. “Patty had extended my role as PTA secretary to include videotaping all of the special PTA-funded events. We talked about that at the first meeting back in September. Remember?”

  “Not really. My attention wanders quite a bit during meetings.” If Adam had edited the tape, Susan could know a lot more about the killer’s motive than she was letting on. I tried to make my voice sound casual as I asked, “Did Adam show you the outtakes of the tape?”

  “No, he didn’t have them. Skye was in charge of the project and she kept all of the camcorder cassettes at her house. Adam told me that, last winter, he’d shown the girls how to pick and choose which portions of the camcorder cassettes to put on the final tape.”

  “Do you still have the recording of Patty spiking your orange juice, though?”

  She shrugged and turned her attention to her food. “I think so.”

  “You’ve got to turn it into the police, Susan. There could be a reason behind . . .” I let my voice fade, lost in thought. “My God. I hope the two things aren’t connected.”

  “What two things?”

  “Skye came to see Karen, all in tears yesterday. Fortunately Karen wasn’t home. Skye told me that her house had been burglarized last week.”

  Had the police allowed evidence that could have revealed the killer’s motive to slip through their hands?

  Chapter 12

  Stirring Up Trouble

  Susan interrupted my silent reverie by saying, “I’m sorry to hear that Skye’s harassing Karen. Maybe you should talk to her parents. They’re divorced and both remarried. I’ve got their phone numbers in my address book at home, if you need them.”

  “Thanks. I’ll let you know if it comes to that.”

  “I can’t tell you how relieved I am that Adam gave her the heave-ho. She always struck me as petulant and self-obsessed.”

  “That was my impression, too,” I murmured.

  The news of Patty’s duplicities and the unedited tape perhaps being in the killer’s hands had so unnerved me that I no longer felt like tapping Susan for information about Skye. We finished our lunch, not discussing anything of consequence.

  After Susan had pulled out of the restaurant parking lot, I snatched my cell phone out of the glove box and called Tommy at the police station. As soon as he was on the line I said, “Tommy, I just wanted to double-check something. Have you looked into a recent burglary of a Carlton home?”

  “I’ve been rather busy with a murder investigation, Molly.”

  “I know, but the crimes might be related. The burglary was at Skye Smith’s house, one of the four girls who made the tape about the PTA. At one point that night, Mr. Alberti had said that the embarrassing sections were left on the cutting room floor, so I was just—” I stopped. The truth was that I was calling to make sure Tommy was aware of the connection, but I needed to be more tactful. “I was wondering if the whole thing was connected.”

  “Prob’ly not. Hate to disillusion you, Molly, but we do get a number of burglaries in this town every year. Anyways, if it makes you feel any better, I’ll look into it.”

  “You did already ask those girls to give you everything they’d filmed, right?”

  Tommy hesitated. “I’m sure we did.”

  “So you might not have? I would have thought that was one of the very first things you would do. I mean, you knew there were supposedly embarrassing outtakes.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Tommy, what if the kids recorded something that would have been the one piece of evidence that identified the killer? And what if that evidence has since been stolen in this seemingly random burglary?”

  “Come off it, Molly! Just what do you think could have been on that tape? Someone saying, ‘I’m planning on killing the PTA president in March, so don’t count on me for any volunteer work that month!’?”

  “No, but what if someone was caught in a compromising position? What if Patty had found out that someone . . . bought themselves a new car with the PTA’s money? And what if the kids recorded their argument?”

  “Like I said, Molly, I’ll look into it. Is there anything else?”

  “No, just . . . could you keep me posted?”

  “Of course, Molly. Just as soon as you get hired as my superior officer, I’ll be sure ’n’ fill you right in on every little detail of my investigation.” He hung up.

  I stared at the phone as I turned it off, then returned it to the glove box. Maybe my side of the conversation hadn’t been a lesson in civility and tact. Still, what an outrageous oversight if Tommy truly hadn’t immediately collected the camcorder cassettes from those students.

  I drove straight to the high school, ostensibly to give Karen a ride home and spare her from a bus ride. My plan, however, was to try to find out what part of the building Skye Smith would be in during the last period. I could camp out near that exit and perhaps talk to her.

  To my frustration, I arrived a few minutes late. Classes had already let out for the day, and my chances now of catching her were greatly reduced. Nevertheless, like a salmon swimming upstream against the torrent of students leaving the building, I made my way into the lobby. Where I ran smack into Karen and Adam, walking arm in arm.

  She stopped dead in her tracks, as did Adam, the three of us forming a little eddy in the traffic pattern. “Mom! What are you doing here?”

  “I’m . . . giving you a driving lesson. Thought I’d see if you were up for driving home.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me, but said, “You remember my mom, right, Adam?”

  “Yo,” he said with a nod.

  “Nice to see you again, Adam.”

  Karen and Adam made a nice-looking couple, all right, and I trusted her, but I sure didn’t know him well enough to trust him. And I wished he would drop the “yo” from his vocabulary. I was always tempted to respond, “Skoal,” but didn’t actually know what that word meant.

  “In fact,” I said, “I’m really glad we ran into each other. I just had lunch with your mother, and she mentioned that you helped edit the tape that some students put together in Mr. Alberti’s government class.”

  “Yeah, that’s true.”

  “Those tapes are kind of important, considering what happened to Patty Birch. Did you see anything when you were editing them that somebody might have wanted to make sure nobody else saw? Maybe that you deliberately left out because it was so embarrassing?”

  He shrugged. “Those tapes were mostly lame, you know? Moms and teachers talking on and on about nothing.”

  “That’s what I thought you’d say.” I waited, hoping he’d elabor
ate, but no such luck. I cleared my throat. “Skye came over to our home the other day and mentioned that their house was burglarized. Do you happen to know what was stolen?”

  “Just like . . . their VCR and stuff.”

  “By stuff, do you mean their tapes? Including the ones of the PTA? Or did you keep the original tapes?”

  “No, I gave them back to Skye.” He had no trouble meeting and holding my gaze.

  “Do you know how I could find Skye, to ask her about them?”

  “Haven’t seen her much today.” He had stiffened, and Karen was giving me the evil eye.

  Time for me to exit and give them time alone so as to appear to be less the prying, nervous parent than I actually was. Al might have seen an earlier version of the tape, or discussed the content of the outtakes with his students. Besides, he was another person with opportunity to have killed Patty. Maybe he had some motive that I’d yet to uncover. “I’ve got to talk to Mr. Alberti about some PTA business. How about meeting me in the parking lot, Karen? I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  “Yeah, okay. Thanks, Mom.” Her tone was anything but thankful, however.

  On the lookout for Skye or her cronies, I made my way toward the wing where Al’s classroom was located. From there it would just be a matter of poking my head into the ten or so rooms till I found him.

  After looking in four doorways, I spotted Al. He was alone, reading something on his desk, his shiny pate aimed in my direction. I leaned into the room. “Hi, Al. Have you got a minute?”

  He smiled. “Of course. Is this about ballroom dancing?”

  “No, ’fraid I’ve hung up the old dance shoes for good.” I closed the door behind me. “It’s about that video your students made. It appears that the original recording might have been stolen from Skye’s house during a burglary.”

  He furrowed his brow. “She mentioned last Friday that now she really did need a camcorder from the PTA . . . that hers had been stolen.”