Murder by the Slice Read online

  There were a few spaces in the small lot when Phyllis and Carolyn arrived. As they got out of the Lincoln, Phyllis couldn’t help but hear loud voices coming from a man and woman who stood next to one of the other cars.

  The woman, a pretty brunette around forty, was saying, “Think again. I know you have the money, Joel.”

  “Of course I do, but the office renovation cost more than I expected and it would really help me out if you would—”

  “And why exactly would I be interested in helping you out?” Scorn dripped from the woman’s voice as she interrupted the man. “I don’t owe you any favors.”

  “You could cut me a little slack, for old times’ sake, if nothing else.”

  “Old times? Old times? You mean like when we were married? You mean when I thought we had a happy family? Is that what you mean?”

  Phyllis and Carolyn exchanged a glance and walked briskly toward the school entrance, being careful not to look at the arguing couple. Another thing that had changed during the decades Phyllis taught was the exploding divorce rate. In her first classes there had been only a few students whose parents were divorced. By the time of her retirement, the situation had turned around. The students who lived with both birth parents were the uncommon ones. So many of the kids had stepparents, stepsiblings, half siblings, parents who had been married three or four or even five times … Phyllis knew that sometimes marriages broke up and it just couldn’t be helped. But she hated to see the dissolution of families become such an epidemic.

  The voices behind them had grown louder and more angry by the time Phyllis and Carolyn reached the entrance. Phyllis felt a sense of relief as they went inside. Violence at a school had once been unheard of. Now angry ex-spouses had been known to cause trouble and even get into fights at school. It was a dangerous world out there and becoming more so all the time.

  They stopped in the office to ask where the carnival planning meeting was being held. Phyllis had been to Loving Elementary before but didn’t know any of the staff. A secretary directed them to a conference room down the hallway to the right.

  It was just before ten o’clock in the morning, which meant that the kids had been in class for almost two hours. As Phyllis and Carolyn walked down the hall, Phyllis heard the voices of the teachers inside the classrooms, mixed with an occasional burst of laughter or the voice of a child asking a question. She had never taught elementary school; her subject had been eighth-grade history. But all schools, even these new ones, had similar smells and sounds and an indefinable something in the air that told you immediately where you were. Most of the time Phyllis was glad that she had retired and didn’t miss teaching at all, but there were moments, especially when she was inside a school, when something inside gave a little twinge and tried to pull her into the classroom. She wanted to be up there in front of that roomful of students again, looking out at their faces—some eager, some bored, some openly hostile—and seeing the promise in all of them, even in the ones who had no idea it was there.

  But then the feeling passed, thank goodness. She had done her time. The torch had passed to other educators.

  They came to the conference room. The door there was open, too. It was a fairly small room, with most of the space taken up by a long, narrow table. Half a dozen women were seated at the table, talking among themselves. They looked up as Phyllis and Carolyn entered the room. Some of them smiled, Phyllis noticed, but a few just looked curiously at them.

  “Oh, hey, there you guys are,” Marie Tyler said as she got to her feet. She turned to the others and went on, “This is Carolyn Wilbarger and, uh, Phyllis, right?”

  “Phyllis Newsom,” Phyllis said. Some of the women at the table looked vaguely familiar to her. They were old enough that they might have had kids in some of her last classes. That was another thing she had noticed about modern women. Some of them had kids, waited ten or fifteen years, and then had more. Even though very few families had seven or eight children spanning more than a dozen years in age, as had once been common, it wasn’t unusual to find one where the oldest children were in high school, even college, and the youngest still in elementary school. Carolyn had told her about one case where mother and daughter had been pregnant at the same time and had even delivered during the same week, resulting in the older woman becoming a new mom and a first-time grandmother in the space of a few days.

  “Carolyn and Phyllis are going to help us out with the bake sale,” Marie continued. “Both of them are retired teachers, and they can’t wait to pitch in with the carnival.”

  That was stretching things a little, Phyllis thought, but she was willing to forgive Marie’s enthusiasm.

  “I remember you,” one of the women said to Phyllis. “You taught at the junior high, didn’t you?”

  “Eighth-grade history,” Phyllis confirmed. She hoped she hadn’t given this woman’s child a bad grade. Of course, if she had, the kid should have worked harder.

  The woman smiled. “You were one of my daughter’s favorite teachers. I’m Abby Granger.” She had short blond hair and freckles and looked like a woman who spent a lot of time outdoors. Phyllis would have been willing to bet that the family had horses.

  She returned Abby’s smile and said, “It’s good to see you again, Mrs. Granger. How’s Kayla doing?” Phyllis wasn’t sure how she had plucked that name out of her memory. She hoped it was the right one.

  It was. Abby said, “She’s doing fine. Starting her junior year at A&M.”

  Phyllis nodded. “Say hello to her for me.”

  Marie went around the table making the rest of the introductions. “This is Holly Underwood … Kristina Padgett … Lindsey Gonzales … and Irene Vernon.”

  Phyllis and Carolyn said their hellos, and Lindsey Gonzales, who despite her name was a tall, blue-eyed blonde, waved them into chairs and said, “We’ll get started as soon as Shannon gets here.”

  “We can’t start until then,” Marie said. “We wouldn’t dare.”

  The women all exchanged looks, and Phyllis was reminded all over again that the board president, Shannon Dunston, was not one of their favorite people. She wondered if they had all known beforehand that they would have a hard time getting along with Shannon, or if that had become apparent only after she had taken the reins of power.

  “So you’re going to help us with the bake sale,” Holly Underwood said. She was one of the older board members, somewhere between forty and fifty, with quite a bit of gray in her brown hair.

  “Actually, I have an idea about that,” Carolyn began.

  “Save it until Shannon gets here,” Marie said. “There’s no point in discussing anything until then, because she’ll have to approve anything we do.”

  Phyllis couldn’t stop herself from asking, “Don’t you vote on things?”

  Again the women looked at each other, and then Abby Granger said dryly, “Some votes are more equal than others.”

  Phyllis wondered if it was too late for her and Carolyn to back out. After all, they weren’t members of the board. They weren’t even members of the Loving Elementary PTO. They were just here to lend a helping hand to a worthwhile cause.

  More people had probably gotten into more trouble that way, Phyllis reflected.

  The women chatted among themselves for several more minutes as a feeling of impatience grew in the air. A few of them glanced at their watches. A couple took cell phones from their purses and checked for text messages.

  “I don’t understand,” Irene Vernon finally said. “The meeting was scheduled for today, wasn’t it?”

  Marie nodded. “Yes, and Shannon is usually very prompt. We’re the ones who usually get in trouble for being a few minutes late.”

  A moment later they all looked around as the sound of footsteps came from the hall, moving swiftly and purposefully toward the conference room. A woman appeared in the doorway. She came into the room and put a large purse down on the table with a little more force than was absolutely necessary.

  “Good,�
� she said, her voice as sharp as her movements. “You’re all here.”

  Phyllis wasn’t a bit surprised to see that the newcomer was the angry brunette from the parking lot.

  Chapter 4

  The woman switched her gaze to Phyllis and Carolyn. “Who are you,” she demanded, “and what are you doing here? This is a special meeting of the Loving Elementary PTO board.”

  Marie said, “Shannon, this is Carolyn Wilbarger and Phyllis Newsom. I told you they’d be here, remember?”

  Actually, thought Phyllis, Marie had only been expecting Carolyn, but clearly she didn’t mind that Phyllis had tagged along. Shannon Dunston minded, though. She was glaring at both of them like they were interlopers.

  “We’re supposed to help with the bake sale at the carnival,” Carolyn said.

  Shannon took a deep breath and blew it out through her nose. “All right. Let’s get this meeting started. We’ve already wasted enough time.” She sat down in the chair at the head of the table. “Let’s hear your reports.”

  One by one, the women began explaining the preparations they had undertaken to get ready for the carnival. Phyllis had never given the matter much thought, but she was surprised just how much went into putting on one of these things. There were all sorts of supplies to be gathered; construction work to carry out; arrangements to be made for the rental of a bounce house, a dunking booth, and a little train that was pulled by a tractor; paperwork to be filled out for the school district, which would be charging the PTO a fee for the use of the property; even a liability insurance policy that had to be bought just for the day of the carnival. With all these expenses, Phyllis felt like asking how the PTO or any other organization that put on a fundraiser ever made any money.

  Each of the board members had a different task assigned to her, with Marie in overall charge of the preparations because she was the fundraising chairperson. In addition, she had volunteered to personally oversee the bake sale, Phyllis gathered, before realizing that taking on that chore was too much on top of her other duties. So she had turned to Carolyn for help, and Carolyn, in turn, had called on Phyllis.

  Eventually, Marie turned to them and said, “Ladies, what about the bake sale? I’d suggest printing up fliers about needing donations of baked goods. You can give them to the room mothers to distribute to all the parents—”

  “Room parents,” Shannon broke in. “You can’t say room mothers. It’s sexist.”

  “Well, yes, of course. I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just that when all of us were kids it was always the moms who served as room parents. The dads didn’t—”

  “They still don’t. We all know nothing would ever get done if it was up to the fathers to do it.”

  No one made any reply to Shannon’s coldly voiced comment. After a moment of awkward silence, Carolyn glanced at Phyllis, who smiled and nodded in a show of that moral support for which Carolyn had asked.

  “Actually, I have an idea about the bake sale,” Carolyn said. “I’m not sure we should do a traditional one.”

  “There’s always a bake sale at the carnival,” Shannon said.

  “Yes, but they don’t make much money these days. A lot of the baked goods are usually left over and have to be thrown away or taken home by the volunteers.” Carolyn ventured a smile. “You ladies are all young enough so that you can afford to have some pies and cakes and cookies around the house without threatening your figures, but I’m not.”

  Some of the women smiled, but Shannon said, “Get to your point. If we don’t even have a bake sale, why are you here?”

  “I think you should have the cake auction that you’ve had in the past,” Carolyn said. “And at the same time, you can have a contest for the healthiest snack.”

  Several of the women looked at Marie. Phyllis knew what they were thinking: Marie was the one who had brought Carolyn into this, and now she was coming up with odd ideas.

  “That’s … interesting,” Marie finally said. “Why don’t you tell us more, Carolyn?”

  “It’s just that children eat so much junk food these days. I thought people might enjoy having something that’s not only good, but good for them, too.”

  Phyllis tried not to wince at that. She knew Carolyn was struggling.

  Shannon said, “Well, that’s just the most—”

  “I have a recipe,” Phyllis said. She ignored the angry glare Shannon sent her way for interrupting and forged ahead. “I have a recipe for peanutbutter-andbanana cookies that are made with oatmeal and applesauce. I make them for my grandson sometimes, and he loves them. They have very little sugar, and all the ingredients are nutritious.”

  “That sounds good,” Abby said, showing some interest.

  “And we could come up with other things like that,” Carolyn said. “I’m sure some of you have recipes that you like to fix for your children, rather than just letting them stuff their faces with junk food all the time.”

  Lindsey Gonzales said, “My son would eat a case of potato chips in a week’s time if I’d let him.” Several of the other women nodded. Phyllis could see a little enthusiasm for Carolyn’s idea growing on their faces.

  Carolyn went on to explain how the contest would be set up. “The entry fees would be small,” she concluded, “and so would be the fee to sample the snacks and vote for the best one. I think if you combined the money you’d take in there with what you’d get for the cakes that will be auctioned off, you’ll make just as much or more than you would with a traditional bake sale. I know the interest in it will be higher among the parents.”

  Another idea occurred to Phyllis. “You could also collect all the recipes beforehand and make a little cookbook that you could sell. It would probably be small, so you could just copy the recipes on regular paper and fold and staple them. The cost would be low.”

  “You’ve won me over,” Marie said. “I think we should do it.”

  “I think it’s a mistake to get too far away from the traditional,” Shannon said. “People don’t like change. People hate change.”

  Marie suggested, “Maybe we should vote on it.”

  For several seconds, the two women looked at each other, and Phyllis could practically see the sparks of dislike crackling between them. Shannon was clearly a woman accustomed to getting her own way in everything, and she didn’t like it when anyone opposed her. And just as clearly, that attitude chafed at Marie.

  Finally, Shannon said, “Fine. This board is a democracy, after all. We’ll vote on it. All in favor of the bake sale ideas from Mrs… . Wilbarger, was it?”

  “That’s right,” Carolyn said. “Carolyn Wilbarger.”

  “All in favor,” Shannon said again.

  Marie, Holly, Abby, Kristina, and Irene all raised their hands. Lindsey hesitated, glancing nervously at Shannon a time or two before she finally lifted her hand, too. It didn’t really matter. The vote had already passed.

  “All right,” Shannon said, not bothering to ask if anyone was opposed. “Just don’t blame me if the PTO doesn’t make as much money as it would have the other way.” She reached for her purse. “Does anyone have anything else to discuss?”

  Shrugs and head shakes around the table answered the question.

  “Then we’re done here.” Shannon picked up her purse and stood. “We’ll get together again on Friday. I expect a lot of progress on the preparations by then.”

  She stalked out of the conference room, leaving the other women still sitting around the table.

  Several seconds of uncomfortable silence passed. No one seemed to be in a hurry to get up and leave. Phyllis knew she shouldn’t say anything, but the question inside her was bursting to get out.

  “I hope you’ll all pardon me for asking, but … what exactly is Shannon doing to help get ready for this carnival?”

  “Making life hell for the rest of us,” Marie said. She looked over at Lindsey. “And don’t you go running to her to tell her I said that, either, okay?”

  The blonde looked offended.
“Hey, I don’t like Shannon any more than the rest of you do.”

  “Yeah, but you’re the most scared of her.”

  Lindsey tried to look defiant, but the expression dissolved into a worried grimace. “It’s just that she can be so mean. I don’t like mean people.”

  Marie turned to Carolyn and Phyllis. “I’m sorry about the way Shannon treated you. We’re kind of used to her, or at least we ought to be. Usually she’s not quite that snippy to outsiders. She can actually be very charming when she wants to be.”

  “Which is not that often,” Abby put in.

  Phyllis said, “She was probably just upset because she was arguing with a man out in the parking lot before she came in. We saw them when we got here.”

  “A man?” Marie asked as she sat forward. “What man?”

  “I don’t know. He was a little taller than her, dark brown hair, nice-looking. He wore glasses.”

  Marie leaned back in her chair. “Ah. Joel. Her exhusband.”

  Phyllis put the names together. “Joel Dunston. He’s a doctor, isn’t he?” She thought she had seen the name on the directory at the medical building where her own doctor had his office.

  “That’s right. He’s an otolaryngologist.” Marie put a sarcastic edge on the word.

  “Ear, nose, and throat man,” Abby said. “You didn’t dare call him that around Shannon, though, when she was still married to him. She insisted on calling his specialty by its proper name.”

  “Since the divorce she mainly just calls him a cheap bastard,” Marie said.

  That brought smiles from some of the other women and a chuckle from one or two of them. Lindsey didn’t smile, though. She said, “We shouldn’t sit around and gossip.”

  “You’re right, we shouldn’t,” Marie agreed with a nod. “But Carolyn and Phyllis deserve to know what they’re getting into, don’t they?”

  Lindsey just grimaced and shrugged.