Excerpt of Murder at the PTA by Laura Alden

Chapter 1

"You need to get out more," Marina said.

As I was in her backyard, my best friend’s comment was obviously incorrect. "I am out."

"Don’t be a putz." Without turning, she spoke to a five-year-old playing in the nearby sandbox. "Andrew, don’t whack your sister on the head. It’s not good for you, her, or that piece of processed petroleum stamped into a plastic toy shape in China by underpaid employees and brought to this country on a container ship undoubtedly carrying illegal aliens."

Marina and I stood in the late-September sunshine of Rynwood, Wisconsin, enjoying the warm weather. There wouldn’t be many more days like this before the cold of winter set in, and Marina was a big believer in outside play for the children in her home daycare.

"You know what I mean, Beth," she said to me. "Socially out."

On the inside I was shrieking, No! It hasn’t been long enough! The kids aren’t ready! I’m not ready! On the outside, my lips tightened an infinitesimal fraction of an inch.

"Now, don’t look like that." Marina shook her finger at me; she was the only person outside of a sitcom I’d ever seen actually do such a thing. "It’s been a year since the divorce."

A year and eight days of sleeping alone, but who was counting?

"Which makes this a perfect time to get back into action." A wisp of Marina’s light red hair fell out of her ponytail and across her plump cheek. We looked across the yard to where my ten-year-old daughter, Jenna, had barricaded herself in a tree fort and was dropping bits of maple leaf onto the head of my seven-year-old son. Oliver was red faced and grunting from the effort of trying to reach the lowest branch of the tree.

Ripping apart their young lives with divorce had been the hardest thing I’d ever done. Jenna had taken it on the chin, but Oliver had started sleeping with a pile of stuffed animals big enough to smother him, and every single one had to be given a kiss good night. Bedtime took forever in our house. I knew I should start weaning him off the animals, just as I knew I should start talking to Jenna about the Wonders of Womanhood. After Christmas, I thought. Why rush things?

"Know what?" Marina pushed back the stray hairs. More, and then more, would fall out of the ponytail without her noticing, and finally the full glory of her reddish locks would cascade over her shoulders. The hair scrunchie would be on the floor, or in the yard, or in the car, or on the kitchen counter. Marina dropped hair scrunchies like Hansel and Gretel dropped bread crumbs. "I ran into Dave Patterson the other day-" Her extrasensory powers reasserted themselves. "Nathan! Don’t climb the fence."

"But my mom’s here!" Young Nathan jumped, trying to swing his legs over the white picket fence.

"Wait for your mother to open the gate."

Nathan jumped again.

"Gate!" Marina’s sharp command was like a whip. The boy dropped to the ground.

"Hey, Marina." A slim blond woman walked up the side yard’s stone path and stood at the gate. "Wonderful day. Oh, hi, Beth. Got a new name for that bookstore yet?" Debra-don’t-call-me-Debbie O’Conner grinned at me.

If I’d been blessed with quick wit instead of quick alphabetizing skills, I would have come up with something clever enough to silence Nathan’s overly perfect mother. But since I hadn’t come up with anything better than the current "Children’s Bookshelf" since I’d bought the store two years ago, I just shrugged. "Not yet."

Debra opened the childproof latch with one hand, a task that took me two hands and a considerable amount of sotto voce cursing. "Let’s go, kiddo," she said to her son. "See you ladies later. I’d love to stop and chat, but the book club is at our house tonight, and I need to fill the cream puffs I baked last night. Bye!"

Cream puffs? No one made cream puffs. You bought them from the bakery or thawed them after getting a box out of the grocery store’s freezer. I climbed the stairs to the deck and sat in a plastic green chair, feeling inadequate. Cooking I could do, but baking? The last thing I’d baked from scratch had been cupcakes for Jenna’s birthday-her eighth. It hadn’t gone well.

"Quit that." The deck stairs squeaked under Marina’s weight.

"What?"

"You have that comparing-apples-and-oranges look. Speaking of which, did you know Debra can’t swim?"

"Please. Everyone knows how to swim."

Marina shook her head. "Can’t swim a stroke. She’s so scared of water, she wears a life jacket around a pool."

My childhood bulletin board had been crowded with hockey photos and blue ribbons from summer swim meets. I could do something better than Debra? Inconceivable. She was my opposite in a thousand ways-blond, where I was mousy brown; slim, which I hadn’t been in years; elegant in a way I only dreamed about. "Why didn’t you ever tell me?"

"Didn’t know until the other day. Which was the same day I ran into Dave Patterson. We were at the community pool for the ducky swim class, see, and-" Her smile was a little too wide, and she was talking a little too fast, clear indications she was trying to convince me to do something I didn’t want to do.

"I’m not going to date Dave Patterson." I didn’t want to date anyone. All I wanted was to raise my children and to run my store. I wanted everything and everyone safe and sound; no traumas; no tragedies; no upsets or upheavals-a peaceful Goodnight Moon existence.

"He’s not bad looking." Marina waggled her eyebrows.

"I don’t care if he’s Apollo reincarnated. I’m not ready to date anyone. Not yet." Or ever. Men left the toilet seat up and complained about mowing the lawn. Why bother with them?

"How about-"

"No," I said as firmly as I could, which must not have been firmly enough, because she looked ready to offer up another victim. "Maybe in the spring," I said.

She looked thoughtful, and I was sorry I hadn’t said a year. Marina’s circle of friends was larger and more varied than mine. We overlapped solely because we’d been neighbors years ago, before Richard had decided to move us into a brand-new pseudo-Victorian house more suitable for his status as CFO of a large insurance company. Maybe living in a ranch house three blocks away from the elementary school didn’t fit Richard’s image, but it worked wonderfully for Marina’s home daycare business. She watched two children during the day, and three more walked to her house after school.

"Okay," she said. "No dating."

I slid down a little in my chair. Safe and sound. No pressure. Just the peace and warmth of early fall. Leaves turning yellow, orange, and red against the bright blue sky. A tangy earthy smell in the air-that special autumnal scent that summoned memories of high school football games, trick-or-treating, and scooping wet stringy seeds out of pumpkins. I closed my eyes and breathed in fading images of Jenna in a princess costume and of Oliver dressed as his favorite stuffed animal.

"Then how about being the secretary of the school’s Parent Teacher Association?" Marina ran the words together as fast as an auctioneer trying to unload a box of moldy books.

I opened my eyes and sat up straight. She couldn’t possibly have said what I thought she’d said.

"You’d make a great committee secretary. You’re organized. You do what you say you will. You know how to do things. You’re reliable. Responsible. People trust you." Her smile stretched two feet wide.

"What makes you think I know how to do things?"

"You don’t give yourself enough credit. You own a business, for crying out loud. Doing this little secretary thing would be a piece of cake."

"If it’s so little, you do it."

"My darling,"-"daah-ling" it came out-"think about what you just said."

I did. I thought about it, visualized it, and rejected it. Marina, with her big heart and cheer and love and flamboyance, was not what you’d call efficient. Her husband and youngest son got fed on time, and her college-aged children got regular care packages in the mail, but her desk looked like a horizontal wastebasket. Paperwork was not her strength.

"What happened to the old secretary?" I asked. Though I was a member of the Tarver Elementary PTA, I’d skipped most of last year’s meetings. Raising money for handicapped playground equipment was important, as were most of the causes, but my children had needed me more than the PTA did.

"You’ll make a great secretary," Marina repeated. "And you need more social interaction. Running that bookstore doesn’t count."

"The kids-"

"PTA meetings are on Wednesday, and Richard has the kids that night, yes? I bet you’re not doing anything fun with that free time. I bet you do laundry. Maybe sometimes you go wild and balance your checkbook."

Chores weren’t my typical Wednesday night, but I wasn’t going to tell even my best friend what I did do.

Jenna dropped out of the tree and tore across the yard. Oliver gave up his attempt to climb Tree Everest and tore after her, his shrieks joining hers. Marina’s surprise child, nine-year-old Zach, abandoned his pogo stick and followed. In seconds the yard was full of children playing a bizarre variety of tag. My flesh and blood didn’t look at me once.

A tiny piece of my silly sentimental heart shredded into pieces. My babies were growing up. Maybe it was time for me to grow up, too. "Okay," I said, sighing. "I’ll run. For secretary. I probably won’t win, but I’ll run."

"Hallelujah!" Marina clapped her hands, leapt out of her chair, and pulled me into a hard hug. "Bet you dinner and a movie that you win."

"You’re on."