"PTA President Must Prove Secretary Innocent of Murder in Excellent Cosy"
Reviewed by Min Jung
Posted July 12, 2013
Mystery Cozy
In the latest instalment of the PTA Mystery Series,
Beth Kennedy is taking over
as president of the Tarver Elementary School PTA, much to
the chagrin of her
archenemy Claudia, PTA vice president. The first order of
business is electing
a new secretary, which immediately pits Beth and Claudia
against each other.
Fortunately, Beth's choice (Summer) wins the seat, which
Beth thinks is a good
omen for the year. As the meeting progresses, she
introduces a guest
speaker to discuss investment options for the PTA's money.
But during the
meeting's short break, he is shot and killed.
Beth is one of the first people on the scene, having run
toward the gunshot as
soon as she heard it, much to the consternation of her
friends. Fortunately,
she isn't considered a suspect, as there is plenty of
evidence that it would
have been impossible for her to have committed the murder.
However, Beth
feels responsible for Dennis' death since he was only at the
meeting at her
request. As soon as she can, she jumps into sleuth mode,
despite the pleas
of the local sheriff to stay out of the investigation.
As Dennis was a financial planner, Beth finds out that there
may have several
people with a motive to want him dead. In the meantime,
Claudia is
spreading vicious gossip that the secretary is behind the
murder, causing
Summer to come down with a serious self-confidence crisis
and making Beth
look bad in the process. Now, Beth not only has to solve
Dennis' murder but
hope that Summer isn't the culprit!
As if trying to solve a murder wasn't enough, during all of
this, Beth is trying
to figure what's wrong with her son Oliver, who is suddenly
acting odd, non-
communicative, and jumpy. Her best friend is trying to make
over her
wardrobe, and the town has suddenly decided that the PTA is
cursed,
accounting for the sudden decline in PTA meeting attendance.
And to top it
all off, her daughter, Lauren chooses this time to start
acting like a typical
adolescent!
This is quickly becoming one of my favourite cosy series --
so much so that I
recommended it to my cosy book group, who also enjoyed it.
Laura Alden portrays PTA life so accurately; the politics of PTA
parenting, but
without it getting too overblown and exaggerated that it
becomes tiresome.
Beth is clearly a devoted parent who cares about her
children, but Oliver and
Lauren aren't the focus of the book. Beth is also a great
amateur sleuth who
is clever enough to solve mysteries with just a little help
from the most
unexpected sources. I'm definitely going to keep reading
these!
SUMMARY
As the new PTA president, Beth Kennedy wants to make a
difference in the lives of the students and faculty at
Tarver Elementary. But with a killer on the loose, staying
alive is the first order of business...
With the book sales from their Story Project, the PTA has
come into some money. Now they just have to decide how to
spend it. With different factions vying for their own
interests, Beth brings in financial consultant Dennis
Halpern. But before they can come to a resolve, Dennis comes
to his final end—shot to death right in the school.
With the doors to the building unlocked, virtually anyone
could have done the deed. And they soon discover that Dennis
had plenty of secrets. Now locals are whispering that the
PTA is cursed, and it's up to Beth to catch the killer
before she gets cashed out.
ExcerptChapter 1
"Old and boring," she said. "No doubt about it."
I looked up from my notes to see my best friend, Marina,
staring at me with that
it's–time–to–improve–Beth look on
her face. "Forty–two isn't old," I said.
"Forty–two is the new twenty–five."
"Stop making stuff up. And I notice you didn't say
anything about not being boring."
"Boring is in the eye of the beholder." I went back to
studying my notes. There were a lot of them. Tonight was the
annual September organizational meeting of the Tarver
Elementary PTA, and due to what must have been temporary
insanity on my part, I'd volunteered to be the PTA's president.
I'd been secretary for two years, and you'd think I'd
have soaked up knowledge aplenty about how a meeting is run,
but I was realizing there was a lot to learn. Which
shouldn't have been a surprise. Everyone else's job is
always simple, and the previous PTA president had made
running a meeting look as effortless as eating chocolate.
I'd spent the last two weeks researching parliamentary
procedure, reading up on management techniques, and
wondering if I was up to the job.
Marina had made great fun of my self–assigned
homework, saying that it was just a PTA meeting, for crying
out loud, but I wanted to be prepared. Really prepared. The
PTA vice president, Claudia Wolff, would love to catch me
making a mistake, the bigger mistake the better. Time spent
making sure that wouldn't happen was time well spent.
"And anyway, I wasn't talking about you," Marina said
from the too–small chair upon which she was sitting.
The fifth–grade furniture was the biggest in the
school, but it still wasn't exactly adult–sized.
"Oh?" I glanced at the classroom's wall clock. Ten
minutes until the meeting began and the room was starting to
fill up with parents and grandparents. Normally we had high
school students in the gym to watch over the children, but
the gym had spent the summer in a state of repair and the
finish on the new floor wasn't quite ready for prime time.
Instead, the kids and their keepers had been divided among
two homes close to the school.
Which, thanks to the temporary suspension of my former
husband's visitation schedule due to a Wednesday evening
insurance seminar he was leading, meant my Jenna, twelve,
was probably playing a shoot–'em–up video game.
My Oliver, nine, was probably playing a quiet board game
with some other quiet children. Jenna was of the opinion
that since she was in middle school, she was old enough to
stay home by herself, but she hadn't convinced me yet. Maybe
when she was sixteen.
"No, I wasn't talking about you." Marina stood. "Not
exactly."
"That's good," I said vaguely, sorting my stack of
papers. Two more PTA board members came in and settled at
the collapsible table the janitor had set up. Two down, one
to go. Randy Jarvis, the treasurer, nodded at me. Claudia
busied herself with a fluffle of movements that accomplished
exactly nothing. She repositioned her chair. She cleared her
throat. She moved her purse from her left side to her right.
She fussed with her hair. I made sure my polite smile was
on. This could be a very long year.
"It's your clothes." Marina plucked at my sleeve. "I was
talking about your clothes. They're old and they're boring.
You need to venture out of your rut, Beth."
"My rut is very comfortable, thanks." After all, there
was nothing wrong with khaki poplin pants and
button–up camp shirts. Average clothes that, I
thought, went well with my average–ish height of five
foot five and my completely average brown hair. And today
I'd even slipped on a navy blue jacket. I thought I looked
professional and businesslike, a style equally appropriate
for tonight's meeting and for my career as owner of a
children's bookstore.
"Clothes can be fun." Marina waved her arms. "Don't you
want to have fun?"
"No, I don't. Not ever."
"Liar," Marina said comfortably, sitting back down, her
red hair in disarray. "If that were true, you wouldn't have
spent half of last summer playing disc golf."
"Exercise. For me and the children."
"Fun. It's all about fun. And those clothes are
definitely not."
I crossed my eyes at her and looked at the clock. We had
a missing board member, but it was time to start the
meeting. "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen," I said.
"Tonight's meeting of the Tarver Elementary School PTA will
come to order."
"Um . . ." A slight, dark–haired woman, a PTA
newcomer whose name I couldn't remember, stood up. "I don't
know if this is the right time, but . . ." She walked to the
front of the room and handed me an envelope. "It's from Nat.
She says she's really sorry."
I took the envelope from her. Without opening it, I knew
what was inside. It didn't take any great leap to guess that
the empty board seat, reserved for the new PTA secretary,
Natalie Barnes, was going to stay empty a little longer.
"What does it say?" Claudia asked, leaning over and
craning her neck in her attempt to read the letter.
"Just a second." I scanned the pages. Natalie's large
handwriting and her lengthy explanations filled up almost
five sheets of paper.
Randy Jarvis, who'd been treasurer for as long as anyone
could remember, grunted. "Bet she says she can't be secretary."
I read the last page and handed the letter over to
Claudia. "You're right, Randy. She resigned." The scrawling
pages had detailed how sorry she was, how much she wished
things were different, and how horrible she felt about all
this, but with the way things were, she was just too busy to
be secretary.
He nodded and opened the pack of corn chips he'd brought
from his downtown convenience store. "She got gas from me
the other day. Said she got a new job."
The PTA newcomer, who'd retreated to her seat as soon as
she'd given me the envelope, spoke up. "It's a really good
job, and with her husband on short hours, she couldn't pass
it up."
"No, of course not." It would have been nice to have had
a phone call from Natalie before the meeting, but you
couldn't have everything. "We still have a quorum," I said,
"so we'll continue. But I'd like to add an item to the
agenda. New PTA secretary."
Feet shuffled around in the half–filled room. We
had a nice–sized group of about twenty, but you
wouldn't have known it from the flat silence. I saw a couple
of people half stand, then sit down. It was the
fight–or–flight reaction starting to take
effect, and who could blame them? Volunteering to bake
cookies was one thing; offering your services for an entire
school year was quite another.
I could have stood up and made an impassioned speech
about the many pleasures and rewards of being on the PTA
board, but one accidental glance at Claudia would have made
my words cling to the insides of my throat. Working with her
this year was not going to be a pleasure or any sort of
reward, unless I was being rewarded in a negative way.
What had I ever done to deserve Claudia? Sure, I'd
skipped school once when I was a high school senior, but I'd
been caught and I'd had my car privileges revoked for a
month. I wasn't always as patient with my children as I
could be, though, and my good intentions to have all three
of us eat more fruit and vegetables were constantly being
eroded by the smell of fresh–baked cookies just down
the street from the bookstore, and—
Marina's overly loud throat clearing shook me out of my
reverie. I blinked, briefly reflected that it was good to
have friends who kept you from making an idiot of yourself
in public, and went back to the agenda. We moved through
approving the agenda, approved the minutes of the last
meeting, and approved payment of the few invoices that had
accrued over the summer.
The only old business item was my recap of last spring's
senior story project. We'd paired Tarver Elementary students
with residents of Sunny Rest Assisted Living. The end
product was a softcover book of the life story of the
residents as seen through the eyes of the children. Sales
had done much better than expected by
anyone—especially me—who'd come up with the idea
in the first place. The fact that the Tarver PTA was making
serious money and was receiving state–wide attention
was a fresh shock every time I thought about it. A nice
shock, but still.
I finished with the latest sales figures. The pleased
murmurs were music to my ears. There was
nothing—nothing—that Claudia could say that
would take this moment away from me.
"What does that mean in terms of money for the PTA?" one
of the fathers in the audience asked.
I checked my notes to make sure I would be totally,
absolutely correct when I publicly stated the number. I said
it, and this time there weren't even any murmurs. Wide eyes
and open mouths were the order of the day.
The part of me that was small–minded and petty
desperately wanted to sneak a look at Claudia to see how she
was reacting to the news. The noble and forgiving part of me
knew that doing such a thing was beneath the person I wanted
to be.
So I compromised; I snuck a tiny, fast look.
She looked just like the others. Eyes wide, mouth dropped
open.
On the outside, I kept a polite smile on my face. On the
inside, I was running around, shrieking with joy, thrusting
my fists into the air. All last spring, Claudia had done
nothing but question the whole story project. Everything
from the concept to the choice of printer had been raked
over the hot coals of her caustic commentary.
Sweet, sweet victory.
"We'll talk about the financial aspects of the story
project in a minute," I said, nodding at a man sitting in
the back row. "But first, we need a secretary." I looked
across the audience. "Being PTA secretary is a thankless job
that is never rewarded and brings you only criticism and
more work than you imagined."
"Sign me up!" called a female voice from the back of the
room. Carol Casassa waved wildly, grinning.
"She didn't mean that," said her husband, Nick, trying to
pull her hand down. "Joke. It was a joke, honest."
Carol crossed her arms and pouted hugely.
So, yes, a joke. Too bad. Carol would have made an
excellent secretary. I looked around the room, skating over
Marina's upraised hand. She wanted to be secretary about as
much as I wanted to gain back the fifteen pounds I'd so
laboriously lost in the last six months. "Anyone else?"
Marina stood up, ignoring the way that I'd ignored her.
"Can I nominate someone? Because if I can, I nominate Summer
Lang."
All eyes skewed toward Summer.
The thirtyish woman had lived in Rynwood for only a
couple of years, but the two of us had discovered that we
had so much in common it was almost scary. Besides the
straight brown hair and the tendency toward clumsiness when
feeling uncomfortable, we shared a compulsion for list
making that was not understood by most and made fun of by
many, including my best friend, my offspring, and my employees.
Summer squirmed, looked at the floor, looked at her
fingernails. "Um . . . well . . . I guess I—"
Claudia's voice soared out. "I nominate Tina Heller."
My eyes flew open wide and I felt the beginnings of
panic stir around in my stomach.
"You want to do this, don't you, Tina?" Claudia said,
prompting her bosom friend. "You can be secretary. I mean,
it can't be that hard."
I kept my mouth closed. My mother had always told me that
if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.
Forty years later, her admonition was finally taking effect.
"Oh." Tina, determinedly blond and always on a diet that
for sure was going to help her lose weight this time, opened
and closed her mouth a few times before anything else came
out. "Sure. I guess I could. I mean, if you want me to."
I most certainly did not want her as secretary. "You
accept the nomination?" I asked.
"Uh, yeah."
"Well, there you go." Claudia lounged back in her chair,
smug as a bug in a rug. "We have a secretary."
Not so fast, missy. "There is another nomination on the
floor."
Claudia sat upright, fast. "What do you mean? I nominated
Tina, and she accepted. That's all we need, one nomination,
and she's it. That's the way it works."
"Another nomination is on the floor," I repeated.
"Summer, do you accept the nomination of secretary?"
Summer looked at me. Looked at the glowering Claudia.
Looked at Randy, who was crunching through the last of his
corn chips. Looked at Tina, who was biting her lips and
texting madly. Looked back at me.
I hoped that she could magically see on my face the
begging that was going on in my head.
Please run, Summer. Please please please, don't make me
be president of a PTA board that I'll be arguing with for
the next year over everything from meeting times to what
color paper to use for the father–daughter dance
flyers. Please . . .
I held my breath.
"Okay," she said. "Sure, I accept."
The sharp pain in my chest eased to nothing. "Then we
have two nominations." I tried to keep the elation out of my
voice, but if Claudia's sour sideways glance meant anything,
I hadn't done a very good job.
"But we can't have two nominations." Claudia tapped the
table with her red–painted fingernail. "We always only
have one. There can't be two."
"Why not?" I asked.
"Because . . ." Her glare sharpened to a point that ended
in the middle of my forehead and started to drill deep into
my skull. "Because that's the way we've always done it."
Of all the stupid reasons to do something, I'd always
thought that was one of the stupidest. Easier, sure, and it
was the way the world worked in a general sort of way, but I
still thought it was stupid.
"That's the way we've always done it," she said again,
"and there's no reason to change now. Tina accepted first,
so she'll be secretary."
"Not necessarily." Reaching into the old diaper bag I
used as a PTA briefcase, I reached for a manila folder and
dropped it onto the table with a small plop. "Our bylaws
state that in cases of multiple nominations, there will be a
vote."
"Where? Let me see that." Claudia half stood and grabbed
the folder. "Where does it say that? I don't see it anywhere."
"Page four," I murmured, earning a thumbs–up from
Marina.
"Four? I don't see it. You're wrong about this. You must be."
I tucked my lips between my teeth, leaned over, and
pointed out the pertinent paragraph.
"No, this only talks about . . . oh." Claudia slapped the
folder shut. "Fine," she said. "We'll vote. Something like
this, it has to be a board vote, right? I vote for Tina.
Randy, how about you?"
Randy, who'd been busy collecting the last crumbs of his
corn chips on the end of his thumb, grunted.
"There," Claudia said. "Randy votes for her, too. That's
two votes and that's enough. Tina, you're the new PTA vice
president. Come on up." Smiling, she pointed at the empty chair.
I dreamed a short dream of a distant and secluded island
populated only by Claudia. She'd be happy there, after a
short period of adjustment. And even if she wasn't, I'd be
comforted by my own happiness in knowing that she'd never
attend another PTA meeting.
"Page five of the bylaws," I said, "states quite clearly
that multiple nominations will be voted upon by the PTA
membership."
"It can't." Claudia snatched at the bylaws and flipped
through the pages. "It just can't."
"Page five," I said. "Robert's Rules of Order concurs. I
can find the section number if you'd like."
Claudia didn't answer; she was too busy running her
finger down the text on page five, muttering as she went.
"Nominate . . . office of . . . multiple . . . PTA." Her
finger stopped right where I knew it would.
After a moment, her chin went up. Grim–faced, she
looked out at the people in the audience, one by one. "All
right, then," she said. "We'll vote."
"By secret ballot," I said.
"Oh, absolutely," she said, smiling.
I watched her smile turn into more of a smirk and
wondered what she was up to. Coercion by narrow–eyed
glare? Telepathic mind control? Please. But Claudia looked
far too confident for my comfort. What if . . . ? I shook my
head and concentrated on the task at hand.
In short order, Claudia, Randy, and I rounded up paper,
ripped the pieces into quarters, wrote down the names of
both candidates on each one, folded each ballot in half, and
passed one to each PTA member in the room.
There was a rustle while women fished through purses for
pens, a few murmurings as the men present asked to borrow a
pen from their wives; then the ballots were refolded and
passed to the front, where they were deposited on the table
in front of me.
I looked at the pile. It shouldn't have been a surprise
that the ballots were given to me. I was president, after
all, but somehow it I wasn't ready for this. Part of me
still thought the presidency thing was a mistake of some
kind. Erica Hale was president. She'd been PTA president for
years. Surely she was going to walk in the room any second
and motion me aside.
Only that wasn't going to happen. Erica had made it quite
clear that she was done with the PTA. "I'll be in Italy from
mid–August through October," she'd said. "You're on
your own. And don't look like that. You'll do fine."
So. It was up to me to run this meeting and make sure it
was run smoothly. I looked at the ballots and reached out to
take the first one.
"You think you're the one who should count?" Claudia asked.
My hand froze.
"Don't the bylaws have something in them about counting
votes?"
I revised my earlier fantasy involving Claudia and a
distant island. It didn't have to be far away. A close one
would do. And it didn't even have to be an island. It just
had to be somewhere that Claudia was and I wasn't.
"We'll all count," I said. "You, me, and Randy; we'll
each make a tally, then compare. A triple check."
She started to protest, but the audience was nodding in
collective agreement. I felt an odd rush of pleasure. Maybe
I could do this. Maybe I wouldn't want to crawl into the
back of the closet when I got home.
Turning to a fresh sheet on my legal pad, I wrote the
names of both nominees at the top and drew a vertical line
down the middle of the page, dividing it in half. Tina on
the left, Summer on the right.
Out in the audience, murmurs of conversation started up
and grew in volume. Marina was asking Carol and Nick about
their summer vacation to Nova Scotia, and Summer was asking
someone about an upcoming ski swap. Good. Being eyeballed
throughout this process wouldn't have been good for my blood
pressure.
An errant breeze made the ballots shift in their loose
pile. If Tina won, it'd be Claudia and Tina against Beth the
entire school year. Randy would swing between being a tying
vote and a three–to–one vote in favor of
whatever Claudia wanted to do, and since Randy wasn't big on
confrontation, there'd be three–to–one votes
from now until June.
Icky didn't begin to cover how I'd feel about that. Okay,
maybe Claudia and I didn't disagree on everything. We agreed
on some things. Like . . . like . . .
I gave up the effort, took a shallow breath, and reached
for the first slip of paper.
A few short minutes later, I was steepling my fingers and
dreaming more island dreams, this time with me on the island
along with my children, our cat, our dog, and an enormous
pile of books. My pleasant reverie was interrupted when
Claudia and Randy handed their tallies to me. I unfolded
their papers and looked at their totals. Both agreed with
mine. Exactly.
I signed all three tallies and had Claudia and Randy also
sign all three. Better to cross the T's with too long of a
cross and dot the I's with too big of a dot than to be
called up later for not doing things properly.
"Ladies and gentlemen," I said, and waited for the
chatting to die down.
I could have used the gavel, but something in me balked
at the idea. At the June meeting, the one in which I'd been
voted president, Erica had ceremoniously handed me her
gavel. "Use it wisely," she said, smiling, "but not too
well." Since I wasn't the gavel–banging type, I didn't
want to use it at all. Before tonight's meeting started, I'd
felt like a poseur pulling it out of the diaper bag and
setting it on the table. Me as president was weird enough.
Me wielding a gavel was ridiculous.
When everyone was facing front, I stood.
For a moment, I didn't say anything. All eyes were upon
me, and surprisingly, I didn't feel uncomfortable. I didn't
want to speak fast and sit down as quickly as I could, I
didn't feel as if I were undergoing a sort of
Marina–induced torture, and I had an odd confidence
that I wasn't going to say anything deathly embarrassing in
the next two minutes.
Wonders, truly, never cease.
"I'd like," I said, "to announce the name of the new
secretary of Tarver Elementary's PTA."
What do you think about this review?
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
|
© 2003-2025 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy