“Marina, you didn’t!”
She crossed her eyes at me. “Sucker. We’ve been playing restaurant after school all week. I told them if they kept quiet about it and did well tonight, they could watch two movies.”
“You are a devious woman.”
“Why, thank you.”
“Speaking of devious.” I got up and fetched my purse. “So, the other day I went through the WisconSINs blog posts and made a list of—”
“Great God in heaven.” Marina flopped forward and thunked her forehead against the table. “Not a list. Please, anything but a list.”
“Do you want my help or not?” I asked. Marina made a small mewing sound that was probably a yes. She’d once dared me to go a full week without a list. I’d lasted two days, but I had broken down upon realizing we’d needed milk, eggs, bread, and bananas. Three things I could keep in my head. Four things were one too many.
“So what’s the title of this list?” Marina lifted her head and propped it up with her two fists, one atop the other.
All my lists had titles. Why anyone found this amusing, I had no idea. I unfolded the piece of lined yellow paper. “Murder Suspects.”
“So descriptive,” Marina murmured.
Brushing the paper flat, I said, “Some of these people are identified on your blog as potential suspects.”
Marina jumped her chair around the table to sit side by side with me. “Lemme see, lemme see.” It sounded as if she were repeating a take-out order for a Chinese restaurant.
“Not so fast, twinkle toes.” I held the paper out of her reach. “First, the introduction.”
She slumped back and folded her arms across her chest.
“Cut that out.” I opened the paper a few inches, then closed it up again. “There is no order to this list. Not most likely suspect to least likely, and not least likely to most. I just wrote names down as they came to me”
Marina looked heavenward. “On with it, O Queen of the Lists.”
I held the paper a little farther out of her grasp. “Suspect number one: Kirk Olsen.”
She nodded. “The affair of the school buses.”
“Suspect number two is Claudia Wolff.”
“Ooo, the Dysfunction from Fish Fry Friday.” Marina perked up. “I could stand it if Claudia was the killer. Sad for those horrible children, though.” She looked downcast for a moment, then brightened. “Growing up without a mom would be bad, but could it be any worse than having Claudia Wolff as your primary caregiver?”
“Well . . .”
“Can’t be Claudia, though,” she said, sighing.
“Why not?”
“She was up with a sick kid that night. Taylor? Tyner? One of those. Claudia was calling around to borrow a vaporizer. She called me around eleven.” Marina shook her head sadly. “Another good suspect toasted. Who’s next?”
The lyrics of a Tom Lehrer song went through my head. I tried to turn them off, but I knew they’d keep coming back until I replaced them with something else. I crossed off Claudia. “Next is Randy Jarvis.”
“Ah.” She looked left and right. “He’s my favorite,” she whispered.
Their relationship had been strained at best since the time she and Randy had gone at each other hammer and tongs over the end-of-school gift the PTA gave out. Randy had pushed for root beer floats; Marina had wanted to hand out paperback books. After too many hours of discussion, Erica banged her gavel and said they’d hand out gift certificates to the Children’s Bookshelf.
“Randy and Agnes were having it on,” Marina said. “I’m sure of it. I know he didn’t look grief-stricken at the memorial service, but he’s a man, and he’s from Wisconsin. He wouldn’t show public grief if his mother was run over by a truck right in front of him.”
I didn’t see how Randy’s not crying at the memorial service proved he’d been involved with Agnes, but I didn’t pursue the issue. “Randy didn’t kill Agnes,” I said.
“Yes, he did.” She spread her arms wide. “Here’s how it worked. The meeting at the school ended. Everybody left. Randy hung around, left his car at the school, and walked to Agnes’s house for an assignation. They had an argument. In the heat of anger he picked up something heavy”—she picked up an invisible object—“and hit her on the head.” Her arm swung down. I winced as her hand thudded against the table. “After that, he sneaked out the back door.”
“You really think Randy would have walked three blocks?”
She wavered, in love with her theory, but seeing the flaw. Randy hadn’t walked that far in years. “Well . . .”
“Marina, Randy wasn’t even in town that night.”
“Don’t be silly. Where else would he be? No, wait. Let me guess.” She started playing an air guitar. “He plays guitar for a classic-rock band. They play in nasty little bars all over the county. But, wait! A discerning crowd hears the emotion Randy pours into the solo for ‘Free Bird,’ and the applause doesn’t stop for half an hour.” Her hair bounced all around as she bobbed her head in time to music only she could hear.
Suddenly I was tired of the game. A murderer was roaming free while my children were watching Free Willy. Not that, deep down, I thought they were in any danger, but still . . . “On Tuesday nights,” I said, “Randy is a volunteer.”
Marina’s mouth slacked open. “He’s a what?”
“Every Tuesday and one Saturday a month. And don’t ask where he’s volunteering, because I’m not going to tell you. Confidential sources.”
She stuck her tongue out at me. “Don’t you hate it when someone you can’t stand turns out to be a good person? What a waste of a perfectly good suspect. Who’s next on the list?”
I rattled off the rest of the names. “Nick Casassa, Dan Daniels, Cindy Irving, Joe Sabatini, Erica Hale, Harry the janitor, Lauren Atchinson, and Gary Kemmerer.”
“Lauren Atchinson?”
I shrugged and told her that Nick, Lauren, and Gary all had solid alibis.
“What are they?” Her eyes were bright.
“Not saying.”
“Come on, pretty please?”
“Nope. Not a chance. Move on to the next question, please.”
She pouted and flounced her hair a few times, but I didn’t budge. She sighed dramatically. “How about Agnes’s ex-husband?”
“Do you want the long or the short version?”
She cocked her head, listening to the sounds emanating from the family room. “Isn’t that the start of The Willy Show? We have time for all the details.” She rubbed her palms together.
I dug into my purse for another set of notes. If I was going to keep on with this investigating stuff, I was going to need a bigger purse. “John Mephisto remarried a week and a half after his divorce from Agnes.”
Marina blew a soft, sympathetic whistle. “Ouch.”
“Yup.”
“What was that all about?”
“Agnes and John got married the summer after they graduated from college. University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. After driving around the country for a summer in a VW bus—”
“How very seventies,” Marina said.
“Agnes went on to graduate school here in Madison. John Mephisto started working as a junior loan officer for the State Bank of Madison. Agnes, one of a handful of females in the doctoral program—”
“Agnes had a PhD?”
“She was taking her studies very seriously. Mephisto was left to his own devices in a town where he knew very few people.”
Marina made a slicing motion across her neck. “Never mind the rest. So what wife is Mephisto on now? Three? Four?”
“Still on two, actually. They live near San Diego.”
“Hmm.” Marina frowned. “Doesn’t sound like he holds a grudge against Agnes.”