Irresolute, he stood, the pot top in one hand. The other hand, without anything to do, wandered around aimlessly, plucking at a shirt button, tugging on a belt loop, finally coming to rest at his side. “She needs to eat,” he said.
I tried to match this battle-fatigued husband with the decisive school superintendent I’d known for years. Again my imagination came up short. “You need to eat, too.” I found a dish mop behind a tottering stack of glasses. “I’ll wash; you eat.”
“The dishwasher is broken,” he said.
“Eat,” I commanded.
The top went on the pasta pot with a clatter. “I should eat something,” he said. “Maybe I’ll have that chicken in the broiler and the rice Jo didn’t want.”
I closed my eyes for a moment and counted to ten. Which wasn’t enough, so I counted to twenty.
The ostensible head of the house took a clean plate out of my hand, dried it, and filled it with food. Still standing, he started to eat. I left him alone and went on with washing dishes. By the time I’d filled the dish strainer, he’d polished off the entire meal. I found a dish towel. “Joanna says the kids don’t know about sibling number five.” I held out a dry cookie sheet.
“Really?” He took the offering. “Oh. Well, I suppose they don’t. Maybe I should have them over for Sunday dinner.”
Past Sunday dinners would have included a roast, mashed potatoes, a vegetable, fresh rolls, a Jell-O salad, and some sort of home-baked dessert—all cooked by Joanna. “Maybe,” I said, “you could have them over on Saturday. Order pizza.”
“Saturday?” A look of revolted surprise crossed his face. “But it’s always Sunday dinner. Joanna makes—” He stopped, seeing the impossibilities inherent in his assumptions.
“It’s going to be different,” I said softly.
He stared at the frying pan I’d just handed over. The shiny bottom reflected a warped view of Mack’s face. “I’m going to be a daddy again,” he said. “At my age. Just think of it.” A slow smile spread across his craggy features.
I smiled back at him. “Congratulations, Mack.”
“A daddy,” he said in wonder. He laughed, and I decided to stop worrying about the Vogels. Joanna would eventually tire of being waited on hand and foot, and their children would take one look at the wreck of the house and make sure Mack got some assistance.
“So,” Mack said, “how can I help you?”
I carefully dried a wire whisk. Right. I hadn’t stopped by to wash Vogel dishes. I thought back to what Bick had said. “I was wondering if the school board had made any decision about Tarver’s addition.”
“Is it still going to happen, is the question, correct?” Mack took the whisk. “The board was scheduled to meet yesterday.” He waved the whisk around like a conductor’s baton, convening meetings left, right, and center. “Joanna’s situation delayed the meeting. It is rescheduled for next Tuesday. As a Tarver parent and the secretary for the Tarver PTA, you will no doubt be notified when the decision is made.”
Yup, Mack was feeling better. Pontification galore. “Do you have any feel for how the vote is going to go?”
“As superintendent, I am obliged to keep meeting proceedings confidential until the votes have been cast and tallied.”
A plethora of pontification, but those were just warm-up questions. “Who’s funding the addition?” I asked. “All I ever heard was that it’s an anonymous donor.”
“Ah.” Mack held the whisk at attention. “That question I can answer. The Ezekiel G. Tarver Foundation has agreed to pay for the entire project.”
The paring knives I was drying rattled against each other. “Who,” I wondered out loud, “is Ezekiel G. Tarver?”
Mack looked at me pityingly. “Dear Beth. It’s the proper name of Tarver Elementary. Look at the sign near the front door next time you drop your children off at school.”
Maybe I didn’t know who Ezekiel was, but I did know it would be silly to insult anyone holding sharp objects. I felt the heft of a wooden handle and thought that maybe Joanna would play the Helpless Pregnant Wife for quite some time.
Chapter 16
Lois hummed as she realphabetized the picture books. The songs being hummed had bounced between “Stars and Stripes Forever” and “Take Me Home, Country Roads” for twenty minutes. “Why,” she asked, “do we have five copies of If You Give a Moose a Muffin? Two I can see, even three, but five? Is Marcia doing the ordering again?”
“No.” I adjusted my legal pad. No sense in letting the sharp gaze of my manager see the list.
“Have you thought about Christmas books yet?”
I looked at the crossed-off names. One single solitary name was left. “Not really.” There had to be more names. There just had to be.
“Are you okay?” Lois squinted at me. “You seem even more distracted than usual. The kids okay?”
“Fine.”
“Have you introduced them to that handsome hunk of maleness yet?”
“No.”
“Are you sick?”
“Not since last winter,” I said vaguely. More names. We needed more names. I only wished I knew how to get them. What came next when an investigation was at a dead end? Maybe I should page through some Nancy Drews for some ideas.
“Lois, do you know who Ezekiel G. Tarver was?”
“Sure. The school is named after him.”
“But why is it named after him?” I’d developed all sorts of theories. Maybe he’d been a small-town bad boy but dragged himself out of the slop thanks to a dedicated teacher. Or maybe he was a World War I hero who died while saving his comrades-in-arms. Or maybe—
“He donated the property.”
The prosaic reply deflated me. Once again, real life paled in comparison with my imagination.
“How’s Marina these days?” Lois asked. “I haven’t seen her in ages.”
“She’s been . . . busy.” The night before we’d talked on the phone about what we should do next. I’d told her that Cindy, Harry, and Joe Sabatini were off the list, I’d told her about the Tarver Foundation putting up the money for the addition, and I had wondered aloud what to do next.
“Money,” she’d said. “It’s always about money. We need to find out where all Agnes’s money was going. She made good money, but didn’t live like it. Maybe she was being blackmailed. If we got a look at her checkbook, I bet we could figure it out.”
At that point Spot had bumped his head against my knee, his own personal signal for take-me-out-now-or-I’ll-make-a-mess, and I’d had to hang up.
Now I was doodling dollar signs on the list and Lois was starting to hum “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” at two in the afternoon.
Money. Did it make sense that Agnes was killed for money? School principals couldn’t exactly afford charter planes and personal chefs. Not that some people wouldn’t kill for a pair of shoes, but nothing had been taken from her house or the school during the break-in.
Again, I saw the stain on the living room floor. And again I remembered how Marina had noticed my reaction and pushed me out of the room until she’d done the cleaning herself. No one could ask for a better friend.
Lois dropped the mail on my desk. “Are you crying?”
“Don’t be silly.” I sniffed and rubbed my face. “An eyelash fell into my eye.”
“Of course it did.” She moved away, humming Fleet-wood Mac’s “Little Lies.”
Erica couldn’t have killed Agnes. She just couldn’t. I started circling dollar signs. If money was the reason for Agnes’s murder, what had happened to it? I didn’t see how money from a foundation could have anything to do with her death.
An anonymous donor was going to fund the addition, but the donor was the Tarver Foundation. Hmm . . .