Curse of the PTA

  PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS

  OF LAURA ALDEN

  Plotting at the PTA

  “Cozy readers will truly delight in the fact that this is the third in the series of these superfun books, and with each release the plots just keep getting better and better. . . . Strong characters and monumental surprises, this cozy is a definite keeper!”

  —Suspense Magazine

  “Laura Alden has written another delightful mystery. The plotting is fast-paced. . . . Just wish I wouldn’t have to wait so long to read the next in the series.”

  —MyShelf.com

  “An engaging whodunit. . . . Fans will enjoy Laura Alden’s complex murder mystery, thankfully without a recall in sight.”

  —Genre Go Round Reviews

  Foul Play at the PTA

  “Well-crafted.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Beth Kennedy gives amateur sleuths a good name. . . . For those of us who appreciate good characters, it’s just as satisfying as her first book.”

  —Lesa’s Book Critiques

  Murder at the PTA

  “Alden has strong talent and a well-skilled use of language that brings the story alive and gives vitality to each character . . . an excellent start to a new cozy series.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “A terrific debut.”

  —AnnArbor.com

  “Murder at the PTA is well worth your time.”

  —Mystery Scene

  Also Available from Laura Alden

  Plotting at the PTA

  Murder at the PTA

  Foul Play at the PTA

  CURSE of the PTA

  Laura Alden

  AN OBSIDIAN BOOK

  OBSIDIAN

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com.

  First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, April 2013

  Copyright © Penguin Group (USA), Inc., 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  OBSIDIAN and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  ISBN 978-1-101-59930-3

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  Contents

  Praise

  Also by Laura Alden

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  For Jon.

  Always.

  Chapter 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 had 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 statewide 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 flo
or.”

  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 bake sale 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.”