“Beth?” Her voice sounded strong and vibrant. “What are you doing here? Come the heck in. If I have to spend one more day in this bed without seeing anyone other than Mack, I’m going to go stark raving mad.” She laughed. “If I’m not already.”
From a Garden Club tour I remembered a brass bed covered with quilts and brightly colored pillows, lace sheer curtains at the bay window, a watercolor landscape of a country garden, a wood floor cushioned with an Aubusson rug. All that was gone. In their place were a hospital bed, stark white shades, and a wide collection of medical charts and graphs.
I stared at Joanna, at the naked windows and floors, at the charts littered with images that told me exactly what was going on. “You’re . . .” I couldn’t say the word. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was inferring an incorrect conclusion. Maybe I was—
“Pregnant,” Joanna said cheerfully. “That’s me.”
“But . . .” The words crowding into my mouth couldn’t be said out loud.
“But I’m forty-nine years old.” She grinned. “Yah. Who would have guessed?”
“Um . . .” It felt like years since I’d finished a sentence.
“I felt weird,but I figured it was hormonal stuff. Menopause, whatever. I finally went to the doctor because I was throwing up in the mornings.” Joanne giggled. “She took one look at me and asked, ‘Have you been taking your birth control pills?’ Lo and behold, I’d run out for a few weeks, busy hosting three weddings this summer and seven concerts. Never once thought about getting pregnant. I’m almost fifty years old, for heaven’s sake!”
I dragged over a chair and sat down. “What do your children think?” One of the girls and both boys were married, and the younger girl was away at college. I tried to imagine my own mother getting pregnant when I was in my twenties and couldn’t do it.
“Haven’t told them yet. Been too busy with bed rest.”
“From now until the end?”
“You bet. My doctor is worried about a miscarriage. Guess the rate goes way up when the mommy is more than forty. I’m stuck here for the duration.” Smiling, she flung out her arms. “Nothing to do for months and months.”
My knees knocked together, and I put my hands on them to keep them still. I’d felt old giving birth to Oliver when I was thirty-three. Joanna would be fifty when the baby was born. Fifty!
“Poor Mack is frantic.” She chuckled. “He’s got a bug about keeping this room germ-free. I’m surprised he didn’t make you put on a gown and mask before coming up.”
“How far along are you?”
“Two weeks into the second trimester. The morning sickness is already gone, thank goodness. That gives me only five and a half months of lolling around in bed.” She looked sad for a moment, then perked up. “But that’s five and a half months I don’t have to polish Vogel furniture, dust Vogel knickknacks, vacuum old Vogel floors, or wash the glass on the front of Vogel pictures. Have you ever taken a close look at Mack’s great-grandmother?” She shuddered. “With a face like that, I’m amazed there were any more Vogels at all.”
“I’ll try and remember to look.”
“Don’t get me wrong.” She pleated the white sheet that lay across her chest. “I love this house. Keeping it in the family is important to me. But you know something?” She looked up at me, her face earnest. “It consumes me. I could do with a break.”
Having a baby seemed like an extreme way to get out of housekeeping, but I kept that thought to myself.
“Honey?” Mack knocked on the door. “Joanna? Are you all right?”
Joanna grinned at me. “Mack?” she called in a faint voice. “Is that you?”
The door creaked open, and Mack’s mostly white head of hair came inside. “Dinner’s almost ready.” He spoke with a sickroom voice. “Broiled chicken, rice, and a spinach salad. I’ll have the tray here in ten minutes.”
She held up a trembling hand. “Could I have noodles instead of rice?”
His frown came and went in an instant. “You can have anything you want. It’ll take a few extra minutes, though.”
She sighed and turned her head away. “Never mind. It’s too much trouble.”
“No!” His voice bounced off the room’s many hard surfaces. “No,” he said more quietly. “It’s not too much trouble.” He came to the bed, kissed her forehead, and left.
“I’d like rice just fine,” Joanna whispered. “But I like the idea of Mack washing extra dishes even better.” She gave an exaggerated wink.
After I’d said good-bye, I went down to the kitchen. The room, which I’d always seen with shiny copper kettles hanging from hooks and decorated with flower-filled earthenware vases, was a disaster. Dirty pots filled the sink, dirty dishes cluttered half the counters, and lumpy grocery bags crowded the other half.
Mack was standing at the sink, trying to fill a pot with water. Since the sink was overflowing with dishes, he was filling a glass with hot water and dumping it into the pasta pot, over and over and over.
“I’ll have to cook another chicken breast,” he said dully. “This one will be dried to leather by the time the pasta is done.” He dumped a last glassful into the pot and lugged it over to the cooktop.
I looked at him, at the kitchen, at him, at the kitchen. Then I rolled up my sleeves and started running hot water into the sink. “Sit down,” I said. “Eat that chicken and rice while the water is heating.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?” I opened the cupboard door and rummaged around for dish soap.
“Joanna hasn’t had dinner yet.”
“It’s silly to let food go to waste,” I said. “And how long has it been since you’ve eaten? Did you have lunch?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Eat something. You’re not going to be any help to your wife if you keel over in a dead faint.”
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
L
ois 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 . . .
I went to the counter, pulled out the phone book, and dialed.
“Lakeview Animal Shelter, how may I help you?” a woman asked.
I introduced myself and asked about the donor who had funded their new building.
“It was an anonymous donation,” she said. “No one knows who was behind it.”
“Yes, I understand. But the checks had to come from somewhere.” I tried to sound reasonable. Jovial, even. “Were the checks written by the Tarver Foundation?”
There was a long pause. “How did you know?”
I gave a broad and vague answer, then hung up.
So. Two big projects, one foundation. I didn’t know much about foundations, but I was pretty sure they could be funded by a large group or they could be created by a single person.