Free Grime and Punishment: A Jane Jeffry Mystery by Jill Churchill

orchestra.
     

Seven
     
    Jane would have
had a
whole, precious hour of solitude if Shelley hadn't phoned. "Jane, you
are
going to that PTA meeting at the junior high this afternoon, aren't you?" she asked briskly.
    “Are you crazy?"
    “Good. I'm so glad. Early planning for the spring fund-raising carnival is so important."
    “You
have
gone mad. You can't have forgotten the last one. The time I had to run the cotton candy machine and got that goo in my hair and vowed never to become involved again."
    “I knew you'd feel that way. I'm looking forward to seeing you there. I'd give you a ride, but
Paul
is dropping me off."
    “I see. Paul's there and you can't say what you mean."
    “Wonderful. Yes, of course. See you then.”
    Jane gave some serious thought to the nature of friendship before dragging herself to the junior high. This seemed too high a price to pay. But, if Shelley was desperate enough to attend such a meeting, Jane's curiosity alone was roused to the point of enduring the setting to find out what was up.
    She parked at the front of the big circle drive, the better to escape when the opportunity came. She had to sit quite still, getting her nerves under control, before she could enter the building. In Jane's opinion, junior high schools were possibly the worst idea educators had ever come up with. At the age children most needed to have older teens to look up to and younger children to set examples for, the system pulled them out and isolated them to flounder around without guidance. No, not without guidance; they had nearly as many counselors as teachers assigned to the school, but those supposedly trained adults hadn't a fraction of the influence the mere presence of exalted high school kids would have had.
    Drawing a deep breath, Jane entered the school. Unfortunately, at that moment, the bell rang for the last class change and she found herself engulfed in a tide of children. A good third of the boys towered over her and half of them tripped over her. She was jostled unmercifully as she struggled to make her way to the art room, where the meeting was to be held. Some of the kids ran into her deliberately, some because they weren't paying attention, and a few because the poor things simply didn't know where all the parts of their rapidly developing bodies were at any given moment. Twice, as she clawed her way forward, a timid voice greeted her by name. She couldn't discern the source either time.
    She thought she glimpsed Katie, but made no attempt to get her attention. That would have been asking for a snub. She knew that junior high schoolers always tried to maintain the fiction that they had no parents. They might, if pressed, grudgingly admit to a father for the sake of filling out forms, but not to a mother. And never in public.
    She all but fell into the art room when she finally reached it. There were about twenty women present, most of them more or less familiar. Grade-school PTAs consisted of a beleaguered cross section of parents. By junior high, however, only the truly devoted club women were involved. These were the folks they should have called on to bail out Chrysler; they'd have staged international bake sales to boggle the mind. Small knots of conversation were breaking up, and the women were moving (with obscene eagerness, it seemed to Jane) toward desks so the meeting could commence.
    “It positively reeks of hormones in this building," one of them was muttering to her friend.
    “It isn't all hormones. It's dirty gym socks and chalk dust too. And cheap perfume," the friend replied.
    Before Jane could contribute her opinion, Shelley appeared and dragged her to the back of the room, where she'd staked out two desks for them. "Thank God!" Jane exclaimed. "I thought you'd gotten me here and not shown up yourself. What is it?"
    “Remember when Paul's mother died a year ago?" Shelley was talking fast, anxious to convey as much as possible before the group was called to order.
    “Huh? Yes,