Free Murder at the PTA by Laura Alden

breaths flutter fast. Oh, my. Oh, my, my. “It was paint,” I said. “Thanks to my daughter’s artistic talents, I needed to repaint the living room the day before a dinner party. I didn’t have time to go to the paint store, so I mixed up some different cans and slapped it up. Turned out to be the hip color of the month on HGTV.” It was the only time Debra O’Conner had ever given me a look of approval. Not that I cared.
    Dorrie put our plates down. “Can I get you anything else?” She looked at Evan and, I swear, she batted her eyelashes.
    “All set, thanks,” he said.
    “Let me know if you need anything.” A couple more bats, and then she put her hand on her hip and waltzed off.
    Evan reached for the ketchup. “Did you know the woman who was killed?”
    “Not well. She was principal at the elementary school. My daughter and son both go there, but Agnes and I didn’t cross paths much.”
    “Murder makes it different, though.”
    I paused, a forkful of coleslaw halfway to my mouth. “That sounds like the voice of experience.”
    “Just an overactive imagination. My ex-wife always told me it would get me into trouble someday.”
    I wasn’t going to ask, but out it came. “How long have you been divorced?”
    Dorrie returned and did the leaning thing again. “Dessert?” When the answer was no, she slid the bill on the table and winked at Evan. “Have a nice day.”
    Over my protests, Evan placed his big hand over the bill and put it in his shirt pocket. “Five years divorced,” he said. “I waited to leave Chicago until my girls got out of high school. The younger one’s a freshman at Wisconsin.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of Madison. “The older one is in the army, jumping out of perfectly good airplanes.”
    That made the army daughter at least ten years ahead of my Jenna. Maybe he was older than he looked.
    “I married my high school sweetheart a month after graduation,” he said. “I’d say it was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done, but I ended up with two top-notch daughters, so I don’t regret a minute of it.”
    What I needed was a mood-breaking topic. “What did you do in Chicago?” Perfect. No one could talk about their jobs without being boring.
    “Corporate. Talk about boring.” He made a face. “Want the last of these fries?”
    “No, thanks. So you just chucked the whole rat race and came up here?”
    “Pretty much,” he said cheerfully.
    Ah-ha. I knew he was a jerk. Big-time Chicago lawyer playing at being a small-town store owner. He probably saw himself sweeping the sidewalk every morning, popping the awning with a broom handle after a rainstorm to let the water whoosh to the sidewalk. So idyllic. So quaint. Sooo unrealistic.
    “My dad ran a men’s clothing store up in Green Bay,” he said. “It won’t be easy, but I have some ideas that might make it work.”
    I wanted so badly to dislike this man, and he wasn’t making it easy. Clearly, I was going to have to try harder.
    Up at the cash register, Ruthie greeted us. “How was everything?” Her thin face was a map of wrinkles—one for each year she’d run the restaurant, she always said.
    “Excellent.” Evan laid down an unusual credit card that, after a moment, I recognized. No plebeian applications could get you a card like that. For that card you had to receive an invitation from the credit card company. “Best burger I’ve had in a long time,” he said.
    Ruthie lowered her voice and leaned toward us. Our three heads drew together in a conspiratorial huddle. “Sorry about Dorrie,” she said. “Did you hear about Jim? I think it’s really over this time. He left Dorrie for Viv Reilly’s youngest.”
    “Nicole?” I gasped. “You can’t be serious. She’s barely out of high school.”
    Ruthie’s lips firmed, and she shut the cash register drawer with a slam. “Young and pretty and not a brain in her head. Not that Dorrie is going to win a MacArthur Fellowship anytime soon,