Read Poison at the PTA for Free Online

good-for-nothing lawyer. He was my cousin, died young from not enough fun, if you ask me. He was okay when he was a kid, though.” She smirked. “Want to know what he did under the bleachers with Dolly Duncan in eleventh grade?”
    “No,” the rest of us said.
    But I had the crawly feeling that Auntie May had told that story at her cousin’s funeral. If she’d done that in a church, what was she going to say tonight? Frantically, I tried to think of a reason to call Todd and Kirk and haul her bodily off the stage. Could I pretend she was sick? Say she’d had a fainting spell? Fake an emergency phone call for her?
    “Beth?” Isabel was at my side, a clipboard in her hand. “It’s time to start.”
    I approached the podium, tapped the microphone to make sure it was on, and started. Not so very long ago, I wouldn’t have dared to stand in front of a large audience without a word-by-word script to read verbatim. Today, I was fine just winging it. Who would have guessed?
    “Good evening,” I said. “If you’re here for the seminar on analytical auditing procedures, you’re in the wrong room.” Smiling, I waited for the chuckles to die down. “We’re here tonight to celebrate the eighty years of the Tarver PTA’s existence. Eighty years, folks. There’s been a PTA in this elementary school for eighty straight years.”
    There was a smattering of applause, and I nodded. “It is something to applaud and I’d like to salute all those who came before us.” I turned and looked at the group of women sitting to my left and clapped my hands hard and loud. The audience joined in. Then, in what felt like a single surge, they all got to their feet, giving these women the recognition they deserved.
    I sniffled back some unexpected tears and turned back to the podium as the audience sat back down. “Sadly,” I said, “we don’t have anyone who can talk to us about the Tarver PTA’s first decade, but we do have a Rynwood resident who knew women from that first decade. The same woman was a PTA member in its second decade, from the end of World War Two to the boom years when Rynwood almost doubled in size. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Auntie May Werner.”
    The audience clapped politely as Auntie May wheeled herself to the podium. I handed her the microphone, sat down, and thought positive thoughts. There was no reason to think Auntie May would spend her allotted twenty minutes—ten minutes per decade—dredging up ancient gossip. I’d told her to stick to PTA agenda items and she’d agreed easily enough. She had no reason to slide sideways from straightforward history to sixty-year-old scandal.
    Did she?
    “Thanks, Bethie,” Auntie May said. “You’re a sweetie for inviting me. Lots of people wouldn’t, you know. But just because I’m old don’t mean I don’t remember things.”
    I tensed. Not the story about catching Flossie’s younger sister running around without any clothes on—please, not that. She’d been all of four years old, and it had been ninety degrees; who could blame her? But the poor woman was still carrying that story around with her.
    “Like when the first Tarver PTA came about,” Auntie May went on. “My momma’s friend, Ethel, she’d moved here from out east and brought with her this idea about a group of parents getting together and trying to help the teachers.”
    Perfect. I relaxed. This would be fine. At last, Auntie May’s prodigious memory was being put to productive use. Long may it reign.
    We listened to Auntie May’s tale of the first bake sale. “Made all of two dollars and thirteen cents and they were happy to get that much.” Listened to her heartbreaking stories of children losing fathers to the war and the PTA doing what they could to help, and her account of the PTA’s growing pains.
    I glanced at the clock on the gym wall. She was right at the twenty-minute mark, but it sounded as though she was wrapping it up.
    “And that’s how that second PTA