Poison at the PTA by Laura Alden Read Free Book Online

moment please.” After a short pause came her call. “Yo, Beth! It’s for you.”
    I abandoned the tea choices and picked up my office phone. “Good morning. This is Beth.”
    “Oh, Beth,” said the faint female voice. “I’m so glad I got hold of you.”
    It took me a moment to place the voice. “Cookie?” I frowned and sat down. “You sound awful. Don’t tell me you went to work today.”
    “No, no . . .” There was a loud swallow. “I have a horrible upset stomach, and I’m so afraid that I have . . .” Another swallow. “Food poisoning.”
    “Oh, that’s too bad,” I said sympathetically. “And food poisoning can be dangerous. Make sure you get enough fluids and . . .” The reason that Cookie Van Doorne was calling me about her health sank in. “Are you saying you think you ate something last night that made you sick?” My mental mom manual was telling me that it usually took twenty-four hours for the nasty effects of food poisoning to make themselves known, but “usually” isn’t “always.”
    “I’m not sure,” she said, “but I thought you should know.”
    “Yes. Thank you. I’ll starting making calls right away and—” But I was talking to empty air. Cookie had hung up the phone.
    Hoping that Cookie was wrong about the food poisoning, and hoping—selfishly—that if she did have food poisoning, it wasn’t because of anything she ate at the PTA event, I dialed a phone number I’d only recently memorized.
    “Mary Margaret? It’s Beth. We might have a problem.”
    Mary Margaret told me she’d take care of all the phone calls that suddenly had to be made. “I know just what to do, so don’t you worry about a thing. Say, how do you feel?”
    In my worry about sickening half of Rynwood, I hadn’t once considered that I myself might get sick. “Fine. How about you?”
    “Healthy as a horse. Let’s hope I stay that way, eh?”
    For a long, long time.
    •   •   •
     
    The phone tree that Mary Margaret quickly set up worked like a charm. Within a few hours, everyone who’d been at last night’s event had been contacted. Some people had been contacted more than once, but better too often than not at all, Mary Margaret reported, and I agreed.
    “And now we wait,” she said. “I told all my callers to have anyone who got sick call me. That way we can track what’s going on.”
    “Let me know if anyone calls,” I told her. “Morning, noon, or night.”
    “You bet. Now, don’t worry, okay? It’ll be fine.”
    We hung up. “Don’t worry,” I muttered. “I can’t believe she said not to worry.”
    •   •   •
     
    I spent the rest of the day and evening waiting for a phone call from Mary Margaret. All through dinner, no phone call. All through evening chores and dog walking, no phone call. Through bedtime, no phone call. Twice, I started to pick up the phone to call her but stopped. She’d said she’d call if she heard anything, and she would.
    The next morning I waited and worried some more. To alleviate some of that worry, I called Cookie. She sounded almost like her normal self and thought she’d be back to work in a day or two. “Must have been one of those stomach viruses,” she said. “Thanks for all you did, Beth. It meant a lot to me.”
    “It was nothing,” I said, a little itchy at her gratitude. “Just get better, okay?”
    At lunchtime, I couldn’t take it any longer and picked up the phone.
    “Hey, Beth,” Mary Margaret said. “The only calls we got were a kid with a sore throat who wasn’t even there. Oh, and Randy Jarvis twisted his knee out shoveling snow.”
    I heaved a huge sigh of relief. “And I called Cookie a little bit ago. She said she’s feeling much better.”
    “False alarm, then,” Mary Margaret said cheerily. “Well, all’s well that ends well, right?”
    “Right,” I said. Sometimes things really did work out.
    •   •   •
     
    But a few days later Glenn Kettunen stopped by the