Houser had married young and had two children right away, back in her twenties, Serna said. Her husband, Vernon, had fallen off a rented houseboat fifteen years earlier and drowned in the Mississippi. He’d left enough money behind to finish raising the children, and to send them to college: they were both now working in the Twin Cities. Vernon Houser’s insurance had not been enough to provide a decent lifestyle for Jennifer, and so she’d gone to work for a real-estate dealer, and had been good at it. “She liked being busy, and being in the public eye, and when an open seat came up on the school board, she ran for it, and she won. She was the public watchdog on spending issues.”
Houser got a small salary for serving on the school board, Serna said, “but very little, really, for the time she put in. Something like five hundred dollars a month.”
“Did she say anything to you about trouble at the schools? About being frightened of anybody?”
“No, nothing like that — although everybody knew that you were sniffing around.”
“That’s the second time today that somebody said I was sniffing,” Virgil said.
“Well, the idea that Jen would take anything from the schools… that’s simply ridiculous. If you’re sniffing, you’re sniffing up the wrong tree.”
Virgil left Serna sitting on a couch, and did a quick tour of the house, peering in closets, finding clothes, looking in drawers, finding socks and underwear, probing medicine cabinets, finding a high blood pressure prescription, partly used. A desk in the converted bedroom yielded a checkbook, showing a neatly entered balance of one thousand, six hundred and eighty-four dollars.
The hall leading from the short flight of stairs across the upper floor to the office was decorated with two dozen family photos; most prominent was a fleshy man wearing large plastic-rimmed glasses, and, Virgil thought, a bad brown toupee. Vernon? He thought so.
Back in the living room, Virgil asked Serna, “Was Miz Houser close to her children?”
“Oh… I guess. They didn’t really… visit back and forth much. Why?”
“I noticed that most of the family photos were older. Kids were small in all of the pictures.”
“Yeah, she wasn’t much for photography, I guess. Not sentimental that way, except for that little picture of her with her mom, when she was a toddler.”
“Where’s that?”
“Right there in the hallway. It’s the little black-and-white one,” Serna said.
“There aren’t any black-and-white ones,” Virgil said.
“Yes, it’s right there in the center, down from that awful picture of Vernon.”
“Show me,” Virgil said.
There was no photo of Jennifer Houser and her mother. Serna put her fingers to her mouth, puzzled: “Jeez. It’s always been right there. Forever. It was the centerpiece.”
Virgil relaxed.
There was no murder: Houser was running.
And she’d had to take just one little memento.
23
Vike Laughton called for an emergency meeting of the Buchanan County school board in the back storage room of the newspaper. The remaining four members of the board arrived at intervals of a minute or two, slinking in the back door from the busy parking lot that served both Village Pizza and Quartermain’s Bar and BBQ.
Laughton offered beer, but nobody took one, except him. “What happened?” Bob Owens demanded, as Laughton popped the top on a Coors Light. “Why are we here?”
“What do you mean, why are we here?” Jennifer Gedney said. “Randy’s dead. Who knows what he left behind? Obviously, we’ve got to find out—”
Laughton interrupted: “Jen Houser disappeared. The police found blood on her kitchen floor.”
That stopped everybody short.
Then, “She’s been killed?” Jennifer Gedney put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, my God, what’s going on? I heard that Randy was murdered, too. Some people said it looked like suicide, but now everybody’s saying it was murder. They say the police know for sure—”
“Where’re Henry and Del?” Larry Parsons asked.
“That’s what I want to talk about,” Laughton said. He took one of the folding chairs he’d set out, flopped his hands in the air and flopped them back down on his thighs, sloshing a little beer on the floor without noticing. “The fact of the matter is, this Flowers guy is breaking things down. The biggest thing we always had going for us is that nobody worried about the school board. We’re all upstanding citizens, committed to educating the kids, keeping an eye on things. But once somebody starts looking hard, a police officer or an attorney or a CPA… things are going to come bubbling out.”
Jennifer Barns: “You’re telling us that our goose is cooked?”
Laughton shook his head: “Not quite yet. I think I might be able to skate, unless you all decide to take me down with you. I mean, I have no power over the school budget—”
“You sure took the money, that’s all the police would have to know,” said Owens.
“Like I said, you all could drag me down. I know that,” Laughton said. “Listen: if we hang together, we could still make it. But to do that, we may have to throw Henry and Del overboard. They actually moved the money, they’re the ones who always talked with Masilla, they made the deals. They were Randy’s boss — Henry hired Randy himself. I think we could argue that it was a three-man arrangement, and we didn’t know about it.”
“But we knew every step,” Barns said. “If we tried to throw them overboard, they’d take us down out of revenge. I mean, that’s what I would do, if I was in their shoes.”
“They might try, if they had nothing to lose, but they do have something to lose,” Laughton said. “They both have families.”
The board members looked at each other, and then Parsons said, “Stop beating around the bush. Tell us what you’re thinking.”
“Very simple,” Laughton said. “I’m pretty sure that Flowers is going to tear the house down. He’s smarter than he looks, and he’s been working everybody. Suppose we went to Henry and Del and said, ‘We’re not going to make it. If you take the rap, the other six of us… well, five of us, if Jen Houser doesn’t show up… we’ll take care of your families. They can go off to live with their folks, and every year they’ll get X amount of dollars in the mail.’”
“How big an X?” Gedney asked. She looked unhappy with the prospect.
“We’d have to work that out,” Laughton said. “I’m thinking, you know, if each one of us put two hundred thousand dollars into a trust at Vanguard or Fidelity, and if we had to have all five signatures to move money, we could probably get both families twenty thousand a year, and still keep the million. We’d just send them the interest, four percent, and anything over that we’d keep. Then, when this is all blown over, and nobody remembers it… we cash the fund out. Take our money back.”
They all sat silently for a minute, then Jen 1 said, “You really think… I don’t know. It seems crazy. Maybe too easy.”
Owens said, almost conversationally, “You know, Henry and Del have got to know they’ll be the first to go. There’s no way we could have done any of this without them knowing. So maybe… they might buy it.”
“If Henry doesn’t stick a gun in his ear,” Jennifer Gedney said.
“Which would save us all some money,” Laughton said. “Wouldn’t have to take care of his family.”
The other four turned to look at him, then Owens said, “You went out the door with Randy the other night. I saw you talking.”