by Susan Breen
Peter began making more calls, arranging for the ambulance and the coroner, and Maggie found her attention drifting over to Bender, unchanging, immutable. She’d never got over the granite-like irreversibility of death. All conflict resolved, all love absorbed, all feeling extinguished. So much of Bender’s personality had been in his eyes, she realized, the arrogance, confidence, hostility. With the eyes lifeless, he seemed so insignificant. Here before her lay the man who had occupied so much of her waking time in the last few months, and he seemed so paltry. One might as well find out you’d been obsessed by a gerbil. And yet, how profound her hatred for this man had been.
“He looks so innocent,” she said.
“He was a son of a bitch, Dove. Pardon my French. And now he’s dead.”
“Peter!”
“It’s the truth. Thou shalt not lie. One of the Ten Commandments.”
How he had struggled to learn those commandments, which the minister had insisted each child memorize before being confirmed. Peter wanted to write them on his hand, but Maggie felt it was wrong to cheat in a religious ceremony, and so they worked on it for weeks, trying to invent games to help him remember, finally coming up with a complicated scavenger hunt involving commandments and clues, which did eventually work, though he still had a tendency to rock a bit, like he was walking, when he quoted one of them.
Now he stood up and surveyed the lawn, the road, the Bender house.
“Well, it went fast for him,” Peter said, “if you’re looking for comfort. He must have felt the pain and fallen over. I doubt he even knew what hit him.” Maggie heard the siren’s cry; the ambulance would be there in a minute.
“You think it was a heart attack?”
“Hannah will give the official pronouncement, but it looks that way to me. Occupational hazard for these guys, working in the city and living in Westchester. Push themselves all the time and then, wham, the stress gets them. Had another case last month. Exercise bicycle. Wife away. Gets home after a weekend with the girls in Cancún and finds him. He was next to the electric heater.”
“Peter, please.”
“Sorry, Dove.”
“He has blood on his lip,” she pointed out.
“That’s common. Heart attack victims often bite their tongue. Or he might have hit his lip on a rock when he fell.”
Peter bit his lip, something he always did when he was thinking. How many times had she watched him studying alongside Juliet, she laughing at him as she helped him go through some passage, write a paper? Peter so strong and handsome and Juliet so beautiful, she with her dark black hair and her fair skin. Always Snow White in every school play.
“He must have been running, felt pain and turned toward the light in your house.”
Maggie looked toward her house, which sat tidy and close in front of her, its two stories covered in white shingles, the shutters blue, the porch decorated with some new pots of impatiens, her foolish little flowerpot in the shape of a chicken; the forsythia starting to erupt into bloom, the neat white lace curtains. They were see-through. He must have seen her sitting by the window. She cringed as she thought what her face would have looked like. She had a horrifying image of that mother in Psycho.
“I can’t imagine any scenario in which he thought he’d get help from me,” she said.
“He might not have had time to think. You have a pain, you stagger. I wonder how old he was.”
“Thirty-nine,” Maggie replied, then blushed as she realized what she’d given away. She knew all there was to know about Bender. Had spent considerable amount of time researching him on the Internet, wanting to understand him. It was the same process she used when writing one of her mysteries, spending hours filling out dossiers for her characters, though it was much stranger, she acknowledged, when you did it for your neighbor. The result was she knew Bender was born on Long Island, had gone to college at Amherst, was active in its alumni society, made donations to the Democratic Party and Doctors Without Borders, had a degree in archeology but worked in a law firm. He posted frequent reviews of books in an online reading community. He liked Updike, hated Rushdie.
Peter looked at her, tired eyes reflecting nothing but love. “No one liked him, Dove. Don’t fret.”
“I hoped I held myself to a higher standard,” Maggie said, but he wasn’t paying attention anymore because just then the street erupted into sound. The ambulance came whirring down the street, followed by a police car. Joe Mangione got out, no longer wearing his pizza clothes. Followed by the Lindstrom twins in their green ambulance jackets, and a muscular young woman who Maggie hadn’t seen in a while. Thalia Greenburg? Back from London?
They got to business immediately. Although they were a volunteer force they saw a lot of action; the town was near one of the more dangerous curves on the Saw Mill Parkway and Maggie knew they’d seen some terrible things.
Noise bred more noise. Out came the piano teacher, Ellis Cavanaugh, along with his little white dog, Fidelio. Then the lights of the Van Dorne house snapped on, though they didn’t come out. They tended to keep to themselves. One of the Lindstrom twins headed over to the Bender house, Maggie assumed to try to locate the widow. Where was she? Maggie wondered. Where was his family? Surely they were home, yet no one had answered when she yelled. No one came out when there was a circus on the lawn.
“Hey, Mrs. Dove,” Joe said. “You okay, dear?”
“I’m okay,” she said. “Thanks for calling it in.”
“We did install a 911 system a few years ago,” he said. “Just for future reference.”
“Hopefully I’ll never need it again.”
“So, what, he came for your tree?” Joe said.
“I don’t know,” Maggie answered, feeling her cheeks warm, remembering how she’d been down at the police station earlier that day, complaining about this man.
“You call Campbell?” he asked Peter. He looked angry, but Maggie knew that was just the way he always looked. He was a small man who’d gone to great effort to get an ambulance corps jacket to fit him just right. He was the neatest one there.
“This is no crime scene. I don’t need to disturb him at the ballet for a heart attack.”
“Disturb him, Nelson.”
“Let me get Dove inside. Then I’ll call him.”
“Don’t bring me into this,” Maggie said. “If you’re supposed to call your boss, do it, Peter.”
“Pish posh,” he said, pushing her toward her house. “I’ll be right back,” he called to Joe. “Someone find that wife and see what she knows. See if she wants to come out and say goodbye.”
He propelled Maggie up her porch and into her living room and then went into the kitchen to make her some tea. She felt more tired than she expected. Only now did Maggie realize she had on sweatpants and sneakers. She felt embarrassed. She usually dressed more formally, carefully. When you lived in a small town, there was no privacy. She remembered one afternoon, some months ago, running out to the post office without makeup on. That Sunday, at church, Agnes Jorgenson said she was sorry to hear Maggie’d been ill. Now the whole town would be buzzing about her. She could only imagine what people would have to say, and she, a Sunday School teacher. Even she was appalled at herself.
“Love thy neighbor as thyself,” Jesus said. One of his most important commandments.
She sank into her couch. The whole room looked so prim and proper. She imagined Bender standing beside her, looking at it, the white curtains, the little china teacups displayed in her hutch, the doilies that her great-grandmother had tatted. She loved that verb. Rarely came up. The picture of her daughter in a silver frame. Juliet dressed as the Princess Anastasia and Maggie’s husband dressed as Tsar Nicholas. They’d gone trick-or-treating in those costumes for years, even as Maggie stayed home, dressed as Rasputin, and made huge batches of hot dogs. Over the course of Halloween night, the whole village would stop by and grab a hot dog and talk and laugh.
“Here’s some fortification, Dove,” Peter said as he
walked in, carrying a tray loaded with tea and cookies. He set it in front of her, and then perched on the edge of her coffee table. That boy never sat down on a chair like a normal person.
“Do you need to take a statement?” she asked.
“No. He had a heart attack, that’s all. Don’t you worry. Even Campbell can’t make more of it than it is.”
“You’ll call him, right? I don’t want you to get fired over this.”
How he struggled to graduate from the Police Academy. Every course a challenge, except for guns and weapons, which he loved.
“You won’t do anything foolish?” she asked.
He laughed.
“When have I ever been foolish?” he said, but now he jumped back to his feet and peered out the window.
“Go,” she said. “Do your job. Don’t worry. I’m fine.”
“You sure?” He looked at her so urgently.
“Yes.”
“We’ll be here a little longer. The widow wants to see him, but first she wants to dress appropriately. Why don’t you call Winifred?”
He stood up, started to go to the door, then stopped to look at the very thing she’d been hoping he’d miss.
“Hey, Dove. What are you doing with a rock by your window?”
So he had noticed. She should have known; he was so much smarter than he ever liked to let on.
“I was planning on throwing it at Bender,” she said, and he laughed.
Why do people always laugh at the truth? she wondered.
Chapter 4
Her house felt smaller after Peter left. Which made sense, Maggie supposed. Love expanded, hate contracted. She could hear Joe on her front lawn, the familiar caw of his voice. He always sounded like he was announcing a baseball game. Mr. Cavanaugh’s little dog was snarling. He acted so much bigger than he was. The dog, not Mr. Cavanaugh. She felt off-kilter. She paced around her living room, not certain what to do.
Had she liked Bender, she would have wept. In the days and months after her daughter died, while other people assumed she was rudderless, she was, in fact, perfectly focused, which gave her days a rhythm. She grieved. That was all she had to do; didn’t need to eat, write, love, talk. In some ways she was more focused on her daughter after her death than before, because before there had always been the distraction of real life. But Bender was different; she couldn’t mourn him. Yet she couldn’t ignore him either. Couldn’t turn on the TV, or listen to music. Couldn’t eat. Would not do to have the smell of broiled steak floating over her lawn. Even she could not bring herself to be so coldhearted.
Her heart pounded. She hoped she wasn’t having a stroke. A man was dead on her front lawn. A man she’d hated. She remembered then the feeling she’d had of being watched. The creaking twig. Her house was on a quiet street, the neighbors all a good distance from one another, excepting Bender, who had encroached. But between the trees and the darkness and the Van Dornes being preoccupied with themselves, the street was very quiet. Maggie shivered as she thought about someone standing there, watching her, judging her. Thinking about how cruelly she had treated that man. He had a wife, who was even now getting dressed before she viewed his body.
What would she wear?
What did she even look like? Maggie wished she could remember. She must have met Noelle Bender. They’d lived in that house for more than two years, after all. Yet she couldn’t conjure up any strong memory of her. Bender was so vivid that anyone standing alongside him would have paled. All she could envision was light brown hair and bare feet. She didn’t like to wear shoes.
All Maggie really knew of Noelle Bender was that she wasn’t much of a gardener, nor much of an environmentalist. The lights in their house were on all the time and they didn’t recycle. And Tim Harrison, the garbageman, told her Noelle didn’t give a Christmas tip, a fact that Maggie wished she didn’t know and tried to put out of her head, without success. Such details one learned when one lived in a small town. That, and she knew one of the daughters had lice and it kept coming back, although Noelle told the school nurse otherwise. And now she knew that the widow wanted to dress up to see her husband’s body, and that she hadn’t come out of the house when Maggie yelled for her, though maybe because she was afraid of Maggie.
Peter was right, she thought. She should call her best friend, but getting hold of Winifred was problematic. Her friend lived in an adult community, and they didn’t allow phone calls late at night. But there had to be a way to reach her.
Maggie remembered then that one of the nurses had given her a card some time ago. Had told her to feel free to call if she ever had concerns about Winifred’s care. They were kind there and recognized the value of friendship—the only question was, what had she done with the card?
Probably put it in her desk, which was at the far end of the living room. Her one attempt at organization; if you put all stray things in one place, you have a shot at finding them later. She pulled open the top drawer. Alone among all the furnishings in the house, the desk was not an antique. She’d made it herself, following instructions from a catalog, before she wrote her first book. Had she been able to carve her own pen, she would have done that too. She wanted the act of creation to be as much under her control as possible. So she had a handmade Shaker-style desk that wobbled when she leaned on it too hard, but it was her own, and she imagined that the very wobble had influenced her writing. That she had stayed away from longer words because the desk could take only so much pressure; perhaps she would have had a more literary bent with a stronger desk.
Miraculously she found the card, right next to three for chimney sweeping. She called and got a startled-sounding nurse, who eventually remembered who Maggie was, and when she explained to her what had happened, hearing herself the tremor in her voice, the nurse said not to worry. She’d find Winifred and let her use her cell phone. Just wait a moment, the nurse said, and she’ll call back. So Maggie sat quietly, waiting for her friend to call, listening to Joe Mangione hollering on her front lawn, visualizing the nurse going through the halls of the home, finding Winifred, who would be in bed this time of night. Propping up the pillows, punching in the number.
The phone rang and Maggie grabbed it.
“Are you all right?” Winifred asked. Her voice was shaky, but Maggie knew a forceful lady was behind it. Sixty-two years old, with a beautiful figure that she was unable to display, much to her aggravation, because she couldn’t walk. The Parkinson’s was going after her with all it had, though Winifred was giving the disease a heck of a fight.
“You must have been frightened,” Winifred said.
“It seemed so unreal I didn’t have time to be frightened,” Maggie answered. “I must have sat alongside him for fifteen minutes and I didn’t think anything about it, but now I keep seeing him in my head.”
That dark, curly hair, the lips pulled back in alarm. A moment of sharp pain before crashing onto her front lawn; a stab of fear but nothing more. A quick way to die, the only trace of violence the blood on his lip that must have been from when he fell down. On a rock, perhaps. She thought of his reflector vest. He’d intended to go for a run; was there anything more tragic? A run to improve your life, that ended in death. A run on her lawn. By her tree.
“Do they know who killed him?” Winifred asked.
“Killed him? He had a heart attack.”
“Heart attack? Is that what Young Sherlock says?”
She heard Peter outside, talking to his boss. Thank God. Yes sir. Yes sir. A whiff of honeysuckle blew in through the window, a smell she’d always detested.
“Peter seemed pretty sure about the heart attack. Didn’t even ask Doc Steinberg to come out.”
“A man like Bender. I just assumed he’d been murdered. Seemed the type. In fact, if I didn’t know you better I’d think you murdered him.”
“Winifred, don’t even joke about that.”
Winifred laughed, dropped the phone, scrabbled around for it, and then resumed talking.
“Maggie
Dove, don’t you dare be a hypocrite. You hated that man and that’s no lie. One of the first things I said to myself, the day I moved into this place, was that I was done being seemly. I’ll speak the truth and nothing less. You should speak it too.”
“I wanted him gone, yes, but not like this,” Maggie said, the pain of her words scraping against her vocal cords. Ridiculous to feel so upset because she had hated the man. “I just wanted him to move away.”
“Of course, my friend. But he brought it on himself. It’s nothing to do with you; it was his time.”
Maggie sank down onto her living room couch, the rotating red light from the ambulance chasing itself around her sedate room.
“I can’t help but think that I precipitated the arrival of his time. That all the hate and anger I was feeling transposed itself onto him. Like voodoo. Maybe if I’d been kind to him, he’d still be alive.”
“If you were kind to him you’d be a woman without a willow tree.”
Winifred had never been a plant person. Maggie’d always been the one who picked Winifred’s plants, watered them, filling her friend’s home with orchids because it got perfect light. Winifred would have killed them all.
“No, my friend. It was an oak tree.”
“Well, it’s green and it has roots and he wanted to kill it. You can’t say that wasn’t so.”
Maggie pressed the phone against her mouth, trying not to speak too loud, conscious of the crowd on her front lawn and yet desperate to confide her secret. “I was watching for him, Winifred. That was why I was up. I stayed up, waiting for him. I was so sure he would show up on my lawn.”
“You were looking out the window for Bender?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see him?”
“No, that’s just the thing. I didn’t. I watched and waited and I was so furious because, you see, I knew, I knew he was going to come. I felt it, and so I got a rock.”
“What? What rock?”
Winifred wheezed with the effort of her speech. Maggie crouched even more tightly into a ball.
