by Susan Breen
“I’m not saying it’s right for them to drink, but I can’t be a hypocrite. We drank all the time. Kids got sick. I wanted to protect them.”
A boat cruised by. People laughed. How messed up things become, Maggie thought.
“Bender told me he made an appointment with Campbell. They were going to meet on Monday. He wanted to get me fired, and I told him what he could do.”
“You had an argument with him?”
“I’m an idiot,” he said.
“Yes, you are.”
He picked up some dirt and rubbed it in his hands. “It was a lucky thing for me that he died.”
“No one could seriously think you would hurt anyone.”
He laughed at that.
“No,” he said, squeezing her in a hug. Then he said the worst words in the English language, the words that signaled to Maggie that everything would get messed up, that disaster was lurking around the corner.
“Don’t worry, Dove,” he said. “Everything will be fine.”
Chapter 13
Saturday morning was Bender’s funeral and even though Maggie didn’t plan to go, she didn’t feel she should ignore it. Some solemnity seemed called for and so she dressed with care that morning, put on heels and her black Eileen Fisher pants and her black Eileen Fisher blouse, and she figured if nothing else, she looked elegant. Then she combed out her hair, put in her pearl earrings, checked the clock and saw it was 7 in the morning.
So it was going to be that kind of day.
Might as well plan out her Sunday School lesson. She gathered up her supplies and cogitated over what to do the following day, when Edgar Blake, he of the lice in his hair, was certain to show up in her classroom. She had no proof, of course, but she was inclined to believe Agnes on this one. If Agnes said the boy had lice, he did. She couldn’t toss him out of class and she couldn’t embarrass him, but she wondered if there would be a way to get him to wear a bathing cap. He was the sort of child who would probably like a bathing cap. Her own daughter had worn a bathing cap for years. Maggie never did figure out why.
If she could get Edgar into a cap, maybe then she could persuade him to watch one of the new movies the church had ordered in which various characters from the Bible were portrayed by vegetables. Maggie wasn’t sure why it was easier for people to accept Saint Paul as a potato than as a man, but so be it. Then there was Doubting Thomas as a carrot and the Virgin Mary as a plum. That at least made some sense. Jesus was a little apple with a nose and ears and the Sermon on the Mount looked like a vegetarian buffet.
She looked at her watch and saw it was now 7:30.
She made herself some coffee and sat down at her kitchen table. The sun shone in; it was a glorious day. Disaster always struck on glorious days, she believed. Nothing bad ever happened in the rain. Maggie had often thought how wrongheaded producers were to set their movies in dark and gloomy nights. It was in the glare of a sunny day that horrors usually took place. She wondered how many people would go to Bender’s funeral. He had two daughters. Their friends would go. Family. At Juliet’s funeral, the whole town turned out. The principal shut down the high school early so that all the kids could come. The local deli catered the reception, donating hundreds of dollars’ worth of food, and they kept bringing her meals for long afterward. Every day there would be a knock on her door: Joe Mangione, or the lady that ran the cupcake store, or someone from the church, just stopping by to sit for a while.
She kept thinking about what Peter said last night, how they were testing for poison. That still seemed odd to her. As a mystery writer, she’d spent a lot of time reading about poisonings and one of the things she knew for sure was that they were hard to detect. That many poisoners went unpunished because no one thought to look. Evidence didn’t show up on a regular autopsy. She went over to her computer and typed in gas chromatography. It was a “confirmatory test,” Wikipedia explained. The first round of tests are presumptive tests, which screen for the possibility of drugs but are less specific, and less expensive. Confirmatory tests are used only if there is “the possible presence of a drug or toxin.” Possible presence. What made Campbell think to look? she wondered.
Suddenly Maggie saw a flash of movement out her window and noticed Noelle Bender walking on her lawn. Walking toward her little oak tree.
What was it with that family and boundaries? she wondered. Why didn’t they stay where they were supposed to? They had a perfectly good lawn all to their own and a fine house, so why did they have to bother with Maggie’s? She watched as Noelle minced her way over to the oak tree and stood there, looking at it. Be patient, Maggie thought. Her husband died under that tree. Maybe she just wanted to meditate a moment.
But it was Maggie’s tree. Her oak tree. No, she reminded herself. It was God’s oak tree. Well, God didn’t want it moved any more than she did, she thought.
Oh God. Today was the day of this woman’s husband’s funeral. How could she be cruel to her? She noticed that Noelle was holding the same white bag she had when Maggie saw her coming out of the pharmacy yesterday. Now what? Was she going to pour a box of arsenic on the tree?
Maggie could bear it no more. She went outside.
“Hello,” she said.
Noelle didn’t answer. Why should she? Maggie thought. She was only standing on Maggie’s front lawn, under an oak tree that her husband had wanted to destroy.
“May I help you with something?”
Noelle didn’t meet her eyes, but she shook her head. She was a slender woman, with a nice figure, as Maggie’s mother would have put it. She wore a black dress for the funeral that would have worked just as well at a cocktail party. The skirt had swing to it. Her soft brown hair was pulled back, but Maggie could see, when she turned around, that she’d put on a lot of makeup. Once, a very long time ago, in a home ec class, a cosmetician had come in and told the girls how to play up their assets. Maggie remembered how Winifred had laughed at that, though Maggie, studious as ever, jotted down notes. Put contour on your nose if you want to slim it. Put liner around your lips to plump them up. Noelle must have gone to a similar class. And she wore shoes, in honor of the occasion, though they were open-toe. She seemed to feel a need to expose her feet.
“Are you looking for something?” Maggie asked, her temper starting to rise. She hated being ignored.
“All he wanted was to paint his pictures. He loved the river.” Again, there was that fluty baby doll voice that seemed so unnatural. Were people born speaking like that?
“I’m sorry, but he could have painted pictures of the Hudson with a tree in front. Think of the great Hudson River school of painters. There are plenty of trees in their paintings.”
“Bender wasn’t one to compromise his vision,” his widow said.
She looked like she might sob, and Maggie took a step toward her, thinking to offer comfort, but at the first step Noelle whirled around and put up her hands.
“No,” she said. “Don’t you come near me.”
“But you’re on my lawn,” Maggie said. She sounded so childish, even to herself. She wished she could be big about this, she wished she didn’t care. But she did.
“Where I grew up,” Noelle said, “we were part of a real community. People didn’t worry about boundaries. Children could go wherever they wanted. If you wanted to play on your neighbor’s lawn, you just went there.”
“Did you put drain cleaner on your neighbors’ trees where you grew up?” Maggie snapped.
Noelle took a step back then, stumbling slightly, as she did so patting her stomach in the age-old way women do when they’re pregnant. Oh, the whole thing was so sad, Maggie thought. If Noelle were anyone else she’d invite her into her house. She would befriend her. But she just couldn’t do it. She couldn’t connect with this woman. Seventy times seven, she heard her minister say. That’s what Jesus said about forgiveness, that you should forgive someone seventy times seven times. Of course our Lord had issues with trees Himself, she thought, remembering how he curs
ed the fig tree.
“I’ll just leave you alone out here,” Maggie said. Sometimes the best thing to do was leave. But she hadn’t gone far when Noelle called after her.
“I hear you’re a writer.”
Maggie stopped. “Yes. Well, I was.”
“I need to make some money fast,” Noelle said.
“Publishing’s not a way to make money fast,” Maggie said.
“I read about a woman who dreamed an idea, wrote it down and sold it for seven figures.”
Why was she arguing about publishing with a woman on the day of her husband’s funeral? “Of course,” Maggie said. “It could happen.”
Four helicopters flew overhead, in formation, heading south from West Point. Maggie wondered what they were doing, what was going on in the larger world.
“I want to hire you to help me write it,” Noelle said.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t do that kind of thing anymore.”
Noelle shook her head. Not a woman to hear what she didn’t want to. “It’s a mystery about an exotic dancer,” she said. “I mean, the exotic dancer is the detective. Isn’t that fabulous? One of her clients gets murdered and she’s got to solve it. She knows all sorts of self-defense skills because she’s used to having to defend herself from men. It’s all sort of film noir,” Noelle said. She looked more animated than Maggie had ever seen. She looked sincere. For the first time Maggie felt Noelle wasn’t toying with her.
“It sounds like a good idea.”
“I know,” Noelle said. “It’s a great idea. I even have the title. ‘Strip and Search.’ ”
“It could be good.”
“How much would you want?”
“Really, I just don’t do it anymore. Quite honestly, if I were going to write, I’d write my own book. But I just don’t write anymore.”
Noelle glared at her. A limousine pulled into her driveway. The driver beckoned to Noelle, but she held up her hand. “Coming,” she called.
She opened up the little white bag then, and began tearing at the package. She didn’t make eye contact with Maggie, just began ripping away cardboard, shredding it onto the grass, and then an ornament emerged, and Noelle took it and hung it on the tree. It was an angel, sitting on a toilet. Maggie stared at it, dumbfounded. It was the most tasteless thing she’d ever seen.
“He loved these,” Noelle said. “They always made him laugh.”
Maggie wanted to point out that Noelle had a perfectly good cherry blossom tree on her own lawn that could host a multitude of angels, but something in Noelle’s face stopped her. It was that look of defiance, that same look Peter always got, that look that touched Maggie’s heart every time. It aroused some instinct of protectiveness inside her. For a moment she wondered what Peter would make of Noelle, or vice versa.
“I do have a hook,” Noelle said. “A hook that will make my book absolutely irresistible to publishers.”
Maggie nodded. She suspected Noelle was going to tell her that her best friend was in publishing, or that Steven Spielberg was her uncle. But what Noelle said did surprise her. So much so that as soon as Noelle got in the car, Maggie got out her phone and called Winifred.
Chapter 14
“Guess what Bender’s wife used to do for a living?” Maggie asked her best friend. The phone felt warm in her hand. She’d made herself a cup of tea, and settled herself in her kitchen, a tidy little room built for a time when servants did the cooking and weren’t expected to use much space. No island. Barely enough room for a refrigerator. She had chickens everywhere. Mugs in the shape of chickens and little chicken oven mitts and salt and pepper shakers. Maggie never had figured out where this love of chickens came from, given that she didn’t like the living creatures particularly well. But for years, for Mother’s Day and her birthday, people gave her chickens.
“She was a stripper,” Winifred answered.
“Dang, how did you know? I thought I’d surprise you.”
Maggie could hear Arthur chuckling in the background. She suspected Winifred was rolling her eyes. Or worse.
“I have my sources of information,” Winifred said. “Bender’s wife worked as a stripper and that’s how she met him. She jumped out of a box on his 35th birthday. It was love at first sight. Something similar happened with my second husband,” she went on, “though there wasn’t a box, and no poles were involved.”
“How long have you known?” Maggie asked.
“A few months,” Winifred answered.
“But why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why is it important?”
Somehow her chickens looked a little foolish in this light. But not so bad as an angel on a toilet, Maggie reminded herself.
“Well, I don’t know that it’s important, but it’s interesting. If she were an accountant, you would have told me, so why not tell me this?”
“Bender didn’t care,” Winifred said. “He married her, didn’t he? It’s the only thing I know about that man that I like. Needs to be someone in Darby-on-Hudson who’s not a prude.”
“I am not a prude,” Maggie said, because she knew that comment was directed at her.
“You’re a Sunday School teacher. You can’t help yourself.”
“I live my life by a certain set of rules, but that’s not to say I think everyone should. Or that I want to burn those I disagree with.”
“You’re a prude, Maggie Dove. Look how you carried on about that man.”
“I didn’t have an issue with his morals, Winifred. I had an issue with the fact that he was trying to kill my tree.”
She felt oddly hurt. First Peter hadn’t wanted to tell her about his trouble with Campbell. Now Winifred didn’t want to tell her about Noelle. Was she so forbidding? She thought of herself as a woman trying to do the best she could. Maybe she did cling to rules more than most, but she needed something to cling to.
Maggie noticed Mr. Cavanaugh walking by with his dog. So he hadn’t gone to the funeral either. He paused for a moment in front of the tree, looked at the angel and then moved on. What if she should have moved the damn tree? Maggie thought. What if she had been unreasonable?
“So now that you know she’s a stripper, do you think she murdered Bender?” Winifred asked.
Maggie turned her attention back to the phone, which was becoming slippery under the heat of her emotion.
“I don’t know that anyone murdered him, Winifred. Peter says he died of a heart attack and I believe him, but I just want a better sense of what’s going on.”
“In case Young Sherlock winds up being the murderer?”
“In case he’s accused of it. Yes, all right, I’m concerned because I know Peter had a disagreement with Bender and he has a flair for getting into trouble and I assume you already know all about it since you seem to know everything.”
“Peter Nelson is trouble.”
“He’s always been trouble,” Maggie snapped. “That’s part of his charm.”
“No, it’s gotten worse. You’re so fixated on the boy he used to be that you don’t see the man he is. You don’t see what he’s become.”
Maggie began pacing around her kitchen, not that there was anywhere to go. On the refrigerator she had a picture of Juliet and Peter from back in third grade, when the nature counselor came to talk to the class, to tell them about all the birds and animals in the community and Maggie had raised her hand, because she was the parent of the day, and asked why it was that peepers make that high squeaking noise in the spring. “Because they’re having sex,” the counselor had said. Juliet didn’t speak to her for a week, but Peter, dear Peter, laughed and hugged Maggie.
“If someone had run Bender down,” Maggie said, “or shot at him, or stabbed him, I could believe that Peter was the culprit. But I simply do not see Peter as a poisoner. By God, that child barely passed biology and that with old Mr. Laws helping him cheat, tapping him on the back during the Regents test whenever he got something wrong. I simply do not see Peter committing that type of crime.”
“They wouldn’t have lasted, you know,” Winifred said. “If Juliet were alive today, you probably wouldn’t even remember who Peter is.”
“How can you say that?”
“Because they wouldn’t have. Because she was so different than him. Your daughter was a star. She would have soared, and he’d wind up exactly where he is, doing a lousy job and drinking too much.”
Again Maggie pictured him as he had been that last night, the last truly happy night of her life. Juliet so full of life, and Peter so handsome. So strong.
“You’re wrong. He would have been a star too. She would have pulled him up with her. But when she died, he lost the best part of his life.” Her voice began to crack. She wasn’t even sure what they were arguing about. “His life was destroyed because he loved my daughter. How can I let down someone like that?”
“So even if he killed Bender. Even then, you’d find some excuse?”
“He didn’t do it, Winifred. I know that as surely as I know I didn’t do it. Or you didn’t do it, for that matter.”
“You’re sure of me too?”
“Yes, because I know the people I love. I know who you are and what Peter is. And I also know what you’re not.”
Winifred began clearing her throat, raspy sounds coming across the phone. It sounded like Arthur was pounding her on the back, trying to bring her relief. When she finally spoke, her voice was husky.
“You’re a fool, Maggie Dove.”
“I must be, to have put up with you all these years.”
Winifred laughed at that, a welcome sound.
“You’ve been a good friend.”
“So have you, Winifred. You don’t sound so good.”
She wheezed deeply. “Old friends. Old hearts.”
“You’re right,” Maggie said. “I am a prude.”
“I know,” Winifred said, and then her voice got serious. “And I’m a fool.”
“Fair enough,” Maggie said.
“No, I really am a fool. I think I’ve made a mistake, Maggie.”
“Tell me what. Can I help?”
