Maggie Dove

by Susan Breen

  He looked like an insane person. His hair was all on end, his face red and wet with tears, and he clambered toward her. She stood up, confused, assuming he was going to yell at the boy, prepared to remind him that he himself had ridden dirt bikes in the forest. The boy went roaring off, but Peter didn’t even look his way. His attention was on Maggie.

  “Peter,” she said. “Are you okay?

  “Did you get my message?” she went on. “I met with Doc Steinberg and I was trying to reach you. I could help you find a lawyer. We’ll be able to work this out,” she said, though even as she walked toward him she knew something terrible was coming. She flinched against bad news.

  “I’m sorry, Dove,” he said, voice breaking. “But I just got word about Winifred. She had a heart attack. She didn’t suffer, but we’ve lost her.”

  She looked at him stupidly. She’d only just spoken to Winifred the other day and she sounded fine. There was a mistake. It was just like Winifred to play a joke, but death was no joke. Death was sudden and vicious and Maggie sank into Peter’s arms and she sobbed against his chest and as she did she heard the peepers singing around her. They must have begun singing while she was watching the boy. They had turned on, but she had missed them. She cried as she thought of her friend. Sadness and loneliness stretched out in front of her, but how grateful she was to have Peter’s strong arms to lean on.

  Chapter 19

  The town stopped for Winifred’s funeral. Three of her four husbands came and spoke, which caused a palpitation in the community. So much sex for some old woman, though of course Winifred had been young and beautiful at most of the times she’d been married. The husbands spoke about her humor and liveliness and wicked tongue, which caused them all to titter a bit.

  They clustered together after the service and Maggie said hello, though she hadn’t been wild about any of them: Ned, the high school football star who Winifred had followed to college, whereupon he immediately injured himself and ended his career. She’d had her daughter with him. Then there was Scottie, a jockey she met in Saratoga. After that divorce, she’d moved out to Fort Worth, where she married Jerry, the one who broke her heart, the one who hadn’t come. And then finally there was Fred Melrose, who ran a catering business in Ardsley but got into some difficulties with his taxes. They’d got divorced a decade ago.

  Winifred always made much of the fact that although she’d divorced her husbands, she’d never broken up a marriage and never had an affair. Each one came sui generis. Maggie’d never been sure why that was such a good thing, but it mattered to Winifred. She’d broken up no marriages. She had ethics, if not a long attention span.

  Winifred would have liked her funeral, Maggie thought. That was the only way to get through it. To distance herself a little. To laugh. Winifred would have been pleased at the turnout. The synagogue was packed, with people standing up in the back aisle. She would have liked the rabbi’s speech and the way he spoke about her good works. She’d been involved in so many more causes than Maggie had realized. She would have liked her daughter’s speech too. Winifred and Amy hadn’t always gotten along. Amy actually lived a mile south, but hadn’t seen Winifred in five years. She put that all aside for the funeral service and talked about her mother’s bravery. How she was such an inspiration.

  “You did good,” Maggie said to her afterward and Amy grinned one of her rare grins.

  “Thanks, Auntie Mag. Isn’t it amazing what thousands of dollars of therapy can do?”

  The Dolan boys came then to play their bagpipes, which wasn’t a traditional feature of a Jewish service, but Winifred had loved to hear them play. Watching them huff and puff to “Sunrise, Sunset,” made Maggie tear up all over again, and she had just wiped her eyes dry when Agnes appeared, almost out of nowhere.

  She was in fine form. Her hair was now a dusky shade of red, parted to the side, without bangs. She had on false eyelashes and dark lipstick and she wore a very nice white suit. She looked a little like a bride, in fact.

  “I tried out a new hairdresser in the city,” Agnes said, answering the question Maggie hadn’t asked. “Thought I’d splurge.”

  “It looks very nice.”

  “Want a ride home?” Peter interrupted. He looked like he’d been punched. His face looked a decade older than it had when she’d met him in the park.

  “No,” Maggie said. “Thanks, but Winifred always got mad if I left a party too early.”

  “Is there going to be a party?” Agnes asked.

  She looked so concerned that Maggie felt touched. She remembered Agnes as she had been, Agnes in high school, always on the outside of things, always left out. She was one of eight children, which you would think would make her sociable, but her family hadn’t gone that way. They’d all stuck together, clannish, with the result that none of them had friends outside the family. Only Agnes seemed interested in making friends, but she was a homely girl. Not part of the popular set, which consisted of Maggie and Winifred and Shelly Lundeen and Patti Baker. They’d been cruel to Agnes.

  “There’s no party,” Maggie said. “I just meant that Winifred would not want me to leave the funeral early.

  “Oh,” Agnes said, looking flustered for the first time in all the years Maggie had known her. But then she rallied.

  “Why didn’t the third husband come?” she asked.

  “I don’t think she’d spoken to him in twenty-five years,” Maggie said. “Plus, I don’t think their breakup was amicable. She never liked to talk about him.”

  Maggie hadn’t even met him. The wedding was out in Fort Worth, where Winifred had gone after the breakup of her marriage to the jockey, her second husband. She’d moved to Fort Worth, got a job as an assistant to someone at an oil company, left her daughter back in Darby, with her parents. Maggie couldn’t go to that third wedding. Juliet was young then, Maggie busy with her husband, they’d lost touch. She must have been married to him for five years. Maybe more, and then one day she showed up back in Darby. She could see Winifred was hurting. She knew she’d loved that husband and he broke her heart; but Winifred, she never wanted to talk about him. He was like a bad dream.

  “Maybe he killed her,” Agnes said.

  “Nobody killed her.”

  Agnes scanned the room. She was like a terrier, Maggie thought. Relentless.

  “She was sick. She told me herself she was worsening.”

  “For a mystery writer you have an unsuspicious mind.”

  “Winifred was an old woman. She was sick and her heart gave out.” That’s what Amy said, anyway. That they assumed it was heart failure.

  “Only 62,” Agnes said. “Not so old.”

  Maggie felt something cold encircle her heart. “What are you suggesting?”

  “It’s just that our small village seems to be suffering from a spate of sudden deaths. A suspicious mind, which I freely acknowledge having, might wonder if there wasn’t a serial murderer at work.”

  Maggie felt the ground underneath her shift, as though she’d been in an earthquake. The bagpipe music began to sound louder, more grating.

  “A serial murderer. You think Winifred’s death is related to Bender’s?”

  “Is it impossible?”

  “What do they have in common that anyone would want to kill them both? They didn’t even know each other.”

  “On the contrary,” Agnes said, eyeing Gretchen, who seemed to be yelling at Hal. The world’s most romantic couple was having an argument right in the middle of Winifred’s funeral reception. Had the world gone mad? “There are more points of connection between them than you think. Including your young friend.”

  “Peter? Why on earth would Peter want to kill Winifred? They were friends.”

  “Were they?” Agnes said, looking at her so sadly that Maggie faltered, wondering what new horror was coming her way. But before she could pursue the conversation, Winifred’s daughter, Amy, appeared by her side and started to cry and Maggie put her arm around her and guided her off to a secluded corn
er. They sat next to each other on a red couch. Maggie felt dizzy, concerned, exhausted. How desperately she wanted her friend right then! How much she wished she had Winifred there to talk to. But here was this girl. Girl, she was 44 years old, but Maggie still saw that sweet girl in front of her who spent so many years of her life crying. Even her father wasn’t paying much attention to her. He’d married again, to a young, thin wife; his other four daughters took after her.

  “Now I’ll never have a chance to make things right with her,” she wept. Poor thing, Maggie thought. Poor girl, who had been born with a football player’s body and a pair of liquid brown eyes that could tear your heart right out.

  “You were a good daughter. You have nothing to reproach yourself for.”

  “A good daughter.” Amy wiped her hand across her nose. Maggie searched around for a handkerchief and gave it to her.

  “She was a provoking woman,” Maggie said.

  “I thought she’d live forever. I always thought I’d have a chance to fix things with her. I figured she’d live to 105. I never thought she’d die so young.”

  She began to cry, large fat tears that actually bounced off her legs as they fell. Tears, Maggie suspected, that came from deep within her, from a little girl who cried because her mother wasn’t there. Tears she’d been crying for a long time.

  “She did love you,” Maggie said. “I hope you know that. She didn’t always show it as well as she should have. But she loved you and she was proud of you.”

  “Yeah,” she sniffed. “Right.”

  “She was so pleased you were good with numbers. Remember that time you counted to 10,000 and wrote all the numbers down on a pad of paper? She talked about that for years. She couldn’t believe she had a daughter who was such a math whiz. And I think,” Maggie went on, “that even though she hadn’t seen you in a while, she always knew you would come if she needed you.”

  Amy nodded. “I would have.” She blew her nose strongly into her handkerchief. “In fact,” she said, “Mom did call me. Right before she…right before she passed.”

  Maggie thought, So hard to say the word “died.”

  “What for?”

  “It was something insignificant. I thought she was calling to apologize, but she just had a question about something.”

  “What?”

  “It was about Peter. She wanted to know if I was going out with him, which was ridiculous because he’d be the last person I’d go out with.”

  Why would Winifred ask a question like that? Maggie wondered.

  “The funny thing is,” Amy said. “I actually had news I wanted to tell her. I have started seeing someone, and I’d planned to go by and tell her about him this week. I thought it might patch things up between us.”

  “That’s wonderful news.”

  “I know. A miracle, right?” She laughed and cried at the same time.

  “Well, she would have been happy, then. She always hoped you’d find someone.”

  “I don’t know why. She didn’t have much luck with romance.”

  “No, but she was always hopeful.”

  “Do you suppose I could bring him by to meet you sometime? I suppose you’re my surrogate mother now.”

  “Of course,” Maggie said. “You don’t even need to call first. Just come. Please. Better yet, let’s pick a date, that way we’ll be sure to meet.”

  —

  The next day Maggie went over to the nursing home to clear out Winifred’s things. Amy had offered to come, but Maggie knew she had to work, and was content to do it. She wanted time alone in her friend’s place. She wanted to soak up whatever remained of her. There wasn’t much though. Winifred had cleared away most of her things before she moved there. So there were some clothes, some jewelry, which Maggie set aside for Amy, a bunch of books, mainly her own. The furniture she gave to Arthur, who came by looking sincerely grief-stricken.

  Most of the day Maggie spent sitting on the bed, looking through the old photos and letters and bills before putting them in boxes or throwing them away. She came across a note from Juliet that she hadn’t even known Winifred saved. It was a thank-you note for a long forgotten birthday present, but it touched Maggie that Winifred had hung on to it.

  “Dear friend.”

  She folded it up and was putting it in her pocketbook, when she heard someone at the door.

  Maggie looked up and almost laughed out loud. She couldn’t believe who stood in front of her.

  Chapter 20

  It was Inspector Benet, just as she’d described him in her mysteries. His hair was silver, his lips wry, his cheekbones carved. A man who knew how to tell a joke. A Frenchman. Elegant, mocking.

  “Not much stuff left,” Inspector Benet said. Even his voice sounded right. Not quite French, but southern. Genteel.

  Maggie smiled at him. She couldn’t help herself. This was who Winifred had wanted her to see, this was what she had been so excited about.

  “I’m Frank Bowman,” he said. “You must be Maggie Dove.”

  She felt herself blush. How foolish. She struggled to rise to her feet and he put out his hand. Strong hands, she thought. Inspector Benet had been a jujitsu master. He had strong hands too. Hard hands.

  “I saw you at the funeral,” he said. “But you were surrounded by a crowd and I didn’t want to interrupt.”

  “Winifred had a lot of friends.”

  “Yes,” he said. His eyes sparkled. They actually sparkled. “She was a pip. One of the most remarkable women I ever knew.”

  “Yes,” Maggie said. “Me too.”

  He leaned against the bed, smoothed out his pants. “She told me you were the best writer who ever lived.”

  Maggie laughed. “Except for Shakespeare. Even Winifred had to bow down before the Bard.”

  “ ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ ” he quoted, which made her blush.

  The sun was beginning to set. She’d spent the whole day cleaning and sorting. Surprising, given that Winifred didn’t have many things; but moving always took so much longer than expected. The sounds of the nursing home were becoming more insistent, the wheels of the food carts, the medicine being dispensed. Maggie’s stomach rumbled loudly and automatically she crossed her arms.

  “You must be hungry, Ms. Dove. And tired. Would it be presumptuous of me to invite you out for some dinner?”

  Her first instinct was to say no. It was the day after her best friend’s funeral. Less than a week since finding her neighbor dead on her lawn. She should find Peter. She should talk to him.

  “You know she’d want you to go,” he said, this man with the sparkling eyes and the hard hands and the soft white hair.

  “She would, wouldn’t she?” She could almost feel Winifred’s hands at her back. Go! Go! “I’d like that.”

  She picked up the last of the things. The room was empty, and she wished it farewell, and then they walked together toward the front door. Maggie noticed a cluster of white-haired women sitting by the front entryway, eyeing her as she went past. She noticed they all held copies of Crime and Punishment. Book club, she suspected. They smiled at Frank, then began whispering. It all went back to high school, she thought. But then he went off to retrieve his car, which was a sleek silver car with a door that swung open rakishly. A Mazda, and it had a stick shift, which she’d always found appealing. There was something competent about a man who could drive a stick shift.

  “I know just the place,” he said, and she sank against the seatback and let him drive. It felt so good to have someone in control. She’d felt so rudderless, and here was a man who knew exactly where she wanted to go, and he was right. He drove them to a charming restaurant, right on the Hudson, that served drinks with all sorts of spices mixed in and tasty little plates of food and delicious desserts and she wolfed it all down, surprised at her hunger.

  He knew all about her, which was also nice. She didn’t have to explain who she was or who Juliet had been. Sometimes she thought part of why she stayed in her
town was because everyone knew who she was. But mainly he talked and she ate and he told stories and she ate.

  He told her stories about his childhood in New Orleans, and his mother, who was still alive, who was captain of her golf team somewhere in Florida. She’d been quite a character. She’d been a smuggler and had taken them back and forth to Mexico City, stealing artifacts. “We had nasty encounters with customs, let me tell you. When they do a full body search…”

  She laughed and laughed as he told one story after another, and when she was as full as could be, she looked at the river for a bit. A group of kayakers went by, the rhythm of the paddles oddly comforting.

  He put his hand on hers then. “Are you all right, Ms. Dove?”

  “Please, call me Maggie. And I’m feeling more all right than I expected to,” she said. “Thank you.”

  She looked into his face, so keen and interested. He reminded her a little bit of her husband, because of course Inspector Benet had reminded her of her husband too. She’d never liked macho men. She’d loved men who had command of their minds, who spoke with authority and had elegance. She liked that he didn’t make a lot of noise when he ate.

  “You have an expressive face, Maggie. I don’t imagine you’d be a good liar.”

  “No, not much good at poker either. Every time I have a winning hand I say, ‘Yippee,’ no matter how hard I try not to.”

  He laughed. “And you, a Sunday School teacher. I didn’t know you were allowed to play poker.”

  “When I was growing up I couldn’t. Couldn’t play any games on Sunday, or sing, or dance. My parents were very strict. But I never liked all those rules. I always felt like God wanted me to have fun. Maybe it’s just my own projecting, but I have always liked the story of Jesus at the wedding, turning water into wine.”