Maggie Dove's Detective Agency

by Susan Breen

  Chapter 10

  The invitations arrived the next day. They went to every single citizen of the village of Darby-on-Hudson. They were printed with gold lettering on heavy black stock. “Come celebrate the return of Domino Raines and her family at a special Halloween celebration on the grounds of Stern Manor. Costumes required.”

  Immediately the village sprang into action. Costume consultants began arriving from Manhattan to set up shop. Two hundred dollars for a consultation. People began to form teams. Five of D’Amici’s regulars planned to go as a giant Italian sub. Joe Mangione planned to tag along as a pickle. A fight broke out between two men who wanted to be Harrison Ford in Star Wars. Some of the high school students refused to dress up out of principle, though Maggie wasn’t sure what the principle was.

  Agnes wanted the three of them to dress as detectives, with trench coats and hats and business cards. She planned for Cherrelle to dress up as a saucy detective secretary. She planned to introduce her around. Edgar wanted to go as a zombie with a knife in his eye, but Helen said no, and instead he dressed up as Detective Grudge.

  Everyone was excited except for Maggie, who felt that the whole thing was wrong. It wasn’t natural for Racine to be happy. People didn’t change overnight, did they? Not that way. Of course, Maggie had changed overnight herself, but that was because disaster struck. Maggie’d gone from being a normal, friendly person to someone clenched with grief, and it had taken her decades to get back to any form of normalcy. But that was different, surely.

  Something was wrong, and she felt certain Domino was behind it.

  She kept seeing Domino as she had looked in the cellar. Just because somebody says no once, doesn’t mean they’ll say no forever. Was it possible that Domino put a spell on Racine that caused her to change her personality, and if she could do that, could she also bilk money out of Racine? Could she get her to give her the inheritance? Did Domino’s witchcraft actually work? Maggie didn’t want to think so, but she was a religious person. She believed in a God she could not see; could only feel and love. But was it such a stretch to go from believing in one set of unseen forces to another? This was the exact reason Racine had come to her, Maggie realized. Racine knew it would take a believer to believe what she was afraid of.

  “She gave us $5,000,” Agnes said, when Maggie raised her concerns. “You’re not thinking we should give that back.”

  “Seems sort of hard to prove, Maggie Dove,” Helen said, but she couldn’t say more because there was a crisis in Syria and she had to write a report.

  Maggie would not go to Walter Campbell about it. That much she knew.

  After puzzling over it a bit, Maggie decided her best plan of action would be to go to the library. She could research witchcraft there. But not at the Darby library. It would be all over town in fifteen minutes. Instead, on Thursday afternoon she went to the big, anonymous library in Yonkers. Almost immediately, she found the book she was looking for: The Only Book of Wiccan Spells You’ll Ever Need. She flipped through it.

  There were spells for everything. Spells to relieve digestive complaints, and spells to quell the common cold. There was a weight-loss chakra. She flipped through to the chapter on spells for hard times. There was a courage spell and a quick cash potion. Then there was a spell to overcome obstacles. That required a statue of an elephant and a knife. There were no statues mentioned that looked like the one she’d seen on Domino’s circle. None of the spells seemed anything but innocuous, and the book assured its readers that white witches believed it was unethical to try to change someone’s will without their consent.

  But that implied there were black witches, and black spells. The book was silent on that score. She looked through all the books on witchcraft, each one more life-affirming than the last. Invariably she would find a sentence suggesting another type of witch, but nothing more was said. She decided the best thing to do would be to take out the books and read through them more carefully and then perhaps go through the bibliography.

  That Sunday, the minister preached a sermon on evil. Surprising how often that happened, Maggie thought, that she heard a sermon on the very topic she’d been worrying about. Maggie had not heard a minister preach about evil in years, and yet here was Reverend Sunday Nkrumah tackling the subject. She looked somber. She wasn’t a large woman, but she had presence. She exuded power, and she started to speak—so softly that everyone had to lean forward—about what the word “evil” meant today.

  “We have become so preoccupied with forgiveness and grace, that we have forgotten about the word that’s at the heart of it all,” she said. “Sin!”

  Then she began to talk about the prodigal son, and that the reason the father forgave him was because he confessed his sin. He atoned.

  “If we abandon the language of sin, then when the devil appears in our midst we will be speechless before him,” she said.

  Afterward, Maggie kept thinking about what the minister said. She knew she had felt something dark in the cellar with Domino. She believed that hatred carried its own power, and she sensed Domino was a woman who hated. At the same time, she felt out of her league. She was just a Sunday School teacher. Nothing more. She had no superpowers. She had no weapons. But she knew what she believed and she knew there was right and wrong, and she believed Domino was on the wrong side of things. Maggie feared what would happen at the party next Saturday night. She felt she owed it to Racine to protect her as best she could.

  Chapter 11

  Stern Manor was transformed on the night of the party. There were pumpkins everywhere. Some were carved to look like gargoyles or monsters. Others were stacked on top of one another to look like dinosaurs. Still others looked like celebrities, and every single pumpkin glowed with light. The constant flickering made Stern Manor seem alive, beating with a thousand hearts.

  Thousands of people poured onto the lawn. People from the village, people Maggie had never seen before, people she couldn’t recognize because of costumes. Edgar ran off the moment they got there to watch the magicians doing tricks, Helen chasing after him. There were roving fortune-tellers and women dressed as maids serving an extravagant selection of hors d’oeuvres: bacon dipped in chocolate and chili-covered snapper and seared steak lettuce cups and crab beignets. Everything oozed the moment you put it in your mouth, so it seemed like the whole village was oozing and dripping and everyone seemed overexcited.

  Almost immediately, Agnes got into an intense phone call with Cherrelle, who had not yet turned up. Cherrelle couldn’t find the manor, she couldn’t park, she had a migraine and she had to go home. Agnes’s insistent voice throbbed underneath all the other mayhem. “You’ve got to take care of yourself better, babe. You have to take care.” Finally Agnes charged off, and Maggie was alone.

  Not really, because she was surrounded by a whole village worth of people she knew, but her lack of costume separated her from them. Every so often Maggie caught a glimpse of Domino in white, with her husband at her side. Honestly, it was hard to know if they were in costume or not. Mercy was there, dressed as a police officer, which Maggie assumed was also not a costume. She noticed Milo Raines lope by, also not in costume, followed by a group of girls and Billy Kim on a hover board. She waved. She couldn’t help herself, and Billy waved back and gave her that crooked grin of his. She hadn’t seen as much of him since Agnes stopped paying him to follow her, but it was always a treat when he cropped up, and she was absurdly touched that he waved at her. She remembered riding on his dirt bike with him. She remembered how he saved her life last spring.

  Finally she spotted Racine. Or she spotted her beret anyway, and Maggie made her way in her direction. Racine was dressed as an artist, in a white smock. Her red beret completed the look. Maggie was relieved to see Racine standing alongside her mother. Her devotion hadn’t changed, whatever was going on with her sister.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  The old lady seemed much frailer than she had two weeks earlier. She wore a flapper outfit
costume that looked like she might have worn it in the 1920s, and she had a soft white blanket draped over her.

  “Who are these people?” she asked. “I don’t know any of them.”

  “This is Maggie Dove,” Racine said. “You remember her. She came and visited with us.”

  “I don’t know who these people are,” she said. “Why are they all on our lawn?”

  “It’s a celebration, Mama,” Racine said, tucking her hand against her mother’s cheek, stroking her softly. “We’re celebrating Domino’s return.”

  “They look disheveled,” she said. “These aren’t our kind of people.”

  Racine nodded at Maggie. “I think I better get my mother inside. She’s exhausted.”

  “Of course,” Maggie said.

  Maggie watched the two of them head back to the house. The crowd parted in front of them, but no one spoke to them. They were in their own world. A sharp bolt of lightning suddenly lit up the sky. Everyone oohed, assuming for a moment that it was a light show. Anything seemed possible right then.

  Maggie turned away and found herself face-to-face with Domino. She wore a sweeping white cape, tight white pants, and she’d dressed Charlotte in a little matching outfit. Around the spider’s midsection was a diamond-studded chain. It looked as though Domino had gotten access to some of the money.

  “Maggie Dove,” she said. “I heard you were doing research on witchcraft at the Yonkers Library.”

  Maggie felt herself blush. The lightning speared overhead.

  “How on earth do you know that?” she asked.

  “Don’t you suppose that there are librarians who are witches?”

  Maggie thought back to that bland, modern building—the open tables, the rows of shelves. To think that a witch had been spying on her, or maybe not. There were a lot of ways Domino could know she’d been at the library. Maybe she’d been there herself.

  “It’s true. I was researching spells.”

  “And what did you learn? Did you determine whether or not I’ve put my sister under a spell?”

  Domino was the same height as Maggie, and yet she seemed to loom so much larger. She was like a spider, all her parts moving, ready to bite. Maggie wanted to take a step back, but felt she shouldn’t. She had to maintain whatever control she could.

  “I learned that it violates your code to put someone under a spell against her will.”

  Domino laughed at that. She had one of those loud, attention-getting laughs. Always the center of attention, Maggie thought. One of those people who crave it, no matter the reason.

  “Against my sister’s will? I don’t think she’s a good judge of what’s good for her or not. Look at how she’s spent the last forty years, taking care of my mother. If I put her under a spell that gets her out of that, I would think she’d be grateful.”

  “Lucky for you she is so devoted. You haven’t had to spend much time looking after your mother.”

  “No,” Domino said, eyes suddenly softening. Her lips turned down a little bit. “Now you’ve made me feel guilty, Maggie Dove.”

  A bright shard of lightning split against the sky. For a moment it seemed it would hit Stern Manor. It ratcheted right over the tower.

  “The gods are so strong,” Domino said, reenergized. “It’s time for me to get my part of this party going.”

  She leaned forward and Maggie thought she might kiss her. She pulled back sharply, and Domino laughed, and then she walked away.

  Now Maggie really and truly was done. As she set off toward the exit though, she ran into Walter Campbell, dressed as a spruce tree.

  “It’s the perfect costume,” she said, in all honesty. “Are your children little spruces?”

  “They’re not here,” he said. “They had to go visit their grandmother.”

  “You mean to say you dressed up as a tree and your kids aren’t around to witness it?”

  “I wanted to get into the community spirit.”

  Suddenly she could see him so clearly as a tall, earnest boy, bullied horribly, and she felt the strongest tug of emotion for him. Maybe she could tell him what she feared. Maybe she should give him more credit.

  “You seem troubled,” he said. She stared into those caring brown eyes that looked so ridiculous shrouded by green leaves. She had to try, but how do you tell a respectable man that you think someone put a spell on your client?

  “Walter, this is really hard to say. I feel like a fool. It’s just I have something I need to tell you and I know you’re going to think I’m insane, but I—”

  “Stop,” he said, putting his hand out to her cheek, brushing it softly. “There’s no need to say anything else. I feel exactly the same way, but it’s not right. It just can’t be.”

  Then he turned around and left.

  “Oh my God,” Maggie muttered. “Oh my God.”

  At that moment, the crowd seemed to vibrate with Maggie’s consternation. The whole assembly began to murmur and hum. Turning in the direction of the crowd’s gaze, Maggie saw Domino walking out onto the tower. The tower had always looked high, but with Domino’s slight figure on top of it, it seemed ever higher. A spotlight picked out her face.

  “My people,” she said. “My village. Thank you so much for coming here to celebrate my favorite holiday. Halloween.”

  Everyone cheered.

  The noise reverberated and the sound of the thunder got louder. Sudden cracks of lightning flickered over the water and acted like a strobe light. Maggie felt the hairs on her arm prickle. Everything seemed off. Domino was so exposed up there. What if she got hit by lightning?

  “I think she’s drunk,” Tim Harrison said. “She’s slurring her words.”

  “I’m happy to announce that I will be moving back here permanently. We will be living in Stern Manor with my sister and mother. My dear sister is welcoming us with open arms. Come here, Racine!” she said, beckoning toward a figure in the hallway that Maggie could now see was Racine. “Come on,” she crooned. Suddenly Maggie knew what she was going to do. Domino was going to force Racine to jump. She’d bewitched her. Maggie started to push through the crowd toward the tower, when suddenly she heard a sharp laugh. She looked up in time to see Domino hurtling toward the ground.

  Chapter 12

  For just a moment, there was complete silence. Then all was movement and there was Walter Campbell, rushing toward the body, tearing off his costume as he ran. Joe Mangione pushed his way forward as well and the rest of the ambulance corps assembled. More quickly than Maggie would have believed possible, the police began arriving. They cordoned off the body and asked people to fill out statements, setting aside people they wanted to talk to further.

  Maggie, being one of the last people to talk to Domino, was asked to sit for a while, but in the end she didn’t have much to say. Everyone had seen the same thing. Domino walked toward the balcony, she gestured toward her sister to join her, she laughed and fell over it. It was her laugh that haunted Maggie. A triumphant laugh. It echoed over and over in Maggie’s head. She dreamed it in her sleep, and the next morning, when she woke up, she thought she still heard it, except that it was the telephone.

  “They’ve finished the autopsy,” Agnes said.

  “That seems fast. How do you know that?”

  “Cherrelle told me. She works for the county and has access to the coroner’s records. They’re calling it an accidental death.”

  “I guess that makes sense.” Maggie kept reliving the sight of Domino seeming to flip right over the railing.

  “There was one surprise,” Agnes said. “She had LSD in her system. Cherrelle thinks the family wants to suppress that information. They want to bury her quick, hush it all up. The lawyers are talking to the coroner now. Welcome to America.”

  “Agnes, maybe they’re just ashamed of how she died. Maybe they don’t want people talking about it.”

  “Right, and if you and I had somebody die and we were ashamed about it, I imagine they’d listen to us too. This is why the rich a
re different than you and me. They have influence.”

  Maggie didn’t want to get into an argument about class in America. She also didn’t want to point out to Agnes that she was rich herself. She wasn’t actually shocked Domino had taken LSD. In fact, she would rather think Domino was possessed by drugs than witchcraft. But she couldn’t stop thinking about what Domino said about the afterlife. She wondered if she was in heaven now, or if she had been transformed. Had her soul perhaps moved in to Maggie’s cat? That she could believe. And what about Juliet? She thought of Domino’s words; in truth, she’d never forgotten them. How many times had she had the sense of Juliet right near her? Especially on birthdays and holidays, she sometimes found herself turning around quickly, expecting to see her daughter there. She felt unsettled. Domino was dead, but the story didn’t feel over.

  The next day was Sunday and the Sterns came to church. They walked down the center aisle, staring straight ahead, Racine pushing her mother in her wheelchair, Milo walking alongside them. Each was dressed in black, Madame Stern with a bit of gauze shielding her eyes. The minister paused the service to come down and hug them, and Maggie went over and tried to offer her condolences, but Racine was brittle as a twig. She wouldn’t even make eye contact.

  “I’m sorry,” Maggie said.

  Racine looked like what she had been before. The smiles were gone. The color was gone. Once again she was downtrodden Racine Stern in her black clothes and her red beret. Maggie wondered if she even remembered how she had changed.

  During the service Maggie noticed several strange men and women file into the church. It was always nice to see young people in church, of course, but these didn’t seem to have a religious aspect. They all clustered behind Racine’s pew and Maggie noticed during the Passing of the Peace that one of them grabbed on to Racine’s hand and wouldn’t let go.

  “Leave us alone,” she shouted. “Animals.”

  They all began taking pictures then and Racine went tearing out of the church, pushing her mother’s chair, shouting at the reporters to leave her alone. Four of the ushers surrounded her to try to offer protection, but Maggie could hear the reporters clamoring: “What are you hiding? When will the autopsy be made public? What do you think of the rumors that you killed your sister?”