Black Cat White Paws_A Maggie Dahl Mystery

by Mark McNease

  “You do that.”

  “Thank you so much,” Alice said, heading to the door with Maggie at her side.

  Maggie had no idea what Alice was thanking her for, but she was happy to have the intrusion over. She held the door for Alice, waved at her when she glanced back from the walkway, then closed the door and went about her very busy day.

  CHAPTER Two

  LAMBERTVILLE, NEW JERSEY, IS A Halloween town. Outsiders, among whom Maggie no longer considered herself, came in droves to view the annual displays put out by everyone with a porch, window or yard large enough to hold a ghoul, without fully understanding the depths to which the townspeople took their frightful passion. They strolled by the houses on Union Street; they drove slowly up and down like teenagers cruising Main Street in small Midwestern towns, gawking at the mummies, witches and zombies in various states of undress on people’s lawns and walkways. There was an unmistakable air of competition to it all, each house attempting to outdo its neighbor, but in a playful way. Maggie had come to know enough of these neighbors to realize the competitiveness did not include malice; and, in fact, nearly all the displays were the same from year to year, with just a goblin added here and there or a bloody corpse taken away for repair.

  Fortunately, for Maggie, this was her first Halloween living in Lambertville. It did not spur memories from years past. For many people whose loved ones have died, especially spouses, the seasons can bring renewed grief, reminding the survivor of what they’d seen, done and felt the previous year when the other person was still alive. Christmases were notorious for making people think of someone who’d passed away; not so much Halloween. She was glad she had no memories of it with the man whose dreams had brought them here.

  Until a year ago, David and Maggie Dahl were diehard New Yorkers. Maggie had lived in New York City her entire life, having been born and raised in Brooklyn before moving to Manhattan just out of college. David had been a transplant to the city, like so many who called it home. He’d grown up in Detroit and moved to the East Coast when he was twenty-five. By the time the two of them decided to move to New Jersey they’d raised a son, Wynn, put him through college, and watched him move to Astoria, Queens. Not exactly far from home, but not the Upper East Side where the Dahls had lived for twenty-three years before agreeing that life outside the city might have more to offer them in their midlife years.

  Maggie had worked at museums her entire professional life, beginning as an administrative assistant at the Hyde and working her way up to the Director’s position at the Bolyn Museum of Modern Art in Brooklyn Heights. She spent fifteen years there and had expected to someday retire from the job. David had been a successful financial manager, handling the personal wealth of a half dozen very rich clients. He’d been a stock broker before that, and had tried his hand at selling commercial real estate in his twenties. He’d been at the photo gallery the night he met Maggie as a way of prospecting for potential clients. He’d heard the gallery owner was looking to move to a larger space, and he had a few on offer. The gallery owner was not interested; David left the real estate game six months later, and his and Maggie’s lives were forever changed by that chance encounter.

  The previous October they decided to venture out of the city and see what New Jersey had to offer. They knew the state was beautiful once you got out of the large cities into the rural counties and towns. It was called the Garden State for that reason: New Jersey offers lush valleys, hills, farmland and rivers as far as the eye can see, once the eye is no longer looking at Newark Airport or the buildings of Trenton.

  They’d been to New Hope, Pennsylvania, once before and thought it was a lovely town. This time they headed across the bridge that connects Pennsylvania to New Jersey and found themselves in Lambertville. Lambertville. It didn’t sound like the vibrant, artistic, bustling town it was. Much to their surprise, they both loved it. They strolled for an entire Sunday afternoon, up and down the streets, looking at the historic homes, stopping at nearly every shop along Union and Bridge streets. And while David had said it was a little too soon to make a definitive judgment, he was smitten with the place and knew by the time they headed back to Manhattan that he wanted to live there.

  Maggie had been reluctant at first. New York City was all she’d ever known as a place to live and it took her awhile to imagine life without the Theater District, Lincoln Center and Central Park. But she was devoted to David and she knew he wanted to change their lives. He’d grown tired of the relentless pace, the demands and the pressures of being successful in Manhattan. He’d grown tired of the concrete, the ubiquitous scaffolding that covered every other building, and the ceaseless noise. New York City was never truly quiet, just like it was never completely dark. Not the kind of darkness you experience on a country road, or out beneath a blanket of stars. The reflection of Manhattan’s million lights created a permanent gray haze over the city, and David had reached a time in his life when he wanted to look up and see the glowing heavens, when he wanted to lie in bed at night and hear absolutely nothing.

  “What are we going to do there?” Maggie asked one night when they were reading in bed. It was a habit they’d shared since their wedding night. Both were voracious readers, and each night would end with David holding a book or magazine while Maggie read the next chapter of some historical fiction, her favorite genre.

  “Do we need to know that now?” David replied.

  They’d met with their financial adviser (David did not think acting as his own adviser, when he handled other people’s money for a living, was a good idea) who went over their assets and assured them they would be fine, for several years at least.

  “Well,” Maggie said, “I enjoy the whole spontaneity of this move, Sweetheart, but there are a few things it would be nice to know before the moving men haul our lives to New Jersey.”

  “Like?”

  “Like, what will Wynn think?”

  Their son had been very independent all his life. He was now twenty-two, pursuing a career in freelance journalism and living with his boyfriend across the river.

  “He said he was fine with it.”

  “When we mentioned it as a hypothetical. This is no longer a ‘what-if.’”

  “He’s got Leo. He’s got his career. And he hates being mothered.”

  “This is not mothering.”

  “Refusing to live your life so you can stay near your son, who wants you to go anyway, is the worst kind of mothering, Maggie. If we stay, he’ll know why and he’ll feel responsible. It’s not fair to him.”

  Maggie knew he was right but she was still not completely convinced it was a smart move. “So what are we going to do there? We’re too young to retire.”

  “Jams,” David said, as if it were the obvious response.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Jams,” he repeated. “We’re going to launch Dahl House Jams.”

  Maggie remembered making a stop on a trip to Maine to see the sprawling property of Kenwood Kitchens, a wildly successful jam, jelly and specialty company started by two women. David had been fascinated by their story and the whole challenge of entrepreneurship, and Maggie remembered him saying at the time they should start Dahl House Jams. She’d laughed it off that day, taking it as a passing comment among the many they shared in their travels. Now she knew he was serious.

  “What do we know about making jams?” she asked, closing the book she’d been reading and setting it on the night stand.

  “Nothing. That’s the point. It’s an adventure.”

  “Which part of it?”

  “All of it!” he said, as he tossed his magazine on the floor and rolled toward her. Their twenty-fourth anniversary was coming up soon and they still made love as if it they’d been married a week. It was one of the things Maggie held most dear about their marriage, and one of the things she missed most achingly now.

  She would never make love with David again. She would never feel him kiss her breasts or glide his finger with a feather’s touc
h along her spine. On the other hand, she would never again wake up to find him dead in his sleep, taken from her by viral myocarditis that had presented as a flu, a bout of heartburn that would be gone in the morning.

  Instead it had been David who was gone in the morning. David whose loss cratered her soul and left her struggling to put one foot in front of the other.

  She shrugged it off as best she could: the memories, the expectations, the shock. She had not given up. She had not gone running back to New York City in a widow’s veil, seeking the comfort of friends who doubted her resolve. No. Dahl House Jams was a going concern. They had their biggest order to date, 2,000 jars of custom Halloween jams: Crabby Apple, Strangefruit, and Pumpkin Paradise, a recipe David had been working on when he died. The order would go out on time. The storefront on Union Street would open on time. And, Maggie realized looking at her watch, her sister Gerri would be moving in that afternoon, on time. There wasn’t a minute to waste, so she guzzled the rest of her coffee, popped a last sliver of rye toast in her mouth and rushed out the door, locking it behind her. She did not want to see Alice Drapier or anyone else standing in her living room unexpectedly again.

  CHAPTER Three

  THE FACTORY, AS MAGGIE AND her assistant Janice Cleary called it, was a converted auto repair shop a mile outside Lambertville. Located along Route 29 just up the road from a CVS and a popular farmer’s market, the building had been empty for several years, though not in disrepair. Its owner, Bud “Auto-Man” Grassley, had died doing what everyone said he loved most: turning a wrench on a car engine, struck down by an aneurism that exploded in his brain.

  “He never saw it coming,” his wife Maryanne had told Maggie and David when they’d first approached her about buying the old shop. “Like a balloon popping, the doctor said. One second he was under a hood talking to our son Buddy, the next he was gone. I suppose that’s a blessing.”

  Maryanne told them she had not held onto the property for any sentimental reason. It was just that no one had asked to buy it. It wasn’t a good location for a restaurant, or a retail shop of any kind. But a factory that made jams and jellies? Why not!

  So it was that Dahl House Jams (the official name of the business’s jam, jelly and preservative side) made its way from the Dahl’s garage into a proper factory setting, and within six months it was running well enough to take on its largest order.

  Maggie employed three people besides Janice, making it a very small, tight team that included two local women in their late forties and a man named Peter Stapley best known around town as the father of a twelve-year-old girl who’d vanished ten years ago. Maggie knew Peter’s story. She knew his wife Melissa had left him a year after their child’s disappearance, and that he had not been the same since the couple first realized their daughter was never coming home. She did not like to think of herself as taking pity on people (except the demonstrably less fortunate), but there was something about Peter that told her he would not be returning to his old self, whoever that had been. Working at a jam factory was just about his speed at this point in his life and with what he’d endured. The women, Gloria and Sybil, were cousins who’d both returned to the work force after getting their kids off to college. Maggie liked hiring older people. She cared about each of them, and about Janice, the youngest of the crew at thirty-two and the only one who would be dividing her time between the factory and the store Maggie was opening. Janice was her right hand, without whom she might drop every single ball she was juggling.

  The morning went smoothly after a slight delay with the jar delivery. Dahl House Jams was a small start-up and Maggie could not afford the kind of equipment she needed to grow the company much more. That was coming, she was sure of it, but for now they made their jams, jellies and preserves by hand, using vats, pots and everything else they needed that David had purchased from a school cafeteria that was upgrading.

  The idea for Dahl House Jams had been in David’s mind long before their visit to Kenwood Kitchens. His grandmother Patricia used to make her own jams, and one night while they slept soundly in their Upper East Side co-op, David had a dream about her. According to his retelling the next morning, he didn’t remember much of it except that she had served him toast with her homemade jam. He’d been just eight years old when she died. Here she was forty years later, bringing him comfort and bread in a dream. It came back to him on their visit to Maine and the jam company. Then they made the trip to Lambertville. The dominoes soon fell, and now Maggie was a widow struggling to establish a company and open a store in a town she’d only known for nine months.

  A few of her friends, the ones who still spent evenings in restaurants on Columbus Avenue or enjoying a concert at Carnegie Hall, had encouraged her to move back. Others carefully suggested the whole thing had been for David, that she had left in pursuit of her husband’s dream, not hers. While knowing there was some truth to what they thought, Maggie had no intention of calling it quits and returning to the city. The move, house and business had become both their dreams. She would not go running back to Manhattan. She would not give up on the new life they’d just begun when David died. She would not abandon their dreams. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.

  Maggie was lost in thought, barely listening to Janice explain the timeline and how they would get the jams made and shipped in the next two days, when her phone vibrated. She kept the sound off, preferring the occasional vibration to having conversations interrupted by a ringtone.

  “Excuse me,” she said, turning away from Janice. She slipped the phone from her sweater pocket and glanced at the caller ID: Gerri.

  “What’s up?” Maggie said, stepping away from the small desk where Janice was sitting.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m at the factory. Where are you?”

  “On your front porch! Where I’m supposed to be.”

  Maggie glanced up at the wall clock. It was 11:00 a.m.

  “Three hours from now,” Maggie said. “You were supposed to get here around two.”

  “Yes, well, the movers showed up early and I didn’t have as much to bring as I thought. You said I would have two rooms. That’s not a lot of space, Maggie.”

  Maggie sighed. “I meant two rooms for living. A bedroom and an office or whatever you want to do with the second room. But it’s a big house, for godsake. You could bring whatever you wanted.”

  “Which wasn’t much. The whole apartment reminded me of John,” Gerri said. He was her third and, she swore, last husband, who had left her six months ago for the receptionist in his office, something Gerri had considered pedestrian beyond words.

  She’d taken her abandonment as a final humiliation and filed for divorce. “I sold what I could and gave the rest away, Maggie. The furniture, that awful bamboo cabinet from his dead mother.”

  “He left it?”

  “No, he just never came to get it like he promised. I got fifty dollars for it on Craigslist. He said it was worth five hundred, lying prick. Now it’s gone, he’s gone, and so am I, standing on your porch wondering where you are.”

  Maggie heard a truck horn in the background.

  “They want to get going,” Gerri said. “And I’m paying them by the hour. I rode with them, by the way. They smell like movers. Please hurry.”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes, just hold on,” Maggie said. She hung up and walked back over to Janice.

  “I’m so sorry …”

  “You have to go, I heard. Don’t worry about it. I’m on top of it. We all are, Boss. We won’t let you down.”

  Maggie had gotten used to Janice calling her Boss and had stopped telling her not to. She knew that when Janice said they would not let her down, she meant they would not let her and David down. He and Maggie had hired each of them. They had grieved his loss together. They’d only known him a month when he died, but they knew him as a kind, funny and generous man.

  “Thank you, Janice,” Maggie said. “I don’t know if I can get back today. I have a feeling m
y sister is going to suck all the air and time out of me, at least for the day.”

  “Don’t worry! Just go. Call me as often as you need to for reassurance. I’m telling you, Boss, we’ve got this. You’re on your way.”

  “We’re on our way,” she said. “We’re a team, and a good one. This is ours, remember that.”

  Janice nodded, reached out and squeezed Maggie’s hand. Maggie thanked her a final time and headed out of the factory.

  CHAPTER Four

  MAGGIE’S RELATIONSHIP WITH HER SISTER Geraldine had always been complicated. Gerri, as she’d been called since childhood, was three years older than Maggie and had led a very different life. She’d left their home in Brooklyn when she was only seventeen, running off to be with a man who was ten years her senior and who her parents detested. That misadventure had taken her to Chicago for several years before her husband abruptly left her without explanation. One night he was home, and the next morning he was gone. Gerri never heard from him again and was relieved to be rid of him. She moved back in with her parents while Maggie was in college and living at home, commuting to school by subway. Two more husbands followed, with the third, John Corker, taking Gerri to Philadelphia with him to start a series of failed businesses before he replaced her with his receptionist. Her only regret this time was that it had been so cliché. She would have preferred he run off with a male stripper or rich older widow, anyone but a receptionist.

  “I think he’s gay anyway,” Gerri told Maggie one night shortly after John had departed. “The sex was always terrible. Is that a sign?”

  “Of being gay, or just a lousy lover?” Maggie had said.

  She wanted to feel badly for her sister, but Gerri never seemed to feel badly for herself. It was one of her strong suits: she was a tough one and oblivious to her own misfortune.

  “I really don’t know what the signs of being gay are,” said Maggie. It was just a week before Gerri announced she’d be moving to Lambertville to support her grieving sister, a convenient motive for escaping Philadelphia and the disappointment it represented.