Maggie Dove (16 page)

“May I give you some advice, Mrs. Dove?” Walter cleared his throat. “We are up against a man who has taken two lives, and maybe more. He's ruthless. If you get in his way, he'll kill, and there's nothing I can do to protect you. Please, let the professionals deal with it. You are inhibited by your affections.”

“You mean because I love people I can't see them clearly. Well, perhaps you're right. Perhaps love does blind you. But the blind have a gift for seeing things that we sighted people can't.”

She turned around ready to stalk away and ran smack into Agnes Jorgenson, standing on the outskirts with a cheese platter. “Would you like some?” she asked. “You could do with a bit of protein. You're looking peaked.”

“Oh good Lord,” Maggie muttered, and she walked out of the room, leaving them both behind. But Walter's words stung. She hoped they weren't true.

Maggie found Peter in the midst of a marathon viewing of
Law & Order.
He was up to the end of season 4. Poor Ben Stone was having a terrible time getting a woman to testify against a Russian mobster. Maggie'd always liked Ben Stone. He looked so tortured. She could imagine him as one of the monks making pretzels.

“Want to watch?” Peter asked. “It's his last episode.”

“Sure.”

She sat down alongside him on the couch, jumping up when she felt something bite into her, which fortunately was just the tip of a Dorito. That would explain the cheesy smell in the room, which almost, but not quite, overpowered the smell of sweat. Peter looked like he hadn't showered in a while and he certainly hadn't cleaned his apartment. Maggie took off her sweater and sat down on it. The alternative was to clean, and she didn't feel like doing that. She noticed he'd put most of the pictures of Juliet away, though his favorite one remained in the middle of the table, the one that showed the two of them at the prom.

She wasn't a big TV watcher, but she'd loved watching TV with her daughter. They tried to watch the silliest shows possible, ones with people eating spiders and trying to survive on desert islands or attempting to lose 300 pounds in two weeks. Stuart had never understood how they could waste their minds on such things when all of Shakespeare's sonnets were there to be pored over, but she thought it was fun. It was a form of communion.

“I did my pretzel thing today,” she told Peter.

“How'd it go?”

“Surprisingly well. Nothing burned.”

“Did you remember to bring eggs?”

“No, I stole one from Agnes.”

“Ha!” he said.

There was a Russian mobster on TV and you could see by his piggy little eyes that he was evil. He could be a poisoner. There was that poor woman, who had been in some other TV show surely. She was so scared and Ben Stone was pressing her and you could see the poor woman was going to die. He offered her witness protection and she didn't want it and he was going to send her to jail and then he played on her guilt and she surrendered and took the stand and there was that beady-eyed man peering at her. Maggie looked into his eyes. Thought how afraid she'd be having them looking at her. Thought of what Walter Campbell had said. About someone evil being after her. In the presence of evil. She'd always wondered what she'd do if she were confronted by true evil. Would her faith give her strength or would it desert her? Would she be able to stand up to someone like that?

The jury found the mobster guilty, but it didn't end there. They did kill the woman, who was the tall one from
The
West Wing,
the one who was so scared, and Ben Stone repented and quit so that Sam Waterston could take his place.

Peter and Maggie were both still after it was over.

“He shouldn't have pressed her so hard,” Maggie said. “He knew she was going to get killed.”

“This was an evil guy. He had to put him away.”

“I hope I'm never asked to do something like that. Imagine if out of sheer innocence you wind up seeing something terrible. Would you speak up?”

“Yes.” He shrugged. “You'd have to.”

She believed him. Whatever his flaws, she'd never doubted his courage. He would always be the first one running in to a burning building, running toward trouble.

The day was still. Sundays. Maggie always found them the hardest day of the week, even with church to look forward to. There was always a pause on Sundays, a moment where it was impossible not to reflect.

“Peter,” she said. “What went on between you and Winifred?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“I know you had an argument with her, Peter. I know it was more serious than usual. She told me herself that things were bad between you.”

The sunlight made him look older. It wasn't fair that the people you loved aged. She wished she could stop him in time. But then, her daughter had escaped aging and such foolishness, by dying. She was forever a young woman laughing in a picture.

“Peter, I will love you no matter what on earth you did, but I need to know. Things are getting really intense and I can't help you if I don't know what was going on, and everywhere I turn, it's always something to do with you. I wish you would just trust me and tell me.”

He stared resolutely at the TV, which had moved on to season 5. A woman was brought to the hospital and the fumes from her were so bad that several of the nurses fell over. She'd been poisoned, they thought. Perhaps with radioactive material. She was dangerous. Maggie lowered the volume on the TV.

“Peter, I love you. I know you didn't kill Winifred. I don't have a moment's hesitation. But something was going on and I have to know what it was.”

He slumped down, put his hand on hers. Just as they had sat at the hospital together, side by side, waiting for the results, waiting to see if Juliet could live.

“She changed, Dove. Maybe you didn't see it, but Winifred changed.”

“How do you mean?”

“She was really angry about living there, at the Castle, and it made her kind of crazy. She was bored and she wanted to have some fun.”

“So what did she do?”

“It started with Hal Carter.”

“Hal? What did Hal do?” Hal, the most romantic man in town. The man who took care of his mother for all those years and then married the beautiful young Gretchen.

“You know Gretchen's mother lives at the Castle.”

“I didn't know that.”

He nodded. “She's lived there for a long time. She lives in one of the nice units, on the river.”

“Okay.” Maggie began to get a bad feeling.

“One day, Winifred noticed Hal Carter leaving her room. Late at night. She became curious, began watching, one thing led to another.”

“Hal Carter was visiting Gretchen's mother?”

“He was more than visiting her, Dove. Turns out he'd always loved her. They'd been having an affair all the years his mother was alive. After she died, he got swept up with Gretchen, but he never stopped loving the mother. That's what it all turned out to be.”

“That's awful.” Hal Carter, she thought.

“So Winifred, you know Winifred, she had to say something to him. And then the next day, Hal came back with a bouquet of flowers and a bunch of steaks.”

“Steaks?”

“You know how Winifred liked a good steak. After that, every few weeks or so he'd show up with some steak.”

“Did she ask him for the steak?”

“No, but she sort of made it known that if she had the steak, she wouldn't talk. Then she realized that a nursing home was a place where there were a lot of secrets, particularly if she had Arthur to help her.”

“Arthur was involved?”

“People talk when you're massaging them. They tell you stuff. She had a whole list going. Small things. She didn't ask for money, but she liked…gifts.”

Maggie thought of the new couch and the new rug. She'd never thought to ask how she'd paid for it.

“It became an obsession with her, Dove. She began looking into everybody. Not just people in the Castle, but in the village too. She got something on Doc Steinberg, but Hannah wouldn't play along. Told her she could say whatever she wanted.”

“And what about Marcus Bender?”

“She was crazy about him, desperate to find out something about him. Because of you, Dove. She wanted to bring him down. That's what we were arguing about. She wanted me to use the police computer to see if he had any history. You know how she could be if she thought someone had wounded you in any way. She wanted him to go to jail. To be perfectly honest, Dove, when I first heard that he was murdered, I was sure she had killed him. I thought maybe she'd had Arthur do it.”

Gentle Arthur. Winifred.

What shocked Maggie was how little shocked she was. So much made sense then. Winifred's glittering eyes. How she always seemed to know everything. She must have known about Bender's murder before Maggie even called her.

How had Maggie not realized? Was everything between them a lie? Maggie remembered how happy she'd been when Winifred came home to Darby after having been away for a decade. She'd looked defeated and wary when she first returned, following her disastrous divorce from Jerry, but soon enough she rebounded. She got involved with Fred Melrose and everything went back to normal. She was who she had been. She was who Maggie wanted her to be.

Winifred a blackmailer. That changed everything, didn't it? It broadened the field. Now there were so many possible suspects. Maggie felt like her head was spinning. She began to hear pounding from the work being done on the Tappan Zee Bridge. She felt ashamed of Winifred. She felt pity for her too—poor Winifred, who wound up alone in a nursing home, unloved after all those husbands, so desperate for love. She must have turned her attention to the wrong person. Someone who didn't trust that she'd be able to keep a secret. Someone with a secret so dangerous he couldn't risk being found out.

“I wouldn't do it, Dove. She asked me a bunch of times and I always said no. I knew you wouldn't approve.”

“Forget about me, Peter. It was wrong. You knew that all on your own.”

She thought of her friend as she'd been as a young girl, so vibrant and wild, so willing to risk everything. Then she thought of herself, and how this whole horrible thing had begun with her anger at Marcus Bender. Maybe Noelle was right, she should have just let him move the tree. Or she should have tried harder to talk to him, anyway. She should have laughed with him.

“I'm sorry, Dove,” Peter said.

“Me too.”

“Are you going to tell Walter Campbell?”

“I have to, Peter. Frankly, I think we all need to grow up a little bit about this. But first,” she said, “first I think I'm going to talk to Arthur. Maybe he has a list of names. Maybe if we examine them I can figure out how big this is.”

He sank back in his chair. Sam Waterston pounced onto the screen; the first episode in which he appeared, so different from the later, ponderous man he became. This earlier iteration of Sam Waterston was flirtatious, boyish, handsome.

“I should have died that night,” Peter said. “Why did God save me and not her?”

There was only night, as far as Maggie and Peter were concerned. She knew exactly what he was talking about. Maggie didn't answer. She didn't answer because there was nothing to say. She didn't answer because who understood God's reasoning? She couldn't believe God had chosen for her daughter to die. Nowhere in her imagination could she see God being so cruel. But she also didn't answer because she was tired of talking about it. For twenty years they'd been going over the same territory and for the first time she felt like she was drowning in a swamp.

“I can't talk about that now,” she said, and she left. She had to get to the Castle and talk to Arthur.

But Arthur wasn't there. Gentle, laughing Arthur had skipped town, or so the nurse said, taking some of the residents' jewels with him. He wasn't at the home address he had given. No one knew where he was.

“What a shock,” the nurse said.

It was a shock.

Dispirited, Maggie planned to turn back, but then she heard someone laughing and felt herself drawn toward it, as she'd known she would be the moment she got there. She followed the laughter toward an airy salon and there she found Frank Bowman in front of an easel, surrounded by his coterie of women, each of them in front of an easel. Before them stood a man with a black beret, standing next to yet another easel, on which was pinned a postcard. A tranquil Hudson Valley scene that they were all in the midst of reproducing.

“Why, hello,” Frank Bowman called out at the sight of her. Eight women glared and Maggie couldn't help but feel a bit of pride that this man was so obviously glad to see her, this handsome man with his cool gray eyes, now crinkling up into a smile. He had on a plastic smock, and under that khakis and a striped, long-sleeved shirt. She imagined a pencil behind his ear—but no, that was Inspector Benet she was thinking of, who had that particular affectation. So that whenever he had an idea he could write it down. Benet didn't trust technology, though it would have been helpful for him with his crime solving. Also, he didn't have any scars. Winifred had wanted him to be missing a leg, but Maggie had fought her off.

“I didn't expect to see you today,” Frank said.

He took off his white smock and walked toward her.

“Should we wait, Frankie?” one of the women called out.

“Better not,” he said. “Carry on without me.”

He tucked his hand into Maggie's arm, and guided her toward the hallway. Behind her she could hear hissing, like so many balloons giving up air.

“But you look upset,” he said to Maggie. “What's bothering you?”

Funny how quickly you can grow to care for someone, she thought. Funny how important it can be to have a pair of sympathetic eyes looking at you and to know that he would be willing to drop anything he was in the middle of to talk with you. She'd forgotten how special that feeling was. She had held herself away from the world for too long, Maggie thought. Winifred was right, in that one particular instance.

“Is there somewhere private we could talk?” she asked.

“Of course,” he said. “This way.”

She followed him past a nurses' station, into an elevator that took them downstairs, to her surprise. Somehow she thought it would be up, but it turned out this wing was set closer to the river. The whole tone of the place changed. Here the Castle was like a regular apartment building, with amenities. People were reading newspapers and laughing, and Maggie and Frank kept walking, down a muted hall, and then deeper and deeper into the building. They passed by a pool, a gym and a quiet couple playing chess, and then around another corner, and then they were in front of his apartment. She almost cried out when they went inside, it was so magnificent. A huge window faced out onto the Hudson River. Maggie couldn't help but notice a willow tree slightly blocking his view and felt a sudden tenderness for Frank for not insisting that the tree be cut down. The room itself was somewhat impersonal, like an upscale hotel, but there was a picture of an old lady in the corner. His mother, she assumed.

The kitchen was twice the size of her own, though he had as few things in it as she did. Not a cook, she thought.

“I'm just going to wash my hands,” he said. “I'll be right back.”

She sat down on the couch and noticed, on the coffee table, copies of all her books. Winifred would have given them to him, she felt sure. She felt both flattered and exposed. What had she written?

She hadn't been alone in a room with a man in a long time, if you didn't count Peter, which she didn't. She'd forgotten how different a man's room smelled, without the floral scents with which she was so familiar. Frank's room smelled of toothpaste and she remembered reading once how there was coal in toothpaste. That's how Colgate got its name, and she thought about her husband then, about the way his room had smelled, which was of old books. She'd been so sure of herself when she seduced him. She knew he desired her. She could remember how powerful she felt when she draped herself across that desk. “Oh, my dear,” he'd whispered, but then he'd surprised her with his strength.

She had no power now. No one had seen her naked in years, except for Doc Steinberg. She was 62 and yet people did marry at her age. She knew several. And there was Gretchen's mother, who had to be Maggie's age. Was that why she had come here? Maggie wondered. At the back of her mind, was she hoping Frank Bowman would sweep her up in her arms and carry her away from all these troubles. Would that be so wrong? Maybe Walter Campbell was right. Maybe she shouldn't be involved.

“Now,” Frank said, walking back into the room, sitting down on the chair across from her, so close their knees were almost touching. “Would you like some tea?”

“No thank you,” she said. “I just really need to talk.”

“Of course.”

She told him everything. His eyes turned dark as she spoke, like storm clouds, especially when she got to the blackmail part.

“I know about that,” he said.

“You do?”

He smiled slightly. “Winifred went after me too.”

“Oh dear. I'm sorry.”

“I'm afraid that I was not completely honest about my sources of income when I filed my report with the Castle. As Winifred discovered, some of my investments come from places that are not, shall we say, Triple A rated.”

“You're a crook?”

“No, I'm an aggressive investor, I would say. Nothing illegal. But close. To answer the question you want to ask, I gave her free accounting advice. She was harmless, Maggie. She was just bored.”

“Not everyone might have found her harmless. She could have come across someone who didn't want to pay up. That fact is, I can't make excuses for her. I don't know what possessed her to go around blackmailing people. Nothing makes sense. I can see why someone might have wanted to kill Winifred. I can see why someone wanted to kill Bender. But I can't see why anyone would want to kill both of them. There can't be two separate murderers running around.”

She looked out the window, at the river, which had darkened. The waves looked like little sharks, swimming around in front of her.

“I feel so stupid,” she said. “I feel like someone's laughing at me.”

He held her hand then. “Maybe Walter Campbell's right. Why don't you go to him and tell him everything and let him take over?”

“I tried that. He wasn't impressed.”

Why was she even fighting this battle, she wondered. She hated Bender, Winifred had brought destruction down on herself and Peter would be in trouble no matter what she did. Maybe she should just give up. Hand it all over to Walter Campbell and devote herself to Frank Bowman. She finally had a moment of peace in her life. Why not enjoy it?…And yet, when he invited her out to dinner, she said no. She wasn't ready to surrender just yet. She couldn't give up, because there was someone out there killing people and she didn't trust Walter Campbell to stop him, and the fact was, it was wrong. Even if the people deserved to die, it was wrong. It was evil.

She got back into her car.

“You sure you don't want dinner?”

“I'll see you Friday,” she said. “At the Thai restaurant.” She headed out, but was so distracted she wound up on the other side of the county, near Rye Playland. She parked her car and wandered around there for a bit, strolling across the beach and picking up shells. Being outside cleared her head, and after a few hours she got back in her car and drove home, where she found, on her front lawn, a body lying under her oak tree in the same exact position in which Bender had been.