Maggie Dove (6 page)

Of course Peter was late. Maggie could have taken a nap and read a book and he would still have arrived ten minutes after her, but she didn't mind. Maggie loved sitting in the park at nighttime. The Tappan Zee Bridge hung like a necklace across the Hudson. Maggie loved to watch it at night; she'd been doing it since she was a child. Now she watched the new one slowly taking shape alongside of it.

She'd thrown rocks into the river as a little girl, skipping them across the flat water. She'd swum in the river, as had her daughter, climbing out onto the jetty and splashing around and, depending on the decade, clambering back in covered with sludge, or in recent years, clean water. (Thank you, Pete Seeger.)

Over this very spot the planes that wreaked destruction on 9/11 had come shrieking, and from this site she could see where the Twin Towers once stood. For months afterward the members of the village had gathered at this point, staring down at the scarred tip of Manhattan and mourning their own who had died in the attacks. Several trees had been planted here to commemorate it, and Maggie, inspired, had a tree planted in memory of her daughter. A spruce. She rarely went to Juliet's grave, preferring instead to sit alongside this little tree. She felt closer to her daughter in this open, happy place, the lights twinkling, the leaves smelling of Christmas, and as she sat there she caught some movement out of the corner of her eye and saw it was the same Asian boy she'd seen skateboarding earlier that day. He was doing tricks with his skateboard right near the edge of the river, scraping the wheels against rocks she knew would stab him if he fell. Reckless. She wanted to warn him to stop. But she knew he wouldn't; that type of person doesn't stop no matter how you caution them.

Instead Maggie crept forward, thinking that at the least she could help him if he broke his leg. He didn't acknowledge her, but she felt he was aware of her, so purposely did he not meet her gaze. He exuded strength. The wheels made a pleasing, whirring sound.

He began to jump.

Maggie was not a risk taker herself, but she admired the quality in others.

A tugboat went by; the ground shook with the power of an oncoming train. Suddenly the boy looked up and grimaced and Maggie, startled, heard Peter's voice.

“Come on. You know that's illegal here.”

The boy crossed his arms; looked like he might argue.

“You want me to take you to the police station?” Peter yelled. “No skateboarding allowed here.”

The boy smacked his skateboard to the ground and rolled off, the angry click ricocheting like a bullet as he left the park.

“Are there not enough signs?” Peter asked, as he sat down alongside her. “There's one right there. No skateboarding in the park.”

“You were awfully harsh with him.”

“Rules are rules.”

Maggie was touched to see him wearing the leather jacket she'd given him so many years ago. He ran his fingers through his hair, and it looked like some loose wisps might go flying right off. “Lucky for you I wasn't as strict as you are.”

Strange phenomenon she'd noticed with Peter in specific, but with other bad boys in general, that they were much less patient as adults than you'd expect them to be. You'd think they'd have more sympathy. But they didn't.

“You spoiled me, Dove,” he said, with the grin she remembered. “I took advantage of you.”

“Yes, you did. But I never minded. Children need to be spoiled a little.”

“Not that one,” he said, nodding in the direction of the skateboarder. “He'll get in trouble for sure. Goes too fast.”

“Can't cause that much harm on a skateboard.”

“Tell me that after he plows into you and you wind up in the hospital with a broken hip.”

Peter stretched his neck; she heard the crack. Time was such a strange thing. Only yesterday, it seemed, this boy had been coloring in front of her. He loved to sharpen the crayons until they turned into little stubs. Later, when he was a little older, he put air freshener on his iguanas by mistake, and killed them. How he'd cried. She thought of what Agnes had suggested about his getting into a fight with Bender. Was it possible? Anything was possible. He had a temper.

“Everything all right with Walter Campbell?” she asked. She handed him one of the turkey sandwiches and he crammed half of it into his mouth.

“Everything's fine,” he mumbled.

“Don't say that. It makes me nervous.”

He laughed at that, put his arm around her. “Walter Campbell has it in his head that I should have closed off your lawn as a crime scene. I should have insisted he come back from the ballet. He's all in a lather about it. Says I'm insubordinate. And the widow's mad because she says someone murdered her husband.”

“Was there something wrong with the body?”

“No, no. The preliminary autopsy was fine, and they released the body to be buried tomorrow. They just have one more test to do. They're doing a gas chromatography.”

“Don't they do that for poisoning?”

“It's a possibility, I guess.”

“But how could it be a possibility? I thought he died of a heart attack.”

A train went past, a slick metallic sound. Progress, the future. She shuddered.

“Campbell has an instinct about these things,” Peter said, chewing the second half of the sandwich more slowly. “He says he can tell something's wrong. And why not? He's a genius, with millions in his bank account. Why shouldn't he spend some of the village's money on these tests?”

She looked at the man, but saw instead the boy, with eyes that always burned with passion. Who loved her daughter so much. Who was content to sit alongside her and read, even though he was no great reader, just because he knew Juliet needed quiet. Maggie used to love the way he held her daughter, almost tentatively, as though she were so valuable he didn't dare press her too hard.

“I wish you could get along with him,” she said.

“A-hole,” he said. “Pardon my French.”

“He's your boss,” Maggie pointed out.

“What's he going to do to me?”

“He could fire you.”

“Then I'll get another job.”

There was a chill breeze off the river. Little white ripples darted on top of the water, but not so many years ago, during Hurricane Sandy, those little waves had crashed over and flooded the park and caused terrible damage.

“Agnes Jorgenson told me you had a fight with Bender,” she said.

“Well, Agnes Jorgenson. She'd know, wouldn't she?”

“Did you have a fight with him?”

Peter jumped up and stood by the rocks at the side of the river. Too dark to skip rocks now, but he'd loved to do it when he was young. Had quite a talent for it. Could make a rock skip four times, which had been a source of great frustration to Juliet because she could only make it go two times.

“Did you hear what he did to Mr. Laws?” Peter asked.

“Eugene Laws? From the high school?”

“Yeah. He's got two years to go until he can retire. But Bender heard he was a bad teacher. He heard his success rate with the AP tests wasn't up to par.”

“Eugene Laws is a disaster,” Maggie said. “Everyone knows it. But what would Bender care? His daughters aren't in high school, are they?” It was one of those facts of village life, that if your kid was on track to go to a good school, you made sure she didn't get into Laws' class.

“Bender didn't care that his daughters weren't in high school yet. They would be someday, and he wanted it to have high standards. Nothing second-rate about our school system. He made it a one-man mission to get rid of Laws. He raised it at school board meetings and circulated a petition.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, they got rid of him. They've hired somebody new for next year. She has a master's degree from Columbia.”

“In fairness to Bender, she's probably an improvement.”

“I know, Dove, but that's not the point. There's something passing from this village. Don't you feel it? These people move in and they don't care about the village. Just themselves and their property values and the schools, so their kids can go to the best colleges and make a lot of money. Everything has to be top rate, but where's the room for the normal people? Where's the heart?”

“So you had a fight with Bender about Eugene Laws?”

Peter crouched forward, his back in the posture of prayer. Something bad was coming, Maggie thought. She was tempted to run, just as last night when she'd crouched next to Bender's body. She wanted to get the heck out of there; to run back to her tidy little house and into her bedroom and lock the door. But you couldn't. You just couldn't do that. You had to face down your fear.

“Clemmy Atwood was having her eighteenth-birthday party,” Peter said. “You know Clemmy. She's crazy and her mother was worried that the kids would go off and drink and then there would be an accident. She wanted to make sure they were supervised. She figured they were all going to drink, but if someone was watching out for them, they wouldn't get too drunk and no one would get hurt.” Clemmy Atwood, Maggie thought, her second-worst Sunday School student.

“I didn't take any money,” Peter said. “But I went to the party and I watched them, and with the ones that were too wasted to make it home on their own steam, I drove. I couldn't risk them getting hurt, Dove. I couldn't risk that they would be in an accident.”

She still saw him as he looked that night, as handsome a boy as it was possible to imagine. A little like Robert Redford, with his beautiful hair and his basset hound eyes and the leather jacket he wore then and always had worn. Juliet had been worrying about what was to become of the two of them. They would be separated by hundreds of miles, and an academic culture so foreign to what Peter knew. Juliet had loved him and wanted to marry him, but Maggie'd been cautioning her. Wait a little longer. A little longer.

“Nothing went wrong. Everyone got home. No one got hurt, but one of the kids told her parents and she told Bender.”

“You're the DARE officer, Peter.”

“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.”

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 cursed 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.