Maggie Dove (7 page)

“Guess what Bender's wife used to do for a living?” Maggie asked her best friend. The phone felt warm in her hand. She'd made herself a cup of tea, and settled herself in her kitchen, a tidy little room built for a time when servants did the cooking and weren't expected to use much space. No island. Barely enough room for a refrigerator. She had chickens everywhere. Mugs in the shape of chickens and little chicken oven mitts and salt and pepper shakers. Maggie never had figured out where this love of chickens came from, given that she didn't like the living creatures particularly well. But for years, for Mother's Day and her birthday, people gave her chickens.

“She was a stripper,” Winifred answered.

“Dang, how did you know? I thought I'd surprise you.”

Maggie could hear Arthur chuckling in the background. She suspected Winifred was rolling her eyes. Or worse.

“I have my sources of information,” Winifred said. “Bender's wife worked as a stripper and that's how she met him. She jumped out of a box on his 35th birthday. It was love at first sight. Something similar happened with my second husband,” she went on, “though there wasn't a box, and no poles were involved.”

“How long have you known?” Maggie asked.

“A few months,” Winifred answered.

“But why didn't you tell me?”

“Why is it important?”

Somehow her chickens looked a little foolish in this light. But not so bad as an angel on a toilet, Maggie reminded herself.

“Well, I don't know that it's important, but it's interesting. If she were an accountant, you would have told me, so why not tell me this?”

“Bender didn't care,” Winifred said. “He married her, didn't he? It's the only thing I know about that man that I like. Needs to be someone in Darby-on-Hudson who's not a prude.”

“I am not a prude,” Maggie said, because she knew that comment was directed at her.

“You're a Sunday School teacher. You can't help yourself.”

“I live my life by a certain set of rules, but that's not to say I think everyone should. Or that I want to burn those I disagree with.”

“You're a prude, Maggie Dove. Look how you carried on about that man.”

“I didn't have an issue with his morals, Winifred. I had an issue with the fact that he was trying to kill my tree.”

She felt oddly hurt. First Peter hadn't wanted to tell her about his trouble with Campbell. Now Winifred didn't want to tell her about Noelle. Was she so forbidding? She thought of herself as a woman trying to do the best she could. Maybe she did cling to rules more than most, but she needed something to cling to.

Maggie noticed Mr. Cavanaugh walking by with his dog. So he hadn't gone to the funeral either. He paused for a moment in front of the tree, looked at the angel and then moved on. What if she should have moved the damn tree? Maggie thought. What if she had been unreasonable?

“So now that you know she's a stripper, do you think she murdered Bender?” Winifred asked.

Maggie turned her attention back to the phone, which was becoming slippery under the heat of her emotion.

“I don't know that anyone murdered him, Winifred. Peter says he died of a heart attack and I believe him, but I just want a better sense of what's going on.”

“In case Young Sherlock winds up being the murderer?”

“In case he's accused of it. Yes, all right, I'm concerned because I know Peter had a disagreement with Bender and he has a flair for getting into trouble and I assume you already know all about it since you seem to know everything.”

“Peter Nelson is trouble.”

“He's always been trouble,” Maggie snapped. “That's part of his charm.”

“No, it's gotten worse. You're so fixated on the boy he used to be that you don't see the man he is. You don't see what he's become.”

Maggie began pacing around her kitchen, not that there was anywhere to go. On the refrigerator she had a picture of Juliet and Peter from back in third grade, when the nature counselor came to talk to the class, to tell them about all the birds and animals in the community and Maggie had raised her hand, because she was the parent of the day, and asked why it was that peepers make that high squeaking noise in the spring. “Because they're having sex,” the counselor had said. Juliet didn't speak to her for a week, but Peter, dear Peter, laughed and hugged Maggie.

“If someone had run Bender down,” Maggie said, “or shot at him, or stabbed him, I could believe that Peter was the culprit. But I simply do not see Peter as a poisoner. By God, that child barely passed biology and that with old Mr. Laws helping him cheat, tapping him on the back during the Regents test whenever he got something wrong. I simply do not see Peter committing that type of crime.”

“They wouldn't have lasted, you know,” Winifred said. “If Juliet were alive today, you probably wouldn't even remember who Peter is.”

“How can you say that?”

“Because they wouldn't have. Because she was so different than him. Your daughter was a star. She would have soared, and he'd wind up exactly where he is, doing a lousy job and drinking too much.”

Again Maggie pictured him as he had been that last night, the last truly happy night of her life. Juliet so full of life, and Peter so handsome. So strong.

“You're wrong. He would have been a star too. She would have pulled him up with her. But when she died, he lost the best part of his life.” Her voice began to crack. She wasn't even sure what they were arguing about. “His life was destroyed because he loved my daughter. How can I let down someone like that?”

“So even if he killed Bender. Even then, you'd find some excuse?”

“He didn't do it, Winifred. I know that as surely as I know I didn't do it. Or you didn't do it, for that matter.”

“You're sure of me too?”

“Yes, because I know the people I love. I know who you are and what Peter is. And I also know what you're not.”

Winifred began clearing her throat, raspy sounds coming across the phone. It sounded like Arthur was pounding her on the back, trying to bring her relief. When she finally spoke, her voice was husky.

“You're a fool, Maggie Dove.”

“I must be, to have put up with you all these years.”

Winifred laughed at that, a welcome sound.

“You've been a good friend.”

“So have you, Winifred. You don't sound so good.”

She wheezed deeply. “Old friends. Old hearts.”

“You're right,” Maggie said. “I am a prude.”

“I know,” Winifred said, and then her voice got serious. “And I'm a fool.”

“Fair enough,” Maggie said.

“No, I really am a fool. I think I've made a mistake, Maggie.”

“Tell me what. Can I help?”

“I don't know,” Winifred said. “I have to think. I've got to get my head straight.”

The noon whistle sounded right then, a sound that always startled Maggie, mainly because it never sounded at noon. There was no way to prepare yourself for it. Sometimes it blared at five minutes to twelve and sometimes five minutes after, but whenever it blared, it always surprised her, and by the time the sirens finally stopped sounding, Winifred had hung up.

Maggie woke Sunday morning with a sense of dread so heavy she could feel it pressing against her stomach. This went way beyond her nervousness at teaching Edgar Blake, though she was nervous about that. Surprising because there wasn't a lot to be nervous about when you were a Sunday School teacher. You couldn't be fired from the job. You couldn't go wrong, really, and yet she struggled to get out of bed. She felt like a storm was coming, felt it so surely that she looked out the window, but all she saw was a blue sky and some clouds.

Maybe it was time to retire as a Sunday School teacher, she thought. She'd been doing it for thirty years, which was a long time. The President of the United States could only serve eight years. No point in doing it if there was no joy to it. In fact, the whole purpose of teaching Sunday School was to communicate joy.

She decided not to show the vegetable movie. Better to do something crafty, something that would occupy Edgar's hands. Maggie got to church early and set up the classroom. She put out five glue sticks, just to be on the safe side, though she doubted five students would show up. It was soccer season. They wouldn't have any students at all except that some of them did hockey and practiced on Saturdays. Funny to think that when she was growing up, church was so closely associated with athletes. Muscular Christianity. The YMCA.

Edgar burst into the classroom two minutes ahead of everyone else. His hair had been shaved off, which resolved one problem, but soon enough another problem emerged. He roared right over to the glue sticks and grabbed them. All five. In trooped Ambrosia Fletcher, on the verge of tears, as always, and the lovely Shu Chin, who, if the past was any predictor, would sit quietly for the next hour.

“Share the glue sticks,” Maggie said to Edgar.

He clutched them tightly to his chest. She didn't feel like arguing, and so she went to the supply closet and retrieved five more glue sticks, one of which she handed to Ambrosia and one to Shu Chin. Edgar paused, and then grabbed up Ambrosia's glue stick as well. She began to cry.

“Give that back,” Maggie said. “You're being a bully.”

He stared at her implacably, a little like a shark.

“Peter Nelson,” she said, “or no, I mean Edgar Blake. Put down the glue stick.”

She sat down so she could look more clearly into his eyes. There had to be a way to reach this boy. “You're being cruel.”

The little chickadee began to sing, the class pet. Edgar gazed at her, and then threw all the glue sticks at Ambrosia. “Take them,” he said.

She thought of a story her husband liked to tell about how President Kennedy handled Russian leader Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis. An agreement had been reached, but then Khrushchev sent a telegram saying he wanted to back out. Kennedy could have gone forward and launched an attack, but he chose to ignore the telegram. He allowed Khrushchev a face-saving moment, which many considered to be one of the triumphal decisions in American foreign policy. Maggie decided to allow Edgar a face-saving moment as well.

“Thank you,” she said. “Now, let's talk about Adam and Eve.”

“I don't want to glue anymore,” Ambrosia said.

“You don't have to. Why don't you color?”

The girl looked at Edgar like a rabbit eyeing a snake. “I don't want to.”

“You can color next to me,” Maggie said, thanking God for Shu Chin, who throughout this whole fiasco sat quietly, reading the children's Bible.

And then, in confirmation of the principle that no matter how bad a situation was, it could always get worse, Agnes appeared. She was the principal of the day. It was her job to remove unruly children from the Sunday School class. Never in all of Maggie's years had she sent a student to the principal of the day. It violated everything she felt about Sunday School, but now, watching the look that played across Edgar's face, a look of anger and triumph that reminded her of Peter in his prime, Maggie began to get a bad feeling.

“Trouble?” Agnes asked. She cocked her head.

“No trouble at all, Agnes,” Maggie said.

Agnes looked around the room brightly. “Peter helping you today?”

“Peter? No.”

“He wasn't in church. I thought perhaps he was with you.”

“No,” Maggie said, and willed Agnes to go away, which she did eventually, leaving Maggie once more alone with Edgar, who had, while Maggie wasn't looking, taken all the crayons from Ambrosia. He looked at Maggie. She looked back. She had given birth to a child. She had buried that child. She had buried her husband. She could face down this miserable child, spawn of Satan, Bender, she thought. Bender with his manicured hands stretched toward her house. Funny how some men got manicures.

Edgar lunged to take Shu Chin's Bible, which he succeeded in grabbing out of her hands and throwing onto the floor.

Everyone hushed at that. Maggie could hear the minister's voice projected through an intercom, talking about a tree and temptation. So much came back to trees. But she barely heard it as she swept forward and picked up the Bible and kissed it, an old tradition.

“Never throw the Bible on the floor,” she hissed. “People have died for this book. This book matters.”

She felt like all the anger she'd been carrying around for years, ever since her daughter died, so cruelly, was about to erupt into a terrible plume that would sear right out of her like a dragon. She was so angry she felt afraid. What was she capable of?

“Who died?” Edgar asked.

“Juliet,” she whispered.

“Who died?” he repeated, and she realized he was talking about the Bible. He wanted to know who had died for the Bible. Maggie couldn't think, she was so upset, and the only name that came to mind was Khrushchev, who most certainly had not died for the Bible.

“Well, Thomas Cranmer for one. Have you heard of him?”

Ambrosia sank onto Maggie's lap and began to suck her thumb.

“No.”

“He lived a long time ago. In England,” Maggie said, as she surreptitiously picked up all the glue sticks and put them away. “He loved the Bible and wanted everyone to be able to read it, even regular people, and so he made sure that copies of the English Bible were displayed in churches. King Edward, a boy of about your age, supported him, but then he died. The new queen didn't agree with Cranmer's religious views and she told him to recant, which means to say he was wrong. Then he had to sign his signature to some papers, and he used his right hand.”

“Why did he sign? I wouldn't sign.”

“Probably not,” Maggie said, “but I imagine he was scared. He knew the queen was very powerful, and very angry, and quite mean. Her nickname was Bloody Mary.”

She looked out the window of the classroom, toward a little grove of magnolia trees. They were just starting to flower, the pinkish petals dewy, though Maggie knew within a week or so they would be blowsy. Nothing aged as quickly as a magnolia blossom. Some bedraggled forsythia huddled in a corner like teenagers from a party gone bad. Everything she thought about lately seemed to involve trees, Maggie realized, which brought her back, in her memory, to the sight of Marcus Bender lying dead under her oak tree.

“What happened then?” Edgar asked.

She wiped her eyes. “To Cranmer? Well, he wound up being sentenced to death. The queen had no mercy. And then, on the day of his execution, he said he was wrong to have ever recanted. They tied him to the stake, and the flame began to burn, and do you know what he did?”

“No.”

Both Edgar and Ambrosia looked at her intently. Even Shu Chin seemed intrigued.

“He took his right hand and he put it in the flame, so that it would burn first, and as it burned he said, ‘That unworthy hand.' Though, of course, he wasn't unworthy at all. He was very, very brave.”

The classroom was silent after that. Edgar surveyed his right hand. Ambrosia went over to the naptime rug and sat down, and they were sitting peaceably when the parents arrived to retrieve them. Ambrosia's parents were running off to soccer practice, but Edgar's mother stayed to help her clean up, though Maggie assured her it wasn't necessary. She was so tired she had no conversation left in her. She wanted to go home. But Helen Blake was not to be deterred. In her own way, she was just as stubborn as her son, and so she put away the Bibles and the remaining crayons, and set the chairs back on the table.

“We learned about Thomas Cranmer today,” Edgar told her.

“Did you?” she said. She grinned at Maggie. “And here I thought you were going to learn some foolish thing about the twelve vegetables.”

“It was a near miss,” Maggie said.

Helen laughed. “He does love history. Thank you for taking the time with him. I know he's not always easy.”

She looked exhausted. Her eyes had dark circles under them and her face was flushed, as though she'd just woken up, which Maggie suspected she had. Helen didn't go to church. Instead she dropped Edgar off at Sunday School and then lay down on the couch in the church library and slept. There were some who felt she was using the church for free babysitting, but Maggie figured there were many different ways for a church to be a sanctuary.

“He wasn't too much?”

“Not at all.”

“Well thank you, Ms. Dove. Sometimes I think you're the best part of this town. Quite honestly, I don't know why we moved here in the first place.” At that, her glasses fell on to the ground. She scooped them up and pressed them back on her nose.

“People might be a little reserved at first, but they'll come around. You'll see.”

“We've lived here for five years,” Helen said.

“Oh.”

Maggie did one last check to see that everything was put away, then locked up the room.

“It's more than that,” Helen said. “Well, I'll be honest. I think some of the people here are cruel. One of my best friends died here a couple of days ago, and now they're saying he might have been murdered.”

“Marcus Bender?”

“Did you know him?” Helen said. She rubbed her wrist against her pale face. “I still can't believe he's gone. He never would have moved here if it weren't for me. He would have stayed in the city, but then one day he came up to visit me and he saw the river, and well, you know how Marcus was about the river.”

“I do know.”

“When he was passionate about something, he was passionate.”

“Did you know him a long time?”

“We went to college together. Amherst. We were part of the honor society there, Marcus and his first wife, Char. I was so lost when I first got there, coming from Kansas, and they both took me under their wing. They were good friends to me.”

They started up the steps, in the direction of the parlor, and coffee hour. “His daughter Lorelei is the same age as Edgar. She had a bunch of developmental issues and they wanted to put her in special ed classes, but Marcus wouldn't have it. He wanted her mainstreamed. He fought to get her tutors. He challenged them, wouldn't let them get away with taking the easy way out.”

The church bells began to chime, a lovely sound. Automatically Helen reached for her son's hand as they made their way up the steps.

“He did everything,” she said. “Met with the principal, the tutors, the special ed board. I don't know how he did it all.”

Maggie couldn't even picture the Bender girl except for a distant memory of someone dressed up as a princess. Someone sparkly who she noticed dumping a whole bucket full of candy into her trick-or-treat bag. But now Maggie felt badly that she didn't know that about her father. That she didn't know his kids.

“When I heard he had a heart attack, I wasn't even that surprised. I thought it was because he was pushing himself so hard all the time. But now they're saying he was poisoned.”

“I think they have a ways to go before they can prove that.”

“Who would want to murder Marcus?” Helen asked. “Everyone loved him.”

Edgar just stared at Maggie, as though he knew all the secrets to her heart, and the one time she would have wished for the boy to be bad, to distract his mother, he was good as gold.

“One of the police officers had a grudge against him, they're saying. Some rogue officer who was selling drugs on the side.”

“No,” Maggie said. “No, you're wrong about that. I know that police officer and he's a good man.”

But after coffee hour was over, she thought she'd better go see what was happening with Peter. His name was coming up in too many conversations. It was a bad sign.

For the first time she felt a twinge of doubt. What if he had gone bad? Would she know it?

Maggie called Peter when she got home. “How are you doing?”

“Fine,” he said. His voice sounded slushed.

“Didn't see you at church.”

“I've got a cold; I took medicine.”

She felt irritated with him, but that wasn't fair. Maybe he had taken medicine; maybe he was sick; maybe it would all turn out right. Maybe she was just being pessimistic. She crawled into bed, waiting for it to be 5 o'clock. A person shouldn't go to bed before five, she thought, but by 3:30 she was asleep and slept right through until 10 o'clock in the morning, right until five minutes past the moment that she was supposed to meet up with Iphigenia.