by Susan Breen
So, to drum up business, Hal had started up a contest to find “the oldest furnace in town.” Winner would get a free furnace, but all the runners-up would get “consultations.” Maggie knew for herself that Hal was persistent as a tick. If you were a runner-up, you were doomed to get a lot of consultations, until Hal finally harangued you into installing a brand-new furnace. She’d expected the contest to fall flat, but surprisingly, a lot of people signed up. Especially the new folk, who were sharp lawyers in the city, and then bemused by the ways of the village when they moved here. She suspected they knew they were falling for a line, and they wanted to; that’s why they’d chosen to live in this beautiful town.
“It’s our own celebrity,” he repeated. “Come up here, Maggie Dove.”
“I already have a new furnace, Hal,” she said. “You put it in last year.”
He guffawed at that, the crowd did too. She thought that would be the end of it, but he pressed on.
“Tell us about your new mystery.”
“It’s about a plumber who gets murdered,” she said, which just about pushed Hal over the edge. He was a florid man with a loud galloping laugh, the kind of laugh you heard from blocks away. He’d put in a new furnace at Bender’s house too, she remembered. She’d heard the sound of his laughter coming from inside the house.
“This lady wrote the best book I ever read,” he said. He held out his hand, inviting her to stand up front with him, but she shook her head no. She felt self-conscious talking about her books in the best of circumstances and she didn’t want to be forced into endorsing his services, particularly when, now that she thought about it, her new furnace kept turning off last winter.
“Come on up, Maggie. I need your seal of approval.”
“Not right now, Hal.” She wished he’d stop. She felt something weird in the intensity with which he was pressing her; remembered then the look he’d got on his face when she’d gone out with him that one time. When she’d not invited him into her house for coffee. But surely she was being silly.
For just a moment her vision of him twisted, of the village twisted. There was hatred here, she thought. Hatred in her heart, hatred perhaps in Hal’s heart, and who knew where else. Her expression must have changed because Hal backed off. He turned his attention to a thin young man in a suit.
The crowd’s attention drifted away from her and Maggie might have drifted away herself, except that she noticed Joe Mangione standing near the front of the ambulance corps building. Now, there was a port in the storm. She made her way over to him.
“Thanks for coming so quickly last night,” she said.
“It’s my job,” Joe replied, his voice sounding of Boston. “Don’t forget to call 911 next time.”
“Right. Say, have you seen Peter today?”
“Nah, well, it’s only three o’clock. He’ll be up and around soon.”
“Three o’clock? Has he gotten that bad?”
“We’ve all got our demons, Mrs. Dove. Right?”
“Did he get in trouble for not calling Campbell right away?”
Mangione looked up and down the street as though Campbell might be hiding somewhere, which was laughable. The man was easily six-foot-eight. There were statues smaller than Walter Campbell, and statues with more warmth to them, Maggie suspected. He was one cold son of a gun. But he was certainly not the sort of man who lurked.
“Ah, Peter’s his own worst enemy.” Joe shook his head.
“Was he having trouble with Bender, do you know? Did they have an argument?”
Joe crossed his arms. He was so small and brave, but in this society only his smallness was noticed. He was a passionate Red Sox fan and always aggrieved about them. Even when they won, he couldn’t get the memory of their losses out of his head.
“Bender,” he said. “Now, there was a piece of work.”
“Why didn’t you like him?” Maggie asked.
“Bend-uh,” he said. “Thought he owned this town, thought he owned everything, him and his money. His mother died of a heart attack when he was a boy, so what’s he got to do? Has to make sure the village has the best emergency supplies. He donates money for the 911 system. He arranges for us all to take special certification classes. He wants the village to have New York City–caliber regulations.”
“You didn’t want that?”
Joe crossed his arms. He spit into one of the begonias the gardening club had planted in front of the firehouse. “He wanted to improve the physical capacity of the firefighters. He wanted to make the requirements more standard.”
“What do you mean?”
“He wanted a height requirement. His mother died because none of the firefighters was big enough to lift her. He wanted all firefighters to be over five-foot-ten.”
“Is that legal?”
“No. He couldn’t force the village to go along with his demands, but he wouldn’t donate his money if we didn’t comply. He gave us a month to make up our minds. We had until May first.”
He rocked back on his feet. She wondered if she’d ever seen him without his ambulance jacket on.
“The guys would never have voted you out.”
“No,” he said. “I was going to quit. I couldn’t ask them to make a sacrifice like that for me. I planned to quit today. But now it’s all over. He’s dead.”
Yet another person who hated Bender, Maggie thought. The whole village was full of people who wanted Marcus Bender dead. She shivered. Why move to a small community and then do everything you could to make people hate you? Surely that was an attitude more suited to the anonymity of the city.
Suddenly the crowd hushed, and Maggie, following the direction of the crowd, saw the widow Bender walking down the street. Noelle wore a black dress, slightly different than the one she’d worn the night before, but equally formfitting. She sashayed as she walked, barefoot, eating the largest ice-cream cone Maggie’d ever seen. She didn’t know there was anywhere in the village that sold ice creams that large. Impossible not to stare.
Impossible not to listen too, to the whispers around her.
Funeral’s tomorrow.
On the river. Humanist minister. What’s a humanist funeral?
Heard they took the kids away.
“I feel like we’re in ‘The Lottery,’ ” Maggie whispered.
“What?”
“You know, the Shirley Jackson story where they throw a rock at Mrs. Hutchison.” No sooner had the words escaped her that Maggie remembered her own rock.
There was too much darkness surrounding this man. She had to break through to the light somehow. She slipped past the crowd, following Noelle, thinking perhaps there was something she could do to connect with her, but as she turned onto her street, as the gap between them grew smaller and she yelled out her name, Noelle paused for just a moment, then turned her back on her and went into her house. Maggie followed to the door and rang the bell, but there was no answer, just as there had been no answer last night, when Noelle’s husband’s corpse was on Maggie’s lawn. She noticed, though, when she walked toward her own porch, that Noelle had flipped the remains of her ice-cream cone onto Maggie’s lawn. She picked it up, desperately wanting to do the right thing, but flipped it, instead, right back onto Noelle’s lawn.
“Take that,” she said, and walked back to Main Street to retrieve her car. Then she called Peter to arrange for a meeting, to figure out what was wrong and what she could do.
“We have to talk.”
“I’ll meet you at the park in an hour,” he said.
So she took a shower and washed all Iphigenia’s shellac out of her hair, put on a warm sweater and jeans and made some turkey sandwiches and coffee and then headed out for the park, hoping the news from Peter would not be too bad. That her sweet boy would stay safe.
Chapter 12
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.”