by Susan Breen
“I hope you’re right,” he said. “It would be nice to get to heaven and be offered a glass of wine.”
“It would be.” And to see her daughter, she thought, and to see her parents, and her friends, and all the people she’d loved. She felt her eyes tearing up.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Not such good company.”
“Don’t apologize for your grief,” he said, and Maggie, grateful, smiled into his eyes. He touched her hand lightly. “You’ve been struggling for a long time. You must be exhausted.”
She felt like he was seeing into her soul. She felt the strangest feeling of release.
“You’re not a psychiatrist, are you?”
“No,” he laughed. “I’m in insurance.
“We should go,” he said. “I don’t want to wear you out. Let me take you back to your car and then you go home and try to rest.”
He drove expertly, smoothly, and she was in front of her car before she knew it. He came over and opened the door, and walked her to her car.
“Can you make it home all right?”
“Yes, thank you. It’s not far to go.”
“I’ll just follow you for a bit,” he said.
“There’s no need.”
But he did. He followed her all the way back to her house, his lights in her rearview mirror, a comfort, and when she pulled into her driveway he tooted his horn and then drove away, and then she went in, to bed. That night Maggie dreamed of Winifred. She dreamed they were at a party in Mexico, and Frank was there too, and there was loud frantic music and laughter and then a gunshot, and when she woke Friday morning Maggie felt groggy, and she noticed the light on her answering machine blinking. It was Winifred, who must have left her a message on the day she died, that Maggie hadn’t noticed because she’d been so busy running after Peter.
“Hey, Maggie,” she said. “You’d better come by. I think I’ve done something wrong.”
Chapter 21
Maggie needed to find Peter, which she didn’t want to do because she knew whatever he had to say would be upsetting. She felt like a child. The day was so beautiful, the air so sweet and perhaps she should just drop the whole thing and let whatever happened take its course.
But she couldn’t.
She found herself thinking of Jesus asking God to take the cup from him, which wasn’t the perfect analogy since she wasn’t the son of God, but she’d always like that moment. On the night before he was crucified, when he knew what was coming, Jesus hesitated. Just for a moment. Often when she prayed she pictured that Jesus, the human one, the hesitating one. One she could relate to so much more than the one who was so powerful.
Peter didn’t answer the phone. Of course. So she called the police station and the secretary told her he’d been suspended and her heart seemed to slingshot right into her throat.
“Why?”
“I shouldn’t say,” the secretary whispered.
“Please, Stephanie.”
She spoke so quietly Maggie could barely hear. “They got the autopsy report on Mrs. Levy,” she said. “That’s all I can say.”
“Winifred was murdered? Is that what they’re saying?”
“I can’t say,” she whispered.
“Stephanie,” Maggie said. “This is important. I need to know.”
“I can’t tell you. He’s here.”
“Peter?”
“No. Walter Campbell,” and she hung up the phone.
Walter Campbell was everywhere. He was like fate or death, always looming, always larger than you thought it should be. Walter Campbell who left his wife and children behind in Manhattan so he could move to Darby-on-Hudson and destroy Maggie’s life. Who had insisted on an autopsy for Bender, who was going to destroy Peter, who set this whole wretched thing in motion.
Peter had to be home. Judging by the way he’d looked at Winifred’s funeral, he hadn’t been out much. Maggie grabbed her purse and headed toward the door, startling Mr. Cavanaugh, who was staring at her tree. Had the whole town gone mad? she wondered. She was tempted to stop and ask him why he spit at the tree, but she didn’t want to be distracted. Not now, not when she needed to find Peter.
She half walked, half ran down to Peter’s apartment. The school buses were out in force, and a huge black Yukon was behind one of them, the driver hammering on his horn. “Come on. Come on.”
She turned to glare at him and he glared back. More anger. Hal Carter? Was that really his face?
Winifred murdered! How was that possible? Who would take her life? Maggie’s eyes were tearing, her nose ran. She was an ugly crier, she knew it. She thought of what Frank Bowman had said last night, that she had an expressive face. She thought how she’d been laughing and smiling. How was that possible? How had she gone from her best friend’s funeral to going out with a man, and now to discover her friend had been murdered.
She got to Peter’s and rang the doorbell and he didn’t answer. She was furious. She couldn’t take this. He was a grown man. He had to meet her partway. She yelled his name. “Peter Nelson, open your door.”
Was that her voice? she wondered. Was she that harridan? She felt like she was splitting in two and then the door was open and Peter was there, looking at her with an expression so haunted that she couldn’t possibly yell. His face was pale. He held his head stiffly as though he had a migraine. She knew at once he hadn’t slept all night. By the look on his face, he hadn’t slept in a long time.
“They got the autopsy report,” he said. “She was poisoned.”
“With Ecstasy?”
He nodded.
“So the same person killed them both?” Maggie asked, trying to make sense of it.
“It came from the same lot,” he said. “Same pills, it looks like.”
Peter spoke as though he were drugged, though he didn’t smell of beer. She had a terrible feeling that he was just shutting down. He smelled old, of dirty clothes.
“That makes no sense. I can see someone wanting to kill Bender, and I suppose I could see someone wanting to kill Winifred, but why would anyone want to kill both of them? They had nothing in common.”
She wanted him to come up with an explanation, to be the same loud, vehement man she’d always known, but this Peter was someone different. Quiet, resigned.
“Think, Peter. Can you think of any connections between them?”
He walked carefully down the hallway. She was struck by how quiet everything was. No music blaring, no TV shouting. He must have been sitting in the quiet, which was so unusual as to be unnerving. He’d left his door open and she followed him inside, into his living room, and then she saw what he was doing, why he seemed so sad.
The room was filled with scrapbooks. Everywhere she looked, Maggie saw pictures of her daughter. Juliet and Peter graduating from kindergarten, both of them wearing mortarboards made out of construction paper. Juliet standing on Peter’s shoulders, doing a flip at some long-ago birthday party. There’d been a huge parachute and they’d all jumped around on it. The two of them holding hands and walking on the beach, his handsome face tanned, his blond hair bleached and Juliet fair, always, with her dark black hair.
“Oh good grief, Peter,” she said, as she sat down on the couch and put one of the albums on her lap. It was like tearing at her heart with an ice pick. It hurt, but it also felt so good, to see Juliet’s face, to know that even twenty years later her daughter was still loved. As long as she was loved, she lived. In a way.
“I like to look at her pictures,” he said. “I like to remember.” He ran his hand over one especially loved picture, the two of them at the prom. They only got to go to the junior prom. She died before the senior one, and so they canceled it for her, the town coming together in their grief. No one could celebrate with Juliet dead.
“When she’s with me, I feel like I’m better,” he said.
“I know, chickie.” She ran her finger over her daughter’s face. So loved. So loved. She looked, startled, at a picture she hadn’t seen in a l
ong time, Juliet in shorts in front of a Christmas tree. Juliet had loved Christmas so much that Maggie used to enjoy surprising her on July 25. She’d wrap up a present and decorate one of the fir trees and her husband would dress up as Santa and they’d sing Christmas songs. The joy of the unexpected. The joy of love.
“I should have died that night.”
“No,” she cried out. “Never say that.”
“I should have. My life hasn’t meant anything since then. I was the one who didn’t have my seatbelt on. I deserved to die. Why did God choose me to live?” Was this the same strong man who’d been with her only last week, who’d wanted nothing more than to protect her when she found a body on her lawn?
“You can’t know what God was thinking. All you can know is that you are alive and you have to appreciate that. You have to be thankful for that.”
“Thankful,” he said.
“You can’t just surrender, Peter. If not for yourself, think of Juliet. She would have wanted you to fight. She would have believed in you.”
Such a passionate girl. Always so committed and so quick to fight injustice. She hated to see anyone bullied. She joined the Gay-Straight Alliance because she didn’t want anyone to feel alone. It’s a terrible thing to be isolated, Mom.
“Did you get a lawyer?” she asked.
He nodded. “I got O’Connor.”
The local real estate lawyer. “I thought he was dying.”
“No, he’s in remission.”
“Do you think you might want someone a little more energetic?” she asked. Even when O’Connor was perfectly healthy, he didn’t have all his wits about him. “Anyway, don’t you want a criminal lawyer?”
“He’s good people, Dove. Don’t you fret.”
“I’m not fretting. But it does seem to me that there are forces mobilizing against you and you might do well to fight them.”
“They will never arrest me. Not here, Dove. There’d be a revolution.”
“Peter, that sounds like the sort of thing people say right before the revolution. If they can prove you did it, they’ll arrest you and it won’t matter who you are, what you’ve done or anything at all.”
He pressed his lips tightly together. No point in telling him to be reasonable. She knew he wouldn’t be. His whole life was predicated on not being reasonable. It was like when he’d played baseball. Peter had been a good player. He wasn’t that big, but he was all heart, and you knew when he had his bat that he was going to swing it. When he made contact with the ball, it sailed. One time, she remembered, the ball stayed in the air, looping up like a kite, so far out in the field that the poor outfielder had almost run into the river to get it. Not long afterward a scout came to town. Small college, but a good scholarship, and it would have worked except Peter got mad at the umpire at the game and pushed him. He got tossed out. End of career. It was as though he’d rather throw something away than discover he couldn’t be good at it.
“You don’t need to make it easy for him, Peter.”
He threw a bottle cap in the direction of the wall. On the windowsill he had a stack of books from high school, the last ones he’d read, she suspected. To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, The House on Mango Street, Leaves of Grass, the last a gift from Juliet.
“How can I stand up to a man like that? He has millions of dollars in the bank and he has everyone in the village on his side. Campbell says this and Campbell says that. How am I supposed to fight that?”
“With facts. With other suspects. There are alternatives, you know. There are other people who wanted them dead. There have to be, because I know you didn’t do it.”
“Being a mystery writer isn’t real life, Dove.”
“It is though, I know about people. Listen, I’ve done a lot of reading about poisoners. I’ve poisoned off all my victims, in fact, except for the third one, and that was a cement block, but the thing is that poisoners are a specific type of person. They’re patient. They’re manipulative. They like playing games. You are the opposite of a poisoner, Peter. You’re more of a meat cleaver kind of guy.”
“You’re just saying that because you love me,” he said, though she could see a bit of a spark returning to his face.
“I do love you. Quite honestly, I would defend you even if I thought you were the murderer. But you’re no poisoner, Peter. And I won’t let Campbell pin this on you. But you have to help me. You can’t just sit here and let them frame you.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Well, the thing I don’t understand is why someone would use Ecstasy in the first place. It doesn’t seem like a dangerous drug. I mean, why not use cyanide or strychnine or belladonna, for that matter,” Maggie said, thinking of the shrub on her front lawn, thinking of all the various ways there were to kill someone.
“Maybe that’s what the person had on hand. People usually use the substance they’re familiar with.”
“What sort of person would have Ecstasy in his possession?” she asked, feeling slightly foolish.
“A DARE officer.” He grimaced, flicking another bottle top.
“Beyond that?”
He sighed. “A teenager. God knows there’s enough Ecstasy in this town. Not as much as there used to be, but it’s still pretty easy to get. And there’s this new type that’s supposed to be very lethal.”
“Yeah, but I don’t see why a teenager would want to kill Bender. Plus, how would they get to Winifred? Anyway, teenagers tend to be more impulsive. Who else?”
He leaned forward, Rodin’s thinker on the couch. With Peter thinking was a physical process. He ran his hands through his hair. He chewed his lips.
“What other sort of person would use Ecstasy?”
He grinned at her then.
“Well, Dove, not to shock your tender sensibilities, but there is one class of people known for using Ecstasy.”
“Who’s that?” she said.
“Strippers,” he said, “but there are no strippers in Darby-on-Hudson.”
Chapter 22
She had a clue! It wasn’t much, but it was something. She’d actually done something, which was sort of amazing. Now Maggie just had to figure out what to do about it.
It was so easy to get people to do things in books. All you had to do was write a scene and Inspector Benet leapt into action. But in real life, it was not easy to knock on a grieving woman’s door and try to interview her. Particularly when you knew that woman hated you, and when you were trying to ask her if she might have killed her husband.
Maggie had no authority. She had no badge. She considered going to Walter Campbell for help, but rejected it instantaneously. She could almost picture the expression on his rock-like face when she told him why she suspected Noelle. No, she had to do something else.
Maggie went home and changed her clothes. Put on a little more makeup and a V-neck shirt. She wasn’t sure what vibe she was going for, but thought she should look a little sophisticated. Not that it worked, because the moment Noelle opened the door to her house, she thrust out her hip and said, “What do you want?”
“I brought you a chicken casserole,” Maggie said. She’d defrosted it; always kept one handy for the dinner brigade. You never knew when one of the elderly parishioners would twist an ankle.
“Oh,” Noelle said. “You’re the second person to drop off food today.”
There was that same artificial voice, baby-like, and the same languid motion, as though she could hardly be bothered to reach for the casserole dish. Her eyes were large and slightly slanted, like a cat’s.
“Really? Who else was here?” Maggie asked automatically, but Noelle didn’t seem offended. Not a woman who kept secrets, it seemed. Not a woman who valued her privacy. “That other lady,” she said. “The one who looks like you. Agnes.”
“Agnes Jorgenson does not resemble me in the least,” Maggie snapped. But Noelle just stared back blankly. She had a way of looking all innocent, Maggie realized, when she was about to stab you in the back. Agne
s Jorgenson. She of the googly eyes and dour expression. She did not look like Maggie. Not that looks were important. Not that she was vain. Not that she looked as good as she used to, but still…
“Anyway, I wondered if I might talk to you.”
“About what?”
This was not going to be easy, Maggie thought. She could hardly flat-out ask if Noelle used Ecstasy and had poisoned Winifred with it.
“You said you were working on a book. Is there anything I can help you with?”
“You said you didn’t want to help me. You said you didn’t do that type of work anymore. Anyway, everyone says you hated my husband.”
She looked like a martyr. She looked like she expected Maggie to tie her to a stake and light the wood. Honestly, Maggie didn’t think she was that bad. Maggie tried to smile. She tried to look like a normal, friendly person, which she hoped she was.
“I didn’t hate him. I hated what he did to my tree.”
Don’t hate the person, she always said to her Sunday School students. Hate the act.
“You hated him from the moment he moved in. Hated me too. You don’t need to try and hide it. I’ve been dealing with people like you my whole life.”
She tucked her head back at that. Maggie couldn’t figure out if the woman was beautiful or not. Her skin was slightly pockmarked from acne, but the color of it was beautiful. Lightly tanned. Her hair was thick, her eyes a little close together. She had beautiful eyebrows and long lashes. She reminded Maggie a little bit of one of the Romanov princesses, girls who looked beautiful from some angles and homely from others. One thing was clear. She had a very nice figure. Into Maggie’s head popped a long-ago memory of her church youth leader telling the girls that a woman’s breasts only needed to be as big as a man’s hands. Sex ed, in the church.
Maggie wondered how on earth to ask her the question she needed to.
“People like me how?” Maggie asked, feeling her heart beginning to pound, feeling like what she wanted to do was slam the door and leave, but she couldn’t do that. She needed information. She needed to help Peter. That was worth a certain amount of humiliation.