by Susan Breen
Meanwhile, over Noelle’s shoulder, Maggie could see the interior of the house was the color of a brothel, insofar as Maggie knew what the inside of a brothel looked like. Where there had once been colonial-blue walls and soft-white wainscoting, the room was now painted a color that reminded Maggie of inflamed tonsils. The walls were pink, plush, pulsating, unnerving. In the corner, where the Levys had kept their piano, where Mr. Levy used to sit and play songs and Mrs. Levy would pull out her banjo and they would all sing “Ramblin’ Rose” and “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” in that corner was a picture of Noelle, in the nude, with a pinecone. It always came back to trees with that man, Maggie thought.
Noelle crossed her arms. Maggie stood there like an idiot, hanging on to the casserole, thinking she should have brought a bottle of scotch. “People like you,” Noelle went on. “People who judge. People who lead your safe little lives. People who think they’re better than people like me. Hypocrites.”
“I don’t think I am a hypocrite,” Maggie said. “I was quite up front about disliking your husband. Whatever else I am, I’m not a liar.”
Noelle stepped backward, brought her fingers to her lips, as though hoping desperately to find herself holding a cigarette. She smelled ripe, Maggie thought. She smelled like she’d been fermenting. She remembered reading once that Steve Jobs had a distinctive and unpleasant aroma because his diet was so strange. She wondered what sorts of food Noelle ate.
“Why did you come live in this village if you feel that way about us?” Maggie asked. “Why not stay in the city?”
“Why shouldn’t we live where we want to live? On the river. Bender loved the river. It was his passion. He named his children after river gods. He was committed to the river. He loved it.” Her voice broke. “He said you were a Sunday School teacher,” Noelle said.
“Yes,” Maggie said, straightening up just a little bit. She was proud of her job.
“You!” Noelle said. “Screaming at him, reporting him to the police, being so cruel to him.”
“He was trying to kill my tree.”
“Weren’t you supposed to forgive him? Weren’t you supposed to try and understand him?”
Maggie sagged slightly. “Yes,” she said. “I should have. I’m not proud of the way I acted with him.”
“Everyone acting high and mighty, but really so judgmental in their hearts.”
“I’m tired of hearing that I’m not supposed to judge,” Maggie snapped. “That people should be whatever they want to be. But tell me this: I know as a Sunday School teacher I’m trying to make my life into something better. I’m trying to help people. I bring food to people who are hungry. I visit people in hospitals. I pray for people. What are you doing? Are there strippers visiting the sick? Are they collecting clothes for disaster relief? I don’t think so.”
Noelle stared at her, unblinkingly. Maggie waited for her to throw her out of her house, but instead she turned and began walking toward the staircase. “Take off your shoes,” she said, which Maggie did, reluctantly. Without her shoes she was a good inch shorter, and she felt she needed all the height she could muster to handle this interview.
Now she followed Noelle, barefoot herself, to the staircase.
That at least looked familiar. Maggie could remember sledding down those steps on pillows. Winifred, she thought. Winifred had wanted so much out of life, had been determined to marry a prince, had tried so hard. Always expecting something magical to be inside every man she went out with and always disappointed to find out he was just a man, after all. Yet still hopeful, still looking for that fifth husband. Was it possible this woman could be involved in her death?
Finally they were up in the room that had been Winifred’s. They’d torn down the walls between several of the bedrooms, turning them into one giant studio. At one end of the room, near a window, was Bender’s easel. On the other side was a desk with a computer on it and several neat shelves containing folders. Noelle walked over to the easel, and gestured to it. There was Bender’s painting.
“He’d been working on it for months,” Noelle said. “He loved the river.”
Maggie looked at it. Perhaps not surprisingly, it looked very plush. Very sensual. Lots of brushstrokes. It was the blue of the river on a spring day, when the sun turned a soft yellow, as it did sometimes, and the houses on the river were whitewashed and the river itself was so blue it looked like the Mediterranean. In the lower corner of the painting was the tip of Maggie’s house and next to it was a blank spot, where the tree should be. Bender hadn’t even been able to bring himself to paint the tree. Her pretty little oak.
She could see how that wouldn’t fit in with the tone of his painting, but why not just paint around it? Why not reimagine it as a tulip tree, for that matter? She was surprised at how much lower her house was than his. What had he felt, every day looking down on her like that? Maggie wondered. From this angle, she must have looked so small. From this angle, she realized, he had a clear view right into her house. He would have seen her glaring at him. He would have known, but he didn’t care.
Well, that much she knew, though she felt herself start to get angry all over again. She couldn’t even be in the home of this man, now dead, without feeling annoyed. The fact was, if anyone in this area had the disposition of a poisoner, it was Bender. He was manipulative, spoiled, vain. It would be easy to imagine him toying with a victim, pretending to be caring even as he slipped poison into her food. In fact, he had done that exact thing with her tree. Pretending to be concerned for what Maggie wanted even as he slipped drain cleaner onto its roots. But it was Bender who was dead, Bender who had been poisoned.
“This is who he was,” Noelle said. “This was my Bender.”
Maggie was touched by the sincerity in her voice, even though she objected strenuously. What could she say of seeing Bender’s work beyond that he was exactly what he seemed? At the same time, it did seem like he loved Noelle and she loved him and that was something honest. She had to respect that.
“What do you want from me?” Noelle asked.
Maggie took a deep breath. She could do this.
“I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there was another death in the village. The woman who used to live in this house, matter of fact. Her name was Winifred Levy.”
Noelle shook her head.
“You probably met her when you bought this house.”
“I wasn’t there,” Noelle whispered in her fluty voice. “Bender took care of all that.”
“Did he ever say anything about her?”
“That old lady?”
Maggie sighed. “Yes, the old lady who was my friend. Did he ever say anything about her?”
“Why?”
“Because they both seem to have been murdered in the same way and so there must have been some connection between them and I’m trying to figure out what that was.”
“I thought that good-looking policeman did it,” Noelle said. “Peter Nelson.”
“No,” Maggie said. The room was oppressively hot.
“He poisoned Bender. He hated him because Bender was going to get him fired.”
“He hated your husband, but he didn’t kill him, and he didn’t kill Winifred either.”
Noelle looked at her blankly.
“Winifred,” Maggie said. “My friend. The lady who used to live in this house.”
Noelle shrugged.
Maggie knew she needed to press on. She might not get another chance.
“I know this is going to sound tactless,” Maggie said, “but I understand there’s a lot of Ecstasy in your profession.”
“The drug?” Noelle asked.
“Yes.”
Noelle’s eyes narrowed. “There was, but I left that all behind a long time ago.”
She put her hand on her stomach protectively. A woman who was used to having her every action observed, Maggie thought. Not a woman who would make such a motion without knowing what it implied.
“I’m trying to think of w
hy someone might have used Ecstasy to kill Bender and I wonder if it was a way to put suspicion on you.”
“Me!” she cried out.
“Maybe as a way of framing you. Of making the police look into your background.”
“No, I never would have hurt him.”
“It’s just that it’s an unusual drug to use. It’s not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of killing someone. I was reading up on it and it’s very difficult to know how much Ecstasy could be lethal. It might be one pill or it might be fifty. There had to be some reason the killer used this particular drug.”
“But the policeman’s the killer.”
“Say he’s not,” Maggie snapped. “Say Peter Nelson’s not the killer. Is there anyone else you can think of that Bender might have known who would use Ecstasy?”
Noelle sank down onto a heart-shaped seat. There was no place for Maggie to sit, but she didn’t want to. She crossed her arms. She wondered if Noelle was taking her question seriously, and then the woman spoke.
“His first wife uses Ecstasy,” she said. “She uses it a lot.”
“She’s a drug addict?”
“No,” Noelle said. “No, she has Parkinson’s. She uses it to treat her Parkinson’s. She always has a large supply. She gets it on the Internet.”
Parkinson’s, Maggie thought. The same disease Winifred had. She didn’t know whether this first Mrs. Bender knew Winifred, much less wanted to kill her, but it was something. Something new she hadn’t known before; something she doubted Walter Campbell knew. It was time to go see him, she thought. She’d been putting it off, but finally she had something to tell him. Maybe she could go see the first wife too.
“Did that help?” Noelle asked, and suddenly she looked changed again, from angry to needy, and for a second Maggie saw what Bender had loved about her, the vulnerability that must have touched him, the softness beneath the armor.
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”
—
The phone was ringing when she walked into her house.
“Just wanted to see how you were doing,” Frank Bowman said. “Did you recuperate from last night?”
“I had a wonderful time, thank you very much.”
“You sound upbeat.”
“I am, I just went to talk to Bender’s widow and I think I got a clue.”
She could hear him smiling over the phone. Funny how changing the shape of your lips made the sounds come out differently.
“A clue?”
“A little clue, but it’s something.”
“May I ask what it is?”
“I’ve found out that Bender’s first wife used Ecstasy to treat her Parkinson’s. Well, you would be the person to ask. Did Winifred ever meet her?”
“What’s her name?”
“Char. Char Bender.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t recognize the name. But I can ask around if you like. Maybe someone else knows.”
“That would be wonderful.”
“Now I’ll feel like the real Inspector Benet,” he said. She started, wondering how he even knew who Inspector Benet was, and then she realized Winifred probably spent hours talking about her and Inspector Benet and her husband and his fingers. Good grief. She began to blush. “Perhaps we could discuss our findings over dinner,” he said.
“I’d love that,” she said.
Such a small step, she thought. But such an important one. So many small steps lately. And now for the next challenge. Now to see Walter Campbell.
Chapter 23
It was 3:00 on a Friday afternoon, which meant Walter Campbell would be at D’Amici’s Deli. Maggie knew that in the same way she knew that Agnes had her hair done at Iphigenia’s every Friday, or that Allison Cooper had her nails done every Wednesday, or that the town drunk would be standing outside the marina around 4:00. Because part of the pleasure of living in a small town was knowing its patterns. Its rhythms. Like the tide. So many of the children of the village moved away because they craved adventure. But Maggie loved the order, loved the way everything made a sort of sense.
Maggie knew she needed to talk to Walter Campbell, but she didn’t want to do anything as official as make an appointment. That would put too much on the line. But she figured she could stop by D’Amici’s and grab a late lunch. She wasn’t surprised to see Hal Carter there, and Joe Mangione, who had answered her call when she’d intended to call 911. And Walter, of course, and Agnes, which was surprising. Even more surprising was that Agnes seemed to be in the middle of laughing at a dirty joke. A surprising woman. Though they all quieted the moment Maggie walked in. She had that effect on people, she supposed, because she’d been a Sunday School teacher for so long, or because of her looks, which were patrician. She felt badly about that, but wasn’t the sort of person who would cut loose with some foul noise just for a laugh.
“You’re slumming,” Agnes said to Maggie the moment she walked in.
“Hello, dear,” Joe said. He was still wearing his Darby-on-Hudson ambulance corps jacket. He was very proud of it; said he’d be buried in it and she believed him. “Let me get you a cup of coffee.”
He didn’t actually work at the deli, but when Mr. D’Amici was hung over, which was quite often, Joe stepped in. Now he went behind the counter and poured her a cup.
“Sorry about your friend,” he said, as he handed her the hot cup. He also set a corn muffin on a napkin. She knew he’d accept no money for either. Generous and kind. When her minister got sick last year, Joe had brought her meals for a week, and he wasn’t even religious. He just thought things should be done in a certain way.
“That Winifred. She was a pip,” Hal said. “I had to fix her furnace right before her second wedding. Do you remember that?”
“She was one of a kind.”
“I remember the time someone stole her pocketbook and she chased him down the street,” Agnes threw out. “Doesn’t seem like someone who would be poisoned.”
They were quiet then. A poster of a naked woman hung in the corner. Two winning lottery tickets and an autographed picture of Elvis Presley. Some muffins the size of pumpkins were set on the counter. Walter still hadn’t said anything. From the moment she walked in, she noticed him standing in the corner, but he hadn’t spoken, smiled or anything else. He just stood, watchfully. Which was unnerving because he was a big man. He seemed even larger up close than he did at church. He had a massive face, something that should be etched in a rock. When they sang hymns, he always turned north, away from the direction of the choir, toward something unseen.
“I wonder if I might have a word with you, Walter,” she said, after a while, when the conversation began to wind down. The deli closed at 4. They’d all been up since 4 a.m.
“Uh-oh,” Hal said. “You’re in trouble now, Walter.”
“Of course,” he said, as though he’d been expecting her to ask.
He was supposed to be a genius, she knew. He taught Sunday School too, though he preferred the older kids, grappling with the more serious issues. She’d heard him once leading a discussion on faith by action. One of the confirmands refused to write a faith statement and Walter kicked him out of the class. She’d protested because she didn’t think anyone should be kicked out ever, but Walter had argued that if the church didn’t believe in anything, there’d not be much point. She knew he was right, which made her dislike him more.
“Do you want to come to my office?” he asked.
“I’d rather just walk and talk, if you don’t mind.”
Going to the office would make it too official, she thought. Also, it would alert Peter’s co-workers. She knew how visible she was walking on Main Street, but she thought her motive might seem more innocuous.
“I wanted to talk to you about Peter Nelson,” she said. “I’m a friend of his.”
“I know,” Walter said, his voice an ominous rumble. The good-natured persona he’d exhibited in D’Amici’s seemed to have disappeared. “They tell me he’s been like a
son to you.”
“That’s true,” she said, and felt a throb of emotion, though she forced it back. She didn’t want to be sidetracked, didn’t want to be pitied, in any event, by this man who had made his millions and then deposited them so he could toy with his life and throw away his family. She felt a crushing desire to explain Peter to this man. She knew Peter didn’t like him and knew Peter well enough to know that where there was dislike, there was always impudence. How to mend that fence.
“His mother died young,” he said.
“Yes, that’s right. She was a gentle woman and her life became too harsh.”
“She killed herself.”
“No. Not intentionally. She lost hope. That’s all it took.”
“She overdosed.”
A young couple walked past them, so fresh and neat, with a little plump baby swinging in a carrier.
“She mixed drugs and alcohol, but no one ever thought it was intentional. She was medicating herself, the best she knew. You know,” she said to this man, who probably thought he had complete charge of his life, “I’ve never agreed with that proverb that God doesn’t give you more than you can bear. It seems to me that quite often He does.”
“And you a Sunday school teacher.”
“I love God. But I’m not entirely sure I trust Him. Or I do trust Him, but I don’t understand Him. All I know is that Bettina Nelson was overwhelmed by her life. That’s all.”
“And then you stepped in?”
“Yes, that’s right. I always saw something special in him, even when he was a little Sunday School student. He’s one of those people who would be great in wartime, who would hurtle himself in front of bullets in order to break through a barricade, but he had a terrible time with the law and order of a community. Still, he always tried to do the right thing. He’s passionate about kids. He’s very protective.”
Campbell didn’t speak. They continued to walk down Main Street, in the direction of the river. A boy shot by on a bicycle, without a helmet, his feet splayed wide as he soared past them, his laugh a desperate cackle. Without thinking Maggie reached toward him, wanted to slow him down, though he was beyond them before she could do anything about it.