by Susan Breen
Doc Steinberg brought Iphigenia into her office and within five minutes she emerged.
“It was a mosquito bite,” she cried out. Maggie noticed she was holding a little piece of white paper. “The doctor wrote me a prescription for Xanax.”
She flew out the door then, and Doc Steinberg remained. “Did you want to talk to me Maggie?” she asked.
Maggie looked at her. She had been thinking of her as a suspect. She had been hoping Doc Steinberg was the killer because, somehow, if she had to pick someone, Doc Steinberg felt the most disposable, and she knew many poisoners were doctors. Yet now, looking at her, at those firm, competent eyes, at the red shoes she always liked to wear, at the tired, pale face, she could not believe that this committed doctor would hurt anyone. She loved Doc Steinberg. What was she even thinking about?
“Do you want to come into my office?” Doc Steinberg said.
“No thank you,” Maggie replied. “I have someone I have to talk to,” because she did need to see Agnes. She felt guilty about it, but Agnes was the only person she knew who she hoped would be the murderer. Though even Agnes, carted off to jail, would tug at Maggie’s heart. But it had to be someone.
Chapter 35
Agnes lived in a new development called Sheep’s Meadow, so named because, in building the houses, the developer had torn up a sheep’s meadow. Now it was a huge enclave of massive houses. In every driveway there was a Lexus or two. In front of every garage was a built-in basketball court, every mailbox announced the house was protected by a security system. On this late Monday afternoon, the whole area vibrated with the sound of leaf-blowers and lawnmowers.
“I never realized you lived here,” Maggie said, after walking up from Doc Steinberg’s office. She’d gambled that Agnes would be home, and willing to receive her, which she was.
“I’ve come a long way,” Agnes said, and she spoke the truth. Maggie vividly remembered the apartment Agnes had grown up in. It was a squalid space over the video store, which had then been the candy store. Agnes lived there with her seven siblings, her exhausted mother and her father, who couldn’t keep his hands to himself. Maggie’s mother wouldn’t let her go over there. That was how you handled a man like that in those days. You didn’t report him to the police. You didn’t complain to his wife. You simply told your own daughter to avoid him, and if he had daughters of his own, well that was too bad.
“Seven thousand square feet,” Agnes said. “One of the biggest units in the development. Have you ever seen anything like it?”
Not since Tara, Maggie was tempted to say, but forbore.
“I know you disapprove,” Agnes said, pursing her lips. She seemed different here, on her home turf, Maggie thought. She looked more confident, more normal.
“Not at all,” Maggie said. “I’m glad you got here, Agnes. You deserve it.”
Agnes cleared her throat, beckoned for Maggie to come in. “Well, I suppose you’ll want a tour.”
They walked into the entryway, which was built in the shape of a rotunda. Maggie couldn’t help herself, she thought of Abraham Lincoln laid out at his funeral. Why did this house keep conjuring up images of the Civil War era? In the center of this particular rotunda was a nude, carved out of black stone, contorted in what seemed to be a very uncomfortable position.
“Me,” Agnes said. “In my salad days.”
Maggie looked at the nude more carefully. She’d never been sure when Agnes was joking, which she supposed was part of why she didn’t like her that much.
“This way,” Agnes said, leading Maggie down a long hallway. She caught sight of a media room with a gigantic TV screen; then another room, filled with leather-bound books, and they were in the kitchen and Maggie laughed out loud. She’d never seen anything like it. There was a huge granite island in the middle that was long enough to serve as an aircraft carrier. All the appliances matched color. Everything gleamed silver. Maggie noticed Agnes eyeing herself in the refrigerator, smiling at her reflection.
“Fabulous,” Maggie said.
“Isn’t it?”
“No wonder you like to cook so much. Here I was picturing you slaving away over a hot stove.”
“Yes,” Agnes said. “That’s how everyone pictures me. Like the witch in ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ ”
“I wouldn’t put it like that.”
“No,” she said. “You’ve always been so tactful, Margaret.”
It was going to be a long afternoon.
Agnes gestured for her to sit down on one of the chairs around the island, which Maggie did and immediately felt enveloped in a plush warmth that molded itself like a hand to her back. It was a little like being held in God’s hands, she supposed. If God were in the kitchen, and why shouldn’t He be?
Agnes shrugged on an apron that had an image on it of one of the Disney princesses, and then she began bustling around with an espresso-maker.
“So what did you do out there in Oregon?” Maggie asked.
Agnes laughed. “Where did I get the money for this, you mean?”
“Exactly.”
Agnes tugged opened the freezer, which was crammed full of pans of what Maggie assumed was her famous bread pudding. No wonder she was always first on the scene for the dinner brigade.
“Have you ever heard of Nancy Straub?”
“No.”
Agnes put the bread pudding in a microwave that looked like it had the capability of launching a spaceship. “She was a genius. A pioneer. She had an idea for a website where people could go to get their eyes examined, online, and then it would make up glasses for them. Simple actually, the difficulty was in getting the funding, but that’s where Nancy excelled. She was a real wheeler and dealer. She built a very successful business.”
“And you were her assistant?” Maggie asked, trying to reconcile the image of this mover and shaker with the Agnes she knew. With the girl that lived with that creepy father and haunted their cheerleading practices, always trying to make the team, always the butt of jokes. Always about twenty pounds overweight and so eager. Always so eager.
“No. I was her wife.”
“Oh.”
“You’re shocked?” Agnes said. She peered at Maggie as though from a great distance, a scientist looking at a specimen under a microscope.
“Agnes, I wish you’d get it out of your head that I’m such a prude. Just because I’m a Sunday School teacher doesn’t mean I don’t know there are gay people in the world. I am an intelligent and fairly liberal member of the twenty-first century. I just didn’t realize you were gay. I’m processing the information.”
Agnes laughed, spurting air like a whale. Then she grew thoughtful.
“I didn’t realize it either,” she said. “I thought I was just miserable because of this town. I thought I hated men because of my father. I thought the reason I wanted to be with you so much was because I wanted a friend. Nancy saw something in me that no one had ever seen before. She saved me.” Agnes’ eyes glistened. “She opened up a whole new world for me.”
Maggie remembered the sense of wonder she’d felt when Stuart loved her. The way he made everything seem possible.
“What happened?” she asked. “What happened to Nancy?”
Agnes cleared her throat. The microwave began to chime. “She died. Brain cancer. It was a hard death. I was by her side for every minute of it. She left me everything. Her family fought it, but there was nothing they could do. She was an outsider, like me. She made sure they didn’t get any of her money.”
Maggie knew she and Winifred had been cruel to Agnes. They had, in some respects, formed the woman she had become. Maggie had been beautiful and she knew it and she loved it and she’d had devoted parents and she’d thought that life was good and people were good and God was good, and how different would she have been had life been less generous to her? How differently would she have handled the hard times had she not had that cushion to fall back on?
“I’m sorry,” Maggie said.
Agnes tur
ned her back to her, retrieved the bread pudding and brought it over to the table.
“You were always the best of them,” she said.
“I’m afraid that’s not saying much,” Maggie said, remembering all the times she’d laughed at Agnes’ expense.
“No, but it’s something.”
Agnes set the platter in front of Maggie. The bread pudding smelled of eggs and vanilla; it was Maggie’s favorite thing in the world, and now it bubbled and spat in front of her.
“Why did you come back here?” she asked Agnes. “You were so successful there, why did you want to come back to Darby?”
A cloud seemed to pass in front of Agnes. Her whole demeanor changed. Maggie had a terrible feeling her own face had changed in just that way when she spoke to Bender. It was the transformation of anger.
“I dreamed of coming back here. I dreamed of buying the biggest house I could, of showing everyone what I had become. When I got back and saw Winifred in that nursing home, her legs bent up, her hands like claws…”
Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun, Maggie thought. One of Frederick Buechner’s most famous lines.
“How I laughed,” Agnes said, “to see her bowed down, who had been so cruel to me.”
To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come.
“When I think how she used to make fun of the way I looked in a cheerleading outfit. Which of us looks better now?” she said.
The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.
Of course Agnes hated Winifred, Maggie realized. She’d always known it. How could she not after how cruelly Winifred had treated her, but the intensity of her emotion shocked Maggie. For Agnes to speak so openly about it.
How difficult would it have been to poison one of Winifred’s meals? Agnes was always in and out of the Castle, visiting someone. She could have stopped by Winifred’s room, could have put something in one of Winifred’s pill bottles, and Winifred wouldn’t have noticed. Agnes worked at the traffic court, so she was near the police station. Maybe she had come across some Ecstasy there.
But why would she have killed Bender? What grudge did she have against him, and how would she have killed him?
Maggie looked into Agnes’ triumphant eyes. The skeleton at the feast is you.
“But enough of that,” Agnes said. “Won’t you have some bread pudding?”
The bread pudding bubbled ominously. It looked alive. Maggie smelled nutmeg and remembered then a fact she’d discovered in researching her mysteries. That nutmeg could mimic Ecstasy. That you could poison someone with nutmeg.
“Come, you know you’re hungry.”
Maggie wondered if Agnes intended to poison her. Was that what the bread pudding was about? She looked carefully at Agnes’ face, at her arched eyebrows, at her all-knowing expression. She was a manipulative woman. She liked to play games. She had the exact disposition of a poisoner, or of a person mimicking a poisoner. Suddenly Maggie thought of a different time, at the hospital, after her daughter had been pronounced dead and Maggie, looking up, caught sight of her own face in a mirror and thought to herself—couldn’t help it—So that’s what a woman looks like who’s lost her child. How could you write after that?
“Agnes,” Maggie said, pushing the hot plate away from her. “This is not something to joke about.”
She thought she heard Agnes laughing as she walked toward the door. She was halfway home before she remembered that she’d wanted to ask Agnes a question. She wanted to ask her if she’d ever met Winifred’s third husband, because it seemed like from something she said at the funeral that she might have. But Maggie was damned if she was going to go back there and talk to that woman. She had other avenues to pursue.
Chapter 36
“So was there poison in that bread pudding?” Frank Bowman asked. “Was Agnes trying to kill you?” Maggie had called him as soon as she got home. She needed to vent and could think of no better candidate.
Maggie settled onto her couch in the living room. She looked at her desk, and the rock she kept on top of it, as a reminder. She didn’t want to wind up like Agnes.
“I don’t know whether there was real poison in it or not, but there was certainly a lot of hatred,” she said.
“Don’t have anything more to do with her,” Frank said. “I don’t like her, Maggie. She’s dangerous.”
Maggie looked over at her oak tree, which appeared different after the poison attempt. The leaves were still starting to come out, but some of the buds had hardened. They’d turned into little rocks.
Suddenly Maggie felt so tired. Agnes could have killed her, or hit her over the head, or shot her. She’d known that, hadn’t she, when she went there, to her house.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” she said. “There was a moment when I looked at that bread pudding and I wanted to taste it. I think I wanted it to be poisoned. I figured I’d probably go quickly. It would all be over. Is there such a thing as killing yourself because you didn’t have the energy for protection?”
“You’ve suffered,” Frank said. She liked the way he didn’t offer reassurance, didn’t say everything was going to be okay. She always found that ridiculous when things were so obviously not going to be okay, and yet everyone seemed to feel obliged to say it.
“But for all that, I don’t think there was poison in the bread pudding. Agnes had no reason to kill Winifred. If anything, she would have been happier having Winifred live. She wanted her to suffer. She took enjoyment out of it, and God bless her, I can’t even blame her. The hatred she felt was born out of the teasing that we gave her. It just seems like hatred twists everything around. Me going after Bender, and Agnes going after Winifred, and Peter going after Walter Campbell.”
“Why don’t I come over?” Frank said. “Let me keep you company.”
“No, thank you. I’m not good for much right now, but I’ll see you Friday night. At the Dining Out Club.”
He laughed softly at that. “Of course. My debut.”
“They’ll love you,” she said.
“I will be on my best behavior.”
Maggie had a vision of all the ladies of the church circling him, the way women did at the Castle.
“But after that,” he said, “after the dinner, perhaps we could spend some time together. Alone.”
She heard something in his voice she hadn’t heard before, something that ran like a hot current underneath the gentility.
“Yes,” she said, remembering the press of her lips against his. “Yes.”
She felt so strange. So excited. So odd. And when the phone rang again, she grabbed it, thinking it was Frank Bowman, but it was Helen Blake’s distinctive Kansas twang on the other end.
“Do you remember how you said you’d be willing to watch Edgar for an hour or two?” she asked. Her voice was always unnaturally high, as though someone was stepping on her foot, a likely scenario.
“Yes,” Maggie said. “I think so.”
“Do you suppose, would it be an imposition, if I were to bring him over now?”
“Now!” Maggie looked at the clock. It was almost 3:00. Two hours until dinner and six hours until bed. Not that she was regimented.
“It’s too much, isn’t it? I knew I shouldn’t ask.”
“Hold on,” Maggie said. “It’s just I was surprised.”
“You’ll do it, then,” Helen Blake gushed. “Would you really? That would be such a help. I would owe you for the rest of my life.”
“Well, when you put it like that, how can I say no?”
“Thank you, thank you, dear Ms. Dove. And please, don’t worry about that mark he has on his arm. I took him to the pediatrician and she assured me Edgar doesn’t have rabies.”
Chapter 37
Within seconds of putting down her phone, Maggie’s doorbell rang, and there was Helen Blake with Edgar in tow. He se
emed to be frothing, though perhaps that was the lollipop.
“Thank you so much,” Helen said. Edgar hesitated, but she lifted him up off the ground and deposited him on the other side of the door, and then she squeezed him tight and said, “You are my heart. And now I must go.”
And she did, leaving Edgar blinking in Maggie’s direction.
“I have to pee,” he said. Tufts of downy blond curls made him look like an angel.
“All rightie,” she said, and she brought him inside and showed him to the bathroom. Then he emerged and she showed him the hole under the staircase that used to be a hideout for runaway slaves. She told him about how there used to be slaves in Westchester, but how her ancestors, the Leighs, had been involved in helping them escape.
“They hid in here.”
“Can I hide in there?” Edgar asked. He was fierce, this boy. His eyes gleamed.
“Yes,” she said, and so he did, for an hour, and when he came out she asked him if he knew how to play chess, which he didn’t, and so she showed him some moves and they did that for an hour, and then she thought perhaps he’d like to walk around Main Street. So they popped into Iphigenia’s and said hello and then stopped by D’Amici’s, and she got him a bagel. Then she remembered how she’d been wanting to stop by the nail salon and ask about Marcus Bender’s hands, which for some reason had stayed vividly in her mind.
There were four nail salons in Darby, and she and Edgar stopped by each one, until finally they got to the one owned by Billy Kim’s mother, which Maggie recognized because the woman had a picture of Billy on the wall. She was an elegant woman, dark hair pulled back into a bun. Even Edgar seemed impressed by her. Or perhaps he was just tired. But he clutched on to Maggie’s hand and didn’t move.
“Your son helped me out the other night,” Maggie said.
“Yes,” she said, eyes crinkling. “He tell me you like dirt bikes.”