Although less than a mile from her own apartment building, St. Juniper was abused and kicked around, an older neighborhood made up of small, dilapidated crackerbox houses with blistering paint and stingy-sized garages that had once been proper sheds. Maggie had often seen old people hobble out at the mouth of St. Juniper’s Street to go sit in the dismal little park next to St. Phillips Cathedral, the snooty-grand Episcopal church directly across the street.
She picked up the hanging phone book and carefully flipped the pages to the ‘W’s. Kazmaroff, bless him, had proven a wealth of useful information. Not only had he told Maggie about Gerard and outlined the police report on Elise’s death, but he’d given her Alfie’s surname. He’d thrown it out in reference to “St. Juniper’s”, obviously not thinking she would take it any further. She ran her finger down the list of names. “Wexford, Carole.” It was the only Wexford listed on the street.
Maggie let the book drop from her hands. It swung impotently against the glass on its rusty chain. She looked around the neighborhood. She thought she remembered seeing a few sleazy-types come out of this neighborhood as she’d driven by from time to time—her idea of what crack addicts and pimps look like these days. Seedy, dirty, looking everywhere at once, going nowhere in particular.
According to Kazmaroff, the police had questioned Alfie at police headquarters. Mother Carole had waited patiently during the interview and then taken Alfie home. No one had interviewed her.
Although hardly as exciting as the prospect of a confrontation with Gerard Dubois, Maggie still felt a nervous anticipation when she climbed back into her car. She expected Carole Wexford to be protective of her handicapped son. Maggie also expected that the mother would have a clearer understanding of what her son had seen that afternoon.
Or done.
505 St. Juniper’s Street was less than a quarter mile from the telephone booth. An attractive little cottage, obviously appreciated and taken care of, with blue-gray cedar siding and a bright red door, the Wexford place stood out among the neighboring houses like a jewel in a basket of seaweed. The other homes were ranch-style homes in varying stages of disrepair. Only the Wexford place had any flowers or shrubs—and few enough of them—lining its broken driveway and bordering the street. Maggie drove up the bumpy driveway, slabs of cement heaving away in chunks and craters looking like a scaled-down model of the aftermath of an earthquake. There was no car in the drive.
Maggie made her way up the tiny walkway, crowded by overgrown boxwoods and glossy-green azaleas, and knocked on the door. Her approach had apparently been monitored because the door opened immediately.
“Yes?” The woman was not attractive. She’d obviously tried to make herself up to appear so, but the attempt had not been successful. Her hair, shiny black and worn in dated spikes of jagged shocks, belonged on a much younger woman. Her eyes were framed in varying shades of green and purple eye shadow. Maggie guessed her age at about forty-five or so.
“My name is Maggie Newberry. Are you Mrs. Wexford?”
The woman looked at Maggie and then sighed. When she did, it looked like the whole front of her too-short house dress deflated and sagged inward.
“You can come in,” she said, holding the door wide to allow Maggie to enter.
“Thank you.” Maggie stepped into the house. Too small for a foyer or welcoming hallway, the cottage opened immediately into the living room. Maggie’s first impression was an olfactory one. The house smelled of old, fried food, as though years of cooking had trapped the odors in the very fiber of the wallpaper and the thin, gray-colored carpeting that flooded the place. The effect of the pretty cottage on the outside was not carried through on the inside. The atmosphere was stifling, made worse by the blast of Georgio cologne that Maggie caught as she passed Mrs. Wexford.
“It’s about the girl that was killed, isn’t it?” The woman motioned Maggie to a small seating arrangement of two wingback chairs and an overstuffed sofa immediately ahead of her.
“Uh, yes,” Maggie said, as she picked out the least stained chair in the room. The house was tidy but not clean. A crusted glob of something perched on the back of one of the chairs. Maggie sat down as if she were using a strange toilet and didn’t have anything to paper the seat with first.
“She was my sister.”
Maggie could see the woman more clearly now and it occurred to her that she might have misjudged her age. The lines cupping Mrs. Wexford’s mouth were harsh and indelible. Too many years of pursing lips around a cigarette, Maggie guessed. The face was harder than she’d first thought too. Colder.
“Alfie already talked to the cops.” The woman sat on the sofa. She eyed Maggie warily.
“I know, they told me. I just thought...I wanted to talk with you for a minute.” Maggie tried to keep her eyes from straying around the room. She thought she detected a light, bitter odor of something burning. Like electrical wiring?
The woman leaned back and her hand went out to a pack of cigarettes resting on a scarred oak side table.
“I mean,” Maggie continued, licking her quickly drying lips, “I’m not sure that Alfie...your son, absolutely understood the questions the po...the cops were asking him, you know? I was hoping, maybe, that the two of you discussed, you know, what happened.”
“What happened?” The woman lit her cigarette and tossed the match in the general vicinity of a large plastic ashtray on the side table.
“Well, I mean, what Alfie saw the day my sister was killed.”
“He already told the cops he didn’t see nothing.”
Maggie felt her weariness return. What was she doing here?
“I know, but I thought, maybe he told you some things he might not have told...I mean, he communicates with you better than with other people, right?”
The woman nodded slowly, her eyes holding Maggie’s gaze. She took a heavy drag off her cigarette.
“So, I just thought that maybe he told you something...even a little something, that maybe he forgot to tell the cops.” This is hopeless.
“Your sister was a goddamn bitch.”
Maggie knew her mouth flew open and she couldn’t help it. She simply gaped at the woman.
“What?” she managed to say.
“Your sister. She was mean to Alfie. Real mean.”
“Are you sure?” What in the world was this woman talking about? Had Alfie spoken to Elise?
“You don’t understand what ‘mean’ is?” Carole took another full drag off her cigarette. “You know, Alfie’s not right in his brain. You know that, right?”
Maggie nodded.
“He had him an accident when he was just four and the doctors all said he was gonna just stay that age forever. Far as I can tell, he has.” She stubbed out her cigarette and looked at Maggie with real bitterness. “I reckon Alfie is going to live with me until I keel over and die. Gonna live right there in the room next to mine as long as I live. I can’t afford no special sanitarium.” She stretched the word out: “san-ee-tor-ee-um.”
“Did Alfie tell you my sister was mean to him?” Maggie knew the police had not questioned Carole Wexford. She knew that what she was hearing was news and she felt herself getting excited.
“He said she made fun of the way he talked. Said she, like, laughed at him, to his face. He might not seem to have much in the way of feelings to you, Miss Whoever, but he’s got as many feelings as you do.”
“It’s hard to believe that my sister—“
“Oh, I’m sure it is,” Carole said in a mocking voice. “But she did, all right. Made him cry if you want to know. Made him cry his goddamn heart out in that room.” She jabbed an unlit cigarette in the direction of what Maggie assumed were the bedrooms.
“What exactly happened? Was he delivering groceries in the building? Because I never have groceries delivered to my apartment and I can’t imagine my sister doing it. She was sick and had only been in town for—“
“I ain’t sure of the particulars. I know he was there doing his business
and she come out into the hall and they talked. And that’s when it happened.”
“I see. And Alfie didn’t tell the cops this?”
“He was too afraid. I told him he didn’t have to tell ‘em and he said he didn’t want to. If you tell ‘em, I’ll deny it and call you a filthy liar.” She pointed her cigarette at Maggie as if for punctuation.
Charming. Maggie gathered up her purse and stood up.
“Well, I’m sorry for all the trouble.”
The woman said nothing. Her too-red lips gripped the cigarette and puffed out an angry cloud of smoke.
“Anyway, thanks for talking with me.” Realizing that the woman was not going to see her to the door, Maggie let herself out.
5
“Your father changed the time for me to come, ainsi it is tonight and not this afternoon. I love you, cherie.
Laurent”
Maggie sat on the couch with her feet resting on the coffee table with a chilled glass of Sauvignion Blanc in her hand. Laurent’s note remained stuck to the refrigerator door where he’d placed it. She was disappointed and sorry she hadn’t called him in the afternoon after all. He could have accompanied her on her not very fruitful investigations. As it was, she longed to tell him of her discoveries, to see his thoughtful face as he listened to her theories and revelations. He would help her make sense of what she learned today.
The little apartment smelled of sautéed garlic and onions although the galley kitchen was tidied to a shine with not a pot nor a dribble of olive oil to be seen. She imagined her Frenchman whipping up his—presumably quite involved—lunch several hours earlier and she smiled. Although it was true that she’d never read in any of the questionnaires or articles in Cosmopolitan magazine that smiling all the time was a sure sign of compatibility, she assumed it was on the right track.
Had Elise been hateful to Alfie? Maggie shifted on the couch, set her wine glass down and then got up to adjust the venetian blinds. It was dark now and she didn’t enjoy the thought of Peachtree Street traffic peeking in her living room window. Maybe Elise had begun withdrawal and had been really testy? Maybe she hadn’t realized that Alfie was mentally handicapped?
She resettled herself back on the couch and took a sip of her wine. And where does all this lead? Did Alfie kill Elise? She tried to imagine the soft, lumbering man-child angry enough to kill somebody. She tried to imagine him chasing Elise down the hallway with a wire outstretched in his chubby fists. She closed her eyes and willed the image away. It was too soon. Too soon to think of Elise’s terror in her last moments alive. Too soon to imagine it all happening. And where was Maggie then? In a late meeting at the office, laughing and joking with Gerry and Dierdre.
Maggie set her wine down and went over to the stereo system sitting on an old etagere she’d found in a garage sale. She selected a CD of Laurent’s and popped it in. The music was sweet but complicated. It was French. She picked up the CD jewel box and tried to read some of the lyrics printed on the insert. She tossed the cover back down. Impossible. She returned to her chair and her wine.
She wouldn’t be able to say that she and Elise had been close, exactly. Growing up, Elise—although the younger in years—was always the eldest in everything else. People often mistook Elise for Maggie’s older sister because of her knowing, carefully groomed affect, her studied sophistication. They were about the same height too. Or Maybe it was Maggie’s edgy lack of savoir faire that had people reshuffling their ages.
She remembered a time when she was thirteen and Elise was eleven. Elise had already begun her menstrual periods—at about the same time that Maggie had—and was well on her way to developing a singular, projectionable impression of wisdom and careless angst. The family had been on vacation in Hilton Head, South Carolina, and were spending a wet week starting at a soggy beach. Everyone had been disappointed, Maggie remembered. Everyone except Elise, who was rapt with the gloomy romance of it all. One afternoon, while Maggie, her parents and her older brother, Ben were busy playing long bouts of “Scrabble” and “Monopoly”, Elise excused herself to walk to the head cottage in the group of resort bungalows to get a Coke from one of the vending machines.
She was gone for twenty-four hours.
The rainy ennui was replaced by frantic visits to the police station, a thorough community-organized combing of the beach—in a full, torrential downpour, as Maggie recalled—and a good deal of tears.
Maggie took a sip of wine. This evening’s rain had stopped and left fat, glabulous droplets hanging by glittering threads from the small magnolia bush outside her living room window. She could see the branches, black and slick with the raindrops, tremble in what looked like a reasonable effort to dislodge them.
Elise had been discovered about the time the resort was deciding to drag the bottom of the small two-acre lake the families had spent the last seven summers water-skiing on. Maggie’s parents had been so relieved to see Elise alive that any punitive action dissolved immediately from their minds. Elise was allowed to resume her place at the “Scrabble” board as if nothing had happened. In Elise’s mind, Maggie knew, certainly nothing much had. It seemed that her sister had spent the bulk of her escaped time with a teenage boy named Dillon who, along with his very pleasant family of a mother, father and two younger sisters, had been assured by Elise that she was nearly 16 and traveling alone. Without calling her own parents, perhaps without even thinking of them, Elise had spent a day and a night with these friendly folk from Tennessee, eating with them, sleeping on their couch, snuggling with their strapping young son, and enjoying her freedom in a manner and style that had aged Elspeth an easy ten years.
Maggie finished off her wine and glanced at the clock. Ten-thirty. She was glad Laurent was getting to know her dad, but she’d have to ask her father what it was all about.
When the phone rang, Maggie frowned, assuming it was Laurent calling to say he’d be even later. She picked up the receiver.
“Hello?”
The voice rasped into her ear like a jar full of wasps.
“How ‘bout if you’re next on the list, bitch?”
Chapter Twelve
1
“Do you have to talk about the price of mangos in Auckland?” Darla squirmed in the passenger seat of Gerry’s BMW and rearranged her headband in the car visor mirror. “I mean, let’s just be normal guests for a change, what do you say?”
Gerry smiled over at his wife. She looked good. She seemed happier, more relaxed. Did he imagine it?
“Maggie knows we’re planning to move to New Zealand, Darla. I’ve been discussing it with her all week.”
“I’m surprised she hasn’t called me yet to suggest some good prices on a semi-private at a good mental hospital.”
“She supports me in this, Darla.” Gerry switched on his turn indicator and pulled into the parking lot at the Parthenon. “Something you would do well to—“
“Oh, stop it! Just shut up, okay? She doesn’t have to live with it. She doesn’t have to wake up to your ‘G’day, mates’ and hear the price of kiwi fruit as it rises and falls in the world market. We are not moving to New Zealand, for crying out loud, and you are making us both look like idiots!”
Maybe he’d rushed that assessment about her happiness. Come to think of it, he thought, she looked bloody tense.
“I won’t mention mangoes,” he said, pulling into a parking spot.
“Thank you.”
“Then maybe Maggie won’t mention her latest obsession.”
“What are you talking about? I thought Laurent was going to be having dinner with us?”
“I’m talking about her other obsession. The one she’s developed about tracking down her sister’s killer. It’s all she talks about anymore.”
“Well, it gives her a sense that she’s doing something. I know she must feel pretty helpless.” Darla pulled down the sun visor and checked her hair.
“I know how she feels.”
“Yeah, well, in that case you could probably su
ggest to her that she do something more constructive than tracking down Elise’s killer. Like, say, moving to the Antipodes, instead.”
“Very amusing, Darla. I hope you’re going to be a little less riotous during dinner.”
Maggie removed the candles from the fireplace mantle and placed them on the table. She flattened the heavy cotton napkins out with her hands and placed them to the left of the four forks at each place setting.
“You know, I still can’t get over the lack of interest the police showed in that obscene phone call,” she said. “You know? I mean, if it wasn’t the killer himself—and I don’t know why they don’t think it wasn’t—then it was some kind of real low-life, and all cops did was—“
“Magggee.” Laurent appeared in the doorway of the kitchen, wearing a stiff, white apron. His eyes looked tired and he smiled at her with effort. He held a dripping wooden spoon in one hand.
“I know, I know,” she said sulkily. “No one wants to hear about this stuff.”
“It is not that. But it has been almost one week since the phone call and—“
“Yes, yes, old news, I know. Boring stuff, rehashed, ho-hum. Sorry, sorry.”
“Maggeee, you will stop it now, s’il te plâit.” He shook his big head at her and wagged a finger too. She remembered the first time he had done that, how sweet and sexy and possessive it had seemed to her.
“I love you, Laurent,” she said.
Caught in a half-turn on his way back into the maw of the steamy kitchen, Laurent stopped and faced her again.
“Je t’aime, aussi, cherie,” he said, a smile creeping across his face.
Maggie moved to him and gave him a tight hug.
“And I’ll stop talking about death for at least the duration of our dinner party with the Parkers. Je promis,” she whispered.
“Merci.” He kissed her softly on both her closed eyes and stroked her cheek with his large hand.
“Your roue is roiling,” she said sweetly.
“Merde.” He released her and returned to his stove to snatch up the bubbling paste from one of the gas burners.
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