His Maggie was so easily flustered in the daylight. Thankfully, not once they were alone together, in the dark. But it was early days yet, he'd give her all the time she needed. Saint Just brushed his fingertips across the back of her neck as he led the way past the doorway, and into the living room of the condo. "Call it what you will, sweetings. I know what it was."
"Yeah, well ... okay," Maggie said, tagging after him, her casted left leg bent at the knee, her right foot bare, and probably cold on the tile floor. "Hey, where are you going? Aren't you going to stay here with me? Aren't we going to talk about this some more?"
"Then you do wish to discuss our romantic interlude?" Saint Just inquired, pausing at the short half flight of steps that led up to the three bedrooms in the condo apartment. "Anything you wish, Maggie."
She fell backward onto the couch, then struggled to sit upright, grabbed her coffee mug once more. "Ha. Ha. I meant Dad. And Mom. And the two of them spying on each other. That's creepy. Don't you think that's creepy? If they don't care about each other, why watch each other?"
"Because they do care about each other?"
Maggie pointed a finger at him. "Aha! That's what I think. Mom fell apart last night, at least as far apart as I've ever seen her since the day I swung my softball bat in the dining room and took out her grandmother's pedestal vase that the woman brought here from County Clare."
Saint Just looked at her levelly. "You weren't an easy child, were you, Maggie?"
"Another subject, for another time. I don't go to my high school reunions, though, if that gives you any indication of how well I dealt with being a teenager. Anyway —it stands to reason that Mom and Dad do still love each other, or whatever has ever passed for love between them. And, no, I don't really want to go there, either. But, if Dad still loves her, and if Bodkin did something to her, or even tried to do something to her ..."
"Such as?" Saint Just asked her, taking a seat in a nearby chair. He thoroughly enjoyed watching Maggie's mind work. He believed he could almost hear the gears turning inside her head.
"I don't know. They've been separated since around Thanksgiving. She might have started dating? After all, Dad was—maybe still is—dating that Carol woman. Bodkin might have brought Mom home, gone into the house with her, made a pass at her in the kitchen, where Dad could see—"
"We can see clearly into the side windows of the kitchen, Maggie. I had the chance to tour the entirety of your mother's condo when we first visited last month. If you'd raised your gaze slightly, to the next floor, you'd realize that we could also see into what I believe is the master bedroom."
"Worse!" she said, plunking down the now empty mug. "Bodkin wormed his way upstairs, attacked Mom, she had to fight him off. Now she's afraid of him. Dad figures that the way back into Mom's good graces is to play the hero for her, confront the guy, warn him off. They have words, it gets physical, yadda-yadda. Oh, damn, Alex. I'm building the prosecutor's case for him, aren't I? Oh, hi, Dad, Sterling. Merry Christmas!"
Saint Just got up as the two men closed the door behind them. As they shrugged out of their coats, they stamped their feet as though to rid themselves of the cold air they'd walked through. "Yes, Happy Christmas, everyone."
"Thank you, Saint Just," Sterling said, pulling a face as he repeatedly shot his gaze toward Evan Kelly.
But Saint Just hadn't needed Sterling's worried expression or eyeball gymnastics to ascertain that Evan Kelly was not quite as jolly as the red and white Santa cap on his head.
"Daddy? What's wrong?"
"Nothing, sweetheart," Evan said, handing the bag of donuts to Sterling before heading for the steps to the bedrooms. "Merry Christmas. Everyone. Please excuse me."
"Sterling?" Maggie asked as he handed several newspapers to Saint Just, who saw nothing alarming on any of the front pages. That was, until he'd rifled through the first one to find the first page of the Local section, to see Evan Kelly smiling at him as he held up a bowling trophy. Saint Just knew it was a bowling trophy because the copy beneath the photograph supplied that information. The garish thing had, to him, looked like something one might employ to prop open the door of a brothel. The headline read: Police Arrest Local Man in Murder of Bowling Buddy.
"No perp walk, as you termed it, my dear, but I doubt there is anyone in Ocean City who is unaware of your father's dilemma."
"Oh, yes, Saint Just. Everyone knows. It was terrible, Maggie," Sterling said sadly as he subsided into a chair, still holding his red knitted hat with the pom-pom on top—the pom-pom he was doing an admirable job of shredding in his agitation. "It took us some time to find a shop that was open on the holiday, and it was quite crowded. People looked at Evan. Nobody spoke. They just looked. And then they turned and walked away."
"The cut direct," Saint Just said, sighing. "I should have realized. It's as Balzac said, 'Society, like the Roman youth at the circus, never shows mercy to the fallen gladiator.' "
"Oh, God. Poor Daddy. What did he do?"
"Lifted his chin and ordered a dozen glazed, seemingly having forgotten that I'd told him I prefer powdered, with that lovely jelly filling," Sterling said, and then shook his head. "That is, he stood up manfully, Maggie. Until this person approached him. I'm afraid I didn't get his name, but he spoke to Evan, just for a moment, and then he, too, turned on his heel and walked away. Evan, well, Evan just stood there, looking as if he'd been poleaxed. I brought him straight home."
"Do you know what the man said, Sterling?"
"Yes, Saint Just, I do. The man told Evan that he is no longer to consider himself a member of the Majesties. I can't be sure, unaware of the level of prestige the Majesties may hold in this community, but I gather this must be the way Byron felt when the ton delivered him the cut direct at Almack's that night—you know, before he was forced to leave England entirely. He's a broken man, Saint Just, his spirit crushed by this terrible turn of events."
"They threw him off his bowling team? Daddy lives for his bowling team."
"Yes, Maggie," Sterling agreed. "I thought I saw a tear in Evan's eye, although that may have been from the cold and wind. In any event, we must do something. We must do something very soon."
Chapter Eleven
"Margaret? Margaret!"
Maggie pushed herself to her feet and hopped into the kitchen. "You bellowed—that is, I'm here, Mom."
Yes, she was here. And she'd been here for five hours now. Five hours that seemed like five days.
The Christmas tree was lit, decorated as it had always been decorated, in early after-Christmas-clearance items. One thing she had to say for her mother, though, she did faithfully hang up every ornament her children had made for her over the years.
Unfortunately, that included the one Maggie had made in sixth grade, with her school picture glued to the center of a gilt elbow macaroni frame. The photograph of her grinning maniacally in pigtails and teeth braces. Saint Just had gone up to it as if guided there by some sort of radar, and she'd glared at him, just daring him to say something, anything, that would force her to beat him heavily around the head and shoulders with her walker.
The nativity scene was spread out on top of the spinet, as always. The shepherd boy's flute was still missing its front end, the guardian angel's wing still oddly glued back in place where it had been broken the year their cat, Tuffy, had been frightened up onto the piano when Tate tried out his brand new drum set.
The lighted village—the one with the animated skaters whirling around a pond made out of a mirror—had been set up on the sideboard.
There were candles everywhere, none of them ever burned, of course, some of them slightly misshapen as a consequence of being stored in the hot garage.
The Santa candle's face had, for instance, melted slightly, so that it looked now as if he was leering at Mrs. Claus with an eye toward slipping away with her to someplace private for a little one-on-one celebration.
Maggie's whole day thus far, her surroundings, had been one big trip down Memory Lan
e, and if her father had been there, wearing his silly Santa hat, ho-ho-ho-ing from time to time from his favorite chair in the living room for no apparent reason, Maggie would have been a reasonably happy camper.
But he wasn't there. He was back at his apartment, behind the locked door of his bedroom, refusing to come out, refusing to talk to anyone.
Her mother could have taken a hint from that, and done the same ...
"Margaret, I asked one thing of you. One."
"Three, actually," Maggie said, still fairly delighted in her newfound knowledge that her mother no longer held the power to intimidate her. All of her life, Maggie had held her mother in awe. She was big. She had a big voice. She had a big bosom—but Maggie didn't think she really needed to number that among her problems with her mother.
Her mother spoke in absolutes. She had a way of cutting a person to ribbons if she scented blood in the water.
Her mother, as Doctor Bob had pointed out, was pretty much at the bottom of Maggie's problems with authority, with those who wielded their authority or their supposed knowledge like hammers, with those who yelled louder, were physically bigger ... etc., etc., etc.
Stupid, really. A childhood trauma she'd carried with her into adulthood.
But, hey, not anymore. She was free. Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty—etc.
And all it had taken was to have her father arrested for murder.
Jeez.
"You asked me to slice the carrots and celery, which I did. You asked me to take a bowl of potato chips into the living room, which any id—which I couldn't do. And you asked me to lift the turkey into the roasting pan for Maureen as long as I was just sitting at the kitchen table, taking up valuable space, so that she could then slip it into the oven, which I did do, although it wasn't easy. Smells, good in here, doesn't it? Is it ready?"
Mrs. Kelly had been standing in front of the stove, her hands on her hips, her expression unreadable. Now she stepped to one side, half facing the stove. She gestured at the roasting pan and the lovely, golden brown turkey inside it. "Where are the breasts, Margaret?"
"Hmm?" Maggie asked, moving the walker forward as she hopped closer to the stove. "There's the legs. And the wings," she said helpfully. "Aren't the breasts nearby?"
"No, Margaret, they're not. Maureen, I can understand. One more of her little pills and she'll be sliding onto the floor, dribbling saliva out of the corners of her mouth. But you should have noticed."
"That we had a flat-breasted turkey? Oh, I don't think so, Mom. I don't really cook, remember? And if I had noticed, it probably would have been impolite to point it out, don't you think? Isn't it enough we killed it and we're going to eat it? Do we have to insult it, too?"
Mrs. Kelly eyed her suspiciously. "How much of that boxed wine have you drunk, Margaret?"
"Clearly not enough," Maggie muttered, although she had noticed a sort of glow about the world around her after her last glass, and looked at the turkey again. "So. Where are the breasts?"
"They're under the bird, that's where they are. You put the turkey in the pan upside down!"
"Get out!" Maggie thought back to the moment. She'd been sitting in a kitchen chair. The big, empty black roasting pan had been in front of her, the unwrapped turkey to her right. Her mother had told her to lift it into the pan for Maureen, and Maggie had braced her good foot on the floor, hefted the raw, slippery twenty-pound bird the best she could with the rotten leverage sitting down allowed her ... and sort of dumped it, shoveled it, into the pan.
Yeah, that kind of meant turning the dumb bird over, didn't it?
Oops.
Well, you'd think Maureen might have noticed.
Maggie leaned closer to the stove, smiled. Laughed out loud. "Upside down? Really? I thought the drumsticks should, you know, sort of stand up in the air? Upside down. Oh, God, that's hysterical! It's definitely a Kelly bird, huh, Mom?"
Alicia Kelly sort of tottered to the nearest chair and sat down, buried her head in her apron. Her shoulders shook, and she was making rather weird sounds behind the apron.
Maggie hopped over to her, held out her hand, thinking to put it on her mother's shoulder, to comfort her. She got close but, for all her recent strides, she just couldn't do it. She was too worried her gesture wouldn't be appreciated. "Mom? Ah, Mom, I'm sorry. Don't cry."
Her mother lifted her head and looked up at Maggie. True, there were tears in her eyes. But the smile that all but cut her face in two told Maggie that they were tears of mirth. "A Kelly bird! It is, it is! We're all upside down anymore, aren't we?"
And then, which was much more reasonable, Alicia Kelly's face rather crumpled, and she began to cry.
"Damn this stupid cast," Maggie growled, wishing she could hug her mother. Do something. But all she could do was to bellow, "Alex! I need you in the kitchen now!"
Within minutes, Saint Just had taken in the situation and had led Mrs. Kelly to the sunroom behind the kitchen, poured her a nearly full glass of wine, and he and Maggie (who had managed to carry an open box of tissues with her, in her teeth) sat facing her, waiting for her to dry her eyes one more time.
"You okay now, Mom? Tate and his friends are still gone wherever they went, and Maureen won't be back for a while from John's parents' house. Can we talk now, hmm?"
"The breasts will be fine," Mrs. Kelly said, wiping at her eyes. "In fact, they should be quite moist, don't you think, cooking in their own juice?"
"I'm sure the meal is going to be delicious. All of it. But that's not what we want to talk about, Mom. We need to talk about what you said last night, at the police station. About how Daddy ... well, how you thought maybe Daddy had killed Bodkin for you. Remember?"
Mrs. Kelly sniffed, sat up very straight, once more the mother, the authoritative figure. "I spoke out of turn. I was upset. I didn't mean any of it. No, not at all. Certainly not. Don't be so cruel, Margaret, throwing a weak moment in my face like that."
"Mom ..."
"Mrs. Kelly, if I might be so bold," Alex said quickly, before Maggie could say anything else—not that she had been able to think of anything else to say. "Who, exactly, is Walter Bodkin?"
Maggie's mother had begun shredding the tissue in her hands, much the way Sterling had been pulling his pom-pom apart. But Sterling had been upset. Alicia Kelly was stalling.
"One of Evan's bowling friends. They're on the same team. The Majesties. They have been, for years and years."
"Yes, thank you," Alex said kindly. "I deduced as much from the stories in the morning newspapers. And were they friends, as well? Away from the bowling establishment?"
Mrs. Kelly shook her head. "Walter doesn't—Walter didn't have many friends. He had ... a very busy life."
"Really. I read that he was the proprietor of quite a substantial number of properties here in Ocean City. Rental units, I believe they're called?"
"Yes, that's right. He was a landlord. He ... he owned a lot of buildings. Not the big, fancy ones close to the ocean or the bay. The smaller ones, more inland, more downtown. A few of them were sort of run-down, but they all made him money. And he had a lot of them. Maybe a dozen or so."
"And he'd rent them to summer vacationers, is that correct?"
"High school and college kids, mostly. He said he could cram them into the buildings a dozen or more at a time. They didn't care, he said, because not many people would rent to them in the first place, so they took whatever they could get. Walter wasn't always ... scrupulous."
"I don't see where this is going, Alex," Maggie said.
"Everything leads somewhere, my dear. Eventually," he told her, and Maggie subsided. She was too close to this whole thing, she had to let Alex take the lead. He could be more objective.
"Walter was a good landlord. I shouldn't speak evil of the dead. He kept the places in fairly good repair," Alicia Kelly said when the room fell silent. "He was very good ... quite, um, talented with his hands."
Maggie winced, tried to banish her mother's last fe
w words from her brain's memory banks.
"And therefore also a strong man, Mrs. Kelly? To carry out his own repairs on the buildings. Was he also a large man?"
She nodded. "He used a sixteen-pound ball."
"Dad uses a twelve," Maggie explained to Alex, happy for the change of subject, away from Bodkin's talented hands. "When I ordered it, the guy told me a lot of women use twelve-pounders, but men go a little heavier. But Dad liked the loft he could get, I think he said, with a lighter ball. But sixteen pounds? Wow, Bodkin must really have been a strong man."
"And tall, Mrs. Kelly? Was Mr. Bodkin tall?"
She nodded her head. "He was a ... a very active man."
Maggie sat back in her chair. "So he was tall, strong, active. We know, from the newspaper story, that he was sixty-three, same age as Daddy. My dad isn't exactly short, Alex, but no one could call him a giant. He's in his early sixties, and I saw one of those rubber disks in one of his kitchen drawers. You know, Mom, the kind you use to help get the top off jars?"
"I always have to open his pickle jar for him," Alicia Kelly said, sighing. "He probably hasn't had a good gherkin in months."
"Right," Maggie said quickly, as her mother looked ready to cry again. "One's tall, strong, one's medium height, no Schwarzenegger back when he was on steroids. So how, Alex, did my dad conk Bodkin over the head with his bowling ball? He would have had to carry a footstool with him."
"Not if he first disabled the man, swinging the ball at Bodkin's knees, for instance, so that the man was down when Evan delivered the fatal blows."
Maggie shot him a fierce look. "Don't help anymore, Alex. I'm trying to prove that Dad couldn't have done it."
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