Dreadlocked songbird Mitchell, on the other hand, was prone to chat too much and screw up orders, but was so charming the customers loved him. The other three baristas she employed were also college students, all three were blonde, and their names were Kristen, Kirsten, and Christine. They were all reliable, nice girls, but Maggie never got their names right.
As she secured the easel with the chalkboard to the nearest lamp post, Maggie saw Mamie Rodefeffer rounding the corner in front of the bank, wrapped in multiple layers of dress, cardigans, and scarves topped with a moth-eaten coat, tote bags swinging and cane banging the pavement. She was listing right and then left as she made her way forward toward the bookstore. Mamie was legally blind and wore thick lenses, but her hearing was supernaturally sharp.
“Mary Margaret!” she yelled. “You’re late again!”
Maggie shook her head and sighed. The minute hand of the bank clock on the corner had just ticked past 7:03 and dawn was barely peeking over Pine Mountain. It still looked more like a clear, moonless night, and twinkly stars were still visible in the dark sky over the hilltops to the west. A sudden drop in temperature overnight had sucked up all the humidity, leaving the air crisp and sharp.
Mamie was the oldest surviving heir of Gustav Rodefeffer, the original owner of the now closed Rodefeffer Glassworks. She lived in a large, sprawling Gothic Revival style house up on Morning Glory Avenue, with a small staff to care for her.
“I guess you heard about Anne Marie,” she said.
“Yes I did, Mamie, I’m so sorry,” Maggie said.
“That woman never did have the brains God gave a goose,” Mamie said, and glared at Maggie, daring her to disagree.
Maggie just murmured again that she was sorry to hear about the accident, and then fled.
Mamie settled herself at a central table so she could better hear everyone’s conversations and interrupt with her own commentary. Benjamin waited on her every morning, and was ready for her usual interrogation and insults.
“Are you still working here?” she demanded.
“Yes, Miss Rodefeffer,” Benjamin said. “You know I work here most weekday mornings.”
“Don’t you have a degree in something?” she yelled over the sound of the espresso machine.
“Theoretical Physics,” Benjamin told her, and grinned at Maggie, who mouthed, “I’m so sorry.”
“Where did you say you got your degree?” Mamie demanded.
“Caltech,” Benjamin told her.
Mamie addressed the room at large, which held only a couple customers waiting for their cappuccinos to go.
“Then why in God’s name are you working here? Did you have a nervous breakdown? Was it drugs?”
“No ma’am,” Benjamin said, a smile lurking just beneath his straight face. “I work here to pay my expenses. I like it here.”
Mamie acted as if it were the most insane thing she had ever heard, every day.
“Why are you so short?” she asked him, as he served her cappuccino and a scone.
“My parents were short, Miss Rodefeffer.”
“You can hardly be blamed, then,” she said, satisfied. Thus concluding their daily interaction, she tucked a large paper napkin into the collar of her blouse and started nibbling on her scone.
“This scone doesn’t have many sultanas in it!” she complained.
“That’s because it’s cranberry,” Maggie said through clenched teeth, and escaped even further back on the bookstore side.
Maggie tried to stay out of the old woman’s limited sight line, and spoke to her customers as quietly as she could. The store had the usual morning clientele, despite the cold weather and icy sidewalks.
When a young woman from the bank came to pick up a large order, Mamie told her, “You tell my lazy nephew to come and get his own damn coffee. I’d like to speak to him.”
The girl smiled nervously at Mamie, with fear in her eyes, and hurried out when her order was ready.
Some students from the college came in.
“The least you could do is to get dressed properly before you go out in public!” Mamie told one young girl. “It’s ten degrees above zero outside and I can almost see your personal business!”
The young woman just laughed at her.
Mamie accosted Maggie as she crossed the room to clean off a table.
“You hear about old Theo getting his head bashed in?” she asked loudly.
“You know anything about it?” Maggie asked her.
“I know he stole our family business right out from under us, and then drove it straight into the ground. I know he tried to cheat my nephew out of a large sales commission. If you ask me, he got exactly what he deserved.”
“I bet Trick was pretty mad about that business deal,” Maggie said.
“His name is Richard,” Mamie said crossly.
Trick had been nicknamed in grade school, where “Richard” started as “Rick,” became “Tricky Dick,” and was eventually shortened to “Trick.”
“Richard and Knox came to dinner on Sunday night,” Mamie said. “Brought their idiot wives with them, and told me all about it.”
“Pretty big sum of money, was it?” Maggie asked.
Mamie, maybe realizing she had just suggested her nephew had a motive to kill Theo, immediately changed the subject.
“You’re getting awfully fat, Mary Margaret,” she said. “You need to lay off the desserts.”
Maggie jumped up fuming, but bit back the dozens of retorts that sprang to her mind.
“You know, my name is Mary Margaret too,” Mamie yelled at her retreating back, “but my father liked to call me Mamie.”
“Short for ‘cockamamie,’ no doubt,” Maggie whispered to Benjamin, who hid behind the espresso machine and giggled.
“I heard that!” Mamie said, and wagged a shaming finger at them.
Grocery store owner Matt Delvecchio stopped in for his latte at 8:15, just after he opened his store.
“You sure you’re Sal’s son and not the milkman’s?” Mamie asked him. “You look a lot more like that Pollock Kazminsky than that Dago Delvecchio.”
Maggie started to say something but Matt just winked at her and said, “She’s a live one.”
He was the nicest man in the town, married to one of the biggest bitches Maggie could name, yet she’d never seen him angry. They never charged him for his latte so he always left a three-dollar tip in the tip jar.
As Matt left, Mamie said loudly, “I can’t decide if he’s a retard or just an idiot.”
“All right, Mamie, that’s enough,” Maggie said.
Mamie stood up, gathered her things, and muttered about Maggie not appreciating her patronage. As she left, she said the same thing she always said when she left in a huff, and Benjamin mouthed the words to Maggie as Mamie said them.
“Good-bye and good riddance. I probably won’t be back.”
“We should be so lucky,” Maggie said quietly.
“I heard that!” Mamie retorted, and teetered out the door and down the sidewalk.
“What is it with this town and the name Mary Margaret?” Benjamin asked Maggie.
“Funny, isn’t it,” Maggie said. “There’s me, Margie at the post office, crazy old Mamie, Meg at the pharmacy, Mary at the bank, Madge at the IGA, Margaret the crossing guard, Midge who’s secretary at the church, and let’s see, Sister Mary Margrethe.”
“You should have a club,” Benjamin said.
“We do,” Maggie replied. “It’s called Sacred Heart Catholic Church.”
Dr. Drew Rosen found Maggie in her office later that morning.
“Can I buy you some of your own coffee?” he asked. “We keep saying we’re going to get together but we’re both always too busy.”
“I know, I’m so sorry,” Maggie said. “Let’s do it now. I need an excuse to take a break.”
Drew placed an order at the counter and Maggie directed him to join her at a table by the front window, the closest thing she had to a more private
section of the café.
“Have you been allowed back into the clinic?” she asked him after he sat down.
“They let me put together a kind of emergency call kit, so I can make home visits,” he said. “I have to take Skip or Frank with me when I pick up supplies. All the calls are forwarding to my home phone.”
“That can’t be too good for business.”
“Actually I think people prefer home visits to dragging their dogs and cats to my office. Plus they’re curious about what happened.”
“Asking you a lot of questions, I expect.”
“Yeah, it will be a relief when they catch whoever did it and things get back to normal.”
“You have any ideas about that?”
“I didn’t know Theo all that well, but he seemed like someone who frequently made enemies,” Drew said. “Not a nice guy.”
“You know I used to live in the house next door to you.”
“Scott said something about Theo burning it down.”
“He was trying to buy up every piece of property on Possum Holler,” Maggie said. “I wouldn’t sell it to him so he set it on fire, with me in it.”
“That’s terrible. How did you get out?”
“Have you met Lily Crawford, who lives on the farm at the end of the holler?” Maggie asked, and Drew nodded. “The Crawford’s dog woke me up howling under my window. The whole downstairs was on fire by that time. I had only enough time to wrap my photo albums in my grandmother’s quilt and fling them out the window. I climbed out onto the porch roof and into a crabapple tree and stayed there until Lily’s husband Simon came running down the road with a ladder; he pitched it up and helped me down. By the time the fire truck got there it was too late to save any of it.”
“You didn’t have smoke detectors?”
“I had several. Someone had taken all the batteries out. We found them in the ashes later.”
“So he didn’t mean to just scare you.”
“No, he meant to kill me.”
“If you knew it was Theo, why wasn’t he arrested?”
“Phyllis Davis gave him an alibi. He laughed about it in the Thorn later, said he’d warned me it was a fire trap. The fire chief investigated and concluded it was the wiring, although we had all that upgraded when we bought the place.”
“We?”
“My boyfriend Gabe and I bought it together. Well, I bought it, and he and my brothers did all the renovations. We lived there for three years.”
“Was he there when it caught on fire?”
“No, he’d been gone for a few weeks by then. Just went out for a walk one night and never came back.”
Maggie looked away and Drew touched her hand briefly.
“I’m so sorry. Both of those events must be painful subjects for you.”
“It seems like it all happened to someone else now. That was six, almost seven years ago.”
“When did you buy the bookstore?”
“The very day I got the insurance check for the house burning down I ran into the owner of this store. She had opened this for her retirement, not realizing how much work it would entail. I think she saw herself more as a gracious literary hostess, spending her days recommending books and having intellectual discussions with members of the college faculty. In reality she spent most of her time managing inventory and covering shifts for employees who didn’t show up for work.”
“I always assumed bookstore employees read all day.”
“It cracks me up when people say that. All these books don’t unpack themselves and jump onto the shelves, you know. She also wasn’t prepared for eight months of winter, and it can feel really isolated up here when you’re not used to it.”
“I can vouch for that.”
“So you can understand why she was desperate to sell and accepted my measly offer.”
“Had you always wanted to own a bookstore?”
“Never considered it before in my life. I love to read, but I was a library girl, town and college; I couldn’t afford new books. My real motivation was being sick of living and working with my mother. This building came with an apartment upstairs, the business was breaking even most months, and I was pretty sure I could get the college textbook business if I tried. I had my brother Sean look over everything, and he pronounced it a crazy idea but backed me up anyway.”
“It was a really brave thing to do.”
“I didn’t feel brave. In a way, I was as desperate as the previous owner was. I wanted my own business, my own space, my own life.”
“Fate brought you together.”
“I don’t know about that, but it was lucky for me.”
“So are you glad you did it?”
“Some days I wonder what in the world I was thinking.”
“I have days like those, myself.” Drew said.
“I’ve been dying to ask you why you moved here,” Maggie said. “Start at the beginning.”
“It’s not a long story,” he said.
Drew’s answer was interrupted by a staff member calling Maggie to the phone, and by the time she was finished dealing with the call Drew had to go.
“We’ll continue this conversation soon,” Maggie said. “Promise me.”
“Absolutely,” he said, smiling. “Besides, I want to see that great apartment you’ve got upstairs. Hannah has been raving about it.”
Maggie realized Hannah had been doing some matchmaking, which was her third favorite hobby after eating and gossiping. She didn’t really mind it, though, come to think of it. Drew Rosen was a nice, attractive man, and when he touched her hand, she felt a little spark.
Scott was on his way back to the station from lunch at the diner when his cell phone rang. He answered it to Maggie saying, “You need to get over here to the bookstore right away.”
Scott stopped in his tracks.
“Why? What’s happened?”
“Theo’s sister Gwyneth is in my bookstore, Chief Gordon,” Maggie hissed, “and if you don’t come and remove her within the next five minutes, you’ll have another dead Eldridge on your hands.”
She hung up with a loud bang. Scott shook his head and started back in the direction of Little Bear Books. Talking to Maggie Fitzpatrick could be like a right to the chin, a left to the stomach, and a knee to the groin, all before you could get your wits about you and your dukes up.
When he arrived at the bookstore the situation looked civil enough, although Scott could feel the tension crackling in the air like electricity around a transformer just before lightning strikes it. The staff members were covertly watching, some with worried expressions, and some with delighted anticipation.
Gwyneth Eldridge was obviously the elegant blonde to whom Maggie was serving cappuccino. She had all the stereotypical accoutrements of a rich city dweller, including a severe blonde haircut and a business suit. Her expensive looking clothing, handbag, and cell phone were all black. Everything about her was young and fashionable except for her gnarled looking hands and drawn, gaunt face, which seemed to have a peeved expression permanently etched upon it. When she spoke Scott noted she hadn’t lost her affected British accent, much like the one her brother Theo could turn on and off at will.
As he approached the table Gwyneth was saying to Maggie, “I’m surprised you don’t have more requests for soy. This is nonfat milk, though, correct?”
“I get it fresh from anorexic cows every morning,” Maggie said through clenched teeth, and Gwyneth, not knowing how dangerous it was, actually tut-tutted her in return.
“My private psychology practice in Manhattan is largely devoted to young women with serious eating disorders, Aggie, and even though that is something you obviously don’t suffer from, you really shouldn’t joke about it.”
The pink blotches on Maggie’s cheeks deepened to a hazardous level red, and Scott swooped in between the two women before Maggie could pick up Gwyneth’s twig-like frame and snap it in two.
“Hello Gwyneth, you probably don’t remember me,” he sa
id. “I’m Scott Gordon.”
He offered his hand for her to shake, which she did, with a couple of cold, limp, bony fingers, as he said, “I’m the chief of police here in Rose Hill.”
“I certainly would have remembered you had I met you, Todd,” Gwyneth said appreciatively, and gestured for him to sit.
“It’s Scott,” he said as he sat down, “and it was a long time ago. This was a clothing store back then.”
“I wouldn’t even be in here, Todd,” she said, looking around with distaste, “Were I not in desperate need of a decent cup of cappuccino. I should have known it would be impossible to find one this far from civilization.”
“It’s Scott,” he said again, “and I think their cappuccino is really good.”
“Obviously you have never had a real cappuccino,” Gwyneth assured him. “In Manhattan the baristas perform the theater of espresso. It’s really as much a performance art as it is a kind of urban communion.”
Scott couldn’t think of any appropriate response to such a statement.
“I’m so sorry about your brother,” he said instead, thinking it wise to change the subject before ceramics were launched from behind the counter.
Gwyneth immediately teared up in a dramatic but studied way, and touched her eyes with the paper napkin Scott handed her. With her eyes full of tears and her lower lip trembling, Scott finally saw the sulky teenager he remembered from so many years ago, lurking behind the sophisticated façade.
“That is so kind of you to say, Todd. I was shocked at the news, of course, and immediately rescheduled all my patients so I could be here, to manage things.”
“Well, it’s certainly good to have you back in our little town,” Scott said.
“Little town? It’s more like a stage set for a farce,” she said. “The Irish own the pub; the Italians own the pizza parlor; it’s just so stereotypical, so rife with clichés.”
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