by Susan Breen
Maggie liked apple trees, which seemed so unobtrusive and low to the ground, and yet burst with this miraculous fruit. She’d always wished Adam and Eve got into trouble over a chestnut tree, leaving the apple out of the picture. Of course all Edgar wanted to do was climb a tree and throw the apples to the ground, and they were only half an hour into this trip and she was feeling exhausted. Had he been her own child, she would have tugged him into a corner and hissed at him, but you couldn’t yell at someone else’s kid…could you?
“Come, let’s stand like soldiers,” she tried, which didn’t work exactly as she had planned, but got him off the tree.
“Edgar,” she said. “You’re killing me. Could you calm down just a little bit?”
“Maggie Dove,” he cried out, barreling into her.
Just then a cluster of kids came over and Maggie hoped for a moment they were going to join him. Beyond Ambrosia Fletcher, who he abused, Edgar didn’t seem to have any friends, she realized, but now one of the group stepped forward and said, “Is this your grandma?”
“Yes,” Edgar said.
Maggie didn’t correct him. There was nothing worse than a fact-checker in a conversation. So many good conversations were built around lies, she thought.
“How come she has a different name?”
“I’m on his mother’s side,” Maggie said, which was the truth.
“How come your mom didn’t come?”
“She has to work,” Edgar said, but Maggie noticed he stepped back toward her. His normal bravado had vanished. The parents were all off chatting a few trees away.
“My mom works but she’s here today,” one of the girls said. “She always tries to make time for me when something’s important.”
“Prioritizing,” another kid said.
“Where’s your dad?” a different kid asked. Edgar didn’t answer. He just leaned back against her.
“You don’t have a dad, do you?”
“Now, that’s enough,” Maggie said, “all of you. You’re being unkind.”
But they were relentless.
“You don’t have a dad. You just have a grandma and she’s not even your grandma.”
Maggie tugged Edgar away from there, suddenly understanding why he had been so eager to get off the school bus. It hadn’t occurred to her that he would be a child kids would tease. She had always worried that he would be the bully, what with all his energy.
“Oh, Edgar,” she said, crouching down, hugging the poor little chick whose eyes were filled with tears. Then, swooping onto them was Sybil, tugging along her son, who’d been in the back of the pack. “You apologize now,” she said to him; he looked down at the ground.
“Come on,” she said. “Don’t be this type of boy.”
“I’m sorry,” her son said.
Sybil then linked her arms with Maggie’s. She was a big, strong woman and Maggie suspected she could have carried her through the orchard, which she sort of wished she would have done. “Come on, we’re going to pick these apples together.”
Soon enough Sybil’s good nature lifted everyone. The boys got on well together, and Maggie and Sybil stood there watching them play.
“I’m sorry,” Sybil said. “I’ve spoken to Lester about this teasing.”
“I wasn’t even aware it was going on.”
“You know how it is. Anyone different.”
Maggie did know how it was, she just hadn’t realized that Edgar fell under the category of different, and there was a lesson for you. He seemed so smart and cute and energetic to her, and she loved him for all those qualities. It hadn’t occurred to her that other people might not feel the same. She supposed she also hadn’t realized how rambunctious he was. Put Edgar next to a bunch of other six-year-olds and you realized his wildness.
“I don’t know how they figured out that not having a father here bothers him so much. There are plenty of kids who don’t live with their fathers, but they only pick on him. They have a sixth sense. Monsters.”
“I had no idea. I’ll talk to Helen. Maybe she can arrange for his father to come on a field trip.” Though even as she said it she realized she had no idea who Edgar’s father was. Helen never spoke about him.
Fortunately, the teachers began teaching the kids a lesson, and Maggie and Sybil were left alone for a bit. They began talking about the party at Stern Manor and Domino’s death. Sybil had been there too, of course, and had seen Domino fall.
“I didn’t want to go. That place is cursed.”
“How do you mean?”
“Don’t you know, Maggie? To think you’re a lifer. I guess it’s one of those things everyone assumes people know and so no one talks about it.”
Sybil patted around her shirt absentmindedly. Maggie remembered how she’d stood on street corners when she was a young woman, smoking cigarettes. Old habits were hard to break.
“That house has a terrible history,” Sybil said. “Haunted, and I don’t mean just on Halloween. I mean the real deal.”
She brushed back her blond hair and smoothed down her shirt. She was a laughing girl, a person who brought joy.
“Why?” Maggie asked. “What happened?”
“You know how a lot of people in Darby were connected with the Underground Railroad?”
“Of course,” Maggie said. “I have a hiding spot in my house where the escaped slaves hid on their way to Canada.”
“Right, right, right, I forgot. Well, Stern Manor, or as it was called then, St. Clair Manor, was built in 1843. Some woman with a lot of money. I don’t know how she got it, but she built an extensive cellar in the house and became involved with the Underground Railroad. However, the railroad was built on trust—secrecy doesn’t exactly breed responsible oversight—and this woman was evil. She took the slaves in, then she held them. In her basement. For years. Until one day, one of the slaves set a fire. I guess he figured he’d rather burn to death than live in that cellar any longer, enduring God knows what went on down there.”
Maggie remembered the scar of black smoke in the basement. Surely Domino knew the cellar’s dark history and yet she chose to sit down there. What horrors had she wanted to tap into?
Sybil shivered. “Supposedly there’s the ghost of a slave who stays in that house. She wears a white shroud and cries for her daughter. Oh, Maggie, why would someone do something like that—and why would anyone want to live there? That house has been cursed. I can’t tell you how many suicides took place there. Quite honestly, I think that’s why the Harrison family sold Leonard Stern the house. They never had much joy living there. The oldest son died and the wife got sick. It was cursed, I always thought. I wouldn’t sell it.”
“Hold on a bit. What do you mean? I thought that house had been in the Stern family for generations.”
“No, Leonard Stern wanted people to think that. All lord of the manor.”
Sybil bit into an apple. Juice ran down onto her shirt and she laughed. Maggie thought if she bit into an apple like that her teeth would fly right out. “No, Stern didn’t buy that place until after World War II. My father sold it to him. Harrison had fallen on hard times, with his son killing himself and all. Started gambling. He needed the money, but I think he was glad to get out of there.”
“How did his son kill himself?”
“Cyanide, I think? Anyway, there he was and there was Stern with his new war bride. So Harrison moved out, and he got the family settled in a nice, small place he could afford, but things kept going wrong for him, and then young Tim ran into trouble with the law. Fast forward…and here we are.”
“Tim Harrison, the garbage man, grew up in Stern Manor?”
“He was quite a hottie,” Sybil said. “He and Domino had a thing, actually. But she was ambitious. She didn’t want to marry a hometown boy.”
“Domino and Tim Harrison dated?” Maggie was astounded.
“In high school. Yes.”
Tim Harrison, whom she ran into all the time at D’Amici’s deli, was a nice quiet man who alw
ays had a dog tucked under his coat. He rescued strays and carried treats for dogs or cats. Maggie’d never actually spoken to him. He had the damaged look of someone who’d seen too much trouble when he was young. But she thought him kind.
“Is he the one the whole voodoo doll incident was over?”
“Crazy, right?”
“It is crazy,” Maggie said, though she wasn’t that surprised. That was the thing about living in a small village, so many connections. People changed and evolved over time, but their roots went deep.
The boys started running toward them. Sybil sighed and stood up. “I’ll tell you the truth, when I saw Domino falling, and I saw that woman in white, even though I knew it was Racine, I thought it was the ghost come to take its revenge. I thought the house itself killed Domino.”
Chapter 17
Maggie Dove went home and took a long hot shower. She needed to wash all the apple juice off her skin, and hair. When she was done she changed into a fresh pair of black pants, a black shirt and a soft gray scarf. She put on some blue eye shadow and pink lipstick. She thought, when she examined herself in the mirror, that she looked thinner. She hoped being sick all morning had worked off a few calories. She was considering the possibility when Kosi jumped up on the counter, knocking over her bottle of foundation.
“It’s not bad enough,” she pointed out to him, “that you’re vicious, but you’re also emotionally needy. It’s a bad combination.”
Offended, Kosi jumped off the counter and bolted downstairs, his tail twitching as he ran. Maggie followed him, heading toward the kitchen, thinking that so long as she’d lost weight, she might as well have some bread pudding. But before she got to the kitchen, she stopped to look at the spot under her staircase that had served as a hiding station for people on the Underground Railroad.
It had always been a source of pride for her that her family, the Civil War–era Leighs, had helped with the Underground Railroad. She’d felt proud thinking of how they’d hid fugitive slaves right in this very house, helping them journey on to Canada. Part of why she had stayed there after her daughter died was because she felt the house had good karma. To think of someone imprisoning those slaves who had already been through so much was horrifying. It was evil.
She kept coming back to that, the evil that wound its way through Domino’s life. Why would she choose to sit in a cellar where such hateful things had been done? What dark passions did she draw on? One of the joys Maggie had always felt in her faith was that she believed it brought her into contact with goodness. She liked the people at her church because she believed that most of them were committed to doing good with their lives. She couldn’t understand the pleasures of evil, and yet she knew they were all around her. Not long ago, she’d seen a bus with an ad on it that said, Tap into your dark side. Why? She wondered. Why would you want to?
Was it possible that Domino had tapped into something evil that had come out and killed her? Could the house itself have drawn Domino to her death? Houses did have atmosphere. She remembered once Sybil decided she should consider moving into another house and the two of them had spent a day visiting places. You could tell the moment you walked into a place whether people had been happy there. Maggie’s own house, she thought, had a sort of weary happiness to it. She hoped people who visited felt happy here, in her home with all her books and maps and comfortable seats. What comforts did Stern Manor offer? Could it be haunted? And if it was, what was she supposed to do about that?
Detective Grudge was silent on the issue of investigating ghosts who might have commit crimes.
An image came into her head of that broomstick and all that implied.
Maggie settled herself on her couch, and opened her computer. It was only early afternoon. She figured she’d watch a half hour of Detective Grudge and then head to the office. She clicked on the video and the sound came up, the jazzy trumpet and shivering cymbals. Detective Grudge arrived in his Maserati, got out of the car, looked into the camera and said, “To understand the present, you must know the past.”
Dear God, she thought. How had he managed to express the exact thought she’d been having? It was like the way her minister had spent years preaching about forgiveness and neighborly love throughout her whole siege with Marcus Bender, and the moment he died, she stopped talking about that. Maggie had noticed something similar when she wrote mysteries, a long time ago. When her mind was focused on an issue, it cropped up everywhere.
He went on to talk about how important it was to understand everything about a suspect. “Your ability to delve into a suspect’s past and uncover secrets will be key to how successful you are as a private investigator.”
He made sense, she thought.
She had to believe that whatever caused Domino’s death had its roots in the past. If she had committed suicide, it was some trouble from the past that pushed her in that direction. Even an accident might have been spurred by an encounter with someone she hadn’t seen in a while. And what if it was murder? No one had officially said it yet. But it was her job to investigate everything. Could she absolutely rule it out?
Then she thought of the broomstick. All right, it was unlikely, but she had to consider everything.
She turned off the video and pulled out a pad of paper. She’d make a list of everyone she needed to speak to: Lucifer Raines and Milo and Passion and Tim Harrison. She would earn this money that Racine was paying her.
Now she just had to call Lucifer, which gave her pause. Phones made her nervous. There was something presumptive about them in the way a text wasn’t. Plus, Lucifer was a rock star. She’d never spoken to one. Automatically she felt old and insignificant. But she had his number. Racine had given it to her. She tried to think of positive things. She thought of her cherrywood table, which she loved.
“Hello,” he said. He had a slight British accent.
“This is Maggie Dove,” she said. “I’m a private investigator.”
Chapter 18
Stern Manor looked sullen. Its lawns were still covered with pumpkins, but they sagged under the heat of their candles. The balcony was boarded shut, and crime scene tape whipped around in the wind. The temperature had dropped 30 degrees, the sky was gray and the river behind it was gray too. Little brown waves rippled through it like sharks. Maggie parked her TT and got out. The instant she closed the door, Racine came running out of the house.
“You’re here,” she said. She seemed to be getting thinner and thinner, Maggie thought. Her eyes were actually sinking into her head.
“Don’t let him manipulate you,” Racine said, as she beckoned Maggie into the house. “You have your questions prepared? You’re ready?”
“I’m ready,” Maggie said. She’d spent the whole night preparing for this interview. She’d read up on Lucifer’s background, which was surprisingly unremarkable. His mother was a schoolteacher and his father a builder. He grew up in a small town in England, but even as a young boy he’d felt drawn to the dark side of things. She’d found an old school photo of him from when he was Edgar’s age, and he looked like a young version of his Gothic self. He formed a band called The Shards. They had a hit and another hit. He married Domino, and their antics always seemed to keep them in the news. Maggie was curious to talk to him because he seemed more persona than person, but then Domino had been like that too.
“Remember,” Racine said, “he’s not going to think it’s a suicide. He certainly wouldn’t want the world to think she was unhappy. He’s going to try to convince you that it was an accident. Just remember that. And you’ll write up a report later, right, since I’m a gold star client?”
“I most certainly will,” Maggie said. “How is your mother doing?”
“Not well. Not well. She’s taken to her bed. She won’t be satisfied until this is all resolved. We’re depending on you.”
Maggie felt something stirring inside of her that might have been complete panic. “Where is he?”
“He’s in the library,” Racine said
, and led her down the long hallway she’d been through before, but this time they went left. The same tile pattern carried on the floor, and looking at it more carefully now, Maggie could see it was a throne interlaced with a star. The walls were richly paneled, every single detail of the house carefully chosen, she thought, and underlying it all, the screams of the people who had died here.
They came to a heavy wooden door. Racine knocked.
“Maggie Dove is here, Lucifer,” she called out, and then she darted away, as though frightened.
Maggie stepped into the library, which was stunning in its opulence. It smelled of leather and old paper. Light shone in through the window in beams, picking up the dust, like a searchlight. There were books and books sitting on cherrywood shelves, but they weren’t the sort you would actually read. They looked like they might shatter if you picked them up. And there, in the middle of it all, was Lucifer Raines, rising gingerly from a leather chair, an old copy of The Brothers Karamazov in his hands. The gold lettering on the leather cover glinted.
“Ha,” she said without thinking. “I’m reading that too.”
“Are you?” he asked, in a gentle British accent. “Which translation?”
“I don’t know. The one you get for 99 cents from Amazon.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to my Russian translations. A purist, you might say. But it does make a difference.”
“I suppose so,” she said, sitting down in a leather chair across from him at his invitation. Her feet did not quite reach the floor, but she crossed them and hoped he wouldn’t notice. He had a cup of tea next to him, and he’d draped a shawl across his legs. He did not, on the face of it, look like a man who would stand on a balcony and urinate onto a fan’s head.
He asked if she’d like some tea, but she didn’t want to put him to any trouble because she could see he was shattered. She recognized the stance of grief so well. The rigidness in the jaw, the shoulders clenched, the tentativeness of the gaze, as though not quite certain what was coming next. It brought her back to her own deep grief, to a memory she’d forgotten of how her friend had given her a gift certificate for a massage soon after Juliet’s death. The masseuse, after working on her, asked if she’d been in a car accident.