by Susan Breen
“You’re a natural private detective,” Helen said. “You’re good with people and you’re curious and you’re brave.”
“I’m curious anyway,” Maggie allowed.
“I’m serious, Maggie. That took bravery. I do a lot of things.” She looked over toward Edgar, who was making piles of red and white LEGOs. “I see a lot of bravery and cowardice and I want to tell you that was brave.”
She clinked her glass with Maggie’s.
“Would you look at this lettering?” Maggie asked, showing her the picture on the phone. “Does it mean anything to you?” Helen looked at it.
“Maggie Dove,” Edgar started to wail. “Maggie Dove. I want to build LEGOs.”
“Hold on, treasure, I’ll be right there.”
“They’re runic,” Helen said, squinting at Maggie’s phone, “but I don’t know what they mean. Tell you what I’ll do. I have a friend who’s a cryptologist. I’ll ask him to look at them.”
“Thank you,” Maggie said, “but I don’t want to distract him if he’s trying to discover the secret to world peace, or some such thing.” Helen never talked about where she worked, but Maggie knew it was something serious. One call from Helen had gotten them their private detective license, and one time Maggie had googled Helen’s name, and the minute she clicked on it, it disappeared. But now Helen just laughed.
“Not to worry. Edgar has time on his hands. Not young Edgar, I mean. Old Edgar.”
Maggie looked over to Edgar, who seemed to have fallen asleep, using the LEGO instructions as a pillow. “Is that who you named your Edgar after?” Maggie whispered.
Helen’s eyes sparkled. “You can’t work your magic on me, Maggie Dove. My secrets stay with me.”
“I’m good at keeping secrets,” Maggie said. She wished Helen would confide in her. This young woman was holding a lot to herself and Maggie worried it was wearing her down. She had no family she spoke about, and no friends that Maggie could see. She certainly had made no friends among the first-grade parents.
“Sorry, Dove,” she said, but there was no harshness in her voice. Still, Maggie couldn’t help but wonder what it was about Edgar’s father that troubled her so. She wondered if he could be someone famous. She assumed Helen hadn’t married him and she wondered if that was the source of her hesitation. Maggie wasn’t a prude, but she knew she came across that way.
“Helen,” she said, looking again at Edgar, who looked like an angel when he was asleep. “You don’t need to tell me anything. But you should think about talking to Edgar. He might need to know.”
“He’s being bullied, you mean.”
That surprised Maggie. She’d just assumed Helen didn’t know. “The teacher called you?”
“Yeah.”
Helen drank some more of her wine. “I’m sorry for that, I know it’s tough being bullied. But he’ll have to deal with it. There are bullies in this world, and you have to learn to be strong.”
“That’s a hard lesson for a little boy.”
Maggie looked over to Edgar, who snored gently, mouth open. Helen got up and covered him with a blanket.
“Life’s hard. I don’t need to tell you that, Maggie Dove.”
“No, though I’ve always been appreciative that I had people like you, to soften things a bit.”
Helen poured the last of her wine into the sink. Then she sat back down at the table with Maggie.
“You asked me, when this whole thing began, if I believed in evil. I didn’t answer you then, but you should know this about me: I do believe in evil.”
She looked at Edgar and smiled slightly.
“I grew up Holcomb, Kansas. Does that ring a bell?”
“That’s where In Cold Blood took place.”
“Correct. My mother was friendly with the Clutter family, with the older of the sisters, the one who survived because she wasn’t home when the murderers came. Not that it mattered. It destroyed her life. I was fascinated with that murder growing up. Maybe because it touched people I loved. People came up with all sorts of explanations for why those two men did what they did. Broken home. Sexual orientation.” She shrugged. “I’ll tell you what I believe. I believe they were possessed by the devil. No normal human could have done what they did, and because of that I decided to devote my life to fighting evil. All over the world. It’s a hard road, Maggie Dove, and it’s lonely, and the sooner you get toughened up for that, the better.
“I love Edgar with all my heart, but he is not going into this world defenseless.”
Chapter 25
That night Maggie’s dreams were violent. She dreamed of blood and witches. She kept seeing Domino falling and then rising up and then falling. After the third time jolting herself awake, Maggie decided she’d be better off sitting in the living room. She’d have a cup of warm milk and sit and read. Except that in The Brothers Karamazov she was up to the scene in which Ivan talks to the devil, and she was feeling inundated with witchcraft, and so she set the book aside and just looked out the window.
Most of her view was taken up with the oak tree on her front lawn, which had had a growth spurt. There was a metaphor for you. It had been savagely attacked last spring, and now it bloomed and flourished. Unfortunately, right now it sounded like it was clawing at her window. A sharp breeze had come up. The oak tree kept tapping. Kosi was restless, roaming around, pouncing into corners. A train went north, screaming on the brakes. She could see a bit of the rising moon above the tree, hovering.
Maggie pulled a blanket up around her and tried to rest, and then her phone rang. She jumped, grabbed it. But no one was there. She pressed star six nine, but it said the number was private. She looked at the phone, waiting for it to ring again, but it didn’t. Still, her heart kept pounding. All the events of the day swam before her. Her meeting with Lucifer. She’d come away from that confident that he was truly grieving, that he was not involved in Domino’s death. But now she wondered if that was so. She thought of Dr. Winfrey, who seemed to be a good guy, if an overextended one. But there was something going on at the pagan bookstore. And then there was Helen, who she loved like a daughter, who was keeping an important secret from her son. Maggie knew there was nothing worse than getting involved in another person’s parenting, and she’d heard what Helen said about evil, yet she’d always believed it more important to be truthful.
But then, how well had she protected her own daughter? On a night like this, it was impossible for her to keep her guilt from rising. Perhaps she had coddled her. Had she been stricter with Juliet, then perhaps she wouldn’t have gone to that party. Or she wouldn’t have taken up with Peter Nelson in the first place. Had she only been able to protect her. She began to cry. It was all so much, these highs and lows. She missed Juliet so much. And she missed her husband. She wanted her old life. She wanted to do what she knew how to do.
Kosi tiptoed over. He sat down alongside her. Automatically she stretched out her hand to pet him, and he scratched her hard.
“Damn you,” she cried out, and ran back to her bedroom. She closed the door. It was enough. He scratched the door, but she pulled a pillow over her head. She had no patience for him. She didn’t want him. Finally she slept, and she had a happy dream, and in some ways those were the worst of all. Because you had to wake up. But she did wake up, and she had some cereal and a lot of coffee. Kosi sat on the couch, eyeing her, unrepentant. The phone rang and she thought it might be Agnes asking her where she was. She knew she was late for work, though they didn’t punch a clock.
It was Walter.
“Maggie Dove. Please come to my office immediately.”
“Is everything all right?”
He hung up.
So Reverend Sunday must have spoken to him about having her sub. He was going to have a tantrum. Perfect. Well, let him. It wasn’t her fault that he was so inflexible. The 1950s were a long time ago and it was pointless to try to go backwards. While she dressed she had an entire imaginary conversation with Walter, planning what she wanted to s
ay. But as she started for the door, Kosi pounced in front of her. She assumed he wanted to get in one last swat before she left. But no, he had something in his clutches. She looked down at it, uncertain of what she saw.
It was Charlotte, the tarantula. She’d followed Maggie home.
Chapter 26
Maggie put the tarantula in one of her Tupperware containers. She used spaghetti tongs to pick it up. That spider had weight. Then she put the Tupperware container into a Stop & Shop bag, so she wouldn’t have to look at it, and set out for the police department. She hoped that Walter would give her a little slack on the subject of Sunday School since she’d faced down a tarantula, though with Walter it was hard to say. He was just as likely to argue that the tarantula would never have found her had she not become involved in the first place.
Mercy Williams looked suspiciously friendly when Maggie got to the police station. She kept smiling even when Maggie handed her the bag and told her what was in it.
“What should I do with it?” Mercy asked.
“I would call Lucifer. He might want it back.”
Then Maggie set off down the hall to talk to Walter, who she assumed would be sitting dejectedly at his desk, but not so. Walter stood right by the door and lunged at her the moment she walked in. He was a tall man, and an angular one. On a good day he looked like Frankenstein, but when he was angry, as he was now, there was something almost prehistoric about him.
“Sit down,” he growled.
He sounded so preemptory she was tempted to flop right down on the floor, but she got hold of herself and made her way over to the desk. She certainly hadn’t expected him to be this upset. Perhaps Reverend Sunday wasn’t as tactful as one might have hoped.
“I’ll come right to the point,” he said. “I’ve had a complaint against you.”
“Against me!” Maggie said. She felt her jaw open and snapped it shut. “For what? By whom?”
“Grant Winfrey filed a harassment report with the police. He said you’d been following him.”
“Oh dear,” Maggie said. She started to laugh. “Oh dear. I’m sorry. Oh dear, I guess I was following him, but I’m a private detective. I have that right, don’t I?” That was what Detective Grudge said anyway. She’d taken careful note of it. The chief reason for lawsuits against investigators came out of rough shadowing, from surveillance conducted in an offensive manner, or by embarrassing someone. None of which she’d done.
“You are not allowed to follow someone if you make him feel unsafe,” Walter said.
“He felt unsafe because of me?”
Walter didn’t smile, but she thought she saw his lips tip up just the teensiest bit. “Why were you following him?”
“Because he wouldn’t talk to me.”
“Why did you want to talk to him?”
“I told you. Racine hired me to find out more about the circumstances of her sister’s death. I know she and Winfrey had words and I wanted to ask him what that was about.”
Walter put his large hands on the desk. Hard to remember that only last April he’d hugged her to him and whispered, “My dear.” Hard to understand why he was always so agitated over everything she did.
“And I told you that the matter of Domino Raines’s death is closed. The coroner ruled it an accidental death.”
“And coroners are never wrong?”
“You plan to prove the coroner of Westchester County is wrong.”
“I’m not planning to prove anything,” Maggie said. “I have been hired to get information, and that’s what I’m doing.”
“Not with Dr. Winfrey, you’re not. I told him you’d leave him alone.”
She really, really hated being told what to do. It activated a reflex in her that went right back to her teenage years. She stood up.
“I am a licensed private detective and I have the right to ask any questions I want. I’m not harassing him. I’m not embarrassing him in any way. It is my right.”
“Maggie,” he said.
“Walter, I’m tired and I’m stressed and I don’t want to argue. I’ll see you in class on Sunday.” She started toward the door.
“What?” he said.
She turned around. For the first time since she’d known him, Walter Campbell looked unsure of himself.
“Reverend Sunday spoke to you, didn’t she?”
“She called,” he said. “But I wasn’t in, and then when I called back, she was at the hospital with Gemma Jones.”
“Oh,” Maggie said, feeling flustered. She knew this would hurt him and she really didn’t want to. All the excitement of the past few days was catching up with her. Her eyes were starting to close. She’d had no sleep. It had been a rough night.
“Is it something important?” he asked.
There was no point in beating around the bush. Nothing she said was going to make this palatable to him. “She asked me to help you out with confirmation class.”
“But you don’t teach the confirmation class,” he said. “You teach the six-year-olds.”
“I know. But you’ve got a big class and she thought you could use some help.”
Maggie would have expected to feel triumphant, but she didn’t. He looked so hurt. She realized how important his position was to him. Suddenly she saw him as the boy he had been, probably teased for his height, trying to do the right thing, always working hard and not understanding why he was so unpopular.
“I’m sorry, Walter.”
“I suppose you suggested it,” he said.
“No, I did not.”
“I suppose you’ll be doing arts and crafts with them. Baking cookies.”
“Believe it or not, I do actually teach things. Some people think I’m good at it.”
He crossed his arms. “When I was a boy, we had to memorize the entire long catechism. All 196 questions. We had to recite all the books of the Bible at our confirmation.”
“I learned that too, Walter. But times have changed. We don’t do that anymore.”
“We should!”
She shrugged. She loved the old catechism too, especially the first question. What is the chief and highest end of man?
Man’s chief and highest end is to glorify God.
“We have to be a church of our time,” she said. “We have to be able to speak to the young people of today.”
He stared at her mournfully. “It’s a cruel thing, Maggie Dove, to undercut another Sunday School teacher,” he said, and he turned his back to her.
Chapter 27
The man was infuriating. Maggie burst onto Main Street, plowing right into Daisy Stanton, who asked her to sign a petition for a dog park, which Maggie signed, although she didn’t have a dog and didn’t actually care. Yet it seemed important in that moment for her to have her name on a list. She wanted to make a mark. She walked past the candy store, paused and then decided to go in and buy a Snickers bar. Her anger would burn up the calories, she reasoned.
Trudi Branch excelled at candy. Her family had owned the shop for generations. Maggie suspected that some of the candy had been there for generations too, and yet it still tasted so good. Trudi organized the candies in a haphazard fashion, but whenever you looked at the shelves, you saw just what you wanted. Periodically people came in and told her to arrange the candies alphabetically, but Trudi wanted no part of that. A very long time ago, when Maggie was a girl and Trudi’s mother ran the shop, Maggie bought a Coke in a glass bottle and accidentally dropped it. She still remembered the shock of hearing the bottle crack. Her family’d had little money. Maggie had a quarter to spend each week, and if the quarter was gone, that was the end of it, and she always remembered how Trudi’s mother swept up the glass and then gave her another Coke. Funny the way one small kindness could stay with you for so many years.
“What’s making you smile?” Trudi asked. She handed over the Snickers bar without Maggie asking. She’d been buying the same thing for a long time.
“I was thinking about your mother,” Maggie said. Trudi
looked like a nurse, Maggie thought. She had warm gray eyes, soft white hair, and she wore a chain bracelet that jingled. You could always hear her coming.
“A long time ago, she gave me a free Coke. It was a small thing, but it mattered.”
“It’s only the small things that matter,” Trudi said. “That’s what I’ve learned working in a candy shop.”
“You should write a book,” Maggie said. “You could call it: Everything I know I learned selling candy.”
Trudi laughed, and her charm bracelet jingled.
“I was thinking about your daughter just now,” Trudi said. “I always think of her when I open up a new box of Take Fives.”
“I’d forgotten how she loved them.”
“In fact,” Trudi said, “I always keep one set aside, just for her. You’ll think me silly perhaps, but it’s my way of remembering Juliet.”
Maggie felt her eyes start to mist. “I’m glad to know you remember something like that about her. I worry sometimes that the only thing people do remember about her was that she died in a car accident. She was so much more, but she’ll always be The Girl Who Died.”
“Not to me,” Trudi said. “To me, she’s The Girl Who Ate Take Fives, and who stopped by occasionally to buy her mother a Snickers bar because she knew how much she loved them.”
“Thank you,” Maggie said. “I’ll be smiling about that all day. And crying.”
Trudi smiled with her.
It was so peaceful in the store, Maggie thought. That was the beautiful thing about living in a small town—you felt like you were always in the presence of ghosts, and that could be a very good thing. Sometimes when she walked the same paths she’d walked for decades, she felt the people she loved walking alongside her. There was a verbena bush near the river park where she absolutely always heard her mother. People suggested she move away periodically, buy a condo in Florida, start a new life, but she never wanted to.
“There are good ghosts, aren’t there?” she asked Trudi.