Maggie Dove (4 page)

Iphigenia's hair salon sat in the center of the village, both physically and metaphorically. Almost every woman in town passed through her doors, and because Iphigenia felt very strongly that all women looked best with blond straight hair, almost every woman in the village looked slightly similar. On village-wide occasions, such as the Fourth of July fireworks or the Spring Fling, there were so many blond women of all shapes and sizes that Maggie sometimes thought the whole village looked related. Which was a nice thought, but not so nice that she wanted to look like an elderly Marilyn Monroe.

“Tscha,” Iphigenia cried out. “Look at you, Maggie Dove. Look at your hair. You look like a rag doll. You ruin my reputation. Sit down. I have ten minutes.”

“I really just wanted to ask…”

Iphigenia stood before her, a fury of perfume. She wore her own hair blown up like an Egyptian princess, with bangs, an effect she highlighted by shading her eyes with lots of dark pencil. She was gorgeous. “We can do color too. I have time.”

“No color,” Maggie said, as Iphigenia propelled her toward a black chair.

“Why don't we try something new today?” Iphigenia said. “We were talking about changing the shape.”

“Dear God,” Maggie cried out. “Nothing new.”

“Of course. Of course. I know, Miss Maggie wants to play it safe,” Iphigenia said, swiveling the chair so Maggie could settle in more easily.

“That's exactly right. Miss Maggie wants safety.”

Iphigenia swung Maggie around so that she faced the mirror, and, confronting her image so suddenly, Maggie laughed out loud. Who was this person with the white hair and blue eyes?

“I'm turning into my mother,” she said.

“You're beautiful,” Iphigenia said, snapping a black plastic cape around Maggie's neck. “Beautiful. You haven't aged a day. Isn't that right, my friend Agnes, who sits over there so quietly?”

Maggie started. She hadn't even noticed Agnes Jorgenson's sullen figure in the corner, all swathed in black.

“Yes,” Agnes said. “You're still beautiful. How are you, Margaret?”

They'd gone to high school together, Maggie and Agnes and Winifred and for some reason Agnes felt compelled to call Maggie by her full name, though Maggie wasn't sure why. No one else in the world called her Margaret.

“I heard you found Marcus Bender's body,” Agnes said. She was secretary to the traffic court judge and spent a good deal of time listening to people come up with excuses. She'd learned to trust no one. She had large blue eyes and should have been attractive, except she never blinked. She always looked startled.

“Tscha,” Iphigenia clucked. “Such a tragedy. Such a bad thing.”

“Bad for Bender, certainly,” Agnes said. She gazed at Maggie speculatively. Her lips twitched and Maggie had the strongest possible feeling she was laughing at her. For just a moment she thought of Bender collapsing on her lawn. She imagined his haughty face and the drop of blood on his lips. She shivered as she remembered the feeling she'd had that someone else was there. In the night. Watching her.

“I heard he'd just been to the doctor,” Agnes said.

“How many times does that happen? You go to the doctor and the next day you're dead. That's why I never go to the doctor,” Iphigenia said, laughing loudly. “Not for ten years.”

“That's just foolishness,” Agnes said. “You don't have mammograms?”

“No. Nothing. Nothing. And look at me. I'm healthy as a horse.”

“You should go,” Maggie said.

“No. Me? I want to go just like Bender. Alive one minute and then dead the next.”

She snapped her scissors at the thought, though Maggie noticed her hands were shaking. The scissors came a little closer to Maggie's cheek than she suspected Iphigenia intended.

“Did you do CPR?” Agnes asked.

“There was no call for it. He was dead.”

“How could you be sure?” she asked. “I've heard stories about people being buried alive. They used to worry about that, didn't they? That's where the expression comes from.
Saved by the bell.
Because they'd put a bell down in the coffin.”

“Agnes!” Maggie interrupted. “The police were there. Trust me, Bender was not alive.”

“Was he stiff?”

“Tscha,” Iphigenia said. “Look over there. Edgar Blake must have lice again.”

The pharmacy was across the street from the hair salon. Sure enough, Edgar Blake's mother was clutching her son with one hand and a bag with the other, the bag distorted by a familiar shape. Edgar was renowned for his lice; his mother said they kept reappearing, but the general consensus was they never went away.

“Such thick hair, the son has,” Iphigenia said. “I think maybe I cancel her appointment for tomorrow. Just to be safe. I don't want any creepy-crawly things in my salon.” She shivered dramatically.

“He's in your Sunday School class, isn't he?” Agnes asked.

“Yes.”

“Better wear a hat this Sunday,” Agnes said. “Or maybe tell the reverend to call and ask them not to come to church.”

“Dear God,” Maggie exploded, “if the worst thing that ever happens to me is I get lice from one of my Sunday School students, I'll consider myself lucky. For all we know, it's a home pregnancy test. Am I going to cut a six-year-old boy off from salvation because we saw his mother with a bag?”

Agnes laughed at that. “You're a good Sunday School teacher, Maggie, but I don't know that you're that good. Do you seriously think young Edgar's salvation hinges on going to one of your classes?”

Maggie blushed. What was wrong with her lately? She didn't recognize herself.

“Are you going to Bender's funeral?” Agnes asked.

“No,” Maggie said, determined not to get pulled into this discussion. On the street one of the young skateboarders shot by, a tall Asian boy with pants that looked like they would slide right off his hips. He jumped to go over the curb and the skateboard seemed to attach itself to his feet, a move so dangerous and graceful that Maggie almost cried out.

“I can understand that,” Agnes said. “I wouldn't go to his funeral if I were you. But I wonder if Peter will go.”

“Why wouldn't he,” Maggie asked, a twinge of anxiety pinging through her.
Please don't let Peter get swept up in this mess,
she prayed.
Not this time.

Agnes peered toward her curiously. “Let's just say that Bender was not a fan of our assistant chief of police. One might even say that Bender was trying to get him fired.”

“Why would Bender want Peter fired?”

“I didn't say he was. I said he might be.”

“I don't know what that means, Agnes. Are you saying Peter's in trouble?”

She laughed at that. “My dear, Peter's been in trouble since the day he was born.”

Maggie started to reply, but before she could go further, Iphigenia shouted, “Ping. Time's up. Color's ready. Time to do some blow-drying.” She swept Agnes out of her chair before she could speak. Then aimed the blow-dryer at her like a gun, humming loudly, fluffing her hair. Agnes sat rigidly throughout, a prisoner awaiting execution.

Iphigenia was a whirl of fluffing and blowing for the next few minutes, and when she was done, Agnes surveyed herself in the mirror, obviously pleased with the result. She took a check out of her pocketbook, pre-written, and handed it to Iphigenia and walked out the door, stopping, for just a moment, in the doorway.

“Don't you worry, Margaret. Peter's not the only one who doesn't mourn Bender's passing,” Agnes said. “I could name ten other people in this village who would have been happy to kill him too.”

Having said that, she exited through the door, sailing onto Main Street like the queenliest of ships, bowing to those who passed.

“Brrr. I don't like her,” Iphigenia said.

“Me neither.”

“What makes someone like that?” Iphigenia said, eyeing Maggie's hair speculatively, snipping every so often.

“I don't know,” Maggie said. “She had a crazy family, I can tell you that. There were eight of those Jorgenson children, each one stranger and meaner than the next. But the father, he was really a piece of work.” He'd been thrown out of town after fondling some girl, or so the rumor had it, though Maggie figured she wouldn't pass on that tidbit. She'd like to think she had a little honor left.

“She's not happy. Her roots are unhealthy. I can tell.”

Iphigenia then turned her attention back to Maggie's hair, which she cut and fluffed until Maggie thought she looked a little like Julius Caesar.

“Very young,” Iphigenia said. “Very beautiful.”

It will grow out, Maggie thought.

“Is it true you haven't been to the doctor in ten years?” Maggie asked.

“I wouldn't want to go through chemo. I'd rather die.”

“Do you think something's wrong?”

Automatically Iphigenia put her hand to her breast.

“If you're worried, it's better to find out early. It's not a death sentence, you know, but you're better off finding out. You're probably making yourself sick worrying about it.”

“No.”

“I'll take you. Make an appointment with Doc Steinberg and I'll go with you and then we'll have lunch. Why don't you make it for Monday?”

“We'll see,” Iphigenia said, and then she nodded over at the pharmacy and they both looked at Noelle Bender, who was walking out the door of the pharmacy, carrying a white bag. Lice? Maggie wondered. Or something else? What else came in a box? A home pregnancy test? Good grief, Maggie thought. Living in a small town turns us all into spies, but before she could shift focus, Noelle looked straight at her.

Maggie blushed, and turned away.

After she left Iphigenia's, her thoughts went back to Peter. Was it possible he had some sort of beef with Bender? Of course it was possible. Peter argued with everyone. But how bad was it? Probably he hadn't told Maggie about it because he didn't want to upset her. But she knew who he would tell. She knew who would know.

Maggie drove over to Winifred's nursing home, and there she found her friend, as she so often did, staring at the pictures of her four husbands. Winifred liked to define herself as a serial marrier. Although she'd hit a bit of a rough patch in the last few years, having developed Parkinson's, that didn't stop her from looking for husband number five. She'd divorced the four previous ones, being of the view that there was no point in staying in a bad situation, so it was something of an irony that Winifred had wound up in the ultimate bad situation, semi-paralyzed and in a nursing home. Yet she took it with a surprising amount of grace.

She didn't complain, although she had enough justification. Maggie had noticed that often the people with the most to complain about did it the least, possibly because they didn't need the attention. In any event, Winifred looked awful when Maggie walked into her room, dyed brown hair teased too high, right arm swollen, head craned perilously to the side. Blue eyes sparkling. Those eyes had been looking for trouble for more than sixty years.

“Here she is,” Winifred said. “I was just telling young Arthur here about your adventures last night.” Young Arthur grinned genially, a soft young man with large spongy hands. He was massaging Winifred's arm, trying to build up her muscles. Winifred was determined to beat the disease and had done a lot of research on the Internet, trying to find alternative cures, or any cures, and one thing she was passionate about was exercise.

“Not much of an adventure,” Maggie said. “More of a nightmare really.”

She sank down onto Winifred's new couch. Unlike every other person at the Castle, Winifred had elected not to bring her furniture from home. Instead she'd gone to Bloomingdale's and selected a jewel-blue couch and an antiqued, white bookshelf. She'd had Arthur spend the afternoon moving everything around to get it just right, which had not made the Castle happy because the administrators were of the view that Arthur was there to work for more than one person. But Winifred didn't care and neither did Arthur. The whole thing was quite nice except Maggie felt the couch had been designed for someone about six inches taller than her. She felt like a child with her feet hanging in space.

“A nightmare,” Winifred crowed. “Nonsense. You're a mystery writer. You should be eating up death for breakfast. I would think you'd be delighted to have someone die on your front lawn. If that's not a cure for writer's block, I don't know what is.”

“I didn't become a mystery writer because I wanted to see a murder,” she said, “but rather because I like to write stories.”

“I thought you became a writer because it gave you a respectable way to fantasize about men.”

Arthur had moved on to Winifred's other arm, trying to press some feeling into her poor abused limbs. Maggie knew Winifred and her moods well enough to know she was looking for an argument; she'd been like that as a girl too. So excited by trouble that she couldn't calm down. Maggie focused on the bookshelves, which Winifred had filled, three rows deep, with copies of Maggie's books that she still handed out to doctors and nurses although Maggie hadn't published anything in twenty years.

“Maggie's detective was quite the dreamboat,” Winifred explained to Arthur.

At one point Maggie had told her to stop buying books because she didn't want her to bankrupt herself, but Winifred didn't care. She told Maggie she loved her books, they were the best books ever written; and she'd set them on her shelf, between
War and Peace
and
Beloved.

“She's ignoring me,” Winifred said.

“I'm not ignoring you,” Maggie said. “I don't want to argue with you.”

“Inspector Claude Benet. He had big hands,” she said to Arthur. “He was the perfect man. He was like James Bond, but faithful. He was even good at house repairs. That man could change a bulb,” she said, cackling wildly. Arthur laughed along genially. Maggie hoped he didn't go home and relate these stories to his family.

“He was handsome, spoke three languages and played the clarinet.”

“Flute,” Maggie said.

“Same thing.”

“Not really.”

“Oh yes, my dear. It's all the same.”

Maggie wondered if it would be possible to have a conversation with Winifred that did not end in sexual innuendo. Arthur smiled at her. He was a kind young man who performed his job with grace. She knew he had a mother and grandmother and great-grandmother who lived with him. He talked about them fondly, didn't complain, didn't get mad. What was his outlet, Maggie wondered. What was the secret of his grace? Everyone has a secret.

“And he didn't own a gun. He won all his cases through quick thinking.”

“And jujitsu,” Maggie said. “He was a black belt.”

“Not that it mattered. His suspects always confessed.”

Maggie was tempted to come to the defense of her dear Inspector Benet, but decided to say no more. One way or another Winifred would get in the last word, and she didn't want this to get ugly. She was Maggie's best friend, but that didn't mean Maggie always liked her.

“Did you base him on someone you knew?” Arthur asked.

“I suppose I based him a little bit on my husband.”

Winifred howled. “The marvelous Stuart Dove.”

“My husband was some years older than me…” Maggie started to say.

More howling from Winifred. “Some years! Maggie's own father used to call him Dad.”

Maggie resumed. “But when he was young, he was quite elegant. I didn't know him then, of course, but I liked to imagine what he would have been like, and so part of Inspector Benet came out of that.”

She'd found her husband so mysterious. That was part of his charm for her. She didn't know him fully and doubted she ever could. He was a Russian scholar and had spent years traveling around Russia, and so they were always having visitors. Curious people who showed up in the middle of the night and told stories and drank and ate and argued about religion and love. They were all so over-the-top, most of them Ph.D. students, some writers, and some who didn't fit into any category. They all respected her husband and she loved being part of that world. She began studying Russian herself. Inspector Benet, of course, was fluent.

“Stuart Dove could not change a lightbulb.”

“He was a professor,” Maggie explained. “He was very charming, very cultured.”

“He was no James Bond.”

“I thought he was,” Maggie said, and she looked meaningfully at Winifred, who had once been a champion fencer, who had known back then when to parry and when to go in reverse. Though not now.

“Why, on their honeymoon—” Winifred started to say, but Maggie cut her off.

“That's enough,” Maggie barked and finally Winifred snapped her jaw shut.

“I'm in trouble now,” she stage-whispered to Arthur.

“You're too much,” he said, laughing. Maggie wondered what it would take to upset Arthur. Now, he'd be a good murderer, Maggie thought, involuntarily. Occupational hazard of being a mystery writer. Every time you meet someone, you wonder what would make them kill.

He began gathering up his towels, putting away his ointments, preparing for his next client.

“So long, pretty lady,” Arthur said.

“Bye, Arthur,” Winifred cawed. “Don't be a stranger.”

She stared after him as he left. “I should have married a man like Arthur,” Winifred said. “Someone calm and good with his hands.”

“I thought Fred was like that.”

“Ah,” Winifred said. “He was boring.”

She gathered herself together then, and looked at Maggie. “So, how much trouble am I in?”

“Not so much,” Maggie said, because that was the thing about Winifred. Bad as she was, it was awfully hard to resist the spirit that flamed inside her. “Lucky for you, I'm trying to control my anger.”

“Saint Maggie.”

“I was over at Iphigenia's, and I ran into Agnes Jorgenson.”

“Oh my God,” Winifred said. “The light that failed.”

Maggie laughed. “She's just as wretched as ever. More so.”

“I don't know why she moved back to town. Couldn't she have stayed somewhere else and made everyone there miserable? Do you remember when she tried out for cheerleading? When she wanted to be on the team? No one wanted to catch her. Remember how she looked in the uniform?”

Maggie shook her head. She did remember quite clearly. It was almost as though Agnes had gone out of her way to look foolish. Short little skirt that did not flatter her hefty body, hair tied in pigtails, but instead of looking bouncy, it just sagged onto her shoulders. Plus she had no sense of timing at all. Even the gym teacher, sweet Mary Callahan, had to leave the room so as not to laugh.

“Anyway, Agnes implied that Peter had some reason for being angry at Bender. Do you know about that? I wouldn't have thought their paths would cross.”

Winifred shook her head. She tried to cross her arms, but they were too heavy to move. Her right foot began to twitch. “I haven't seen Peter in a week or so. He's been busy with something. I thought he found a woman.”

Maggie looked at her friend's twitching foot. Seemed wrong to use someone's disability against them as a tell, but she had to know.

“Is it that bad?” she asked.

Winifred's eyes glittered the way they always did when there was danger. She loved trouble. Damned fool, Maggie thought. She put her hand on her friend's, to try and stop the spasm.

“Winnie,” she said. “What has he done?”

Winifred's entire body clenched in rebellion. She would not tell the secret, no matter what sort of torture she endured. Maggie wondered if she was the bravest person she knew or the most impossible. She wondered what on earth Peter could have done. She wanted to cry, to scream, and then suddenly Winifred cried out, “There he is!”

“Who?”

“That man I wanted you to meet. Remember?”

“No.”

She began calling to him, but her voice was dry and nothing came out. She gestured toward Maggie, suggesting that she go and waylay him, but Maggie wanted no part of it, and soon enough he was gone. She only had a general image of him, a blur of white hair, laughter.

“Frank Bowman,” Winifred rasped. “I want you to meet him.”

“Are you kidding me?” Maggie said. “Right now, at this moment, when I've had a dead man on my lawn and I'm preoccupied with Peter, that's what you think I need?”

Winifred recovered her voice. “I'll tell you what you need,” she said.

But Maggie was up and out. “That's it,” she said. “That's it.”