The Other Widow (20 page)

How did you know?
she texts him back.

Didn't. Educated guess.

XXIII

MAGGIE

M
aggie drives back to Boston with an eye on her rearview mirror. She's much more vigilant, more aware of her surroundings, since Iraq. Sometimes she feels like a guitar string tuned a little too tight.

She turns on the radio and listens to some vintage Smashing Pumpkins and thinks about her trip to Waltham. Karen seemed genuinely shocked to hear her husband's death might not have been an accident, obvious not from anything Karen
said
—Maggie learned when she was a cop that people will
say
just about anything. It was clear from her reaction, though, her body language, facial expressions—from the aura, if Maggie believed people
had
auras, which, at this point, she won't discount. Happily, she doesn't see them. Not yet, but there's always tomorrow. Who the hell knows what she'll be seeing tomorrow?

She reaches down to turn the heater up as high as it will go. She needs to get it fixed. Like Joseph Lindsay and his brakes. According to his wife, he'd noticed there was something wrong. Did he get sick of having to pump the brakes and decide to do a quick fix, not realizing what would happen over time? No. From what Karen said, he knew next to nothing about cars.
He wasn't good with cars.
It was a paradox, though, because anyone who knew enough about cars to tie-wrap the brake line where they did would know not to. They'd know the line would wear through sooner or later. Still. She fiddles with the music, turns it down as she hits Boston traffic. Joe Lindsay traveled a lot for the company. Was he out of town when the brakes got worse? Did he have a mechanic do a Band-Aid fix just until he got back to Boston?
Make sure you get these fixed right,
some mechanic in the boondocks somewhere might have told him.
This is just to get you back to the city.
And Lindsay might have meant to do just that, but put it off. Forgot about it, even. Stranger things have happened.

She thinks back to the conversation she just had with the widow. Karen said she was in town—right near the accident—when her husband died. Having dinner with a friend, she said. But why would she set out for Waltham in the middle of a snowstorm? Or even at the start of one as bad as the one predicted that Friday night? Why not just stay on Beacon Hill with her friend? Sleep on the friend's couch? It wasn't like she still had kids at home. There was the dog, but, clearly, Karen didn't center her life on snappy little Antoine. And, even if she did, would she risk her life to get home to him?
Really?
Or was Karen's friend a guy? Maybe Joe Lindsay wasn't the only one fooling around. Maybe his wife was, too. When Karen answered the phone that morning, she was obviously expecting it to be someone else. A friend, she'd said.
This morning, when you called, I thought you were—

So who the hell is Tomas?

Back in Boston, Maggie drives straight to Mass Casualty and Life. She's missed a lot of time. There was Jeananne's hit-and-run and now the trip to Waltham this morning. Still, the thought of being cooped up in her claustrophobic little office makes her feel like stepping on the gas and heading straight out of the city and never coming back, catching the closest highway and driving until she's halfway to Canada, far away from all the traffic and the crowds, from the jabbering, demanding clients, from the pitying looks she gets from her family.

She parks her car. The cop part of her is dying to dig into the Lindsay case. Claim, she reminds herself, not case. Not at this point anyway.

She thinks about the paperwork stacked up on her desk, the clients, about Viola Watkins on the phone the day before, the seven messages she left while Maggie was at Mug Me with Dorrie, while the woman in the too-large coat was getting run down by a dark sedan. She thinks about how many messages Viola's had a chance to leave while she was in Waltham.

She eases the Land Rover out of the parking space and into the street. She'll go back to Southie. She'll check out Joseph Lindsay's car again. She'll find out if she's drummed up all this drama just because she hates her job, if she's connecting disconnected things, conjuring ghosts that don't exist. Ghosts she left back on a crappy blown-out street in Baghdad years before.

Ian isn't at the shop. When she asks for him, she's told to talk to a guy named Lucas in the back, a freezing area filled with cars in varying states of disrepair. “Revival,” Ian calls the back lot.
If it's got a gasp of life, we can resurrect.
It turns out Lucas is Ian's nephew, something Maggie might have guessed. They have the same tall, skinny build, the same brooding gray eyes. The nephew says yes, the Audi's still out in the shed. He tells her she can go on back. And then he seems to reconsider. “I'll walk you over,” he says, and he sticks his tools in a long metal box, wipes his hands on a rag.

“I've got this,” Maggie waves her hand in the air. “Really. Don't stop what you're doing on my account.”

“Glad to.” They walk a minute in silence, tramp through mounds of dirty snow.

“My uncle said you were in Iraq,” he says when they're almost to the shed, and Maggie feels a little shock go up her spine. Silently, she curses Ian, his meddling, his big mouth.

“Yeah.” This is so the last thing she wants to talk about, or think about, at this point. “Has anyone else been here about the Audi?”

“Not that I know of.” Lucas opens the door and steps inside. “I was there, too,” he says, “is why I mentioned it.”

She squats down, averts her eyes. “I don't really like to talk about Iraq.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Sorry. I totally get that. Worst time in my life. Listen. I'll just leave you to it then.”

“Thanks.” She stares at the Audi.

He stops in the doorway. “What's your name? Your first name?”

“Margaret.”

“Margaret Brennan. Irish,” he says. “Pretty.”

“Maggie, really. Everyone just calls me Maggie.”

He smiles, holds out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Maggie.”

She watches him leave and then she wishes he hadn't left, that he was still there, talking tie-wrapped brakes and whatever else might come up. Although she'd cringed at his remark about Iraq, she liked Ian's nephew. Warm. And he has the most amazing eyes. She smiles. Maybe she'll come back, run into him again if Ian's out for a while. Maybe he finally took that trip to Florida he was always threatening to do. She looks out the small window and smiles.
Promising
to do.

She looks back at the car. Obviously a head-on collision. Even so, Hank said only one of the airbags had gone off—the one on the passenger side, which is what saved Dorrie—no question, now, that it was Dorrie. Maggie moves over to the car and pokes around under the hood. No fuse in the airbag system. Interesting. So, with the fuse out and a sudden forceful stop of the car—like when it slammed up against the tree on Newbury—when the airbag should have been signaled to go off, it wasn't. It didn't.

She backs away from the car. Could it have been knocked loose by mistake or left disconnected after a distracted mechanic did some work under the dashboard? She glances at the sound system. New. So, maybe whoever installed it—some idiot texting his girlfriend or whatever—forgot to stick the fuse back in again when he was finished. Was the caution light on? And, even if it was, would that have been enough to make Joe Lindsay take his car in to get it checked? Would he have even noticed it?

Or did someone purposely remove the fuse? Did the same person who rigged the brakes also disconnect the airbag on the driver's side? Was Lindsay murdered? And, if so, who would want him dead? Edward? Friends or not, he might have wanted the company to himself. Or
will
he be the only owner? Did someone else stand to gain from Lindsay's death? Like Karen? The wronged wife? Hell hath no fury, after all. Maybe Edward's just a jerk, not a murderer. Maybe Karen is a good hostess but has anger issues. Or did Joe Lindsay sabotage
himself
? The company was losing money, his marriage evidently down the drain. Did he decide to kill himself, make it look like an accident, and do right by his widow with the hefty life insurance policy? But if he'd gone to all that trouble, wouldn't he make sure he was alone the night of the accident?

Maggie picks up a rag that's lying near the car and wipes her greasy hands. Or maybe the whole thing
was
actually an accident. Sometimes the simplest explanation is the one that makes the most sense. She takes out her phone and points it at the car, gets a couple of shots of where the missing airbag fuse should be.

She won't turn this over to the police. Not yet. Not until at least
she
is fairly clear on what they're dealing with. This could be her chance to redeem herself. If she can figure out what's happened—if she can hand this over to the BPD with only a few loose threads to tie up . . . Meanwhile, she'll keep her eyes open. If it was a murder, maybe Jeananne's hit-and-run is tied in somehow. She hopes to hell it isn't.

She looks down at her watch. Nearly two. The stack of claims will be a mile high on her desk, her voice mail overflowing with impatient, bristly voices. Out of the corner of her eye, she notices Lucas look up as she slides across the frozen slush. He waves. “Find what you were looking for?”

“I'm not sure,” Maggie says. She stops. Makes a little visor with her hand and stares across the stained white of the yard as Lucas walks toward her. “Anybody mess with the car after it came in? Remove any fuses?”

He glances over her shoulder toward the shed. “Nope. Why would they?”

She smiles. “They wouldn't. Just trying to figure out what happened,” she says, and Lucas walks along beside her through the snow.

“Once a cop . . .”

“Wow. Is there anything Ian
didn't
tell you about me?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Your name. Your first name. And I'm assuming there are a few other things you've kept from my uncle.”

“Many,” she says.

“We could get a drink sometime. Cover them then.”

“I don't think so.” She slips through the gate, unlocks her car door. When she looks back, he's still standing in the same spot. He raises his hand in a wave, but he looks embarrassed. Disappointed. “It's your turn,” she says. “We can cover
you
when we get that drink.”

He smiles. “What's your number?”

She jots it down on a scrap of paper, hands it to him through the metal fence. She starts her car and heads back in to work.

XXIV

DORRIE

D
orrie jumps, startled when she sees Samuel standing in the kitchen, staring into space with his coffee and his O eat Dad cup. “You're late,” she says, and he nods.

“Overslept.” He's looking better these days, since he stopped drinking and started going to 12-step meetings. It's only been two weeks, but Dorrie can see the difference in his face. It isn't puffy, now, the way it's been for years. She wonders, sometimes, why Samuel suddenly changed his life around, but she won't ask him. She'll let well enough alone. She doesn't want to rock that boat. Hurray for AA.

Purrl bolts into the kitchen, meowing as she trots, so it's a weird sound, like a doll that wails when it's turned upside down, but the wails are segmented on account of her moving.

“Have you seen her yet?” Samuel says.

“Maaa aaa aaa.” Purrl continues her pilgrimage to the empty bowl and stops in front of it. Dorrie opens the cupboard door over Samuel's head and takes down a Tupperware bowl that has Meow Mix snapped inside it, so Purrl can't help herself.

“Yes,” she says. “She looks bad.” Did he mean Jeananne, Dorrie wonders, or did he mean Viv? Is it her best friend he's really thinking about, wondering about? If it is, he doesn't let on—he doesn't even blink.

“I'm sorry.” He sets his cup down gently in the sink. “I'll drop Lily. I'm already so late, another few minutes won't—” He walks into the hall, calls upstairs to his daughter, who, Dorrie knows, would so much rather drive to school with Mia.

Dorrie lingers over breakfast, trying to decide whether she should go to work at all today or stay here in her house, where she feels slightly safer, and then take a cab down to the hospital later.

Jeananne isn't doing well. She isn't doing anything, apparently. Her condition is “unchanged.” She's neither worse nor better, the doctors told Dorrie the night before. She's heavily sedated, to give her brain a chance to rest. A bit like floating in limbo. The prognosis isn't very good. Dorrie understood this from the expression on the doctor's face as they stood together in the narrow hallway in intensive care and he said, “We'll have to see,” with a bright smile, a little pat. She could tell the doctor had assumed the role he'd played a thousand times before with families and friends.

Was it an accident? Some stupid, frightened person rounding a corner too fast? Driving without a license? With a DUI or two under his belt? Panicking? It's quite possible. Did they even notice that they hit someone? Jeananne is small and the day was snowy. No. She isn't
that
small and the day wasn't
that
snowy. Whoever hit Jeananne knew they'd hit her and, for whatever reason, didn't stop.

Something falls upstairs and Dorrie jumps, even though she knows it's probably only Purrl stepping across her dresser, knocking over nail polishes and framed photos. She shivers. There is no place now that she feels safe, not even here in her own kitchen. The cat, the phone, the creaking of the house, its old bones rattling, groaning, settling. Everything is suspect. Nothing is the way it was before.