Maggie Dove (18 page)

Of course, Agnes was not on Main Street, though she practically lived there. But Maggie did find Iphigenia, who looked surprisingly droopy. Far different than the cheerful Iphigenia she had seen a week earlier, when they went to Doc Steinberg's.

“Hello, old friend, how are you?”

“Good,” Iphigenia said, though she wasn't a good liar. Her dark eyes glistened with tears. Her hands shook.

“You don't look well.”

“Tscha.”

“Did Doc Steinberg call?” Maggie asked.

They'd only gone to the doctor a week ago. Life seemed to be speeding up, slowing down. Time playing such tricks.

“You got a good report from the doctor, didn't you? That was a relief.”

“Yes, a good report,” Iphigenia said, automatically guiding Maggie over to the chair. She was one of those people who couldn't speak unless her hands were busy. She looked upon Maggie as though she were an overgrown yew and began to hack.
It will grow back, her mother whispered. Kindness is always more important.

That's easy for you to say.

“Are you feeling okay?” Maggie asked. She closed her eyes.

“Yes, I feel great. I'm in good health. This is what the doctor said.”

“Tell me what's wrong. I thought seeing the doctor would make you feel better.”

“Hush,” Iphigenia said, and resumed clipping. She did it for a while. Maggie had no idea what was going on because her eyes were closed. Better that way. She listened to the snipping and made believe it was happening to someone else.

“There!” Iphigenia said, and smacked Maggie on the back of her head, which caused her to open her eyes and gaze upon her reflection incredulously. She looked like a movie star. An old movie star, but still. She'd always worn her hair casually, but Iphigenia had done something to bring out cheekbones she didn't know she had.

“Finally,” Iphigenia said. “If I do nothing else before I die, I do this. My work is complete.”

Maggie looked into her friend's eyes. Iphigenia sank into the chair next to her. “What is it? Why are you completing your work?”

“I didn't tell the doctor everything.”

“Why?”

“Because if I tell her everything, I know she'll want me to go get tests and I can't handle that.” She began shaking her head no.

“What didn't you tell her?”

Iphigenia looked like she was boiling inside. “I feel a lump.”

“Didn't she examine you? Didn't the doctor feel it too?”

“Yes, but I turned so she wouldn't feel it. I'm scared. I'm not like you, Miss Maggie. I'm not brave.”

“I'm not brave either,” she said.

“Yes you are. Look at all the things you do. You lose your daughter and your husband and you keep on going. You have the courage of a lion, and me, I am a mouse. I am less than a mouse.”

“Iphigenia, I don't know where courage comes from, but I know this: it flourishes among people who love you. It's possible to do things you'd never do when someone believes you're capable of it. I suppose living in this village, and being part of this church, I've grown used to having people believe in me, and so I've come to believe in me too. If Doc Steinberg said you're fine, you probably are. But if you're not, you can deal with it, and I'll be there to help you.”

Iphigenia nodded vehemently. “Yes, of course, you are right.”

“Should we go to the doctor now?”

Iphigenia seemed about to sink to her knees, but then she pulled herself together, tossed her hair, locked the door to the shop, and the two of them walked up to Doc Steinberg's. So many people waved at them as they walked by. Some Maggie didn't even know, and it struck her hard to think that someone in this village was a murderer. Someone she probably knew, probably loved, was killing people. Someone might have tried to kill her last night, and the thought made her angry, and when she felt angry it brought up the emotion she'd felt toward Bender. She couldn't get past the feeling that although he was the victim, he was also the person who had set this whole thing in motion.

Doc Steinberg brought Iphigenia into her office and within five minutes she emerged.

“It was a mosquito bite,” she cried out. Maggie noticed she was holding a little piece of white paper. “The doctor wrote me a prescription for Xanax.”

She flew out the door then, and Doc Steinberg remained. “Did you want to talk to me Maggie?” she asked.

Maggie looked at her. She had been thinking of her as a suspect. She had been hoping Doc Steinberg was the killer because, somehow, if she had to pick someone, Doc Steinberg felt the most disposable, and she knew many poisoners were doctors. Yet now, looking at her, at those firm, competent eyes, at the red shoes she always liked to wear, at the tired, pale face, she could not believe that this committed doctor would hurt anyone. She loved Doc Steinberg. What was she even thinking about?

“Do you want to come into my office?” Doc Steinberg said.

“No thank you,” Maggie replied. “I have someone I have to talk to,” because she did need to see Agnes. She felt guilty about it, but Agnes was the only person she knew who she hoped would be the murderer. Though even Agnes, carted off to jail, would tug at Maggie's heart. But it had to be someone.

Agnes lived in a new development called Sheep's Meadow, so named because, in building the houses, the developer had torn up a sheep's meadow. Now it was a huge enclave of massive houses. In every driveway there was a Lexus or two. In front of every garage was a built-in basketball court, every mailbox announced the house was protected by a security system. On this late Monday afternoon, the whole area vibrated with the sound of leaf-blowers and lawnmowers.

“I never realized you lived here,” Maggie said, after walking up from Doc Steinberg's office. She'd gambled that Agnes would be home, and willing to receive her, which she was.

“I've come a long way,” Agnes said, and she spoke the truth. Maggie vividly remembered the apartment Agnes had grown up in. It was a squalid space over the video store, which had then been the candy store. Agnes lived there with her seven siblings, her exhausted mother and her father, who couldn't keep his hands to himself. Maggie's mother wouldn't let her go over there. That was how you handled a man like that in those days. You didn't report him to the police. You didn't complain to his wife. You simply told your own daughter to avoid him, and if he had daughters of his own, well that was too bad.

“Seven thousand square feet,” Agnes said. “One of the biggest units in the development. Have you ever seen anything like it?”

Not since Tara,
Maggie was tempted to say, but forbore.

“I know you disapprove,” Agnes said, pursing her lips. She seemed different here, on her home turf, Maggie thought. She looked more confident, more normal.

“Not at all,” Maggie said. “I'm glad you got here, Agnes. You deserve it.”

Agnes cleared her throat, beckoned for Maggie to come in. “Well, I suppose you'll want a tour.”

They walked into the entryway, which was built in the shape of a rotunda. Maggie couldn't help herself, she thought of Abraham Lincoln laid out at his funeral. Why did this house keep conjuring up images of the Civil War era? In the center of this particular rotunda was a nude, carved out of black stone, contorted in what seemed to be a very uncomfortable position.

“Me,” Agnes said. “In my salad days.”

Maggie looked at the nude more carefully. She'd never been sure when Agnes was joking, which she supposed was part of why she didn't like her that much.

“This way,” Agnes said, leading Maggie down a long hallway. She caught sight of a media room with a gigantic TV screen; then another room, filled with leather-bound books, and they were in the kitchen and Maggie laughed out loud. She'd never seen anything like it. There was a huge granite island in the middle that was long enough to serve as an aircraft carrier. All the appliances matched color. Everything gleamed silver. Maggie noticed Agnes eyeing herself in the refrigerator, smiling at her reflection.

“Fabulous,” Maggie said.

“Isn't it?”

“No wonder you like to cook so much. Here I was picturing you slaving away over a hot stove.”

“Yes,” Agnes said. “That's how everyone pictures me. Like the witch in ‘Hansel and Gretel.' ”

“I wouldn't put it like that.”

“No,” she said. “You've always been so tactful, Margaret.”

It was going to be a long afternoon.

Agnes gestured for her to sit down on one of the chairs around the island, which Maggie did and immediately felt enveloped in a plush warmth that molded itself like a hand to her back. It was a little like being held in God's hands, she supposed. If God were in the kitchen, and why shouldn't He be?

Agnes shrugged on an apron that had an image on it of one of the Disney princesses, and then she began bustling around with an espresso-maker.

“So what did you do out there in Oregon?” Maggie asked.

Agnes laughed. “Where did I get the money for this, you mean?”

“Exactly.”

Agnes tugged opened the freezer, which was crammed full of pans of what Maggie assumed was her famous bread pudding. No wonder she was always first on the scene for the dinner brigade.

“Have you ever heard of Nancy Straub?”

“No.”

Agnes put the bread pudding in a microwave that looked like it had the capability of launching a spaceship. “She was a genius. A pioneer. She had an idea for a website where people could go to get their eyes examined, online, and then it would make up glasses for them. Simple actually, the difficulty was in getting the funding, but that's where Nancy excelled. She was a real wheeler and dealer. She built a very successful business.”

“And you were her assistant?” Maggie asked, trying to reconcile the image of this mover and shaker with the Agnes she knew. With the girl that lived with that creepy father and haunted their cheerleading practices, always trying to make the team, always the butt of jokes. Always about twenty pounds overweight and so eager. Always so eager.

“No. I was her wife.”

“Oh.”

“You're shocked?” Agnes said. She peered at Maggie as though from a great distance, a scientist looking at a specimen under a microscope.

“Agnes, I wish you'd get it out of your head that I'm such a prude. Just because I'm a Sunday School teacher doesn't mean I don't know there are gay people in the world. I am an intelligent and fairly liberal member of the twenty-first century. I just didn't realize you were gay. I'm processing the information.”

Agnes laughed, spurting air like a whale. Then she grew thoughtful.

“I didn't realize it either,” she said. “I thought I was just miserable because of this town. I thought I hated men because of my father. I thought the reason I wanted to be with you so much was because I wanted a friend. Nancy saw something in me that no one had ever seen before. She saved me.” Agnes' eyes glistened. “She opened up a whole new world for me.”

Maggie remembered the sense of wonder she'd felt when Stuart loved her. The way he made everything seem possible.

“What happened?” she asked. “What happened to Nancy?”

Agnes cleared her throat. The microwave began to chime. “She died. Brain cancer. It was a hard death. I was by her side for every minute of it. She left me everything. Her family fought it, but there was nothing they could do. She was an outsider, like me. She made sure they didn't get any of her money.”

Maggie knew she and Winifred had been cruel to Agnes. They had, in some respects, formed the woman she had become. Maggie had been beautiful and she knew it and she loved it and she'd had devoted parents and she'd thought that life was good and people were good and God was good, and how different would she have been had life been less generous to her? How differently would she have handled the hard times had she not had that cushion to fall back on?

“I'm sorry,” Maggie said.

Agnes turned her back to her, retrieved the bread pudding and brought it over to the table.

“You were always the best of them,” she said.

“I'm afraid that's not saying much,” Maggie said, remembering all the times she'd laughed at Agnes' expense.

“No, but it's something.”

Agnes set the platter in front of Maggie. The bread pudding smelled of eggs and vanilla; it was Maggie's favorite thing in the world, and now it bubbled and spat in front of her.

“Why did you come back here?” she asked Agnes. “You were so successful there, why did you want to come back to Darby?”

A cloud seemed to pass in front of Agnes. Her whole demeanor changed. Maggie had a terrible feeling her own face had changed in just that way when she spoke to Bender. It was the transformation of anger.

“I dreamed of coming back here. I dreamed of buying the biggest house I could, of showing everyone what I had become. When I got back and saw Winifred in that nursing home, her legs bent up, her hands like claws…”

Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun,
Maggie thought. One of Frederick Buechner's most famous lines.

“How I laughed,” Agnes said, “to see her bowed down, who had been so cruel to me.”

To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come.

“When I think how she used to make fun of the way I looked in a cheerleading outfit. Which of us looks better now?” she said.

The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.

Of course Agnes hated Winifred, Maggie realized. She'd always known it. How could she not after how cruelly Winifred had treated her, but the intensity of her emotion shocked Maggie. For Agnes to speak so openly about it.

How difficult would it have been to poison one of Winifred's meals? Agnes was always in and out of the Castle, visiting someone. She could have stopped by Winifred's room, could have put something in one of Winifred's pill bottles, and Winifred wouldn't have noticed. Agnes worked at the traffic court, so she was near the police station. Maybe she had come across some Ecstasy there.

But why would she have killed Bender? What grudge did she have against him, and how would she have killed him?

Maggie looked into Agnes' triumphant eyes.
The skeleton at the feast is you.

“But enough of that,” Agnes said. “Won't you have some bread pudding?”

The bread pudding bubbled ominously. It looked alive. Maggie smelled nutmeg and remembered then a fact she'd discovered in researching her mysteries. That nutmeg could mimic Ecstasy. That you could poison someone with nutmeg.

“Come, you know you're hungry.”

Maggie wondered if Agnes intended to poison her. Was that what the bread pudding was about? She looked carefully at Agnes' face, at her arched eyebrows, at her all-knowing expression. She was a manipulative woman. She liked to play games. She had the exact disposition of a poisoner, or of a person mimicking a poisoner. Suddenly Maggie thought of a different time, at the hospital, after her daughter had been pronounced dead and Maggie, looking up, caught sight of her own face in a mirror and thought to herself—couldn't help it—
So that's what a woman looks like who's lost her child.
How could you write after that?

“Agnes,” Maggie said, pushing the hot plate away from her. “This is not something to joke about.”

She thought she heard Agnes laughing as she walked toward the door. She was halfway home before she remembered that she'd wanted to ask Agnes a question. She wanted to ask her if she'd ever met Winifred's third husband, because it seemed like from something she said at the funeral that she might have. But Maggie was damned if she was going to go back there and talk to that woman. She had other avenues to pursue.