Maggie Dove Read Free

Bender, unchanging, immutable. She’d never got over the granite-like irreversibility of death. All conflict resolved, all love absorbed, all feeling extinguished. So much of Bender’s personality had been in his eyes, she realized, the arrogance, confidence, hostility. With the eyes lifeless, he seemed so insignificant. Here before her lay the man who had occupied so much of her waking time in the last few months, and he seemed so paltry. One might as well find out you’d been obsessed by a gerbil. And yet, how profound her hatred for this man had been.
    “He looks so innocent,” she said.
    “He was a son of a bitch, Dove. Pardon my French. And now he’s dead.”
    “Peter!”
    “It’s the truth. Thou shalt not lie. One of the Ten Commandments.”
    How he had struggled to learn those commandments, which the minister had insisted each child memorize before being confirmed. Peter wanted to write them on his hand, but Maggie felt it was wrong to cheat in a religious ceremony, and so they worked on it for weeks, trying to invent games to help him remember, finally coming up with a complicated scavenger hunt involving commandments and clues, which did eventually work, though he still had a tendency to rock a bit, like he was walking, when he quoted one of them.
    Now he stood up and surveyed the lawn, the road, the Bender house.
    “Well, it went fast for him,” Peter said, “if you’re looking for comfort. He must have felt the pain and fallen over. I doubt he even knew what hit him.” Maggie heard the siren’s cry; the ambulance would be there in a minute.
    “You think it was a heart attack?”
    “Hannah will give the official pronouncement, but it looks that way to me. Occupational hazard for these guys, working in the city and living in Westchester. Push themselves all the time and then, wham, the stress gets them. Had another case last month. Exercise bicycle. Wife away. Gets home after a weekend with the girls in Cancún and finds him. He was next to the electric heater.”
    “Peter, please.”
    “Sorry, Dove.”
    “He has blood on his lip,” she pointed out.
    “That’s common. Heart attack victims often bite their tongue. Or he might have hit his lip on a rock when he fell.”
    Peter bit his lip, something he always did when he was thinking. How many times had she watched him studying alongside Juliet, she laughing at him as she helped him go through some passage, write a paper? Peter so strong and handsome and Juliet so beautiful, she with her dark black hair and her fair skin. Always Snow White in every school play.
    “He must have been running, felt pain and turned toward the light in your house.”
    Maggie looked toward her house, which sat tidy and close in front of her, its two stories covered in white shingles, the shutters blue, the porch decorated with some new pots of impatiens, her foolish little flowerpot in the shape of a chicken; the forsythia starting to erupt into bloom, the neat white lace curtains. They were see-through. He must have seen her sitting by the window. She cringed as she thought what her face would have looked like. She had a horrifying image of that mother in
Psycho.
    “I can’t imagine any scenario in which he thought he’d get help from me,” she said.
    “He might not have had time to think. You have a pain, you stagger. I wonder how old he was.”
    “Thirty-nine,” Maggie replied, then blushed as she realized what she’d given away. She knew all there was to know about Bender. Had spent considerable amount of time researching him on the Internet, wanting to understand him. It was the same process she used when writing one of her mysteries, spending hours filling out dossiers for her characters, though it was much stranger, she acknowledged, when you did it for your neighbor. The result was she knew Bender was born on Long Island, had gone to college at Amherst, was active in its alumni society, made donations to the Democratic Party and Doctors Without