Maggie Dove Read Online Free Page A

smell she’d always detested.
    “Peter seemed pretty sure about the heart attack. Didn’t even ask Doc Steinberg to come out.”
    “A man like Bender. I just assumed he’d been murdered. Seemed the type. In fact, if I didn’t know you better I’d think you murdered him.”
    “Winifred, don’t even joke about that.”
    Winifred laughed, dropped the phone, scrabbled around for it, and then resumed talking.
    “Maggie Dove, don’t you dare be a hypocrite. You hated that man and that’s no lie. One of the first things I said to myself, the day I moved into this place, was that I was done being seemly. I’ll speak the truth and nothing less. You should speak it too.”
    “I wanted him gone, yes, but not like this,” Maggie said, the pain of her words scraping against her vocal cords. Ridiculous to feel so upset because she had hated the man. “I just wanted him to move away.”
    “Of course, my friend. But he brought it on himself. It’s nothing to do with you; it was his time.”
    Maggie sank down onto her living room couch, the rotating red light from the ambulance chasing itself around her sedate room.
    “I can’t help but think that I precipitated the arrival of his time. That all the hate and anger I was feeling transposed itself onto him. Like voodoo. Maybe if I’d been kind to him, he’d still be alive.”
    “If you were kind to him you’d be a woman without a willow tree.”
    Winifred had never been a plant person. Maggie’d always been the one who picked Winifred’s plants, watered them, filling her friend’s home with orchids because it got perfect light. Winifred would have killed them all.
    “No, my friend. It was an oak tree.”
    “Well, it’s green and it has roots and he wanted to kill it. You can’t say that wasn’t so.”
    Maggie pressed the phone against her mouth, trying not to speak too loud, conscious of the crowd on her front lawn and yet desperate to confide her secret. “I was watching for him, Winifred. That was why I was up. I stayed up, waiting for him. I was so sure he would show up on my lawn.”
    “You were looking out the window for Bender?”
    “Yes.”
    “Did you see him?”
    “No, that’s just the thing. I didn’t. I watched and waited and I was so furious because, you see, I knew, I knew he was going to come. I felt it, and so I got a rock.”
    “What? What rock?”
    Winifred wheezed with the effort of her speech. Maggie crouched even more tightly into a ball.
    “I had a rock and if I’d seen him, I was going to throw it at him.”
    For a moment the phone was quiet. Then Winifred began to laugh. “I’ve played softball with you, Maggie. You’d never have hit him.”
    “That’s not the point,” Maggie said. “I had murder in my heart.”
    “Seriously, you were going to throw a rock through a window. What were you thinking was going to happen? Wait, didn’t someone do that in one of your mysteries? But no, the murderer dropped a boulder from the roof.”
    “I couldn’t get up on my roof. And I didn’t want to kill him. I wanted to hurt him.”
    Winifred laughed so hard that Maggie heard the nurse come back in and ask if she was all right. She felt like laughing herself, and might have except that there was still a body on her lawn and a man was dead and his wife was a widow and his children fatherless.
    “I feel so foolish. What sort of person plans to throw a rock at her neighbor? I feel like an ant, or a worm. This is not at all the sort of person I want to be.”
    “You’re a good person, Maggie. But you’re not a saint. No one is. No one should want to be. Better to be human. Tell you the truth, this hatred of yours for Bender has been the most interesting thing about you in years.”
    “That’s a terrible thing to say!”
    “I mean it. You’ve become a droop, Maggie.”
    “A droop! My daughter died. My husband died. My whole world disappeared. I think I’m entitled to be depressed.”
    “That was twenty years ago,” Winifred