Free Maggie Dove by Susan Breen Page A

reader, just because he knew Juliet needed quiet. Maggie used to love the way he held her daughter, almost tentatively, as though she were so valuable he didn’t dare press her too hard.
    “I wish you could get along with him,” she said.
    “A-hole,” he said. “Pardon my French.”
    “He’s your boss,” Maggie pointed out.
    “What’s he going to do to me?”
    “He could fire you.”
    “Then I’ll get another job.”
    There was a chill breeze off the river. Little white ripples darted on top of the water, but not so many years ago, during Hurricane Sandy, those little waves had crashed over and flooded the park and caused terrible damage.
    “Agnes Jorgenson told me you had a fight with Bender,” she said.
    “Well, Agnes Jorgenson. She’d know, wouldn’t she?”
    “Did you have a fight with him?”
    Peter jumped up and stood by the rocks at the side of the river. Too dark to skip rocks now, but he’d loved to do it when he was young. Had quite a talent for it. Could make a rock skip four times, which had been a source of great frustration to Juliet because she could only make it go two times.
    “Did you hear what he did to Mr. Laws?” Peter asked.
    “Eugene Laws? From the high school?”
    “Yeah. He’s got two years to go until he can retire. But Bender heard he was a bad teacher. He heard his success rate with the AP tests wasn’t up to par.”
    “Eugene Laws is a disaster,” Maggie said. “Everyone knows it. But what would Bender care? His daughters aren’t in high school, are they?” It was one of those facts of village life, that if your kid was on track to go to a good school, you made sure she didn’t get into Laws’ class.
    “Bender didn’t care that his daughters weren’t in high school yet. They would be someday, and he wanted it to have high standards. Nothing second-rate about our school system. He made it a one-man mission to get rid of Laws. He raised it at school board meetings and circulated a petition.”
    “What happened?”
    “Oh, they got rid of him. They’ve hired somebody new for next year. She has a master’s degree from Columbia.”
    “In fairness to Bender, she’s probably an improvement.”
    “I know, Dove, but that’s not the point. There’s something passing from this village. Don’t you feel it? These people move in and they don’t care about the village. Just themselves and their property values and the schools, so their kids can go to the best colleges and make a lot of money. Everything has to be top rate, but where’s the room for the normal people? Where’s the heart?”
    “So you had a fight with Bender about Eugene Laws?”
    Peter crouched forward, his back in the posture of prayer. Something bad was coming, Maggie thought. She was tempted to run, just as last night when she’d crouched next to Bender’s body. She wanted to get the heck out of there; to run back to her tidy little house and into her bedroom and lock the door. But you couldn’t. You just couldn’t do that. You had to face down your fear.
    “Clemmy Atwood was having her eighteenth-birthday party,” Peter said. “You know Clemmy. She’s crazy and her mother was worried that the kids would go off and drink and then there would be an accident. She wanted to make sure they were supervised. She figured they were all going to drink, but if someone was watching out for them, they wouldn’t get too drunk and no one would get hurt.” Clemmy Atwood, Maggie thought, her second-worst Sunday School student.
    “I didn’t take any money,” Peter said. “But I went to the party and I watched them, and with the ones that were too wasted to make it home on their own steam, I drove. I couldn’t risk them getting hurt, Dove. I couldn’t risk that they would be in an accident.”
    She still saw him as he looked that night, as handsome a boy as it was possible to imagine. A little like Robert Redford, with his beautiful hair and his basset hound eyes and the leather jacket he wore