Free Maggie Dove by Susan Breen Page B

then and always had worn. Juliet had been worrying about what was to become of the two of them. They would be separated by hundreds of miles, and an academic culture so foreign to what Peter knew. Juliet had loved him and wanted to marry him, but Maggie’d been cautioning her. Wait a little longer. A little longer.
    “Nothing went wrong. Everyone got home. No one got hurt, but one of the kids told her parents and she told Bender.”
    “You’re the DARE officer, Peter.”
    “I’m not saying it’s right for them to drink, but I can’t be a hypocrite. We drank all the time. Kids got sick. I wanted to protect them.”
    A boat cruised by. People laughed. How messed up things become, Maggie thought.
    “Bender told me he made an appointment with Campbell. They were going to meet on Monday. He wanted to get me fired, and I told him what he could do.”
    “You had an argument with him?”
    “I’m an idiot,” he said.
    “Yes, you are.”
    He picked up some dirt and rubbed it in his hands. “It was a lucky thing for me that he died.”
    “No one could seriously think you would hurt anyone.”
    He laughed at that.
    “No,” he said, squeezing her in a hug. Then he said the worst words in the English language, the words that signaled to Maggie that everything would get messed up, that disaster was lurking around the corner.
    “Don’t worry, Dove,” he said. “Everything will be fine.”

Chapter 13
    Saturday morning was Bender’s funeral and even though Maggie didn’t plan to go, she didn’t feel she should ignore it. Some solemnity seemed called for and so she dressed with care that morning, put on heels and her black Eileen Fisher pants and her black Eileen Fisher blouse, and she figured if nothing else, she looked elegant. Then she combed out her hair, put in her pearl earrings, checked the clock and saw it was 7 in the morning.
    So it was going to be that kind of day.
    Might as well plan out her Sunday School lesson. She gathered up her supplies and cogitated over what to do the following day, when Edgar Blake, he of the lice in his hair, was certain to show up in her classroom. She had no proof, of course, but she was inclined to believe Agnes on this one. If Agnes said the boy had lice, he did. She couldn’t toss him out of class and she couldn’t embarrass him, but she wondered if there would be a way to get him to wear a bathing cap. He was the sort of child who would probably like a bathing cap. Her own daughter had worn a bathing cap for years. Maggie never did figure out why.
    If she could get Edgar into a cap, maybe then she could persuade him to watch one of the new movies the church had ordered in which various characters from the Bible were portrayed by vegetables. Maggie wasn’t sure why it was easier for people to accept Saint Paul as a potato than as a man, but so be it. Then there was Doubting Thomas as a carrot and the Virgin Mary as a plum. That at least made some sense. Jesus was a little apple with a nose and ears and the Sermon on the Mount looked like a vegetarian buffet.
    She looked at her watch and saw it was now 7:30.
    She made herself some coffee and sat down at her kitchen table. The sun shone in; it was a glorious day. Disaster always struck on glorious days, she believed. Nothing bad ever happened in the rain. Maggie had often thought how wrongheaded producers were to set their movies in dark and gloomy nights. It was in the glare of a sunny day that horrors usually took place. She wondered how many people would go to Bender’s funeral. He had two daughters. Their friends would go. Family. At Juliet’s funeral, the whole town turned out. The principal shut down the high school early so that all the kids could come. The local deli catered the reception, donating hundreds of dollars’ worth of food, and they kept bringing her meals for long afterward. Every day there would be a knock on her door: Joe Mangione, or the lady that ran the cupcake store, or someone from the church,