Rose Hill (11 page)

Maggie handed Scott the phone, and he told Sean about the card and photo. Sean said he was available Thursday morning if Scott wanted to talk.

After he hung up, Scott stood as if to leave, but she said, “Stick around, and as soon as I’m through cleaning, we’ll order a pizza.”

Scott could hardly believe his good luck. Instead of lounging around, Scott pitched in and mopped the kitchen fo
r her while she took a shower. Afterward, he went to the front room to wait for the kitchen floor to dry. Maggie had multiple photograph albums and he went through them, ostensibly looking for pictures taken around the time Brad died, but also to look at pictures of Maggie.

The first album held photos of her grandparents and parents when they were young, and all her aunts, uncles, cousins, her three brothers, and Maggie up to the age of twelve or so. The photos of her father Fitz, taken before his accident, show a lively, robust man, much the size Patrick was now. He was pictured wrestling with his boys, working at the bakery, bowling with his league, standing with his arm around wife Bonnie, and h
olding baby Maggie as if she were a fragile china doll.

There were several photos of Uncle Ian and Aunt Delia’s son Liam, who died of leukemia
as a child. His sister Claire was close in age to Maggie and Hannah. Maggie’s Aunt Alice and Uncle Curtis were pictured with their four boys and scrawny little Hannah, who always seemed to have scraped knees and a dirty face.

The next album held photos taken after Fitz fell off a ladder while painting the trim on the second story of their house. Scott could remember him lying in the hospital bed
they put in the front room after he first came home from the hospital. He looked like a pale, skinny ghost of his former self. Scott thought about how quiet the house was afterward.

There was a photo of sunburned pre-teen cousins Claire, Maggie, and Hannah, along with Caroline Eldridge, at a pajama party at Claire’s house, with Aunt Delia in the background, talking on the phone. Claire was tall and skinny with dark hair and bright blue eyes; Maggie was also tall and skinny, but covered in freckles, with her
curly red hair in pigtails. Hannah was tiny and always looked like she was up to something.

There were several before-the-school-dance photos of her eldest brother Brian with his wife-to-be Ava, and Patrick with a varied collection of girls. There were plenty of Brian and Patrick in their football and baseball uniforms, trying to look macho with unfortunate haircuts. All the Fitzpatrick men were athletic, so every family get-together featured touch football
in the yard, and there were several of those photos.

There were only three snapshots of Ava and Brian’s wedding, but they were blurry and poorly developed. It had been a hasty affair, when Ava was just sixteen years o
ld and Brian had been about to leave for college.

There were school and graduation photos, and all Hannah’s brothers’ weddings. There was one photo of Fitz, Ian, Curtis, and all their sons, standing out in front of Fitz’s house in their best suits on the day of Grandma Rose’s funeral. Rose had been the formidable Fitzpatrick matriarch, who famously did not get along with any of her daughters-in-law, and doted on her boys. In the photo Curtis and Ian were obviously holding up their brother Fitz between them.

There was one of Maggie’s brother Sean with his beat up Honda packed to the roof, leaving for college. There was one of Brian working at the service station with Uncle Curtis, and several of Hannah and Patrick working at the Rose and Thorn with Aunt Delia. There were only a couple photos of Maggie working at the bakery. She worked there alongside her grandmother, mother, and aunts for several years after her father had his accident, up until she bought the bookstore.

There were photos of Hannah’s husband Sam Campbell, at a party held just before he left for the Gulf, handsome and indestructible looking in his uniform, with his former high school sweetheart Linda by his side. The pictures of him afterward at his welcome home party showed a skeletal, haggard version of the same man. He looked smaller and much older, slumped in his wheelchair, with haunted, shadowed eyes. There was no girlfriend by his side then, just his brittle, bitter mother, who looked as if her expectations in life had been amputated along with her son’s lower limbs.

Scott skipped ahead, past photos of Sam working out with the high school wrestling team, sled riding with Patrick, Ed and himself, and going off to MIT. There were many shots of Hannah and Sam’s wedding, a much happier time, and then the farm, as family and friends helped them turn it into a place Sam could negotiate with his wheelchair.

There were several
photos of Ava and Brian as young newlyweds in the huge run down Victorian house which later became the Rose Hill Bed and Breakfast. All the Fitzpatricks and their friends worked many long hours on the house, restoring it to the grand lady it had once been. There were snaps of Ava’s and Brian’s daughter Charlotte taken before their son Timmy was born. Ava was so photogenic there was no way to take a bad picture of her, and Brian always hammed it up for the camera. Charlotte was a miniature of her beautiful dark-eyed mother, and Timmy was just as red-headed as his father and Aunt Maggie.

Then there was Scott’s wedding. He looked so happy, as did Sharon. The only unhappy person pictured was his mother, who had red-rimmed eyes and a miserable look on her face. She had fainted during the service and had to be carried out.

There were photos taken during the time he was married, while Maggie and her boyfriend Gabe lived in the house up Possum Holler, and socialized with Scott and his wife Sharon.

‘We all look so young,’ he thought, although it had been only six years or so since the photos were taken.

Sharon looked pretty and sweet. Scott was working in Pendleton at that time, and Sharon was doing her best to make a home for them, built on dreams of a family he could not fulfill. He’d heard she was married with children now, and he sincerely wished her well, but they did not stay in touch. He was mostly sorry to have wasted even a few years of her life.

Scott looked at the photos of Gabe with his arms around a beaming Maggie, and felt an aching pain in his chest. After Gabe left and her house burned down, a light went out in Maggie, and although Scott occasionally saw it flicker, he knew she believed that with Gabe had gone her only chance for happiness. He studied Gabe’s face in the photos and felt conflicting feelings: sadness at losing a friend, anger at what his friend had done to someone he loved, and guilt for his part in it; but mostly regret, for there was plenty of hurt to go around.

Toward the end of the same album there were a few pictures of a New Year’s Eve party Maggie and Gabe had hosted, with everyone crowded in the living room, listening to some friends of Patrick’s playing the mandolin, fiddle, and tin whistle while Patrick played the drum badly but sang really well.

Sam was there in his wheelchair, a silly hat on his head, with a drunk and disorderly Hannah sitting on his lap. Scott was cuddling Sharon on the loveseat, looking very cozy and happy. Brian and a very pregnant Ava were laughing and pointing at something just out of frame, probably Ed’s dog Goudy, who used to go everywhere with him and farted all the time. A couple of Hannah’s brothers and their wives were there. Scott thought he remembered their cousin Claire being there as well, along with her husband Pip, but they weren’t in any of the pictures.

Ed was behind the camera, as usual, a part of them but always apart, observing and recording. His wife Eve claimed to be too ill to come, but everyone knew the truth was she couldn’t stand to be around his friends, who didn’t seem to care enough about political issues or world affairs to argue passionately with her about them. She left Ed six weeks later on Valentine’s Day, and as the year progressed, the lives of several other people in the party photos fell apart as well. On this night however, everyone looked young and happy, and it seemed as if it would never be any different.

Photos of the blackened wreckage of Maggie’s house were the last in this album. It was late April but there was still snow on the ground. Scott, Ed, Brian, and Patrick were shoveling debris into a big dumpster, under the superv
ision of uncles Curtis and Ian. The sky was gray, the trees scorched, and everyone looked grim. There were no pictures of Maggie taken at that time, but Scott would never forget the grief stricken look in her eyes.

Maggie came out of the bathroom wearing jeans and a man’s flannel shirt, her hair hanging in dripping ringlets down her back. Scott felt the attraction between them like a thermal layer, surrounding them, connecting them. Her color was high, maybe from the shower, or maybe from the same thing he was feeling. She walked up behind his chair, leaned over it, and looked at the last page of the open photo album on his lap.

“I don’t look at them much,” she said. “Ava had Timmy a week later, and by summer Brian was gone, too.”

Scott couldn’t think of the right thing to say. He put the album aside, got up and hugged her. What was meant to be a comforting gesture quickly changed into something more. He looked in her eyes, and her pupils were large and dark. He looked at her mouth, and was drawn toward it; hypnotized by her fragrance, her warmth, and the closeness she was allowing him to experience. He could feel them drawing together in this sparking magnetic field they created between them, and he was more than willing to take advantage of this opportunity.

His cell phone rang and broke the spell. It was Skip, reporting Anne Marie Rodefeffer’s car had gone over the side of Pine Mountain road.

The snowplow driver who reported the accident claimed it was a lucky thing he came along shortly after it happened.

“Otherwise, the sleet and snow would have covered up the skid marks within five minutes.”

Because of the treacherous road conditions, Maggie’s Uncle Curtis was already out on another wrecker call with two others waiting, so a wrecker from Glencora was employed to pull Knox’s Lincoln up out of the ravine. Anne Marie was unconscious but alive when they pulled her out.

“She didn’t have a coat on,” the wrecker operator told Scott. “No pocketbook and no ID. I got the name from the car registration.”

Knox, on a business trip to DC, was reportedly flying to Pittsburgh, where Anne Marie was being airlifted by helicopter. She had sustained multiple fractures, the emergency medical technicians suspected internal injuries as well, and her condition was considered critical.

Maggie Fitzpatrick unlocked the front door of her bookstore, Little Bear Books, and pulled her café easel outside onto the recently shoveled and salted sidewalk. The bear design painted on the top of the easel looked like a chalk drawing, and matched the colorfully painted wooden sign that stretched across the top of her storefront windows. On the left hand side of the sign was the logo, a bear cub balancing a large open book on his little bear legs as he sat and appeared to read through big glasses perched on his cute little bear nose. “Little Bear Books” was written across the rest of the sign in a fairy tale font. It was all way too cutesy for Maggie’s taste, but tourists would buy anything she put the logo on, from mugs to t-shirts, so she kept it.

Benjamin, her best barista, had already been at work for half an hour when Maggie came downstairs and opened the bookstore. She liked Benjamin because he was reliable and easy to work with, besides being an excellent barista. But most of all, he didn’t talk her ear off first thing in the morning, when she was feeling grumpy. He picked up the bakery order, shoveled the sidewalks, performed all the opening procedures, and the café was ready for customers by 7:00 a.m., all without any irritating chit chat.

Dreadlocked songbird Mitchell, on the other hand, was prone to chat too much and screw up orders, but was so charming the customers loved him. The other three baristas she employed were also college students, all three were blonde, and their names were Kristen, Kirsten, and Christine. They were all reliable, nice girls, but Maggie never got their names right.

As she secured the easel with the chalkboard to the nearest lamp post, Maggie saw Mamie Rodefeffer rounding the corner in front of the bank, wrapped in multiple layers of dress, cardigans, and scarves topped with a moth-eaten coat, tote bags swinging and cane banging the pavement. She was listing right and then left as she made her way forward toward the bookstore. Mamie was legally blind and wore thick lenses, but her hearing was supernaturally sharp.

“Mary Margaret!” she yelled. “You’re late again!”

Maggie shook her head and sighed. The minute hand of the bank clock on the corner had just ticked past 7:03 and dawn was barely peeking over Pine Mountain. It still looked more like a clear, moonless night, and twinkly stars were still visible in the dark sky over the hilltops to the west. A sudden drop in temperature overnight had sucked up all the humidity, leaving the air crisp and sharp.

Mamie was the oldest surviving heir of Gustav Rodefeffer, the original owner of the now closed Rodefeffer Glassworks. She lived in a large, sprawling Gothic Revival style house up on Morning Glory Avenue, with a small staff to care for her.

“I guess you heard about Anne Marie,” she said.

“Yes I did, Mamie, I’m so sorry,” Maggie said.

“That woman never did have the brains God gave a goose,” Mamie said, and glared at Maggie, daring her to disagree.

Maggie just murmured again that she was sorry to hear about the accident, and then fled.

Mamie settled herself at a central table so she could better hear everyone’s conversations and interrupt with her own commentary. Benjamin waited on her every morning, and was ready for her usual interrogation and insults.

“Are you still working here?” she demanded.

“Yes, Miss Rodefeffer,” Benjamin said. “You know I work here most weekday mornings.”

“Don’t you have a degree in something?” she yelled over the sound of the espresso machine.

“Theoretical Physics,” Benjamin told her, and grinned at Maggie, who mouthed, “I’m so sorry.”

“Where did you say you got your degree?” Mamie demanded.

“Caltech,” Benjamin told her.

Mamie addressed the room at large, which held only a couple customers waiting for their cappuccinos to go.

“Then why in God’s name are you working here? Did you have a nervous breakdown? Was it drugs?”

“No ma’am,” Benjamin said, a smile lurking just beneath his straight face. “I work here to pay my expenses. I like it here.”

Mamie acted as if it were
the most insane thing she had ever heard, every day.

“Why are you so short?” she asked him, as he served her cappuccino and a scone.

“My parents were short, Miss Rodefeffer.”

“You can hardly be blamed, then,” she said, satisfied. Thus concluding their daily interaction, she tucked a large paper napkin into the collar of her blouse and started nibbling on her scone.

“This scone doesn’t have many sultanas in it!” she complained.

“That’s because it’s cranberry,” Maggie said through clenched teeth, and escaped even further back on the bookstore side.

Maggie tried to stay out of the old woman’s limited sight line, and spoke to her customers as quietly as she could. The store had the usual morning clientele, despite the cold weather and icy sidewalks.

When a young woman from the bank came to pick up a large order, Mamie told her, “You tell my lazy nephew to come and get his own damn coffee. I’d like to speak to him.”

The girl smiled nervously at Mamie, with fear in her eyes, and hurried out when her order was ready.

Some students from the college came in.

“The least you could do is to get dressed properly before you go out in public!” Mamie told one young girl. “It’s ten degrees above zero outside and I can almost see your personal business!”

The young woman just laughed at her.

Mamie accosted Maggie as she crossed the room to clean off a table.

“You hear about old Theo getting his head bashed in?” she asked loudly.

“You know anything about it?” Maggie asked her.

“I know he stole our family business right out from under us, and then drove it straight into the ground. I know he tried to cheat my nephew out of a large sales commission. If you ask me, he got exactly what he deserved.”

“I bet Trick was pretty mad about that business deal,” Maggie said.

“His name is Richard,” Mamie said crossly.

Trick had been nicknamed in grade school, where “Richard” started as “Rick,” became “Tricky Dick,” and was eventually shortened to “Trick.”

“Richard and Knox came to dinner on Sunday night,” Mamie said. “Brought their idiot wives with them, and told me all about it.”

“Pretty big sum of money, was it?” Maggie asked.

Mamie, maybe realizing she had just suggested her nephew had a motive to kill Theo, immediately changed the subject.

“You’re getting awfully fat, Mary Margaret,” she said. “You need to lay off the desserts.”

Maggie jumped up fuming, but bit back the dozens of retorts that sprang to her mind.

“You know, my name is Mary Margaret too,” Mamie yelled at her retreating back, “but my father liked to call me Mamie.”

“Short for ‘cockamamie,’ no doubt,” Maggie whispered to Benjamin, who hid behind the espresso machine and giggled.

“I heard that!” Mamie said, and wagged a shaming finger at them.

Grocery store owner Matt Delvecchio stopped in for his latte at 8:15, just after he opened his store.

“You sure you’re Sal’s son and not the milkman’s?” Mamie asked him. “You look a lot more like that Pollock Kazminsky than that Dago Delvecchio.”

Maggie started to say something but Matt just winked at her and said, “She’s a live one.”

He was the nicest man in the town, married to one of the biggest bitches Maggie could name, yet she’d never seen him angry. They never charged him for his latte so he always left a three-dollar tip in the tip jar.

As Matt left, Mamie said loudly, “I can’t decide if he’s a retard or just an idiot.”

“All right, Mamie, that’s enough,” Maggie said.

Mamie stood up, gathered her things, and muttered about Maggie not appreciating her patronage. As she left, she said the same thing she always said when she left in a huff, and Benjamin mouthed the words to Maggie as Mamie said them.

“Good-bye and good riddance. I probably won’t be back.”

“We should be so lucky,” Maggie said quietly.

“I heard that!” Mamie retorted, and teetered out the door and down the sidewalk.

“What is it with this town and the name Mary Margaret?” Benjamin asked Maggie.

“Funny, isn’t it,” Maggie said. “There’s me, Margie at the post office, crazy old Mamie, Meg at the pharmacy, Mary at the bank, Madge at the IGA, Margaret the crossing guard, Midge who’s secretary at the church, and let’s see, Sister Mary Margrethe.”

“You should have a club,” Benjamin said.

“We do,” Maggie replied. “It’s called Sacred Heart Catholic Church.”

Dr. Drew Rosen found Maggie in her office later that morning.

“Can I buy you some of your own coffee?” he asked. “We keep saying we’re going to get together but we’re both always too busy.”

“I know, I’m so sorry,” Maggie said. “Let’s do it now. I need a
n excuse to take a break.”

Drew placed an order at the counter and Maggie directed him to join her at a table by the front window, the closest thing she had to a more private section of the café.

“Have you been allowed back into the clinic?” she asked him after he sat down.

“They let me put together a kind of emergency call kit, so I can make home visits,” he said. “I have to take Skip or Frank with me when I pick up supplies. All the calls are forwarding to my home phone.”

“That can’t be too good for business.”

“Actually I think people prefer home visits to dragging their dogs and cats to my office. Plus they’re curious about what happened.”

“Asking you a lot of questions, I expect.”

“Yeah, it will be a relief when they catch whoever did it and things get back to normal.”

“You have any ideas about that?”

“I didn’t know Theo all that well, but he seemed like
someone who frequently made enemies,” Drew said. “Not a nice guy.”

“You know I used to live in the house next door to you.”

“Scott said something about Theo burning it down.”

“He was trying to buy up every piece of property on
Possum Holler,” Maggie said. “I wouldn’t sell it to him so he set it on fire, with me in it.”

“That’s terrible. How did you get out?”

“Have you met Lily Crawford, who lives on the farm at the end of the holler?” Maggie asked, and Drew nodded. “The Crawford’s dog woke me up howling under my window. The whole downstairs was on fire by that time. I had only enough time to wrap my photo albums in my grandmother’s quilt and fling them out the window. I climbed out onto the porch roof and into a crabapple tree and stayed there until Lily’s husband Simon came running down the road with a ladder; he pitched it up and helped me down. By the time the fire truck got there it was too late to save any of it.”

“You didn’t have smoke detectors?”

“I had several. Someone had taken all the batteries out. We found them in the ashes later.”

“So he didn’t mean to just scare you.”

“No, he meant to kill me.”

“If you knew it was Theo, why wasn’t he arrested?”

“Phyllis Davis gave him an alibi. He laughed about it in the Thorn later, said he’d warned me it was a fire trap. The fire chief investigated and concluded it was the wiring, although we had all that upgraded when we bought the place.”

“We?”

“My boyfriend Gabe and I bought it together. Well, I bought it, and he and my brothers did all the renovations. We lived there for three years.”

“Was he there when it caught on fire?”

“No, he’d been gone for a few weeks by then. Just went out for a walk one night and never came back.”

Maggie looked away and Drew touched her hand briefly.

“I’m so sorry. Both of those events must be painful subjects for you.”

“It seems like it all happened to someone else now. That was six, almost seven years ago.”

“When did you buy the bookstore?”

“The very day I got the insurance check for the house burning down I ran into the owner of this store. She
had opened this for her retirement, not realizing how much work it would entail. I think she saw herself more as a gracious literary hostess, spending her days recommending books and having intellectual discussions with members of the college faculty. In reality she spent most of her time managing inventory and covering shifts for employees who didn’t show up for work.”

“I always assumed bookstore employees read all day.”

“It cracks me up when people say that. All these books don’t unpack themselves and jump onto the shelves, you know. She also wasn’t prepared for eight months of winter, and it can feel really isolated up here when you’re not used to it.”

“I can vouch for that.”

“So you can understand why she was desperate to sell and accepted my measly offer.”

“Had you always wanted to own a bookstore?”

“Never considered it before in my life. I love to read, but I was a library girl, town and college; I couldn’t afford new books. My real motivation was being sick of living and working with my mother. This building came with an apartment upstairs, the business was breaking even most months, and I was pretty sure I could get the college textbook business if I tried. I had my brother Sean look over everything, and he pronounced it a crazy idea but backed me up anyway.”