The Affliction

  “What have you got?”

  Maggie, skimming the letter, said, “It’s just a bread-and-butter note from a student who came to dinner. But it makes me think we should turn out all of these books to see what else is tucked in the pages.”

  “You do that, and I’ll get into these drawers.”

  Maggie was sitting on the floor paging through a book on Bernard Berenson and Hope was deep in one of the desk drawers when a voice from the doorway said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Maggie’s heart moved so violently in her chest that it took long moments to return to normal rhythm. Hope slammed the file drawer so fast she caught one of her fingers and swore.

  “Holy crow, you nearly gave me a fit!” Maggie said.

  “I asked you what the hell you’re doing,” Ray Meagher said, menacing as he stepped into the room. He was wearing the same clothes as when they’d last seen him being escorted away by the White Plains detectives. He looked as if he regretted that the fright he’d caused them had not been fatal.

  “We were just—” Maggie began, wondering how she was going to finish the sentence when Hope interrupted.

  “I don’t wonder you’re cross,” she said with warm sympathy. “You’ve had a long night.”

  “I’ve had a long night, a long day, I’ll be having a long rest of my life. What the hell are you doing in my house?”

  “We’ll get out of your way. Have you had anything to eat? Would you like me to make you tea or coffee?”

  “I’d like you to answer my fucking question!” he yelled. “You’ve broken into my house, you’re pawing through my dead wife’s stuff, and I’d like to tear your fucking hair off!”

  Maggie looked at Hope and said, “I know just how he feels, don’t you?”

  Ray took a step toward Maggie, as if he was going to drag her to her feet and beat her up, but Hope stepped between them.

  “Oh gosh, I’m sorry, did I step on your foot?” she asked, sliding by him. Before he could answer, they had both gotten around him and were racketing down the stairs.

  Once they’d gotten outside and safely into their car, Hope slammed it into gear and took off, not quite burning rubber. She pulled over to the curb when the house was out of sight and took deep breaths.

  “Ohmygoodness,” she said.

  “How did you think so fast? I was paralyzed. I kept trying to think how to answer the question,” Maggie said.

  “Instinct. There wasn’t anything we could have said that wouldn’t have made it worse, was there?”

  “There was not.”

  “In a case like that, I’ve learned, it’s better to go for knocking them off balance. I got caught going through Hank’s pockets in his closet once, and it worked then.”

  “But you lived there.”

  “And he was guilty, which was the ever-important subtext. He couldn’t push me too hard, because he didn’t know what I might have found.”

  “What a useful dodge,” Maggie said.

  “Yes.”

  They were both beginning to feel their pulses return to normal.

  “Have you got everything?” Maggie asked. “Your bag?”

  “Yes. Am I bright red?”

  “You are a little pink.”

  Hope tilted the rearview mirror so she could see herself, and said, “Well. I guess I’m safe to drive.” She tilted the mirror back, put the car into gear, and inched back into the street. Actually, Maggie didn’t think Hope was ever really safe to drive, but there was no point mentioning it.

  “Did you find anything helpful in the drawers?” Maggie asked.

  “There was a travel file with receipts and brochures from museums and churches. Italy and Spain, mostly Spain. I was just getting into it. Did you?”

  “Similar. Grocery lists. To-do lists. A boarding pass. It’s all in here.” She indicated the chicken bag. “And did you mean to say you think Ray Meagher is guilty?”

  “I’m sure he’s guilty of something. Maybe a lot of things. But what I really meant was that after a night of being questioned by the police he for sure is feeling guilty and that would give us a little chink of advantage. Also he hasn’t had any sleep. I didn’t think he was at his best, did you?”

  “Very much not. I wonder where he was on Thursday night though.”

  “Me too. How can we find out?”

  “Make ourselves useful to those detectives, I’d say.”

  Marcia Goldsmith’s house was on a cul-de-sac called Violet Circle. She and Todd had bought it in the early 1990s with a dream of happy children able to play outdoors in safety and ride their bikes and skateboards around the neighborhood. No through traffic, a neighborhood watch against strangers. All seemed to be going according to plan; then Jesse was born, and their family origin myth began to darken. By 2008 the economy followed suit, and neighbors, unable to pay their mortgages, moved farther out into the country or in with relatives as the banks took over and tried fruitlessly to find new buyers. The lawns of many of the houses where friends had once lived were tended fitfully by an irregular rota of day workers, if at all; the blinds were drawn, the garages were empty. As Violet Circle unraveled, Marcia’s older son Eric found ways to spend less and less time at home. He was a happy sociable kid and he preferred the more stable atmosphere at his friends’ houses. But Jesse liked the decimated neighborhood fine.

  The houses on the circle were all of a pattern, some identical except for paint colors, others the mirror image of the basic layout. Marcia’s house was painted slate gray with white trim and was tidier than most on the circle. She and Todd had added a screened porch at the back. Marcia tended the lawn herself, or persuaded Jesse to do it. Bribed him, really, with new video games, or trips to the firing range, his latest passion. He was doing extra chores these days, saving up for a gun for shooting trap. A membership at the gun club was to be his birthday treat.

  Marcia was sitting at her desk at an upstairs window grading French dictations when she saw a late model Buick tiptoe down Violet Fairway and, after a pause, turn into the circle. Maybe a buyer for the Johnsons’ house? If Eric were at home she might have thought it was one of his pals coming to visit, but Eric wasn’t, and no one came to visit Jesse. She watched as the car slowed, stopped, reversed briefly, and then parked in front of her own front walk.

  Out climbed Maggie Detweiler and that friend of hers, whom Marcia had met briefly but not memorably enough to recall a name. She put down her red pencil, checked her face in the hall mirror to be sure she didn’t have parsley in her teeth, and was downstairs and at the door by the time the doorbell rang.

  “Is this a terrible time for us to be disturbing you?” Maggie asked.

  “Not at all, I’m grading papers. Always happy to be distracted from that.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “Come into the kitchen. Have you had lunch?”

  “We have.”

  “Coffee then?”

  “Love some,” said Hope.

  The kitchen was large and yellow with a brick fireplace at one end. On a table beside it was an empty cage with a wheel, a bedding of wood shavings and a few petrifying shreds of lettuce.

  There were dishes in the sink from lunch, and an open Westchester paper on the table in the breakfast nook, which was designed like a booth in a diner, a place for a happy family of four, beside a window overlooking the back lawn where there was still a rusted swing set and a sandbox, long unused.

  “Is Jesse at home?” Maggie asked as Marcia measured coffee into a cone of filter paper. She was fairly sure of the answer, since she could hear the explosive noises of a video game coming from somewhere.

  “He’s upstairs. He’s playing one of those games where you’re on a team with other players who are in Hawaii or Dubai. He had to eat his lunch upstairs because he didn’t want to let the team down. They’re fighting their way out of a booby-trapped gorge, guarded by a golem. Unless that was last week.”

  “My daughter is a fanatic about electroni
cs,” said Hope. “She won’t let her children play them.”

  “How old are her children?”

  “Going on four. But you see babies who can barely hold their own heads up clutching their tiny screens in their fat little hands these days.”

  “I’ll talk to her when they’re sixteen,” said Marcia. “For my son, they’ve been a godsend. He has learning differences. Those games provide him with challenges he can master. He’s learned to focus intently and he knows what it feels like to succeed at something. And it’s social for him. He’s homeschooled, so this is his team. I try to get him to go to bed at a decent hour and he says ‘Mom, I can’t . . . the Lizard King just got up and he needs me, I’m his bodyguard.’”

  “Where does the Lizard King live?”

  “Somewhere in Eastern Europe. It’s made for some very good units on geography. Time zones. Modern European history. And medieval, of course. For the dragons.”

  She brought her Chemex to the table with three mugs and went back for spoons and a carton of cream. She slid into the seat beside Hope, and when it was ready, poured the coffee.

  “How are things going down at the school?” Marcia asked.

  “Ray Meagher is back. He spent the night being questioned by police, but they let him go.”

  Marcia tore a packet of sweetener and stirred it into her coffee. “It’s so hard to believe. Florence gone is hard enough, but murdered . . .”

  Hope and Maggie briefly looked at each other. No one official had yet said Florence had been murdered.

  “What can you tell us about Florence’s frame of mind in the past few weeks?” Maggie asked. “Was she worried about anything? Depressed, upset?”

  Marcia got up and began rooting around in a cupboard. She found an open package of Fig Newtons and arranged some on a plate. Maggie watched her carefully, trying to decide if she was stalling.

  “I’m trying to think if there was anything unusual,” Marcia said when she came back to the table. “She was busy with the play, and she always loved that. As far as I know she was happy with her classes. She was very concerned with the evaluation. Christina depends . . . depended . . . on her a lot. Of course the end of the year is stressful, with exams coming, and the curling parents pressing you to raise grades, and overlook term papers cut and pasted from Wikipedia.”

  “What are curling parents?” Hope asked.

  “Like the ice sport. The parents sweep along in front of the children removing obstacles from their paths.”

  “How was her marriage?” Maggie asked.

  “Well—you know. Poor old Ray. He’s kind of mean, and he’s kind of a dope, but otherwise, what’s not to like?”

  “Did Florence like him?”

  “She must have at one time. They rubbed along, like a lot of people. I don’t think they had much in common, but she’d reached a certain age and she wanted to be married. She especially wanted children. When that didn’t happen, I guess the whole thing made less sense to both of them. And he gave up his work. Gave up or was fired, I don’t know which. So that didn’t help, she was so busy and very good at what she did, and she had a community. Ray doesn’t have much except, frankly, Florence, and those louts on the auxiliary police force. I think he’s one of those people whose personality is formed in opposition to something else. His was disrespecting Florence.”

  “That doesn’t sound like much of a marriage.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Marcia.

  There was a silence.

  “I see you have a hamster,” Hope said, indicating the cage. “My son, Buster, had a couple of those.”

  “We had a pair of dwarf ones,” Marcia said. “I didn’t realize when we got them that they’re nocturnal. I thought it would be so cute to watch them running on their wheel, but they mostly slept all day. Jesse begged me for them. He really wants a cat or dog but he’s allergic to everything.”

  “Where are they now?”

  Marcia shrugged. “I don’t really know what happened to them. I came home a few days ago and the cage was empty.”

  “What does Jesse say?”

  “Not much. He doesn’t like to talk about things when he’s upset. I think he probably took them out to play with them and lost them. They’re tiny, they could scoot under something in a heartbeat.”

  “Be careful when you put on your shoes,” said Hope. “The voice of experience.”

  Maggie decided, remembering her first view of Jesse in the cemetery, that she didn’t want to pursue the question of the hamsters’ fate any further.

  There was another silence. Then Marcia added, musing, “The oddest thing was that he seemed very upset that first day. He was sniffly and his eyes were red, although he said he wasn’t crying. Then the next evening while we were sitting right here at supper, he said ‘Right now is when Calvin and Hobbes wake up. I don’t hear them though.’”

  Maggie and Hope looked at each other.

  “What did you say?”

  “I reminded him that we’d talked about them being gone the day before and he said ‘Oh,’ and went to his room.”

  Hope said, “Has he met Christina Liggett’s cat? It’s supposed to be hypoallergenic.”

  “Nimbus hides from him. She’s a one-woman cat. And Jesse comes away from Christina’s house with his nose all stuffed up anyway.”

  “But the hamsters don’t bother him?”

  “He takes a Benadryl if he’s going to play with them.”

  “What day was that?”

  “What day was what?” Marcia said. Maggie instantly sensed something change in Marcia’s posture, a stiffening. This woman had a sixth sense for anything sensitive to do with Jesse.

  “What day did the hamsters disappear?”

  “Why?”

  Maggie thought for a moment. She wasn’t official; no one had to talk to her. Her only play was to keep things personal and social.

  “You were upset on Wednesday morning, when we first met. Remember?”

  “Oh. Yes,” said Marcia. “I was upset. So it must have been the night before that they disappeared. That’s why I wasn’t at the reception Tuesday night, I didn’t think I should leave Jesse alone, in case he needed to talk. His father had just left us, so . . .”

  “This sounds hard,” said Hope.

  Marcia, suddenly teary, looked down at her mug and nodded. They all let the silence stretch until Hope produced a packet of tissues from her bag and pushed them to Marcia. Maggie said, “We were wondering if we could speak with Jesse for a minute or two.”

  Marcia’s face was concealed behind a wiping of eyes, and blowing of nose. When she raised her eyes again, her expression was cold.

  “Yes? Why?”

  “We’d like to ask him about his—disagreement with Mrs. Meagher.”

  “It was nothing.”

  “That wasn’t the impression you gave me.”

  “What I told you was it was hard for Jesse, one of those accidents of timing. They’d been close but then they briefly weren’t and then he never got a chance to make it up.”

  “I understand that, but I’d like to hear it from him, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Look. My son has a hard time with a lot of things that are easy for other people. I tried to explain that to you because I mistook you for someone who would care. I would mind very much if you talked with him; he’s busy and engaged and he’s going to stay that way.” All three listened to the sudden explosive sound of something in a computer game upstairs coming to a violent end.

  Marcia stood up to let Hope out of the booth. Maggie took the hint. Marcia walked them in silence to the front door.

  Outside, when the door had closed behind them, Hope said, “That went well.”

  “This was easier when we had Buster to help us. Maybe I should get a PI license.”

  In the car, Hope set the GPS to take them to Christina’s house, while Maggie drove.

  “What creeped me out was Jesse forgetting the hamsters were gone.”

  “Were
dead, if you ask me,” said Maggie. “That’s about as serious a case of compartmentalizing as I’ve seen.”

  “It would be convenient, wouldn’t it, if you could take terrible things and put them in a closet in your brain and truly forget that they were there?”

  “Convenient is one word for it.”

  “Were you serious about getting a private eye license?”

  Maggie was at the intersection of a highway and a country road, waiting for a long enough break in the traffic so that she could make her turn without being T-boned. As she finally zipped across the oncoming lane and swung into her own line of traffic, she said, “Oh I don’t think so. I can’t imagine that we’re going to keep finding ourselves in situations like this.”

  Hope was thoughtful. She was going to be seriously depressed if she had to go back to reading Silas Marner and playing mah-jongg full-time.

  “On the other hand,” said Maggie, “I seriously want to know what happened to Florence.”

  Hope exhaled. “I think getting licensed might be kind of fun.”

  Florence’s sister Suzanne was small and plump and very sad. She had driven up from Leesburg, Virginia, where she lived with her daughters and her husband, who was an IT guy with the State Department. There would be a memorial service for Florence next weekend, in the Congregational church in Rye-on-Hudson where Florence had been married and where she had worshipped. Suzanne had come to talk with Florence’s minister about the service, and to make herself available to the police. She was staying with Christina Liggett.

  Hope and Maggie arrived for dinner at the appointed hour, and Christina led them into the overstuffed formal drawing room, where Suzanne was drinking sherry with tears rolling down her cheeks. After introductions and more pouring of sherry into little cut-glass thimbles, the four sat in a half ring looking out at the sunset over the Hudson, and Suzanne tried to stop crying.

  “She was my big sister,” she eventually explained, in apology. “We’re both adopted. Our parents were older and they’ve passed on. We were a team.”

  Christina reached across to her and clasped Suzanne’s hand. Suzanne had surely shed many tears already, but it had all started again for her here in this place where Florence had done her life’s work. Down on the river, the sun glowed red and scattered pink, maroon, and magenta shards on the water. Suzanne talked heartbrokenly of their childhood, about what a tender and loving aunt Florence was to her daughters, about how much her sister loved teaching, about her kindness to their confused and difficult parents at the end of their lives.