Maggie Dove by Susan Breen

She grinned at Maggie. “And here I thought you were going to learn some foolish thing about the twelve vegetables.”
    “It was a near miss,” Maggie said.
    Helen laughed. “He does love history. Thank you for taking the time with him. I know he’s not always easy.”
    She looked exhausted. Her eyes had dark circles under them and her face was flushed, as though she’d just woken up, which Maggie suspected she had. Helen didn’t go to church. Instead she dropped Edgar off at Sunday School and then lay down on the couch in the church library and slept. There were some who felt she was using the church for free babysitting, but Maggie figured there were many different ways for a church to be a sanctuary.
    “He wasn’t too much?”
    “Not at all.”
    “Well thank you, Ms. Dove. Sometimes I think you’re the best part of this town. Quite honestly, I don’t know why we moved here in the first place.” At that, her glasses fell on to the ground. She scooped them up and pressed them back on her nose.
    “People might be a little reserved at first, but they’ll come around. You’ll see.”
    “We’ve lived here for five years,” Helen said.
    “Oh.”
    Maggie did one last check to see that everything was put away, then locked up the room.
    “It’s more than that,” Helen said. “Well, I’ll be honest. I think some of the people here are cruel. One of my best friends died here a couple of days ago, and now they’re saying he might have been murdered.”
    “Marcus Bender?”
    “Did you know him?” Helen said. She rubbed her wrist against her pale face. “I still can’t believe he’s gone. He never would have moved here if it weren’t for me. He would have stayed in the city, but then one day he came up to visit me and he saw the river, and well, you know how Marcus was about the river.”
    “I do know.”
    “When he was passionate about something, he was passionate.”
    “Did you know him a long time?”
    “We went to college together. Amherst. We were part of the honor society there, Marcus and his first wife, Char. I was so lost when I first got there, coming from Kansas, and they both took me under their wing. They were good friends to me.”
    They started up the steps, in the direction of the parlor, and coffee hour. “His daughter Lorelei is the same age as Edgar. She had a bunch of developmental issues and they wanted to put her in special ed classes, but Marcus wouldn’t have it. He wanted her mainstreamed. He fought to get her tutors. He challenged them, wouldn’t let them get away with taking the easy way out.”
    The church bells began to chime, a lovely sound. Automatically Helen reached for her son’s hand as they made their way up the steps.
    “He did everything,” she said. “Met with the principal, the tutors, the special ed board. I don’t know how he did it all.”
    Maggie couldn’t even picture the Bender girl except for a distant memory of someone dressed up as a princess. Someone sparkly who she noticed dumping a whole bucket full of candy into her trick-or-treat bag. But now Maggie felt badly that she didn’t know that about her father. That she didn’t know his kids.
    “When I heard he had a heart attack, I wasn’t even that surprised. I thought it was because he was pushing himself so hard all the time. But now they’re saying he was poisoned.”
    “I think they have a ways to go before they can prove that.”
    “Who would want to murder Marcus?” Helen asked. “Everyone loved him.”
    Edgar just stared at Maggie, as though he knew all the secrets to her heart, and the one time she would have wished for the boy to be bad, to distract his mother, he was good as gold.
    “One of the police officers had a grudge against him, they’re saying. Some rogue officer who was selling drugs on the side.”
    “No,” Maggie said. “No, you’re wrong about that. I know that police officer and he’s a good man.”
    But after coffee hour was over, she thought she’d