Maggie Dove by Susan Breen Read Free Book Online Page B

except Maggie felt the couch had been designed for someone about six inches taller than her. She felt like a child with her feet hanging in space.
    “A nightmare,” Winifred crowed. “Nonsense. You’re a mystery writer. You should be eating up death for breakfast. I would think you’d be delighted to have someone die on your front lawn. If that’s not a cure for writer’s block, I don’t know what is.”
    “I didn’t become a mystery writer because I wanted to see a murder,” she said, “but rather because I like to write stories.”
    “I thought you became a writer because it gave you a respectable way to fantasize about men.”
    Arthur had moved on to Winifred’s other arm, trying to press some feeling into her poor abused limbs. Maggie knew Winifred and her moods well enough to know she was looking for an argument; she’d been like that as a girl too. So excited by trouble that she couldn’t calm down. Maggie focused on the bookshelves, which Winifred had filled, three rows deep, with copies of Maggie’s books that she still handed out to doctors and nurses although Maggie hadn’t published anything in twenty years.
    “Maggie’s detective was quite the dreamboat,” Winifred explained to Arthur.
    At one point Maggie had told her to stop buying books because she didn’t want her to bankrupt herself, but Winifred didn’t care. She told Maggie she loved her books, they were the best books ever written; and she’d set them on her shelf, between
War and Peace
and
Beloved.
    “She’s ignoring me,” Winifred said.
    “I’m not ignoring you,” Maggie said. “I don’t want to argue with you.”
    “Inspector Claude Benet. He had big hands,” she said to Arthur. “He was the perfect man. He was like James Bond, but faithful. He was even good at house repairs. That man could change a bulb,” she said, cackling wildly. Arthur laughed along genially. Maggie hoped he didn’t go home and relate these stories to his family.
    “He was handsome, spoke three languages and played the clarinet.”
    “Flute,” Maggie said.
    “Same thing.”
    “Not really.”
    “Oh yes, my dear. It’s all the same.”
    Maggie wondered if it would be possible to have a conversation with Winifred that did not end in sexual innuendo. Arthur smiled at her. He was a kind young man who performed his job with grace. She knew he had a mother and grandmother and great-grandmother who lived with him. He talked about them fondly, didn’t complain, didn’t get mad. What was his outlet, Maggie wondered. What was the secret of his grace? Everyone has a secret.
    “And he didn’t own a gun. He won all his cases through quick thinking.”
    “And jujitsu,” Maggie said. “He was a black belt.”
    “Not that it mattered. His suspects always confessed.”
    Maggie was tempted to come to the defense of her dear Inspector Benet, but decided to say no more. One way or another Winifred would get in the last word, and she didn’t want this to get ugly. She was Maggie’s best friend, but that didn’t mean Maggie always liked her.
    “Did you base him on someone you knew?” Arthur asked.
    “I suppose I based him a little bit on my husband.”
    Winifred howled. “The marvelous Stuart Dove.”
    “My husband was some years older than me…” Maggie started to say.
    More howling from Winifred. “Some years! Maggie’s own father used to call him Dad.”
    Maggie resumed. “But when he was young, he was quite elegant. I didn’t know him then, of course, but I liked to imagine what he would have been like, and so part of Inspector Benet came out of that.”
    She’d found her husband so mysterious. That was part of his charm for her. She didn’t know him fully and doubted she ever could. He was a Russian scholar and had spent years traveling around Russia, and so they were always having visitors. Curious people who showed up in the middle of the night and told stories and drank and ate and argued about religion and love. They were all so