Chapter 48 Maggie
Chapter 48
Maggie
“It’s embarrassing to admit,” said Lloyd, “but we couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Or in this case, we let the forest get in the way of seeing the all-important tree.”
“Any way you put it, dear, it is embarrassing,” said Ingrid. “We should have done better.”
The five of them had assembled at Maggie’s house for a postmission debriefing and a potluck dinner of Ben’s paella, Lloyd’s ratatouille, and the Stouffer’s Spinach Soufflé that Maggie had hastily pulled out of her freezer. Frozen food was a lazy shortcut, and she wasn’t proud of it, but she’d spent the afternoon mowing her fields, moving the mobile chicken coop, and reassembling the electric fencing. While a spy might be able to take a day off, a farmer could not. Declan, with his broken ankle, had been excused from contributing a dish to their potluck, but tonight he’d produced the real treat: a bottle of thirty-year-old Lowland single malt, which helped take the sting out of their communal sense of failure. They’d already passed the bottle once around the farm table, and when it came her way again, Maggie splashed a refill into her glass and passed the bottle to Declan. He was looking particularly dashing tonight, a silver-streaked forelock drooping rakishly over his eyebrow. He’d become so adept at navigating on crutches that he could easily return home to his own bed, but Maggie rather liked having him around to spar with.
Among other things.
“It’s not as if we were entirely off base,” said Ben. “We did conclude, correctly as it turns out, that Zoe’s backpack was deliberately left on the roadside. That it was planted there to make the police think she’d been abducted and carried south. All to keep them from searching the pond.”
“All right, so we were right about that detail,” said Ingrid. “But after they found the skeleton in the pond, that’s when we let ourselves be lured into the weeds. We overthought it. We started chasing conspiracy theories.”
Lloyd patted his wife on the knee. “Because that’s what you do, dear. And you do it so well.”
“It’s no wonder, though,” Maggie pointed out, “that our minds did go straight to conspiracies, once we realized the Conovers were part of MKUltra. When you turn over a rock and find a nest of spies, it’s natural to think they’re up to no good.”
Declan laughed. “Now why would we think that ?”
“We should take this as a cautionary tale,” said Ingrid. “Yes, conspiracies exist. Yes, we’ve been trained to always look for the bigger picture, to assume there’s a larger organism with tentacles reaching in multiple directions. Governments, crime syndicates. But this time it wasn’t a big picture. It was a small one, a very human one. A marriage. An affair.”
“This was a conspiracy, in a way, though,” Maggie said.
“Between Brooke and her son, you mean?”
“And between Brooke and her father-in-law, George Conover. As Elizabeth said, her late husband’s superpower was cleanup. Whenever things went wrong, he was adept at mopping up the mess, whether it was covering up MKUltra’s role in the Main Street massacre, or silencing Vivian Stillwater. He helped cover up Anna’s death as well, because Brooke couldn’t have managed that on her own. There he was, faced with a scandal in his own family: A pregnant nanny, pushed down the stairs by his son’s enraged wife. Brooke, dragged off to prison for murder. The publicity could have blown open all the family secrets, including their work with the Agency and MKUltra. I think he decided the best course of action was just to cover up the murder and dispose of Anna’s body in the pond. It would protect Brooke. It would keep the family together. And it would protect all their secrets.” Maggie looked around at her friends. “People like us, we’re good at burying secrets. Too good, sometimes.”
“And it almost worked,” said Ben. “For sixteen years, anyway.”
Ingrid shook her head. “That poor girl, Anna. All these years, her family never knew what happened to her.”
“In George Conover’s mind, Anna was probably expendable,” said Maggie. “Just a girl from Mexico, whose family had no idea how to find her in this country.” She shook her head. “Yes, George Conover was an expert at cleanup.”
They fell silent for a moment, and Maggie thought of Anna, doubly a victim. First, she’d been seduced by her married employer, and then she’d been punished for that affair by the berserk wife, who’d shoved her down the same stairs where Susan Conover fell, fracturing Anna’s skull. Perhaps Brooke hadn’t intended to kill her. Perhaps it was just a split second’s fury, an uncontrollable impulse that drove Brooke’s attack, but the result was a dead body and a crisis that had to be reckoned with.
Enter George Conover, who took care of the problem. Both Elizabeth and Colin were out of town that night, so no one else in the family needed to know what had happened. With his usual efficiency, George set about protecting his daughter-in-law, his family, and his own secrets.
For sixteen years, those secrets stayed buried. Until the day Zoe dove into the water and spotted what lay at the bottom of the pond. Maggie imagined the girl frantically swimming to shore, climbing out of the water. She pictured her scrambling up the lawn and blurting out There’s a skeleton in the pond! to the first person she encountered.
Brooke.
This time, there was no George Conover to pull Brooke out of the fire and help her neutralize this witness. Panicked, Brooke had dealt with the problem herself, with a blow to Zoe’s head. Now she had a new problem: How to load the unconscious body into the trunk of her car? For that, she turned to someone strong enough to lift the girl, someone she knew would do her bidding and would never betray her: her son, Kit.
While they’d been chasing the phantoms of MKUltra, the real killer was in that household the whole time, sleeping under the same roof, sitting at the Conovers’ dinner table.
“Do you think we’re slipping?” Ingrid asked quietly. “The fact we were so wrong about this one, well, it makes me wonder.”
The question unnerved Maggie; no doubt it unnerved them all, the possibility that they’d lost their edge and that what lay ahead was an inexorable decline into senility. They may have accepted that their joints were not as limber, that they could not run as far or as fast as they could in their youth, but one could always adjust to those physical changes, or find ways to compensate.
But a sharp mind was central to what they did and who they were, and to feel their well-honed skills beginning to recede would be a death all its own.
“Even if we are slipping,” said Ben, “we were still ahead of the police.”
“Rather a low bar,” sniffed Ingrid.
“Still, that thought should buck us up.”
“And we can learn something from this,” Maggie added. “A lesson we should remember in the future.”
“What lesson?” Ingrid asked.
Maggie looked around at her friends, fellow travelers on this journey into the twilight of life. Her gaze fell on Declan, and she smiled. “Never overlook the human heart as a source of mischief.”
They heard a knock on the door, and she rose from her chair. They all knew who this would be.
Jo was out of uniform, dressed in blue jeans and a fleece on this cool summer night, and as she walked into the house, it struck Maggie how rarely she saw the young woman in civilian clothing. That was sad. Dedication to a career was a fine thing, but youth was fleeting, and she wished more for Jo than endless patrols and 911 responses.
“You just missed dinner,” Maggie said.
“Any chance you have leftovers?” she asked.
“Doesn’t anyone ever feed you?”
“Not the way you people feed me.”
“Paella and ratatouille.”
“What?”
“That’s what’s for dinner. We saved you some. They’re all in the dining room, feeling sorry for themselves.”
“Why?”
“We should have done better. We apologize for leading you astray, when the killer was right there in front of us. As Lloyd says, we didn’t see the forest for the trees.”
“Because there were too many damn trees in the way.”
They had already set a place for Jo at the table, and as she sat down, Lloyd slid her a plate of food and Declan poured her a whisky. When they’d first met Jo, she was not a fan of scotch, but now she happily took a sip. That’s what happened when one spent too much time with this group; one got corrupted by shady habits and excellent booze. Jo seemed happy tonight, almost celebratory, not the uptight Jo Thibodeau that they’d tangled with in the past.
“So I hear you folks are kicking yourselves,” she said, a trifle too cheerfully.
“We lost the thread,” said Ingrid. “We became distracted by irrelevant issues like MKUltra and Vivian Stillwater.”
“Those issues weren’t irrelevant to Reuben Tarkin.”
“Well, no.”
“And if not for Reuben, Susan Conover would be dead.”
“True,” Ingrid admitted.
“So in a way, it’s all relevant.” Jo looked around the table. “This case has been one big machine with multiple moving parts. Reuben. The Conovers. Project MKUltra. And the damage your Agency did here.”
“Which we were not involved in, may I remind you,” said Ben.
“Right. Pure as the driven snow, you people.”
They were hardly in a position to claim sainthood, so they let her comment slide.
“This should change things for Reuben, and the way the town looks at him,” said Maggie. “I hope people will be kinder.”
“It definitely changes things for Elizabeth and Arthur,” said Jo. “You should hear what folks are saying about them. No wonder they fled town so fast.” She raised her whisky glass. “ That’s worth celebrating.”
“You seem in an especially fine mood tonight,” observed Declan.
“I am.”
“Any reason for that?”
Jo looked around at their faces and sighed. “You’ve already heard the news, haven’t you? God, I can never surprise you people.”
“Tell us anyway.”
“I just got the call from the town manager. I’m no longer acting police chief. I’m now, officially, the police chief of Purity, Maine.” She put down her glass. “Oh, come on. You can at least try to act surprised.”
Maggie glanced at Ingrid. Ingrid glanced at Ben. None of them knew about this decision, but they were too proud to admit it. They really must be slipping.
Declan raised his glass. “To our new police chief. The youngest ever, I assume? And the first woman?”
“Right on both counts,” said Jo. “And I have all of you to thank.”
“For what?” Maggie asked.
“For pushing me to dig deeper. For making me look beyond the obvious. For being, basically, a giant pain in my ass.”
“That does not sound like gratitude,” said Ben.
“You made my job both easier and harder. By introducing MKUltra into the equation, you got me into trouble with Detective Alfond. But then you got me out of it by pointing me to Brooke Conover.” She looked around the table. “I appreciate what you did for me. And for the town.”
“It’s our town, too, Jo,” Maggie said. “And if you need our help again, we’re here.”
“ Unofficially ,” interjected Jo.
“ Unofficially ,” Maggie concurred. She looked around at her friends, who’d spent their careers living undercover. Their lives once depended on hiding the truth, on pretending to be who they were not. Even though retirement had allowed them to cautiously venture a bit into the light, they would never truly be able to shake that old habit of adhering to the shadows. “As long as we agree to keep this just between us,” Maggie said, “the Martini Club is always here to help.”
“I can keep a secret,” Jo assured them.
Maggie smiled. “So can we.”