Bowled Over

Chapter Eleven

"Margaret? Margaret!"

Maggie pushed herself to her feet and hopped into the kitchen. "You bellowed—that is, I'm here, Mom."

Yes, she was here. And she'd been here for five hours now. Five hours that seemed like five days.

The Christmas tree was lit, decorated as it had always been decorated, in early after-Christmas-clearance items. One thing she had to say for her mother, though, she did faithfully hang up every ornament her children had made for her over the years.

Unfortunately, that included the one Maggie had made in sixth grade, with her school picture glued to the center of a gilt elbow macaroni frame. The photograph of her grinning maniacally in pigtails and teeth braces. Saint Just had gone up to it as if guided there by some sort of radar, and she'd glared at him, just daring him to say something, anything, that would force her to beat him heavily around the head and shoulders with her walker.

The nativity scene was spread out on top of the spinet, as always. The shepherd boy's flute was still missing its front end, the guardian angel's wing still oddly glued back in place where it had been broken the year their cat, Tuffy, had been frightened up onto the piano when Tate tried out his brand new drum set.

The lighted village—the one with the animated skaters whirling around a pond made out of a mirror—had been set up on the sideboard.

There were candles everywhere, none of them ever burned, of course, some of them slightly misshapen as a consequence of being stored in the hot garage.

The Santa candle's face had, for instance, melted slightly, so that it looked now as if he was leering at Mrs. Claus with an eye toward slipping away with her to someplace private for a little one-on-one celebration.

Maggie's whole day thus far, her surroundings, had been one big trip down Memory Lane, and if her father had been there, wearing his silly Santa hat, ho-ho-ho-ing from time to time from his favorite chair in the living room for no apparent reason, Maggie would have been a reasonably happy camper.

But he wasn't there. He was back at his apartment, behind the locked door of his bedroom, refusing to come out, refusing to talk to anyone.

Her mother could have taken a hint from that, and done the same ...

"Margaret, I asked one thing of you. One."

"Three, actually," Maggie said, still fairly delighted in her newfound knowledge that her mother no longer held the power to intimidate her. All of her life, Maggie had held her mother in awe. She was big. She had a big voice. She had a big bosom—but Maggie didn't think she really needed to number that among her problems with her mother.

Her mother spoke in absolutes. She had a way of cutting a person to ribbons if she scented blood in the water.

Her mother, as Doctor Bob had pointed out, was pretty much at the bottom of Maggie's problems with authority, with those who wielded their authority or their supposed knowledge like hammers, with those who yelled louder, were physically bigger ... etc., etc., etc.

Stupid, really. A childhood trauma she'd carried with her into adulthood.

But, hey, not anymore. She was free. Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty—etc.

And all it had taken was to have her father arrested for murder.

Jeez.

"You asked me to slice the carrots and celery, which I did. You asked me to take a bowl of potato chips into the living room, which any id—which I couldn't do. And you asked me to lift the turkey into the roasting pan for Maureen as long as I was just sitting at the kitchen table, taking up valuable space, so that she could then slip it into the oven, which I did do, although it wasn't easy. Smells, good in here, doesn't it? Is it ready?"

Mrs. Kelly had been standing in front of the stove, her hands on her hips, her expression unreadable. Now she stepped to one side, half facing the stove. She gestured at the roasting pan and the lovely, golden brown turkey inside it. "Where are the breasts, Margaret?"

"Hmm?" Maggie asked, moving the walker forward as she hopped closer to the stove. "There's the legs. And the wings," she said helpfully. "Aren't the breasts nearby?"

"No, Margaret, they're not. Maureen, I can understand. One more of her little pills and she'll be sliding onto the floor, dribbling saliva out of the corners of her mouth. But you should have noticed."

"That we had a flat-breasted turkey? Oh, I don't think so, Mom. I don't really cook, remember? And if I had noticed, it probably would have been impolite to point it out, don't you think? Isn't it enough we killed it and we're going to eat it? Do we have to insult it, too?"

Mrs. Kelly eyed her suspiciously. "How much of that boxed wine have you drunk, Margaret?"

"Clearly not enough," Maggie muttered, although she had noticed a sort of glow about the world around her after her last glass, and looked at the turkey again. "So. Where are the breasts?"

"They're under the bird, that's where they are. You put the turkey in the pan upside down!"

"Get out!" Maggie thought back to the moment. She'd been sitting in a kitchen chair. The big, empty black roasting pan had been in front of her, the unwrapped turkey to her right. Her mother had told her to lift it into the pan for Maureen, and Maggie had braced her good foot on the floor, hefted the raw, slippery twenty-pound bird the best she could with the rotten leverage sitting down allowed her ... and sort of dumped it, shoveled it, into the pan.

Yeah, that kind of meant turning the dumb bird over, didn't it?

Oops.

Well, you'd think Maureen might have noticed.

Maggie leaned closer to the stove, smiled. Laughed out loud. "Upside down? Really? I thought the drumsticks should, you know, sort of stand up in the air? Upside down. Oh, God, that's hysterical! It's definitely a Kelly bird, huh, Mom?"

Alicia Kelly sort of tottered to the nearest chair and sat down, buried her head in her apron. Her shoulders shook, and she was making rather weird sounds behind the apron.

Maggie hopped over to her, held out her hand, thinking to put it on her mother's shoulder, to comfort her. She got close but, for all her recent strides, she just couldn't do it. She was too worried her gesture wouldn't be appreciated. "Mom? Ah, Mom, I'm sorry. Don't cry."

Her mother lifted her head and looked up at Maggie. True, there were tears in her eyes. But the smile that all but cut her face in two told Maggie that they were tears of mirth. "A Kelly bird! It is, it is! We're all upside down anymore, aren't we?"

And then, which was much more reasonable, Alicia Kelly's face rather crumpled, and she began to cry.

"Damn this stupid cast," Maggie growled, wishing she could hug her mother. Do something. But all she could do was to bellow, "Alex! I need you in the kitchen now!"

Within minutes, Saint Just had taken in the situation and had led Mrs. Kelly to the sunroom behind the kitchen, poured her a nearly full glass of wine, and he and Maggie (who had managed to carry an open box of tissues with her, in her teeth) sat facing her, waiting for her to dry her eyes one more time.

"You okay now, Mom? Tate and his friends are still gone wherever they went, and Maureen won't be back for a while from John's parents' house. Can we talk now, hmm?"

"The breasts will be fine," Mrs. Kelly said, wiping at her eyes. "In fact, they should be quite moist, don't you think, cooking in their own juice?"

"I'm sure the meal is going to be delicious. All of it. But that's not what we want to talk about, Mom. We need to talk about what you said last night, at the police station. About how Daddy ... well, how you thought maybe Daddy had killed Bodkin for you. Remember?"

Mrs. Kelly sniffed, sat up very straight, once more the mother, the authoritative figure. "I spoke out of turn. I was upset. I didn't mean any of it. No, not at all. Certainly not. Don't be so cruel, Margaret, throwing a weak moment in my face like that."

"Mom ..."

"Mrs. Kelly, if I might be so bold," Alex said quickly, before Maggie could say anything else—not that she had been able to think of anything else to say. "Who, exactly, is Walter Bodkin?"

Maggie's mother had begun shredding the tissue in her hands, much the way Sterling had been pulling his pom-pom apart. But Sterling had been upset. Alicia Kelly was stalling.

"One of Evan's bowling friends. They're on the same team. The Majesties. They have been, for years and years."

"Yes, thank you," Alex said kindly. "I deduced as much from the stories in the morning newspapers. And were they friends, as well? Away from the bowling establishment?"

Mrs. Kelly shook her head. "Walter doesn't—Walter didn't have many friends. He had ... a very busy life."

"Really. I read that he was the proprietor of quite a substantial number of properties here in Ocean City. Rental units, I believe they're called?"

"Yes, that's right. He was a landlord. He ... he owned a lot of buildings. Not the big, fancy ones close to the ocean or the bay. The smaller ones, more inland, more downtown. A few of them were sort of run-down, but they all made him money. And he had a lot of them. Maybe a dozen or so."

"And he'd rent them to summer vacationers, is that correct?"

"High school and college kids, mostly. He said he could cram them into the buildings a dozen or more at a time. They didn't care, he said, because not many people would rent to them in the first place, so they took whatever they could get. Walter wasn't always ... scrupulous."

"I don't see where this is going, Alex," Maggie said.

"Everything leads somewhere, my dear. Eventually," he told her, and Maggie subsided. She was too close to this whole thing, she had to let Alex take the lead. He could be more objective.

"Walter was a good landlord. I shouldn't speak evil of the dead. He kept the places in fairly good repair," Alicia Kelly said when the room fell silent. "He was very good ... quite, um, talented with his hands."

Maggie winced, tried to banish her mother's last few words from her brain's memory banks.

"And therefore also a strong man, Mrs. Kelly? To carry out his own repairs on the buildings. Was he also a large man?"

She nodded. "He used a sixteen-pound ball."

"Dad uses a twelve," Maggie explained to Alex, happy for the change of subject, away from Bodkin's talented hands. "When I ordered it, the guy told me a lot of women use twelve-pounders, but men go a little heavier. But Dad liked the loft he could get, I think he said, with a lighter ball. But sixteen pounds? Wow, Bodkin must really have been a strong man."

"And tall, Mrs. Kelly? Was Mr. Bodkin tall?"

She nodded her head. "He was a ... a very active man."

Maggie sat back in her chair. "So he was tall, strong, active. We know, from the newspaper story, that he was sixty-three, same age as Daddy. My dad isn't exactly short, Alex, but no one could call him a giant. He's in his early sixties, and I saw one of those rubber disks in one of his kitchen drawers. You know, Mom, the kind you use to help get the top off jars?"

"I always have to open his pickle jar for him," Alicia Kelly said, sighing. "He probably hasn't had a good gherkin in months."

"Right," Maggie said quickly, as her mother looked ready to cry again. "One's tall, strong, one's medium height, no Schwarzenegger back when he was on steroids. So how, Alex, did my dad conk Bodkin over the head with his bowling ball? He would have had to carry a footstool with him."

"Not if he first disabled the man, swinging the ball at Bodkin's knees, for instance, so that the man was down when Evan delivered the fatal blows."

Maggie shot him a fierce look. "Don't help anymore, Alex. I'm trying to prove that Dad couldn't have done it."

Alex got to his feet. "In which case, my dear, we'll have to wait for more information, won't we? Where it happened, when it happened, the logistics of the scene. The results of the autopsy. Perhaps there were bruises, contusions, elsewhere on Bodkin's body. We know the cause of death from the blood and bone evidence on the bowling ball itself. We know his skull was badly smashed. But we don't know all of it, do we?"

Mrs. Kelly put a hand to her mouth and ran out of the room.

"Well, that helped, big mouth. You had to talk about the autopsy? We haven't learned a damn thing."

"On the contrary," Alex said, getting to his feet. "We know your mother had feelings for Walter Bodkin. And, if we know, it's more than possible that your father knew as well."

Maggie's mouth dropped open. She looked to the doorway, where her mother had disappeared, and then back to Alex. "Cripes, Alex, my mother is a little chippie!"

"Shhh," Alex warned, walking over to the now opened doorway. "Ah, your sister has returned. Good cop or bad cop, Maggie?"

"Hmm?" she asked, still struggling with the idea that her mother might have had not one, but two affairs. It was difficult to believe there were that many men in this one small town who'd had the courage to take her on.

"I said, your sister has returned. We've agreed that we need to speak to her, yes?"

"We do," Maggie agreed, turning her walker in the direction of the kitchen. "But not now, Alex. I know you want to troll for clues, but Tate and his friends will be back soon, and people still have to eat. Let's get all of that out of the way, and then grab Maureen later and grill her. Tate already announced that he's taking his pals up to Atlantic City for some show at seven. John will be snoring on the couch by then, and we'll have a free shot at Maureen."

"Agreed. Now, where do I hide this box of wine, so that we can hope she'll still be reasonably coherent by that time? And then please explain to me again why anyone would purchase wine that comes in a box."