“Cottage,” Faith knew, referred to something the size of a resort.
“I needed to work after high school, so with my Katie Gibbs typing and shorthand diploma, I got a secretarial job. Arnold and I were married when I was nineteen. Helen and Havencrest became part of my past, although I recall hearing from another classmate once that there had been some sort of trouble.” Ursula sighed. “But I don’t remember any details. I’m afraid this is happening to me more and more.”
Ursula had seemed so cheerful when Faith first came in and there was a cloud across her face now. “Nonsense,” Faith said quickly, feeling responsible. “You remember more than I do. I found that I had put a pot holder in the freezer for some reason the other day. It was meant to remind me of something, but I have no idea what.”
This produced a smile. “Thank you, dear. The truth is that, like Arnold, I never felt comfortable at Havencrest. Despite the house, which was a Richardson one by the way. You know, Henry Hobson Richardson, the architect who designed Trinity Church in Copley Square and so many other wonderful places?”
There must have been more than one Havencrest house designed by the firm, Faith thought swiftly, aware that Ursula had stood up. There wasn’t a hint of a cloud in her expression now. “I hear a car in the drive. It must be Austin. Let him in, will you? I need to freshen up.” She raised a hand to her hair, like Pix’s thick and short with soft waves produced by nature. Pix’s hair was chestnut, which Ursula’s may have been once. Now it was pure white, almost platinum.
“You look lovely,” Faith said. “But go along and I’ll let him in.”
As she went to the front door, she was glad that Ursula had something new in her life. Glad, yes, but was she also feeling a little wary? Ursula was certainly old enough to look after herself. Wasn’t she?
The catering kitchen smelled delicious. Niki had been making various soup stocks. Have Faith was still supplying the food for the Ganley Museum’s small café, and this time of year people wanted soup, not salad. Faith immediately felt herself relax on her home turf. Since Rowan House, and even Ursula’s, she’d been feeling a bit as if she were in someone else’s movie.
She put the manila envelope Ian had given her containing a copy of the contract, another Heaven or Hell Playbill, and the list of invited guests on her desk. She’d have time to go over the names and hit the Internet for the start of her sleuthing once she’d talked to Niki about the café menus for the week. The museum was closed on Mondays. Tricia Phelan, who had started as a server years ago and then become an intern, had now taken over this part of Faith’s business, but she had Sundays and Mondays off.
“Smoked chicken and wild rice? Scandinavian yellow pea soup is always popular, a change from split pea?” Niki’s voice broke through her thoughts. “And how did it go at the famous Mr. Dane’s?”
Faith found herself giving Niki a slightly edited account of the visit. She omitted the finale. Like Tom, Niki had misgivings about those activities that could conceivably put Faith in danger. Catering a weekend where a killer was an expected guest and a casket was the pièce de résistance definitely qualified as such. Faith steered the subject back to soup.
“We haven’t had the Portuguese chourico with kale and white bean soup in a while. Maybe a different nationality each day for fun? Hungarian mushroom and call the chicken Asian tea-smoked. Add some Chinese five spice? We just need one more for Saturday.”
“Look no further than the Greek girl in front of you. Avgolemono!”
“I could go for a bowl of it right now,” Faith said. Avgolemono soup was on her list of foods for solace—rich chicken stock gently mixed with egg, lemon, and rice.
Niki and she got to work on the menus and worked out a timetable for all three of them for the week. Niki had become known for her baked goods, especially her cheesecakes. During these slow weeks, this was the one area where business didn’t slack off—they always had plenty of special orders for all of the flavors, but especially Niki’s new creation, a s’mores cheesecake with dark chocolate, marshmallows, and graham crackers. Faith helped with the cakes that needed to be ready tomorrow, then left Niki to it and turned her entire attention to Max Dane’s guests.
Ian Morrison had exceptional penmanship, almost like calligraphy. The list was a work of art.
James Nelson ........Original director
Adrian St. John .....Writer ..................London
Philip Baker ........Composer............Los Angeles
Betty Sinclair .......Lyricist ..........New York City
Tony Ames ..........Choreographer .....New York City
Jack Gold ...........Set designer .......New York City
Eve Anderson .......Actor ........Holmes, New York
Alexis Reed .........Actor ..............Los Angeles
Travis Trent..........Actor ............Atlantic City
Bella Martelli......Costume designer.......Brooklyn
East Coast and West Coast with one overseas. Or perhaps another location. There was no place named after James Nelson—and what did “original director” mean? She sent off a quick e-mail to Ian asking if the omission had been an oversight. She doubted it, but perhaps they had tracked Mr. Nelson down by now. It would save Faith having to do so. Her plan was to learn as much as possible about these ten people before the weekend. Forewarned is always forearmed . . .
Tapping the invitation card against the window frame, Jack Gold looked out at Fourteenth Street. He’d lived in the East Village, specifically Alphabet City, ever since he arrived in New York thirty-three years ago. The last year of his teens and the last year for Indiana. He’d lived in all sorts of apartments with all sorts of roommates, but now he was alone and in a studio, more accurately a “shoe box.” If he stretched out both arms he could almost touch the two walls. But he was tall, and his reach was a good long one. It wasn’t bad and it was cheap for Manhattan, a find on Craigslist—a little over a thousand a month, and who needed an elevator or a doorman? He’d created a sleeping loft with seating below. Jack had learned carpentry skills from his grandfather. Definitely not his father.
His nineteen-year-old Hoosier self didn’t know anything about stagecraft, but he started with jobs he’d picked up at club concerts. Maybe he’d missed the 1970s Golden Age of Punk, but there was still plenty of music. CBGB and Club 57. He hung around the new art galleries that were springing up all over and absorbed Jeff Koons, Keith Haring, and Kiki Smith like a sponge. Someone told him he should be doing set design and he thought, Why not? A summer theater gig in the Berkshires and a fabricated résumé that included membership in his high school drama club—as if they would have had him. He was never sure if the reason kids bullied him was because he was a Jew or they suspected his sexual preference. He knew why his father regularly took a belt to him until Jack was taller and bigger. It had nothing to do with religion.
Jack thought about his mother and felt the familiar tightening around his heart. If she’d lived would things have been different or would his father have gone after her, too? He was nine when she lost her battle with cancer and didn’t remember a time when she wasn’t sick. Her parents just assumed they’d be raising Jack. He still remembered the scene after the funeral, his father shouting, “He’s mine and I need him for chores.” His father had seemed triumphant that he’d won, even if he didn’t want the prize.
His grandmother had died when he was in his early teens, and a week after the funeral his grandfather had taken him to the local bank and opened up a savings account for him. He told Jack not to mention it to his father and made sure Jack could withdraw money himself. After he died two years later, Jack went to the bank. There was almost five thousand dollars in the account.
He left town straight from the high school after graduation ceremonies—his father hadn’t come—took the money out and got on a bus.
He’d escaped and never looked back.
Before too long he didn’t need to pad his experience as one gig led to another. Jack Gold was
in demand. At least back then.
The sight of some slips of paper that had fallen from the envelope broke his reverie. He picked up a round-trip plane ticket to Boston from the floor.
It was more than a plane ticket. It was his ticket to the future. He’d been waiting for years. Pulling his phone from his pocket, he clicked a number on his Favorites list. It answered immediately and Jack started talking. He put it on speaker. His hearing wasn’t what it used to be. Years of high decibels.
“Max is giving himself a birthday party.”
“Yeah, I got one, too, Jack.”
“Going?”
“Maybe. You?”
“Oh yes. And who are you kidding? You know you’re going and I know why.”
There was a loud chuckle. “Right. I’m in town. Meet for drinks? Tomorrow?”
“Works for me. Manitoba’s? Avenue B. You know it? Four thirty?”
“I’ll be busy until close to then. Come up here and we’ll decide where. Ciao.”
Jack ended the call and put the phone back in his pocket. He picked up the invitation and went back to the window. Soft sleet had started to fall, turning the streets and sidewalks into glistening surfaces beneath the backdrop of his beloved city. He never got tired of the scene. No play could equal what went on every day here in front of his eyes.
Niki said good-bye and Faith heard herself responding, but she kept her eyes fixed on the list. When the door closed she said the names softly aloud. Ten of them. Some common; others not.
And one was apparently out for blood.
CHAPTER 3
While Faith had given up thinking of herself as an exile from Manhattan—though not all that long ago—she still read her hometown paper, the New York Times, from the front page to the last with a scrutiny befitting a diamond cutter. Tom read the Boston Globe with less intensity, but closely enough that he could tell her anything she might need to know. Over the years, she had found it wasn’t much, although she listened to his reports on the vagaries of Massachusetts politics with appreciative disinterest.
The kids had gone off to school—Ben still looked as if he had lost his best friend, and in fact he had—Tom was at work, and Faith didn’t need to be at the catering kitchen for an hour. She’d had plenty of coffee, so although the weather outside did not call for it, she poured herself a large glass of agua fresca, “fresh water” in Spanish. In the summer she made it with strawberries, melons, and other fruits. In the winter she made it with a simple sugar syrup—not too sweet—lime and mint.
Her method for reading the paper, and she liked the print version, had been honed over the years. Making sure there wasn’t an article on the back she wanted to read, she clipped the crossword puzzle to do before she went to sleep. Next she read the news summary, turned back to the front page, and then, since today was Wednesday, went to the Food section. After that the New York Metropolitan news before International and National. Today her eye was immediately caught by the headline: APPARENT SUICIDE AT 14TH STREET STATION. She quickly skimmed the short article:
Onlookers at the East Village’s 14th Street station watched in horror as a man jumped in front of the oncoming 6 train heading uptown yesterday around 4 pm. One of the crowd noted that the individual, who had been standing in front of one of the pillars, seemed agitated. Police disclosed that a wallet found on the body identified the man as Jack Goldberg, age fifty-two. The landlord at the address listed on a driver’s license said he knew the deceased as Jack Gold and that he had been involved with the theater as a set designer, also commenting, “Nice guy, paid his rent on time.” There are no known next of kin.
Abandoning the rest of the paper, Faith went to her laptop, which was on the kitchen counter. She’d been looking up heaven or hell–related recipes. She opened today’s New York Post and read the same story, albeit couched in much more dramatic language: “anguished” to describe the crowd on the subway platform and an interview with the train’s “considerably shaken” driver, who said, “If they want to do it, they do. He was my second.”
She then Googled both Jack Gold and Jack Goldberg, adding “set designer.” Nothing for Jack Goldberg, but Jack Gold appeared immediately in the Times and Post articles. All the other hits were for shows he’d worked on.
Monday after Niki left, Faith had stayed on, reading the brief Playbill bios—some with photos—for each of Dane’s guests. The online mentions confirmed what she recalled. Gold had been the set designer for a number of long-running award-winning shows, mostly musicals. His work was highlighted in a few reviews, which painted a picture of someone who was both creative and painstaking. Much was made of how well the sets were constructed—“an artist and a craftsman.” There was little to nothing about his personal life anywhere. And she couldn’t find any indication that he’d been connected to a show of any kind after Heaven or Hell. She had a growing list of questions she wanted to ask Aunt Chat when she saw her next week and added this. If Jack Gold had been with touring shows for which he had already designed the sets, where would she find mentions?
There were an enormous number of Jack Golds and Jack Goldbergs on Facebook, but when she checked the New York profiles, none fit. She went to Switchboard. No landline. These were becoming rare, especially in places like Manhattan, a city of cell towers. Switchboard did list an address and gave his age as fifty-two, as the papers had noted. Google Earth revealed he’d lived close to the subway station where he had met his death. She knew the neighborhood. It was modest—so far and probably not for much longer, given the current state of New York’s luxury apartment building boom. Gentrification didn’t come close. It was stratification with a very, very small percent on top.
Would Gold have had the wherewithal for an expensive casket? And how would he have delivered it to Max Dane’s doorstep? Both questions were moot now.
As Faith tapped at the keys, one thought remained uppermost in her mind. Jack Gold was most certainly dead. She could cross him off the party’s guest list—and the list of suspects, too?
Tom’s predecessor at First Parish had been well liked, but there had not been much weeping or wailing—if New Englanders ever did indulge in such—when he left to write a history of celibacy. He was, as Faith had inferred upon hearing this, unmarried. Despite the kitchen’s 1950s linoleum and appliances, as well as the taupe, faded walls in every room, he had made no changes to the parsonage save one she learned—a Canadian hemlock hedge along the driveway that ran between the Millers’ house next door and the parsonage. By the time Faith arrived, the hedge had grown tall enough to screen off a Minotaur and certainly the neighbors. Soon, however, Tom and Sam cut an opening, reinforcing it with an attractive curved trellis as a shortcut—particularly for their wives, who had been sporting scratched forearms—to each other’s houses.
Heading toward the garage to go to work, Faith saw Pix come through the hedge and stopped to wait for her.
“Samantha got home late last night,” Pix called.
Faith waited until her friend was closer before asking, “How is she? Losing your job and your boyfriend the same day. Way too much for her to have to go through.” She expected Pix to commiserate and was surprised when instead a very flushed Pix said angrily, “Don’t feel sorry for her. She certainly doesn’t seem to feel sorry for herself. Says she’s fine. Has never been happier.” She shook her head. “Wellesley, Wharton, London School of Economics, for goodness sake.”
The litany was one Faith had heard before, but it was usually recited with pride. She wasn’t sure where Pix was going with it now. “But that makes it harder to understand why they let her go. And don’t you think she’s just putting on a good front? She must be hurting inside.”
“Then she should get an Academy Award. Maybe she’ll talk to you—or Tom. All she is telling us is that she’s taking a break, maybe a long one.”
“Doing what? Has she said?”
“Oh yes, she’s at a job interview now and I have no doubt she’ll get it.”
Th
is was more like it, Faith thought. Smart, attractive, hardworking—what firm would not want to hire Samantha Miller? “Where?”
“The Starbucks at the corner of Charles and Beacon in town. She’s applying to be a barista, probably on the strength of the fancy espresso machine we gave her for Christmas last year, although I can’t imagine they want any credentials other than a willingness to show up.” Pix was grim-faced, but Faith could also see her friend’s eyes were moist. “Oh, and one more thing—I know you have to get to work—the breakup. Caleb didn’t dump her; she dumped him.”
Before Faith could say anything, Pix walked back through the opening in the hemlocks, muttering, “Wellesley, Wharton, London School of Economics.”
Faith got it now.
Eve Anderson peered at her face in the mirror. She’d surrounded it with high-wattage dressing room lights. Hollywood lights they were called and they were totally passé. Like herself? She made a slight moue at her reflection. The rest of the house was straight from the pages of Architectural Digest, but over the objections of her decorator she’d insisted on the lighting in here. She’d never been one to walk away from the truth—or from telling it, even when people didn’t want to listen.
She put both hands on either side of her neck under the jawbone and pulled back. Necks always gave away a woman’s age. She’d need to do something again soon. Sixty may well be the new fifty or even forty, but it didn’t come without work. A lot of work.
Her voice was holding up. She’d never been a smoker, and the booze, well that had only been recently and she could stop tomorrow if she wanted. Today even.
The invitation had arrived last week. She was waiting to RSVP. Let Max sweat. She’d sweated for him plenty of times. But she’d go. Oh yes. Twenty years give or take, since that opening night. Twenty years without another. Just shit cameos in B movies. Commercials. When her agent had called with the most recent offer he’d laughed and told her that when he suggested her, the casting director had said, “Isn’t she dead?”
The Body in the Casket Page 5