The Body in the Cast ff-5

by Katherine Hall Page

  “Honey, she's so little. She doesn't even know what bothering is." But she'll find out, assured a voice from within. "Show me what you've been doing. Have you had lunch yet?”

  Ben wasn't sure. Tom shook his head from his position by the phone, where he was engaged in a remarkably one-sided conversation.

  “Do you want to help Mommy make toasted cheezers?" The chance to reduce a slab of cheddar to crumbs with the cheese slicer was always a winner, and Ben nodded enthusiastically. "Amy can't do it. Amy can't do anything," he happily explained to his mother, who was getting out some sliced ham and tomatoes to add to the sandwiches.

  Tom hung up and came over. He wrapped his arms around his wife and said, `Boy, am I glad you're awake. The phone has been ringing all morning. That was Millicent." He raised his eyebrows. "Our friend regards last night's incident as some kind of divine retribution. Her first words were, in fact, `Isn't it wonderful for the town' "

  “I don't think it's that she's insensitive—well, maybe she is—but in this case, it's simply the old McKinley tunnel vision at work. She sees the goal, her goal, and nothing else."

  “You may be right. At the moment, she's looking for Penny"

  “What! You mean she didn't go home after leaving last night?"

  “She may have gone home, but she wasn't there by the time Charley got there."

  “Maybe she decided not to answer the door."

  “They thought of that. Charley knew Millicent had Penny's spare key and went back to the Town Hall to get it. Millie insisted on going back with them to make sure Penny was all right, but she was gone. Millicent had some idea we knew Penny's whereabouts, and you know how Millie is. The more I said I didn't have a clue, the more she seemed to think I had secreted Penny in the attic."

  “There's certain to be a lot of publicity. Maybe Penny wanted to avoid it. She's definitely of the `a lady only appears in the newspaper three times: birth, marriage, and death' school. Given the way she felt about Alden, it doesn't seem as if this is a crazed grief reaction."

  “It's troubling, whatever her reasons. And speaking of publicity, you're in great demand—we've heard from every newspaper, TV, and radio station on the East Coast. Charley's holding a press conference at three o'clock, so maybe you can'get away with a statement there."

  “Good idea." Faith removed the nicely browned sandwiches, slightly oozing with the melted cheese, from a large cast-iron frying pan, cut them in half, andarranged them on a platter. She poured milk in a pitcher and set both on the table. All this publicity wouldn't hurt business. Her conscience immediately snapped to attention. What kind of person could even think of something like that!

  When she got back from delivering her brief statement about finding the body, it was almost five. Amy was up from her nap. Ben had stoutly refused one, Tom reported. Both Fairchild men looked beat.

  “Why don't you lie down before supper and I'll read to Ben?" Faith suggested. "There's some chili and I'll make a salad. Nothing much."

  “Sounds wonderful. All of it. Don't let me sleep too long, though. I have a ton of work to do. Nobody mentioned anything about when they would release the body for the funeral, did they?"

  “No, but Alden's lawyer from Boston was there. You could call him.”

  Tom nodded.

  “Oh, I almost forgot, two other things," Faith told him. "They've issued a description of Penny statewide and asked that anyone seeing her contact the police."

  “The poor woman. What can be going on?"

  “Everyone is as puzzled as we are"

  “And what's the second thing?"

  “Alden was killed with a piece of wood from the pile of old lumber in the storeroom, so it may not have been premeditated—unless the murderer was extremely familiar with the Town Hall's basement.”

  Tom, his eyes drooping, was clearly not as fascinated by all this as she was.

  “Go to sleep, sweetheart, and we'll talk later when the kids are in bed.”

  After they had finished eating, it was time to tuck Ben and Amy in. When Faith came back downstairs, Tom had started working. She decided to leave him to it. She had work of her own. She got one of his yellow legal pads and sat down at the kitchen table.

  Alan Morris had been at the press conference, representing the movie company, and Faith had feared he would avoid her. In a way, she had once more brought the production to a screeching halt. Instead, when the press left, he had greeted her warmly, expressing concern over her gruesome discovery and asking whether she was all right. She'd thanked him, then wondered if she should ask him about plans for the shoot. Were they going to continue—and, if so, would her services be required? The police hadn't said anything and Alan's own statement to the press had been a short expression of sympathy for the victim's family. Just as she started to say something, he did. She let him go first.

  “Evidently, the police have decided there is nothing to be gained by keeping us captive in our hotel rooms, so we're going to be shooting again tomorrow night. With that area in the basement roped off and an officer at every door, I'm told. Will you be able to supply the same sort of provisions?”

  Faith had assented emphatically. And she'd be sure they brought their own extra tables this time.

  They would have all day tomorrow to get ready and maybe even sneak in a nap, since it would be a late night again, she thought as she began to make a list on the paper in front of her.

  It wasn't a shopping list.

  Somewhere, somehow, there had to be a connection between the two deaths besides their occurrence during the shooting of A. f she wrote down everything she knew, that connection might become clear.

  She folded a sheet in half and neatly labeled one column "Death One" and the other "Death Two." Approaching the whole thing as a kind of social studies report helped. These were events, not people. The first thing to determine was who was present at both times. This neatly enabled her to eliminate all of Aleford save her own catering staff and self. The day Sandra died, there had been no extras around. She had to assume the cast and crew were the same at both, except for Caresse. She hadn't been on the set during the prison cell scene. But everyone else who was at the Town Hall had been.

  So where did that leave things? Plenty of suspects, yet no apparent motives. She let her imagination roam free over the landscape of her mind. What possible connection could Sandra have to Alden? They were an unlikely couple, although Alden might have harbored certain fantasies. Besides, Sandra was so besotted with Max that she wouldn't look at Greg Bradley, certainly a more suitable choice than portly, pretentious Alden. Maybe Sandra was Alden's long-lost illegitimate daughter and she was blackmailing him. But Alden hadn't been anywhere near the set of A when she died. His presence, even before, to doctor the drink, would have been noted. And, if he'd killed her, then who'd killed him? Sandra's mother, a possible avenger, was already dead. According to the police, Sandra's closest connection had been her roommate, who was in California at the time, and Greg Bradley had not given Faith the impression of an impassioned lover. His relationship to Sandra had been mostly wishful thinking.

  But was it so improbable to assume that Alden had been on the set when she died? He'd certainly been there, lurking in the woods, during the shooting of the forest scene. Alden with his binoculars. Faith hadn't ac- tually seen them, and she suddenly realized she'd been barking up the wrong tree. It wasn't a pair of binoculars that Alden had been trying to hide, but a camera. Alden had had an interest in photography—"art" photography. Now where did this take her?

  f the slides he was showing at the Town Hall were nude shots of Sandra, who would have been there watching with him? The most logical choice was Sandra. He might have tried to blackmail her in some way with them. But she was dead.

  Faith decided to approach the subject from another angle: timing. She scribbled away. The neat columns had long gone by the board. Alden had not been killed during a general break, which meant it couldn't have been anyone actively involved in the scene bei
ng shot. One of the townspeople would have been able to slip away, but this didn't link up with Sandra's death. Were there any cast members peripheral to the scene? She made a note on a separate page to ask Dunne, who was no doubt going over the footage and might let her have another peek.

  She started to gnaw on the pencil eraser, then got herself a large ruby comice pear instead. It was a juicy one and she stood up to eat it over the sink. Her meanderings had touched upon Sandra's mother, which reminded Faith that neither victim had had many family ties. This was invariably the first place to look for a perpetrator, since every third grader knew from constant repetition on TV and in the press that you were much more likely to be bumped off by blood than water.

  The pear finished, she rinsed her sticky fingers and sat down again, the sensation that she wasn't getting anywhere increasing steadily. Her interesting but admittedly tenuous theory about Max/Chillingworth did not apply to Death Two, unless—going back to the purported photos—Max was enraged by Alden's voyeurism. Yet unless Max had some well-concealed reason for wanting to sabotage his own film, she was forced to eliminate him from her suspects. But it could be someone else wanting to sabotage the film. Someone who had it in for Max or one of the other actors?

  She thought of Alan Morris, the ever-present, loyal assistant director. He seemed devoted to the movie, and especially its director; however, it was possible he was secretly jealous of Max and resented all the credit Reed got. Certainly, Alan worked incredibly hard. Maybe the one line he got on the screen wasn't enough. Maybe he wanted to move up. He'd been in medical school and might have known Sandra was asthmatic.

  She went back to Alden and Sandra. What in their past lives could have connected the two? They lived a continent apart, but she had been born in Boston. Or was it something completely separate in their pasts that led to their deaths happening coincidentally close together? Was Alden's a copycat crime? The two methods were so different: one quite subtle and obviously premeditated; the other brutal and impulsive.

  She wrote "Find out more about Alden and Sandra's past" on the page with "View footage." Her head was starting to swim. She had two possible leads. It wasn't much.

  Then she added: "Alden on set last Friday? Saw something? Blackmail?" f this was true, she could put Max, Alan, and virtually everyone else at the Pingrees' back in the running. She thought about what Greg Bradley had said: "... a lot of everyday rules get turned upside down." Maybe a lot of those rules got broken, as well.

  What else? There was the question of the soup. It had never been answered. Was it safe to assume Caresse added the Chocolax in a moment of pique, or was it some kind of rehearsal for Sandra's poisoning? She made a note to suggest to Dunne that he press the little girl—oh so gently, of course—to confess to her prank.

  She tried to picture a piece of blank paper. Someone had once told her this was a way to cure yourself of insomnia—or trigger something you were trying to remember. It seldom worked for Faith in either case, not that she'd had much trouble sleeping since Ben was born. The problem was staying awake.

  The sheet stayed snowy white, then a single word appeared: suicide. "Suicide," she wrote down. Not Alden. That would have been quite a feat, but Sandra. There was the slim possibility she had been despondent enough over her hopeless crush on Max to want to kill herself. Or drugs may have been involved. Faith needed to think it through some more.

  Tom came out to the kitchen in search of nourishment.

  “What are you up to, honey?" he asked.

  “I thought if I got something down on paper, I might be able to make more sense out of all of this."

  “And have you?"

  “I've written a lot, but it's mostly gibberish." Faith was disgusted.

  “Well, you can't expect to solve a crime sitting at your kitchen table." Tom was sorry the moment the words left his mouth. "Not that you're involved in solving these." He had been understandably very upset about Faith's near tête-à-tête with Alden's murderer.

  “Why don't I make you a big sloppy sandwich with the entire fridge in it and we can talk.”

  “Swell," said Tom. "I know when I'm being sidetracked. But be sensible, Faith—and haven't I said this before recently?—you have two kids to think of, and me, by the way."

  “Don't worry, love, you won't be stuck with them.”

  “That's not what I mean and you know it." Tom was clearly not in a jovial mood.

  He seemed to feel better after starting to consume a bottle of Samuel Adams Boston Lager and the sandwich of roast beef, red onion, broiled peppers, tomato, lettuce, Swiss cheese, and mayo on sourdough bread his wife set before him. They talked over the various possibilities on Faith's list, but the combined Fairchild forces didn't get much further than she had alone. They were about to give up and go to bed when the phone rang.

  “I'll toss you for it," Tom suggested.

  “No, I'll get it. You had to deal with all those calls this morning. Besides, I'm curious to find out who could possibly be calling at such an unfashionably late hour. What is it? Almost ten o'clock? It can't be anyone from Aleford.”

  Faith wasn't to know where the call came from. "Faith Fairchild?”

  She didn't recognize the voice. Whoever it was had a heavy cold.

  “Yes," she replied, ready for a fund appeal.

  “Keep your fucking nose out of other people's business."

  “Who is this! Hello! Hello!”

  The line went dead.

  She hung up and immediately dialed the police. Charley was on duty. She realized she was shaking. The voice—she couldn't be absolutely sure whether it had been a man or a woman—had sounded so venomous. The warning was clear.

  Charley said he'd be right over and would get in touch with Dunne. Faith went back to the kitchen. It seemed as if she had been gone for an hour. Tom was still contentedly munching.

  “Who was it, honey?”

  Faith's call to Chief MacIsaac had calmed her down. The last thing she wanted was to upset Tom, but it was inevitable in this particular situation.

  “It was a crank, an obscene phone call. Whoever it was told me to mind my own business, essentially."

  “Faith! I knew it! We have to call the police!" Tom looked stricken, the remains of the sandwich in his hand suspended between his plate and mouth.

  “I've already called and Charley is on his way. Honey, don't worry. Nothing is going to happen to me." Faith knew she could take care of herself. It was harder to convince her husband.

  Charley was more agitated than usual, and as they sat debating the ways someone could disguise his or her voice, Faith realized the chief's mind was elsewhere.

  “Charley, is something more bothering you? Because if it's just the call, please trust me. I know it was a warning and I'll be careful. Very careful."

  “I hope so. You're right. The call was the last straw, but frankly, I'm worried sick about Penny. No one's seen hide nor hair of her since last night after I announced that Alden was dead."

  “I wish we could help you, except we haven't heard a thing, either. Millicent's been calling, too. She thinks Tom is hiding Penny.”

  There was a short pause.

  “And of course he's not." MacIsaac's expression turned the statement into a question.

  Faith hastened to defend her husband, who appeared startled.

  “Charley! First of all, Tom is a man of a very high quality of cloth, and they don't do things like that, unless the Nazis or whatever are at the door. And second of all, why on earth would he—we—hide Penny? And why would she need to hide? Do you think she's in some kind of danger?"

  “You tell me. We searched the house from top to bottom today. Every time I opened a closet, I got the willies, the way things have been happening around here." Faith thought she detected a sigh. More garrulous than was his wont, Charley kept talking.

  “Nothing's going right. All those people, and not one saw Alden leave. Too busy stargazing. And he's the only person missing from the audience on the fi
lm"

  “This is a really tough time for you. I hope you'll drop by whenever you want," Tom offered.

  “Thanks, I will. Oh, and you can have the funeral on Friday. I told the Chronicle and they managed to get it into tomorrow's edition. Maybe Penny will show up.”

  The chief was not the only one in Aleford who had the willies. Ever since Alden's body had been discovered, the entire town was looking over its shoulder. Doors that had been kept on the latch for centuries acquired shiny new dead bolts. Children were cautioned to come straight home from school, and hosts and hostesses of social gatherings planned for the weekend found themselves facing a night of TV. No one wanted to be out after dark. Penelope Bartlett was the constant topic of conversation.

  The woman had simply vanished from the known world.

  The baby was crying. Why didn't that woman shut her up? She was certainly getting paid enough, and with her English accent and starched uniforms, she looked like the real thing. A costume. You could be anybody with the right costume. No one knew this better than Evelyn O'Clair did. Makeup and costumes; smoke and mirrors. It was all an illusion. Her whole life.

  Why couldn't the damned nanny keep the baby quiet! Probably didn't want to spoil the kid, but she'd been told more than once that when Evelyn was home, she didn't want to hear a thing.

  She reached forward and turned on the gold-plated hot-water tap. It wasn't like her bathroom at home. That was made up of three rooms, one opening into another, culminating in the largest, which had a pool-sized tub made of marble, with malachite inlays, overlooking the ocean through dramatic floor-to-ceiling windows. But this setup wasn't bad. At least it had a Jacuzzi, and the rose carpeting gave the room a warm glow She leaned back on the inflatable pillow and let her thoughts drift. The perfumed water steamed slightly.