Body in the Bog ff-7

by Katherine Hall Page

  Body in the Bog

  ( Faith Fairchild - 7 )

  Katherine Hall Page

  Faith Fairchild is momentarily shocked to find her husband, the Reverend Thomas Fairchild, embracing Lora Deane -- and relieved to discover the distraught nursery school teacher is merely seeking solace and advice. Lora has been receiving threatening phone calls. And she's not the only resident of tiny Aleford, Massachusetts, who is being terrorized. Ever since local environmentalists have begun protesting the proposed housing development that will destroy Beecher's Bog, the more vocal opponents have become targets of a vicious campaign of intimidation-which is more than enough reason for Faith to launch into some clandestine sleuthing. But when a body turns up in the charred ruins of a very suspicious house fire, Faith is suddenly investigating a murder -- and in serious danger of getting bogged down in a very lethal mess indeed!

  From Publishers Weekly

  The cozy village of Alesford, Mass., may seem an unlikely spot for murder, but such crimes gravitate toward Faith Fairchild, the local minister's wife and self-employed caterer. In her seventh case (after The Body in the Kelp), the sleuthing mother of two and her husband, Tom, find themselves in the middle of a town controversy over the proposed development of Beecher's Bog, a popular nature spot. The disagreement turns nasty when opponents of the planned luxury housing begin receiving poison pen letters. An arson fire and a corpse later, the town's residents are enraged and fearful as they plan the annual Patriots' Day celebrations. Faith keeps an eagle eye out for the murderer, whom she eventually encounters in her own company kitchen. While Page's pacing lacks crispness, some unusual characters-a preschool teacher who has an apparent double life and the feisty town historian who heads up POW! (Preserve Our Wetlands!)-and Faith's good nature generally compensate in this New England mystery, which is accompanied by five recipes, including one for Faith's Yankee Pot Roast.

  KATHERINE

  HALL PAGE

  BODY

  i n t h e

  BOG

  To my friend Mimi Garrett,

  and in memory of her dear mother, Marion Mullison Ellis

  Accidents will occur in the best-regulated families.

  —CHARLES DICKENS

  One

  Seeing another woman in the Reverend Thomas Fairchild’s arms was not a sight his wife, Faith, had expected. She’d flung open the door to her husband’s study prepared to deliver an impassioned account of the infuriating selectmen’s meeting she’d just attended this April evening. Instead, she stood frozen on the threshold, perversely embarrassed at having walked in on something. Then the anger so conveniently close to the surface veered toward another target and she made her presence known by slamming the door—hard.

  As a matter of course, Tom had to comfort the afflicted in mind, particularly the bereaved, and Faith could only hope that the woman, whoever she was, had lost her entire family to the bubonic plague, or else there would be some serious explaining due.

  While she was considering whether to grab said woman by the hair, wrenching her from the good reverend’s grasp, Tom spoke.

  “Faith, you’re home!”

  “Yes, dear,” she replied, quelling the impulse to add, “obviously.”

  She’d no sooner spoken when the woman turned around and abruptly threw herself into Faith’s arms.

  “I’m so glad you’re here!” she cried. So was Faith.

  It was Miss Lora, almost-five-year-old Benjamin Fairchild’s beloved nursery school teacher and sometime weekend sitter for Ben and his younger sister, Amy. Miss Lora was crying. Miss Lora was upset.

  Faith patted Miss Lora’s back, the fleeting earlier notion of clocking her one totally obscured. This was the woman who provided her son with quality care and—possibly more important—actually enabled the elder Fairchilds to get away for a few weekends alone together.

  Faith looked at Tom over Miss Lora’s heaving shoulders. It was a bit difficult to read his expression since, Janus-like, one side of his face was registering deep concern while the other displayed acute embarrassment. He repeated his earlier cogent remark. “Ah, honey, you’re home,” adding, “and early. Good, good, good.”

  Faith again opted for brevity. “Yes,” she replied, trusting that after six years of marriage, Tom could read the volumes between the lines, volumes entitled,

  “What the Hell Is Going on Here?”

  “Lora came to discuss a problem, and I’ve been trying to convince her that it really is a police matter.” Things were looking up. Faith loved nothing better than poking her nose into police matters. But Miss Lora? What on earth could be going on?

  “Absolutely not! No police,” Lora said, fishing around in her pocket for a tissue, with which she proceeded to blow her already-red nose noisily.

  Faith regarded the teacher and thought, not for the first time, that Miss Lora needed to look to a fashion beacon other than Raggedy Ann. Lora wasn’t wearing red-and-white-striped tights and a ruffled apron at the moment, but these were staples of her wardrobe, which also included a number of shapeless denim and corduroy jumpers, gingham blouses, and the like. She had an abundance of mousy brown hair, worn pulled back with a scrunch. Unlike the doll, however, she did not have even a hint of red on her lips or cheeks. What paint there was lay under her fingernails, the result of active participation with her young charges.

  “Why don’t we go into the kitchen and have something to eat while you tell me all about it?” Faith suggested. The makeover could wait. “I assume,” she said to Tom, “that the children are asleep.”

  “Naturally,” he replied, adopting an attitude of injured dignity as he led the way into the parsonage kitchen.

  A parsonage was the last place Faith Sibley Fairchild had expected to be spending her adult years. It had been bad enough growing up in one. Tradition-bound, Faith’s father, the Reverend Lawrence Sibley, donned the cloth, as had his grandfather and father before him. He also clung to Sibley family mores by naming his daughters Faith and Hope. Charity might have followed had not his wife, Jane Sibley, a real estate lawyer, put her well-shod little foot down. Enough was enough.

  Faith had chafed at the fishbowl existence as a “preacher’s kid”—the freely offered, “well-meant” remarks at the way the Sibleys raised their children, ate, drank, even slept, if it was too late. The fishbowl was, however, nicely located on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and that had helped.

  Spurred by her younger sister’s meteoric rise in the world of finance, Faith had finally found her own true calling—as a caterer—and Have Faith was born. After glowing reviews and by much deliciously satisfied word of mouth, she became the caterer of choice for the Big Apple’s glitterati. Have Faith jams, jellies, chutneys, and sauces followed. Then, at a wedding reception, while checking to see whether a tray of the smoked trout wrapped in an herbed crêpe topped with a soupçon of caviar and crème fraîche was holding out, Faith met Tom Fairchild. He’d changed collars, and it wasn’t until they’d talked into the wee hours of the morning that the fact that she’d fallen head over heels in love with a minister hit her full force. It hit her again when she found herself in the small village of Aleford, Massachusetts, after their own wedding.

  She was acutely homesick—and bored.

  She was determined not to sacrifice her standards, and kept her wardrobe and haircut up-to-date. At present, her thick blond hair was chin-length, parted on the side, enabling her to let the curtain fall strategically across her face. Trips home always included the three B’s—Barneys, Bergdorf, and Bloomingdale’s—along with two others—Bendel, and Balducci’s for food, if she had time.

  Yet, the years in Aleford had proved more eventful than she could have predicted. The place was beginning to gr
ow on her, like the ivy and old mosses attacking the brick parsonage walls. Not only had she produced two children and started Have Faith again, but she’d also demonstrated an uncanny knack for getting involved in crime. Getting involved after the fact, that is, having literally stumbled across several bodies and, as she liked to remind herself, in each case beaten the police to the denouement.

  Police matter. The moment Tom referred to the boys in blue—although Chief Charley MacIsaac, thirty-four years in Aleford alone, could scarcely be referred to as a boy—Faith found herself drawn to Miss Lora as never before. Certainly it was interesting to hear that Ben was truly gifted when it came to block building, but nowhere near as riveting as the possibility that Miss Lora might need Faith’s detective skills.

  All in good time. Faith made fresh coffee, the drug of choice in places like Aleford, and cut some thick slices of the Scandinavian cardamom raisin bread (see recipe on page 337) she’d made the day before. Cardamom and coffee went well together and transformed the kitchen into an instant replica of the one in I Remember Mama. Faith had to watch that she didn’t start to nod at Lora’s every word and say, “Ja.” It was an atmosphere calculated to encourage confidences.

  Miss Lora was hungry and slathered her bread thickly with sweet butter. Twenty-two-year-olds didn’t worry about cholesterol, Faith reflected from her vantage point ten—soon to be eleven—years ahead. In your early twenties, you didn’t worry about much. Maybe boyfriend/girlfriend troubles, finding a job, small stuff, but nothing like clogged arteries. So what was Lora worried about? She was eating heartily, yet her face, kittenlike behind the huge horn-rimmed glasses she wore, was still troubled.

  Tom, bless his heart, got right to the point.

  “Lora has been receiving some threatening phone calls.”

  Faith turned to the young woman. “What do they say?”

  Lora swallowed hard and took a gulp of coffee.

  “The third one came about dinnertime. They’ve all been the same. A man’s voice tells me to get out of Aleford if I want to stay healthy. Tonight he said, ‘Get out soon.’ I was sitting in my apartment and I suddenly got so scared, I had to talk to someone, and Reverend Fairchild was the only person I could think of.” Faith wondered why Lora had not sought solace from her own spiritual leader, Father Reeves. At well over sixty, he was balding and paunchy, no match for Tom Fairchild’s good looks, but a resource that should have occurred to Lora. Tom, the only one? Faith knew she hadn’t spoken out loud, but Lora volunteered the answer as if the question had been asked.

  “I couldn’t go to Father Reeves, because—and I know this is an awful thing to say about a member of the clergy—I wasn’t sure I could count on him not to tell my grandfather. I knew I could trust you not to repeat what I said to anyone.”

  Well, it made sense, and it also put the kibosh on any inclinations the Fairchilds might have to go to the police, or to Lora’s grandfather, for her own good.

  Lora Deane was from an old Aleford family. Not old in Millicent Revere McKinley’s book—she traced her ancestors to the famous silversmith’s door and beyond. According to Faith, Millicent’s ancestors were the forward-thinking ones who had adopted Puritan garb and Congregationalism well before the Flood.

  Lora’s family had come to this country from Germany in the mid-nineteenth century and had headed straight for Aleford, where they found employment as farm la-borers and servants. Named Deane when the original name was misspelled by some official along the way, they weren’t too sure where in Germany the family had originated. Nor did they much care. They were Americans and eager to make the most of their new country through hard work. They put their money into land and now owned a few good-sized chunks of Aleford, besides several businesses, mostly in the building trades. Lora’s grandfather Cyrus Deane, called

  “Gus” for so much of his life that only his wife, Lillian, ever used Cyrus, ruled the current clan with an iron fist—never mind the velvet glove.

  “If my grandfather found out, he’d go nuts and make me move in with them. He wants me to, anyway,” Lora explained further.

  Faith was firm. “But you have to take these phone calls seriously and find out who’s behind them. If you tell the police, they can help you get the phone company to put a tracer on your line.”

  “I know that, but I can’t believe anyone would really want to hurt me. Besides, I’m pretty sure I know who it is.”

  “Who?” Faith and Tom asked the question simultaneously.

  “Well, actually two people.”

  Faith’s image of the nursery school teacher was becoming seriously skewed. Two people who might be threatening her?

  “One is my boyfriend, or I should say ex-boyfriend, Brad. Brad Hallowell. Do you know him?”

  “I’ve met his parents at various functions. They moved to Aleford shortly after I did, almost six years ago. He was in college at the time. I think I know who he is, but I’m not sure.”

  “You’re not missing much,” Lora said bluntly.

  “He’s good-looking. I think that’s what attracted me, but all he can talk about are his computers or whatever cause he’s latched onto at the moment—Save the Field Mice, whatever.”

  If Faith was surprised to discover the teacher more interested in the life of the flesh than the life of the mind, she did not show it. Only her husband might have caught the one eyebrow raised a millimeter.

  “He was very upset when I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore. If you can believe it, he backed his car right over the cold frames where I was starting the children’s flower seeds. He isn’t much for children.

  That was another problem—but he could have respected their work!”

  Respect was a key concept in Miss Lora’s room, appearing on banners, spelled out in dried legumes, and on the leather key ring Ben had made Tom for Christmas. Faith had received a slogan-free looped pot holder.

  “But why would he want you out of Aleford? It sounds as if what he really wants is to get back together,” Faith said.

  “Oh, he knows I’d never go back with him, so now he goes out of his way to be nasty. You should see the looks he gives me. It sends chills down my spine. He’d just love to mess up my life and get me all upset.” It did sound plausible, and if it was Brad Hallowell, perhaps Tom could have a quiet word with him. Faith made a mental note to make some discreet inquiries about the young man.

  “You said there were two,” Tom prodded in a low, sincere voice. Lora looked at him adoringly. Faith was used to this.

  “The other person is my brother-in-law, Joey. Joey Madsen.”

  Now this was a surprise. A scorned lover was one thing, but a member, albeit by marriage, of the Deane family!

  “Why would you think it was Joey?” Tom asked.

  Faith was too surprised to talk. Joey Madsen was the prime cause of the fury she’d felt when she’d come home from the selectmen’s meeting. If there was one person in town Faith herself was tempted to threaten, by phone, letter, or eye-to-eye, it was Joey Madsen.

  Lora’s father, Cyrus Deane, Jr., had been married twice. Over twenty years ago, as a relatively young widower with four children ages eight through twelve, he’d immediately remarried. Lora was born a year later, and the second Mrs. Deane decided she had more than enough children to raise. After Cyrus’s un-timely death two years ago, Carolyn Deane had moved to California to escape the cold of New England, much to the Deane family’s bewilderment. They couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Carolyn had recently remarried.

  Joey Madsen had married the oldest daughter from Cyrus’s first family, Bonnie. He’d joined one of the family businesses, Deane Properties, and had recently formed his own company, the Deane-Madsen Development Corporation. Tonight, his presentation of Deane-Madsen’s latest project before the selectmen had been the reason for a packed room—and Faith’s subsequent agitation.

  Despite their climatic partisanship, New Englanders started looking for harbingers of spring in February. Faith’s friend an
d next-door neighbor Pix Miller had called her excitedly one late-February morning to announce the sighting of her first robin—quivering on a telephone wire that was encased in solid ice from the latest storm. Spring meant the turning over of new soil, and the turnees fell into diametrically opposed camps. On one side were the passionate gardeners, armed with tools from Smith & Hawken, clutching the latest book by Roger Swain, the Victory Garden man. On the other were local developers who started digging foundations and framing as soon as nature permitted, anxious to get their houses up and sold before the killing frosts of autumn. One group hear-kened to the ping! sound of a shovel hitting a rock in the unforgiving loam of the region; the other to the chorus of chain saws clearing the way for naturalistic foundation plantings. Good hedges, preferably fast-growing Canadian hemlocks, made good neighbors.

  Joey Madsen had purchased a large tract that most of Aleford had mistakenly assumed was town conservation land. It included a bog, woodlands, and meadows. Joey planned to reduce them to one common denominator—enormous houses on postage stamp–sized lots. Five and six bedrooms, baths to match, exercise rooms—and gazebos. “California colonials,” he called them, clustered in a planned community with shared pool, cabana, and tennis courts. In short, Alefordiana Estates.

  And the new access road would pass between the parsonage and the church, an existing—though unused—right-of-way discovered by Joey. Like other developers, he viewed the town ordinance maps much the way Long John Silver did Captain Kidd’s.

  Faith fast-forwarded past her own irritations and leaned toward Miss Lora. “Yes,” she asked the teacher, “why Joey?”

  “Well, you know he’s going to be building all these new houses out behind the church?”

  “We have heard something about it,” Faith said, muttering under her breath, “and if he does, it will be over my dead body.”

  “He needs a lot of money up front. You know, to pay for the land, put in the roads, and the houses themselves. Once he starts to sell them, he’ll be okay.