Body in the Bog ff-7

by Katherine Hall Page

  She began to walk more rapidly. The sky was growing overcast and she didn’t have an umbrella. It had been sunny and warm when she’d left the house.

  There was a sudden rustling sound in the trees to the left of her. She knew it was absurd, but she felt nervous and picked up her pace even more. The rustling increased and followed suit. She stopped. It stopped. Now she was panicky. There was no way out.

  No houses. No way to get off the path until the next cross street—a long distance ahead. She couldn’t run off into the woods on the right side. If someone was following her, there was nothing to stop the pursuit and she’d be even farther away from help. She looked into the woods, venturing to take a step closer, but she could see nothing beyond the trees. Whoever it was stayed hidden, taking great care not to be recognized.

  The thought chilled her.

  Faith started walking again, then ran. Ran flat out.

  The watcher in the woods increased speed. When and where would the attack come? Her heart was racing.

  If only she could make it to the street! If only someone would come along! She opened her mouth to yell for help and at first no sound came out. Then she managed a strangled cry. She was getting breathless.

  Who will be next? That’s what she’d wondered aloud with Tom. The question had been answered.

  Faith was next.

  Nine

  To her left, she could hear her stalker coming closer.

  Faith looked frantically ahead for the cross street. She had never run so fast in her life. She focused all her thoughts on her legs, pushing and straining to keep going. There was no hope of screaming now; she was gasping for breath. Any second, her attacker would be at her back. She heard a whooshing sound and turned her head, even as fear produced a fresh burst of speed.

  It wasn’t an assailant. It was a bicycle. A venerable lady’s Raleigh with a wicker basket dangling from the handlebars.

  It was Millicent Revere McKinley.

  “Help!” Faith grabbed at the bike. “There’s someone in the woods. Someone’s after me!” Millicent reached into the basket and took out a pocket siren. She pressed the button and produced the desired effect. Faith put her hands to her ears and sat down in the middle of the path, panting. After a while, Millicent twisted the canister and the noise stopped.

  “It’s not a good idea to sit there. You’re smack in the way of traffic,” she pointed out. “Now, what’s going on?”

  Faith wanted to hug her and did. It was that kind of moment. Fleetingly, she realized that this was the second time Millicent had come to her aid in a time of great peril. Faith wondered if she would have to present the woman with her firstborn or perform some kind of Herculean labor such as cleaning the moss from all the headstones in the old burial ground to even the score.

  It took a moment for her to get her breath and arrange her thoughts.

  “Someone was stalking me. I could hear the person but couldn’t see who it was—not even if it was a man or woman. Every time I stopped, the noise stopped and whoever it was hid. But why wasn’t I attacked right away? Not that I’m sorry.” Now that the danger was passed, Faith was puzzled. There had been plenty of time before Millicent happened by. Had it been some sort of sadist who had been delighting in her terror?

  “You’re sure it wasn’t an animal, a dog?” Millicent asked.

  “I’m sure. An animal doesn’t increase speed when you do and slow down when you do. And whoever it was kept moving closer to the path. If you hadn’t come along, I don’t know what would have happened.” Faith’s last words were sticking in her throat.

  They had moved and were sitting on the grass off to the side of the path. Millicent’s bike was resting ma-jestically on its kickstand.

  “I use the bike path often. Much safer than the street, but I always carry my horn. You never know what undesirables could be lurking about, and I suppose that’s who it was—a tramp in the woods, some such person.” She looked Faith straight in the eye.

  Neither woman believed for a second that it had been a tramp.

  “Maybe,” Faith said. “I can’t imagine who else it could have been.” Which was the truth.

  “I’ll see you home,” Millicent offered courteously.

  Faith had almost forgotten she was not going straight home. “Oh dear, the children. They’re at the playground. I was on my way there.”

  “Then we’ll go there.”

  Millicent got back up on her steed and rode at a stately pace next to Faith, who was happy to trot rapidly alongside. She wanted to get off the bike path as soon as possible.

  “Where were you going?” The last Faith had seen of Millicent, she was deep in conversation with those who lingered on after the meeting.

  “I was on my way to see Chief MacIsaac. Right after you left, we realized that we can’t plan any sort of meeting until we know when the funeral will take place, and there are one or two other things I want to discuss with Charley in person. We would not want to offend anyone by having the meeting on the same day as the funeral. It would be in extremely poor taste.” Faith agreed. She was tempted to tell Millicent not to mention the incident on the bike path, but Charley might as well know sooner than later. Also, Millicent wouldn’t listen to her anyway.

  They reached Reed Street and turned toward the playground. Faith felt as if she was stepping back into place, back into her normal life. Kids were running around like crazy; their mothers were sitting in small groups, talking and every once in a while retrieving an overly ambitious toddler from the big slide or settling a dispute about whose turn it was for the tire swing.

  Amy was in the sandbox and Ben was on the mon-key bars. The sitter was halfway between, reading Hermann Hesse. Millicent bade Faith farewell, looked around at the scene with the air of someone visiting the zoo, and rode off. Without Faith beside her, she rode speedily and with expertise, negotiating hand signals and turns with aplomb. Speed. If she hadn’t ridden so fast . . . Faith didn’t want to think about it.

  She paid the sitter, thanked her, and led the children home. Amy had collected as much sand in her shoes and clothes as a day at the beach produced.

  Tom was waiting for them. “I finished my sermon.

  It’s a gorgeous day and we need to go someplace.” He looked at his wife. “What’s happened? Are you okay? You look—”

  She interrupted him. “Pas devant les enfants,” she said. Definitely not in front of the children. She put Amy in her high chair with a cup of yogurt and cut-up strawberries, then Ben at the table with the same. She drew Tom into the living room and told him what had happened.

  He was terribly upset. As soon as she finished, he went to the phone and called Charley. Chief MacIsaac arrived in time for a bowl of squash soup, bread, and cheese.

  “What do you call this? It’s good.”

  “Butternut squash soup—good for us, too. I added lots of nutmeg and a little cream,” Faith told him.

  She’d had some herself and was feeling better. She took the kids upstairs. Amy went down for her nap—

  you could set the town hall’s clock by her—and Ben went to his room to “rest,” protesting vociferously all the way, “But I’m not tired!”

  When she returned, Charley was eating some apple crisp Tom had dug out of the refrigerator. Tom had a plate of it, too. Both portions were crowned with a large scoop of ice cream.

  “But you didn’t warm it up,” Faith protested. “The ice cream is supposed to melt.”

  “Tastes fine. Now let’s talk about your adventure this morning. Millicent filled me in, but I want to hear it from you.”

  Faith described what she now considered her marathon and ended with a new idea.

  “It had to be somebody I know.”

  Tom nodded. “I thought of that right away. Otherwise, why not come out immediately and why take so much trouble to hide each time you stopped? You didn’t even catch a glimpse of any clothing, right?”

  “No, not even the size of the person, although to make tha
t much noise, he or she couldn’t have been too small. But that doesn’t give us much to go on.”

  Charley was getting depressed. Things were totally out of control. “I’ve called Dunne and should hear back from him this afternoon. What are your plans for today? Going to stay put?”

  “No,” said Faith.

  “Yes,” said Tom.

  They looked at each other and smiled for the first time since Faith had come in the door.

  “I have got to get out of the house,” she said. Out of the town, too, she added to herself. Aleford had lost some of its charm lately. “I want to go someplace with lots of people, where no one knows us. Someplace indoors. No nature walks.”

  Tom nodded. Faith was right.

  “The Boston Museum of Science it is, then,” he said. “I can’t think of anyplace more crowded on a Saturday afternoon than that, except the Children’s Museum maybe, but we were just there, or the Aquar-ium, only I’m not in the mood for sharks.”

  “Neither am I,” his wife agreed.

  It was late, but Faith and Tom were still sitting up in the kitchen. They’d eaten at Figs in Charlestown, great thin-crust pizza—tonight’s the house specialty: figs and prosciutto with Gorgonzola cheese.

  There wasn’t a sinkful of dirty dishes staring them in the face, but that was the prevailing mood in the room. The kids were finally asleep—wired after the museum, even Amy.

  “Hungry?” Faith asked in a desultory voice. She knew the answer.

  “No, thanks. Want anything to drink?” Faith thought for a moment. The occasion didn’t call for champagne. “Pour me some seltzer, will you?

  The prosciutto made me thirsty. I’m going to get some paper. Maybe if we write this all down, we’ll be able to make some sense out of it.”

  “I doubt it, but you get the pad and I’ll pour the libations.”

  Faith was a great believer in organization. She couldn’t cook in a messy kitchen, and while she didn’t always measure ingredients, when she committed a recipe to print, everything was precise. She approached crime the same way.

  “All right, let’s list the targets. In some cases, he or she was successful; in some, not.”

  “Thank God,” Tom said. “But shouldn’t we list suspects? Isn’t that the way it’s usually done?”

  “Do you want to help or not?” Faith was understandably abrupt after the day she’d had.

  “I want to help. It was only a suggestion. Targets it is. Much easier, too.”

  “That’s the idea.” Faith patted his hand. “Now, the first was Margaret, then Nelson, then Joey, then me.”

  “What about the people who received the letters, and Lora?”

  “For now we’ll start with bodily harm, known attempts; then we can add all the other information.” She folded the paper into columns and wrote each name at the top. “Think suspects, means, motive, opportunity—all the stuff you read about. Also, anything else that comes to mind. For instance, Margaret got one of the letters.” Faith wrote “letter” in the column, followed by “threat”—that “if you want to stay healthy” business. The Batcheldors’ letter had been the only one to contain a threat. Faith put an asterisk next to the threat and wrote, “Same wording as Lora’s calls” at the bottom of the page, after another asterisk.

  She continued. “Now, in terms of suspects, it could have been anyone in Aleford. Maybe we can get at it through motive.”

  “The only scenario I can think of is that Joey, or someone else in the family, came across the arson attempt too late to do anything about saving the house, hit her—maybe not with the intent to kill her—then got panicky and left when it became clear she was dead.”

  “I agree, and therefore, the likeliest suspect is Joey.”

  “Okay, but what about the attack on Nelson? Let’s assume it’s the same person. Nelson has said over and over that he has no idea who would have wanted to harm Margaret, so what would the murderer gain from Nelson’s death? Nelson doesn’t know anything.”

  “Gain—that’s what’s missing. Usually there’s a common link there. Who would profit from Margaret’s death? Nobody. The same with Nelson’s. Unless the Batcheldors have all sorts of hidden assets.

  Certainly they spent a fortune in bird seed, but apart from that, they never threw money around.”

  “True, but the link may not be gain. It could simply be to avoid exposure.”

  “You certainly seem to have the lingo down, darling.”

  “I try. I’m switching to beer. You want one?” Faith shook her head. She wanted to keep her mind clear.

  “The suspects in Nelson’s case are more limited,” she said. “The chloral hydrate had to have been ad-ministered sometime during the breakfast, which means it had to have been someone who was there.”

  “It’s beginning to look more and more like Joey. He may have thought Nelson knew something—or Nelson may know something and not know he knows it.

  That makes more sense than it sounds.”

  “I know,” Faith said, and wrote it down. “But Joey didn’t kill himself—and he is in no condition to go scampering in the woods after me.”

  Tom looked disheartened. “We do have a problem.

  Unless Joey’s killer was completely unrelated to the other two crimes and that killer thinks you saw something when you discovered the body.”

  “It was a person he knew,” Faith mused. “Who disliked him but might have seemed like a friend, or at least an acquaintance?”

  “People in the construction field, perhaps, some of the POW! members, and from what you told me about your conversation with Gus, he might be a possibility.”

  “If Gus found out that Joey had killed Margaret and tried to kill Nelson, would he have taken the law into his own hands? He wouldn’t have wanted his family’s name dragged through the courts—and the tabloids.

  It’s also possible that it was Joey all along who sent the letters to try to intimidate POW! and made the calls to Lora. If Gus found all this out, he might have seen getting rid of Joey as justifiable homicide, an extreme form of citizen’s arrest.”

  “I can’t believe Gus Deane would kill anyone, though. Especially a family member.” Tom sipped his beer slowly.

  “He was at the breakfast, remember. And he adores Bonnie. If he thought Joey was hurting her in some way . . .” Faith was scribbling madly. “And what about Bonnie herself? She’s very tough. Suppose she found out what Joey had been up to?” Faith added her name. Bonnie had been at St. Theresa’s. She’d been wearing a voluminous snuff-colored skirt with a wide apron of blue-striped mattress ticking—plenty of room for pockets. Plenty of room to hide a bottle of medicine.

  “And you? What would these people have against you?” Tom asked.

  “I must be getting close to the truth—which leads me to my plan.” She hadn’t intended to tell Tom, but they were in this together now. “I want to give whoever it is another chance, but before you say anything, this time it would be perfectly safe. I’d be a decoy, let it be known that I do know something. But have John or Charley in the pantry or wherever.”

  “You must be out of your mind!” Tom exploded.

  Faith was disappointed. She’d thought he understood.

  “Tom, it’s the only way to stop this. Someone else may get killed.”

  “And it’s not going to be you.”

  Faith kept quiet. Tom finished his beer.

  “Well, what have we learned?”

  “Besides the fact that I married a crazy woman?” He tempered his remark with a long kiss.

  “Besides that.”

  “One of our killers, if there are indeed two, was someone at the Minuteman breakfast. Although, the notion that there are two seems unimaginable.” Faith was casting her thoughts back to Patriots’

  Day morning, assembling the cast of characters: Gus, Joey, Nelson, Bonnie, Brad . . .

  “Brad Hallowell. We haven’t talked about him.”

  “How does he fit into all this?” Tom had slipped his arm
around his wife’s shoulders. She smelled good—

  having put Amy to bed, Faith had a whiff of the corn-starch powder she used for the baby mixed in with her Arpège.

  “Suppose he was the person Margaret was meeting at the unfinished house on Whipple Hill. He sees Joey kill her, then tries to blackmail Joey into dropping the Alefordiana Estates plan. When Joey refuses, Brad kills him.”

  “What about the attack on Nelson?”

  “Nelson knows Margaret was meeting Brad at the house. Maybe Brad has a ski mask, too, and was ca-vorting in the bog with them. Brad is satisfied now that Nelson is too terrified to say anything and is letting him live. He may be certain there’s no evidence to tie him to the crime.”

  “And he made the calls to Lora and threw the brick?”

  “Yes—and cut the hoses on the excavator. Joey would never damage his own property, unless he really did want to frame POW! But I think he would have picked something less expensive.”

  “All the pieces fit so far, but there’s the attack on you. You guys are on the same team,” Tom pointed out.

  “True, but Brad knows I’ve been looking into things. I implied that I’m not satisfied with what the police have been doing—or not doing. I said as much at the meeting this morning.”

  “I remember,” Tom said glumly.

  “And Brad was sitting right there.”

  “He certainly is temperamental. I thought he was going to blow his stack when I said I’d quit if we didn’t call off Town Meeting for now.”

  “Exactly. Lora said as much, too, when she first told us her suspicions about her caller.” That night, Lora in Tom’s arms, seemed a century ago. And what about Lora? Lora, the lady of at least two faces, if not a thousand. Could she have been in this with Brad and their whole breakup a smoke screen? Then who was Mr. Miata?

  Faith wrote a few more hasty notes.

  “Let’s call it a day—or rather, it is day. It’s tomorrow already, and if I’m not mistaken, it will be show time in a few hours.”

  Tom pulled her to her feet. “Show time? Not exactly. But I do have plenty to say.” Joseph Madsen’s wake was Sunday evening. The funeral would be held at St. Theresa’s early Monday.