Body in the Bookcase ff-9

by Katherine Hall Page

  No one had shouted anything at them in Aleford, but she wasn’t fool enough to think all Aleford welcomed the Averys’ coming, an act that gave a mighty boost to the percentage of minorities in town. Subtle racism was usually more hurtful for its insidiousness than the kind that smacked you right in the face. What kind of a choice was this called? She was tired and her brain wasn’t working at its usual speed. Anyway, it was for sure between a rock and a hard place.

  Hard places. She remembered that guy in Greek mythology who was punished by perpetual hunger and thirst. When he bent down to take a drink of water, it would recede. When he reached up for some fruit, it would be jerked just out of his grasp. Will and she had managed to grab some sustenance—look at this house, a dream house—yet there were so many others who would never have any kind of house, forget the dream part. . . . These were her night thoughts.

  Her sleepless night thoughts.

  She opened the back door and strained her ears. Not a sound. Not even the damn bugs. The whole town was asleep. She was the only one awake; hers the only light she could see. She felt like the last woman on earth, survivor of a nu-clear holocaust. What was producing all these images in her mind night after night? she wondered.

  Girl, you have to get some sleep! she told herself, switching off the lights. This is your home now.

  Believe it.

  Danny Miller, age twelve and a half, was dream-ing that he was in a canoe on the Moose River in Maine. He was with his camp on a wilderness ex-pedition. Everything was perfect. The sky was bright blue; it was warm. There were no mosquitoes. He lifted his paddle out of the water and watched the drops fall from it like diamonds sparkling in the sun. He glanced back over his shoulder to share his happy thoughts—and he gasped! His English teacher was in the stern. He was twice his normal size and laughing his head off. “You didn’t finish your homework, Miller,” he yelled, and waved a list of vocabulary words at Danny. It was miles long, fluttering in the breeze, trailing onto the bottom of the craft. “Oh no!” Danny mumbled, tossing his covers to the floor. “Not more!”

  His mother, Pix, had been known to sleep through thunderstorms, but children talking in their sleep, never. She was by Danny’s side in an instant, picking the sheet and blanket off the floor and tucking them securely around him. She stroked his hair back from his forehead. He had always been a sweaty little boy. “It’s okay, sweetheart, you just had a bad dream.”

  With his eyes still closed, Danny mumbled, “It was so weird, Mom. Mr. Hatch was at camp, making me do more vocabulary words.” Pix went back to bed and crawled under the covers. Her husband, Sam, asked, “Everything all right?”

  “Danny was having a nightmare—and Aleford’s seventh graders are definitely getting too much homework,” she answered, going back to sleep.

  It was a quiet night, too, at the Aleford police station, which shared space with the town clerk’s office in the town hall. Sometime in the sixties, a new one-story addition—lots of plate glass and solid vertical siding—had been added to the ven-erable brick building, which itself was most aptly described by Selectman Sam Miller as “H. H.

  Richardson tripping with Maxfield Parrish.” The quasi-Bauhaus addition had been intended to house the police, but Chief MacIsaac, although new to the post then, had mustered the nerve, and support, to reject it outright. The town clerk had refused to budge also—hence, the file boxes in the lone jail cell. Over the years, the addition had come to serve for such things as small committee meetings—Aleford had a superabundance of committees, everything from the Historic Dis-trict Commission to a committee appointed to select street names—and also as the headquarters for the Community Education Program—Yoga, Mastering Your Mac, Cooking with Heart, Découpage, and the like.

  The chief was getting ready to go home. He’d taken the swing shift, as he occasionally did, to spread things out fairly among Aleford’s few officers of the law. There wasn’t a whole lot of crime in the town, at least not crimes you could arrest people for. Charley MacIsaac had his own opinion of what constituted a misdemeanor, and what got said at Town Meeting, the board of Selectmen’s, and the school committee often qualified.

  He looked at his watch. It was morning now. The next day. He yawned. Dale Warren was late and if he didn’t get his ass into the station soon, Charley would have to call and wake him up—again.

  The door opened. “Sorry I’m late. I have to get a louder alarm!” It was the same thing Dale said every time. “Anything up?” Dale always asked this, too, and always in the same hopeful tone of voice. He was young and didn’t know any better.

  “No, thank God,” Charley said. It was what he always replied. Their customary exchange completed—a kind of handing over of the watch—

  Charley left and walked out to his car. Now, it was a crime, no question there. He didn’t bother to keep it locked. Not even a kid out for the ultimate joyride—the police chief’s cruiser!—would take it. The selectmen had promised him a new one two years ago, but whenever he raised the matter, it got shelved. “Still running, isn’t it?” one of them would invariably point out. “Barely,” Charley would answer.

  It was cold. After a few false starts, the engine coughed feebly and turned over. Charley drove three blocks to his house. It was dark. He’d forgotten to leave a light burning. Funny—his wife, Maddie, had been gone now for longer than they’d been married, but he still hated walking into the empty house knowing she wouldn’t be there.

  Once inside, he turned on the lights and slung his sports jacket, an ancient tweed, on the back of one of the kitchen chairs. He was too tired to go to bed yet, and he reached for the tin of oat cakes that his sister in Nova Scotia made sure was never empty. There was a beer and some juice in the fridge. Not too much else. He ate most of his meals at the Minuteman Café. He drank some juice from the carton and sat down with the tin of cookies. Maddie had wanted to come to the States. Her brother was a cop in Boston, and so at the tender age of nineteen, Charley had found himself changing countries and eventually pursuing a career in law enforcement himself. After the first miscarriage, Maddie had insisted on leaving the city. She’d been sure the air would be better, and besides, didn’t they want their children to grow up as they had—running through the countryside, like on Cape Breton? Aleford had had an opening, and by the time Maddie died, still childless, Charley was Chief MacIsaac.

  He’d been tempted to move back home—he’d never called Aleford that, because it wasn’t—but he knew he wouldn’t fit in anymore in Canada, either. Too many years away. He had been able to sense it on the visits they made each summer, the visits he’d kept on making. In Nova Scotia, they all thought he had a Massachusetts accent. In Aleford, people meeting him for the first time always asked him where he was from.

  He put the lid on the tin, making sure it was tight. Oat cakes lasted forever. You could put some in one of those time capsules, dig it up a century later, and they would taste just as good as the day they were made. Maddie’s had been the best, but his sister’s were close. She’d wanted him to remarry, writing about this widow or that divorcée for years. She’d given up now. He’d only ever wanted one woman, and his sister should have known that. One woman who was the picture of health, then gone in four agonizing months.

  He looked at his watch. The birds will be singing their sweet songs soon, he reflected, and if I don’t get some sleep, I’ll be dead tomorrow.

  The ropes cut cruelly into her skin—old skin, translu-cent, with a network of veins like the cracked surface of the blue Chinese export platters hanging on the wall above the sideboard. Old skin—dry, powdery, and deathly pale.

  They hadn’t killed her. She had thought they would when she walked into the kitchen just before dawn broke and surprised them, figures in ski masks, who in turn surprised, shocked her. She was sure they would kill her right away. Sure when one grabbed her swiftly, clamping his gloved hand hard against her mouth.

  They gagged her, but they needn’t have. There had been time to scream in
that first moment of terror when all of them had suddenly stood so still, but no sound had emerged from her throat.

  Once, as a child, she had tumbled down the attic stairs to the landing below, then lain there unable to call for help—frightened when she couldn’t make a sound. Her mother appeared, said the wind had been knocked out of her, and pulled her on her lap, until gradually the wind came back and she could speak, could cry. It was like that. The wind had been knocked out of her, but mother couldn’t come now.

  They tied her to this chair—her college chair, a heavy black one with the seal emblazoned on the back in shining gold: non ministrari sed ministrare — “Not to be served, but to serve.” A gift from her col-leagues.

  This chair. They had wound the rope tightly across her chest, then around the curved back; bound her wrists to the chair’s smooth arms and her ankles to the front rung—the black paint embellished with touches of gold. A beautiful gift. An expensive gift.

  They hadn’t known an old lady’s habits. Why should they? They were young. Had assumed the house empty or her deep asleep, as were her neighbors, houses still in darkness before the start of the day. But sleep comes at odd times in life’s waning, and she had come downstairs before daylight, as usual, for her tea.

  The pain was increasing. She supposed it would until she couldn’t feel at all anymore. Tears were streaming down her face and the cloth gag around her jaw was wet. She tried to take a deep breath and felt a worse pain. A knife in her side. Her chest felt as if it would explode.

  But they hadn’t killed her.

  She grasped the chair’s arms and began to move her body rhythmically from side to side, trying to throw all her weight each time. It was exhausting, but the chair began to rock back and forth. She could have tried to tumble forward, but she hadn’t the nerve, hadn’t the courage. She’d have to watch the floor come closer and closer toward her. Better side to side. She’d never been a particularly brave woman, she realized. A thought coming into her mind, coming now at the end. There had been no call. She hadn’t been tested. She continued to move her body side to side.

  She was desperate to stop, to rest—to get her wind.

  Finally, she tipped over. Her head struck the bare floor and for a moment she thought she’d lose consciousness. The blackness that came rushing up was so pleasant, so welcome that she nearly gave in to it. Instead she made herself look about, feel the pine boards against her cheek, hold on to reality.

  Her object was, of course, the phone. Mere steps away on a small table in the next room. By pushing with her right foot, she found, as she had hoped, that she could move an inch or so at a time. There was a chance . . . She’d have to rest, but not too much. The full weight of her body pushed her against the side of the chair, crushing her ribs. More pain. Much more.

  Push, then rest, push, then rest. An infant crawling toward a toy. A crab scuttling across the ocean floor.

  Push, then rest. Push, then rest. Push . . .

  Two

  Feeling as if she should don a little red-hooded cape, Faith slipped one last scone into the wicker basket she’d lined with a bright checked napkin.

  In the center, she’d placed two small jars of her jam: wild blueberry and strawberry. The last of the fruits of the previous summer’s labors.

  She opened the kitchen door and stepped out into the sunshine. It was a beautiful day to be paying any kind of call.

  But she wasn’t on her way to grandmother’s house. Sarah Winslow wasn’t a grandmother.

  Faith had heard her speak of a distant cousin:

  “Distance has not increased our fondness” had been her precise words. Other than this, there had never been any mention or sign of family ties, except for a few faded photographs scattered about the house, a daguerreotype on the mantel and, above it, a fine portrait of a rather dour-looking eighteenth-century gentleman with Sarah’s firm chin. What would it be like to be virtually kin-less? Faith wondered. There had been times in her life, particularly during adolescence, when this notion had been quite appealing. Yet at Sarah’s age, for better or worse, Faith imagined, one wanted consanguinity. Perhaps a last chance to mend broken bridges and certainly a longing for people who knew what your parents had been like, and what you were like when you were young. Old age meant the winnowing of shared experience, until often there was only one person—yourself—who could recall a time when your hair had been its real color, when your limbs had moved freely, and when you had been able to seek comfort in a large lap after tears were shed.

  Faith passed the church, its white steeple creating a sharp interruption in the seamless blue sky.

  Next year was the congregation’s two hundredth anniversary at this site, and First Parish was already gearing up for the celebration. They were looking for a volunteer to write a play charting their history. Faith told the committee head they’d be better off doing those tableaux vivants, so popular in the last century—a step up from freeze tag, these tableaux depicted historic scenes as “living pictures.” It had seemed a reasonable suggestion—no lines to learn, no forced rhymes.

  One suggestion had been a play in sonnet form.

  Tom had laughed; the committee head had not.

  Crossing the green, she became aware of her burden. She’d started off carrying the basket by the handle, but now she found it swinging forward in a motion that threatened to change her energetic steps to Shirley Temple skipping. She slowed down and looped the basket firmly in the crook of her right arm. Millicent Revere McKinley’s house, strategically situated, was coming up. Millicent, a crusty descendant through a cousin twice removed of the equestrian silver-smith, had an armchair in front of her bay window, angled to provide a view down Main Street and across the green. It was just behind her muslin curtains, so passersby could never be certain until it was too late whether Millicent had her gimlet eye trained on them. She passed the time in knitting enough mittens, mufflers, and sweaters to stock her own Congregational church’s holiday boutiques and those of several other neighboring faiths. Millicent devoutly believed idle hands were the devil’s playground, or whatever the homily was. Idle tongues, however, didn’t seem to be proscribed, and Millicent’s wagged with the best—or worst—of them.

  Touching on Faith’s forebears, Miss McKinley’s unvarying response was a raised eyebrow and the emphatic declaration “Not from around here.”

  The fact that Faith had managed to get involved in several murder investigations during her sojourn in Aleford was something the town took in stride. After all, many of its residents had singular, if not downright eccentric, interests.

  Millicent herself devoted her waking hours to accumulating information not only about the living but also about the dead—especially the Revere family, a subspecialty being china patterns of the various branches. No, Faith’s stumbling across a corpse or two and her ability to solve the crimes were not hot topics of conversation in the aisles of the Shop ’n Save or at the Minuteman Café, where most town business really took place.

  Faith’s ringing of the alarm bell in the old belfry at the top of Belfry Hill, the bell rung on that famous day in that famous year and subsequently only for the death of presidents, the death of descendants of Aleford’s original settlers, and of course on Patriot’s Day for the reenactment of the battle—now, that was cause for discussion, even years later. A still-warm corpse lying in said belfry and a perpetrator possibily lurking in the high-bush blueberries that grew on the hill did not matter. Even the presence of Benjamin Fairchild, an infant in a Snugli at the time and a continuing local favorite—he, like his sister, was born in Aleford—did not affect the prevailing opinion that Faith should have had the presence of mind to think of an alternative. Someone from here would have.

  Faith now got past the obstacle, studiously not looking in Millicent’s direction. The woman thought she knew everything going on in town.

  And she is right, Faith thought dismally. At least Millicent didn’t know where the minister’s wife was going this morni
ng, but she’d find out eventually if she thought it mattered. Faith carrying a basket was not up there with some of what Millicent had filed away in her Rolodex lobe, a genetic quirk. This store of fact and supposition posed considerable risk at times. There was such a thing as knowing more than was good for you, although Millicent herself would never cede the point.

  There were no woods to pass through on the way to Sarah’s house, though Aleford abounded in arboreal conservation land. It was one of the draws realtors touted, besides the schools. The peace and quiet, too. Suburban serenity. Location, location, location. Certainly little was stirring on Main Street this morning. The commuters had left for work, school buses had discharged their cargo, and the power walkers were on the bike path.

  No wolves, either. Except for the few squirrels chattering away on the green when she walked past, Faith didn’t expect to encounter any wildlife, despite the rumors that had surfaced once again of a coyote at the Aleford dump. She was almost certain the coyote was two-legged, male, and about fifteen years old, running with a pack of like-minded mammals.

  The town did have raccoons, but they wouldn’t be about now. These bandits had become more than a nuisance, with untidy nocturnal forays into garages left open and curbside trash cans.

  From the few specimens Faith had seen from her bedroom window, sizes seemed to run from much larger than a bread box to slightly smaller than a Winnebago, and they were taking the recycling endorsed by their cartoon relation, Ranger Rick, altogether too seriously. The ultimate indignity had occurred when a mother raccoon took shelter in Millicent Revere McKinley’s chimney, producing offspring before Millicent could get the animal-control officer from neighboring Byford—Aleford’s force being limited to bare essentials such as writing parking tickets. Millicent confided to Faith that she was tempted to light a fire and be done with it; the noise was driving her crazy, yet for once she was afraid of public opinion. “Some people could think I was being a mite cruel.” The officer from Byford—“when he finally took the trouble to show up”—was no help, she’d added bitterly, telling her the critters would leave eventually, which they did, but it was a very long “eventually.”