Body in the Bookcase ff-9

by Katherine Hall Page

  Faith was strolling past Aleford Photo now, stopping to wave at Bert and Richard, who also spent their days keeping an eye on everything that happened and didn’t in Aleford center. Ren-aissance men, their moonlighting ranged from car repair, newspaper delivery, and the sale of reli-gious articles by mail to acting as undertakers.

  They also knew a whole lot about photography.

  She peered in the window. As usual, there was a table up front loaded with items gleaned from their attics and basements, an ongoing, extremely eclectic indoor yard sale. She noted that the blue-sparkled bowling ball, object of young Ben Fairchild’s desire, was still up for grabs. But something new had been added. One corner of the table had been carefully cleared and the camera shop was now selling arts and crafts—macramé plant hangers, beaded chains upon which one’s spectacles might be suspended, painted rocks and the like. Aleford Photo was one of the things Faith cherished about Aleford. She could almost imagine herself in a quirky shop in Greenwich Village—the owner’s predilections determining stock, as opposed to market demand. The bowling ball was getting dusty.

  Spying Faith’s basket, Bert and Richard made extremely gross eating gestures from behind the counter and beckoned her into their lair. It reminded her of the fairy tale again and she continued on her way.

  James Thurber had gotten it exactly right in “The Little Girl and the Wolf.” A wolf dressed in a nightgown and nightcap didn’t look any more like a grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looked like Calvin Coolidge. And Faith firmly believed in the moral of Thurber’s fable, too—it was definitely not so easy to fool little girls as it once was, or, she added to herself, big girls, either.

  All this Little Red Riding Hood mental mean-dering took her as far as the town hall. She hadn’t seen Charley MacIsaac in a while and wondered how he was doing. She’d have to invite him over for dinner soon. The fare at the Minuteman Café, where she knew he consumed his meals, ran mostly to things like New England boiled dinners, a culinary concept Faith had never even considered embracing, however lightly. Meat loaf or potpie on the menu meant the cook was feeling inventive.

  Sarah’s house was on the opposite side of the center from the parsonage. It was at the end of Winslow Street, named for “someone everyone has forgotten,” Sarah once told Faith. Millicent, mistress of every significant and insignificant fact relating to Aleford’s past, had corrected Sarah’s unseemly lack of ancestor worship.

  Winslow Street was named for Josiah Winslow, one of the stalwart band standing their ground on Aleford green that famous chilly April morning in 1775. The Winslow Farm had covered many acres in Sarah’s section of town, Millicent informed Faith, citing the appropriate tome in the Aleford History section of the town library—call number included.

  It was typical of Sarah Winslow not to be caught up in the past, taking credit, as some were wont, for deeds done long ago. Faith was always amused at the way these others talked about their ancestors in the present tense, as if the bloodlines stretching ever thinner across the centuries meant immortality for all.

  Winslow Street was the next left, and Faith turned the corner. Lilacs were blooming—enormous old bushes, their weight causing the white picket fences that lined Sarah’s street to lean ever so slightly akimbo; their strong fragrance filled the air. Ladies used to smell this way before their floral eau de colognes—Muget de Bois, Friendship’s Garden—were banished from store shelves by Opium and CK One. Faith pushed open the gate of the Winslow house, built by Josiah’s son, Millicent had told her, and walked up the path to Sarah’s front door. There was no bell, only a heavy brass knocker. Faith lifted it and rapped twice. There was no answer, and after waiting a minute, she knocked again. Sarah was an early riser, so Faith knew she must be up—as indeed anyone except the most infirm would be at ten o’clock in the morning in Aleford.

  There was still no answer. She must be out for a walk, Faith thought, feeling glad that Sarah had recovered. She’d probably gone to the library or down the street to Castle Park, a small green area kept trimmed and tidy, where children sledded in the winter and people brought their lunches at other times of the year. Faith was tempted to keep walking in that direction and see if Sarah was there, sitting in the sun at one of the picnic tables.

  But she might have taken another direction. Faith let the knocker fall one last time, then decided to go around to the rear and leave the basket in the kitchen. The jam had her have faith labels, so Sarah would know who had been there. She’d know anyway. Faith had left similar offerings in the past—in the same basket, which Sarah always conscientiously returned.

  A path, faintly brushed with moss like the her-ringbone brick one in front, wound around the small house to the backyard. Several fruit trees were blooming and an ancient willow’s long yellow-green branches drooped toward the ground.

  No one in Aleford ever locked their back doors, and they often neglected the front entrances, as well. Faith knocked again at the rear for form’s sake. Sarah would certainly have heard the front knocker from her kitchen. A discreet starched white curtain covered the door’s window. Faith turned the knob, pushed the door open, and stepped in.

  Stepped in and gasped.

  The room had been completely ransacked. All the cupboards were open and the floor was strewn with broken crockery, as well as pots and pans. Drawers of utensils had been emptied. The pantry door was ajar and canisters of flour and sugar had been overturned, a sudden snowstorm on the well-scrubbed old linoleum. A kitchen chair lay on its side. Another stood below a high cabinet, its contents—roasting pans and cookie tins—in a jumble below.

  Faith dropped the basket and started shouting,

  “Sarah! Sarah! It’s Faith! Answer me! Where are you? ”as she moved toward the door to the dining room. She pushed it open; Sarah wasn’t there.

  Nor was she answering. Still frantically calling the woman’s name, Faith ran through the living room, then upstairs, searching for her friend.

  The scene in the kitchen was duplicated all over the house. It looked like a newsreel of the af-termath of a tornado. Things were in heaps on the floors, drawers flung on top. But there was no sign of Sarah. “Sarah!” Faith kept calling her name, not sure whether to be relieved or terrified at the woman’s absence.

  A break-in. Burglars. But surely they wouldn’t have entered while someone was home? They must have seen Sarah leave. There had been no signs of life on the street, most of the residents having gone away for the day or already at work.

  And from the look of things, whoever had been here had worked fast. Sarah couldn’t have been in the house. Sarah had to be all right.

  In Sarah Winslow’s bedroom tucked under the eaves, the bed had been slept in, but the quilt that usually covered it was still hanging on the quilt rack next to the dormer window. The rack stood in its usual place, the spread neatly folded, a note of normalcy, but a discordant one in all this chaos.

  Everything else was in total disarray. Shoes and clothes from the closet and lingerie from the bu-reau drawers had been flung onto the floor. Faith felt sick at the thought of hands touching Sarah’s most intimate things, pulling her orderly universe apart. One pillow had been stripped of its case. The other showed the faint indentation where Sarah’s head had rested; the sheet was slightly pulled back. Faith’s heart sank.

  Sarah would never have left her house with an unmade bed.

  But where was she? It seemed as if Faith had been in the house for hours, but she knew no more than a few minutes had passed. It was time to call the police. She instinctively looked for a phone on the bedside table beside the old four-poster—the bed in which Sarah had been born. This was a connection to the past Sarah did treasure, and she’d mentioned it several times with pride—mentioned that she intended to die in it, too.

  Faith’s heart was pounding so hard, her ribs ached.

  Where was the phone? There should be one next to the bed, as there was next to Faith’s, but of course Sarah wouldn’t have seen the need for more than
a single instrument in the house. Instead, there was a stack of books, or the remains of one. Most were on the floor, facedown on the hooked rug, which was the only covering on the wide floorboards where Sarah placed her feet each day upon rising—had placed them for how many years?

  Yes, there would be only one phone and it would be downstairs, discreetly hidden away, a concession to the exigencies of modern life, an essential intrusion. Faith went to look. A quick glance back in the kitchen revealed nothing.

  Sarah’s phone turned out to be in a small book-lined den off the living room—a room that was out of sight and one Faith had neglected to enter in her rush through the house and up to the second floor.

  It was there that Faith found the woman, lying on her side, tied to a chair, a gray pallor covering her face, her body still. Completely still. Incongruously, her head was resting on the lowest bookcase shelf, her shoulder wedged in among her beloved volumes.

  “Sarah! No, please God, Sarah!” Faith felt for a pulse. There was none, but Sarah’s skin felt slightly warm. Fighting back sobs, Faith grabbed the phone on the small table just out of reach of the motionless body. She dialed 911, new this year to Aleford. Help would come. Help would come fast. Help would come too late.

  She ran back to the kitchen, found a knife, and returned to the den. She sawed away at the ropes, releasing first Sarah’s hands and feet—the feet clad in soft white bedroom slippers. Then she cut the ropes from Sarah’s chest and eased the old woman’s body out of the chair and onto the floor.

  There were horrible bruises on her wrists and ankles. Faith started CPR, all the while praying for a miracle. As she worked on the lifeless form, tears streamed down her face and she could scarcely keep herself from giving way to grief. This was Sarah! Sarah, her friend.

  The sirens wailed and Faith jumped to her feet, rapidly running into the hall and throwing open the front door to let the EMTs in. When they all reached the den, she stood back watching, her back against a bookshelf. She prayed again, prayed that the professionals would accomplish what she could not. Sarah would breathe again.

  Of course she would breathe again. She had to!

  She was still warm. There was still life! Now the sobs did come and Faith turned away from the scene in front of her, pushing her forehead hard against the row of books. There had been books on the floor beside Sarah’s body. One small volume had fallen on her imprisoned hand—a leather-bound presentation copy of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s A Few Figs from Thistles. Lines from the poems crowded into Faith’s thoughts: Sarah did not burn her candle at both ends, yet it still gave a lovely light—“But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends—” Foes. Foes, not friends.

  Tom. She had to call Tom. But she couldn’t move, not with the activity that was going on so desperately a few feet away. The EMTs had put a CPR mask over Sarah’s face, using a bag to force air into the old woman’s lungs, creating an object out of an individual.

  Chief MacIsaac came to the door of the room, looked around quickly, and pulled Faith into the hall. He steered her toward a chair and she sat down automatically. Standing over her, he began a series of terse questions. “When did you get here? Did you see anyone leaving? A car? A van?” He was almost as upset as Faith was, she realized.

  He’d known Sarah Winslow much longer.

  Faith looked at her watch. She had left her house less than thirty minutes ago. “I got here about ten o’clock. It was twenty of ten when I left the parsonage. And there was no one around here.” She shut her eyes, envisioning the quiet street, hoping for a memory of anything out of the ordinary, yet there was nothing. “No cars. Not even on Main Street, once I was out of the center.”

  “How did you get in?”

  “The kitchen door was open. Sarah didn’t answer when I knocked at the front and I thought she must have gone for a walk. I had brought her some scones.” Now they were lying with the rest of the mess in the kitchen.

  The EMTs yelled at them to get out of the way and then raced past with Sarah on a stretcher, heading for the ambulance.

  “I need to go with them,” Faith told Charley emphatically. “She needs someone with her.” He looked at her sorrowfully. “Go ahead. I’ll get ahold of Tom. We’ll meet you at the hospital.” She knew what he wasn’t saying. That Sarah wouldn’t know who was with her, now or ever.

  Not wanting to believe it, Faith got in the back of the ambulance before anyone could tell her to get out. It was still a gloriously sunny day, those lilacs blooming in dooryards, but she kept her eyes on the figure in front of her. Sarah was now connected to all sorts of tubes and machines. A mint green chenille bathrobe chastely covered her nightdress. The sash was tied in a small bow. Tied by Sarah when she’d put her robe on. Sarah!

  Sarah Winslow couldn’t be dead. It couldn’t be true.

  Faith Fairchild hated hospitals. It wasn’t fears of her own mortality or infirmity, although these were no strangers. It was the sense of being in a parallel universe where time stopped, day and night were one, and all the inhabitants expected bad news.

  She was sitting beside Tom in a large waiting room at the Lahey clinic in Burlington, the hospital closest to Aleford. Chief MacIsaac was pacing in the corridor. Several friends from the parish and some neighbors rounded out the silent group. The room was filled with similar groups of people, the only difference being size and intensity of distress. One cluster sat close together, chairs touching, the table in front of them littered with what looked like many days’ worth of empty coffee cups and half-eaten sandwiches.

  One man had an unlit cigarette in his mouth. A woman slept, her head on the shoulder of an older woman next to her.

  Faith remembered the vigil they had kept after her father’s sudden heart attack. She’d raced to the hospital; then everything slowed to a stand-still while they waited, and she had to look at her watch to know whether it was 2:00 a.m. or 2:00 p.m. Lawrence Sibley had pulled through, but Faith’s mother developed a permanent wariness, a watchful look that had never entirely disappeared.

  Then there was the time Ben had had surgery to put tubes in his ears after a year of horrendous ear infections. It had been performed at Children’s Hospital in Boston. There, Faith had quickly felt ashamed of her nervous thoughts as she caught the murmured words of other parents in the cheerful waiting room—words like chemo and shunt, which revealed the enormity of what those parents were facing. Her “What if he doesn’t wake up?” anesthesia anxiety was ter-rifying, but his surgery was routine—and the Fairchilds had never been there in that hospital before. Not like those others—veterans, fighters, survivors.

  Hospital smells.

  It wasn’t just the disinfectant or lack of air moving about. It was the smell of fear, of disease, of death. She stood up and went to get some more coffee.

  Sarah Winslow’s life on earth was officially declared at an end at 11:36 a.m. A young doctor came in with the news. “I’m sorry,” he said to them. “It was her heart—cardiac arrest. We would have had to have reached her immediately to have done anything, and even then it might have been too late.”

  Was he saying this for her benefit? Faith wondered. Reassuring her that if she had left for Sarah’s a half hour, an hour earlier, it would still have been of no use?

  “Would she have had the heart attack if she hadn’t been attacked?” Faith had to know.

  “I can’t really say until we do the autopsy, but the combination of shock and the exertion of trying to reach the phone could have brought it on.” His face darkened. “Bastards! But that’s for the police . . .” After the explosion of anger, his voice trailed off. He’d failed.

  Tom stood up. “I’d like to be with her for a few minutes, if I may.”

  “Of course, Reverend, come with me.” He turned to the rest of them. “Anyone who wishes may come.” He smiled bleakly. “She looks very peaceful.”

  So they all ended up in a curtained-off cubicle in the emergency room, jammed among a multitude of technological advances, to say a final good-bye
to Sarah. A good-bye to Sarah, who in the natural order of things should have slipped off some night, years hence, in her own bed—

  where she had first seen life and where she had expected to leave it.

  The lights had been dimmed and all the machines turned off, but a few feet away the emergency ward was glaringly bright and noisy. Faith found it hard not to think about what was going on out there: who would survive; who wouldn’t—like Sarah.

  She did look peaceful—asleep, except there wasn’t a hint of movement at her chest. The bathrobe was gone, but she was in her own nightgown, a flannel one with tiny pink rosebuds, buttoned to her throat. Her hands lay on top of the white hospital blanket. A nurse came up behind Faith and said softly, “This was in the pocket of her bathrobe.” It was Sarah’s mother’s engagement ring, an old-fashioned diamond solitaire that Sarah wore on her right ring finger. She had managed somehow to get it off and hide it. Faith slid it on Sarah’s finger, then held her cold hand.

  The ring represented a small victory, but a victory nonetheless. The thieves hadn’t gotten everything, and Faith imagined the pleasure the old woman must have gotten from this in her last hours. I was not defeated and will not be—I saved my ring and will try to get to the phone. It was Sarah’s last message to her friends.

  Tom said a prayer and several people wept quietly. Charley MacIsaac abruptly left the room.

  Faith was too sad to cry anymore.

  The Fairchilds were sitting in front of the hearth again, but tonight they were close to each other on the couch. Again, the children were sound asleep upstairs, but neither Faith nor Tom was in-clined to follow their example, despite how exhausted they were. Faith knew that the moment she closed her eyes, all she would see would be Sarah obscenely tied to her chair, toppled over on the bookcase shelf—dead.