Body in the Bookcase ff-9

by Katherine Hall Page

  “What kind of animal does something like this?

  She was a helpless old woman!” It was the question Faith had been asking in various ways since they had returned from the hospital. Tom still didn’t have an answer even if Faith had been asking a real question, rather than venting her rage and sorrow.

  Faith continued: “With some deaths, you can say the person has been released from suffering further pain, like an incurable illness, or there are the cases where someone’s really gone already. Then there’s the opposite—people who go quickly and don’t suffer. It’s horrible for everyone left, but not bad for them, except they’re dead, of course. But they didn’t suffer. Do you see what I mean?”

  Tom nodded. He’d heard Faith on this subject before. She wanted both of them to go simultaneously some unspecified year very far in the future.

  “But Sarah wasn’t sick, she didn’t go quickly, and she did suffer. When I think how frightened she must have been!”

  “Faith, it’s horrible, but you can’t let it obsess you. There was nothing you could have done.” Tom touched upon the thing bothering her most.

  “Charley said the burglars must have entered the house before dawn, expecting she would still be asleep. They may have tried other doors in the neighborhood until they found one open. Or they may have targeted Sarah.”

  Nothing you could have done. Faith sat quietly for a moment, her head on Tom’s shoulder.

  She hadn’t been able to do anything, anything at all. Not even provide some solace in Sarah’s last moments. She focused on her husband’s last statement.

  “But the only really valuable things she had were her books, and those weren’t touched. If you had checked out the neighborhood, looked in windows, whatever, you would have seen that she didn’t have a stereo, computer. Of course, her house was the most isolated on the street, at the end, with the driveway winding around the back.

  You wouldn’t be able to see a car or whatever was being loaded, unless you were back there, too.

  But still, why would they want to rob her house?

  It’s small, nothing to suggest fenceable goods.” They were drinking Delamain cognac and Faith poured herself a bit more. She was beginning to hope she could sleep.

  “Charley mentioned there were several very old small Oriental rugs missing. And she had silver,” Tom said, reaching for the decanter himself.

  “It was in a drawer in her sideboard. They took the whole drawer for convenience sake.” His tone was bitter. Somehow this disregard for a perfectly good piece of furniture kept popping into his thoughts. He was well aware of how minor the act was compared to the rest, but to ruin a perfectly good chest . . . “And there was some good jewelry. Family stuff. Her neighbor said it was in the flour and sugar canisters. Sarah thought they were a good hiding place. Better than the freezer, which was where her neighbor was keeping things. That’s how it came up.

  “Thieves often prey on the elderly, believing they hide money or other valuables in their homes, not in safety-deposit boxes—it’s probably a legacy of the Depression years. Like my great-aunt Agnes with the money between the plates.” Faith remembered the incident well. She and Tom had been helping Tom’s parents and some of the other Fairchilds, who virtually colonized the area around Norwell and Hingham on the South Shore, to pack up the late Agnes’s effects. Marian Fairchild, Tom’s mother, had been ready to stack an unattractive pile of chipped Nippon plates in a box for the church rummage sale, when Tom spied a familiar-looking green piece of paper sticking out from between two of them. It turned out that several Ben Franklins were cushioning each layer of the china, a couple of thousand dollars in all.

  After this, they started all over again, doing a thorough search of the house and what had already been sorted or tossed. They found more bills with the dust rags, some between carefully saved and ironed wrapping paper, and more in Baggies at the bottom of a giant box of mothballs. To this day, Marian still fretted about what might have been unknowingly overlooked and discarded.

  Faith held the small brandy snifter in both hands and finished the amber liquid. The warmth hit her all at once. Her face flushed and she was suddenly very sleepy.

  “Let’s go to bed, darling. And we’ll think what we can do about this in the morning.”

  “Do?” Tom stood up and pulled his wife into his arms. He looked her straight in the eye. “We will give Sarah a beautiful service and hope that the police will be successful in their investigation of this terrible crime.” Drowsy as she was, Faith was well aware of the emphasis her spouse was putting on “their” investigation. “Other than that,” he continued as they climbed the stairs together, “there really isn’t anything either of us can do.”

  Faith didn’t say anything. It offered the path of least resistance. Besides, she didn’t know what she could do. At least not yet.

  Sarah Winslow’s death hit Aleford hard. She was a popular member of the community and widely known from her years of work at the library. She was never too busy to help a patron, and her desk sported a large sign: ask! there are no dumb questions. She was the quintessential reference librarian; someone who read dictionaries for pleasure and collected facts with the same regard for their value as a collector of Fabergé eggs might feel for his objects.

  It was Friday. Sarah’s funeral was scheduled for noon. The day had begun with bright skies, but dark clouds moved in about ten o’clock.

  “Somehow, it makes it harder if it’s a nice day,” Pix Miller remarked to Faith. “Not that it’s any less horrible, but it would be worse if Sarah were missing a beautiful spring day.”

  They were on their way to the church, having eschewed the short-cut through the parsonage’s backyard for the slightly longer but more decorous approach on the sidewalk. Ben and Amy were at Ben’s friend Lizzie MacLean’s house.

  Lizzie’s mother, Arlene, had been making the kind of remark that leads other women to think another baby is being contemplated—things like

  “They grow up so fast”—sigh—and “I have all these perfectly good baby clothes. I don’t know why I’m still holding on to them”—another sigh.

  Faith sincerely hoped several hours with her tod-dler daughter would not cause Arlene to change her mind if she was, in fact, reaching for a First Response kit instead of toothpaste at CVS. Much as Faith adored her daughter, she was not a docile child. “Silent but deadly,” Tom called her. Left to her own devices, Amy would quietly, and win-somely, wreak untold havoc. A hairbrush in the elder Fairchilds’ VCR being the most recent episode.

  “I know what you mean. If the sun is shining, all is supposed to be right with the world, and it isn’t. It’s also less of an affront if nature is in tune with our feelings. It should look the way we feel.”

  “The church is going to be packed. That’s the other thing. I’m sure Sarah never had any idea how much she meant to people, how much we all loved her. She was so surprised by the party the library gave her when she retired—and the chair.

  It was in the living room by the fireplace, remember? Her Wellesley chair. She was devoted to the college, and that’s what the committee picked to give her.”

  The chair, Faith thought bitterly, the chair they lashed her to. The chair in which she died.

  Charley had told her not to talk about any of the details of the case, and she hadn’t. She wasn’t even tempted.

  “I’ve always felt so safe here,” Pix said in a disturbed tone. “I’ve always thought Aleford was different from most places. I took it for granted that I could leave my house and car unlocked.

  That I didn’t have to worry about my children walking anywhere—or myself, for that matter.” Pix Miller had grown up in Aleford, as had her husband, Sam.

  It was a bit difficult for Faith to understand this mentality. Only a lunatic would leave a car or door unlocked where she grew up in Manhattan, yet she, too, had never felt afraid. And now her thoughts were fearful. All Aleford was afraid, particularly its older population. Doors were indeed bein
g locked—dead bolts installed by people who had never known what they were before.

  Aleford had been violated. There had been burglaries before, yet never accompanied by this kind of violence.

  Pix continued thinking out loud. “Of course, they probably didn’t intend any harm. I mean, they weren’t murderers in that sense. They couldn’t have known Sarah would die.” Faith agreed with Pix, yet it was hard to accept.

  Intentioned or unintentioned, Sarah was dead.

  And Faith was sure the life of one old woman was not something that mattered much to these people one way or another. They hadn’t put her nitro pills within reach. Faith was sure they were sleeping soundly, unlike the community they’d turned upside down.

  Pix and Faith climbed the granite church stairs, each step worn in the middle from centuries of feet making their way into the sanctuary. Sanctuary. It was exactly what Faith needed. A moment out of time to sit and pay tribute to a life worth living. A moment of peace and calm to recall her friend as she had been, not as she was on Tuesday.

  Faith slipped into the pew reserved for the minister’s family, Pix squeezing in next to her on the thin, somewhat faded dark red cushions, insufficient buffers against the hard wooden benches. When church services had lasted the entire day on the Sabbath, it must have been almost impossible to move afterward, Faith often thought. Upon her arrival at First Parish, she had opted for a pew in the rear of the church, near the door, for unobtrusive late entries and possible early exits. She had been politely but firmly informed that the minister’s family had always occupied the second row, right pew. The member of the vestry who had apprised her of the fact stopped before saying “and always will,” but Faith got the idea.

  As Sarah had the knack of matching fact to seeker, book to reader, so, too, did the Reverend Thomas Fairchild fashion his service to the individual memorialized. He started his eulogy with William Ellery Channing’s words:

  God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levelers. They give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our human race.

  “God be thanked for books.” The sentence echoed in Faith’s mind throughout the rest of the service. Sarah had left her books to the Aleford and Wellesley College libraries, with a few set aside for particular friends. She had left Tom a signed edition of Emerson’s Essays and Faith an original Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Manage-ment in perfect condition. These two volumes would always retain Sarah’s imprint, as well.

  “God be thanked for books.” Books had been Sarah’s life, yet they had not replaced life, replaced friendships. Faith glanced about the church. People were standing in the rear and some had not been able to get in at all. The reception at the Wellesley College Club that Sarah had planned would be crowded. Neatly attached to her will, there had been a letter detailing her wishes, this one in a separate paragraph: “I like to think of my friends having a good—but perhaps not too good—time in my absence and have therefore arranged for a luncheon at the College Club to follow whatever service the minister deems fitting. Nothing maudlin, please. Just a simple farewell.”

  They sang “I Cannot Think of Them as Dead,” and Faith noticed that Pix’s normal hymn-singing voice—firm, not too loud, not too soft, not off-key, not exactly on—gave out at the last line: “For God hath given to love to keep Its own eternally.” Faith’s voice faltered, too, but she made it through and sat down to listen to a final tribute from one of Sarah’s friends. It was almost as if Sarah were standing before them as the woman reminisced. Then it was “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God”—Sarah’s own favorite, also noted in the letter—and the service was almost over.

  Faith always felt slightly guilty when she came to the rousing refrain of this hymn: “And I mean to be one too.” She wasn’t sure about a lot of things, but about her own lack of qualifications for any kind of sainthood, intent not withstanding, she was definitely certain. Saints didn’t make the kind of snap judgments she did, have phobias about certain prepared foods, or depend on a big purple dinosaur to mesmerize their children when the patter of tiny feet began to sound like a regiment in full gear. A saint would have been able to deal a whole lot better with Stephanie Bullock, for instance. Faith rephrased the thought: Only a saint could deal with that girl.

  Stephanie Bullock was getting married in June and Have Faith was catering the affair. The contract had been drawn up and plans made almost a year ago. The contract stood. The plans had been altered more times than Faith could count, even after she started charging for changes. In the week following Sarah Winslow’s death, as Aleford went on grieving—and double-locking its doors—the Bullock wedding continued to occupy an inordinate amount of Faith’s time and energy.

  “How many Stephanies does it take to change a lightbulb?” Niki Constantine, Faith’s assistant, asked as she reported for work the Monday following the funeral.

  “I have no idea, and besides, why should I spoil a joke you’ve obviously been waiting to tell me?”

  “One,” Niki announced gleefully, “and the whole world revolves around her!”

  Faith had to laugh. It was a perfect description of twenty-three-year-old Stephanie, sole offspring of Courtney, neé Cabot, and Julian Bullock. Mummy and Daddy were divorced, “and it was all Daddy’s fault,” but they had declared an uneasy truce for the nuptials. Courtney’s family was the subject of John Bossidy’s famous toast,

  “And this is good old Boston, the home of the bean and the cod, where the Lowells talk to the Cabots and the Cabots talk only to God.” Stephanie embodied the snobbishness implied, but she was more voluble—way more voluble.

  Her education had consisted of years at a genteel boarding school, followed by several obligatory, desultory semesters at a college where she majored in social connections.

  “She hasn’t called yet, has she? Or dropped by?” Niki asked. Stephanie had taken to using the catering firm as a kind of club, running in whenever she was in the neighborhood, snatching food from carefully counted items on trays and platters, literally sticking her fingers in the pies. “Put it on the bill—Daddy’s paying,” she’d airily instruct them.

  “No, I haven’t had the pleasure, but if it isn’t today, you can be sure it will be tomorrow. We’re getting down to the wire, as she constantly says, and that no doubt means at least one complete menu change.”

  “Wires can be used for all sorts of things,” Niki mused, “like garrotting.” She tied her apron and went to wash her hands. “I’m going to make the caponata for the Lexington job. It’s so much better a day ahead. Okay?”

  “Good idea. I did the phyllo cups for the wild mushroom filling. Besides the caponata, we can make the other toppings for the crostini today, too. The dessert is set, so we’re in good shape.

  The gallery has plenty of room, so we’ll be able to have two tables. The only drinks they want are a May-wine bowl and bottled water. I can cover the front desk and use that. The owner says she only needs the one in back. She’s hoping to sell a lot of the artist’s work during the opening, but she wants it all to be unobtrusive. ‘A party should be a party,’ she told me, which is good to hear for a change.”

  The two women got to work, Faith blessing the day she hired Niki and cursing the day, which would inevitably come, when the talented young woman with a highly irreverent sense of humor would leave to start a business of her own. The good ones always did. But so far, Faith’s tentative probings about Niki’s future plans had been met with firm denials. Faith had an alarming thought.

  Up to this point, Niki had dealt with Stephanie by exploding in either laughter or rage, but what if the prima donna was really getting to Niki? It was time to make another foray.

  “Have you been to that new Italian restaurant in Woburn? It got written up in the Globe’s

  “Cheap Eats” column, and I hear there’s a mini-mum of an hour’s wa
it, even on a weeknight. It’s just a storefront with only a few tables. They started it with very little capital.”

  “ ‘And have you ever thought of doing something like that yourself, Niki?’ ” She stopped peeling eggplant and looked at Faith. Her short, dark curls—wiry like one of the pot scrubbers they used—quivered as she mimicked her employer’s studiously nonchalant tone. She added,

  “Jeez, Faith, you’re getting as bad as my mother.” Niki had grown up in Watertown, closer into Boston, the oldest girl in a large Greek family.

  Niki continued: “The only difference between you two is what you see in my future. She pictures me floating down the aisle of St. Irene’s dressed in white—not because it’s traditional, but because she believes my virginity is still intact.

  And by the way, did I ever mention she also believes if you rub a cut potato on a wart and bury it during the full moon, the wart will disappear and end up on the spud? That’s why there are all those things on potatoes we mistakenly call ‘eyes.’ They’re really warts, but people wouldn’t eat them—the potatoes, I mean—if this incontro-vertible fact was widely known. But I digress.

  Mom has this effect on me and a whole bunch of other people. So in her best-case scenario, I’m coming down the aisle toward some Prince Charming with letters after his name, as in M.D., LLD, MBA. In yours, I’m over at the reception hall baking the cake.”

  “Okay, okay, smart-ass. I won’t ask you again.

  But you know you’re the best assistant I’ve ever had, and yes, I can admit it, you even outshine your master at times.”

  “I’m having too much fun to think about being ambitious—and that goes for both your and Mom’s visions, although catch me telling her. If she ever found out I ditched someone like Tommy, she’d cross my name off the list in the family Bible.”