Body in the Bookcase ff-9

by Katherine Hall Page

  Charley was moving her toward the living room. Again there was the strange feeling that nothing had happened, that it was all a big mistake. Not a pillow was out of place, not a drawer even ajar.

  “Pros,” one of the men commented.

  “What do you mean?” Faith asked.

  “They knew where to look. These weren’t kids.

  They didn’t trash the place. I’ll bet your liquor hasn’t been touched and that they took only the good stuff—and stuff not too identifiable. Left those mugs with the names.”

  He was right. One of the drawers in the sideboard held a full service of silver plate that one of Tom’s aunts hadn’t wanted anymore. Faith used it for large parties. It was all there.

  They moved on to Tom’s study.

  “They really made a mess in here,” the photographer warned Faith.

  The room was a shambles. Books covered the floor and papers were everywhere. It was a mess, yet Faith’s practiced eye immediately detected that it was Tom’s normal mess. Saturday’s fren-zied finishing touches on a difficult sermon, the room not yet put back into the semblance that passed for order before he began the next. A bit bewildered, the police noted her assured response that nothing had been touched, and then they all left the room.

  “We need to go upstairs now,” Charley said to Faith. He wished Tom were here. Where was he, anyway? Pros or no pros, MacIsaac was sure what Faith was about to see would not be a pretty sight.

  “Who are these guys, Charley? State police?” Faith asked as they went upstairs. The icicle that had entered her heart was beginning to melt slightly and with it came the return of her very strong native curiosity.

  “Auxiliary cops. Come when we need them for this kind of thing. Too damn often, lately.” They passed Amy’s room. Nothing. Faith breathed a sigh of relief. Ben’s room, the same.

  Then she went into the master bedroom and crumbled against the wall. Her legs felt all wob-bly, as if she’d run a marathon, and she slid onto the floor, her hand grasping the woodwork. She forgot she wasn’t supposed to touch anything.

  Every drawer had been pulled out and emptied, every surface swept clean. The bedspread was on the floor. Both closet doors were open.

  Shoes were flung about. Clothes were pulled from the rods. Her garment bag lay open and empty. Slowly, she stood up, looking about as if she’d never seen it before, a somnambulist who’d wandered into someone else’s bedroom.

  It was a large room, stretching across the front of the house. A prior occupant had papered the walls with a hand-print of poppies in rust on a warm cream-colored background. There was a roll of it left. Faith had draped yards of sheer fabric around the windows to hide the shades. The furniture was a hodgepodge of offerings from both families, plus a Judith McKie chest from Faith’s old apartment and Tom’s queen-size pencil-post cherry bed—a bed Faith had enjoyed teasing him about during their courtship, challenging his explanation that he liked having a lot of room to stretch out. Now when Ben and Amy piled in, the bed was almost too small.

  It was a beautiful room, especially on days like this, when the sun streamed through the windows. A rainbow danced across the hardwood floor. Faith looked for the source. It wasn’t a diamond. A picture frame lay shattered, the sun sparkling through the broken glass, turning it into tiny prisms. Her parents’ smiling faces, torn in the wreckage, stared up at her. A leather jewelry box Tom and Faith had bought on their honeymoon in Florence had been kicked against the wall. It was empty. Empty. The room was full, but empty.

  Instinctively, she reached up to her earlobes and touched the pearl stud earrings she had hastily put in that morning. She fingered the watch she was wearing. From France, a gift from Tom, it had the cartoon character Tintin and his dog, Snowy, on the face. They were in a plane and it was going down. “Help! We’re going to crash . . .” was what it said in the book. Crash.

  The earrings, the watch, her wedding and engagement rings—the sum total of all the jewelry she now possessed.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” Dale Warren asked.

  “No,” Faith said. “I want my stuff back.”

  “Why don’t you come over to my house?” Faith turned at the words, walked to the door, and saw Pix coming down the hall. She had completely forgotten about her, but now the sight of her friend triggered the question that had been passing through her mind with greater and more urgent frequency since she’d entered the house.

  “When is Tom coming?”

  Pix was almost at the room. “I’m sure he’ll be here soon. Ms. Dawson left a message for him at the hospital. Holy shit, Faith!”

  This was not the message. Pix stood in the doorway, wordless, immobile.

  Faith seldom heard her friend swear. Things were as bad as she thought they were. She put an arm around Pix’s shoulder in a sudden reversal of roles.

  Pix regained her voice. “Everything? Everything’s gone? All your jewelry?”

  Faith nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak.

  Dale, after recovering from the slight shock of hearing his sister’s former Girl Scout leader use foul language, resumed his list making.

  “Can you describe some of the more valuable pieces for me, Mrs. Fairchild? The sooner—”

  “I know, I know,” Faith said impatiently. She’d already run through them in her mind once she saw her garment bag on the floor. The garment bag—her safe hiding place. A pretty velvet jewel roll tucked in the bottom, its compartments filled with the gifts Tom had given her for anniversaries, birthdays, when the children were born.

  Some family pieces. She started describing the items, the words tumbling out. She was still talking and grasping Pix’s shoulder when Tom arrived, taking the stairs two at a time.

  “Faith! Faith! Are you all right?” he called. She heard him and ran down the hall into his arms.

  “Oh, Tom, we’ve been robbed!” She burst into tears and cried as if her heart would break.

  It lasted only a few minutes, although to the police, particularly Charley and Dale, it seemed much longer. This was not the Faith they knew.

  Dale Warren looked down at his notes. Next to

  “Victim,” he’d written her name. He added Tom’s. The Fairchilds, victims? He wished she’d let him get her a cup of tea or coffee.

  When Tom entered their room, his face lost all its color and he sat down heavily on the bed.

  “Don’t!” Faith cried. Tom jumped to his feet, puzzled. Surely, Faith didn’t expect the police to get prints from the rumpled linens.

  “I have to wash everything. Everything they touched.”

  Tom held his wife close. People he’d known in these circumstances talked of feeling violated.

  Raped. He looked at their pillows. One of the cases was missing.

  “Damn it, Charley, what kind of a world are we living in?” He gestured around the room, finishing with his arm flung imploringly toward the police chief. Tom felt completely and utterly helpless.

  Charley knew Tom didn’t want an answer. At least not now. What he wanted was action. So did Charley.

  “You’ll have to go down to the station with me and let us take your prints, so we can eliminate them. The kids’ are so small, we won’t have any trouble recognizing those.”

  The kids! It was almost time to pick them up.

  Where did the morning go? Faith said to herself in conscious irony. And the Lexington gallery reception. She had completely forgotten about work.

  Niki must be wondering where she was.

  “I don’t want Ben and Amy to see this mess. We have to . . .” she started to say.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll get them and take them to my house,” Pix offered. “After Amy’s nap, they can come watch Samantha’s softball game with me.” Pix Miller took motherhood seriously—and joyfully. She’d been the room mother for all of her children’s years in elementary school, the aforementioned Scout leader long after her own left the ranks, chaperone for innumerable trips to the Science Museum, the Aquarium, a
nd virtually every other educational Boston landmark. She was the one who drove, who collected, who called. Watching the two Fairchild children for the afternoon was a mere blip on the radar screen of Pix’s far-flung activities. Her husband, Sam, had tried in vain to teach her the magic words Sorry, I can’t. Maybe he hadn’t tried all that hard.

  He was pretty dependent on her himself.

  “And I called Niki. She said she can handle everything with Scott and Tricia.” These were a young couple Faith employed part-time. “Don’t worry about a thing,” Pix again reassured the Fairchilds, realizing how totally stupid it sounded. She blushed, then headed for home.

  The police left the room, too. Tom and Faith were alone.

  “I don’t know what to do, where to start,” Faith said. She could hardly bear the thought of touching her things. Lingerie and other clothing had been tossed all over the floor. It looked like Fi-lene’s Basement ten minutes after the doors opened for the Neiman Marcus sale.

  “I do,” Tom said firmly. He kissed her—hard—and went to the phone. The light-colored handle was covered with black powder. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped it off.

  In rapid order, he called the couple who came to help clean the house, the handyman to repair the back door, or at least secure it, and Rhoda Dawson. At the close of their conversation, he felt obscurely obliged to assure her, a newcomer, that this type of thing was not the norm in Aleford.

  Or was it? Besides Sarah Winslow’s, the local paper had reported five break-ins in the last few weeks, two of them at night. He sighed. Why hadn’t he worked at home today? But then he’d had to go out to the VA. It would have happened anyway. He sat down on the bed again. He was exhausted. Happened. Anyway.

  Faith listened to her husband make the calls, grateful for his assumption of responsibility.

  She’d be okay once the house was cleaned up. It was all this mess. Out of control. Once everything was under control . . . This was what was getting to her. She’d be okay. She shivered, but she did not reach for one of her sweaters lying so conveniently at her feet. Instead, she wandered downstairs. The police were packing up and getting ready to leave.

  “You’re going to need a new door,” Ray, the fingerprint specialist, observed. “Looks like they used a crowbar. Would’ve popped your dead bolt, if you’d had one.”

  The Fairchilds hadn’t gotten around to installing a dead bolt. Before last week, Faith often didn’t even bother to lock the door at all. Not now, though. Not ever again. She’d been bemoan-ing the lack of a dead bolt—and the open garage door. It made her feel better to hear that one omis-sion wouldn’t have mattered.

  “Place like this should have an alarm system.” Ray was chatty now that the job was done.

  “You’re in full view of everyone and his uncle out front, but once you’re back here, no one would be likely to see you on a weekday, except from the cemetery.”

  It was true. The parsonage was separated from the church by the backyard, the ancient burial ground, and the church driveway. The long sanctuary windows looked toward the parsonage, but the church offices were at the rear of the church.

  Ben’s nursery school was in the basement. In any case, at this time of year the thick hedge and other shrubbery formed a substantial barrier. It had been installed at various times in the house’s history—perhaps by ministers’ wives, seeking, like Faith, the illusion of private life.

  But an alarm system? In Aleford? In the parsonage! The enormity of the crime became defined by Ray’s well-meant suggestion. The silver was gone. The jewelry. The drawer. But most precious of all, the intruders had stolen the Fairchilds’ peace of mind—the security and calm they’d taken for granted all these years. Charley was looking at Faith, but before he could say anything, she spoke.

  “I should have stayed in New York!”

  * * *

  “But why is our door all broken? Why is Mr.

  Kelly nailing it shut? How will I get out to play?

  Why did someone break it, Mom? Why?” Ben Fairchild was firing questions at his mother even as he stood captivated by the handyman, who was indeed systematically nailing the door shut.

  Mr. Kelly was Ben’s hero and he wanted to be exactly like him when he grew up—with all those neat tools, a truck, and a dog named Shamrock.

  Shamrock had been Ben’s suggestion almost two years ago for what to name his new sister. He thought it was some kind of jewel and argued that people named girls Ruby and Pearl, prompt-ing Faith to ask Miss Lora, his nursery school teacher, what she was reading to them lately.

  Even the discovery that the word shamrock referred to vegetation, albeit lucky, did not dampen Ben’s ardor and he thought Amy a poor and distant second choice.

  “The thieves who came into our house when Mommy was out and took some of our things broke it. Remember what Pix told you?” The two women had worked out ahead of time what to say to this little inquiring mind.

  “Yes,” Ben replied, “but why didn’t you leave the door open and then they wouldn’t have wrecked it.”

  It made a certain kind of sense.

  “Well . . .” Faith was losing steam. They’d been going over this terrain for a while now and would be for the foreseeable future. “I didn’t.” Tom’s head appeared at the window of the back door, then disappeared abruptly. Bewildered, Amy’s smile of welcome vanished and she twisted around in Faith’s lap to look at her mother’s face. It was still there. “Daddy?” Daddy walked into the kitchen. “Forgot I couldn’t get in that way,” he said ruefully. “I’ll go out to Concord Lumber tomorrow and order a new door. The sooner the better.”

  Faith agreed. She was consumed by a desire for action—and a return to normalcy. The sound of the washer and dryer was calming. She’d already done several loads and there was a mountainous pile still left on the laundry room floor. She could also hear the vacuum as the cleaners worked to erase all signs of intrusion and investigation. The fingerprint powder was proving difficult to remove—and it was everywhere. Black on light surfaces, white and rust on dark.

  When the children had come home, Ben, although reassured by Pix that nothing of his was missing, raced to his room. Faith followed him, carrying Amy. He was burrowing in his Lego bag and triumphantly held a small chamois pouch aloft.

  “It’s still here! The robbers didn’t find my coin collection. Boy, would they be sorry if they knew.” Ben’s coin collection—a few francs, Canadian money, and the prize, a 1950 silver dollar. Intact. Lesson number one, Faith said to herself: Hide your best jewelry in the Legos or Lincoln Logs. Forget adult hiding places. Better still, place in Baggies and have your child create Play-Doh sculptures around them.

  “The prints will be ready tomorrow. They put a rush on them.” Faith blinked and tuned in to what Tom was saying. Prints? Fingerprints? No, the photographs of their silver and jewelry that Tom’s Dad had been insistent they take a couple of years ago when he did his own. “Believe me,” he’d said, “I know insurance companies, and God forbid you should ever need these, but if you do, it will save a lot of aggravation.” Well, they needed them now. Tom had taken the negatives down to Aleford Photo to have enlargements and multiple copies made.

  “They’re selling bowling balls.”

  Faith put her finger to her lips. She’d told Ben the one with the blue sparkles was long gone.

  “Yes, dear. We can talk about it later,” she told Tom.

  Tom didn’t get the hint. This happened a lot in child rearing. “The guys at Aleford Photo—

  they’ve got a table with all sorts of stuff on it, ancient Polaroid cameras, light meters, a pair of snowshoes, a paint sprayer, a kerosene heater, and a bowling ball.”

  Faith gave up and laughed. Maybe what they needed right now was a sparkly bowling ball.

  “I know. I’ve seen it. Recently, they’ve added arts and crafts—macramé and beadwork. They knew all about the break-in, right?” “Of course.” Either Bert or Richard—Faith could never remember which—was an au
xiliary cop—crowd control on Patriot’s Day and traffic duty during holiday seasons for greater Boston’s pilgrimage to Aleford’s popular farm stand for a fresh turkey, tree, or first corn. The police scanner, which was on all the time, substituted for eleva-tor music at the camera shop. People had long ago formed the habit of dropping in to catch up on the news. And now, Faith thought, they can satisfy a host of passing whims, as well—like a sudden urge to bowl a few frames.

  “Can we get it, Dad?”

  “Get what, sweetheart?” Tom picked Ben up and sat him on the counter, eye-to-eye.

  “The bowling ball.” He leaned around his father and said sternly to his mother, “You said it was gone.”

  “It must be another one,” Faith said, matching his expression. She had no intention of letting her five-year-old get the upper hand.

  “It is a nice one.” Tom caught Faith’s eye. “No nicks. Looks brand-new. A steal at five bucks.”

  “We don’t need a bowling ball.” The moment had passed and Faith’s common sense had returned. She was forced to maintain a constant de-fense against Tom’s Yankee acquisitiveness, the kind defined by the words “Doesn’t cost much and could be useful,” as opposed to other forms of attainment, as in “Let’s browse at Blooming-dale’s.” She knew what Tom’s parents’ house was like, or, more specifically, their attic and garage.

  The garage had been too full to park in since 1962 and Fairchild cars had to suffer the vicissitudes of New England winters. No one seemed to care.

  The story of the Aleford Photo indoor yard sale—true, though hard to believe even of them—was Tom’s first attempt to get back to the way their life had been that morning, before the breakin. And it felt like swimming in Jell-O. From the moment he’d seen Faith in the upstairs hall, he had begun to pray. Help me find the way back.