Stephanie hung up the phone and grabbed her Hermès Kelly bag. She had them in several colors. “It works out perfectly. Mummy has about twenty pairs to return.”
Niki had to turn around. The Cabot Bullocks were fast becoming her favorite sitcom, and it was getting harder and harder not to laugh in the bride’s presence.
Stephanie air-kissed Faith, bonding with the help, and was out the door, leaving traces of Joy, her signature fragrance, to mingle with the more plebeian aromas of freshly baked cookies and bread. Niki exploded. “I swear, Faith, we should be writing this all down.” She wiped a tear from her eye and stopped laughing. “But if they change the rehearsal dinner menu one more time, I’ll spit in Stephanie’s Perrier.”
It was Faith’s turn to laugh, and she did. Niki’s Greek temper was more than a match for these Boston Brahmins.
“Everyone’s accepted,” Faith told Pix. “They positively leapt at the chance to do something about their break-ins.” The two women had bumped into each other at the Shop ’n Save and had pulled their carriages to one side in front of the dairy section. Pix had reached for the Velveeta, while Faith had her hand on a log of Vermont goat cheese.
“When are you going to have this shindig, and can someone who hasn’t had her house robbed come? I could pass the punch and cookies.” Pix knew that Faith would no more consider inviting people to her house without serving food, even for an occasion such as this, than she would purchase dough in a cardboard tube—several varieties of which were tucked under Pix’s cheese.
“Tomorrow night at seven, and you can come, but don’t wear any jewelry.” Pix had some good jewelry inherited from various relatives, but her habitual adornment other than wedding and engagement rings was a Seiko watch with a sensible leather strap. Period. So long as Sam persisted in referring to pierced ears as “body mutilation,” Pix’s lobes remained unadorned.
Clip-ons hurt.
A bit piqued that Faith could think her so in-sensitive, Pix suggested tartly, “Why don’t I wear my mourning brooch? The one with the woven hair that belonged to Great-Aunt Hannah?”
“I’m glad you understand. Of course you can come. Coffee, not punch, but cookies. We don’t want to be fooling around with plates and forks while we’re working. I’m on my way to the church office to do the questionnaire after I finish here. I just needed a few things.”
“Do you want Samantha to come and take care of the kids?”
Faith had been so intent on other matters that she had neglected to plan for the probable interruptions—cute though they might appear—her children would present. It was this single-mindedness that had also caused her earlier jewelry remark to Pix.
“That’s a wonderful idea. Are you sure she doesn’t have plans?”
“Even if she does, I think she’d like to help. The kids have been terribly upset, you know. Danny wants us to get an alarm system. In fact, he’s been talking about it ever since he heard about Sarah.
Now before he leaves for school, he tells me to be sure the doors are locked and not to let strangers into the house. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.”
Faith gave her friend a quick hug and headed for the checkout counter.
The parish secretary’s office was a small ante-room carved from the much larger space that composed the minister’s office at the rear of the church. It had retained one side window, and on this day, another sunny one, the room was warm and welcoming. Faith had called ahead to ask if she could use the laser printer sometime, and Rhoda Dawson had told her when she could come. Stepping through the door, Faith was struck by the changes the woman had wrought—and the contrast between this obsessively neat room and Tom’s work areas—at the church and in the parsonage. Books were lined up neatly in their shelves; there were no stacks of paper. The in box was empty, the out box full. The previous secretary had been a devotee of houseplants, crowding the sill with African violets, obscuring the light with a large hanging spider plant. The top of the file cabinet had been taken up with jars of murky water, containing cuttings from the aforementioned. A strawberry begonia in a perpetual nonblooming state had occupied a good portion of the desk. This flora had all been banished. In its place was a small basket of dried flowers centered on the sill.
When Faith explained what she was doing, Ms.Dawson offered some format suggestions. Faith could see why Tom was so pleased with the woman. She was a model of efficiency. A mastermind.
As Faith typed the questions under the secretary’s watchful eye, she felt uneasy. Was it simply coincidence that the thefts had coincided with the woman’s arrival in Aleford? She hadn’t answered the phone the day of the Fairchilds’ break-in. Dis-posing of the loot? In the short time she’d worked for Tom, she had been in the parsonage several times, picking up or dropping off work. Tom had mentioned to Faith that the only address the secretary had given him was a post office box in Revere, and questions about her personal life had been met with brief, noncommittal responses.
Faith stopped typing and looked up at the secretary, who was sitting across the room, reading the Boston Globe. Rhoda was a woman of a certain age, not unattractive, who dressed for work in midcalf tailored suits with large shoulder pads. Not one to be swayed by the whims of fickle fashion, she’d apparently found her style sometime in the seventies and stuck with it.
“This won’t take but a minute more. I really appreciate it,” Faith said, causing Rhoda to lower the paper a fraction of an inch.
In the twilight world Faith had entered since Sarah Winslow’s break-in and their own home invasion, one of the worst aspects of the terrain was that everybody was a suspect. Here she was, composing a list of questions about burglaries, with a host of suspicions about the parish’s newest employee, who was only a few feet away—no doubt perfectly innocent, a perfect stranger, in fact. A perfect stranger. It was horrible, yet there was nothing she could do about it; Faith had to find out all she could about Ms.Rhoda Dawson.
“I wouldn’t want you to have to stay late and keep your family waiting. I don’t recall whether Tom said you were married or not?” There it was.
The woman would have to answer.
“The Reverend doesn’t have too much for me to do today, so there’s no problem.” Faith persisted. “Well, I wouldn’t want your kids or whoever to worry about where you were later.”
“Thank you.” Ms. Dawson smiled and stood up. “So long as you’re here, I’ll run out to the drugstore if that’s all right. Won’t be more than ten minutes. Will you need more time than that?” It was Faith who couldn’t escape the question.
“No, you go ahead. I’ll be finished by then.” Drat and double drat.
“Cleaning persons, lawn services, plow services,” she typed. She’d already listed “Time of day?” “Day of week?” “Items taken?” as well as queries about construction work in the neighborhood or on own home, service calls, UPS, FedEx, mail delivery, and the like. After baby-sitters and housekeepers, she ended with “Our professions.” Hitting “Save,” she wearily pushed Rhoda’s er-gonomic chair away from the desk and tried to think of any areas she might have missed. Tom came into the room and stopped in surprise at seeing his wife totally out of context behind his secretary’s desk. “Where’s Ms. Dawson?”
“She’s running an errand and I’m doing the questionnaire for tomorrow night’s meeting. The printer here is so much better. She said it would be all right.” Faith felt slightly defensive. She wasn’t sure why. Tom’s turf? Yet, he dropped by the catering kitchen all the time.
“Great. No problem. I was at a meeting at the library. We really need to raise money to repair the roof. If we don’t do something soon, the place will have to be condemned. You wouldn’t believe the mess in the attic.” According to the ironclad stipulations of the bequest that established the library, the trustees were composed of Aleford’s school committee, selectmen, and settled clergy.
Some of these individuals took a more active interest than others. Tom was one of them.
; Faith wasn’t listening. “Did it ever occur to you that there’s something odd about Ms. Dawson? I mean, no address, and she told you her phone was unlisted, too. I asked her whether she was married and she wouldn’t answer. The same with whether she had any kids.”
Tom looked worried. “Rhoda Dawson is the best secretary I have ever had, bar none, and if she wants to keep her private life private, that’s fine with me. You didn’t upset her, did you? I mean, she didn’t seem annoyed or anything?”
“She wasn’t, but you might want to think about your wife.” Faith flushed.
Tom bent over and kissed said wife. “I always think about my wife. It’s my favorite thing to do.
I just don’t want her to grill my secretary and chance losing her.”
The kiss helped. “Don’t worry. I won’t do anything to upset your paragon, even if she does have all our silver.”
The door opened at that very moment and Tom’s look of horror was almost comical. Faith didn’t miss a beat.
“Finished your shopping? I’m done here, too.
Bye, Tom, Ms. Dawson. I’ll leave you to your work, and thanks again for letting me infringe on your time. I have high hopes for this questionnaire. It would be wonderful if the group could turn up something to solve these burglaries.” Ms. Dawson’s face was impassive. “It was no trouble at all. I’m glad to have been of help.
Faith went down to the church basement, where Ben’s nursery school was located. It was almost time to pick him up. As she waited in the corridor with the other mothers, she felt a bit fool-ish about her suspicions of Rhoda Dawson. Everyone a suspect. She wondered how long she would feel this way. Since the robbery, each time she’d looked out the front windows and seen a van or panel truck go by, she’d said to herself, Is this the one? She didn’t greet the mailman as cheerfully as she had before. Answering the questionnaire in her mind as she typed it up, she’d formed theories about a host of people. People she’d trusted. People she didn’t trust now.
“Mommy, Mommy! Look what I made for
you.” Ben flung himself at her, thrusting a macaroni-bead necklace in her face, each rigatoni painstakingly painted with bright primary colors.
“It’s lovely, sweetheart,” she said, scooping him up as she put the necklace on over her head.
Some of the beads were still slightly sticky.
“See, now you don’t have to worry about not having any jewelry anymore. I’m going to make you lots.”
She waited until they had collected Amy, eaten lunch, and the kids had gone down for naps.
Then she went into the bathroom, locked the door, and cried her eyes out.
* * *
Pix volunteered to take notes and Tom passed out the questionnaires, so everyone would have a copy, but Faith was clearly in charge. Five house-holds were represented, six counting Sarah Winslow’s, and Faith was definitely counting it.
As she had tossed and turned the night before—sleep was pretty elusive these days—she realized that the force driving her was not the break-ins so much as Sarah’s murder, for murder it was in Faith’s mind. Yes, she wanted to find out who the intruders at the parsonage had been, but linking them to Sarah was paramount.
“Shall we get started? I spoke to all of you on the phone, but perhaps we should go around and introduce ourselves.”
It was a varied group—Mr. and Mrs. Roland Dodge, an elderly couple—he, a retired MIT pro-fessor, and she, a homemaker active in the Historical Society; Cecilia Greenough, single, an art teacher in the schools; Pauline and Michael Caldicott, young marrieds, both of them CPAs, a baby very obviously on the way; and, finally, Edith Petit, a widow who lived in one of the houses bordering the green.
By the end of an hour, they’d covered all the questions, eaten all the cookies, and Tom had brought out a decanter of sherry.
Michael Caldicott had been keeping his own notes. “There’s quite a lot here for the police.
This really was a brilliant idea on your part, Faith.” They’d gotten to first names by the second question.
She nodded. “The most striking coincidence is the day of the week and time—all on a Tuesday and all daytime breaks.”
“Chief MacIsaac told us daytime breaks are the most common,” Roland Dodge added ruefully,
“especially among those who are doing this for a career, as opposed to teenagers and drug addicts.
If you’re caught, the penalty for a daytime crime is considerably less than for one committed under the cover of darkness.”
“And none of our houses had alarm systems; that’s another common denominator,” Faith continued.
“We’re remedying that,” Pauline said. “Would you believe we’re on a waiting list? All Aleford wants to get wired.”
Faith had found this out herself when she’d called. Minuteman Alarms’ owner’s joy at the sudden rise in his fortunes had been apparent even over the phone. The parish Buildings and Grounds Committee had approved alarm systems for both the parsonage and the church.
“Some of my friends have wondered why I want to put in an alarm now, the old locking the barn door business. It’s true I haven’t got much left to take, but I simply don’t want anyone in my house again whom I don’t know!” Edith Petit said grimly.
Unless it was someone you did know, Faith thought, but she said instead, “I’ve since learned thieves make it a practice to return roughly a year later, on the assumption that you will have replaced what they have taken with your insurance money. You can tell that to anyone who doubts the wisdom of an alarm system.”
They’d been sharing larcency lore throughout the evening, Roland Dodge contributing the fun-niest. Several years ago, a neighbor of theirs had seen a young man leaving the house next door with a television set, putting it into the back of a van parked in the driveway. She insisted he come in and take hers as well, since it was “on the fritz.” “It’s absolutely true,” Roland insisted. “I heard it from the woman myself, and of course she never saw her TV again!”
The items taken from their respective dwell-ings were also the same—silver, jewelry, and, in the art teacher’s case, a box of chocolates from an admirer. Cecilia was particularly indignant about that affront, although it was her mother’s locket with pictures of her mother and father, the only ones the family had, that Cecilia said she would give anything to get back.
Faith knew this game. She played it at night when she couldn’t sleep. The first day it was “If I Could Have One Thing Back, What Would It Be?” She had quickly moved to three things and as she cataloged what was gone, the items changed from night to night.
Silver plate and costume jewelry, except when it was mixed in with the real thing, had been ignored. None of the houses had been trashed, although searched thoroughly. Like Sarah, both the Dodges and Edith Petit had had canisters of flour and sugar emptied. Faith caught Tom’s eye and knew they had come to the same conclusion: clever thieves who knew the inhabitants and ages of the homeowners. These pros knew a younger person didn’t gravitate toward the pantry for hiding places—jewel rolls in the bottom of a garment bag and rings in the freezer were the choices of the next generation.
They did have many of the same service people, but as Detective Dunne had pointed out, there weren’t many alternatives in a town the size of Aleford, and people like Mr. McCarthy, the plumber, had lived in town forever, the firm getting its start plugging up the musket holes in rainwater barrels, no doubt. It seemed crazy to suspect him, but then, he might have had someone working for him who was less reliable. They carefully listed the plumber, the plow service, cleaners—anyone who had been in the houses as far back as a year ago. The Caldicotts and the Dodges had both remodeled their kitchens. It all went down in the report.
As she listened carefully to what had been stolen from each house—and what hadn’t—Faith knew there was something she was missing. Her Nikon camera had been on the kitchen table. The Caldicotts had state-of-the-art computer equipment and a Bang & Olufsen stereo system in the sam
e room. None of this was even moved out of place, nor was liquor touched in any of their houses. “Not even my Macallan twelve-year-old scotch!” Roland exclaimed. “Wished they’d taken all the booze and left my Brass Rat—that’s what the MIT class ring is affectionately called, has a beaver on it,” he explained. Nothing new, even though it would certainly have been easy to fence these things, Faith assumed. It couldn’t have anything to do with size, because the sideboard drawers were large and those had been taken from Sarah’s house and the parsonage. Three homes, including Sarah’s, had lost antique Oriental rugs. The Dodges were missing a pair of mahogany knife boxes, too—empty of cutlery, but fine eighteenth-century examples with intricate inlay work.
“Charley MacIsaac says all the houses bordering the green have been broken into at one time or another, and I certainly wish someone had told me that when I was buying mine,” Edith said. “If we do nothing else tonight, I think someone should write up a list of tips for people on how to avoid being broken into, and we’ll put it in the Aleford Chronicle.”
Things like not leaving your garage doors up when the garage is empty, Faith thought dismally.
It was a good idea, though. Pix volunteered to write the article. She felt it was the least she could do as one who had retained her circle pin.
It was dark by the time everyone left and there was a strong feeling of camaraderie. Dunne had been right about that. Everyone did feel better.
Telephone numbers were exchanged and promises made to keep in touch.
“Oh dear,” Edith said as she put on a pale lavender sweater for the short walk across the green to her house. “We didn’t get a chance to talk about those insurance adjusters. It might be a good idea to meet again. My turn next time. I’ll bake an angel food cake,” she said brightly.
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