The Body In the Belfry (16 page)

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Authors: Katherine Hall Page

BOOK: The Body In the Belfry
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She knew Tom was right and they couldn't allow themselves to believe it was someone they knew. She scanned the upturned, open-mouthed faces once more as they sang praises to the Lord. All those well-scrubbed, innocent faces.
But if not someone they knew, then who? She felt hopelessly confused as she sang, “Amen,” sat down, and bowed her head.
The afternoon passed busily. Tom had calls to make and Faith took Benjamin out into the sunshine while she
tidied up the garden. He practiced his baby push-ups on a blanket under one of the maple trees and shrieked with delight every time a leaf fell. It felt good to be outside and have the cobwebs blown away.
They didn't talk about the murder at all on Sunday, and when Faith's mother called that night to find out how they were, Faith realized with a start that she had almost forgotten to tell her the latest developments.
She was up early on Monday, resolved to do as Patricia asked, not so much because she had asked but because the conversation with Tom had convinced her that practically speaking, and spiritually, she couldn't continue to go around Aleford casting baleful eyes on all the inhabitants and expect to have any peace of mind—or after a while any friends.
Tom was walking out to the Parish Office and Faith went down the front walk with him to get the mail out of the box. Monday's mail was usually a bit sparse and there was only a flyer from Sears and a plain envelope that had not gone through the post with Faith's name rather childishly scrawled on it. She opened it with a smile, thinking one of the children from the Sunday School where she sometimes helped had sent her a drawing.
Tom had gone through the gate and was suddenly startled to find Faith grabbing him desperately, barely able to speak.
“Tom, look!” she cried in horror.
He looked.
Inside the envelope folded in a sheet of white paper was a pressed rose. A pink rose. Just like Cindy's.
Faith looked out the window and watched Boston rapidly assume the look of one of those relief maps made for a school project: the Charles River carefully painted brownish blue by unsteady hands and Beacon Hill a glorious wad of papier-mâché crowned by the State House's golden dome. Afterward there would have been an argument over who got to keep it, or rather which attic, closet, or basement it would grow dusty in before someone's mother heartlessly threw it away.
It seemed only seconds had elapsed between Faith's finding the rose and finding herself enveloped by a Newark-bound 737 securely buckled in with Benjamin clutched on her lap and a scotch and water clutched in her hand. Normally she didn't drink on planes, or rather
not since Benjamin was born. She liked to keep alert, and after discovering that parents traveling with small children were not allowed to sit next to the emergency exits, there was all the more reason. As a matter of course she further protected her urchin by sitting one row back from the door and explaining to one of the people in the row ahead that if they had to evacuate the plane Faith would be passing her baby to him or her. The few startled looks she got were worth the peace of mind and possibly Benjamin's life, she repeatedly told Tom, who always pretended not to know her at these times and flatly refused to sit ahead of her himself and be the receiver. Anyway all this had been accomplished and Benjamin's rescuer was a rather serious-looking young man who was reading Kierkegaard, so Faith was pretty sure he wouldn't be too caught up in the plot to notice the plane was on fire or crashing.
She leaned back, put one of those tiny cushions stuffed with plaster of paris behind her head, and let the reel of the day's events pass before her eyes.
After she had handed him the envelope with the rose, Tom had been like a maniac. He dragged her into the house, shielding her with his body as if there might be an army of machine gun-toting assailants in the shrubbery. He slammed the door, locked it, and called the police all in one motion. Detective Dunne, this time without Charley MacIsaac, was there in minutes.
Faith remembered sitting bolt upright in the wing chair and agreeing automatically that now was a good time for her to visit her parents. She heard herself speaking in a normal tone of voice and wondered why she wasn't screaming. After all, someone seemed to want to kill her.
She decided to mention it to Tom and Detective Lieutenant Dunne, who seemed unduly preoccupied with flight times and at that moment were arguing over Newark
versus Kennedy as an airport. They stopped and looked at her in amazement.
“Faith, sweetie, we just finished talking about all that. Don't you remember? Oh, my God, I'd better come with you for a while,” Tom had cried.
Faith honestly could not remember the discussion. She knew they had all been talking for what seemed like years, but somehow the gist of it had passed her by. So they started again. This time with hot coffee and sandwiches quickly thrown together by Tom. Faith noted that somewhere along the line, it had become “Tom” and “John,” but she was still “Mrs. Fairchild.”
Dunne took a bite out of his ham sandwich, thereby consuming all but a small part of the crust, “Now, Mrs. Fairchild, this business could be any number of things—a prank by someone with a very warped sense of humor or a forcible hint from someone who genuinely cares about you and is afraid you might be too involved.
“However, we can't rule out that it could be from the murderer, who may also think you are too involved, but who might possibly not have your best interests at heart.”
Faith appreciated the attempt at humor and also the way Dunne's voice dropped several octaves, putting it somewhere in the basement of C below low C, when he mentioned the last possibility.
He continued, “It has not escaped our notice that you have been asking people questions and in general hinting around that you'd like to find the murderer yourself.”
He looked at her sternly.
Not another talking to, thought Faith, I just can't take all this advice.
Dunne's expression lightened up to a mere threat of showers, “Not that I'd mind someone else solving this. It's no secret that we aren't satisfied with the case against Sam Miller and even if we were, the entire law
profession of the Greater Boston area has been bombarding us with so many calls, threats, and writs that it would take years to try the damned thing. But I'd prefer the someone else to be a police officer. It looks bad if the Spensers, Peter Wimseys, and Miss Pinkertons of the world show us up too often.”
Faith was surprised. “I never would have guessed that you read mysteries,” she said, momentarily diverted by the idea of John Dunne tucked up in an emperor-sized bed eagerly trying to figure out whodunit.
“I don't, but my wife does. She says it's more interesting than my job and she thrives on crime.”
Tom jumped in. He knew his Faith and the moment Dunne had said “wife” her eyes lit up. The next question was bound to be size-oriented or worse. “Faith, you see why it makes sense for you to leave now, don't you? Aside from easing my mind about your safety?”
Faith knew what he was doing and shot him a glance that said “later” all over it.
Now that she was calmer and fed, parts of the previous conversation were coming back to her. She agreed. “Yes, of course—to make the murderer, if that's who sent it, feel secure and relaxed, thereby committing some kind of blunder, like mentioning in the Shop and Save that he or she killed Cindy.
“If it wasn't the murderer, it doesn't matter so much, but don't worry. I would just as soon absent myself from the scene at the moment. Not,” she added hastily for Dunne's benefit, “that I was ever so involved in it.”
He looked at her and raised one eyebrow skeptically. This was a man who had definitely gone to the right movies as a kid.
Then Faith remembered what she had wanted to ask him. “Why did you say before that it would be virtually impossible to trace the letter?”
“Well, first of all the stationery is sold everywhere—
in CVS or places like it. You've probably got some yourself to use when you pay bills.”
Faith didn't, but that was neither here nor there.
“Then there's the handwriting. Of course, we'll give it to the analysts, but I'll bet you a jar of Ubet's syrup that it was written with an ordinary #2 Ticonderoga yellow pencil with the left hand. Pretty impossible to trace, short of demanding a handwriting sample from everyone in Aleford. And the person may not even be local. We've discovered that the field of Cindy's, shall we say ‘acquaintances,' ranged pretty much over the greater Boston area. She was luckier than we've been, though; they all seem to have alibis and pretty good ones.”
“So you still suspect someone local?” Tom asked quietly.
“We do. Of course we'll take handwriting samples from Sam Miller and Dave Svenson, Oswald Pearson too, but I doubt they'll prove anything.”
“I really wish you wouldn't bother them. It's ridiculous to think one of them did this. Even if he was worried, Dave or Sam would come right out and tell me—or tell Tom.”
“Please, Mrs. Fairchild, Faith if I may, let us go about this in our own way.”
“Yes, you may—call me Faith that is, but I still don't like the idea of your grilling my friends and neighbors.”
“Well, we'll try to make it more of a saute,” Dunne quipped.
“Not funny, John,” said Faith, but she was smiling. He really was a charmer when he tried. She wondered what his wife was like, probably five feet tall and a pistol.
“Before you get ready to go, let's go over everyone you've talked to about the murder again, in the last few
days especially. Maybe we can figure out who got the wind up.”
That reminded Faith of the sail on Saturday. Should she tell him about the conversation with Patricia? And what about Robert's confession in the boat? She looked at Tom uneasily and he understood.
“He means everything, Faith, this isn't a time to hold back, thinking you might be betraying a confidence. I certainly don't intend to.”
“Good,” said John, eyeing Tom appreciatively. He'd never been involved in a case with a minister before and he hadn't known what to expect. It had been a long time since he had been in church himself.
 
Sitting in the plane, thinking about it all, Faith felt far removed and as light as the air she was speeding through. It almost seemed to have happened to someone else, or in a book she read. She sipped her scotch slowly. Benjamin wasn't asleep, but he wasn't really awake either. She had given him a bottle at takeoff so his little ears wouldn't hurt and since then he seemed content to stare out the window and listen to the muffled roar of the engines.
She returned to her thoughts. They had gone over everybody without any significant results and finally she had hurried upstairs to pack, which roughly meant putting everything Benjamin owned in a bag with a few things for herself. Until she had a baby, she never realized how fast they went through clothes. She had expected to change a lot of diapers, of course, but Benjamin turned out to be a champion at what one of the books coyly referred to as “projectile vomiting”—like something from the space program. He was pretty much out of the stage now, but while it lasted Faith began
to think his childhood would be one long laundry cycle.
Tom had been downstairs phoning the airlines. They had decided that Faith could go alone after all. She had felt better and had longed for the relative safety of the Big Apple; besides, she hadn't known what she would do with Tom in the city, since her plan was to fill out her winter wardrobe. She had also thought he should stay in Aleford so he could tell her what was happening. As he called her mother at work she could hear his voice while he tried to explain to her that her daughter had just received what amounted to a botanical death threat in the mail. Well, if anyone could do it, Tom could, Faith thought, and realized she was going to have to keep a firm nonhysterical hand on herself.
Detective Dunne had left with the letter carefully wrapped in some kind of plastic envelope. Faith supposed they would test it for everything in the world—fingerprints, sweat, and so on. She had pointed out to Dunne that, as with the murder, the most logical suspect was Cindy herself. Poison pen letters or the equivalent were certainly in Cindy's line, but she was undoubtedly in no condition to go around pressing flowers these days.
Dunne had wished her a good trip and told her to bring back some decent corned beef. Although they hadn't really gotten anywhere, at least something had happened and that seemed to cheer him up. Just pack little Mrs. Fairchild off to her mother's, solve the case, and then she could come home again.
John Dunne had been born and raised in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx. When his father died, the whole neighborhood, plus relatives on both sides, jumped in to fill the gap. John knew his Bronx wasn't the Bronx of his mother's childhood—she was constantly lamenting the passing of certain landmarks—but it was a good place to grow up. The fires that would erupt later were
just beginning to smolder and a long subway ride away in any case. Orchard Beach and City Island were nearby and if he wasn't at one or the other for a family picnic, he was there to swim and hang out with his friends. Everybody knew everybody else in the few blocks that constituted his world. Then he learned to cross the bridge and discovered Manhattan. By the time he graduated from high school, there wasn't an inch of that island he hadn't explored.
He met his wife while she was on her senior class trip to New York City, the culmination of thousands of bake sales, car washes, and raffles. Betsy was from the potato fields in northern Maine, a stone's throw away from the Canadian border. It took Dunne months to understand everything she said and years to decipher her family's accent. On the New York trip, she had become separated from her classmates and had no idea where she was, so she walked into the closest police station, as instructed by Mrs. Greenlaw, the chaperone. Mrs. Greenlaw's greatest fear was to lose one of her charges to the white slave trade and she understood that the latest tactic was using grandmotherly-looking old ladies in gloves and hats to lure unsuspecting girls astray.
Out of all the police stations in New York, it had to be Dunne's. It wasn't that Betsy was particularly beautiful, but she had something that appealed to him immediately. It was his first year on the force and his mother was after him to settle down. When Betsy walked in and asked how she could find the hotel they were staying at, he knew he'd be taking her there personally and buying her lunch on the way. Later she told him how intimidated she had been. He assumed she meant by his size, or because he was a policeman, but she confessed it was because he had been to college. His size never bothered her and if anyone thought they looked mismatched—Betsy
was just a little over five feet and indeed a pistol—it wasn't something they said to John's face.
He sent Mrs. Greenlaw a dozen American Beauty roses the day they got engaged.
He'd never regretted marrying Betsy, even though she wouldn't live in New York. She made him laugh, was a terrific mother, and understood him better than anyone ever had. But there was scarcely a day he didn't miss the city. It wasn't Faith's city he missed, although a few of the quadrants intersected; it was one of the other hundreds of New York Citys people construct for themselves. He was sorry Faith had to leave Aleford for the reason she did, but he had to admit he'd like to have been on the plane with her.

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