Body in the Bog ff-7

by Katherine Hall Page

  Faith put on a black linen suit from Searle and went next door to drive to the wake with the Millers. Tom had had to go to the hospital to see an elderly parishioner who’d suffered a heart attack that afternoon.

  “I wonder who will be there?” Pix said as they drove to the funeral home.

  “Judging from the number of cars, I’d say most of the town,” Sam remarked. “You two go on in and I’ll park in the Shop ’n Save lot. There’s no room here.” The parking lot of the Stewart Funeral Home was full and when Faith and Pix went inside, there was a long line to get into the room where the family was sitting with Joey. Faith spied Millicent ahead of her and the Scotts. Nelson was with them. This was an occasion that transcended mundane disagreements. At least, Faith hoped so. For these two days, no one had any affiliations. Death was a nonexclusive club. No sponsor needed.

  Faith had been in a great many funeral homes. It went with the job. Stewart’s was interchangeable with most, except for the framed prints of the battle on Aleford Green and other famous moments from local history. The furniture was Chippendale by way of Ethan Allen, the wall-to-wall carpeting beige, and the walls themselves covered with a muted striped paper that matched the floors. As the line moved slowly forward, they passed a number of large floral offerings: Deane Construction Company, Deane-Madsen Development Corporation, Deane Properties, Deane Toyota, the Masons, the Aleford Minutemen, and, when Faith glimpsed the casket, the biggest and most heartrend-ing of all: “Love from Bonnie and Little Joey.”

  “Open or closed?” whispered Pix. She figured Faith, of all people, should know.

  “Closed, I would think,” she answered. Yet, morti-cians could accomplish a great deal. They’d shut those staring eyes and cover the wound. The casket might be open after all. She thrust the image out of her mind and tried instead to think of Joey as he’d been at the selectmen’s meeting.

  Sam joined them. “Such a young guy.” He thought of his own children. “His poor parents. They were very proud of all he’d accomplished. He comes from a large family in Somerville and he’s always been the star.”

  The star. Faith believed it—married well, made good money, produced a long-awaited child, another Joey at that. Joseph Madsen had had everything going for him.

  They were close to the front and one of the Stewarts came along with the guest book for them to sign.

  It was hard to tell the various Stewart generations apart. In their somber clothes and conservative haircuts, they all looked about fifty. Faith wrote her name.

  She was dreading meeting Joey’s parents, who she was sure were the two elderly people sitting next to Bonnie. Mrs. Madsen’s eyes were red and puffy. A balled-up handkerchief was clenched in one hand.

  Bonnie had brought the baby, who was sleeping peacefully in her arms at the moment, unaware of the tragedy surrounding him. It was unbearably sad.

  The casket was closed. Faith breathed a sigh of relief. Someday she might be able to remember him alive. Gus stood up to greet her, gripping her hand hard and pulling her into his arms.

  “I’m so sorry, Gus. I know how horrible this is for all of you.”

  The old man nodded. He hadn’t been crying, but his face was red. He looked angry. Lora was standing beside him. She hugged Faith, too. It was as Faith had expected. All thoughts of POW! and divisiveness were absent.

  “We’ll get whoever did this,” Lora said angrily; then her face changed and tears welled in her eyes.

  “Poor Bonnie! Poor little Joey! He’s never going to know his father.” Lora had her hair pulled back and it looked limp. She was wearing her glasses and no makeup, but now that Faith had witnessed the transformation, she could detect the very attractive woman beneath the disguise. She was surprised she’d missed it before. Context is everything. The way you don’t recognize the checkout people you see several times a week at the market when you bump into them on the MBTA or other places. Brad had picked up on Lora’s appeal. So had the well-dressed stranger. Who else?

  A young man next to Lora put his arm around her and Lora managed to make the introduction, “This is my brother Bobby. Eddie and Terry are over with the Madsens. This is Mrs. Fairchild, Bobby.”

  “So you’re the one who found him. I’m sorry. It must have been a terrible experience.” Bobby Deane was tall and successfully fighting the weight a slight heaviness at the jowls indicated could be a problem.

  He sounded sincere, yet car salesmen always did. He took her over to the Madsens.

  “This is Mrs. Fairchild.”

  Faith looked back at the Millers, who were still talking with Gus senior. She caught Pix’s eye and signaled for her to come to Faith’s rescue—immediately.

  This was because as soon as Bobby said those words, poor Mrs. Madsen lost whatever composure she’d maintained and was now sobbing uncontrollably on Faith’s breast.

  “Tell me what he looked like! Did he say anything?” Faith patted the woman on the back. Mr. Madsen hovered next to his wife. His face seemed to have shut down when he got the news and not opened up again.

  He was silent, waiting for Faith’s reply, too.

  “He was . . . he was at peace. I know he didn’t suffer”—there hadn’t been time—“and I’m afraid he was already gone when I got there.”

  Mrs. Madsen lifted her face to Faith’s. She smelled faintly of some kind of floral toilet water, the kind you give your mother on Mother’s Day when you’re a child.

  “Thank you.”

  Bonnie, who had been sitting motionless with the baby as all this was going on, stood up and guided her mother-in-law back to where they were sitting. It wasn’t that Joey’s widow didn’t look at Faith; she looked through Faith. Pix slipped her arm around her friend and they moved on. Faith realized she was trembling.

  “Dear God, these poor people,” Pix said. Sam came up behind them. “Let’s go get something to eat.

  Samantha’s with the kids and you don’t have to go home yet. You need a drink, and I wouldn’t mind one myself.”

  Gratefully, Faith let the Millers lead the way. On the way out, Millicent stopped them.

  “Nothing is going to be right until we find out who’s responsible for all this.” When she closed her mouth on the words, it made a grim line across the bottom of her face, a line sharply accented by the unvarying shade of red lipstick she favored.

  Faith nodded and started walking. She really wanted to get away. Away from the fury of Bonnie Madsen’s grief. The candles they were burning smelled sweet, like the incense that would be used in tomorrow’s Mass. She was beginning to feel queasy.

  Pix had a question, though. “Did any of the Deanes seem upset to see you or other POW! members here?

  Lora used to baby-sit for us and I don’t think they associated us with the group, but it might have been different for you.” Faith stopped to listen.

  “No, no one expressed anything other than thanks for my words of comfort. I wouldn’t have expected otherwise. I’ve known Gus all my life,” Millicent replied.

  Faith was feeling better. “And that would be . . .” Millicent smiled sweetly and left.

  It was hard to find food in the suburbs, unless you wanted to drive to Waltham, which had unaccountably become the mecca for innovative, excellent chefs outside Boston or Cambridge. To get a quick meal, you had to settle for a chain or choose warily from the menu at the Aleford Inn. They went to the inn. Sam ordered some scotch for himself and sweet vermouth for his wife and asked Faith what she wanted. She knew enough not to order the house wine and joined Pix in some vermouth—but dry.

  The trick with the inn was to avoid anything with a foreign name or fancy sauce. No chicken à la Ver-sailles or scrod with hazelnut sorrel cream. Scrod simply broiled accompanied by the inn’s thick-cut french fries, the skin left on, was delicious, though, and all of them ordered the same thing. They opted for the vegetable of the day, carrot pennies, rather than the house iceberg-lettuce salad with Thousand Island dressing.

  They’d tested those waters
before. When the food arrived, Faith ate hungrily.

  “Remember, just a memorial service and maybe a few words at the grave,” Pix was reminding Sam. The Millers had a plot on Sanpere Island in Maine, where Pix’s father was buried. It was a lovely cemetery surrounded by birch and evergreens. Faith thought it might not be a bad place to end up. Her thoughts were determinedly morbid. Joey was only a few years older than Tom and she. But then they weren’t going to get themselves killed. Not that Joey had chosen this course, but something he did had led to murder. His murder.

  “Who do you think killed him?” she asked Sam straight out.

  Sam took the question in stride. He chewed reflectively.

  “I wish I could think it was someone from away.” He used the term the natives on Sanpere applied to anyone not born there—a category distinct from summer people and tourists; people who lived there but weren’t from there.

  “But you don’t.”

  “No, I’m afraid I think it’s someone he knew well; someone we all know. But damned if I can come up with who that someone is.”

  Faith and Pix nodded their heads simultaneously in agreement. They looked like the ornaments people put in their cars’ rear windows. They bobbed again.

  Someone they all knew.

  The funeral was as sad as—and even more crowded than—the wake. Cars lined the side streets near the church. There were also a number of pickups and vans with the names of various local construction companies. Joey’s colleagues had come to pay their last respects. Inside the church, Faith half-expected the pallbearers to be followed by a contingent of hard hats, uniformed like a police funeral. The police were there; both Charley and John sat in a pew near the door. As Faith and Tom walked by toward the front of St. Theresa’s, John leaned out. “Are you going to be home later this afternoon?”

  They would be now and told him so.

  It was a long service. Father Reeves was accompanied by the priest from Joey’s old church in Somerville, who drew tears when he described Joey as an altar boy, Joey in CYO. Faith tried not to think about what Scott Phelan had told her the night of the Fletchers’ dinner party. Maybe Joseph Madsen’s feet had strayed from the path, but they were there once, and this could be one of the reasons his mother was crying so hard.

  The interment was in a cemetery in East Boston, where his grandparents lay at rest. Tom was going, but told Faith she should pick up the kids and stay home.

  Enough was enough.

  She spent the afternoon engaged in quality time, aware that she hadn’t exactly been piling up points for her motherhood merit badge. She read to Amy until she went down for her nap. Ben was doing Legos on the floor next to them. It was a baby book, he’d declared, but Faith knew he was listening intently as the Poky Little Puppy made his distinctive way through dogdom.

  Tom came home. It had started to rain as soon as they reached the cemetery, of course, he told her. A sodden spring. It meant a hot, dry summer everyone said—the same people who knew the wind velocity merely by glancing at a swaying branch. The catering company was air-conditioned; the parsonage was not.

  Faith figured on doing a lot of cooking. She would, in fact, be doing a lot of cooking this week. They’d accepted several jobs and had a wedding the following weekend.

  She looked out the front window. The rain hadn’t reached Aleford yet, but Detective Lieutenant Dunne had. He was coming up the front walk, covering the distance in several fewer steps than most. She opened the door before he could knock.

  “Good, you’re home,” he said, and walked in.

  “Tom, too?” There was a distinct note of hope in his voice.

  “Tom, too,” Faith assured him.

  Tom had told Faith that Dunne had been in East Boston, as well. It was hard for him to be unobtrusive, but he’d remained at a distance from the main body of mourners.

  He sat down, removed his raincoat, but refused Faith’s offer of nourishment, as usual. The man must eat like a horse when he got home, she thought. Some form of nourishment was preventing any withering away of flesh from his immense frame. She’d been to the state police barracks and aside from some ancient, moldy-looking sandwiches in a machine next to one that dispensed soft drinks, there wasn’t a scrap of food in evidence. She pictured Dunne’s wife, who Faith had heard was a mere slip of a woman, valiantly stirring large pots and turning a spit with huge haunches of meat. Faith was so distracted by her mental images, she almost missed John’s first words.

  “I have to get back right away, but I want to talk to you about Saturday.”

  Faith figured as much.

  “Are you absolutely sure you were being stalked? It wasn’t an animal—or a kid playing some kind of game?”

  “If it was a kid, it was a very weird one,” Faith said, then went through the whole experience again—the way the person had stopped when she did, speeded up—and hid.

  “It seems as if someone thinks you know something. Do you?” John’s question was direct and forceful. “This is no time to hold back, Faith.”

  “I do have several theories. Tom and I spent Saturday night going through every possibility we could think of, but I’m sure I haven’t missed anything and I’ve told you or Charley everything.” It was true—and frustrating.

  “So what did you and Tom come up with?” Dunne leaned back in the wing chair. It didn’t creak, but it looked full.

  Tom gave him a synopsis of the various suspects.

  “Nothing makes sense. Murder doesn’t make sense.

  It’s an act against nature, against the divine order of the universe, but the most likely possibility is that there were two killers: Joey Madsen and then Brad Hallowell. Faith thinks Brad may have developed serious psychological problems as a result of his involvement with some violent fantasy computer games.”

  “He seems to view life as one giant monitor screen and doesn’t distinguish between reality and RAM,” she told John.

  “And you think he was your would-be assailant?”

  “I don’t have any evidence, but yes, I think he was,” she replied. No evidence yet, she added to herself. After Tom’s reaction to her decoy plan, she knew what Dunne’s would be. Not telling him about a future possibility wasn’t, strictly speaking, withholding information—at least not in Faith’s book.

  John stood up to leave. “You notice anything at the Madsen wake or funeral?”

  Faith shook her head. “Nothing, except a truce has been declared between POW! and the Deanes. Bonnie Madsen wasn’t particularly cordial to me, but that’s understandable since she might have some powerful feelings regarding the person who discovered her husband’s body. I don’t think it had to do with my opposition to Alefordiana Estates. Millicent has called a meeting for tomorrow night to suggest to the membership that all efforts to halt the development of Beecher’s Bog cease for the present. Depending on how people react, the truce might be over.” But Joey wouldn’t be around to find out. He wouldn’t be around to make his fortune, either.

  Tom refused to have anything more to do with POW!

  “I made myself clear to Millicent and the others.

  No matter which way the membership votes, I’m out.” Faith felt slightly guilty. She planned to set her trap tonight, or the first phase, and it suited her not to have Tom around. Though she agreed in principle with his stand, she had to go to the meeting. Besides, she was curious. At any rate, Tom’s staying home solved the sitter problem.

  Maybe a hair more than “slightly.” She was walking over with Pix, who didn’t have any problems with guilt at all. She was still 100 percent opposed to the destruction of the bog, she’d told Faith earlier in the day.

  “Of course, I don’t think we should be doing anything about it now. I agree with everything Tom said on Saturday, yet it may become necessary to take action in the future. Suspending but not disbanding POW! would make that easier.”

  Faith kissed her husband good-bye.

  “Why do I have the feeling you’re up to something?” h
e asked.

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “No, you’re supposed to tell me.”

  “That you’re being silly?” She kissed him again.

  “Don’t worry.”

  “Now I really will,” he said gloomily. “I’ve heard those words before. Maybe I should go to the meeting with you after all. We can see if Samantha is free.”

  “Tom! Absolutely nothing is going to happen to me at the meeting, before or after. Besides, I am a grown-up. I also happen to know that Samantha is at some regional sports banquet tonight. The team made the finals, or whatever they’re called. She also got into Wellesley and is going there, so I’m sure she doesn’t want to change a diaper tonight or play Candyland with Ben.”

  “Neither do I.” Tom was being unusually truculent.

  “The two of us haven’t been out alone in ages. Let’s go out next weekend.”

  “That would be lovely, darling. Friday night? Ri-alto bar and a movie?” The bar had the same incredible food as the Cambridge restaurant, but the Fairchilds preferred the service and ambience at the bar, more casual, also more attentive—besides, they could eat well and get to a movie this way.

  “Okay. I’ll look and see what’s playing. What do you want to see?”

  “Sweetheart, this is Tuesday. We have all week, and Pix is waiting. I have to go.”

  “Fine, fine, leave me here all by my lonesome.” Ben called plaintively from his room, “Daddee, Daddee, are you going to read me a story?” Tom wouldn’t be lonesome at all.

  Again, Asterbrook Hall was crowded. Pix and Faith didn’t get front-row seats, but they found two together, even though they were late.

  “Look, Joey’s lawyer is here,” Pix said, expertly scanning the audience for a head count and to see who was there. “What do you think he’s up to?”

  “Same thing he was doing at the other meetings, collecting information for the Deanes.” But the lawyer hadn’t been at the last POW! meeting. Joey had been alone. Faith took a deep breath. She was waiting for the right moment.