Body in the Bookcase ff-9

by Katherine Hall Page

  Tommy was every mother’s dream. Faith had met him when Niki had brought him to the parsonage Christmas party. Harvard grad, handsome, fun, and up to his ears in profits from a software company he’d started. Plus, he was Greek. Faith had watched the relationship get more and more serious. Tommy was crazy about Niki, and her apartment was beginning to look like a branch of Winston’s florists, she’d quipped.

  But Niki never took him home. She’d walked in one blustery March day and announced it was over. Tommy was too right and she’d gotten nervous. “I’m going to stick to bikers for a while, or maybe lawyers. Very similar. I was beginning to lose my edge with Tommy. We had even started staying in and renting videos!” Faith had expressed appropriate horror.

  Hearing once more that Niki wasn’t planning on leaving, Faith felt relieved. She’d miss Niki’s expertise as a chef, but she knew she’d miss the daily installment of Niki’s life even more.

  The morning passed quickly and it was over a lunch break of some leftover vegetable risotto that the Winslow burglary came up.

  “I still don’t understand why they would have bothered breaking into Sarah’s house,” Faith said.

  “It’s a tiny Cape. There’s even mold on the gray shingles.”

  “You lived such a sheltered life in New York.

  Anybody who does this for a living—and you do understand that this is what it is to these guys, right?—assumes there’s going to be something valuable in any house in a place like Aleford. The same for all of the western suburbs. It may not be a PC or whatever, but at the very least, they’ll get some jewelry.”

  Niki was right. The Fairchilds had learned from Charley MacIsaac that the Winslow break-in was merely one in a string of recent burglaries.

  None of them had had the same tragic results, nor were all the houses so thoroughly searched. In one case, the only thing taken was a silver tea set, and the owner was not even aware it was missing for some days. It had been so much a part of her dining room that it wasn’t until a friend commented on its absence that the owner realized her loss.

  “The police won’t tell me anything,” Faith complained. “I don’t know if they even turned up any prints. It makes me furious to think that maybe nobody is doing anything about Sarah’s death—or the break-in.”

  Niki nodded and polished off the last grains of rice—just the right amount of garlic and the spiced sun-dried tomatoes had given the risotto an additional zing. “I just had my bike stolen once and I know how pissed off I was. I reported it, and I’m sure the only reason the cop filled out the form was because he was hitting on me at the same time.”

  “Well, we’d better get back to work.” Faith stood up, but she couldn’t leave the subject.

  “Charley says property crime is the biggest problem he has to deal with, but I wouldn’t say they’re too successful if thieves can enter a home in broad daylight and scare a woman to death.” She picked up their bowls and started toward the sink, then stopped and looked back at Niki. “You know I’m not going to let this go,” Faith said.

  “I never thought you would, boss.”

  Three

  Quite apart from not letting go of the matter, it soon reached out and grabbed Faith, as well.

  Tuesday morning after spouse and progeny had departed, Faith left the house herself for a whirlwind round of errands, the repetitive kind, which don’t bring the satisfaction of a job well done, because in the near future, you’ll have to do them again—the dry cleaners, gas station, post office, market. It had gotten to the point where she could almost negotiate the aisles of the Shop ’n Save blindfolded. Familiarity bred speed, though, and before too long, she was back home, pulling into the driveway to put the food away before going to work.

  As she got out of the car, Faith congratulated herself on the skill with which she had once again managed to avoid the Canadian hemlock hedge while leaving the parsonage shingles intact. The drive combined the challenge of a ninety-degree turn from the street with the width of a footpath.

  Struggling up the back stoop, keys out, she was puzzled to notice that the door was wide open, the storm door, too. She let the grocery bags slide to the ground and stared straight ahead. She’d locked the door only an hour ago. Maybe Tom had come home for something he’d forgotten—

  not an unusual occurrence. The Reverend Thomas Fairchild was quite absentminded.

  “Honey?” she called. Her voice sounded very loud in the still morning. Mounting anxiety was making her stomach queasy, her skin damp.

  “Honey, are you home?”

  One of the brown paper bags toppled over, and as she bent to straighten it, further queries died in her throat. There were shards of wood on the mat.

  She jerked her head up and saw the marks on the door, the frame. Forced entry. The house had been burglarized. Like Sarah’s.

  Apprehension instantly became fury. She kicked the top step over and over, swearing out loud, “Damn! Damn! Damn!” Then she turned and raced next door to the Millers’ to call the police.

  Only a few seconds had passed since she’d seen the splintered wood; a minute or two since noting the open doors. It seemed longer. The bright sun, blue sky, and Pix’s front garden full of blooms mocked her as she pounded furiously on her neighbor’s door. “Pix,” she cried, “where are you? Don’t be out, please!” She was starting to run to the next house when Pix Miller came to the door.

  “Faith, what on earth is the matter?” “My house has been robbed! I have to call the police!” She pushed past her friend, grabbed the phone, and punched in the numbers.

  “Yes, yes, I’m sure. Hurry up! . . . No, I don’t think anyone is still there. There was no car outside and the garage was empty.”

  She hung up and stamped her foot on the floor.

  She wanted to punch the wall, punch someone.

  Pix was staring at her friend open-mouthed.

  Faith’s face was red, her eyes glazed. Her arms were folded tightly across her chest, her hands balled into tight fists.

  “The garage was empty! I didn’t close the doors!” she cried. “I could see right in. Anyone could see right in!” She was hardly aware of Pix.

  Her thoughts careened wildly. Had she locked the back door? Her mind went blank. She was almost positive she had, but maybe she hadn’t. She simply couldn’t remember. Suddenly, the Millers’ hall looked strange, as if she was seeing it for the first time, as if she was watching a movie. She flashed back to her kitchen door, the deep gouges on the frame.

  She felt Pix’s arm around her shoulder and the touch brought her back. “Faith, are you sure about this?” Pix steered her in the direction of the kitchen. “You need to sit down. I’ve got coffee on.” The suburbanite’s panacea.

  Faith twisted out from under her friend’s well-meant gesture, not bothering to respond to the question. She was sure, and Pix would see soon enough. Faith didn’t need to sit down. She needed to do things. One thing especially. “I have to call Tom!” she said, picking up the receiver.

  One corner of her mind was entering the familiar number; another was still berating herself mentally for not closing the garage doors. “I have to tell him what’s happened.” Once she reached him, she wouldn’t mind a cup of coffee. Her throat was so dry, she could scarcely swallow. She hoped Pix wasn’t experimenting with “European” flavors again. The hazelnut ginger had been truly loathsome.

  There was no answer at the church office.

  “Where is he? Oh, merde, I forgot. This is his day at the VA hospital; he’ll be on his way out there, but his secretary should be picking up.” Faith had taken to swearing in French since Benjamin, at the age of twenty months, had displayed a preco-cious ability to recite his parents’ every word.

  She drummed her fingers on Pix’s hall table, leaving little smudges in the Old English shine as she listened. Tom had hired a new parish secretary two weeks ago. Her name was Rhoda Dawson, and Faith had been subjected to nightly reports about how lucky he was, what a treasure Ms. Dawson wa
s, and the like. She let the phone ring a few more times. Still no answer. So, where was this treasure now?

  She hung up, coffee forgotten. “Come on. The police should be there by now.”

  “Do you want me to stay and keep trying?” Pix asked.

  It was the logical thing to do, but Faith didn’t want to go back to the house by herself. She grabbed Pix’s hand and pulled her toward the front door. “We can try again later. I want you with me.”

  They walked rapidly into the next yard. The police had not arrived yet. The house seemed un-naturally quiet. For a moment, the two women stood silently, looking at the gaping doors.

  “Maybe you frightened them off. Maybe they didn’t get much,” Pix offered in a hopeful tone of voice. Faith looked at her dismally. It was an A. A.

  Milne kind of thing to say. An “It’s all right, Pooh” from Piglet. Except it wasn’t.

  “They must have seen me leave, or noticed that the garage was empty! Oh, why did I choose today of all days to do my shopping! And why didn’t I close the garage door?” The thought had continued to nag at her since she first realized her lapse. She was sure now that she’d locked up good and tight, as the entire town had been doing since Sarah’s death, but then she hadn’t closed the garage.

  “I might just as well have left a sign on the front lawn—house empty, come and get it!” she said bitterly. She dug the toe of her shoe into the soft ground, disturbing the turf her husband was doggedly trying to nurture into something resembling a lawn.

  “Don’t be silly, you couldn’t have known you’d be robbed, and those doors weigh a ton,” Pix said briskly in the no-nonsense tone she’d picked up from her headmistress at Windsor. It had worked with adolescent girls and sometimes worked with Pix’s own three children. It wasn’t working with Faith.

  “Where are the police? It’s not as if they have far to come!” The parsonage was one of the houses bordering Aleford’s historic green. The police station was a few blocks farther down Main Street. What was taking them so long? She began to walk rapidly up and down the driveway. Little details were obsessing her. She’d found a brand-new book of stamps on the sidewalk in front of the library and had happily said to herself, This must be my lucky day. Luck. It all came down to that. Good luck. Bad luck.

  Her overriding emotion was anger, and it was mounting as she waited. Faith was angry. Angry at the intruders, angry at the police, angry at her best friend and neighbor, whose house was intact, angry at the world. She turned to Pix. “Maybe you’d better go try to call again.”

  Now Pix seemed unwilling to leave Faith alone. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, tell Ms. Dawson to get ahold of Tom—he should be at the hospital by now—and have him come home as fast as he can. I’ll be fine.” Faith spat out the word fine.

  A police car pulled into the Fairchilds’ driveway as Pix was starting to leave. Patrolman Dale Warren got out. He was carrying a clipboard.

  “The chief will be along in a minute. He had to get some stuff together. Now, what do we have here?”

  “That!” Faith led him to the door.

  Dale was a tall young man. One of his uncles and his grandfather had been cops, too. Law enforcement was his life. He solemnly inspected the damage.

  “Was it like this when you left?”

  Faith looked around wildly for some sort of blunt instrument, seized by an impulse to blud-geon Patrolman Warren to death. It was all she could do to stop herself from breaking out in hysterical laughter. As she walked toward her house, Pix caught Faith’s eye. This time, the headmistress trick worked and Faith took a deep breath.

  “Noooo,” she said in an overly patient tone. “It was not like this when I left.”

  Dale nodded and made a note of the reply.

  Next question. “What time did you leave the house?”

  This, at least, made sense—more sense than the notion that she might have picked up a crowbar or an ax and whacked away at her own door.

  “Shortly after Tom and Ben. Tom was dropping Ben off at nursery school and I was taking Amy to play group. It must have been around eight-forty-five.”

  “Did you go back to the house during the morning?”

  “No, I did my marketing, returned some books to the library, other errands.”

  Faith felt the first tears of the day prick her eyes. They did not fall so much as sting. If she hadn’t gone to the library, if, if, if . . .

  She’d wanted to go into the house since she’d first seen the broken door frame, and now, standing at the threshold, the urge was almost irre-sistible. Dale seemed to read her thoughts.

  “Why don’t you come in and see what might be missing?”

  He stood aside to let her step over the slivers of wood. His optimistic tone suggested, as had Pix’s earlier, that perhaps the Fairchilds’ door had been destroyed by someone desperate to grab a quick cup of coffee or just for the hell of it. Faith, of course, knew better. People only broke doors down when they wanted to get in and take something out. Something valuable. She started to step into the kitchen, then stopped.

  “Shouldn’t we wait for Charley? Aren’t you going to want to dust for prints?”

  “Oh yeah, sure. We’ll wait.” While steeped in the traditions of the force, Dale still got a little confused sometimes about procedure.

  So they waited, an unlikely twosome standing in the Fairchilds’ backyard. Dale gazed up at the sky intently. Faith followed his glance. He seemed about to speak. She prepared herself for something meteorological, something cumulonimbus.

  “These were not nice people,” Dale commented instead.

  Was the whole day going to be like this? Faith wondered bleakly, her anger ebbing. Improbables, idiocies, platitudes? “Was it like this when you left? . . . These were not nice people.” No, not nice at all. Dale didn’t seem to expect a response.

  She didn’t offer one. He was looking to the heavens again, an anxious expression on his young face. He seemed to be searching for an answer—or maybe he was planning to go fishing when his shift was over.

  A few minutes later, Charley arrived with two plainclothes cops, both carrying bulky cases.

  MacIsaac took Faith’s hand.

  “I’m very sorry this had to happen to you.” It was the right thing to say. And the right things started happening. Suddenly, the yard was filled with activity. They shot rolls and rolls of film—photographs of the doors, the steps, the un-sightly yews to either side, which the Fairchilds had been vowing to replace since they moved in.

  They dusted the stoop, the frame, the doors for prints.

  “Two good ones here!” the fingerprint man called over his shoulder, peering at the molding around the outside door. “Must have grabbed it when they were finished, after he took his gloves off. Maybe carrying something and missed his footing.”

  “We’ll get them, Faith. We’ll get them.” Charley stood grimly watching. He had a patrolwoman checking the area surrounding the green and questioning the neighbors. All it ever took was one break. Someone glancing out the window.

  Someone strolling on Main Street, noting a car.

  At last, one of the men motioned to the chief from inside the house. “We’ve taken all the pictures. Mrs. Fairchild can come in and tell us what’s missing. Just don’t touch anything. Ray hasn’t finished checking for prints.” Faith had wanted to know the worst since she’d arrived at the back door, but now she was loath to find out. She wanted to turn time back.

  She wanted it to be yesterday. Please let it not be today; then this wouldn’t be happening. It was the way she had felt last fall when they’d lost a dear friend to breast cancer, the way it had been when Sarah Winslow died. If it’s never tomorrow, you’ll always be safe.

  “Faith?” Charley put his hand on her arm.

  He’d been through this countless times. “Come on. Maybe they didn’t get much.”

  But they had.

  The kitchen was filled with false hopes. It looked exactly the way it had when the
Fairchilds had left—chairs slightly askew around the big round table set in front of the bow window facing the backyard and, beyond, the church. The dishes were in the sink, and Faith valiantly made a joke.

  “You’d think they could have at least cleaned up the breakfast things.” She was valiant. She was plucky. She opened the door to the dining room.

  She was devastated.

  “Oh my God.” She clutched at Charley. “Everything’s gone! They even took the drawer.” The mahogany sideboard looked like a seven-year-old missing his two front teeth, only there was nothing to grin about and the tooth fairy was far away.

  “Must have used it to carry the stuff. Pretty common,” the man with the camera said. He was watching his sidekick brush white powder all over the gleaming dark wood surfaces in the room. “Do you remember if the chair was pulled out like this?” He turned to Faith, who was still transfixed by the hole in her furniture.

  “What? Oh, no.” She looked at the dining room chair turned away from the table, completely sideways. “They must have taken out the drawer and set it on the chair.” All the better to fill it up.

  Patrolman Dale Warren was at her side with his clipboard. “Can you give us some idea of what’s missing? The quicker we do this, the quicker an APB can go out. You never know . . .” Faith wished he would shut up. The car, van, truck—whatever they’d used—was long gone and all her precious things were probably out of state by now. But, she reflected, one speeding ticket and a glance to the rear . . . Suddenly, she was all business. She’d think about how she felt later.

  It was a long list. Their wedding sterling, things that had come down in both their families.

  Sibleys and Fairchilds alike never seemed to have let a possession slip out of their thrifty hands, unless it was going to another family member. Family things. She’d lost all their family things. No, they’d been stolen. It wasn’t her fault. Her mind was muddled. Don’t think about it yet. The words were becoming a mantra. Keep talking, she told herself.

  “A sterling silver sugar and creamer, a carving set with the initials tFp—Tom’s great-grandfather. He was named for him.” She was wander-ing. They had eaten in this room the day before yesterday. Sunday dinner. Their napkins were still on the table. Their napkins, but not their napkin rings. She swallowed hard. A thought seized her and she ran toward the china cabinet at the end of the room. She kept some silver there. The children’s christening mugs, a tray her parents had given them as an engagement gift. The tray was gone. The mugs were there. She felt a rush of happiness. They hadn’t gotten it all.