Body in the Bookcase ff-9

by Katherine Hall Page

  “F.S.F. Always, T.P.F.”

  “May I see that watch, please?” Faith asked.

  She’d expected to be more nervous, more appre-hensive in Stackpole’s presence, but instead she was reacting to him as a kind of Jekyll and Hyde.

  He seemed harmless, even pathetic—an ill-tempered, seedy, aging wreck of a man.

  He put the watch in her outstretched palm. She opened the lid. The initials were there. It was her watch. “What are you asking for it?”

  “I can do two hundred.”

  Faith forced a smile, although she doubted charm of any kind made much impression on Mr. Stackpole. “Could you do a hundred and fifty—cash?”

  “You a dealer?”

  “No.”

  It seemed to be in her favor. “All right, one seventy-five, but I’m losing money here.” Faith knew better.

  “I’m also looking for cameos—pins or rings. Do you have any?”

  “Do you see any?”

  “I thought perhaps you might have things you haven’t put out yet.” There were plenty of boxes piled behind the tables and they appeared to be unopened.

  Stackpole walked over to the next table to kib-itz with the dealer. He’d made a sale and wasn’t interested in Faith anymore.

  “You come back later, honey.” It was Gloria.

  “George’s bark is worse than his bite. Nobody puts all their stuff out at once. He’ll be filling in as he sells, and I think I remember seeing some cameo earrings.”

  “Thank you.” Faith smiled warmly at the woman. What was she doing with a man like George Stackpole? Could he really be a teddy bear? An armed teddy bear? “I’ll try to get back tomorrow.”

  “You do that, honey.” Gloria returned to her costume jewelry. She was painstakingly arranging it in glittering rows.

  There was nothing else in the rest of Stackpole’s cases. After one last look, Faith left the hotel and drove back to what had once been her nice safe home.

  The back door had finally arrived with hinges and been replaced the day before. In this respect, life was settling down to some semblance of normality. It would be physically complete when they replaced the sideboard. She let herself in to check the messages before getting the kids.

  “Why, Mrs. Fairchild. I didn’t expect you to be here.”

  “Nor I you,” Faith said, startled. It was Rhoda Dawson, emerging from Tom’s study with a sheaf of papers in her hand and a book.

  “The Reverend asked me to get these things.

  He’s a bit pressed for time.”

  “Of course.” Faith didn’t know what else to say.

  My house is your house? Drop by anytime? How often have you been here before? Tom, are you crazy? marched through her mind in succession.

  “Well, I’d better get these over to him.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be happy to see them.” Faith showed the secretary out, then leapt for the phone.

  “Honey, your Ms. Dawson was just here.”

  “Great. I’m terribly far behind, and she offered to get what I needed. So, she’s on her way back?”

  “I suppose so. How many times has she come here without you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe three or four. Why?”

  “Come on, Tom. We’ve been robbed. Why do you think! And what did you do, give her your keys?”

  “It’s ridiculous to think she had anything to do with that, but if it makes you uncomfortable, I won’t ask her again. You never minded when my former secretary went into my study at home.”

  “That was before we were broken into, and besides, she was about a hundred and ten years old.”

  “Calm down and we’ll talk about this later.

  She’ll be back any minute. Maybe I’ve been in-sensitive, but I think you’re overreacting. We can’t let the robbery take over our whole lives, getting suspicious of totally innocent people. Bye, sweetheart.”

  “Totally innocent people tell you where they live, whether or not they have a family, and they don’t use a post office box for an address,” Faith sputtered. She was determined to have the last word and almost did.

  “Hi, Rhoda. I’ll be with you in a minute. Thank you,” she heard Tom say as he hung up.

  Easy enough to get a key made on your lunch hour, Faith speculated. Or make a wax impression if there wasn’t time before returning the keys to Tom. She was furious as she walked across to the church to get Ben. Tom really didn’t understand what she was going through. She’d forgotten to tell him about finding her watch. She felt lonelier than ever. Yet, maybe he was right.

  Maybe this was taking over her life.

  She returned to the house with Ben. She hadn’t checked the messages before. There weren’t any.

  The meeting with Stephanie and Courtney was still on.

  The man at George Stackpole’s booth had mentioned he’d see him at Morrison’s. It must be an auction. She grabbed the Yellow Pages and found “Morrison and Son” under auction houses. It only took a moment more to call and find out when and where the auction was being held.

  Tomorrow night at eight o’clock, preview starting at six. A VFW hall in Walton. She’d be there.

  Ben had learned a new song and entertained Faith with a spirited rendition of “Inch by Inch” as they drove to get Amy and then to work. The Bullock women, mother and daughter, were on time, much to Faith’s amazement. Making people wait was such an essential component of maintaining one’s position in society.

  “Your children?” Courtney asked in a somewhat dubious tone, as if Faith might have rented them for the afternoon to add a note of authentic-ity to her role as working mother.

  “Yes, Ben is five and Amy will be two in September.” True to her schedule, Amy was conked out in the playpen. Ben, humming steadily, was constructing a giant block tower. He’d barely cast a look their way, but Faith was eager to get the Bullocks in and out. Blocks captivated for only so long.

  “I’m eager to see what you’ve picked for the tablecloth and I have some suggestions for the flowers. Would you like to sample the avocado bisque we talked about for the first course of the rehearsal dinner?” She knew enough to stop before saying, “I’m sure you’ll like it.”

  “That would be lovely,” Courtney said graciously. She sat down and opened her briefcase, extracting the leather-bound wedding planner, thick as a dictionary now, and a fabric swatch.

  “This will be striking,” Faith said appreciatively, fingering the charcoal gray heavy silk covered with tiny stars embroidered in thin gossamer gold thread. The woman did have good taste. The china was Wedgwood cream ware. Have Faith’s food would look gorgeous. Now, to decide on the flowers.

  “This tastes better than it looks,” Stephanie said, scooping up the last drop of soup in her bowl. Faith reached for it to give her seconds and added some more puff pastry cheese sticks to the plate in front of them.

  “Nonsense. The color is divine. Very primavera.

  I see ranunculus—and masses of fringy parrot tulips in exotic colors. We can put them everywhere. Julian has tons of vases. We don’t want things to be too bridal. We need color.” Faith agreed with Courtney. This was going to be easier than she’d thought. She could do small nosegays to tuck into each napkin for the rehearsal dinner—maybe a few brilliant silken-petaled Icelandic poppies. But not tied with raffia. As far as Faith was concerned, raffia was the rubber band of the nineties and about as attractive. Call her old-fashioned, but she stuck to wired gauzy French ribbon and reels of satin.

  “The word bridal comes from ‘Bride-ale,’ the brew the Britons drank at wedding celebrations,” she told them to pass the time. “Rehearsal dinners used to be more colorful in earlier days. The noisier the better to drive evil spirits away and ensure good luck for those about to be married.

  All the plates and glasses were smashed at the end and people got roaring drunk.”

  “I don’t think Daddy would go for that—the smashing part. He’s very attached to his possessions,” Stephanie commented, graceful
ly flipping her long flaxen hair back over her shoulders, a habitual gesture that palled in repetition.

  “More attached to them than his family,” Courtney observed acerbically. “Now, shall we start making lists?” Business was business.

  Forty minutes later, the menus were etched in stone, the flowers near enough, and Faith was beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss. Stephanie told me about your unfortunate experience.” Courtney had been delighted with Faith’s suggestions and was now in a cheerful-enough mood to chat up the help.

  Faith knew Courtney was talking about the burglary, not a bereavement. Her ex-husband was not the only one for whom objects and individuals were interchangeable.

  “Thank you. It has been a difficult time. I haven’t seen you since we’ve started turning up some more of our things, and that’s been encouraging, to say the least. Everything points to one antiques dealer in particular and I’m hopeful we’ll be able to use this lead.”

  “That’s amazing. Congratulations.” Courtney was sounding positively human. “So few people ever find any of their lost valuables. You really have done a remarkable job—or I should say the Aleford police? I never would have thought it.” Faith felt a glow of pride. “I’m afraid the police have very little to do with it. Break-ins are all too common for them to try to track down individual items. I’ve been checking out this dealer’s various outlets, an antiques show at the Copley this morning, and tomorrow night he has some lots in an auction I plan to attend. I haven’t turned up much, considering what was taken, but at least we’re getting some of our own back.”

  “Was Daddy any help?” Stephanie asked in a bored tone of voice. She was ready to leave.

  “Yes, he told me a great deal about the way the business is structured, but he didn’t know much about the dealer in question, George Stackpole.”

  “George Stackpole?” Courtney said. “Why, that’s absurd. Julian has known George for years.

  They were partners in the old days.”

  Eight

  “When Julian graduated from Harvard, he was already spending most of his time buying and selling antiques. Daddy wanted to set him up with a shop on Charles Street, but Julian preferred to run the business from his—I should say our home. He bought so frequently from Stackpole that they worked out an arrangement that gave Julian first crack at whatever George turned up. I knew him, too, of course, and the man did have an eye. He could have done very well for himself if he hadn’t been such a lush.” Courtney’s voice dripped with scorn at the imperfections of others.

  “He does have nice things; everyone did,” Faith said. “I had such a strange feeling walking around the show, wondering how much of what was for sale had ended up there the way mine did.”

  “There will always be dealers—and customers—who are not overly concerned with provenance, and this is true on every level of the business. Just look at the fuss they had at the MFA about that Egyptian breastplate they bought from Sotheby’s that turned out to have been stolen from some little college someplace no one ever heard of.”

  Faith remembered the incident, and the college was Lafayette, not exactly little. Stephanie was bored. The conversation wasn’t about her.

  “Are you sure about the soup? I think we need to taste some alternatives.”

  Courtney gave Faith a complicit glance. “Darling, you want to fit in your dress, don’t you? The menus are perfect. I wouldn’t change a thing at this point.”

  Faith couldn’t believe her ears.

  “I have to meet Binky at Sonsie’s for drinks in an hour and I really can’t sit here talking about some little man you and Daddy used to get antiques from. Binky doesn’t like it when I’m late.”

  “Sorry, pet. I do feel for you, Faith. A home invasion is the ultimate violation.” Courtney shuddered. “Perhaps you misunderstood Julian. He’s a man of few words—believe me, no one knows that better than I—and he may be able to tell you more about George. He was certainly still purchasing the odd item from him as recently as last fall, because I bought something from him for a client and he said that it had come from Stackpole. To be sure, he paid the man a pittance compared with what he charged me.”

  And you doubled that in your client’s bill, Faith thought.

  Mother and daughter left in a cloud of complementary fragrances. As if on cue, Amy woke up crying and Ben decided to join her for no good reason. Faith locked up quickly, strapped them into their separate car seats, drove home, and settled down on the couch for a few hundred repetitions of The Very Hungry Caterpillar— Amy’s favorite—and every Henry and Mudge book written to date, Ben’s choices.

  At 2:00 a.m., Faith wondered if she would ever get a full night’s sleep again. Either she couldn’t get to sleep or she woke up with a start, unable to fall back. She was getting more reading done than she’d been able to for a long time, but fatigue was taking its toll during the day. She’d nodded off on the couch with the children and Ben had been very annoyed. She’d started to snap back at them, then hugged both of them instead and got a cup of coffee.

  Why had Julian Bullock downplayed his relationship with George Stackpole? She was sure she hadn’t been mistaken. He used few words, but the words were precise. “Met him once or twice.

  Know him slightly.” Then all that business about pickers and runners.

  While she was making dinner, Faith had tried dialing the phone number she’d found in Stackpole’s trash, first without any area code, then with several local ones. Tom had come in and she’d had to stop. They’d resumed the argument about Rhoda Dawson coming alone to the house, though, and Faith, frustrated at a number of other things, had told Tom it was fortunate he didn’t have to pick one of them over the other, because he’d have a very hard time. He’d started laughing at that point, which infuriated her further.

  Her eyes smarted from lack of sleep and she turned the light off, yet her mind kept racing. Tomorrow—or rather, today, Tom had promised, they could go out to Julian Bullock’s to look at the sideboard. Maybe she could introduce Stackpole’s name again and watch Julian’s reaction.

  She’d left Tom a message at his office as soon as she’d heard about the auction in Walton. She knew he was scheduling a meeting with the senior and junior wardens sometime on Saturday and she hoped to get to him before they did. If the meeting was too late in the afternoon, they’d miss the preview. When she’d called the auctioneers, she’d asked if there would be any furniture, specifically sideboards, and they’d said yes. She was in love with the one out in Concord, but she had to have a legitimate reason for going to the auction—and she wanted Tom to come, too. She was thankfully drifting off. Wouldn’t he be surprised when some of their silver came up in lot number something or other and they could buy it back? Who said she wasn’t efficient?

  “He’ll be home all morning,” Tom announced.

  He’d called Julian Bullock while Faith was getting Amy dressed.

  “Daddy come.” She wriggled out of Faith’s grasp and passionately threw herself at her father. This is why women have sons, Faith reflected. Although a daughter is what you want in later years. A friend of Faith’s summed up her fil-ial role as “chief toenail clipper” after one of her frequent visits to her ninety-year-old mother.

  Sons don’t do things like that.

  “Great.” Faith was feeling optimistic. “Why don’t we go now?” Old age was a long way off and today the sun was shining.

  The ride to Concord along Route 2A was a pretty one, especially in the spring. Orchards were blooming; trees had leafed out. There were still farms along the road, and the newly turned earth bore promises of plenty of corn and tomatoes come August. At the Concord Inn, they turned right on Monument Street, driving past Hawthorne’s Old Manse and stopping farther on to let a tour group cross from a parking lot to the path leading to the “rude bridge” where the pa-triots of 1775 had made their stand. They drove over one of the small bridges that crossed the Concor
d River. A canoe was gliding toward them.

  Half a mile farther on, Julian Bullock’s two-hundred-year-old farmhouse sat high upon a knoll. It was surrounded by acres of meadows and or-chards. Horses grazed close to the lichen-covered stone walls. He’d named the estate Dunster Weald, a reference to Dunster House at Harvard, where he’d spent his undergraduate years. When she’d come with Patsy Avery, Patsy had explained to Faith that Julian let his neighbors use the pastureland so he could have an equine aes-thetic with none of the bother. When they’d pulled in the drive, she’d pointed out the beautiful post-and-beam barn behind Bullock’s house,

  “filled with Chippendales, not Clydesdales.”

  “Horsie! Horsie! Moo!” Amy exclaimed proud-ly, reaching toward the window.

  “She’s so dumb, Mom. Why is she so dumb?” Ben complained in a long-suffering tone of voice.

  “I mean, anybody knows horses don’t say moo.”

  “She’s a baby, Ben. Remember? A baby—and you were one, too, once. At her age, you thought horses said meow.”

  “Did not!”

  Actually he hadn’t, but Faith had made her point.

  With Amy delightedly in Tom’s arms and Ben’s hand in her viselike grip, Faith followed Julian into the hallway to show Tom the sideboard. She could tell from his expression that he was as taken with it as she was.

  “Faith tells me it’s not genuine,” he said.

  “If it were, it wouldn’t be here, but out in Greenfield Village or at Winterthur,” Julian pointed out. It struck Faith that he was as good at selling as he was at buying. She wondered if this was unusual. The two skills were so different. For one, you had to present yourself and your worldly goods to the public, or a rarefied stratum thereof; for the other, you had to be invisible, low-profile, behind-the-scenes.

  “How much?” Tom asked bluntly.

  Julian was not taken aback. “I could let it go for twenty-two hundred dollars.”

  Faith had figured at least three thousand. Maybe it was because he felt sorry for them? But then she didn’t think emotion played much of a role in this kind of transaction.