Body in the Bookcase ff-9 Read online

  A new association. What could they call themselves? We Wuz Robbed, Inc., flitted across Faith’s mind.

  After she closed the door on Pix and Samantha, with many thanks to them both, another thought loomed.

  “Honey, do you think Edith Petit was referring to anything specific when she mentioned insurance adjusters?”

  “I doubt it. We’ve been with the same company for years, and Gardner’s been our agent the whole time. You sent them the police report and our list of what’s gone, didn’t you? Anyway, we’ll find out tomorrow morning. The adjuster’s coming at nine, right?”

  “Right—and I didn’t send anything; I took it to the office myself, with the photos, so we know they have everything.”

  “Unfortunately, this happens all the time, Gardner said, and it’s probably done by rote,” Tom added.

  After the conversation of the night before, Faith was unprepared for the fact that in the future she’d be referring to the freshly shaven, well-dressed young man who appeared promptly at nine a.m. on her doorstep as “theinsurancead-justerfromhell”—all one word.

  “Hello, my name is Mr. Montrose.” The voice was devoid of accent and expression.

  He stepped into the hall, extending a business card instead of his hand. Faith took it between two fingers. Maybe this was like showing a badge, presenting credentials in the wake of the crime.

  “Please come in. My husband, the Reverend Fairchild, was called away unexpectedly, but he hopes to be back before you leave.” It appeared first names were being omitted. “I’m Mrs. Fairchild,” she added, although it seemed pretty obvious. Once again, the Millers had whisked the children off. Faith had thought to spare the adjuster any interruptions, yet she was fast conclud-ing that the children were the ones who had been spared. As yet, there hadn’t been any “So sorry you were ripped off” or any other niceties.

  She ushered him into the living room, deciding not to offer coffee. He sat down in the larger of the two wing chairs that flanked the fireplace, setting a slim briefcase on the floor beside him.

  He put the tips of his fingers together and nodded to her to take a seat also. Who did he think he was? Faith thought in growing annoyance, some sort of headmaster, or the host of Masterpiece Theatre? It was a very theatrical gesture and she waited for him to produce a well-worn green brier pipe, tapping out the ashes on her hearth to complete the act.

  Next, he folded his hands together in what under other circumstances would have looked like the old childhood amusement “Here is the church; here is the steeple.” Hands flip. “Look inside and see all the people.” Mr. Montrose’s hands dropped neatly into his lap.

  “Now, Mrs. Fairchild, you understand that the first thing the company needs to establish is exactly what was taken and the value of these items before any compensation can be offered.”

  “I think we can go on to step two. We have submitted a detailed list with the values, as well as photographs of much of what we lost.”

  “Ah, yes, the photos.” He leaned over, balanced his briefcase on his knees, and unsnapped it, pulling out a thin manila folder. “The problem with your snapshots is that we have no way of knowing whether these items were actually in your possession.” He handed her one—sterling flatware spread out on a piece of black cloth, per her father-in-law’s instructions.

  “I don’t need to see the photos. I took them.

  And what do you mean that you have no way of knowing these were ours? Do you think I went out, borrowed a bunch of valuables from friends, took pictures, and then brought them to the agency?”

  He smiled smugly. “It’s been known to happen.

  I’m sorry, but we need to establish ownership. . . .”

  She cut him off in midsentence, ready to throw him out of the house. “Establish ownership!

  There’s the date on the original roll of film, for one thing. You can subpoena the people at Aleford Photo who developed it! And wait—” She raced to the bookcase and took out an album. It was stuffed with photographs, still in their folders from the camera shop, that she had not gotten around to putting in. Roughly two years’ worth.

  The next rainy day never seemed to come.

  “Here.” She thrust a shot of Christmas dinner under his nose. “See the silver on the table. The candlesticks. The carving set my husband is holding. Gone. And they’re in the black-and-white photos. How dare you suggest that somehow we’re out to defraud the insurance company.

  Maybe you think I staged the robbery, too?

  Cracked my own door!”

  “Mrs. Fairchild, there’s no need to take this tone. I have to do my job. Why don’t you show me the room in this picture?”

  Fuming and muttering, “Maybe you think I borrowed that, too,” Faith led the way into the dining room. He took a small camera from his pocket and started snapping away.

  “You can see they took a drawer from the sideboard to carry it all in.”

  “Ah, yes, the sideboard. We’ll need an appraisal on it. We’ll be sending someone along.”

  “I think we’ll be having it appraised ourselves, if you don’t mind.” Faith could well imagine what value his “expert” would assign.

  “Probably the simplest thing would be to have another drawer made.” He’d shot a whole roll, or was finishing one up. In any case, the whir of the film rewinding automatically sounded like fin-gernails on a blackboard to Faith.

  “And this drawer held what?”

  “Mostly serving pieces, candlesticks, a set of coffee spoons in a leather case, some silver wine coasters.” Faith was discouraged from continuing by the look on Mr. Montrose’s face. Lurking behind his impassive expression was total doubt.

  “What?” she asked.

  “What do you mean ‘what?’ ” he countered.

  “You don’t believe me again.”

  “It’s not a question of what I believe, Mrs.Fairchild. It’s for the company to establish what you had and didn’t have. I repeat, how will they know there was all this silver in the drawer? Do you have receipts?”

  That did it. Faith blew up. “I want you out of my house. Now! Do I have any receipts? I’m afraid they weren’t tucked in with our wedding gifts—or passed down over the years. What the hell do you think? That the perpetrators took a drawerful of tablecloths! I haven’t heard that linens are bringing too much on the street these days, but then, they may have specialized in them. In which case, they missed the ones in the drawer below!” She was shouting at him as he walked rapidly toward the front door, obviously eager to get away from this madwoman. “And give me back the picture of our Christmas dinner.

  I don’t want you to have it. Give me the whole damn file!”

  He tossed the photo her way but held his folder tightly and was out the door before she could try ripping it from his grasp.

  Tom appeared twenty minutes later. Faith had fetched the children immediately, both with the thought of not imposing—below the surface, also saving up for another imposition—and because she wanted to exorcise the adjuster. First, she’d given Pix a quick rundown on “Mr. Monstrous,” as she was calling him out of real and pretended confusion as to his name; then she’d scooped up Ben and Amy for some cookie making at home.

  Tom walked into the kitchen as Faith was putting out ingredients for her oatmeal chocolate goodies (see recipe on page 340), an absurdly easy, child-friendly concotion.

  “That was fast. He’s gone already?”

  “Yes,” Faith hissed, “and I’ve been waiting for you to get back before calling Gardner. He has to tell them they have to send another adjuster. If that particular man ever tries to come into this house again, I’ll pour boiling oil on him from the upstairs window.”

  “Really, Mom? Could I watch? A big pot? Like from a castle? What kind of oil?” Ben stopped stirring, excited at the prospect of a siege.

  “Olive oil, and no, you can’t watch,” Faith said, looking at Amy, blissfully ignorant of adult conversation as yet. Having Ben around was like living in C
hina at the time of Mao’s youth informant program. Parental privacy had become a distant memory.

  “Oh, no, Faith!” Tom had spent the last two hours mediating between an angry teenager and her mother with some success, for the moment.

  He’d felt happier than he had in days—until he came home. “What happened?”

  Faith switched to a combination of schoolroom French, pig Latin, and English, which seemed to suit the outrageous events of the morning, and soon Tom was boiling mad, too.

  “It’s like getting robbed all over again!”

  “Exactly,” Faith agreed. “And now we know what Edith Petit meant. They have got to come up with another adjuster!”

  That more than agreed upon, Tom left the room to call, and Faith started to calm down. After the cookies were made and they had lunch, maybe Samantha could come over, or Danny. She was in the mood for action. There were a couple of pawnshops she wanted to check out.

  Five

  He was the largest person she’d ever seen. Faith took a step backward, awkwardly bumping into Tom before she stopped dead in her tracks. pres-tige pawn—we buy everything a neon sign flashed over the front door, competing with the bright sunshine, which only served to highlight the dinginess of the strip mall just across the Massachusetts–New Hampshire border. It was the fourth pawnshop the Fairchilds had visited, starting in Lowell, and so far they’d turned up nothing.

  “Whadya want? Selling or buying?” the man asked, stubbing out a filtered cigarette in an ash-tray brimming with butts. The lower part of his face joined his chin in loose layers of fat, both falling into his neck, straining the collar of his Ban-Lon shirt. Stacks of papers flowed over the desk. Empty Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups and Munchkin boxes teetered on top of an overstuffed wastepaper basket. Faith had the sensation that she and Tom were about to be engulfed in this tide, too. She took a deep breath and went into her number.

  “We’re looking for a wedding present”—after all, it was that time of year—“and we wondered if you had any silver—sterling?” She tried to peer behind his desk, which, with his massive girth, effectively blocked entry to the rear, where stock ranging from audio equipment to Beanie Babies filled the shelves. Browsing was apparently not encouraged. “Or a piece of jewelry—something antique. We’re friends of the bride.” Plenty of brides.

  He cleared his throat—it was not a pretty sound—reached under the desk, and pulled out a fresh pack of cigarettes, all the while looking intently at the two of them. This had been more or less the same kind of reception they’d received at the other places. Faith wasn’t sure whether it meant the proprietors thought she and Tom were undercover cops or jerks. Maybe both.

  “I got some silver. No old jewelry.” He rolled his chair back, reached up to one of the shelves to pull a bunch of Ziploc bags down onto his lap, then rolled back. It was a practiced, fluid motion—almost balletic. Faith had wondered how on earth he got around the store. Now all she had to wonder about was how he got in and out. Perhaps he didn’t.

  He emptied the contents onto the desk and Faith quickly saw that none of the things belonged to them. She had been so sure of herself.

  After the debacle with the insurance adjuster that morning, she had reasoned they were owed.

  Some sign from God, if only a teaspoon.

  Most of the larger pieces of silver were pretty banged up—some Paul Revere bowls, a cream and sugar set—but there was a pretty candy dish with fluted edges in perfect condition. It hadn’t seen polish in a long time, but that was easy to remedy. There was an ornate F in Gothic script engraved in the center. They’d had an initialed candy dish. A wedding gift. She picked it up.

  “How much for this?”

  He looked at it, then at her. “Lady. This ain’t Shreve, Crump & Low. You buy the lot. A hundred bucks.”

  Faith looked at the silver strewn in front of her.

  There were several good serving pieces and it might be possible to have the dents removed from the bowls.

  “Seventy-five,” Tom said. He loved buying things in lots. When they went to an auction, he waited impatiently until the box lots came up, convinced that the best things were often hastily tossed in at the last moment when an estate was being cleared out. This predilection had paid off rather spectacularly one summer in Maine.

  “You seem like nice people.” Later, Tom said the man’s expression had reminded him of a cross between Sydney Greenstreet and Jabba the Hutt. “We’ll split the difference. Ninety. Take it or leave it.”

  They took it.

  “What are we learning here, Tom?” Faith asked once they were back in the car.

  “Let’s see. That there’s a whole world we know absolutely nothing about. That pawnshops—

  which, incidentally, also seem to run to names suggestive of luxury cars, like Imperial and Regency—often have neat things cheap. That a four-hundred-pound man was able to find a chair on wheels that would support him.”

  “Yes, but also I doubt very much that we’re going to find anything of ours.”

  “I never thought we would, kiddo, but I know you did. What’s made you change your mind?”

  “Most of the things we’ve been seeing are pretty new. We haven’t turned up any antique jewelry. In the first place, when I asked if they had any cameos, the guy thought I was talking about movies. I still want to try these other two shops here by the track, though. They’re on this road. It won’t take long.”

  It didn’t. At the first stop, an incredibly tired-looking man sitting in the entryway in a Plexiglas booth, told them through a microphone that the shop was closed when he heard they were looking to buy, not sell.

  “He must never get any sun or fresh air,” Faith commented as Tom drove to the next establishment. “The whole thing is pretty creepy. Gam-blers pawning their possessions—I don’t even want to think where all these Beanies come from, looting their kids’ toy boxes?—and these parasites sitting inside waiting for the next desperate person to come along. And it would be easy to sell stolen goods. When we bought the necklace in Lowell, nobody asked us for sales tax or gave us a receipt. It looked like a pretty small opera-tion, though. The other place in the center was almost like a regular jewelry store.”

  The next pawnshop looked closed, but the door opened when Faith tried it. A man who would have seemed abnormally large, had they not seen the owner of Prestige Pawn, waved them in and turned on some lights. Yes, he had silver. He yanked a few chests out of a showcase and tried to interest them in a complete set of Gorham Chantilly—“a super wedding gift, and I can give you a good deal on it.” He said this a number of times, varying the format only slightly. It was the first time they’d encountered a hard sell, and the man seemed nervous, as well. He kept looking at the door as if expecting company. The Fairchilds didn’t recognize the chests or the patterns as theirs.

  “Sorry, we really wanted a bowl or picture frame, smaller items. We are looking for a wedding gift, but we’re not the parents of the bride.” Faith was hoping this attempt at humor might put the man at ease, so that he’d show them whatever else he might have. She was about to ask about jewelry when she looked at his desk. It, too, was buried under papers. With so much paperwork, surely these guys were keeping careful track of what was coming in and going out. Yet, there was a layer of dust on some of the piles, which put flight to that notion.

  There wasn’t a layer of dust on one piece of paper in the middle of the desk—a solid white eight-by-ten sheet without a word on it. Her eyes flicked over it and stopped—riveted by what was under it. A gun. A very serviceable-looking, dust-free revolver. Close at hand. Ready for . . .

  “Oh dear, I just remembered the sitter has to be home early. We’ll have to catch you another time.

  Bye.” Faith dragged Tom out the door, despite his protests.

  “I thought Samantha said she didn’t have anything on for tonight. Aren’t we going to catch a movie?”

  Faith linked her arm tightly through his.

  “Get i
n the car and drive. A gun. He has a gun.

  Sitting on his desk. Not even well hidden. Under a sheet of paper. Handy substitute for an in-and-out basket. We are way, way out of our league here.”

  Tom blanched. “I would say so.” He did a gangster turn leaving the parking lot and contented himself with that.

  “We are going to go to the movies, though, right?”

  “After the kind of week we’ve had, I’d go to a revival of Heaven’s Gate.”

  They turned onto the interstate, drove straight to Charlestown, ate unfashionably early, as one must to get a table at Olive’s, then parked the car near Harvard Yard and settled into the Brattle Theater. They’d picked an old film after all, the yearly revival of—what else?— Casablanca.

  “I don’t want to get in the way of your other job, Faith, but I promised Tricia I’d take her to her mother’s today. I could meet you now, but I wouldn’t want you to be late for church or anything.” It was Scott Phelan on the phone, and, as usual, his voice was slightly mocking. He had figured prominently in Faith’s first foray into murder—or rather, solving it—and they had become good friends. He and his wife, Tricia, worked part-time for Faith. Scott’s full-time job was in Byford at an auto-body shop. Tricia was studying to be a beautician.

  Faith was disappointed. She was still in an action mode and wanted to pump Scott for information about the denizens of the world of B and Es. She had wanted to wait until after Friday’s meeting with other victims, so she’d have as much information as possible, and she had hoped he’d be free this afternoon.

  As a teenager, Scott had skated very near and sometimes over the letter of the law—truancy, unregistered, uninsured vehicles. He rode a mo-torcycle, and some of the police in Aleford and Byford still regarded him with suspicion. First impressions died hard, even though he pro-claimed now that the love of a good woman, and her volatile temper, would keep him on the straight and narrow forever.