Body In The Belfry ff-1 Page 14

  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 lawprofession 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 sauté," 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 fewdays 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 be- gan 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 werejust 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. E
verybody 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.

  Faith 's scotch was almost gone and they would be landing in Newark soon. She was on the wrong side of the plane to see the Statue of Liberty as it descended but she did get a pretty impressive panoramic view of the New Jersey Turnpike.

  She tightened the seatbelt, which she had never removed, and took the cushion from behind her head. She was thinking again about who could possibly have put the envelope in her mailbox—or rather she had been thinking about it all the time except on the rare occasions when another thought managed to creep through. Not Dave. Not Sam. So who else ? That was the question that kept nagging at her. Maybe she should have taken the Aleford phone directory and gone household by household.

  Faith had ruled out Patricia after classifying her under the heading of interested worried friend. Patricia wouldn 't have spoken to Faith the way she had on Saturday if she had planned to scare her off the case with the rose.

  Pix ? It just didn 't seem to be her style.

  Style was the key to it—style and personality. It was someone who read too many bad novels. Someone with time on his or her hands. Someone like Cindy or someone who liked Cindy ? Faith was playing around with the words. Someone like Millicent Revere McKinley ?

  As Faith brought this to the front of her mind, she realized it had been lurking behind the parlor curtains for a while. Millicent was the type, all right. She didn't like Faith and certainly wouldn 't mind alarming her, but was it such a strong dislike ? And how to classify her ? Murderer ? Worried friend ? Nut ?

  Faith couldn 't believe Millicent was the murderer ; she had been one of Cindy's few supporters, but as for sending the rose, it seemed just up her white-picketfenced alley. And not because she was worried about Faith. Nor did Faith think she was nuts—well, maybe a little nuts. No, Millicent resented somebody else having a poke in her pond. This conclusion made Faith feel a lot better and she resolved to call Tom as soon as she got to the apartment and ask him to tell Dunne—somehow she still couldn 't think of him as "John." It was too simple.

  Faith 's father was waiting for her at the gate and until she saw his tall, calm figure looking completely out of place in the airport chaos, she hadn 't realized how happy she was to be out of things for a while. To let go and be a child again. He caught her up in a bear hug that threatened to squish Benjamin and said, "Faith, what on earth is going on up there ? “

  She spent the trip into the city filling him in on the Peyton Place details that had become everyday life in Aleford, while also keeping a sharp eye on his driving. The Sibley car stayed in the garage for weeks at a time, since they didn't use it in the city, and Lawrence had a tendency to forget that he was driving and not riding in a cab.

  They swung down the ramp approaching the Lincoln Tunnel and Faith feasted her eyes on the skyline, now becoming sadly crowded with banal glass and concrete boxes, but still the most exciting sight in the world. The Chrysler Building, her favorite, was gleaming like something from Oz in the late afternoon sunshine. At the bottom curve of the ramp there was the same enormous billboard that she remembered from her childhood. It always seemed to be advertising some kind of alcoholic beverage related to outdoor activities totally inappropriate to the surroundings—alpine skiing or Hawaiian surfboarding.

  They pulled into the tunnel and Faith automatically looked for the tiles proclaiming the New York/New Jersey line. When they had gone to the Sibleys, it had beèn a contest with Hope to see who would spot it first. Were all children so competitive or just in her family, she wondered ? There were the tiles now. She had seen them first.

  She continued talking to her father. Some of their best and/or most momentous conversations had taken place in the car as he either drove her to or fetched her from the airport. They seemed to be able to communicate best when not face to face, yet still in some physical proximity. Faith had asked her psychology professor at school about this one time, prodded no doubt by finding herself in an elevator with her. The class they had just left had touched upon father/daughter relationships and, carefully couching her question in nonidentifying terms, she revealed herself in the elevator. Her professor had smiled and remarked that many of her closest conversations with her father had been on similar occasions, something about a captive audience and enforced closeness. That made sense, but it also had to do with the lack of interruptions—Hope, her mother, the phone. Her father had always been a very busy man, except when he picked her up or drove her to the airport.

  Before long they were at the apartment. Her mother had just gotten home from work and she folded Faith in a long, close embrace that left Faith smelling slightly of Arpège. Hope arrived a few minutes later. She had moved into her own apartment the summer before and from the contented look lurking below the expression of concern, Faith suspected she might have a "fella" at last. She resolved to get her alone for a sister-to-sister talk after dinner.

  It was lovely to be back in the apartment with everyone wrapping her in cotton wool, admonishing her not to talk about “ it" unless she felt like it, and then asking a lot of questions. She began to cheer up.

  Just before dinner, Faith called Tom to tell him about Millicent.

  “ I really don't know why it didn't occur to me before, Tom. But it could be tricky getting a handwriting sample. Maybe Dunne could get his wife to pretend to be doing a survey. They could also check the envelope for her perfume, Mary Chess. There can't be too many people wearing that anymore. She must have bought a crate of it.”

  Tom had been equally enthusiastic, but he quelled the suggestion about the survey by saying that the police had their methods.

  “Honestly, Tom," Faith retorted, "you're beginning to sound just like them."

  “Glad you are feeling so much better, dear," he had replied sweetly.

  “At least tell them about the perfume," she pleaded. "That I will and I'm su
re they will be very grateful for your highly educated nose."

  “I miss you, Tom. This is our first long separation. Did you realize that?" said Faith, just realizing it herself.

  “Of course, and you can't imagine how empty the house feels, not to mention how empty the bed is going to be. "

  “And better be."

  “Actually this would lie a good time for me to fool around. Everyone's so caught up with the murder that they wouldn 't notice if I had twenty chorus girls living in the parsonage."

  “I don't think men fool around with chorus girls anymore, Tom. They'd be pretty hard to find, and I wouldn 't sell the town so short. I think the residents of Aleford are more than capable of concentrating on several scandals at once, so give it up.”

  And after some more nonsense and a good-night gurgle from Benjamin, they hung up.

  After dinner Faith went into her old room to nurse Benjamin. He had taken wholeheartedly to solid foods and she knew she would be weaning him completely soon. He loved his little "teacher beaker" cup and it would not be long before he would use that full time. Then he'd be off to college.

  She looked around at the familiar surroundings. The walls were a soft gray, the trim white, and the carpet one of her grandparents' cast-off Orientals with beautiful shades of rose. Rose ! She shook her head—better make that pink. The room had gone through several metamorphoses from a Laura Ashley bower in her childhood to an ascetic black, white, and chrome cell in adolescence to its present incarnation, which had been gently demanded by her mother after Faith had been at college for a year and which was spurred no doubt by the nightmares of the guests who occupied the room in her absence.

  She thought she had taken all her books with her to Aleford, but on the top shelf of the bookcase a few still lingered, an incongruous mixture : Judy Blume and C. S. Lewis, Camus and Agatha Christie. There was a thickvolume of Jane Austen, which she thought she might take to bed that night as a pretty poor second best to Tom. Faith had always found Jane Austen 's heroines comforting in times of physical illness or when her mind was diseased. Wondering whether the army was going to stay in town for the winter season, deciding what to wear at the Pump Room in Bath, or the gentle settling of all the complications and humiliations of matchmaking always made Faith feel her problems were small stuff. It also tended to put her to sleep.