Body In The Belfry ff-1 Page 2

  In Tom's view, Faith and Hope were somehow exceptions. No other children had ever been raised there.

  Another thing Tom was firm about was not using any of Faith's trust fund. He considered that it was for Faith's future (read lonely old age, widowed at ninety) and the children's. It wasn't that Tom didn't like money and what it could buy. He was as pleasantly hedonistic as the next parson—or lawyer or firefighter or anyone else. And he was happy for Faith to work and bring home "beaucoup de bacon." A sophomore year in France had left him fluent, permanently in love with the country, and prone to such expressions.

  Faith agreed with him about the money—up to a point. She had replaced what she had initially withdrawn with Have Faith 's profits and was happy to have the fund merrily accumulating "beaucoup de interest.”

  As for the trust, she decided to let the matter lie for the time being. Certainly they would educate their children well and then the darlings were on their own.

  She had no intention of a frugal old age trying to make ends meet on a parish pension when her arms were no longer capable of beating egg whites in her copper bowl. The trust fund could make those golden years a little more golden, preferably somewhere sunny like Provence. But it was not something that concerned her now. She figured she had years ahead to convince Tom.

  Meanwhile the only exception she was quite firm about was clothes. Faith could not see herself in Filene 's Basement beating other women over the heads for a skirt from Saks that no one had wanted to buy in the first place ; nor was she about to plug in a Singer and start running up tea gowns. No, she would pay for her own clothes and Tom, blissfully ignorant of what a little black dress cost these days, gracefully acceded. She would also be allowed to give him an occasional present, and it was her fervent hope to wean him away from Brooks and a little closer to Armani. Tom was heir to the Yankee pride in the longevity of one's wardrobe. He would gleefully point out articles of clothing from days gone by that Faith would have donated to charity years ago.

  Now more than a year and a half later as the Tavern on the Green faded into the grass of the village green, she had Tom. And she had a baby.

  Said baby wriggled against her and she felt inexplicably happy. So I'll get the business going again and meanwhile what better way to spend one's time than sitting with this lovely little brown-eyed bundle, she told herself.

  Faith had reached the end of her journey and turned to enter the belfry. The doorway was low and she had to duck slightly. Sitting down, she reached into her pocket for the sandwich and .put it on the bench beside her, while she started to unloosen the straps of the Snugli. That was when she realized she wasn't alone.

  In the dim light inside, she had not noticed that the bench against the other wall was occupied. Whoever it was was awkwardly slumped over in sleep. Faith stood up to leave. She would eat outside. Benjamin could be waking up any moment and would no doubt disturb him or her. Benj was not an easy waker and protested the abruptness of the transition from sweet dreams to rude awakenings with a particularly lusty cry. She took a step closer to the other bench as she went out and all at once several things became abundantly clear.

  First, it wasn't a stranger. It was Cindy Shepherd, a member of the parish and in fact, President of the Young People's Club.

  Second, Benjamin wouldn 't disturb her. She was not sleeping. She was dead.

  At least Faith assumed she was, since there was a kitchen knife sticking out of her motionless rib cage.

  A kitchen knife that also impaled a single pink rose.

  Having taken in all these details with the precision of a slow-motion camera, Faith suddenly covered Benjamin 's already closed eyes with her hand while she moved quickly to the center of the belfry.

  A murder had occurred and that meant a murderer. There was only one thing to do.

  Faith grabbed the bell rope, pulled with all her might, and sounded the alarum.

  2

  In the days that followed, the actual murder itself was almost eclipsed by the debate that raged within the town over whether Faith should have rung the bell or not. Leading the group that opposed the action was Millicent Revere McKinley, great-great-great-granddaughter of a distant cousin of Paul Revere. It was this progenitor, Ezekiel Revere, who had cast the original bell.

  “I don't know what Grandfather would have said," Millicent remarked in a slightly sad but firm tone that went straight to the hearts of many of her listeners—in the post office, the library, the checkout line at the Shop and Save. Wherever she could gather a crowd. Faith grew accustomed to dead silence and slightly guilty smiles when she entered these places.

  Millicent wasn 't smiling, though. It was her belief that Faith could have run down the hill as quickly as possible and then screamed loudly. Millicent did grudgingly admit that screaming from the top of the hill, however therapeutic, would have been useless.

  After the grandfather line, she would generally add, " It's just not going to be the same on Patriot's Day when we sound the real alarm," and drift out of whatever public site she happened to be in toward home.

  Best actress in a supporting role, Faith thought bitterly.

  This was not Millicent's first foray into local controversy. She was also the main and most impassioned supporter of a proposal, which surfaced at Town Meeting every year, to change the name of Aleford to Haleford. She averred that the H had been inexcusably obliterated by the mists of time and the town was actually named for a family with the illustrious name of Hale. The fact that she was not in the least related to them gave her campaign a disinterested sincerity—as she was quick to point out.

  Opponents logically argued that the very earliest town documents recorded the name as Aleford and there was no question in this case of s's that looked like f 's to confuse the issue. The town was probably called Aleford because of a well-known and well-frequented tavern conveniently close to the best ford of a branch of the Concord River that ran through the town. Ezekiel himself may have hoisted a few at said hostelry.

  Any suggestion of this was enough to make Millicent see red, white, and blue. A member of the cold water army from birth, she scorned the base suggestion that either grandfather or the town had anything to do with ale. And so the battle raged.

  Tom and Faith privately sided with the Aleford contingent as opposed to the Halefordians, and wished thatthe tavern hadn't burned down one particularly boisterous night. Millicent and friends had managed to prevent the licensing of any others. There was no Ye Olde Groggery in town. If you wanted a drink, you had to go to Byford, the next town. So called because it was near yet another ford, not as Millicent might have contended because of an ancient family named By. More familiarly it was known to some Aleford inhabitants as the Packy Run.

  The question of the bell promised to be as engrossing as the Haleford/Aleford issue, and Millicent, or "Thoroughly Militant Millie" as she had been irreverently tagged, certainly must have felt just a tiny bit grateful to Faith in an unexplored corner of her heart.

  For the bell had certainly been rung—furiously, conclusively, and with all the strength Faith could muster from arms that felt like limp strands of pasta. This done, she had raced down the path, literally colliding with the town police chief, Charley MacIsaac, several of his men, and almost everyone else within hearing distance. It was pretty hard to stop on Belfry Hill's sharp incline once you got going.

  They were quite surprised to see Faith, having expected to catch some wayward juveniles (not from Ale-ford, of course) fooling around with the bell. And they were flabbergasted when she blurted out, “Cindy Shepherd's been murdered and the body's in the belfry.”

  The crowd immediately rushed off, leaving Faith and Benjamin in the dust. No one wanted to be left behind. Murder victims were about as rare in Aleford as Tories.

  Faith took one look at the solid phalanx of retreating backs and decided that the safest place for a mother and child was home.

  It had apparently not occurred to MacIsaac and his troops that the mur
derer could still be lurking about concealed in the underbrush, ready to strike again. It did occur to Faith, however, and this is why she left the scene of the crime ; to answer the questions of all those who have audibly wondered why she didn 't stick around and own up to A: ringing the bell and/or B: murdering Cindy, or even C: discovering a body in a town monument. Not a few held this to be the most heinous crime of all.

  When the chief got to the belfry, saw Cindy's very obviously dead body, and turned to ask Mrs. Fairchild a question, he realized she wasn 't there. He quickly sent Patrolman Dale Warren, new to the job and pleased as punch at the turn it was taking, outside to find her. Dale never thought that she would simply go home. This explains the brief APB which went out all over the state for Faith and Benjamin after Patrolman Warren made a thorough search of the hill. Rather than being annoyed when she finally heard about it, Faith was terribly pleased that he had subtracted several years from her age—he made her twenty-four.

  In any case, everything was straightened out that afternoon. Or, rather, nothing was straightened out about Cindy, but everything was straightened out about Faith.

  Except she never did correct Dale. Young people today had few enough illusions to hold on to now that Martha Stewart was doing commercials for K mart.

  Tom, meanwhile, had been running errands as a break from pastoral duties, and after leaving the bank was waiting on line in the post office when the person in front of him turned around and seemed mildly interested to see him there.

  “Don't suppose you know that your wife found Cindy Shepherd's dead body up in the old belfry ? " he remarked.

  Tom had heard the bell pealing earlier and wondered what was going on, but to say the idea that Faith was ringing it after finding the corpse of the president of his Young People's Club was the farthest thought from his mind would be to place that thought somewhere on Venus. He rushed home, correctly divining Faith's natural instincts. She had locked all the doors and was in the bedroom, shivering, with her down quilt pulled tightly around Benjamin and herself. Benjamin was smiling in cozy comfort and blowing little drooly bubbles.

  She sobbed, "Where have you been, Tom? I've been calling the office for hours ! “

  Then she burst into tears. It was not unknown for Faith to cry, in anger, sadness, and especially at the movies; but there was a qualitative difference to these sobs and it took Tom a long time to calm her down. Finally all three of them were bundled under the quilt and Faith started to talk.

  “You can 't imagine how terrified I was, Tom. I kept expecting some maniac with a meat cleaver to come after us. And the body! I've never seen a dead person not in a coffin!”

  Tom was holding her close and making comforting noises.

  “All I was going to do was have a picnic," Faith wailed, “and there she was ! Of course it was lucky it wasn't somebody I liked.”

  Tom looked as though he were going to say something and changed his mind.

  “You were going to say I shouldn 't be speaking ill of the dead."

  “Maybe something like that, but two things stopped me in time. It sounded inappropriately pontifical and besides I agree with you.”

  Faith nestled closer to him. Tom might be a little too pious on occasion, but he was no hypocrite.

  She was feeling very drowsy and now that she was safe she found her mind wandering to all kinds of interesting questions, such as who killed Cindy? And given her personality, why had he or she waited so long? Faith started to tell Tom, but when their two heads bent as one toward Benjamin, they both drew back quickly and she spoke first. "My turn or yours?”

  By the time Tom had changed Benjamin, wondering as he often did how one tiny infant could produce such a volume of odiferous merde, the police had arrived, having eventually figured out Faith 's whereabouts.

  She gave Charley an account of what she had seen or rather hadn't seen. There had been nothing to note that she could think of. They left, then returned an hour later. They had forgotten to fingerprint her and the CPAC unit from the DA's office was screaming for her prints so they could eliminate her. Faith noticed Mac-Isaac's fingers were inky; it looked as if his had had to be eliminated, too.

  It was close to nine that night when the phone finally stopped ringing with calls from assorted well-wishers and gossip mongers. Even the most desperately curious would never break that New England taboo and call after nine o 'clock.

  Faith was curled up in the blue wing chair next to the fireplace, which she had filled with pots of fiery gold and russet chrysanthemums until the weather called for logs. She was beginning to shake off the feeling of being terribly cold and terribly nauseated at the same time.

  Tom walked into the room and threw himself down on the couch.

  “ These calls are beginning to drive me crazy, Faith. They start out sympathetically, but somehow everyone manages to work in the bell. I really think they would rather you had put it to a vote at Town Meeting before you rang it.”

  Faith had her legs draped gracefully over the arm of the chair. She had poured two glasses of Armagnac while he had been on the phone the last time and she held one in her outstretched hand now. She had been thinking about the murder and was starting to enjoy herself.

  “I'm sorry you have to deal with all this, Tom, but think how much worse they'd be to me. Has anybody said anything about suspects? Other than Ben and I?"

  “No, a few have mentioned feeling sorry for the Moores, but mostly they ask kindly if you and the baby are all right, then go straight to the bell. Oh, Mrs. Keller did offer the opinion that it was probably a tramp—not Cindy, you understand, but the murderer."

  “Tramps don't usually carry around roses, Tom. That's the part I don't get," Faith said speculatively. "Who does something like that—a disappointed lover? A mad botanist ? Somebody who 's read one too many Georgette Heyers ? “

  She took a sip of brandy, savored it, and continued. "And why kill Cindy in the first place? I mean, sure, there were any number of reasons to kill her. Even you, Tom, could have done the deed after a particularly heated Young People 's meeting. But why kill her now when she was about to leave town, presumably for good?"

  “Just to set the record straight, I was talking to Mrs. Norris at the register of the Shop and Save. I was in fact returning a quarter I had found on the floor."

  “Are you sure you 're still not an Eagle Scout or something ? I hope you do have to go to court and establish an alibi. There haven 't been too many trials with such exciting testimony lately.”

  Tom grinned.

  “ Well, she did see me pick it up, Faith. I suppose I could have said I would put it in the plate. Anyway I didn 't kill Cindy, despite the number of times I've said to you I'd really like to kill that girl.”

  Cindy Shepherd had arrived in Aleford at age five, when her parents were killed in an automobile accident, to live with her aunt and uncle, Patricia and Robert Moore. Since that time, she had managed to antagonize the majority of the town's inhabitants by ferreting out the one weakness an individual most wished to hide and relentlessly bringing it forth into the light of day with her treacherously sharp tongue. Kids were easy prey and she honed her skills on them. Although she did have friends—anyone who preferred to be in the quiver rather than impaled on the target. These friends also helped in the information-gathering process and loyally elected her to anything she wanted to be—president, director, whatever was in charge.

  Adults were not safe; in fact, she enjoyed the challenge. When she was younger she would adopt an air of youthful ingenuousness to deliver her remarks: "Oh, Mrs. Martin, did I see you in town last week ? Wasn't it on Tremont Street ? Near that cute shop where they sell the wigs ? " When she got older, she didn't bother with subtlety and adopted the simpler method of pretending not to see that the person was standing nearby before she aimed.

  Her behavior was a terrific embarrassment to her aunt, who was acutely aware that, although her female friends pitied her, they were also extremely angry. Women tended to come
in for more scorn than men, since as Cindy matured she began to like men very much and women not at all.

  Patricia Moore had spent countless hours talking to Cindy about hurting people's feelings, hours that could more productively have been spent filling holes in a dike with sand. After one particularly trying day when Cindy, aged fourteen, referred to the Whipple sisters as"dried-up old maids who needed to get some," Patricia burst into tears while she was telling Robert.

  “I know everyone blames me, but short of preventing the accident, I don't know what I could have done differently."

  “Nothing, my dear, you have done more than enough. The only thing that could have happened that didn 't was Cindy's presence in the car with them," he said, sighing.

  Faith had heard all these stories and new ones continued to circulate. They were all coming back to her now.

  “Think, Tom. Even after eliminating one of the town 's most respected members of the clergy who clearly harbored ill will toward her, we can certainly list countless others. It 's not hard to come up with suspects, however unlikely. What keeps puzzling me is the timing. That's a bigger mystery."

  “You're right," he agreed. "Who didn't want her to leave, absurd as that seems? Or had she done something recently to someone that was so monstrous he or she had to kill her and the fact that she was leaving is coincidental ? “

  Tom was an inveterate mystery reader and he was beginning to enjoy himself too, especially as Faith, slightly flushed from the brandy, was obviously more than all right.

  “This is good, Tom; let 's try to think of all the possible connections. How about someone who didn 't want her to get married—an old flame, her future in-laws, or maybe some secret girlfriend of Dave's?”

  Cindy was engaged to Dave Svenson, much to the town 's surprise, although they had gone out together for years. The only logical explanation anyone had been able to come up with was that she had cast a spell on him.

  It wasn 't a wedding Faith looked forward to. She had already attended one function catered by the firm hired for Cindy's reception and the pathetic attempt at "continental cuisine " in the form of Chicken Kiev with what Faith detected as Cheese Whiz in the center had convinced her that it wasn't a moment too soon for Have Faith, Benjamin permitting She was continually astounded at what her neighbors ate. Locating her business in Aleford would amount to an act of mercy. She herself drew the line at boiled dinners. Furthermore, if they were going to want beans it would have to be cassoulet.