Body In The Belfry ff-1 Page 7

  Faith wasn 't surprised to see Patricia. She was beginning to learn a lot about Aleford and one of the things she had learned was not to be surprised. Whatever might be going on at home—and in this case there was plenty—one still had one's obligations.

  They listened to the minutes of the last meeting and had a formal discussion of bazaar plans before they turned to the real business, which was drinking coffee, sewing, and talking.

  Patricia had turned to them and with her mouth set in a firm line told them, “ I know what you're all thinking about, so let me just say Robert and I are fine. It's been a terrific shock, of course," her voice faltered a bit, then rallied, "and you've all been wonderful, sending food and calling. You know how much we have appreciated it. The funeral is tomorrow and after that we are going to try to get back to normal.”

  Eleanor Whipple gave Patricia's shoulder a reassuring little pat. So demonstrative.

  “We'll all be there, Patricia, and you only have to ask if you need anything." -

  “Thank you, Cousin Eleanor. I know that. One realizes how much one depends on friends and family at these times.”

  They sewed for a while in companionable silence. There was a sense that Patricia hadn 't quite finished and it was correct.

  She blushed a little, looked around the group, and said, "When the funeral home asked for a dress, I sent over her wedding dress.”

  Did Faith imagine that an eyebrow or two went up 9 Maybe she wasn't the only one who thought it a bit odd.

  “It was because the morning we bought it was one of the last times I remember having a happy day with Cindy.”

  Or one of the only times, was the thought in not a few heads.

  Patricia spoke wistfully. "She was so excited and the dress was perfect, white velvet with tiny seed pearls. She looked like a Renaissance princess. The saleswomen were all oohing and aahing over her. Afterward we had lunch at the Copley to celebrate. I began to think marriage might change things.”

  The women listened as they stitched away. Over the years they had quietly heard so many revelations—breast cancer now thankfully in remission for one of them ; problems with children ; once even the possibility of an unfaithful spouse ; though as a rule husbands, where they existed, were seldom mentioned. They seemed oddly out of place at an Alliance meeting. As if one of them had suddenly taken it into his head to join them and crochet.

  Patricia sighed. "But of course it didn 't. She was just the same at dinner that evening, making sly digs at Robert and leaving in the middle of the meal.”

  And probably without being excused, thought Faith, a sin in her own family not unrelated to ax murder, certainly considered in as bad taste.

  “She seemed especially on edge lately," said Patricia, “ I keep wondering if something was wrong that we didn't know about.”

  There wasn't much to say to that, or rather there was a lot to say that no one quite had the heart to bring up.

  The group adjourned at five o'clock as usual and rushed off to the Shop and Save to pick up something for supper. Faith's beef carbonnade was all made, waiting to be reheated with some of her fresh egg noodles. She strolled leisurely along Church Street with her next-door neighbor, Pix Miller, toward their respective houses. Pix always had pizza on Alliance nights. She had somehow managed to convince her family it was a special treat.

  “Poor Patricia," Pix said to Faith, "As if Cindy wasn't enough of a pain in the neck when she was alive. Now they'll lose their deposit with the caterers and everything." Pix was eminently practical.

  Faith was thinking of what Patricia had said about Cindy's digs at Robert and wasn't really listening. "What ? Oh, the deposit. I can't imagine a caterer keeping it under these circumstances. I certainly wouldn't.”

  Pix laughed and said, "Well, with your food you wouldn't have to. These guys have to get whatever they can before you go back into business.”

  It was true that Faith had had a slightly nervous exploratory call from one of the local caterers about her future plans. She had been suitably evasive and quite flattered. New gun in town, or rather new whisk.

  “It wouldn't have occurred to me," Pix said, "except I was with Patricia in Talbots the other day and she decided not to get a new coat. ,Something about it never hurt to watch one's pennies.”

  Which meant Robert could be making a killing—or be on skid row, in typical local parlance. New Englanders seemed to watch their pennies most when the pennieswere either pouring in or pouring out. Still it gave one pause. Which was it for the Moores?

  She said good-bye to Pix and went into the house. Tom was in his study presumably working on the eulogy for Cindy. When Faith came in after tapping lightly on the door, he was staring at the wall.

  This was one of the more difficult tasks he had faced so far in his ministry, and the full wastepaper basket by his side attested to the amount of luck he was having getting it done. Benjamin was lying in his playpen by the small bay window staring at a mobile with a slightly puzzled expression, obviously wondering what fish were doing flying around in the air instead of under water where they belonged.

  “Tom," said Faith, "What do you know about Robert and Cindy 's relationship ? "

  “ Robert, you mean Robert Moore ? "

  “Yes. Patricia remarked that she used to make “sly digs' at him at the dinner table."

  “ Faith, I imagine Cindy made “sly digs' at anyone unfortunate enough to share a meal with her at one time or another. I never saw him, or Patricia either, treat her in anything but a reasonable way, which makes them both candidates for any kind of sainthood you could mention. What are you getting at? Still Sherlocking?"

  “I admit it's farfetched, but she could be so sarcastic and after years and years of it, you might explode."

  “Yes, but on Belfry Hill—with a rose and a knife? Sorry, Faith. Try something else."

  “All right. Have you heard anything about Robert being in financial difficulties? Pix says Patricia didn't buy a coat last month because she was watching her pennies."

  “Which probably meant that Patricia thought she had a perfectly good coat at home and didn't need a new one."

  “Yes, probably one from college. One of those duffel coats.”

  Tom looked hurt. He had been very fond of his duffel coat in college and couldn't understand why Faith had been so firm against another one as a winter coat. " I have a rule, Tom, that my clothing should never weigh more than I do and I think you should adopt it," she had said.

  Faith reluctantly abandoned her line of inquiry, "Okay, you're probably right. I may be grasping at straws—or toggles, as it were. Anyway the Alliance is going with the 'deranged tramp now someplace far away' theory." This was the going theory in town and a lot of people thought MacIsaac should buy it or pretend to and not waste his time and valuable town money on the case.

  Tom looked at her in shared disbelief. They laughed and went over to Benjamin.

  As he bent into the playpen to pick up his son, Tom said, "What did they say about Dave?" He never underestimated the Alliance as the prime news-gathering agency in town.

  “He's still missing. His mother was at the meeting, so of course no one said anything, but Pix and I talked on the way home. She pointed out that Eva looked pretty terrible, but not out of her mind, so she must somehow know he's safe. Which makes sense."

  “Yes, I'm sure he's in the area. I can't believe he would run away from all this."

  “I wonder if he knew anything about Cindy's photographic interests ? Maybe the two of them were involved in some sort of blackmail scheme with Cindy as bait, but that doesn 't go along with my impressions of Dave."

  “Nor mine, but this whole town is beginning to resemble one of those tanks at the aquarium—a few sleepy frogs sitting on rocks at the top and underneath, tangledseaweed and fish frantically darting around. I could almost believe anything."

  “I like the fish image. Maybe you could work it into a sermon.”

  They moved out of the study toward t
he kitchen. Tom turned to Faith, " I'm convinced the key to the whole thing is one of those pictures. You're sure you didn't recognize anyone ? "

  “It was an odd context, but I'm sure." Faith had been mentally undressing Aleford 's male population ever since her discovery.

  “It's very puzzling. And what about the joints in the box ? Although it wasn't enough to suggest an opium den. And then there 's the money—it might not have been blackmail ; she could have been selling pot.”

  Faith sighed. " I wish we'd hear from Dave, then maybe we could get somewhere.”

  But Dave didn't call and the next morning was the funeral.

  Faith stood in the cemetery, shivering in the bright sunshine. Tuesday was as glorious a day for Cindy's funeral as Friday had been for her death. Yet Faith was cold despite the warmth of her Lauren suit. The shrill orange and red of the sugar maples and the black clothes of the mourners reminded her of Halloween. All Hallow 's Eve. The night when the dead rise from their graves.

  There is nothing quite so silent as a burial.

  All the birds must have already gone south, Faith thought.

  Then Tom 's solemn, measured voice cut through the air.

  He was reading the Wordsworth and it was beautiful; Patricia had been right : A slumber did my spirit seal ; And I had no human fears: She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years.

  Poor Cindy, thought Faith. So young. Death must have been the last thing on her mind. She was completely alive, grabbing at life with amoral abandon. She deserved something for the way she lived, but was it death l They were lowering the casket now. Faith pictured Cindy still beautiful, lying in its satin interior in her wedding gown. Somewhere her would-be groom, Dave Svenson, was at large. It was all quite impossibly morbid and melodramatic. Faith gave her arm a surreptitious pinch to remind herself she wasn't in some Victorian time warp.

  Even the cemetery contributed to the illusion. It was an old one, of course. People were always coming to make rubbings of the headstones for notions of interior decoration, which Faith had never understood. Virtually every home in Aleford had one or two of the most lugubrious examples framed in the hallway—all those skulls with the wings of angels and drooping willows. The oldest section of the cemetery, by the river, blended well with the motifs of the headstones. Actual drooping willows grew so thick they blotted out the sky above. The lawn was mostly moss. In the summer the dark shade and damp, warm ground below gave it the lush sultry feeling of a bayou, quite alien to its Puritan roots. Despite the obvious romanticism, Faith preferred the newer section.

  Here the trees had not yet reached the stage where they blocked the light, and the grass was green, very green. There were pretty white benches and plantings kept up by the Evergreens. Last year, shortly before Benjamin was born, she often used to stroll here, too unsteady for more ambitious walks. It was peaceful and suited her slightly philosophical musings on beginnings and endings. Unlike its murky neighbor, it was a cemetery in which one could believe life would go on forever. Today, at the end of Cindy's life, those spring thoughts seemed a long time ago.

  Faith looked around at the people gathered at Cindy 's grave : the Moores ; youth group members, looking scared and awe-stricken ; parishioners ; friends of the Moores ; just about everybody else in Aleford not in one of the other categories ; and a few obvious reporters. Only the putative chief mourner was absent.

  In fact he wasn't. As Tom moved onto Wordsworth 's second stanza, Dave Svenson was gazing down on the assembled group through binoculars from a small hill north of the cemetery. Unlike Faith, he was not thinking about what Cindy was wearing. In fact, he found it hard to believe it was Cindy, but he knew that the lowering of the casket and those clods of earth that fell upon it were once and for all signaling an end to some part of his life—for better or worse.

  Since leaving the Fairchilds on Saturday morning, he had been staying with various friends. He managed to call his parents, but did not tell them where he was so they wouldn 't have to tell any lies to the police. His mother had cried, but she didn 't advise him to turn himself in. He knew he had made the right choice.

  All his friends were trying to piece together what they knew and what they heard that the police knew, but so far it was a total mystery. No one, least of all Dave, could figure out why Cindy had been killed. And especially why she had been killed in such a strange way. The Alliance might have been buying the tramp theory—or saying so—but none of Dave 's friends were.

  He had spent most of his time with Steve, who lived on the outskirts of town. Steve's parents had bought a farm in Aleford during the sixties, intending to live off the land. Now in the eighties, they found themselves making a small fortune selling chèvre and wild mushrooms to New York and Boston specialty stores. Dave had been living in their barn and eating whatever Steve could sneak out to him. He was heartily sick of goat cheese and hoped he would never have to eat it again. It was fine for his Swedish relatives, but he frankly preferred Velveeta (a fact that, had it come out at the time, might have taken the edge off Faith's partisanship).

  So Dave stood under the gaily colored tent of leaves that in another time and setting might have been his bridal canopy.

  He focused his binoculars on indlvidual faces : his parents, dour and Ibsenesque; the Moores harder to read, a mixture of confusion and something that might have been sadness. Faith looked as if she was thinking of something else and Reverend Fairchild just perfect, serious, but not fake either.

  Dave was so intent on the scene before him that he did not hear the branches snapping behind him. He was leaning against a tree trying to figure out what exactly he was feeling besides relief and fear when the biggest hand he had ever seen in his life came down hard on his shoulder. He froze.

  “Dave Svenson?" the hand's voice asked quietly. "Yes," said Dave, figuring it was pointless to argue or run.

  “ My name is Detective Lieutenant John Dunne. I've been looking for you.”

  Dunne was happy. He was seldom disappointed. They just couldn't stay away. You could count on it. They always turned up for the funeral.

  Down in the cemetery, the group had dispersed. Manyof the mourners, or more accurately, attendees, had returned to the Moores' house for the traditional funeral baked meats—in this case, thimbles of dry sherry and tea sandwiches. Faith eyed the sandwiches suspiciously. Anchovy paste on trustless triangles of white bread and maybe some egg salad spread a tenth of a millimeter thick. Still, people were managing to put away quite a lot of them. What would they do with real food ? Faith asked herself. If ever a demand existed, it was here.

  She took some sherry in a fragile glass and looked at it appreciatively. Sandwich glass, the exquisite blownthree-mold variety. Just what she would have expected at the Moores. It was lovely not to be disappointed. In a way, the sandwiches matched the setting and occasion, too, but there was such a thing as going too far. She walked over to the window seat, covered with chintz roses, and sat down to think a few wistful thoughts.

  It was still a, beautiful day and people were strolling in the garden. It was not really a mournful occasion, but there was an undercurrent of tension, not lessened by Charley MacIsaac 's presence at the funeral and now back at the house. He joined Faith, balancing a tiny Spode plate heaped with sandwiches and something that was not dry sherry in a tumbler. Faith smiled up at him.

  “Hi, Charley, where's your big friend?"

  “He does give you a start at first, I'll say that," Charley replied, “ but I don't know what he 's up to today. Said he was coming to the funeral."

  “Maybe he's busy tracking down a hot lead," Faith said. " In any case, what's the talk down at the station ? Anything new ? "

  “ Now, Faith, you know I can't discuss it with you."

  “Charley! Is that fair? After all, if I hadn't found her, you wouldn't even have a case," Faith argued with perfect illogic, which nevertheless seemed to convince MacIsaac.

  “Well, you know we're looking for a certai
n person to question and after that maybe we 'll have something to say.

  “Oh, that 's as ridiculous as the tramp theory! You've known Dave all his life. You can't honestly believe he would kill anybody ! “

  Charley looked Faith straight in the eye and drained his tumbler. "Faith, anybody can be a killer given the right place and the right time. Even you would kill to protect that baby of yours, right ? Or Tom ? "

  “ Yes, of course, but it's not the same ! "

  “It's all the same in the end. And I'm not saying Dave did kill Cindy. We just want to know where he was and where he's been.”

  Faith had to be satisfied with that and, disgruntled, left MacIsaac. Of course he was keeping something from her. How was she ever going to help clear Dave if she couldn't find out what was going on ? She felt it was rather mean of Charley not to share what he knew. It wasn't as if she would snitch to Detective Dunne.

  She looked around the room for Tom. How long did they have to stay anyway ? She had had enough of the mystery for one day, and the sherry on an empty stomach—no, she would not eat fish paste sandwiches—was making her slightly queasy. Or maybe it was MacIsaac.

  Oswald Pearson was busily jotting down notes and Faith wondered what he could be writing. Descriptions of what everyone was wearing ? She noted today he didn't seem the dandy he usually was. Oswald was a round little man in his early forties who had compensated for an early loss of hair by growing a precise Van Dyck beard. The few hairs left on his head were carefully drawn across his scalp and had a tendency to rise together in a solid phalanx whenever a breeze drifted by. Today his pink and white complexion looked gray and white. Faith couldn't imagine that he was upset at Cindy's death, especially since the headlines it was producing were increasing his circulation beyond the town limits. Maybe he was coming down with the flu. Where was Tom ? When she was forced to medical speculation about the inhabitants of Aleford, she knew she had reached boredom 's rock bottom.