Body in the Bookcase

KATHERINE

HALL PAGE

BODY

i n t h e

BOOKCASE

A FAITH FAIRCHILD MYSTERY

For Julie Arden and Charlotte Brooks,

my dear friends and precious guides

The robb’d that smiles steals something from the thief.

— WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

One

Night had fallen in Aleford, Massachusetts, and its inhabitants—those who were still awake—were involved in a variety of pursuits.

At the First Parish parsonage, Faith Sibley Fairchild was sitting in the living room with her husband, the Reverend Thomas Fairchild, before the unlighted hearth. It was an attractive room, stretching from the front of the house to the back.

A deep blue Oriental rug bequeathed by some previous inhabitant lay on the floor, its colors repeated in the room’s drapes and upholstery. A few spindly chairs, also hand-me-downs, had been supplemented by the Fairchilds’ own, more comfortable furniture. Their belongings decorated the walls, personalized the tabletops.

Their two children, Ben, five, and Amy, twenty months, were mercifully sound asleep upstairs.

The morning paper and the book she was reading lay untouched on the coffee table in front of Faith.

She was enjoying the rare sensation of doing nothing and her mind drifted to thoughts of May—thoughts of the current season.

Although she had lived in Aleford for six years, Faith had never become used to spring in New England. It was such a tease. Spring in Manhattan, where she had lived previously, went on and on forever. First, a certain ineffable warmth crept into the air. It was followed by the whiff of new soil, which infused the odor of exhaust fumes with promise. Central Park began to look like something from a Disney movie, daffodils playfully bending their heads to gentle breezes, beds of pansies with faces like kittens lining the walks, and animated robins hopping about on the velvet green of the Great Lawn. A brilliant swath of tulips stretched as far as the eye could see down Park Avenue. Swelling pale green buds on branches made veils of the trees in Gramercy Park.

In Aleford, however, April meant six feet of snow and May was a big maybe. Toward the end of the month, a few of the flowers promised by the showers, or moisture in a more solid form, struggled into the light of day. Then Mother Nature did a fast-forward and everything happened at once.

Fruit trees burst into blossom. Birds returned and sang. The bulbs that the squirrels and deer hadn’t eaten bloomed. It was beautiful. Briefly beautiful.

Then the region lurched into summer, the temperatures soaring, narcissi withering. Faith had immediately understood the local mania for forcing bulbs indoors, as well as branches of forsythia and flowering quince, or virtually anything with swelling bark one might find to hack down, cart inside, and plunge into containers of water. Forcing—an apt term—as in “If X wants a hyacinth, X will be forced to force it.”

“Nice to finally be able to turn the heat off,” Tom said cheerfully, interrupting his wife’s somewhat resentful thoughts. She walked over and sat on the arm of the wing chair where he was sitting, planting a kiss on the top of his head. There were certain compensations to New England’s drawbacks, the primary one was her husband, a native son.

“You’d have turned it off in March if you hadn’t married such a thin-skinned New Yorker.

Admit it!” Tom was wearing a T-shirt with the slogan if god is your copilot, change seats, given to him by one of his parishioners, while Faith was in a turtleneck and sweater. Both kids seemed to have inherited Tom’s heat-generating genes. One of Ben’s first full sentences had been,

“I don’t need a jacket, Mom.” And it was a struggle to keep Amy from stripping off most of her clothes once they were on.

Tom wisely decided not to pursue the subject of thermostats any further and instead asked,

“What’s your schedule tomorrow? I may have some time late in the afternoon, and we can take the kids to Drumlin Farm. See the spring lambs.” It sounded terribly quaint and was just the sort of thing Faith hoped her children would remember when they grew up, not the fact that she was the meanest mother in the nursery school because Ben couldn’t have Nintendo. Or at least if they remembered these other things—and there were sure to be plenty—she could always come back with “But what about all those nice times, like taking you to see the spring lambs?” She had observed Pix Miller, her friend and next-door neighbor, try this tactic with her adolescents, with varying degrees of success, but at least the am-munition was there.

“Spring lambs sound great, and I think I’ll make some parish calls in the morning.” Tom looked skeptical. Faith had said the same thing the previous night.

“I know, I know—I’ve been putting them off, but I really haven’t had a spare minute.” Faith had awakened that morning, fully intending to make some. She’d been filled with the kind of vernal energy that impels some women to attack grime on their windows and dust bunnies under the radiators—or the ironing, which, in Faith’s case, threatened to erupt like Mount Vesu-vius from the spare-room closet, flow down the stairs and out the front door, entombing hapless passersby for eternity. But then she’d had to help out at the last minute at Amy’s play group and something had come up at Have Faith, her catering company. Suddenly, it was time to make dinner, and all her best intentions were exactly where they’d been that morning.

“You know, you don’t have to do them,” Tom said, drawing his wife from her perch to a more comfy place on his lap.

Even before they were married, Tom had been adamant that the “gig,” as he occasionally referred to his calling, was his alone. While recognizing her husband’s thoughtfulness, Faith was also well aware of the naïveté of the notion. She’d grown up in a parish. Her father was a man of the cloth, as was his father before him. In Manhattan, the parsonage had, at Faith’s mother’s insistence and expense, taken the form of a roomy duplex on the Upper East Side, yet it remained a fish-bowl, despite the doormen on guard. In every congregation on earth, it’s an immutable law of nature that even the most well-meaning member will feel obliged at some point to express an opinion about the minister’s spouse, child-rearing practices, and behavior of said children. Faith and her sister, Hope, had sworn to avoid a repetition of this part of their childhoods. Hope had succeeded, marrying an MBA; Faith had not. Tom Fairchild hadn’t been in clerical garb when they met, and by the time they got to the “What do you do?” part of the conversation, Faith knew she wanted to see this man again—and again and again. Yes, it was all well and good for Tom to say she needn’t involve herself in his work, but she knew the territory, and it meant, among other things, parish calls.

She didn’t mind paying most of them; plus, she always liked seeing the insides of other people’s houses. Before happening upon her true calling—food—she’d contemplated real estate because of this innate curiosity. But the selling part would have been difficult. It was hard enough when someone trying on a dress in a department store asked for her honest opinion. A house cost considerably more, although her last trip to Barneys had left her in shock.

The parish calls she invariably kept putting off were what she termed the “And now about me” calls—the whiners. Faith had sympathy to spare, even though Tom was more apt to cry at the movies. But the whiners tended to be people with too much time and too little to do. Their small problems became their whole existence, whereas the people who were facing real hardships seemed to soldier on in silence, minimizing their own pain, even seeking to help others. Like Sarah Winslow.

Sarah was number one on Faith’s current list of calls. Sarah had had a bad case of pneumonia last winter but had returned to church in late March.

On Sunday, her usual spot had been empty—left side, right-front pew, the same seat she’d occupied since leaving Sunday school over sixty years ago. Her parents and siblings were long gone, leaving her the last Winslow in Aleford.

Tom had phoned immediately after church and she had said it was nothing to be concerned about; she’d been a bit tired. That was all. Yet Sarah didn’t get tired without a reason, and no matter what else came up, Faith told herself, she’d see Sarah tomorrow.

One of the pleasures of visiting the retired librarian was talking about books. Her house was bursting at the seams with volumes, many of them valuable first editions, lovingly collected over the years. There were books on shelves, books on chairs, books stacked neatly on the floor. Some who never married regarded their pets as children. Sarah felt that way about her books. The love of her life was reading.

“I’ll start with Sarah Winslow, then go down the list,” Faith said, standing up and stretching.

“Are you hungry? I could make you a sandwich.

I’ve got pastrami and some good dark rye. Or do you want to go to bed?”

Tom stood up and held his wife close. He could rest his chin on her smooth blond hair. He loved the way she smelled, Guerlain mixed with something reminiscent of freshly baked bread.

“Now, what do you think?” he whispered in her ear.

Before she let herself slip into sleep, Faith recalled the other reason she always liked seeing Sarah Winslow. Sarah didn’t make her feel like the outsider Faith, in fact, was. And it had been this way since Faith had first arrived in Aleford. While others had looked askance at the minister’s new wife with her fashionable haircut and a wardrobe that did not contain even one Fair Isle sweater with matching wool skirt, Sarah had been openly appreciative of Faith’s New York edge, poking gentle fun at the others. Even Tom, despite protestations to the contrary, maintained deep down the typical New Englander’s view that the Dutch had been taken to the cleaners. And why hadn’t they wanted to hold on to those beads anyway? You never know, they could have come in handy sometime—like short pieces of string and rumpled tissue paper, both neatly stored away in many a local dwelling. If the Dutch had kept their shiny objects, they just might have been able to trade them for a really great island—say, Nantucket. But they lost their chance.

Sarah reveled in Faith’s descriptions of growing up and living in the city. Unlike some of her fellow New Englanders, she was aware that Manhattan was inhabited by more than commuters and tourists. She’d read so many books set there that she was even more familiar with some parts of the city than Faith was. Sarah traveled far and wide from the confines of her small clapboard house. Travel. Faith was almost asleep. It was time for a visit home. Aleford was her home now, but New York would always be home, home. So dangerous, people said when she mentioned an upcoming trip. The truth was, she felt safer there than here. Something about New England. The Salem witch trials, closed shutters, Lizzie Borden, dark woods. Things seemed pretty innocuous on the surface of a place like Aleford, yet you were never sure what the stick you poked into this particular pond might dredge up. She drew close to Tom. She felt his warmth steal over her, and with a slight shudder at her last thoughts, she let them melt away into unconsciousness.

Over on Maple Street, Patsy Avery wasn’t even trying to sleep, despite the lateness of the hour.

After a futile attempt, she’d slipped out of bed, leaving her husband, Will, snoring slightly—a good-sized mound under the bedclothes—and gone down to the kitchen for something to eat.

Most of the time, she slept just fine in the new house; then there would be a run of exasperating nights when sleep eluded her. It was so damn quiet in the suburbs. She couldn’t get used to it—and “quiet” was one of the reasons why they’d moved from Boston.

Not that there wasn’t noise in Aleford. More birds than she thought could possibly find room for nests in one place currently greeted the dawn with a cacophony of screeches, some holdout usually continuing for hours. At dusk, and on into the darkness, insects she didn’t even want to think about made odd belching and sawing sounds.

Then there was the house itself. It creaked. It moaned. The radiator covers occasionally fell open, hitting the floor with sharp retorts like gun-fire, or—more likely here—backfire. The furnace itself hummed, the refrigerator was a candidate for Name That Tune, and branches slapped the windows.

But in essence, it was as quiet as the grave. No sounds of traffic, no sirens, no music from car radios or other apartments, no people talking as they passed by under the apartment windows—talking and sometimes shouting, but signs of life.

Patsy had never heard a single voice from inside her new house. A dog barked every once in a while from a few yards away, but nothing that could be called human. She pulled the drapes shut at night, more as a ritual. No one could see in, and there wasn’t a streetlight poised directly outside, as there had been in the South End. There they’d had to get heavy shades and drapes to keep the orange glow from their bedroom.

She opened the refrigerator, which had re-verted to a single monotonous note, took out the milk, and poured herself a glass. She put a brownie on a plate, then added another. A new friend, Faith Fairchild, a caterer, had dropped a batch off. Brownies, Patsy thought, as she bit into the dense chocolate appreciatively. What are we brownies doing out here in white-bread land?

Out here in the stillness of the night, stuck in the heart of Boston’s secluded western suburbs—a heart that beat so slowly at times that it was in desperate need of CPR? She laughed softly at the image.

It had been Will’s idea. “We should invest in a house now in a good location, before we have kids. Get everything the way we want it. With our salaries, we can do it.”

“With yours, you mean,” she’d countered. Both of them were lawyers. They’d met at Harvard Law, southerners, from New Orleans, though their paths had never crossed in Louisiana. After graduation, Will had risen fast in his firm, and there was no reason to believe he wouldn’t keep on going up. Patsy was a public defender, specializing in juvenile cases. Will’s job allowed her to do what she had always wanted to do. Had always intended to do, since . . . She shook her head. Don’t you be thinking about all that now, child. Not at this hour. She finished the second brownie and put the plate in the sink. Holding the glass of milk, she went to the window and switched on the porch light. The trees in the large backyard sprang out of the darkness. Will was right: Aleford was a good place for kids. She could see them running around the yard here, a swing set by the back fence. She planned to put in a vegetable garden as soon as this Yankee soil warmed up. Maybe she’d have some decent tomatoes and peppers by the fall.

Yes, they’d come to Aleford for the schools, the peace and quiet. Security. She drank her milk.

When her mother—up on her first visit to the house—had walked through Aleford center, she’d told Patsy it looked like a movie set. “The one about those Stepford ladies. You’d better watch out, honey,” she’d teased. And Patsy had laughed, yet the thought had stayed with her. It wasn’t that people were unfriendly. No, that had been worse in Boston. She’d never forget the sweet-looking white-haired old lady on the MBTA who had angrily shouted at her, “Why don’t you people stay in the projects, where you belong?” It had been her first year at law school and she had seriously thought of transferring to Tulane. Will had pointed out that there were plenty of crackers who’d say the same thing if she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and she well knew the geography of hatred and stupidity crossed all state lines. So she’d stayed and toughened—a bit. But you never got used to it—Red Sox games with Will—they both loved baseball—the only people of color for rows and rows. A drunken man’s angry slurred epithet as they left.

No one had shouted anything at them in Aleford, but she wasn’t fool enough to think all Aleford welcomed the Averys’ coming, an act that gave a mighty boost to the percentage of minorities in town. Subtle racism was usually more hurtful for its insidiousness than the kind that smacked you right in the face. What kind of a choice was this called? She was tired and her brain wasn’t working at its usual speed. Anyway, it was for sure between a rock and a hard place.

Hard places. She remembered that guy in Greek mythology who was punished by perpetual hunger and thirst. When he bent down to take a drink of water, it would recede. When he reached up for some fruit, it would be jerked just out of his grasp. Will and she had managed to grab some sustenance—look at this house, a dream house—yet there were so many others who would never have any kind of house, forget the dream part. . . . These were her night thoughts.

Her sleepless night thoughts.

She opened the back door and strained her ears. Not a sound. Not even the damn bugs. The whole town was asleep. She was the only one awake; hers the only light she could see. She felt like the last woman on earth, survivor of a nu-clear holocaust. What was producing all these images in her mind night after night? she wondered.

Girl, you have to get some sleep! she told herself, switching off the lights. This is your home now.

Believe it.

Danny Miller, age twelve and a half, was dream-ing that he was in a canoe on the Moose River in Maine. He was with his camp on a wilderness ex-pedition. Everything was perfect. The sky was bright blue; it was warm. There were no mosquitoes. He lifted his paddle out of the water and watched the drops fall from it like diamonds sparkling in the sun. He glanced back over his shoulder to share his happy thoughts—and he gasped! His English teacher was in the stern. He was twice his normal size and laughing his head off. “You didn’t finish your homework, Miller,” he yelled, and waved a list of vocabulary words at Danny. It was miles long, fluttering in the breeze, trailing onto the bottom of the craft. “Oh no!” Danny mumbled, tossing his covers to the floor. “Not more!”

His mother, Pix, had been known to sleep through thunderstorms, but children talking in their sleep, never. She was by Danny’s side in an instant, picking the sheet and blanket off the floor and tucking them securely around him. She stroked his hair back from his forehead. He had always been a sweaty little boy. “It’s okay, sweetheart, you just had a bad dream.”

With his eyes still closed, Danny mumbled, “It was so weird, Mom. Mr. Hatch was at camp, making me do more vocabulary words.” Pix went back to bed and crawled under the covers. Her husband, Sam, asked, “Everything all right?”

“Danny was having a nightmare—and Aleford’s seventh graders are definitely getting too much homework,” she answered, going back to sleep.

It was a quiet night, too, at the Aleford police station, which shared space with the town clerk’s office in the town hall. Sometime in the sixties, a new one-story addition—lots of plate glass and solid vertical siding—had been added to the ven-erable brick building, which itself was most aptly described by Selectman Sam Miller as “H. H.

Richardson tripping with Maxfield Parrish.” The quasi-Bauhaus addition had been intended to house the police, but Chief MacIsaac, although new to the post then, had mustered the nerve, and support, to reject it outright. The town clerk had refused to budge also—hence, the file boxes in the lone jail cell. Over the years, the addition had come to serve for such things as small committee meetings—Aleford had a superabundance of committees, everything from the Historic Dis-trict Commission to a committee appointed to select street names—and also as the headquarters for the Community Education Program—Yoga, Mastering Your Mac, Cooking with Heart, Découpage, and the like.

The chief was getting ready to go home. He’d taken the swing shift, as he occasionally did, to spread things out fairly among Aleford’s few officers of the law. There wasn’t a whole lot of crime in the town, at least not crimes you could arrest people for. Charley MacIsaac had his own opinion of what constituted a misdemeanor, and what got said at Town Meeting, the board of Selectmen’s, and the school committee often qualified.

He looked at his watch. It was morning now. The next day. He yawned. Dale Warren was late and if he didn’t get his ass into the station soon, Charley would have to call and wake him up—again.

The door opened. “Sorry I’m late. I have to get a louder alarm!” It was the same thing Dale said every time. “Anything up?” Dale always asked this, too, and always in the same hopeful tone of voice. He was young and didn’t know any better.

“No, thank God,” Charley said. It was what he always replied. Their customary exchange completed—a kind of handing over of the watch—

Charley left and walked out to his car. Now, it was a crime, no question there. He didn’t bother to keep it locked. Not even a kid out for the ultimate joyride—the police chief’s cruiser!—would take it. The selectmen had promised him a new one two years ago, but whenever he raised the matter, it got shelved. “Still running, isn’t it?” one of them would invariably point out. “Barely,” Charley would answer.

It was cold. After a few false starts, the engine coughed feebly and turned over. Charley drove three blocks to his house. It was dark. He’d forgotten to leave a light burning. Funny—his wife, Maddie, had been gone now for longer than they’d been married, but he still hated walking into the empty house knowing she wouldn’t be there.

Once inside, he turned on the lights and slung his sports jacket, an ancient tweed, on the back of one of the kitchen chairs. He was too tired to go to bed yet, and he reached for the tin of oat cakes that his sister in Nova Scotia made sure was never empty. There was a beer and some juice in the fridge. Not too much else. He ate most of his meals at the Minuteman Café. He drank some juice from the carton and sat down with the tin of cookies. Maddie had wanted to come to the States. Her brother was a cop in Boston, and so at the tender age of nineteen, Charley had found himself changing countries and eventually pursuing a career in law enforcement himself. After the first miscarriage, Maddie had insisted on leaving the city. She’d been sure the air would be better, and besides, didn’t they want their children to grow up as they had—running through the countryside, like on Cape Breton? Aleford had had an opening, and by the time Maddie died, still childless, Charley was Chief MacIsaac.

He’d been tempted to move back home—he’d never called Aleford that, because it wasn’t—but he knew he wouldn’t fit in anymore in Canada, either. Too many years away. He had been able to sense it on the visits they made each summer, the visits he’d kept on making. In Nova Scotia, they all thought he had a Massachusetts accent. In Aleford, people meeting him for the first time always asked him where he was from.

He put the lid on the tin, making sure it was tight. Oat cakes lasted forever. You could put some in one of those time capsules, dig it up a century later, and they would taste just as good as the day they were made. Maddie’s had been the best, but his sister’s were close. She’d wanted him to remarry, writing about this widow or that divorcée for years. She’d given up now. He’d only ever wanted one woman, and his sister should have known that. One woman who was the picture of health, then gone in four agonizing months.

He looked at his watch. The birds will be singing their sweet songs soon, he reflected, and if I don’t get some sleep, I’ll be dead tomorrow.

The ropes cut cruelly into her skin—old skin, translu-cent, with a network of veins like the cracked surface of the blue Chinese export platters hanging on the wall above the sideboard. Old skin—dry, powdery, and deathly pale.

They hadn’t killed her. She had thought they would when she walked into the kitchen just before dawn broke and surprised them, figures in ski masks, who in turn surprised, shocked her. She was sure they would kill her right away. Sure when one grabbed her swiftly, clamping his gloved hand hard against her mouth.

They gagged her, but they needn’t have. There had been time to scream in that first moment of terror when all of them had suddenly stood so still, but no sound had emerged from her throat.

Once, as a child, she had tumbled down the attic stairs to the landing below, then lain there unable to call for help—frightened when she couldn’t make a sound. Her mother appeared, said the wind had been knocked out of her, and pulled her on her lap, until gradually the wind came back and she could speak, could cry. It was like that. The wind had been knocked out of her, but mother couldn’t come now.

They tied her to this chair—her college chair, a heavy black one with the seal emblazoned on the back in shining gold: non ministrari sed ministrare — “Not to be served, but to serve.” A gift from her col-leagues.

This chair. They had wound the rope tightly across her chest, then around the curved back; bound her wrists to the chair’s smooth arms and her ankles to the front rung—the black paint embellished with touches of gold. A beautiful gift. An expensive gift.

They hadn’t known an old lady’s habits. Why should they? They were young. Had assumed the house empty or her deep asleep, as were her neighbors, houses still in darkness before the start of the day. But sleep comes at odd times in life’s waning, and she had come downstairs before daylight, as usual, for her tea.

The pain was increasing. She supposed it would until she couldn’t feel at all anymore. Tears were streaming down her face and the cloth gag around her jaw was wet. She tried to take a deep breath and felt a worse pain. A knife in her side. Her chest felt as if it would explode.

But they hadn’t killed her.

She grasped the chair’s arms and began to move her body rhythmically from side to side, trying to throw all her weight each time. It was exhausting, but the chair began to rock back and forth. She could have tried to tumble forward, but she hadn’t the nerve, hadn’t the courage. She’d have to watch the floor come closer and closer toward her. Better side to side. She’d never been a particularly brave woman, she realized. A thought coming into her mind, coming now at the end. There had been no call. She hadn’t been tested. She continued to move her body side to side.

She was desperate to stop, to rest—to get her wind.

Finally, she tipped over. Her head struck the bare floor and for a moment she thought she’d lose consciousness. The blackness that came rushing up was so pleasant, so welcome that she nearly gave in to it. Instead she made herself look about, feel the pine boards against her cheek, hold on to reality.

Her object was, of course, the phone. Mere steps away on a small table in the next room. By pushing with her right foot, she found, as she had hoped, that she could move an inch or so at a time. There was a chance . . . She’d have to rest, but not too much. The full weight of her body pushed her against the side of the chair, crushing her ribs. More pain. Much more.

Push, then rest, push, then rest. An infant crawling toward a toy. A crab scuttling across the ocean floor.

Push, then rest. Push, then rest. Push . . .

Two

Feeling as if she should don a little red-hooded cape, Faith slipped one last scone into the wicker basket she’d lined with a bright checked napkin.

In the center, she’d placed two small jars of her jam: wild blueberry and strawberry. The last of the fruits of the previous summer’s labors.

She opened the kitchen door and stepped out into the sunshine. It was a beautiful day to be paying any kind of call.

But she wasn’t on her way to grandmother’s house. Sarah Winslow wasn’t a grandmother.

Faith had heard her speak of a distant cousin:

“Distance has not increased our fondness” had been her precise words. Other than this, there had never been any mention or sign of family ties, except for a few faded photographs scattered about the house, a daguerreotype on the mantel and, above it, a fine portrait of a rather dour-looking eighteenth-century gentleman with Sarah’s firm chin. What would it be like to be virtually kin-less? Faith wondered. There had been times in her life, particularly during adolescence, when this notion had been quite appealing. Yet at Sarah’s age, for better or worse, Faith imagined, one wanted consanguinity. Perhaps a last chance to mend broken bridges and certainly a longing for people who knew what your parents had been like, and what you were like when you were young. Old age meant the winnowing of shared experience, until often there was only one person—yourself—who could recall a time when your hair had been its real color, when your limbs had moved freely, and when you had been able to seek comfort in a large lap after tears were shed.

Faith passed the church, its white steeple creating a sharp interruption in the seamless blue sky.

Next year was the congregation’s two hundredth anniversary at this site, and First Parish was already gearing up for the celebration. They were looking for a volunteer to write a play charting their history. Faith told the committee head they’d be better off doing those tableaux vivants, so popular in the last century—a step up from freeze tag, these tableaux depicted historic scenes as “living pictures.” It had seemed a reasonable suggestion—no lines to learn, no forced rhymes.

One suggestion had been a play in sonnet form.

Tom had laughed; the committee head had not.

Crossing the green, she became aware of her burden. She’d started off carrying the basket by the handle, but now she found it swinging forward in a motion that threatened to change her energetic steps to Shirley Temple skipping. She slowed down and looped the basket firmly in the crook of her right arm. Millicent Revere McKinley’s house, strategically situated, was coming up. Millicent, a crusty descendant through a cousin twice removed of the equestrian silver-smith, had an armchair in front of her bay window, angled to provide a view down Main Street and across the green. It was just behind her muslin curtains, so passersby could never be certain until it was too late whether Millicent had her gimlet eye trained on them. She passed the time in knitting enough mittens, mufflers, and sweaters to stock her own Congregational church’s holiday boutiques and those of several other neighboring faiths. Millicent devoutly believed idle hands were the devil’s playground, or whatever the homily was. Idle tongues, however, didn’t seem to be proscribed, and Millicent’s wagged with the best—or worst—of them.

Touching on Faith’s forebears, Miss McKinley’s unvarying response was a raised eyebrow and the emphatic declaration “Not from around here.”

The fact that Faith had managed to get involved in several murder investigations during her sojourn in Aleford was something the town took in stride. After all, many of its residents had singular, if not downright eccentric, interests.

Millicent herself devoted her waking hours to accumulating information not only about the living but also about the dead—especially the Revere family, a subspecialty being china patterns of the various branches. No, Faith’s stumbling across a corpse or two and her ability to solve the crimes were not hot topics of conversation in the aisles of the Shop ’n Save or at the Minuteman Café, where most town business really took place.

Faith’s ringing of the alarm bell in the old belfry at the top of Belfry Hill, the bell rung on that famous day in that famous year and subsequently only for the death of presidents, the death of descendants of Aleford’s original settlers, and of course on Patriot’s Day for the reenactment of the battle—now, that was cause for discussion, even years later. A still-warm corpse lying in said belfry and a perpetrator possibily lurking in the high-bush blueberries that grew on the hill did not matter. Even the presence of Benjamin Fairchild, an infant in a Snugli at the time and a continuing local favorite—he, like his sister, was born in Aleford—did not affect the prevailing opinion that Faith should have had the presence of mind to think of an alternative. Someone from here would have.

Faith now got past the obstacle, studiously not looking in Millicent’s direction. The woman thought she knew everything going on in town.

And she is right, Faith thought dismally. At least Millicent didn’t know where the minister’s wife was going this morning, but she’d find out eventually if she thought it mattered. Faith carrying a basket was not up there with some of what Millicent had filed away in her Rolodex lobe, a genetic quirk. This store of fact and supposition posed considerable risk at times. There was such a thing as knowing more than was good for you, although Millicent herself would never cede the point.

There were no woods to pass through on the way to Sarah’s house, though Aleford abounded in arboreal conservation land. It was one of the draws realtors touted, besides the schools. The peace and quiet, too. Suburban serenity. Location, location, location. Certainly little was stirring on Main Street this morning. The commuters had left for work, school buses had discharged their cargo, and the power walkers were on the bike path.

No wolves, either. Except for the few squirrels chattering away on the green when she walked past, Faith didn’t expect to encounter any wildlife, despite the rumors that had surfaced once again of a coyote at the Aleford dump. She was almost certain the coyote was two-legged, male, and about fifteen years old, running with a pack of like-minded mammals.

The town did have raccoons, but they wouldn’t be about now. These bandits had become more than a nuisance, with untidy nocturnal forays into garages left open and curbside trash cans.

From the few specimens Faith had seen from her bedroom window, sizes seemed to run from much larger than a bread box to slightly smaller than a Winnebago, and they were taking the recycling endorsed by their cartoon relation, Ranger Rick, altogether too seriously. The ultimate indignity had occurred when a mother raccoon took shelter in Millicent Revere McKinley’s chimney, producing offspring before Millicent could get the animal-control officer from neighboring Byford—Aleford’s force being limited to bare essentials such as writing parking tickets. Millicent confided to Faith that she was tempted to light a fire and be done with it; the noise was driving her crazy, yet for once she was afraid of public opinion. “Some people could think I was being a mite cruel.” The officer from Byford—“when he finally took the trouble to show up”—was no help, she’d added bitterly, telling her the critters would leave eventually, which they did, but it was a very long “eventually.”

Faith was strolling past Aleford Photo now, stopping to wave at Bert and Richard, who also spent their days keeping an eye on everything that happened and didn’t in Aleford center. Ren-aissance men, their moonlighting ranged from car repair, newspaper delivery, and the sale of reli-gious articles by mail to acting as undertakers.

They also knew a whole lot about photography.

She peered in the window. As usual, there was a table up front loaded with items gleaned from their attics and basements, an ongoing, extremely eclectic indoor yard sale. She noted that the blue-sparkled bowling ball, object of young Ben Fairchild’s desire, was still up for grabs. But something new had been added. One corner of the table had been carefully cleared and the camera shop was now selling arts and crafts—macramé plant hangers, beaded chains upon which one’s spectacles might be suspended, painted rocks and the like. Aleford Photo was one of the things Faith cherished about Aleford. She could almost imagine herself in a quirky shop in Greenwich Village—the owner’s predilections determining stock, as opposed to market demand. The bowling ball was getting dusty.

Spying Faith’s basket, Bert and Richard made extremely gross eating gestures from behind the counter and beckoned her into their lair. It reminded her of the fairy tale again and she continued on her way.

James Thurber had gotten it exactly right in “The Little Girl and the Wolf.” A wolf dressed in a nightgown and nightcap didn’t look any more like a grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looked like Calvin Coolidge. And Faith firmly believed in the moral of Thurber’s fable, too—it was definitely not so easy to fool little girls as it once was, or, she added to herself, big girls, either.

All this Little Red Riding Hood mental mean-dering took her as far as the town hall. She hadn’t seen Charley MacIsaac in a while and wondered how he was doing. She’d have to invite him over for dinner soon. The fare at the Minuteman Café, where she knew he consumed his meals, ran mostly to things like New England boiled dinners, a culinary concept Faith had never even considered embracing, however lightly. Meat loaf or potpie on the menu meant the cook was feeling inventive.

Sarah’s house was on the opposite side of the center from the parsonage. It was at the end of Winslow Street, named for “someone everyone has forgotten,” Sarah once told Faith. Millicent, mistress of every significant and insignificant fact relating to Aleford’s past, had corrected Sarah’s unseemly lack of ancestor worship.

Winslow Street was named for Josiah Winslow, one of the stalwart band standing their ground on Aleford green that famous chilly April morning in 1775. The Winslow Farm had covered many acres in Sarah’s section of town, Millicent informed Faith, citing the appropriate tome in the Aleford History section of the town library—call number included.

It was typical of Sarah Winslow not to be caught up in the past, taking credit, as some were wont, for deeds done long ago. Faith was always amused at the way these others talked about their ancestors in the present tense, as if the bloodlines stretching ever thinner across the centuries meant immortality for all.

Winslow Street was the next left, and Faith turned the corner. Lilacs were blooming—enormous old bushes, their weight causing the white picket fences that lined Sarah’s street to lean ever so slightly akimbo; their strong fragrance filled the air. Ladies used to smell this way before their floral eau de colognes—Muget de Bois, Friendship’s Garden—were banished from store shelves by Opium and CK One. Faith pushed open the gate of the Winslow house, built by Josiah’s son, Millicent had told her, and walked up the path to Sarah’s front door. There was no bell, only a heavy brass knocker. Faith lifted it and rapped twice. There was no answer, and after waiting a minute, she knocked again. Sarah was an early riser, so Faith knew she must be up—as indeed anyone except the most infirm would be at ten o’clock in the morning in Aleford.

There was still no answer. She must be out for a walk, Faith thought, feeling glad that Sarah had recovered. She’d probably gone to the library or down the street to Castle Park, a small green area kept trimmed and tidy, where children sledded in the winter and people brought their lunches at other times of the year. Faith was tempted to keep walking in that direction and see if Sarah was there, sitting in the sun at one of the picnic tables.

But she might have taken another direction. Faith let the knocker fall one last time, then decided to go around to the rear and leave the basket in the kitchen. The jam had her have faith labels, so Sarah would know who had been there. She’d know anyway. Faith had left similar offerings in the past—in the same basket, which Sarah always conscientiously returned.

A path, faintly brushed with moss like the her-ringbone brick one in front, wound around the small house to the backyard. Several fruit trees were blooming and an ancient willow’s long yellow-green branches drooped toward the ground.

No one in Aleford ever locked their back doors, and they often neglected the front entrances, as well. Faith knocked again at the rear for form’s sake. Sarah would certainly have heard the front knocker from her kitchen. A discreet starched white curtain covered the door’s window. Faith turned the knob, pushed the door open, and stepped in.

Stepped in and gasped.

The room had been completely ransacked. All the cupboards were open and the floor was strewn with broken crockery, as well as pots and pans. Drawers of utensils had been emptied. The pantry door was ajar and canisters of flour and sugar had been overturned, a sudden snowstorm on the well-scrubbed old linoleum. A kitchen chair lay on its side. Another stood below a high cabinet, its contents—roasting pans and cookie tins—in a jumble below.

Faith dropped the basket and started shouting,

“Sarah! Sarah! It’s Faith! Answer me! Where are you? ”as she moved toward the door to the dining room. She pushed it open; Sarah wasn’t there.

Nor was she answering. Still frantically calling the woman’s name, Faith ran through the living room, then upstairs, searching for her friend.

The scene in the kitchen was duplicated all over the house. It looked like a newsreel of the af-termath of a tornado. Things were in heaps on the floors, drawers flung on top. But there was no sign of Sarah. “Sarah!” Faith kept calling her name, not sure whether to be relieved or terrified at the woman’s absence.

A break-in. Burglars. But surely they wouldn’t have entered while someone was home? They must have seen Sarah leave. There had been no signs of life on the street, most of the residents having gone away for the day or already at work.

And from the look of things, whoever had been here had worked fast. Sarah couldn’t have been in the house. Sarah had to be all right.

In Sarah Winslow’s bedroom tucked under the eaves, the bed had been slept in, but the quilt that usually covered it was still hanging on the quilt rack next to the dormer window. The rack stood in its usual place, the spread neatly folded, a note of normalcy, but a discordant one in all this chaos.

Everything else was in total disarray. Shoes and clothes from the closet and lingerie from the bu-reau drawers had been flung onto the floor. Faith felt sick at the thought of hands touching Sarah’s most intimate things, pulling her orderly universe apart. One pillow had been stripped of its case. The other showed the faint indentation where Sarah’s head had rested; the sheet was slightly pulled back. Faith’s heart sank.

Sarah would never have left her house with an unmade bed.

But where was she? It seemed as if Faith had been in the house for hours, but she knew no more than a few minutes had passed. It was time to call the police. She instinctively looked for a phone on the bedside table beside the old four-poster—the bed in which Sarah had been born. This was a connection to the past Sarah did treasure, and she’d mentioned it several times with pride—mentioned that she intended to die in it, too.

Faith’s heart was pounding so hard, her ribs ached.

Where was the phone? There should be one next to the bed, as there was next to Faith’s, but of course Sarah wouldn’t have seen the need for more than a single instrument in the house. Instead, there was a stack of books, or the remains of one. Most were on the floor, facedown on the hooked rug, which was the only covering on the wide floorboards where Sarah placed her feet each day upon rising—had placed them for how many years?

Yes, there would be only one phone and it would be downstairs, discreetly hidden away, a concession to the exigencies of modern life, an essential intrusion. Faith went to look. A quick glance back in the kitchen revealed nothing.

Sarah’s phone turned out to be in a small book-lined den off the living room—a room that was out of sight and one Faith had neglected to enter in her rush through the house and up to the second floor.

It was there that Faith found the woman, lying on her side, tied to a chair, a gray pallor covering her face, her body still. Completely still. Incongruously, her head was resting on the lowest bookcase shelf, her shoulder wedged in among her beloved volumes.

“Sarah! No, please God, Sarah!” Faith felt for a pulse. There was none, but Sarah’s skin felt slightly warm. Fighting back sobs, Faith grabbed the phone on the small table just out of reach of the motionless body. She dialed 911, new this year to Aleford. Help would come. Help would come fast. Help would come too late.

She ran back to the kitchen, found a knife, and returned to the den. She sawed away at the ropes, releasing first Sarah’s hands and feet—the feet clad in soft white bedroom slippers. Then she cut the ropes from Sarah’s chest and eased the old woman’s body out of the chair and onto the floor.

There were horrible bruises on her wrists and ankles. Faith started CPR, all the while praying for a miracle. As she worked on the lifeless form, tears streamed down her face and she could scarcely keep herself from giving way to grief. This was Sarah! Sarah, her friend.

The sirens wailed and Faith jumped to her feet, rapidly running into the hall and throwing open the front door to let the EMTs in. When they all reached the den, she stood back watching, her back against a bookshelf. She prayed again, prayed that the professionals would accomplish what she could not. Sarah would breathe again.

Of course she would breathe again. She had to!

She was still warm. There was still life! Now the sobs did come and Faith turned away from the scene in front of her, pushing her forehead hard against the row of books. There had been books on the floor beside Sarah’s body. One small volume had fallen on her imprisoned hand—a leather-bound presentation copy of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s A Few Figs from Thistles. Lines from the poems crowded into Faith’s thoughts: Sarah did not burn her candle at both ends, yet it still gave a lovely light—“But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends—” Foes. Foes, not friends.

Tom. She had to call Tom. But she couldn’t move, not with the activity that was going on so desperately a few feet away. The EMTs had put a CPR mask over Sarah’s face, using a bag to force air into the old woman’s lungs, creating an object out of an individual.

Chief MacIsaac came to the door of the room, looked around quickly, and pulled Faith into the hall. He steered her toward a chair and she sat down automatically. Standing over her, he began a series of terse questions. “When did you get here? Did you see anyone leaving? A car? A van?” He was almost as upset as Faith was, she realized.

He’d known Sarah Winslow much longer.

Faith looked at her watch. She had left her house less than thirty minutes ago. “I got here about ten o’clock. It was twenty of ten when I left the parsonage. And there was no one around here.” She shut her eyes, envisioning the quiet street, hoping for a memory of anything out of the ordinary, yet there was nothing. “No cars. Not even on Main Street, once I was out of the center.”

“How did you get in?”

“The kitchen door was open. Sarah didn’t answer when I knocked at the front and I thought she must have gone for a walk. I had brought her some scones.” Now they were lying with the rest of the mess in the kitchen.

The EMTs yelled at them to get out of the way and then raced past with Sarah on a stretcher, heading for the ambulance.

“I need to go with them,” Faith told Charley emphatically. “She needs someone with her.” He looked at her sorrowfully. “Go ahead. I’ll get ahold of Tom. We’ll meet you at the hospital.” She knew what he wasn’t saying. That Sarah wouldn’t know who was with her, now or ever.

Not wanting to believe it, Faith got in the back of the ambulance before anyone could tell her to get out. It was still a gloriously sunny day, those lilacs blooming in dooryards, but she kept her eyes on the figure in front of her. Sarah was now connected to all sorts of tubes and machines. A mint green chenille bathrobe chastely covered her nightdress. The sash was tied in a small bow. Tied by Sarah when she’d put her robe on. Sarah!

Sarah Winslow couldn’t be dead. It couldn’t be true.

Faith Fairchild hated hospitals. It wasn’t fears of her own mortality or infirmity, although these were no strangers. It was the sense of being in a parallel universe where time stopped, day and night were one, and all the inhabitants expected bad news.

She was sitting beside Tom in a large waiting room at the Lahey clinic in Burlington, the hospital closest to Aleford. Chief MacIsaac was pacing in the corridor. Several friends from the parish and some neighbors rounded out the silent group. The room was filled with similar groups of people, the only difference being size and intensity of distress. One cluster sat close together, chairs touching, the table in front of them littered with what looked like many days’ worth of empty coffee cups and half-eaten sandwiches.

One man had an unlit cigarette in his mouth. A woman slept, her head on the shoulder of an older woman next to her.

Faith remembered the vigil they had kept after her father’s sudden heart attack. She’d raced to the hospital; then everything slowed to a stand-still while they waited, and she had to look at her watch to know whether it was 2:00 a.m. or 2:00 p.m. Lawrence Sibley had pulled through, but Faith’s mother developed a permanent wariness, a watchful look that had never entirely disappeared.

Then there was the time Ben had had surgery to put tubes in his ears after a year of horrendous ear infections. It had been performed at Children’s Hospital in Boston. There, Faith had quickly felt ashamed of her nervous thoughts as she caught the murmured words of other parents in the cheerful waiting room—words like chemo and shunt, which revealed the enormity of what those parents were facing. Her “What if he doesn’t wake up?” anesthesia anxiety was ter-rifying, but his surgery was routine—and the Fairchilds had never been there in that hospital before. Not like those others—veterans, fighters, survivors.

Hospital smells.

It wasn’t just the disinfectant or lack of air moving about. It was the smell of fear, of disease, of death. She stood up and went to get some more coffee.

Sarah Winslow’s life on earth was officially declared at an end at 11:36 a.m. A young doctor came in with the news. “I’m sorry,” he said to them. “It was her heart—cardiac arrest. We would have had to have reached her immediately to have done anything, and even then it might have been too late.”

Was he saying this for her benefit? Faith wondered. Reassuring her that if she had left for Sarah’s a half hour, an hour earlier, it would still have been of no use?

“Would she have had the heart attack if she hadn’t been attacked?” Faith had to know.

“I can’t really say until we do the autopsy, but the combination of shock and the exertion of trying to reach the phone could have brought it on.” His face darkened. “Bastards! But that’s for the police . . .” After the explosion of anger, his voice trailed off. He’d failed.

Tom stood up. “I’d like to be with her for a few minutes, if I may.”

“Of course, Reverend, come with me.” He turned to the rest of them. “Anyone who wishes may come.” He smiled bleakly. “She looks very peaceful.”

So they all ended up in a curtained-off cubicle in the emergency room, jammed among a multitude of technological advances, to say a final good-bye to Sarah. A good-bye to Sarah, who in the natural order of things should have slipped off some night, years hence, in her own bed—

where she had first seen life and where she had expected to leave it.

The lights had been dimmed and all the machines turned off, but a few feet away the emergency ward was glaringly bright and noisy. Faith found it hard not to think about what was going on out there: who would survive; who wouldn’t—like Sarah.

She did look peaceful—asleep, except there wasn’t a hint of movement at her chest. The bathrobe was gone, but she was in her own nightgown, a flannel one with tiny pink rosebuds, buttoned to her throat. Her hands lay on top of the white hospital blanket. A nurse came up behind Faith and said softly, “This was in the pocket of her bathrobe.” It was Sarah’s mother’s engagement ring, an old-fashioned diamond solitaire that Sarah wore on her right ring finger. She had managed somehow to get it off and hide it. Faith slid it on Sarah’s finger, then held her cold hand.

The ring represented a small victory, but a victory nonetheless. The thieves hadn’t gotten everything, and Faith imagined the pleasure the old woman must have gotten from this in her last hours. I was not defeated and will not be—I saved my ring and will try to get to the phone. It was Sarah’s last message to her friends.

Tom said a prayer and several people wept quietly. Charley MacIsaac abruptly left the room.

Faith was too sad to cry anymore.

The Fairchilds were sitting in front of the hearth again, but tonight they were close to each other on the couch. Again, the children were sound asleep upstairs, but neither Faith nor Tom was in-clined to follow their example, despite how exhausted they were. Faith knew that the moment she closed her eyes, all she would see would be Sarah obscenely tied to her chair, toppled over on the bookcase shelf—dead.

“What kind of animal does something like this?

She was a helpless old woman!” It was the question Faith had been asking in various ways since they had returned from the hospital. Tom still didn’t have an answer even if Faith had been asking a real question, rather than venting her rage and sorrow.

Faith continued: “With some deaths, you can say the person has been released from suffering further pain, like an incurable illness, or there are the cases where someone’s really gone already. Then there’s the opposite—people who go quickly and don’t suffer. It’s horrible for everyone left, but not bad for them, except they’re dead, of course. But they didn’t suffer. Do you see what I mean?”

Tom nodded. He’d heard Faith on this subject before. She wanted both of them to go simultaneously some unspecified year very far in the future.

“But Sarah wasn’t sick, she didn’t go quickly, and she did suffer. When I think how frightened she must have been!”

“Faith, it’s horrible, but you can’t let it obsess you. There was nothing you could have done.” Tom touched upon the thing bothering her most.

“Charley said the burglars must have entered the house before dawn, expecting she would still be asleep. They may have tried other doors in the neighborhood until they found one open. Or they may have targeted Sarah.”

Nothing you could have done. Faith sat quietly for a moment, her head on Tom’s shoulder.

She hadn’t been able to do anything, anything at all. Not even provide some solace in Sarah’s last moments. She focused on her husband’s last statement.

“But the only really valuable things she had were her books, and those weren’t touched. If you had checked out the neighborhood, looked in windows, whatever, you would have seen that she didn’t have a stereo, computer. Of course, her house was the most isolated on the street, at the end, with the driveway winding around the back.

You wouldn’t be able to see a car or whatever was being loaded, unless you were back there, too.

But still, why would they want to rob her house?

It’s small, nothing to suggest fenceable goods.” They were drinking Delamain cognac and Faith poured herself a bit more. She was beginning to hope she could sleep.

“Charley mentioned there were several very old small Oriental rugs missing. And she had silver,” Tom said, reaching for the decanter himself.

“It was in a drawer in her sideboard. They took the whole drawer for convenience sake.” His tone was bitter. Somehow this disregard for a perfectly good piece of furniture kept popping into his thoughts. He was well aware of how minor the act was compared to the rest, but to ruin a perfectly good chest . . . “And there was some good jewelry. Family stuff. Her neighbor said it was in the flour and sugar canisters. Sarah thought they were a good hiding place. Better than the freezer, which was where her neighbor was keeping things. That’s how it came up.

“Thieves often prey on the elderly, believing they hide money or other valuables in their homes, not in safety-deposit boxes—it’s probably a legacy of the Depression years. Like my great-aunt Agnes with the money between the plates.” Faith remembered the incident well. She and Tom had been helping Tom’s parents and some of the other Fairchilds, who virtually colonized the area around Norwell and Hingham on the South Shore, to pack up the late Agnes’s effects. Marian Fairchild, Tom’s mother, had been ready to stack an unattractive pile of chipped Nippon plates in a box for the church rummage sale, when Tom spied a familiar-looking green piece of paper sticking out from between two of them. It turned out that several Ben Franklins were cushioning each layer of the china, a couple of thousand dollars in all.

After this, they started all over again, doing a thorough search of the house and what had already been sorted or tossed. They found more bills with the dust rags, some between carefully saved and ironed wrapping paper, and more in Baggies at the bottom of a giant box of mothballs. To this day, Marian still fretted about what might have been unknowingly overlooked and discarded.

Faith held the small brandy snifter in both hands and finished the amber liquid. The warmth hit her all at once. Her face flushed and she was suddenly very sleepy.

“Let’s go to bed, darling. And we’ll think what we can do about this in the morning.”

“Do?” Tom stood up and pulled his wife into his arms. He looked her straight in the eye. “We will give Sarah a beautiful service and hope that the police will be successful in their investigation of this terrible crime.” Drowsy as she was, Faith was well aware of the emphasis her spouse was putting on “their” investigation. “Other than that,” he continued as they climbed the stairs together, “there really isn’t anything either of us can do.”

Faith didn’t say anything. It offered the path of least resistance. Besides, she didn’t know what she could do. At least not yet.

Sarah Winslow’s death hit Aleford hard. She was a popular member of the community and widely known from her years of work at the library. She was never too busy to help a patron, and her desk sported a large sign: ask! there are no dumb questions. She was the quintessential reference librarian; someone who read dictionaries for pleasure and collected facts with the same regard for their value as a collector of Fabergé eggs might feel for his objects.

It was Friday. Sarah’s funeral was scheduled for noon. The day had begun with bright skies, but dark clouds moved in about ten o’clock.

“Somehow, it makes it harder if it’s a nice day,” Pix Miller remarked to Faith. “Not that it’s any less horrible, but it would be worse if Sarah were missing a beautiful spring day.”

They were on their way to the church, having eschewed the short-cut through the parsonage’s backyard for the slightly longer but more decorous approach on the sidewalk. Ben and Amy were at Ben’s friend Lizzie MacLean’s house.

Lizzie’s mother, Arlene, had been making the kind of remark that leads other women to think another baby is being contemplated—things like

“They grow up so fast”—sigh—and “I have all these perfectly good baby clothes. I don’t know why I’m still holding on to them”—another sigh.

Faith sincerely hoped several hours with her tod-dler daughter would not cause Arlene to change her mind if she was, in fact, reaching for a First Response kit instead of toothpaste at CVS. Much as Faith adored her daughter, she was not a docile child. “Silent but deadly,” Tom called her. Left to her own devices, Amy would quietly, and win-somely, wreak untold havoc. A hairbrush in the elder Fairchilds’ VCR being the most recent episode.

“I know what you mean. If the sun is shining, all is supposed to be right with the world, and it isn’t. It’s also less of an affront if nature is in tune with our feelings. It should look the way we feel.”

“The church is going to be packed. That’s the other thing. I’m sure Sarah never had any idea how much she meant to people, how much we all loved her. She was so surprised by the party the library gave her when she retired—and the chair.

It was in the living room by the fireplace, remember? Her Wellesley chair. She was devoted to the college, and that’s what the committee picked to give her.”

The chair, Faith thought bitterly, the chair they lashed her to. The chair in which she died.

Charley had told her not to talk about any of the details of the case, and she hadn’t. She wasn’t even tempted.

“I’ve always felt so safe here,” Pix said in a disturbed tone. “I’ve always thought Aleford was different from most places. I took it for granted that I could leave my house and car unlocked.

That I didn’t have to worry about my children walking anywhere—or myself, for that matter.” Pix Miller had grown up in Aleford, as had her husband, Sam.

It was a bit difficult for Faith to understand this mentality. Only a lunatic would leave a car or door unlocked where she grew up in Manhattan, yet she, too, had never felt afraid. And now her thoughts were fearful. All Aleford was afraid, particularly its older population. Doors were indeed being locked—dead bolts installed by people who had never known what they were before.

Aleford had been violated. There had been burglaries before, yet never accompanied by this kind of violence.

Pix continued thinking out loud. “Of course, they probably didn’t intend any harm. I mean, they weren’t murderers in that sense. They couldn’t have known Sarah would die.” Faith agreed with Pix, yet it was hard to accept.

Intentioned or unintentioned, Sarah was dead.

And Faith was sure the life of one old woman was not something that mattered much to these people one way or another. They hadn’t put her nitro pills within reach. Faith was sure they were sleeping soundly, unlike the community they’d turned upside down.

Pix and Faith climbed the granite church stairs, each step worn in the middle from centuries of feet making their way into the sanctuary. Sanctuary. It was exactly what Faith needed. A moment out of time to sit and pay tribute to a life worth living. A moment of peace and calm to recall her friend as she had been, not as she was on Tuesday.

Faith slipped into the pew reserved for the minister’s family, Pix squeezing in next to her on the thin, somewhat faded dark red cushions, insufficient buffers against the hard wooden benches. When church services had lasted the entire day on the Sabbath, it must have been almost impossible to move afterward, Faith often thought. Upon her arrival at First Parish, she had opted for a pew in the rear of the church, near the door, for unobtrusive late entries and possible early exits. She had been politely but firmly informed that the minister’s family had always occupied the second row, right pew. The member of the vestry who had apprised her of the fact stopped before saying “and always will,” but Faith got the idea.

As Sarah had the knack of matching fact to seeker, book to reader, so, too, did the Reverend Thomas Fairchild fashion his service to the individual memorialized. He started his eulogy with William Ellery Channing’s words:

God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levelers. They give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our human race.

“God be thanked for books.” The sentence echoed in Faith’s mind throughout the rest of the service. Sarah had left her books to the Aleford and Wellesley College libraries, with a few set aside for particular friends. She had left Tom a signed edition of Emerson’s Essays and Faith an original Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Manage-ment in perfect condition. These two volumes would always retain Sarah’s imprint, as well.

“God be thanked for books.” Books had been Sarah’s life, yet they had not replaced life, replaced friendships. Faith glanced about the church. People were standing in the rear and some had not been able to get in at all. The reception at the Wellesley College Club that Sarah had planned would be crowded. Neatly attached to her will, there had been a letter detailing her wishes, this one in a separate paragraph: “I like to think of my friends having a good—but perhaps not too good—time in my absence and have therefore arranged for a luncheon at the College Club to follow whatever service the minister deems fitting. Nothing maudlin, please. Just a simple farewell.”

They sang “I Cannot Think of Them as Dead,” and Faith noticed that Pix’s normal hymn-singing voice—firm, not too loud, not too soft, not off-key, not exactly on—gave out at the last line: “For God hath given to love to keep Its own eternally.” Faith’s voice faltered, too, but she made it through and sat down to listen to a final tribute from one of Sarah’s friends. It was almost as if Sarah were standing before them as the woman reminisced. Then it was “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God”—Sarah’s own favorite, also noted in the letter—and the service was almost over.

Faith always felt slightly guilty when she came to the rousing refrain of this hymn: “And I mean to be one too.” She wasn’t sure about a lot of things, but about her own lack of qualifications for any kind of sainthood, intent not withstanding, she was definitely certain. Saints didn’t make the kind of snap judgments she did, have phobias about certain prepared foods, or depend on a big purple dinosaur to mesmerize their children when the patter of tiny feet began to sound like a regiment in full gear. A saint would have been able to deal a whole lot better with Stephanie Bullock, for instance. Faith rephrased the thought: Only a saint could deal with that girl.

Stephanie Bullock was getting married in June and Have Faith was catering the affair. The contract had been drawn up and plans made almost a year ago. The contract stood. The plans had been altered more times than Faith could count, even after she started charging for changes. In the week following Sarah Winslow’s death, as Aleford went on grieving—and double-locking its doors—the Bullock wedding continued to occupy an inordinate amount of Faith’s time and energy.

“How many Stephanies does it take to change a lightbulb?” Niki Constantine, Faith’s assistant, asked as she reported for work the Monday following the funeral.

“I have no idea, and besides, why should I spoil a joke you’ve obviously been waiting to tell me?”

“One,” Niki announced gleefully, “and the whole world revolves around her!”

Faith had to laugh. It was a perfect description of twenty-three-year-old Stephanie, sole offspring of Courtney, neé Cabot, and Julian Bullock. Mummy and Daddy were divorced, “and it was all Daddy’s fault,” but they had declared an uneasy truce for the nuptials. Courtney’s family was the subject of John Bossidy’s famous toast,

“And this is good old Boston, the home of the bean and the cod, where the Lowells talk to the Cabots and the Cabots talk only to God.” Stephanie embodied the snobbishness implied, but she was more voluble—way more voluble.

Her education had consisted of years at a genteel boarding school, followed by several obligatory, desultory semesters at a college where she majored in social connections.

“She hasn’t called yet, has she? Or dropped by?” Niki asked. Stephanie had taken to using the catering firm as a kind of club, running in whenever she was in the neighborhood, snatching food from carefully counted items on trays and platters, literally sticking her fingers in the pies. “Put it on the bill—Daddy’s paying,” she’d airily instruct them.

“No, I haven’t had the pleasure, but if it isn’t today, you can be sure it will be tomorrow. We’re getting down to the wire, as she constantly says, and that no doubt means at least one complete menu change.”

“Wires can be used for all sorts of things,” Niki mused, “like garrotting.” She tied her apron and went to wash her hands. “I’m going to make the caponata for the Lexington job. It’s so much better a day ahead. Okay?”

“Good idea. I did the phyllo cups for the wild mushroom filling. Besides the caponata, we can make the other toppings for the crostini today, too. The dessert is set, so we’re in good shape.

The gallery has plenty of room, so we’ll be able to have two tables. The only drinks they want are a May-wine bowl and bottled water. I can cover the front desk and use that. The owner says she only needs the one in back. She’s hoping to sell a lot of the artist’s work during the opening, but she wants it all to be unobtrusive. ‘A party should be a party,’ she told me, which is good to hear for a change.”

The two women got to work, Faith blessing the day she hired Niki and cursing the day, which would inevitably come, when the talented young woman with a highly irreverent sense of humor would leave to start a business of her own. The good ones always did. But so far, Faith’s tentative probings about Niki’s future plans had been met with firm denials. Faith had an alarming thought.

Up to this point, Niki had dealt with Stephanie by exploding in either laughter or rage, but what if the prima donna was really getting to Niki? It was time to make another foray.

“Have you been to that new Italian restaurant in Woburn? It got written up in the Globe’s

“Cheap Eats” column, and I hear there’s a mini-mum of an hour’s wait, even on a weeknight. It’s just a storefront with only a few tables. They started it with very little capital.”

“ ‘And have you ever thought of doing something like that yourself, Niki?’ ” She stopped peeling eggplant and looked at Faith. Her short, dark curls—wiry like one of the pot scrubbers they used—quivered as she mimicked her employer’s studiously nonchalant tone. She added,

“Jeez, Faith, you’re getting as bad as my mother.” Niki had grown up in Watertown, closer into Boston, the oldest girl in a large Greek family.

Niki continued: “The only difference between you two is what you see in my future. She pictures me floating down the aisle of St. Irene’s dressed in white—not because it’s traditional, but because she believes my virginity is still intact.

And by the way, did I ever mention she also believes if you rub a cut potato on a wart and bury it during the full moon, the wart will disappear and end up on the spud? That’s why there are all those things on potatoes we mistakenly call ‘eyes.’ They’re really warts, but people wouldn’t eat them—the potatoes, I mean—if this incontro-vertible fact was widely known. But I digress.

Mom has this effect on me and a whole bunch of other people. So in her best-case scenario, I’m coming down the aisle toward some Prince Charming with letters after his name, as in M.D., LLD, MBA. In yours, I’m over at the reception hall baking the cake.”

“Okay, okay, smart-ass. I won’t ask you again.

But you know you’re the best assistant I’ve ever had, and yes, I can admit it, you even outshine your master at times.”

“I’m having too much fun to think about being ambitious—and that goes for both your and Mom’s visions, although catch me telling her. If she ever found out I ditched someone like Tommy, she’d cross my name off the list in the family Bible.”

Tommy was every mother’s dream. Faith had met him when Niki had brought him to the parsonage Christmas party. Harvard grad, handsome, fun, and up to his ears in profits from a software company he’d started. Plus, he was Greek. Faith had watched the relationship get more and more serious. Tommy was crazy about Niki, and her apartment was beginning to look like a branch of Winston’s florists, she’d quipped.

But Niki never took him home. She’d walked in one blustery March day and announced it was over. Tommy was too right and she’d gotten nervous. “I’m going to stick to bikers for a while, or maybe lawyers. Very similar. I was beginning to lose my edge with Tommy. We had even started staying in and renting videos!” Faith had expressed appropriate horror.

Hearing once more that Niki wasn’t planning on leaving, Faith felt relieved. She’d miss Niki’s expertise as a chef, but she knew she’d miss the daily installment of Niki’s life even more.

The morning passed quickly and it was over a lunch break of some leftover vegetable risotto that the Winslow burglary came up.

“I still don’t understand why they would have bothered breaking into Sarah’s house,” Faith said.

“It’s a tiny Cape. There’s even mold on the gray shingles.”

“You lived such a sheltered life in New York.

Anybody who does this for a living—and you do understand that this is what it is to these guys, right?—assumes there’s going to be something valuable in any house in a place like Aleford. The same for all of the western suburbs. It may not be a PC or whatever, but at the very least, they’ll get some jewelry.”

Niki was right. The Fairchilds had learned from Charley MacIsaac that the Winslow break-in was merely one in a string of recent burglaries.

None of them had had the same tragic results, nor were all the houses so thoroughly searched. In one case, the only thing taken was a silver tea set, and the owner was not even aware it was missing for some days. It had been so much a part of her dining room that it wasn’t until a friend commented on its absence that the owner realized her loss.

“The police won’t tell me anything,” Faith complained. “I don’t know if they even turned up any prints. It makes me furious to think that maybe nobody is doing anything about Sarah’s death—or the break-in.”

Niki nodded and polished off the last grains of rice—just the right amount of garlic and the spiced sun-dried tomatoes had given the risotto an additional zing. “I just had my bike stolen once and I know how pissed off I was. I reported it, and I’m sure the only reason the cop filled out the form was because he was hitting on me at the same time.”

“Well, we’d better get back to work.” Faith stood up, but she couldn’t leave the subject.

“Charley says property crime is the biggest problem he has to deal with, but I wouldn’t say they’re too successful if thieves can enter a home in broad daylight and scare a woman to death.” She picked up their bowls and started toward the sink, then stopped and looked back at Niki. “You know I’m not going to let this go,” Faith said.

“I never thought you would, boss.”

Three

Quite apart from not letting go of the matter, it soon reached out and grabbed Faith, as well.

Tuesday morning after spouse and progeny had departed, Faith left the house herself for a whirlwind round of errands, the repetitive kind, which don’t bring the satisfaction of a job well done, because in the near future, you’ll have to do them again—the dry cleaners, gas station, post office, market. It had gotten to the point where she could almost negotiate the aisles of the Shop ’n Save blindfolded. Familiarity bred speed, though, and before too long, she was back home, pulling into the driveway to put the food away before going to work.

As she got out of the car, Faith congratulated herself on the skill with which she had once again managed to avoid the Canadian hemlock hedge while leaving the parsonage shingles intact. The drive combined the challenge of a ninety-degree turn from the street with the width of a footpath.

Struggling up the back stoop, keys out, she was puzzled to notice that the door was wide open, the storm door, too. She let the grocery bags slide to the ground and stared straight ahead. She’d locked the door only an hour ago. Maybe Tom had come home for something he’d forgotten—

not an unusual occurrence. The Reverend Thomas Fairchild was quite absentminded.

“Honey?” she called. Her voice sounded very loud in the still morning. Mounting anxiety was making her stomach queasy, her skin damp.

“Honey, are you home?”

One of the brown paper bags toppled over, and as she bent to straighten it, further queries died in her throat. There were shards of wood on the mat.

She jerked her head up and saw the marks on the door, the frame. Forced entry. The house had been burglarized. Like Sarah’s.

Apprehension instantly became fury. She kicked the top step over and over, swearing out loud, “Damn! Damn! Damn!” Then she turned and raced next door to the Millers’ to call the police.

Only a few seconds had passed since she’d seen the splintered wood; a minute or two since noting the open doors. It seemed longer. The bright sun, blue sky, and Pix’s front garden full of blooms mocked her as she pounded furiously on her neighbor’s door. “Pix,” she cried, “where are you? Don’t be out, please!” She was starting to run to the next house when Pix Miller came to the door.

“Faith, what on earth is the matter?” “My house has been robbed! I have to call the police!” She pushed past her friend, grabbed the phone, and punched in the numbers.

“Yes, yes, I’m sure. Hurry up! . . . No, I don’t think anyone is still there. There was no car outside and the garage was empty.”

She hung up and stamped her foot on the floor.

She wanted to punch the wall, punch someone.

Pix was staring at her friend open-mouthed.

Faith’s face was red, her eyes glazed. Her arms were folded tightly across her chest, her hands balled into tight fists.

“The garage was empty! I didn’t close the doors!” she cried. “I could see right in. Anyone could see right in!” She was hardly aware of Pix.

Her thoughts careened wildly. Had she locked the back door? Her mind went blank. She was almost positive she had, but maybe she hadn’t. She simply couldn’t remember. Suddenly, the Millers’ hall looked strange, as if she was seeing it for the first time, as if she was watching a movie. She flashed back to her kitchen door, the deep gouges on the frame.

She felt Pix’s arm around her shoulder and the touch brought her back. “Faith, are you sure about this?” Pix steered her in the direction of the kitchen. “You need to sit down. I’ve got coffee on.” The suburbanite’s panacea.

Faith twisted out from under her friend’s well-meant gesture, not bothering to respond to the question. She was sure, and Pix would see soon enough. Faith didn’t need to sit down. She needed to do things. One thing especially. “I have to call Tom!” she said, picking up the receiver.

One corner of her mind was entering the familiar number; another was still berating herself mentally for not closing the garage doors. “I have to tell him what’s happened.” Once she reached him, she wouldn’t mind a cup of coffee. Her throat was so dry, she could scarcely swallow. She hoped Pix wasn’t experimenting with “European” flavors again. The hazelnut ginger had been truly loathsome.

There was no answer at the church office.

“Where is he? Oh, merde, I forgot. This is his day at the VA hospital; he’ll be on his way out there, but his secretary should be picking up.” Faith had taken to swearing in French since Benjamin, at the age of twenty months, had displayed a preco-cious ability to recite his parents’ every word.

She drummed her fingers on Pix’s hall table, leaving little smudges in the Old English shine as she listened. Tom had hired a new parish secretary two weeks ago. Her name was Rhoda Dawson, and Faith had been subjected to nightly reports about how lucky he was, what a treasure Ms. Dawson was, and the like. She let the phone ring a few more times. Still no answer. So, where was this treasure now?

She hung up, coffee forgotten. “Come on. The police should be there by now.”

“Do you want me to stay and keep trying?” Pix asked.

It was the logical thing to do, but Faith didn’t want to go back to the house by herself. She grabbed Pix’s hand and pulled her toward the front door. “We can try again later. I want you with me.”

They walked rapidly into the next yard. The police had not arrived yet. The house seemed un-naturally quiet. For a moment, the two women stood silently, looking at the gaping doors.

“Maybe you frightened them off. Maybe they didn’t get much,” Pix offered in a hopeful tone of voice. Faith looked at her dismally. It was an A. A.

Milne kind of thing to say. An “It’s all right, Pooh” from Piglet. Except it wasn’t.

“They must have seen me leave, or noticed that the garage was empty! Oh, why did I choose today of all days to do my shopping! And why didn’t I close the garage door?” The thought had continued to nag at her since she first realized her lapse. She was sure now that she’d locked up good and tight, as the entire town had been doing since Sarah’s death, but then she hadn’t closed the garage.

“I might just as well have left a sign on the front lawn—house empty, come and get it!” she said bitterly. She dug the toe of her shoe into the soft ground, disturbing the turf her husband was doggedly trying to nurture into something resembling a lawn.

“Don’t be silly, you couldn’t have known you’d be robbed, and those doors weigh a ton,” Pix said briskly in the no-nonsense tone she’d picked up from her headmistress at Windsor. It had worked with adolescent girls and sometimes worked with Pix’s own three children. It wasn’t working with Faith.

“Where are the police? It’s not as if they have far to come!” The parsonage was one of the houses bordering Aleford’s historic green. The police station was a few blocks farther down Main Street. What was taking them so long? She began to walk rapidly up and down the driveway. Little details were obsessing her. She’d found a brand-new book of stamps on the sidewalk in front of the library and had happily said to herself, This must be my lucky day. Luck. It all came down to that. Good luck. Bad luck.

Her overriding emotion was anger, and it was mounting as she waited. Faith was angry. Angry at the intruders, angry at the police, angry at her best friend and neighbor, whose house was intact, angry at the world. She turned to Pix. “Maybe you’d better go try to call again.”

Now Pix seemed unwilling to leave Faith alone. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, tell Ms. Dawson to get ahold of Tom—he should be at the hospital by now—and have him come home as fast as he can. I’ll be fine.” Faith spat out the word fine.

A police car pulled into the Fairchilds’ driveway as Pix was starting to leave. Patrolman Dale Warren got out. He was carrying a clipboard.

“The chief will be along in a minute. He had to get some stuff together. Now, what do we have here?”

“That!” Faith led him to the door.

Dale was a tall young man. One of his uncles and his grandfather had been cops, too. Law enforcement was his life. He solemnly inspected the damage.

“Was it like this when you left?”

Faith looked around wildly for some sort of blunt instrument, seized by an impulse to blud-geon Patrolman Warren to death. It was all she could do to stop herself from breaking out in hysterical laughter. As she walked toward her house, Pix caught Faith’s eye. This time, the headmistress trick worked and Faith took a deep breath.

“Noooo,” she said in an overly patient tone. “It was not like this when I left.”

Dale nodded and made a note of the reply.

Next question. “What time did you leave the house?”

This, at least, made sense—more sense than the notion that she might have picked up a crowbar or an ax and whacked away at her own door.

“Shortly after Tom and Ben. Tom was dropping Ben off at nursery school and I was taking Amy to play group. It must have been around eight-forty-five.”

“Did you go back to the house during the morning?”

“No, I did my marketing, returned some books to the library, other errands.”

Faith felt the first tears of the day prick her eyes. They did not fall so much as sting. If she hadn’t gone to the library, if, if, if . . .

She’d wanted to go into the house since she’d first seen the broken door frame, and now, standing at the threshold, the urge was almost irre-sistible. Dale seemed to read her thoughts.

“Why don’t you come in and see what might be missing?”

He stood aside to let her step over the slivers of wood. His optimistic tone suggested, as had Pix’s earlier, that perhaps the Fairchilds’ door had been destroyed by someone desperate to grab a quick cup of coffee or just for the hell of it. Faith, of course, knew better. People only broke doors down when they wanted to get in and take something out. Something valuable. She started to step into the kitchen, then stopped.

“Shouldn’t we wait for Charley? Aren’t you going to want to dust for prints?”

“Oh yeah, sure. We’ll wait.” While steeped in the traditions of the force, Dale still got a little confused sometimes about procedure.

So they waited, an unlikely twosome standing in the Fairchilds’ backyard. Dale gazed up at the sky intently. Faith followed his glance. He seemed about to speak. She prepared herself for something meteorological, something cumulonimbus.

“These were not nice people,” Dale commented instead.

Was the whole day going to be like this? Faith wondered bleakly, her anger ebbing. Improbables, idiocies, platitudes? “Was it like this when you left? . . . These were not nice people.” No, not nice at all. Dale didn’t seem to expect a response.

She didn’t offer one. He was looking to the heavens again, an anxious expression on his young face. He seemed to be searching for an answer—or maybe he was planning to go fishing when his shift was over.

A few minutes later, Charley arrived with two plainclothes cops, both carrying bulky cases.

MacIsaac took Faith’s hand.

“I’m very sorry this had to happen to you.” It was the right thing to say. And the right things started happening. Suddenly, the yard was filled with activity. They shot rolls and rolls of film—photographs of the doors, the steps, the un-sightly yews to either side, which the Fairchilds had been vowing to replace since they moved in.

They dusted the stoop, the frame, the doors for prints.

“Two good ones here!” the fingerprint man called over his shoulder, peering at the molding around the outside door. “Must have grabbed it when they were finished, after he took his gloves off. Maybe carrying something and missed his footing.”

“We’ll get them, Faith. We’ll get them.” Charley stood grimly watching. He had a patrolwoman checking the area surrounding the green and questioning the neighbors. All it ever took was one break. Someone glancing out the window.

Someone strolling on Main Street, noting a car.

At last, one of the men motioned to the chief from inside the house. “We’ve taken all the pictures. Mrs. Fairchild can come in and tell us what’s missing. Just don’t touch anything. Ray hasn’t finished checking for prints.” Faith had wanted to know the worst since she’d arrived at the back door, but now she was loath to find out. She wanted to turn time back.

She wanted it to be yesterday. Please let it not be today; then this wouldn’t be happening. It was the way she had felt last fall when they’d lost a dear friend to breast cancer, the way it had been when Sarah Winslow died. If it’s never tomorrow, you’ll always be safe.

“Faith?” Charley put his hand on her arm.

He’d been through this countless times. “Come on. Maybe they didn’t get much.”

But they had.

The kitchen was filled with false hopes. It looked exactly the way it had when the Fairchilds had left—chairs slightly askew around the big round table set in front of the bow window facing the backyard and, beyond, the church. The dishes were in the sink, and Faith valiantly made a joke.

“You’d think they could have at least cleaned up the breakfast things.” She was valiant. She was plucky. She opened the door to the dining room.

She was devastated.

“Oh my God.” She clutched at Charley. “Everything’s gone! They even took the drawer.” The mahogany sideboard looked like a seven-year-old missing his two front teeth, only there was nothing to grin about and the tooth fairy was far away.

“Must have used it to carry the stuff. Pretty common,” the man with the camera said. He was watching his sidekick brush white powder all over the gleaming dark wood surfaces in the room. “Do you remember if the chair was pulled out like this?” He turned to Faith, who was still transfixed by the hole in her furniture.

“What? Oh, no.” She looked at the dining room chair turned away from the table, completely sideways. “They must have taken out the drawer and set it on the chair.” All the better to fill it up.

Patrolman Dale Warren was at her side with his clipboard. “Can you give us some idea of what’s missing? The quicker we do this, the quicker an APB can go out. You never know . . .” Faith wished he would shut up. The car, van, truck—whatever they’d used—was long gone and all her precious things were probably out of state by now. But, she reflected, one speeding ticket and a glance to the rear . . . Suddenly, she was all business. She’d think about how she felt later.

It was a long list. Their wedding sterling, things that had come down in both their families.

Sibleys and Fairchilds alike never seemed to have let a possession slip out of their thrifty hands, unless it was going to another family member. Family things. She’d lost all their family things. No, they’d been stolen. It wasn’t her fault. Her mind was muddled. Don’t think about it yet. The words were becoming a mantra. Keep talking, she told herself.

“A sterling silver sugar and creamer, a carving set with the initials tFp—Tom’s great-grandfather. He was named for him.” She was wander-ing. They had eaten in this room the day before yesterday. Sunday dinner. Their napkins were still on the table. Their napkins, but not their napkin rings. She swallowed hard. A thought seized her and she ran toward the china cabinet at the end of the room. She kept some silver there. The children’s christening mugs, a tray her parents had given them as an engagement gift. The tray was gone. The mugs were there. She felt a rush of happiness. They hadn’t gotten it all.

Charley was moving her toward the living room. Again there was the strange feeling that nothing had happened, that it was all a big mistake. Not a pillow was out of place, not a drawer even ajar.

“Pros,” one of the men commented.

“What do you mean?” Faith asked.

“They knew where to look. These weren’t kids.

They didn’t trash the place. I’ll bet your liquor hasn’t been touched and that they took only the good stuff—and stuff not too identifiable. Left those mugs with the names.”

He was right. One of the drawers in the sideboard held a full service of silver plate that one of Tom’s aunts hadn’t wanted anymore. Faith used it for large parties. It was all there.

They moved on to Tom’s study.

“They really made a mess in here,” the photographer warned Faith.

The room was a shambles. Books covered the floor and papers were everywhere. It was a mess, yet Faith’s practiced eye immediately detected that it was Tom’s normal mess. Saturday’s fren-zied finishing touches on a difficult sermon, the room not yet put back into the semblance that passed for order before he began the next. A bit bewildered, the police noted her assured response that nothing had been touched, and then they all left the room.

“We need to go upstairs now,” Charley said to Faith. He wished Tom were here. Where was he, anyway? Pros or no pros, MacIsaac was sure what Faith was about to see would not be a pretty sight.

“Who are these guys, Charley? State police?” Faith asked as they went upstairs. The icicle that had entered her heart was beginning to melt slightly and with it came the return of her very strong native curiosity.

“Auxiliary cops. Come when we need them for this kind of thing. Too damn often, lately.” They passed Amy’s room. Nothing. Faith breathed a sigh of relief. Ben’s room, the same.

Then she went into the master bedroom and crumbled against the wall. Her legs felt all wob-bly, as if she’d run a marathon, and she slid onto the floor, her hand grasping the woodwork. She forgot she wasn’t supposed to touch anything.

Every drawer had been pulled out and emptied, every surface swept clean. The bedspread was on the floor. Both closet doors were open.

Shoes were flung about. Clothes were pulled from the rods. Her garment bag lay open and empty. Slowly, she stood up, looking about as if she’d never seen it before, a somnambulist who’d wandered into someone else’s bedroom.

It was a large room, stretching across the front of the house. A prior occupant had papered the walls with a hand-print of poppies in rust on a warm cream-colored background. There was a roll of it left. Faith had draped yards of sheer fabric around the windows to hide the shades. The furniture was a hodgepodge of offerings from both families, plus a Judith McKie chest from Faith’s old apartment and Tom’s queen-size pencil-post cherry bed—a bed Faith had enjoyed teasing him about during their courtship, challenging his explanation that he liked having a lot of room to stretch out. Now when Ben and Amy piled in, the bed was almost too small.

It was a beautiful room, especially on days like this, when the sun streamed through the windows. A rainbow danced across the hardwood floor. Faith looked for the source. It wasn’t a diamond. A picture frame lay shattered, the sun sparkling through the broken glass, turning it into tiny prisms. Her parents’ smiling faces, torn in the wreckage, stared up at her. A leather jewelry box Tom and Faith had bought on their honeymoon in Florence had been kicked against the wall. It was empty. Empty. The room was full, but empty.

Instinctively, she reached up to her earlobes and touched the pearl stud earrings she had hastily put in that morning. She fingered the watch she was wearing. From France, a gift from Tom, it had the cartoon character Tintin and his dog, Snowy, on the face. They were in a plane and it was going down. “Help! We’re going to crash . . .” was what it said in the book. Crash.

The earrings, the watch, her wedding and engagement rings—the sum total of all the jewelry she now possessed.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” Dale Warren asked.

“No,” Faith said. “I want my stuff back.”

“Why don’t you come over to my house?” Faith turned at the words, walked to the door, and saw Pix coming down the hall. She had completely forgotten about her, but now the sight of her friend triggered the question that had been passing through her mind with greater and more urgent frequency since she’d entered the house.

“When is Tom coming?”

Pix was almost at the room. “I’m sure he’ll be here soon. Ms. Dawson left a message for him at the hospital. Holy shit, Faith!”

This was not the message. Pix stood in the doorway, wordless, immobile.

Faith seldom heard her friend swear. Things were as bad as she thought they were. She put an arm around Pix’s shoulder in a sudden reversal of roles.

Pix regained her voice. “Everything? Everything’s gone? All your jewelry?”

Faith nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak.

Dale, after recovering from the slight shock of hearing his sister’s former Girl Scout leader use foul language, resumed his list making.

“Can you describe some of the more valuable pieces for me, Mrs. Fairchild? The sooner—”

“I know, I know,” Faith said impatiently. She’d already run through them in her mind once she saw her garment bag on the floor. The garment bag—her safe hiding place. A pretty velvet jewel roll tucked in the bottom, its compartments filled with the gifts Tom had given her for anniversaries, birthdays, when the children were born.

Some family pieces. She started describing the items, the words tumbling out. She was still talking and grasping Pix’s shoulder when Tom arrived, taking the stairs two at a time.

“Faith! Faith! Are you all right?” he called. She heard him and ran down the hall into his arms.

“Oh, Tom, we’ve been robbed!” She burst into tears and cried as if her heart would break.

It lasted only a few minutes, although to the police, particularly Charley and Dale, it seemed much longer. This was not the Faith they knew.

Dale Warren looked down at his notes. Next to

“Victim,” he’d written her name. He added Tom’s. The Fairchilds, victims? He wished she’d let him get her a cup of tea or coffee.

When Tom entered their room, his face lost all its color and he sat down heavily on the bed.

“Don’t!” Faith cried. Tom jumped to his feet, puzzled. Surely, Faith didn’t expect the police to get prints from the rumpled linens.

“I have to wash everything. Everything they touched.”

Tom held his wife close. People he’d known in these circumstances talked of feeling violated.

Raped. He looked at their pillows. One of the cases was missing.

“Damn it, Charley, what kind of a world are we living in?” He gestured around the room, finishing with his arm flung imploringly toward the police chief. Tom felt completely and utterly helpless.

Charley knew Tom didn’t want an answer. At least not now. What he wanted was action. So did Charley.

“You’ll have to go down to the station with me and let us take your prints, so we can eliminate them. The kids’ are so small, we won’t have any trouble recognizing those.”

The kids! It was almost time to pick them up.

Where did the morning go? Faith said to herself in conscious irony. And the Lexington gallery reception. She had completely forgotten about work.

Niki must be wondering where she was.

“I don’t want Ben and Amy to see this mess. We have to . . .” she started to say.

“Don’t worry, I’ll get them and take them to my house,” Pix offered. “After Amy’s nap, they can come watch Samantha’s softball game with me.” Pix Miller took motherhood seriously—and joyfully. She’d been the room mother for all of her children’s years in elementary school, the aforementioned Scout leader long after her own left the ranks, chaperone for innumerable trips to the Science Museum, the Aquarium, and virtually every other educational Boston landmark. She was the one who drove, who collected, who called. Watching the two Fairchild children for the afternoon was a mere blip on the radar screen of Pix’s far-flung activities. Her husband, Sam, had tried in vain to teach her the magic words Sorry, I can’t. Maybe he hadn’t tried all that hard.

He was pretty dependent on her himself.

“And I called Niki. She said she can handle everything with Scott and Tricia.” These were a young couple Faith employed part-time. “Don’t worry about a thing,” Pix again reassured the Fairchilds, realizing how totally stupid it sounded. She blushed, then headed for home.

The police left the room, too. Tom and Faith were alone.

“I don’t know what to do, where to start,” Faith said. She could hardly bear the thought of touching her things. Lingerie and other clothing had been tossed all over the floor. It looked like Fi-lene’s Basement ten minutes after the doors opened for the Neiman Marcus sale.

“I do,” Tom said firmly. He kissed her—hard—and went to the phone. The light-colored handle was covered with black powder. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped it off.

In rapid order, he called the couple who came to help clean the house, the handyman to repair the back door, or at least secure it, and Rhoda Dawson. At the close of their conversation, he felt obscurely obliged to assure her, a newcomer, that this type of thing was not the norm in Aleford.

Or was it? Besides Sarah Winslow’s, the local paper had reported five break-ins in the last few weeks, two of them at night. He sighed. Why hadn’t he worked at home today? But then he’d had to go out to the VA. It would have happened anyway. He sat down on the bed again. He was exhausted. Happened. Anyway.

Faith listened to her husband make the calls, grateful for his assumption of responsibility.

She’d be okay once the house was cleaned up. It was all this mess. Out of control. Once everything was under control . . . This was what was getting to her. She’d be okay. She shivered, but she did not reach for one of her sweaters lying so conveniently at her feet. Instead, she wandered downstairs. The police were packing up and getting ready to leave.

“You’re going to need a new door,” Ray, the fingerprint specialist, observed. “Looks like they used a crowbar. Would’ve popped your dead bolt, if you’d had one.”

The Fairchilds hadn’t gotten around to installing a dead bolt. Before last week, Faith often didn’t even bother to lock the door at all. Not now, though. Not ever again. She’d been bemoan-ing the lack of a dead bolt—and the open garage door. It made her feel better to hear that one omis-sion wouldn’t have mattered.

“Place like this should have an alarm system.” Ray was chatty now that the job was done.

“You’re in full view of everyone and his uncle out front, but once you’re back here, no one would be likely to see you on a weekday, except from the cemetery.”

It was true. The parsonage was separated from the church by the backyard, the ancient burial ground, and the church driveway. The long sanctuary windows looked toward the parsonage, but the church offices were at the rear of the church.

Ben’s nursery school was in the basement. In any case, at this time of year the thick hedge and other shrubbery formed a substantial barrier. It had been installed at various times in the house’s history—perhaps by ministers’ wives, seeking, like Faith, the illusion of private life.

But an alarm system? In Aleford? In the parsonage! The enormity of the crime became defined by Ray’s well-meant suggestion. The silver was gone. The jewelry. The drawer. But most precious of all, the intruders had stolen the Fairchilds’ peace of mind—the security and calm they’d taken for granted all these years. Charley was looking at Faith, but before he could say anything, she spoke.

“I should have stayed in New York!”

* * *

“But why is our door all broken? Why is Mr.

Kelly nailing it shut? How will I get out to play?

Why did someone break it, Mom? Why?” Ben Fairchild was firing questions at his mother even as he stood captivated by the handyman, who was indeed systematically nailing the door shut.

Mr. Kelly was Ben’s hero and he wanted to be exactly like him when he grew up—with all those neat tools, a truck, and a dog named Shamrock.

Shamrock had been Ben’s suggestion almost two years ago for what to name his new sister. He thought it was some kind of jewel and argued that people named girls Ruby and Pearl, prompt-ing Faith to ask Miss Lora, his nursery school teacher, what she was reading to them lately.

Even the discovery that the word shamrock referred to vegetation, albeit lucky, did not dampen Ben’s ardor and he thought Amy a poor and distant second choice.

“The thieves who came into our house when Mommy was out and took some of our things broke it. Remember what Pix told you?” The two women had worked out ahead of time what to say to this little inquiring mind.

“Yes,” Ben replied, “but why didn’t you leave the door open and then they wouldn’t have wrecked it.”

It made a certain kind of sense.

“Well . . .” Faith was losing steam. They’d been going over this terrain for a while now and would be for the foreseeable future. “I didn’t.” Tom’s head appeared at the window of the back door, then disappeared abruptly. Bewildered, Amy’s smile of welcome vanished and she twisted around in Faith’s lap to look at her mother’s face. It was still there. “Daddy?” Daddy walked into the kitchen. “Forgot I couldn’t get in that way,” he said ruefully. “I’ll go out to Concord Lumber tomorrow and order a new door. The sooner the better.”

Faith agreed. She was consumed by a desire for action—and a return to normalcy. The sound of the washer and dryer was calming. She’d already done several loads and there was a mountainous pile still left on the laundry room floor. She could also hear the vacuum as the cleaners worked to erase all signs of intrusion and investigation. The fingerprint powder was proving difficult to remove—and it was everywhere. Black on light surfaces, white and rust on dark.

When the children had come home, Ben, although reassured by Pix that nothing of his was missing, raced to his room. Faith followed him, carrying Amy. He was burrowing in his Lego bag and triumphantly held a small chamois pouch aloft.

“It’s still here! The robbers didn’t find my coin collection. Boy, would they be sorry if they knew.” Ben’s coin collection—a few francs, Canadian money, and the prize, a 1950 silver dollar. Intact. Lesson number one, Faith said to herself: Hide your best jewelry in the Legos or Lincoln Logs. Forget adult hiding places. Better still, place in Baggies and have your child create Play-Doh sculptures around them.

“The prints will be ready tomorrow. They put a rush on them.” Faith blinked and tuned in to what Tom was saying. Prints? Fingerprints? No, the photographs of their silver and jewelry that Tom’s Dad had been insistent they take a couple of years ago when he did his own. “Believe me,” he’d said, “I know insurance companies, and God forbid you should ever need these, but if you do, it will save a lot of aggravation.” Well, they needed them now. Tom had taken the negatives down to Aleford Photo to have enlargements and multiple copies made.

“They’re selling bowling balls.”

Faith put her finger to her lips. She’d told Ben the one with the blue sparkles was long gone.

“Yes, dear. We can talk about it later,” she told Tom.

Tom didn’t get the hint. This happened a lot in child rearing. “The guys at Aleford Photo—

they’ve got a table with all sorts of stuff on it, ancient Polaroid cameras, light meters, a pair of snowshoes, a paint sprayer, a kerosene heater, and a bowling ball.”

Faith gave up and laughed. Maybe what they needed right now was a sparkly bowling ball.

“I know. I’ve seen it. Recently, they’ve added arts and crafts—macramé and beadwork. They knew all about the break-in, right?” “Of course.” Either Bert or Richard—Faith could never remember which—was an auxiliary cop—crowd control on Patriot’s Day and traffic duty during holiday seasons for greater Boston’s pilgrimage to Aleford’s popular farm stand for a fresh turkey, tree, or first corn. The police scanner, which was on all the time, substituted for eleva-tor music at the camera shop. People had long ago formed the habit of dropping in to catch up on the news. And now, Faith thought, they can satisfy a host of passing whims, as well—like a sudden urge to bowl a few frames.

“Can we get it, Dad?”

“Get what, sweetheart?” Tom picked Ben up and sat him on the counter, eye-to-eye.

“The bowling ball.” He leaned around his father and said sternly to his mother, “You said it was gone.”

“It must be another one,” Faith said, matching his expression. She had no intention of letting her five-year-old get the upper hand.

“It is a nice one.” Tom caught Faith’s eye. “No nicks. Looks brand-new. A steal at five bucks.”

“We don’t need a bowling ball.” The moment had passed and Faith’s common sense had returned. She was forced to maintain a constant de-fense against Tom’s Yankee acquisitiveness, the kind defined by the words “Doesn’t cost much and could be useful,” as opposed to other forms of attainment, as in “Let’s browse at Blooming-dale’s.” She knew what Tom’s parents’ house was like, or, more specifically, their attic and garage.

The garage had been too full to park in since 1962 and Fairchild cars had to suffer the vicissitudes of New England winters. No one seemed to care.

The story of the Aleford Photo indoor yard sale—true, though hard to believe even of them—was Tom’s first attempt to get back to the way their life had been that morning, before the breakin. And it felt like swimming in Jell-O. From the moment he’d seen Faith in the upstairs hall, he had begun to pray. Help me find the way back.

And he had been repeating this and various other prayers ever since. Irrationally, he felt deeply upset that he hadn’t been able to protect his family from this crime. Closer to the surface, he was equally upset that Faith had discovered the burglary alone and had continued to be alone for much of the police investigation. Yet, he was also thankful—thankful she had not walked in on the robbery in progress. Unlike poor Sarah Winslow, Faith hadn’t been home. It was the first thing he’d thought of when he got the message. The relief he’d felt far overshadowed any feelings of loss.

He walked over to his wife and put his arms around her. Faith still looked stricken and she was holding Amy as if the baby were some kind of life buoy. We can’t let this get to us. Help me find the way back. He repeated it again.

But it was going to be hard. It was hard now.

There was a knock on the front door. Both adults jumped. Tom went to answer it, returning with a large shopping bag, held flat across his two hands.

“Another one?” Faith asked incredulously.

“Another one,” he answered, a warm smile crossing his face. He placed the parcel on the counter in front of him like an offering.

As soon as word got out that the Fairchilds had been robbed, phones started ringing and the casserole brigade sprang into action. Blissfully unaware that tuna noodle, even with crumbled potato chips on top, would be greeted by Faith as culinary crime, the housewives of Aleford reached for their Pyrex and got to work, offering solace the only way they could.

Earlier, Tom and Faith had followed Chief MacIsaac to the police station, where they waited on the uncomfortable vinyl-covered chairs while Charley got the fingerprint machinery ready.

“Just let your hand relax,” he’d told them, then held their wrists and swiftly pressed their fingers first over a roller of sticky black ink, then onto the paper. “Saw one of those new inkless machines the other day over in Lexington. Pretty nifty, but,” he’d added forlornly, “wouldn’t be worth the ink even to list it in my budget.”

After the ordeal that left Faith oddly feeling somewhat like a felon, she was all for Tom, a Town Meeting member, to demand the town vote in an inkless machine. The ink was impossible to get off, especially with the brand X liquid soap in the station’s tiny bathroom. “Out damned spot,” Faith had said as they washed up. She wasn’t joking. Her hands were red and raw from scrubbing.

The soap in the dispenser smelled like Lysol. “Is this really happening?” she’d asked Tom.

“But I want a bowling ball. I never threw one. I want to do it!” Ben’s voice was tremulous. Faith stood up and sat Amy next to her brother. Amy, thank God, was young enough to be oblivious to the horrendous events of the day. As far as she was concerned, things had gone rather well.

She’d played with her special friend, Nicholas, had lunch with her beloved Pix, and watched Samantha the goddess run around catching a little ball a lot. Yet, although Amy might not be old enough to know what had happened, she was dangerously adept at reading her mother’s moods, translating them instantly into her own replicas. Tired of doing wash, trying to restore order where none would exist for a while, and, most immediately, tired of the bowling ball argument, pained by what it actually represented, Faith was having a hard time controlling her emotions. She mounted a herculean effort not to let the tears so near the surface spill from her eyes or the angry words so close to her lips spew forth.

She put her arms around both kids, kissing her frightened son. Ben would require a great deal of reassurance—and patience—but no bowling ball.

“Let’s go for a drive. I think this family needs to have some ice cream!”

“The farm?” Ben knew when to push his luck.

Great Brook Farm was in Carlisle, a bit of a drive, yet it happened to fall in with Faith’s other plans.

“The farm,” she said, and took Amy off to get her ready. “On the way, we can have a kind of treasure hunt. It will be fun, you’ll see.” Tom looked mystified. “Treasure hunt?” He followed his wife out of the room.

“I want to look in a couple of Dumpsters. It’s possible that they’ll get rid of the stuff they don’t want, like our drawer.” She had heard this was a common practice. Pull over, go through the things, and winnow out. She’d suggested to Charley that the police make a search and he’d said they would, but from his slightly skeptical tone of voice, she wasn’t sure he’d follow through with the kind of diligence the task required. He’d probably have Dale check the Dumpster behind the market and call it a day. She decided she’d better do it herself. She also wanted to check out a wooded area on the Aleford-Byford line where kids hung out. The police had said “pros,” but Faith didn’t intend to eliminate any possibilities at this point, when the trail was so fresh. Hey, let’s ditch school and hit a house or two. The woods were a favorite drinking spot, and if she wanted to get rid of a drawer and maybe a charm bracelet or other less valuable jewelry, the woods would be where she’d go. A nature walk, as far as the Fairchild children were concerned. The start of her own sleuthing for Faith.

Many Dumpsters later and after combing the woods for an hour, the Fairchilds pulled back into their own driveway. They’d gone straight to the farm for ice cream first, but it had disappeared quickly and the kids were tired and cranky. Tom had gently suggested to his wife that they give up, and she had been forced to agree. It had all seemed so simple, yet she’d come up with nothing.

When they got home, the light on the answering machine was blinking. Faith listened to several heartfelt messages of commiseration accompanied by promises of yet more food before Charley’s voice pumped fresh adrenaline into her weary system. “Call the station as soon as you come in.”

The chief answered the phone himself.

“Oh, good, you’re back. Now don’t go getting your hopes up, but we called around to some of the places in the area that buy gold and silver, and a coin shop in Arlington said someone had come in with a bunch of gold jewelry this afternoon.

They bought the lot. I can’t leave the station now, but when Dale gets back from supper, I’ll drive over so you can look at it.”

“I’ll be right there,” Faith said, and hung up.

Calling explanations and instructions to Tom, she grabbed her purse. By the time she reached the police station, she was testifying in court, identifying her property, Exhibit A, for the judge.

But it wasn’t her property. Not even close.

Charley spread out the contents of the Ziploc bag on top of his desk. Faith felt a dull, leaden sensation start in the pit of her stomach and in-vade the rest of her body. She pawed through the tangle of gold chains, dented hollow bracelets, and assorted charms for form’s sake. She was examining a large pendant with a diamond chip and the word Bitch ornately engraved on it when Charley asked in a hopeful tone of voice, “Any of it yours?” She tossed the pendant on top of the rest of the jewelry and said snappishly, “I don’t think so.”

Extremely disappointed didn’t even come close to describing how she felt. She supposed it would have all been too easy. But then, why not?

Dale came back, looked at Faith’s face, and knew enough to keep his mouth shut, nodding solemnly in her general direction. Charley walked her to her car. “Look, it may not be today, or tomorrow, but we’ll get them. I’m sorry, Faith. I wish these had been your things. We do find things sometimes, you know,” he added in what Faith later described to Tom as “a fart in a wind-storm kind of way.”

“Don’t tell me this. I have to think it’s all gone, get used to it. I know how rarely stolen goods are recovered.” She felt a sudden rush of contrition. If the pendant fit . . . Charley was doing everything he could. His big, square, kind face was crumbled in concern. “Thanks for calling us, and anytime you get anything for us to look at—I don’t care if it looks like a bag of lanyards somebody made at camp—let me know right away. You’ve been great, Charley.” She gave him a swift hug. He wasn’t the hugging type.

“I’m just glad you didn’t walk in on them, when I think about it. . . . Anyway, they’re only things. Take it from me—in the long run, things don’t matter at all.”

She nodded and got in her car, closed the door, and waved good-bye. It wasn’t until she was pulling into her drive once again that she softly whispered her reply, “But they do, Charley. Unfortunately, they do.”

By eight o’clock, all the Fairchilds were in bed.

One bed—Tom and Faith’s. The room had been cleaned and straightened. If it had not been for the fact that several of the surfaces had empty spots, no one would have suspected that anything untoward had happened. Faith tried very hard not to picture hands pulling drawers open, feet walking down the hall. Running down the hall. The police said they had probably been in the house for a very short time. Faith’s unimaginative hiding places and lack thereof—a silver chest out in the open, for example—had made their job simple and quick. Not like Sarah’s house, where objects obscurely hidden suggested more to find. Faith shuddered and pulled the blanket covering the four of them up over her shoulders. She was lying on her side, the two children nestled close. Tom was reading a book from Ben’s current favorite, the Boxcar Children series.

She could use those little Sherlocks now, Faith reflected, although they’d probably make her crazy.

They were so good, even the mischievous one, Benny, whatever his name was. Tom’s voice was soporific. Amy had been asleep for a while and Faith knew she should put her into her crib. It was late for Ben to be up, too, but it wasn’t inertia that kept her from moving.

She didn’t want to let them out of her sight.

Rational or irrational, one thought seeped its poison into every corner of her brain, driving all else away: Person or persons unknown had entered their house with intent to harm—and they could be back.

Four

“It’s the little things, things that weren’t valuable.

Not that we had diamonds and emeralds lying around—more’s the pity—but all the jewelry I’d saved from when I was a kid and planned to give to Amy when she was older, like a little coral-bead necklace that was my grandmother’s. She gave it to me because I was ‘the careful one.’ ” Faith’s tone was mournful and bitter.

Patsy Avery nodded and poured Faith some more wine. It was Wednesday and she’d stopped by on her way home from work, bearing char-donnay for what was quickly becoming a wake, as Faith bade final farewells to the coral necklace, her Cinderella watch, and other treasures. Tom wasn’t home yet and the two women had settled into the kitchen to talk while Amy sat in her high chair, content for the moment to pick up Cheerios one by one and, alternately, turn the pages of a new Beatrix Potter board book—also a gift from Patsy. Ben had raced off to his room with his present, yet another Lego. A shaft of late-afternoon sunlight crossed the table, sending reflections of their glasses glimmering against the wall. Faith noted the tiny dust motes lazily drifting in the light and felt she should be sitting with Patsy in two rockers on a front porch.

“Girl, I don’t know anybody with their original jewelry. I kissed all that stuff good-bye years ago when we were broken into, but I still look for a little fake pearl bracelet with a poo-dle charm my daddy gave me every time I’m in a flea market or at a yard sale.” Patsy didn’t mention the number of times she’d had to kiss subsequent stuff good-bye. When you are in the middle of a tragedy, you don’t want to hear how often somebody else has been through the same thing. You want to talk about your pain and you want to talk about it now.

“Aunt Chat, that’s my father’s sister, Charity . . .” Faith paused and added parenthetically, “They were either devoid of imagination or had too much. The Sibleys named the boys in each generation Lawrence or Theodore and the girls Faith, Hope, and Charity as they came along. I’ve always suspected my mother stopped with two rather than have to saddle a child with Charity.” Patsy gave an appreciative chuckle. She could never get enough of these WASP folktales, especially when the teller appreciated them, too. It was hard to keep a straight face when the speaker was a believer.

“Anyway, Aunt Chat used to bring my sister and me a charm from every place she went—all over the world. She had her own ad agency. We were on bracelets number three by the time she retired.” Faith sighed, knowing she’d never see them again—or any of her other treasures. She thought about the other things entrusted to her, especially by her maternal grandmother. It wasn’t that her sister, Hope, was reckless, strewing her possessions about, but rings had a way of slipping off her fingers when she skated and thin gold chains snapping when she climbed trees, lockets disappearing. So Faith had always been the recipient because, unfairly, she was older; and, fairly, she did take better care of them.