Body in the Bookcase

“I know it wasn’t my fault, but I can’t get over feeling guilty. I didn’t just lose a gold watch or drop a silver teaspoon down the garbage dis-posal. I lost everything, Patsy. It was horrible telling them all.” Faith had insisted that she be the one to break the news to both the elder Sibleys and Fairchilds. Her father had brushed aside her talk of possessions, open garage doors, and the like, caring only about how she was. Her mother, calling upon her return from work, had done much the same. Before hanging up, however, Jane Sibley had slipped in a query about what jewelry Faith had put on that morning.

“If I ever get any more good jewelry, I’m going to wear every bit of it all the time,” Faith intoned solemnly to Patsy. The wine was beginning to feel just fine.

“All dressed up like a Christmas tree? I’d like to see that in Aleford. That old biddy—what’s her name?—Ms. Revere something, she would be scandalized for sure.”

“Millicent Revere McKinley. You have gotten around,” Faith commented admiringly. Patsy had retained a touch of her Louisiana accent and it made whatever she was saying sound fascinating—the vocal equivalent of garlic.

“I get to eavesdrop a lot. Particularly at the bus stop in the morning. In the beginning, folks seemed surprised that I was going to town—getting on the bus, not getting off it to clean their toilets. Now I’ve made a couple of friends and I’m invisible to the others. You’d be amazed at what people will say if they don’t register that you’re there.”

Frowning, Faith poured Patsy some more wine and shoved the plate of crackers and chicken liver and mushroom pâté (see recipe on page 337) they’d been steadily nibbling at toward her.

“Are you sure you’re going to be happy here?” They’d talked about the way the Averys stood out in the community before. “It was bad enough for me at first, a New Yorker.” She didn’t need to add “But I was white.”

Patsy slathered one of the Carr’s water biscuits with a good-sized portion of pâté. “You have got to give me this recipe. Will is crazy for anything as artery-clogging as I suspect this is—

and I’m not changing the subject. Just don’t want the moment to pass. No, I’m not sure I’m going to be happy in Aleford, but it has nothing to do with race. Hell, I get more hostile looks in town any day. I don’t know where we could live and bring up kids where our color wouldn’t be a factor. I hear Cambridge, but you have to send them to private school. The South End was fun for grown-ups, but Will worried about my safety.

Roxbury feels the most like home to me, but both prob-lems exist—schools and well-being.

There’s no perfect place on earth, as you really found out yesterday.” Patsy patted Faith’s hand and took Amy, who was beginning to whine, on her ample lap.

Patsy Avery was a good-looking woman. Her skin was dark, smooth, and slightly shiny—like some of the round stones the tide has just uncovered on the beach in Maine. She wore her hair pulled straight back into a large chignon, often sticking an ornate tortoiseshell comb or pair of lacquered chopsticks into the thick, glossy mound.

She was tall and her large frame wasn’t squeezed into any size eights. She’d told Faith once that Will liked a little meat on his women: “He doesn’t want to see bone, honey.” Will, on the other hand, was all bones, tall and skinny; his skin was the color of Faith’s favorite bittersweet Côte d’Or chocolate. Patsy spoke slowly and deliberately; each word seemed especially chosen for the occasion. Will’s words flowed like a fountain, hands gesturing, punctuating his phrases emphatically in the whirlwind he created around him.

Faith returned to Patsy’s comment. “If it doesn’t have to do with race, then why don’t you think Aleford is the place for you?” “Too damn quiet. Too many trees. Too . . . too pretty.” She burst out laughing.

“I know what you mean,” Faith agreed. “Sometimes I feel as if I’m living in a Currier and Ives calendar. When it gets unbearable, I head for New York and walk a few hundred blocks!” Patsy stood up. “I’ve got to get home. I’m not going to need any supper after all this pâté, but I have a perpetually hungry man to fill up.” She knew she hadn’t answered Faith’s question about Aleford. The foreboding she had about the town sounded vague—and even superstitious—when put into words. Maybe it was race. Maybe it was the silence. Maybe it was a whole lot of things.

Faith was scooping the remaining pâté into a container over Patsy’s protests. It was a good recipe—chicken livers, onions, mushrooms, port, and, as Patsy detected, a great deal of butter. Faith had rediscovered it after Stephanie Bullock nixed the pâté de campagne, originally planned as one of the wedding hors d’oeuvres, in favor of this one. Pâté de foie de volaille apparently sounded more elegant than a pâté “of the country.” After Patsy left, Faith decided to feed the children early and heated one of the casseroles. Ben had been greeting the offerings as exotic, extremely haute cuisine, savoring green beans in mushroom soup with water chestnuts and Dur-kee canned fried onions with all the appearance of a connoisseur hailing Paul Bocuse’s soupe de truffes. While her offspring gleefully devoured what appeared to be ground beef, tomatoes, and corn, with mashed potatoes on top, Faith turned her attention to dinner for the grown-ups. Earlier in the day, she had decided they needed more than a nice piece of fish and some salad—her mother’s old standby, or its variation, a nice salad and a piece of fish. No, the Fairchilds needed calories, plenty of them. Comfort food. Food for thought. Faith was ready with both—thoughts and food. She looked at the thick veal chops from Savenor’s market, located on Charles Street, at the foot of Beacon Hill. It was worth the trip to this culinary shrine, transplanted from the original store in Cambridge after it burned down.

Jack, the paterfamilias, had been Julia Child’s butcher, and now it was the next generation’s turn. But Jack still supplied the best jokes. She took some portobello mushrooms out to grill.

They’d go on top of the chops. What else? Fresh steamed asparagus with a little lemon and olive oil—and some polenta with Gorgonzola (see recipe on page 338). That should hold them. She was searing the chops when she heard a familiar voice and felt two arms lock themselves about her waist, pulling her back into a warm embrace.

Tom was home.

“So it’s really up to us. The police can’t investigate the way we can. They don’t have the time, or staff.” The kids were asleep—or at least Faith was choosing to believe Ben was—and their parents were talking about the robbery, what else?

Tom had been happily gnawing on the remnants of his veal chop and Faith’s emphatic statement caused him to drop the bone onto his plate with a clatter.

“What do you mean, ‘investigate’—and what do you mean by ‘we’?” he asked, dreading her reply. Over the years, this anxious response to his wife’s avocation had become something of a reflex.

She poured some of the 1975 Saint-Emilion she’d opened into his empty glass, sighing in-wardly. He ought to be used to her sleuthing by now. But Tom was clinging stubbornly to his protest. She could see it all over his face.

“Nothing even remotely dangerous. I’m not that brave a person, remember. Especially lately.

But we, or I, can go around to pawnshops in the area to look for our stuff, and we definitely need to have a meeting. I want to get the names of people with break-ins similar to ours and invite them as soon as possible. I’ve started to draw up a questionnaire. . . .”

“Wait a minute, honey. Don’t you think the police should be handling all this?” With Faith, inches became miles faster than well-fertilized kudzu grew.

“They can’t. You notice I’m not saying won’t.” After yesterday’s promising beginning—the photography, fingerprinting, Charley’s call, re-grettably resulting in the wrong jewelry—Faith had assumed the tempo of the investigation would continue, even increase. Having seen her family out the door—the front one, for the moment—she’d raced down to the police department that morning to see what Charley had planned for the day. She’d been full of ideas—cross-checking the prints they’d found with U.S. and Canadian authorities, judicious questioning of known stool pigeons, area checks of other break-ins occurring the day before, and so on. Instead, she’d found Dale Warren at the desk.

Charley was having breakfast at the Minuteman Café, as usual, and when Faith confronted him there, he confessed over his scrambled eggs that there wasn’t much more they could do at the moment than they’d already done. Life was not the movies, or books, and there was no mechanism for cross-checking prints on the scale Faith proposed. Her vague notions of DNA testing were out of the question, too. Nor did the Aleford Police Department have a list of canaries. He’d find out about the break-ins, though, and when the pictures were ready at Aleford Photo, he’d send them along to several of the surrounding towns, but she knew he was just saying all this to make her feel better.

She’d returned home and called the man she chose to think of as her partner, Detective Lt. John Dunne of the Massachusetts State Police. In fact, despite numerous cases together, Dunne would never use the word partner regarding Mrs. Fairchild. In his opinion, she was a woman of seemingly insatiable curiosity—and worse. This, however, had never seriously registered with Faith, and she did not hesitate to call him now.

He was very sympathetic, especially when she told him about Sarah Winslow’s death and breakin exactly a week earlier. This attitude changed abruptly when she started relaying her investigative plans and asking him what else she could do.

“Look, Faith, I don’t know how to put this any other way, but most likely your property is out of state by now and the profits up somebody’s nose.

It’s good you have pictures. They’ll help with the insurance. It’ll be enough of a job for you and Tom to deal with the adjuster and get your house back to normal. Concentrate on that.”

“I intend to, yet I can’t simply let these people get away with this. At least I’m going to have the meeting and see what we might have in common.

For all you know, we could have the same plumber, or new roofs or something.”

Faith was beginning to accumulate what she referred to as “larceny lore”—stories about burglaries. The latest was one relayed by Pix about a ring of thieves whose other job was roofing. They cased houses when repairing or installing a roof.

Then on rainy days, when they couldn’t work, they’d come back and break in. A cop in Byford had noticed the rainy-day pattern and solved the crime. Then there was the obituary felon. He noted the time of the funeral of the deceased, when a house would be empty, and planned his crimes accordingly. The cops staked out a series of houses over time and got lucky. He even dressed in black to pass himself off as a mourner if surprised.

Dunne’s deep voice interrupted Faith’s reverie.

“I would say the probability of all of you in Aleford having the same plumber and virtually every other service person is pretty high, but if it makes you feel better, have a meeting. That’s about all you can expect from it, though.”

“Why are you being so negative?” Faith asked.

“Because I’ve been a cop for a very, very long time. Bad guys are mostly stupid and they get sloppy, especially the druggies, although yours sound like pros, and they stay clean for the job.

Somewhere down the line, someone will get caught and the prints will match up. Then, bingo, you’ve got your guy—or girl.”

Faith was by no means ready to give up, or hang up. “If I was going to look for our belongings, what pawnshops should I go to? I’m not particularly well versed on the locations.” Dunne figured he might as well tell her. She’d either nag at him until he did or go through the Yellow Pages. This way, he’d make her feel she had accomplished something and she might leave him alone—for a little while anyway. “You could try up in Lowell. Bad guys like to get rid of things quickly and easily—zip down the interstate to Aleford, or one of the other western suburbs off Route One Twenty-eight, and then zip back up, stopping on the way to get rid of the stuff. You might also go across the border to Salem, New Hampshire. Easy access, and there’s a track there—that means lots of pawnshops.

Then the ones in town. But, Faith, don’t go alone.

I mean it. You’re not dealing with people who gift wrap. Take Tom.”

Faith was pleased. Now she was getting somewhere, if only as far as Lowell. She’d gotten more information than she’d thought she would, and yes, she would take Tom—if he’d go.

Now she looked across the kitchen table—she didn’t plan to eat in the dining room until the sideboard or its drawer was replaced—and thought about the best way to convince her husband to help her.

“ ‘Bad guys.’ That’s what the police kept saying. Really. Good guys and bad guys. It must make life very simple.” She paused and speared a last stalk of asparagus from the serving dish with her fork. “It’s hard to explain, sweetheart, but I feel like they’ve won. The bad guys. Not just that we were robbed but that somewhere they’re sitting around laughing at how helpless we are. If I don’t do something, that helpless feeling is going to get worse and worse. Even if we look in only a few of the pawnshops and have the meeting, I’ll feel as if I have a little of my own back, that I’ve done something. Does this make any sense?” Tom picked up his bone again. Unfortunately, it did make sense. He felt it, too. When you’re a victim, you have lost control completely. Any steps toward changing their status would feel good, although he sincerely doubted the bad guys, whoever they were, spent their time chortling over their victims. It was a whole lot more impersonal than that. But Faith could have her meeting. Pass out her questionnaire. They’d go to two or three pawnshops. What could be the harm?

If someone had told her a week ago that she would be grateful for Stephanie and the diversion the difficult young woman’s wedding presented, Faith Sibley Fairchild would have made an immediate appointment with the nearest therapist for a reality check. Yet, the next day when Stephanie breezed into the catering kitchen, unannounced, as always, Faith greeted her warmly. At least this was lunacy she could handle.

“I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop by to see if there’s anything you wanted to go over. Saves me a trip. Is that fresh coffee?” Stephanie’s requests were always couched this way. She was perennially doing them a favor, while saving herself any bother. “This will save you time later” was one of her ubiquitous, and most dreaded, formulations.

“The Fairchilds’ home was burglarized on Tuesday and they’ve lost almost everything of value—all their silver, jewelry,” Niki said sternly.

Unlike Faith, she was not in the mood—ever—for Stephanie. As Niki was wont to say, it was women like Ms. Bullock who put a hex in Generation X.

“How perfectly awful!”

For an instant, Faith and Niki watched with bated breath. Would the figure on the tightrope topple? Was Stephanie a human being after all?

Not!

“When I was at school, someone stole the diamond tennis bracelet Mummy and Daddy gave me for my Sweet Sixteen, and it was literally sick-making. I had to go to the infirmary. Of course, I haven’t lost anything since then. The one they gave me to make up for it was actually nicer, but that’s not the point. The point is, someone took it, and you can be sure I kept a sharp eye on everyone’s wrists afterward, but she was too smart. I think it was Debbie Putnam. She was new.” Stephanie stopped ruminating over this past in-justice and fixed Faith with a scolding look, as was due someone careless enough to lose not merely a bracelet but absolutely everything of value. “Don’t tell me you forgot to set the alarm.” Faith mumbled something about not having an alarm, not wanting to live that way, but she needn’t have bothered. Dismissing Faith’s mis-fortune with a wave of her hand—no need to speak of unpleasantness—Stephanie went on to something more important: her rehearsal dinner.

Ostensibly, the groom’s parents, the Wentworths, were hosting the event, and footing the bill, but the Bullock women were in charge. Faith had not even met Mr. and Mrs. Wentworth, the couple having wisely departed for Palm Beach when the engagement was announced, and pretty much staying there since.

“Are you sure Daddy’s house is going to work?

It was Binky’s idea to have it there, not so stuffy as the Algonquin Club, which was Daddy’s thought.

But maybe that would be easier on you?” Again the pretense of concern when Stephanie was actually thinking about what was easier for her. It could be that she’d suddenly decided she didn’t want to drive out to Concord the night before the big event, or she could simply be in the mood to stir up trouble.

Binky was Stephanie’s fiancé, Bancroft “Binky” Wentworth III, stockbroker and scion of another old Boston family, the limbs sufficiently far removed from the Cabots and Bullocks to ensure good breeding stock. After seeing Binky and Stephanie together the first time—both blue-eyed, lean, tall but not ungainly, Stephanie’s long, silky light blond hair matched by Binky’s somewhat darker, slightly wavy locks—Faith was not altogether sure that breeding hadn’t been the whole idea—most certainly, in Stephanie’s case.

Lord help them if they produced an errant throw-back to a myopic or undersized ancestor.

Following the ceremony at Trinity Church in Copley Square, the lavish reception would be held high above Boston in the large private dining room on top of the Wentworth Building.

When she and Niki had gone to check out the premises, Faith’s breath had been taken away by the harbor views. Forget the Skywalk at the Prudential Center. The Wentworths had their own personal nontourist attraction—and no ticket could get you in.

“If you cancel the rehearsal dinner at your father’s, the Wentworths will still have to pay for it, plus another one,” Faith warned. “The Algonquin does their own functions.”

“Oh, don’t be a silly, of course we don’t want to cancel it. Daddy would be terribly hurt if we didn’t have it at his house. And Mummy has her own reasons for wanting it there—mostly because Daddy didn’t in the beginning.” Faith wasn’t too sure about the first part of Stephanie’s statement. The one time she had met Julian Bullock at his home, which also served as his very exclusive antiques shop, she’d received the distinct impression that dinner at his house had been his daughter’s and his ex-wife’s idea—

totally. The second part of Stephanie’s remark confirmed this. Courtney Cabot Bullock, as she introduced herself, had positively purred while Julian put up a well-bred protest about the place being too small, then demolished his objections with one swipe of her paw: “It’s going to be an intimate dinner, darling. Only the wedding party.

The dining room table seats twenty, if I’m not mistaken.” She wasn’t.

“Besides, even if we did change our minds about anything, Daddy and Binky’s family have wedding insurance.”

Niki whispered in Faith’s ear, “We do that in my family, too, but we don’t bother with the pre-miums, just keep a loaded shotgun around.” Stephanie reached for a chocolate chip and macadamia nut cookie from a rack where a batch was cooling. Resisting the temptation to slap the back of her hand, Faith said, “We really are terribly busy, Stephanie.” The diversion was beginning to pall.

The young woman looked around in surprise.

“You don’t look very busy to me. Maybe we’d better run through the menus one more time, although Mummy wanted to be here for that.” Grabbing for an out, any out, Faith said, “Then let’s schedule a time to meet. Your mother called last week. She still hasn’t found the fabric she wants for the tablecloth. We could have a final, ” she put extra stress on the word, although knowing it was a vain attempt, “final run-through meeting next week.”

Mrs. Bullock, who had been her husband’s business partner when they were married, handling the decorating end of things, still dabbled in the trade. None of Have Faith’s linens had met with her approval for either the rehearsal dinner or the reception. She had found a gold damask that picked up the colors of the bridesmaid’s simple sheaths for the round tables in the Wentworth dining room, but she was still searching for a print—“witty, but not too Provençal”—for the night before.

Niki stood up and pointedly removed the cookie racks, placing them out of Stephanie’s reach. “The menus you have are perfect, Stephanie. It’s going to be a wonderful wedding. Now, why don’t you run along and break in your shoes or something while Faith and I handle the food?” Niki didn’t believe in coddling the debutante.

She had told Faith months ago that since she never intended to work for Ms. Bullock, soon to be Mrs. Bancroft Wentworth III, she had nothing to lose.

The shoe remark hit home. “Mummy and I are having such a hard time finding shoes to match our gowns. You’re right: I need to concentrate on that. The food can wait until next week. I think I’ll give Mummy a call and see if she’s had any luck at Saks. If not, we can go out to Chestnut Hill and look some more.” Stephanie treated the firm’s phone as her own private line, and after a half-hour call at daytime rates to her maid of honor in San Francisco, Faith had declared the instrument for staff only. In the interests of moving her along today, though, she held out the receiver, dialing Courtney Bullock’s number herself.

Animal imagery seemed to come easily regarding the Bullock women. After meeting them, Faith had characterized Stephanie as the spoiled lapdog of the family and Courtney as the pit bull in pearls. In one of her soliloquies, Stephanie had waxed nostalgic about her grandparents’ house on Beacon Hill—Louisburg Square—where Mummy had grown up, before flying in the face of mater and pater’s advice to marry Julian. Courtney had come to that first meeting with the caterer armed with a leather wedding planner embossed with Stephanie’s name and the date of the wedding—then over a year away—Filofax, swatches, and even recipes. Faith was impressed: Here was a woman who knew what she wanted and usually got it. Surely her organizational acumen was being wasted on a mere slip of a girl, her daughter. After several more meetings, it became clear that Stephanie was Courtney’s jewel in the crown, her most perfect creation. Decorating a condo at the Four Seasons for a princess or locat-ing a King George tankard for the Museum of Fine Arts was naught compared with the job she’d devoted her life to—Stephanie. And Stephanie’s mother. She had not neglected her own complementary persona. Slim, with a flawless complexion and a pageboy the color of an Elsa Peretti gold necklace, Courtney worked almost as hard at being Courtney.

She was clearly delighted with her daughter’s match and wedding plans, the only discordant note being Binky’s insistence on red meat for the main course at the reception—no fish, no chicken.

Meat. Faith had been fascinated to watch Binky, hitherto easygoing to positive carpetlike propor-tions, lay down the law to the Bullock women.

She had wondered how long it would take after the nuptials for Binky to disappear and Bancroft to take charge. Courtney had tried staring him down, pleasantly—firmly—voicing her own preference for poached salmon, “so much more appealing to the eye than bloody slabs of prime rib.” Hoping to lighten the mood, Faith had jocularly suggested as a compromise the largest dish ever served at wedding receptions: hard-boiled eggs stuffed into fish, the fish into cooked chickens, the chickens into sheep, and the sheep into a camel, which is then roasted—a Bedouin custom and guaranteed to provide something for everyone. It was after the leaden silence greeting her remark that she realized for the first of many times that both mother and daughter had no sense of humor. None. None at all. When Binky laughed and suggested they go for it, Courtney had hastily declared beef it would be.

Stephanie hung up the phone and grabbed her Hermès Kelly bag. She had them in several colors. “It works out perfectly. Mummy has about twenty pairs to return.”

Niki had to turn around. The Cabot Bullocks were fast becoming her favorite sitcom, and it was getting harder and harder not to laugh in the bride’s presence.

Stephanie air-kissed Faith, bonding with the help, and was out the door, leaving traces of Joy, her signature fragrance, to mingle with the more plebeian aromas of freshly baked cookies and bread. Niki exploded. “I swear, Faith, we should be writing this all down.” She wiped a tear from her eye and stopped laughing. “But if they change the rehearsal dinner menu one more time, I’ll spit in Stephanie’s Perrier.”

It was Faith’s turn to laugh, and she did. Niki’s Greek temper was more than a match for these Boston Brahmins.

“Everyone’s accepted,” Faith told Pix. “They positively leapt at the chance to do something about their break-ins.” The two women had bumped into each other at the Shop ’n Save and had pulled their carriages to one side in front of the dairy section. Pix had reached for the Velveeta, while Faith had her hand on a log of Vermont goat cheese.

“When are you going to have this shindig, and can someone who hasn’t had her house robbed come? I could pass the punch and cookies.” Pix knew that Faith would no more consider inviting people to her house without serving food, even for an occasion such as this, than she would purchase dough in a cardboard tube—several varieties of which were tucked under Pix’s cheese.

“Tomorrow night at seven, and you can come, but don’t wear any jewelry.” Pix had some good jewelry inherited from various relatives, but her habitual adornment other than wedding and engagement rings was a Seiko watch with a sensible leather strap. Period. So long as Sam persisted in referring to pierced ears as “body mutilation,” Pix’s lobes remained unadorned.

Clip-ons hurt.

A bit piqued that Faith could think her so in-sensitive, Pix suggested tartly, “Why don’t I wear my mourning brooch? The one with the woven hair that belonged to Great-Aunt Hannah?”

“I’m glad you understand. Of course you can come. Coffee, not punch, but cookies. We don’t want to be fooling around with plates and forks while we’re working. I’m on my way to the church office to do the questionnaire after I finish here. I just needed a few things.”

“Do you want Samantha to come and take care of the kids?”

Faith had been so intent on other matters that she had neglected to plan for the probable interruptions—cute though they might appear—her children would present. It was this single-mindedness that had also caused her earlier jewelry remark to Pix.

“That’s a wonderful idea. Are you sure she doesn’t have plans?”

“Even if she does, I think she’d like to help. The kids have been terribly upset, you know. Danny wants us to get an alarm system. In fact, he’s been talking about it ever since he heard about Sarah.

Now before he leaves for school, he tells me to be sure the doors are locked and not to let strangers into the house. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.”

Faith gave her friend a quick hug and headed for the checkout counter.

The parish secretary’s office was a small ante-room carved from the much larger space that composed the minister’s office at the rear of the church. It had retained one side window, and on this day, another sunny one, the room was warm and welcoming. Faith had called ahead to ask if she could use the laser printer sometime, and Rhoda Dawson had told her when she could come. Stepping through the door, Faith was struck by the changes the woman had wrought—and the contrast between this obsessively neat room and Tom’s work areas—at the church and in the parsonage. Books were lined up neatly in their shelves; there were no stacks of paper. The in box was empty, the out box full. The previous secretary had been a devotee of houseplants, crowding the sill with African violets, obscuring the light with a large hanging spider plant. The top of the file cabinet had been taken up with jars of murky water, containing cuttings from the aforementioned. A strawberry begonia in a perpetual nonblooming state had occupied a good portion of the desk. This flora had all been banished. In its place was a small basket of dried flowers centered on the sill.

When Faith explained what she was doing, Ms.Dawson offered some format suggestions. Faith could see why Tom was so pleased with the woman. She was a model of efficiency. A mastermind.

As Faith typed the questions under the secretary’s watchful eye, she felt uneasy. Was it simply coincidence that the thefts had coincided with the woman’s arrival in Aleford? She hadn’t answered the phone the day of the Fairchilds’ break-in. Dis-posing of the loot? In the short time she’d worked for Tom, she had been in the parsonage several times, picking up or dropping off work. Tom had mentioned to Faith that the only address the secretary had given him was a post office box in Revere, and questions about her personal life had been met with brief, noncommittal responses.

Faith stopped typing and looked up at the secretary, who was sitting across the room, reading the Boston Globe. Rhoda was a woman of a certain age, not unattractive, who dressed for work in midcalf tailored suits with large shoulder pads. Not one to be swayed by the whims of fickle fashion, she’d apparently found her style sometime in the seventies and stuck with it.

“This won’t take but a minute more. I really appreciate it,” Faith said, causing Rhoda to lower the paper a fraction of an inch.

In the twilight world Faith had entered since Sarah Winslow’s break-in and their own home invasion, one of the worst aspects of the terrain was that everybody was a suspect. Here she was, composing a list of questions about burglaries, with a host of suspicions about the parish’s newest employee, who was only a few feet away—no doubt perfectly innocent, a perfect stranger, in fact. A perfect stranger. It was horrible, yet there was nothing she could do about it; Faith had to find out all she could about Ms.Rhoda Dawson.

“I wouldn’t want you to have to stay late and keep your family waiting. I don’t recall whether Tom said you were married or not?” There it was.

The woman would have to answer.

“The Reverend doesn’t have too much for me to do today, so there’s no problem.” Faith persisted. “Well, I wouldn’t want your kids or whoever to worry about where you were later.”

“Thank you.” Ms. Dawson smiled and stood up. “So long as you’re here, I’ll run out to the drugstore if that’s all right. Won’t be more than ten minutes. Will you need more time than that?” It was Faith who couldn’t escape the question.

“No, you go ahead. I’ll be finished by then.” Drat and double drat.

“Cleaning persons, lawn services, plow services,” she typed. She’d already listed “Time of day?” “Day of week?” “Items taken?” as well as queries about construction work in the neighborhood or on own home, service calls, UPS, FedEx, mail delivery, and the like. After baby-sitters and housekeepers, she ended with “Our professions.” Hitting “Save,” she wearily pushed Rhoda’s er-gonomic chair away from the desk and tried to think of any areas she might have missed. Tom came into the room and stopped in surprise at seeing his wife totally out of context behind his secretary’s desk. “Where’s Ms. Dawson?”

“She’s running an errand and I’m doing the questionnaire for tomorrow night’s meeting. The printer here is so much better. She said it would be all right.” Faith felt slightly defensive. She wasn’t sure why. Tom’s turf? Yet, he dropped by the catering kitchen all the time.

“Great. No problem. I was at a meeting at the library. We really need to raise money to repair the roof. If we don’t do something soon, the place will have to be condemned. You wouldn’t believe the mess in the attic.” According to the ironclad stipulations of the bequest that established the library, the trustees were composed of Aleford’s school committee, selectmen, and settled clergy.

Some of these individuals took a more active interest than others. Tom was one of them.

Faith wasn’t listening. “Did it ever occur to you that there’s something odd about Ms. Dawson? I mean, no address, and she told you her phone was unlisted, too. I asked her whether she was married and she wouldn’t answer. The same with whether she had any kids.”

Tom looked worried. “Rhoda Dawson is the best secretary I have ever had, bar none, and if she wants to keep her private life private, that’s fine with me. You didn’t upset her, did you? I mean, she didn’t seem annoyed or anything?”

“She wasn’t, but you might want to think about your wife.” Faith flushed.

Tom bent over and kissed said wife. “I always think about my wife. It’s my favorite thing to do.

I just don’t want her to grill my secretary and chance losing her.”

The kiss helped. “Don’t worry. I won’t do anything to upset your paragon, even if she does have all our silver.”

The door opened at that very moment and Tom’s look of horror was almost comical. Faith didn’t miss a beat.

“Finished your shopping? I’m done here, too.

Bye, Tom, Ms. Dawson. I’ll leave you to your work, and thanks again for letting me infringe on your time. I have high hopes for this questionnaire. It would be wonderful if the group could turn up something to solve these burglaries.” Ms. Dawson’s face was impassive. “It was no trouble at all. I’m glad to have been of help.

Faith went down to the church basement, where Ben’s nursery school was located. It was almost time to pick him up. As she waited in the corridor with the other mothers, she felt a bit fool-ish about her suspicions of Rhoda Dawson. Everyone a suspect. She wondered how long she would feel this way. Since the robbery, each time she’d looked out the front windows and seen a van or panel truck go by, she’d said to herself, Is this the one? She didn’t greet the mailman as cheerfully as she had before. Answering the questionnaire in her mind as she typed it up, she’d formed theories about a host of people. People she’d trusted. People she didn’t trust now.

“Mommy, Mommy! Look what I made for

you.” Ben flung himself at her, thrusting a macaroni-bead necklace in her face, each rigatoni painstakingly painted with bright primary colors.

“It’s lovely, sweetheart,” she said, scooping him up as she put the necklace on over her head.

Some of the beads were still slightly sticky.

“See, now you don’t have to worry about not having any jewelry anymore. I’m going to make you lots.”

She waited until they had collected Amy, eaten lunch, and the kids had gone down for naps.

Then she went into the bathroom, locked the door, and cried her eyes out.

* * *

Pix volunteered to take notes and Tom passed out the questionnaires, so everyone would have a copy, but Faith was clearly in charge. Five house-holds were represented, six counting Sarah Winslow’s, and Faith was definitely counting it.

As she had tossed and turned the night before—sleep was pretty elusive these days—she realized that the force driving her was not the break-ins so much as Sarah’s murder, for murder it was in Faith’s mind. Yes, she wanted to find out who the intruders at the parsonage had been, but linking them to Sarah was paramount.

“Shall we get started? I spoke to all of you on the phone, but perhaps we should go around and introduce ourselves.”

It was a varied group—Mr. and Mrs. Roland Dodge, an elderly couple—he, a retired MIT pro-fessor, and she, a homemaker active in the Historical Society; Cecilia Greenough, single, an art teacher in the schools; Pauline and Michael Caldicott, young marrieds, both of them CPAs, a baby very obviously on the way; and, finally, Edith Petit, a widow who lived in one of the houses bordering the green.

By the end of an hour, they’d covered all the questions, eaten all the cookies, and Tom had brought out a decanter of sherry.

Michael Caldicott had been keeping his own notes. “There’s quite a lot here for the police.

This really was a brilliant idea on your part, Faith.” They’d gotten to first names by the second question.

She nodded. “The most striking coincidence is the day of the week and time—all on a Tuesday and all daytime breaks.”

“Chief MacIsaac told us daytime breaks are the most common,” Roland Dodge added ruefully,

“especially among those who are doing this for a career, as opposed to teenagers and drug addicts.

If you’re caught, the penalty for a daytime crime is considerably less than for one committed under the cover of darkness.”

“And none of our houses had alarm systems; that’s another common denominator,” Faith continued.

“We’re remedying that,” Pauline said. “Would you believe we’re on a waiting list? All Aleford wants to get wired.”

Faith had found this out herself when she’d called. Minuteman Alarms’ owner’s joy at the sudden rise in his fortunes had been apparent even over the phone. The parish Buildings and Grounds Committee had approved alarm systems for both the parsonage and the church.

“Some of my friends have wondered why I want to put in an alarm now, the old locking the barn door business. It’s true I haven’t got much left to take, but I simply don’t want anyone in my house again whom I don’t know!” Edith Petit said grimly.

Unless it was someone you did know, Faith thought, but she said instead, “I’ve since learned thieves make it a practice to return roughly a year later, on the assumption that you will have replaced what they have taken with your insurance money. You can tell that to anyone who doubts the wisdom of an alarm system.”

They’d been sharing larcency lore throughout the evening, Roland Dodge contributing the fun-niest. Several years ago, a neighbor of theirs had seen a young man leaving the house next door with a television set, putting it into the back of a van parked in the driveway. She insisted he come in and take hers as well, since it was “on the fritz.” “It’s absolutely true,” Roland insisted. “I heard it from the woman myself, and of course she never saw her TV again!”

The items taken from their respective dwell-ings were also the same—silver, jewelry, and, in the art teacher’s case, a box of chocolates from an admirer. Cecilia was particularly indignant about that affront, although it was her mother’s locket with pictures of her mother and father, the only ones the family had, that Cecilia said she would give anything to get back.

Faith knew this game. She played it at night when she couldn’t sleep. The first day it was “If I Could Have One Thing Back, What Would It Be?” She had quickly moved to three things and as she cataloged what was gone, the items changed from night to night.

Silver plate and costume jewelry, except when it was mixed in with the real thing, had been ignored. None of the houses had been trashed, although searched thoroughly. Like Sarah, both the Dodges and Edith Petit had had canisters of flour and sugar emptied. Faith caught Tom’s eye and knew they had come to the same conclusion: clever thieves who knew the inhabitants and ages of the homeowners. These pros knew a younger person didn’t gravitate toward the pantry for hiding places—jewel rolls in the bottom of a garment bag and rings in the freezer were the choices of the next generation.

They did have many of the same service people, but as Detective Dunne had pointed out, there weren’t many alternatives in a town the size of Aleford, and people like Mr. McCarthy, the plumber, had lived in town forever, the firm getting its start plugging up the musket holes in rainwater barrels, no doubt. It seemed crazy to suspect him, but then, he might have had someone working for him who was less reliable. They carefully listed the plumber, the plow service, cleaners—anyone who had been in the houses as far back as a year ago. The Caldicotts and the Dodges had both remodeled their kitchens. It all went down in the report.

As she listened carefully to what had been stolen from each house—and what hadn’t—Faith knew there was something she was missing. Her Nikon camera had been on the kitchen table. The Caldicotts had state-of-the-art computer equipment and a Bang & Olufsen stereo system in the same room. None of this was even moved out of place, nor was liquor touched in any of their houses. “Not even my Macallan twelve-year-old scotch!” Roland exclaimed. “Wished they’d taken all the booze and left my Brass Rat—that’s what the MIT class ring is affectionately called, has a beaver on it,” he explained. Nothing new, even though it would certainly have been easy to fence these things, Faith assumed. It couldn’t have anything to do with size, because the sideboard drawers were large and those had been taken from Sarah’s house and the parsonage. Three homes, including Sarah’s, had lost antique Oriental rugs. The Dodges were missing a pair of mahogany knife boxes, too—empty of cutlery, but fine eighteenth-century examples with intricate inlay work.

“Charley MacIsaac says all the houses bordering the green have been broken into at one time or another, and I certainly wish someone had told me that when I was buying mine,” Edith said. “If we do nothing else tonight, I think someone should write up a list of tips for people on how to avoid being broken into, and we’ll put it in the Aleford Chronicle.”

Things like not leaving your garage doors up when the garage is empty, Faith thought dismally.

It was a good idea, though. Pix volunteered to write the article. She felt it was the least she could do as one who had retained her circle pin.

It was dark by the time everyone left and there was a strong feeling of camaraderie. Dunne had been right about that. Everyone did feel better.

Telephone numbers were exchanged and promises made to keep in touch.

“Oh dear,” Edith said as she put on a pale lavender sweater for the short walk across the green to her house. “We didn’t get a chance to talk about those insurance adjusters. It might be a good idea to meet again. My turn next time. I’ll bake an angel food cake,” she said brightly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The next rainy day never seemed to come.

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

Maybe you think I staged the robbery, too?

Cracked my own door!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And this drawer held what?”

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

“What?” she asked.

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

“You don’t believe me again.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That was fast. He’s gone already?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some sign from God, if only a teaspoon.

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

“How much for this?”

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

Faith looked at the silver strewn in front of her.

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

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

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

They took it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faith linked her arm tightly through his.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s not that I don’t want to help. We’re mad as hell about what happened to you.” Scott was completely earnest now, the mocking tone gone.

Faith pictured his handsome face, Tom Cruise’s good-looking younger brother. The rest of him matched, as well. She forced herself to concentrate on what he was saying.

“We won’t be late, though. How about after supper? You want to meet at the Willow Tree?” It was going to be a bit difficult explaining to Tom where she was going without actually lying, yet Faith was up to the challenge. She agreed to meet Scott, and Tricia, if she wanted to come along, at eight o’clock at the Concord hangout.

If Tom’s sermon was a bit sketchy, no one seemed to notice, except his wife, who had awakened with him at five to make him breakfast before he finished it. It had been her idea to spend the previous day at pawnshops, and neither had wanted to give up an evening out. After church, Faith threw together a pasta frittata, her old standby. Like zucchini frittata, or other variations, it depended on eggs to bind together the ingredients, which were quickly fried to a golden crisp on both sides in olive oil on the top of the stove. It neatly solved the problem of what to do with leftover pasta. In today’s case, the leftover was fet-tuccine with onions, tomatoes, and prosciutto.

Faith added it to the beaten eggs, a dollop of light cream, pepper, salt, and grated cheese, mixed it well, then poured it, sizzling, into the pan.

“That smells fantastic. When do we eat?”

“Almost immediately. Ben is supposed to be setting the table.” He’d counted out the cutlery, but at the moment he was distracted by what else was in the drawer with the napkins. Amy was sitting in her high chair doing a fine imitation of Buddy Rich.

After lunch, the Fairchilds scattered. Some to nap—“rest quietly,” in Ben’s case; others to tend the garden and read the newspaper. Faith pulled a few weeds. The back door was still nailed shut, an omnipresent reminder of the break-in. The door had arrived from Concord Lumber, but without hinges. Apparently, obtaining these was more difficult than placing a new order for the whole thing all over again. Perhaps the best strategy was to expect everything to go wrong and then be pleasantly surprised by the things that did work out. She frowned and looked at the vegetable garden they’d been planting. Tom had had seedlings all over the house and either the temperature had been below freezing or the backyard awash with torrential rains. Everything was in the ground now, but it didn’t look as if the Fairchilds would be supplying Burpee with their surplus. “We’ll be lucky to have peas on the Fourth of July,” Tom had muttered darkly a few minutes ago, before settling into the hammock with the sports section. Peas on the Fourth—and salmon. Another of those quaint New England customs that started when some observant soul noted the concurrence of three events—early peas, new potatoes, and the run of eastern salmon. It neatly solved the problem of what to serve on the Fourth, the way Saturday-night supper meant baked beans and brown bread. Hinting at a culinary lack of imagination on the part of Tom’s forebears had resulted in an early Fairchild tiff, with husband taking the “What was good enough . . .” line and wife claiming the “Time to get out of the rut . . .” higher ground.

“Do you want to get that, or should I?” Tom called. The phone was ringing. Knowing well her husband’s innate dislike, bordering on distrust, of Bell’s invention, Faith sprinted for the front door and picked up the receiver just as the answering machine kicked in. Whoever it was waited patiently at Faith’s instruction to hold on until the message was over. Promptly at the beep, Courtney Cabot Bullock’s voice came over the line. “So sorry to trouble you on a Sunday,” she began.

From the confident—and insincere—tone of her voice, Faith knew full well Mrs. Bullock wasn’t sorry at all. But she did have good manners.

“Stephanie said you wanted to meet this week to go over the final arrangements, and I have a fabric swatch for the tablecloth at last, so you can get busy with the flowers.” The implication being that Faith need search no more for something to fill the void of her existence—the Bullock women had come to her rescue.

“What day is good for you?” Faith said. She knew how to play. Any time she suggested would be inconvenient. Any time Courtney suggested would be fine.

“Well, the big day is less than two weeks away, so I do think we had better make it soon. Friday at three?”

Faith was almost positive Courtney had already written the engagement down in her book—in ink. “That will be fine,” she said. She’d have to take the kids. She wasn’t about to hire a sitter for a meeting with the Bullocks, and it would give Stephanie a glimpse into the future, although Stephanie’s maternal involvement would be limited to saying good night after the nanny had done all the work. When Faith had taken over the former Yankee Doodle Kitchens, she’d done extensive remodeling and built a play area with low shelves for books and toys, a soft carpet, beanbag chairs, even a chalkboard at the far end of the room. Ben and Amy loved going to work with Faith and it gave her the flexibility she needed. At three o’clock, Amy might be persuaded to nap in the large playpen Faith had stocked with FAO Schwarz’s best to lure her daughter, and Ben before her, into staying within the pen’s confines long after other children without such magnificent diversions had vocally yearned to be free.

“This is definite then, unless you hear from me otherwise.” No mention of Faith’s possibly canceling. One didn’t cancel the Bullocks.

“I’ll see you then. Thanks for calling.” Faith could be insincere too. “Good-bye,” she said.

“Good-bye—oh, and one other small matter.” Faith held her breath. Courtney continued. “When Stephanie was out at your place”—Faith pictured her making that coy little quotation marks gesture around the word place—“on Thursday, she mentioned to me afterward that she felt the teensiest bit unwelcome. Of course I assured her she was imagining the whole thing. Bridal jitters. She was imagining it, wasn’t she, Faith? I know what a wedding like this means to someone in your line of work.” Again those intimations—caterer, lady of the evening, whatever—they were all one and the same to Courtney. Tradespeople.

Faith jumped in quickly, not because she felt she had to curry favor with someone as influential as Courtney—although, damn it, the woman was. Have Faith regularly turned down bookings and had events scheduled into the millennium.

No, it was the distinctly unpleasant prospect of catering the wedding when she was on the outs with the bride and the bride’s mother. It would be like the last days of a remodeling job, when the contractor and home owner invariably crossed swords over the punch list. It was hard enough working with these two ladies when they were all ostensibly friends. And, like it or not, the catering business depended on word of mouth, as much as what went into it. Courtney Cabot Bullock was not someone Faith wanted to offend.

Faith crossed her fingers. “Stephanie is welcome anytime. We’re always happy to see her—or you. And the wedding is going to be wonderful.” That part was true.

Faith pictured Courtney nodding to herself and crossing off item number seventy-five on her “To Do” list: “Chew out caterer.”

“Fine, that’s settled, then. See you Friday. Good-bye.”

What was settled was that Stephanie could continue to feel free to drop in whenever she wanted for cookies or anything else they were preparing. Mummy had taken care of everything.

Clearly, Stephanie was bored being at home. Too many thank-you notes to write? Faith had heard about the avalanche of wedding presents ad nauseam. Or maybe the deb was getting on Courtney’s nerves, as well? “Why don’t you run along to Aleford, dear? Get out of Mummy’s hair?” Faith waited until early evening to mention that she was going out. Tom was returning from a visit to a parishioner who was recovering from heart surgery. Faith had bathed the kids and put them to bed in the interim, hoping there would be some kind of sporting event to occupy her spouse while she left for her rendezvous with Scott. Tom and his entire family were ardent sports fans, favoring local teams, of course. Faith was still not sure when football was played—it seemed to be on TV all the time—yet she was pretty certain that spring meant baseball, and she was right.

Tom came racing through the front door. “We were watching the game, and I don’t think I missed much.” His kiss grazed her cheek and he went straight to the television, flinging himself into a comfortable, slightly decrepit club chair that had come with the house.

Faith appeared by his side a few minutes later with a bottle of Sam Adams beer and a bowl of pretzels. “If you get hungry, there’s a roast beef and Boursin sandwich in the fridge.” She knew he would be. “And some Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk in the freezer.” She’d planned her strategy well. “I have to talk to Scott and Tricia. I won’t be gone long.” She gave him a kiss, listened to his vague acknowledgment of her remarks, and was out the door before he could surface and voice his misgivings. He’d told her last night that as far as he was concerned, their investigation into their own and any other burglaries was now officially over. He’d said it a number of times—very firmly.

It was a short ride to the Willow Tree Kitchen, the place where Faith had first met Scott Phelan six years ago, after Cindy Shepherd was killed.

The Willow Tree hadn’t changed much, nor had Scott, except he might be slightly better-looking.

As for herself, Faith fancied that even the birth of a second child hadn’t caused a precipitous decline toward cellulite and silver threads among the gold. It wasn’t that she feared middle or even old age. She simply wanted to take a long time getting there.

Scott was already ensconced in his favorite booth. Before his marriage, he’d eaten at the Willow Tree every night. It was a regulars kind of place, and, in turn, the regulars knew what to order: the chili, beef stew, pea soup, or the nightly special. The clams and lobster in the summertime were surprisingly good and cheap, but the melted margarine killed the experience. The menu never changed. That is, the printed menu never changed. Veal Florentine had been a figment of the first owner’s imagination and there was no Weight Watchers plate.

Scott was nursing a beer, watching the game.

The Red Sox were losing. A waitress appeared, putting another mug in front of him, together with a basket of huge baking powder biscuits, another of the reliable offerings. The Willow Tree waitresses bore a striking resemblance to one another. Maybe it was the way they dressed—starched lime green uniforms, pleated pastel hankies fanned out like peacocks’ tails from their pockets. Maybe it was that they all seemed to be the same age, somewhere between forty and sixty.

“Are you ready to order?” she asked Faith, her eyes on Scott. He was a favorite among them and they’d long ago adopted a maternal, protective air concerning the young man. Scott seemed to have brought himself up. His mother had moved to Florida when he was in junior high, leaving him to fend for himself. Tricia told her that Scott had lived in his car one year during high school, crashing at friends’ during the coldest weather and grabbing showers where he could. Faith had never heard him mention his father.

“Your chili will be up in a sec,” the waitress said to Scott while she waited for Faith to answer.

Never having fully recovered from the sight of the white wine she’d ordered arriving with a screw top on her first visit, Faith opted for a diet Coke.

“They’ve spruced the place up since the last time I was here,” Faith commented after Scott had explained that Tricia was home giving herself a facial for practice. “The curtains are new.” Incongruously, the small windows were framed with frilly white Priscilla-style eyelet. The Willow Tree was Ben Fairchild’s favorite place to eat, not for the superlative job they did with his hot dogs, but because of the decor—a taxidermist’s paradise.

The long, low building was roughly divided into two rooms, the larger of which contained the bar.

Throughout the interior, animals, ranging from a moth-eaten fox to a moth-eaten wild turkey, had all apparently been bagged, surrendering after a last-ditch effort to cling to life. Like the waitresses, they looked remarkably similar, no matter what the species. Scott had summed their expressions up as “Come one step closer and I’ll rip your guts out.” For young Ben Fairchild, the Willow Tree offered hideous, spine-tingling sensa-tions unavailable anywhere else in his little world. Faith tried to position herself away from the glassy stares and snarling lips—or beaks—in favor of a view of the snowshoes, harnesses, and other New England paraphernalia gracing the walls, but it was impossible.

Her Coke arrived and she asked, “Did you have a nice time at Tricia’s mother’s?”

“What do you think?” Scott asked, and laughed. “Come on, Faith, we’ve known each other too long to chitchat. Now, what do you want me to do?”

“Find out who broke into my house—and the other ones, especially Sarah Winslow’s.” He choked slightly on his draft. “You don’t ask for much, do you, lady!”

“That’s what I really would like you to do. I know it isn’t likely.” She told him about Friday night’s meeting and yesterday’s pawnshop tour.

She also mentioned Mr. Monstrous.

“There’s a very special place in hell for those guys, so don’t worry about it—or take it personally. He wants to pay you as little as he can get away with. They get brownie points—or, more likely, bonuses—for that. You want to get as much as you can. Admit it. You’re mad and feel entitled, which you are. The way to go? Your policy probably gives you a lump sum for the silver and the jewelry and replacement value for a bunch of the other stuff. They broke your door. Forget Home Depot. Get a really good door, dead bolt, solid brass hardware, the works. They took a pillowcase, right? Go get a really nice pillowcase. Embroidered by French nuns, whatever. This is the way it works—and it’s how you get back at guys like him, too.”

Faith sighed. Being robbed was fast becoming another full-time job. She knew what Scott was talking about, and it was true. They hadn’t even thought to shop around for a new door, but ordered a quality one—as was the one that had been destroyed. She wasn’t sure about the pillowcase, though. If not fraud, it was getting close to fibbing. But Scott was already proving her hunch correct. Home invasions: This was a world he knew, from all angles.

In her fantasies, she pictured finding a parked van with everything intact, neatly stacked inside.

She’d just have to put it all back in place. And, she reasoned, if any of her acquaintances would have an inkling of where such a van might be aban-doned, it would be Scott and Scott alone. Pix was the type who returned the change she found on the floor in the Shop ’n Save to the manager.

“Not to cast aspersions on your past, or present, but is there anyone you could ask about who might have done these break-ins?”

“I have no idea what ‘aspersions’ are and don’t want to know, but I get the drift. Yeah, I can ask around. Don’t get your hopes up, though.” Faith was beginning to hate the sound of this expression. Scott elaborated.

“There are a lot of different loops in what you might call ‘the secondary market.’ ” Aspersions or no aspersions, Scott enjoyed letting people think him barely literate, even Faith, and here he was spouting off about “secondary markets.”

“You have your druggies, who go around the neighborhood at night trying back doors until they find an open one, with somebody’s pocket-book conveniently lying on the kitchen table, counter, or hanging from the back of one of the chairs. This is what most women do, and I can tell from your face that you’re one of them.

Bingo! Grab the purse, take off, empty the money out, and throw the thing in some bushes or a Dumpster.”

“I knew I was right to go looking in Dumpsters!” Faith chortled. Tom and Charley MacIsaac had been annoyingly patronizing.

Scott raised an eyebrow and finished his beer.

Another one appeared like magic. “Kids break in the same way—trying doors late at night. Fast, in and out with whatever they see that they can sell easily. Some kids like to refine it a little. Only rip off their parents’ friends—kind of killing two birds with one stone.

“Then there are the real pros, who have it down to a state of the art. Someone knows somebody has something they want or have a buyer for.

You’re never going to get these stolen goods back or trace them. A lot of this quality merchandise gets sold at airport hotels—jewelry, artwork, antiques. It’s on the way to another continent often before the owner knows it’s gone. ‘Oh dear, what happened to my van Gogh while I was in Aruba?’

“Most B and Es are like yours. Especially the daytime ones. Case a house, wait until you’re sure it’s empty—they don’t want to see you any more than you want to see them—then strip it of the good stuff fast. The problem is that I’m not in this loop. I’m pretty careful to stay away from it, in fact. I could give you a fair idea of whose younger brother or sister might be trying the doorknobs and where you could get a nice stereo that fell off the back of a truck, but that’s about it.” Faith was disappointed. She’d been sure Scott was going to be her personal guide through this particular underworld.

“What about the fact that in all our cases, they took only old things?”

“This is funny. Not that they took the old things, but that they left the rest. Doesn’t Tom have a new computer at the house?”

“Yes, and I have a laptop, remember? You’ve seen it at work. It was home in the downstairs closet. The closet door was open, so they obviously looked in there. The TV is fairly new, too.”

“Nobody bothers with a TV anymore, unless it’s one of those digital HDTVs, and only the Donald Trumps of the world have them yet. The rest are too cheap to bother with. Kind of like taking the toaster oven.”

“Do you think it’s a waste of time going around to more pawnshops?”

Faith had told Scott about her conversation with John Dunne and now Scott went back to it.

“You know that Dunne is right. Whoever broke in has fenced everything good by now and dumped the rest. ‘Up somebody’s nose’ is a good way to put it, but it’s also true that the guy may have used the money for his rent and car payment. His kid’s orthodontia. It’s a living—not yours or mine, but it’s a living. Tax-free, except no benefits and not a steady paycheck.” Scott saw Faith’s look of disappointment and quickly added, “Still, I’d try the places in town; there are a bunch near the Jewelers Building at three thirty-three Wash-ington Street, on Bromfield, the next street.”

“I know where that is,” Faith said, happy to have something more to do.

“Even if you don’t find anything, these guys have quality jewelry. You can pick up some things. But don’t pay what they ask. Maybe I should go with you. Or Tricia can. You’ve got

‘Kick me—I’m from the burbs’ written all over your face.”

Faith resented this. “You forget, I grew up in the Big Apple. Most Bostonians wouldn’t even get off the train in Grand Central for fear of being mugged.”

“Yeah, yeah. You’re street-smart. Only, it was the apple, not the core.”

Faith couldn’t argue with that without revealing certain things in her past she’d sworn never to divulge, so she simply smiled enigmatically.

The gesture was lost on Scott, who was reaching for the last biscuit. He broke it in half and offered part to Faith. She heard echoes of the day’s earlier church service, “Take and eat this . . .” It was a vastly different kind of communion, but the gesture still felt ceremonial.

They sat in companionable silence for a while.

A spider had constructed an elaborate web between an elk’s antlers, and several dead flies were festooned there. Faith put her Coke down.

“What has our friend Stephanie been up to this week? Decided to change the date, go Hawaiian, what?” Scott and Tricia had never met any of the Bullocks, but they would be working at both the rehearsal dinner and reception. They reveled in the Stephanie stories, and whether there were any new ones had become the first question when they showed up for work.

“She dropped by on Thursday and proposed moving the rehearsal dinner from ‘Daddy’s’ to the Algonquin Club on Commonwealth Avenue in town. It wasn’t vintage Stephanie, not like lobster bisque being ‘too pink.’ Her heart wasn’t really in it. I think she’s running out of things. Niki sent her home to break in her bridal shoes.”

“They do that, you know. Tricia was wearing the damn things all over the apartment the week before we got married.” Tricia Phelan had informed Scott that she intended to get married only once and it was going to be “the whole nine yards,” not the elopement to the Cape that he’d envisioned.

If the Phelan nuptials had been nine yards, then the upcoming Bullock extravaganza would be nine hundred and ninety-nine.

“What do you think this is going to set ‘Daddy’ back?” Scott asked as he dug into a generous wedge of lemon meringue pie. He’d switched to coffee, and Faith followed suit. It never kept her awake.

“Niki and I sat down a couple of months ago when we had nothing better to do, or nothing we wanted to, and tried to figure it out. We know what we’re billing; it will be somewhere around thirty thousand dollars. Could go up to a million, though, now that we’re charging for changes.” Scott let out a low whistle. Faith smiled. “Hey, that’s nothing. In New York City, a caterer considers a fifty-thousand-dollar wedding midrange.

Twenty-five thousand gets you chicken and an old man with an accordion. Of course, the Bullocks don’t have to rent tents or a room, although I’m surprised Stephanie didn’t insist on flying everyone to Bavaria for a weekend at one of Mad Ludwig’s castles—you know, the Sleeping Beauty type. We are providing the tables and chairs, but not the tablecloths. Another savings, and so thoughtful of Courtney Bullock.”

“From everything I’ve heard, she seems to want to stick it to her ex every way she can.” Faith nodded. “She was so mad at one point when he refused to pay for the kind of roses she wanted for Stephanie’s bouquet—they grow in only one tiny village in Provence—that I thought the whole thing would be put on hold while she sued him for breach of fatherhood, or anything else she could fabricate to cover his ‘maniacal penury’—her words. She was also goading Stephanie to consider a wedding dress embroidered in gold-bullion thread!”

Scott was slowly shaking his head back and forth. “It’s hard to imagine people having that kind of money. They’ll end up dropping more on this wedding than we’ll spend on a house some-day.”

“Easily. We haven’t even mentioned clothes, hair, makeup. Then there’s the band, and photographer, limos, and invitations. Binky’s had to cough up for the rings and his expenses. I doubt his morning coat will be rented.”

“And Julian Bullock has this much dough?”

“Apparently. Courtney has her own nest egg, too, I believe. She was amused, not angry, because Julian wouldn’t pay for her mother-of-the-bride dress. ‘Just like old times,’ Stephanie told us she’d said.”

Scott stood up and stretched. “I’ve got to get going. Work tomorrow. I guess I’d better start saving for the ladder I’m going to give any daughter we might have.”

“As if Tricia would ever let you get away with that,” Faith teased.

“You may be right, but Tricia knows what makes sense and what doesn’t. Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for something that’s over in a few hours is nuts.”

They walked out into the parking lot together.

It was dark, and Faith realized that she hadn’t been paying attention to the time. The small windows at the Willow Tree didn’t let in much light and, in any case, time didn’t pass so much as crawl once you were inside. The baseball game was long over. She had no idea who had won.

“Well, good night—and thanks, Scott.” “I haven’t done anything yet.”

“Yes, you have. I know a whole lot more than I did two hours ago.”

“Me too.” She could see his broad grin in the warm darkness. Damn, he was good-looking.

She was halfway to her car when she heard him call. She waited for him to come closer.

“Faith.” He put his hands on her shoulders.

“Faith, you’ve got to let this go. Get on with your life. Tom, the kids. Believe me, you could make yourself crazy, and it will all be for nothing in the end. Let it go.” He dropped his hands and disappeared into the night.

Faith had automatically walked up the back stoop before stopping herself and turning toward the front door. The hall light was on, but the rest of the downstairs was dark. She took her shoes off and crept up the stairs and into the bedroom, feeling like a teenager who has broken curfew.

The light on Tom’s side of the bed went on the moment she crossed the threshold, flooding the room. She froze.

“Tom, I . . .”

He patted the bed. “Why don’t you come over here and tell me what’s going on?”

She dropped her shoes and padded over to sit on the bed, leaning against him. It was tempting to turn the light off and simply spend the whole night this way. She felt her eyes close.

“I met Scott over at the Willow Tree. I thought he might have some ideas. Not that he’d ever be involved in anything like these break-ins, but he might know someone who might know someone.

That kind of thing.”

“And did he?”

“No, but I learned a lot about different kinds of robberies. He told me some pawnshops in Boston I could try and—”

“Okay, but what’s going on, Faith? What’s going on with you? Where are you?”

She knew what her husband was talking about.

These were questions she’d been asking herself.

“I feel . . . it’s hard to describe. I feel very alone, very empty. Every day I wake up and do all the things I’m supposed to do and tell myself how lucky I am to have my life, yet nothing seems real.

Sometimes people’s voices seem to be coming from far away or I’ll drive to work and not remember getting in the car, and the trip is over. It’s been like this since I found Sarah, found her tied up like that.”

Tom pulled the covers off and drew his wife close to him. She stretched out and let her head fall onto his shoulder.

“The only times I feel like me are when I’m out there doing something about all this, but then later it seems like a waste of time.” She’d dropped off a copy of the results of Friday’s meeting, neatly typed up by Pix, at the police station on Saturday afternoon, before they’d headed north. Charley hadn’t turned any cart-wheels, even after she’d pointed out the similarity in the days and some of their other conclusions.

That night, sleepless as usual, she’d been forced to face the fact that they really hadn’t come up with anything significant.

“Is there some way you could let it go?” Tom asked. “Something I could do to help you get there?” Déjà vu all over again, and what were the odds of having two extremely attractive men offer virtually identical advice within the space of one hour?

“I wish there was. Getting another adjuster will help. And things are busy next week. I doubt I’ll have time to think of anything except radish roses and crystallized violets.”

“Do you want to talk to someone about it all?

Maybe get something to help you sleep?” Faith knew it was the sensible thing to do, but it seemed like an enormous effort at the moment.

“There are other cures for insomnia, darling.”

“Imagine that somebody stole your little electronic organizer or your Filofax—or both.” Faith could hear her sister’s sharp intake of breath over the several hundred miles of telephone wire that separated them. Hope had called Tuesday morning to offer the same advice Faith seemed to be getting from every quarter: Let it go.

“When you put it like that—”

“Exactly,” Faith interrupted. “You’d be doing the same things I’m doing.”

“And the police don’t have any leads?”

“If they do, they aren’t sharing them with us, and I very much doubt they do. The town is filled with rumors. Someone saw a man with a duffel bag in a backyard up on Hastings Hill Saturday night and called the police. The man, if he existed, either disappeared—rumor number one—or gave the police a phony address, which they didn’t realize was wrong until they got back to the station and checked a telephone book—rumor number two.”

“The whole thing makes me absolutely sick, Fay.” Hope was happily the only one who ever used this nickname, and for most of her life Faith had been trying to think of a way to tell her sister how much she disliked it. “How are the kids? Not to change the subject.”

“I’m glad to. You’re not the only one who thinks I’m obsessed. The kids are fine. Amy is right on schedule, chugging along toward two.

She gets these sudden fits of wanting something and wanting it now. Ben watches in fascination, and I don’t dare let her get away with anything. It would be the thin end of the wedge for both of them.”

“But that little face! How can you say no?” Hope and Quentin had made it clear that children, unless they came packaged and with a guarantee, would not be forcing them to face down their co-op board for many a moon, if ever.

So she could say silly things like this. Faith didn’t bother to respond.

“I have to go. There’s a show house over in Byford that Marian wants to see and I’m going with her. You were terrific to call. Love you.” The two sisters hung up, each relieved that they weren’t in the other’s shoes. Hope’s Bruno Maglis were ter-rifyingly corporate, as far as Faith was concerned, and her clothes were so boring—a row of dark suits in the closet.

She pulled on an Armani black linen skirt, tucking in a Dana Buchman ivory silk blouse with full sleeves, tight at the cuffs. It had tiny covered buttons, like those on old-fashioned bridal gowns.

Stephanie Bullock had firmly rejected white tulle and lace. She and Courtney had both headed for Vera Wang in New York almost before Binky could struggle up from his knees. Faith had seen Stephanie’s dress and it was gorgeous. What Faith would have selected herself had she not worn her mother’s dress. Courtney’s dress had been described as a column of pearl gray silk, pleated like Fortuny silk—no mauve lace or turquoise chiffon for this mother of the bride. The woman had certainly kept her figure. Hats had been in, then out so many times that Faith wasn’t sure what the Bullock women or attendants would have on their heads come the wedding day.

She was about to get the silver necklace she usually wore with this outfit, a curve of sterling made by the craftsman Ronald Hayes Pearson, when she reminded herself that it was gone. Dis-paru. This happened more times than she would have thought possible. She’d reach for a piece of jewelry, only to come up against the same old wall. She didn’t have any. To speak of, that is. She clasped the gold chain they had bought at the pawnshop in Lowell around her neck. It was very pretty and similar to the one stolen, but it didn’t feel like hers. Not yet anyway. For an instant, she felt a tiny prickling sensation around her neck.

Whose was it? The pins and needles went away as she reminded herself of what Tom had said when they bought it: “It’s here. It’s for sale and you’ll give it a good home. And I mean that literally. Nobody has a more beautiful, exquisitely kissable neck than my wife.” He’d whispered the latter part in what was supposed to be a sexy voice, but given that it was Tom, it sounded more like an Eagle Scout swearing allegiance. He came close to sensual when he adopted a French accent, but this had also been known to cause the object of his desire to burst into gales of laughter.

Faith leaned over and brushed her hair, then stood up and let it fall into place. Well-meaning friends had burbled on about what fun it would be to buy new things once the insurance money came through. She felt immensely sorry for herself. They had no idea what they were talking about. The next person to say something like that was going to get a smack. She smiled at her reflection in the mirror. Maybe it would be Millicent.

Tom had agreed to pick the kids up and give them lunch so the two women in his life could have this time together. Faith liked her mother-in-law—especially once they’d ironed out the question of what Faith should call her. Mother Fairchild, Marian’s suggestion, had been too reminiscent of a convent, and Faith did not consider herself a novice. The use of Mrs. Fairchild took them through most of the engagement, but then Tom’s Dad had stepped in and announced that it would be Marian and Dick. Much better than all the pussyfooting around he’d observed Faith doing, he’d said, and infinitely preferable to

“Hey, you.” Ben called them Granny and Gramps, which was what they most cared about at this point.

She grabbed her bag. Marian would be here any minute and she wasn’t a woman you kept waiting, particularly when there was a show house in the vicinity.

Some got their kicks from champagne; Marian Fairchild got hers from viewing the latest trends in balloon shades and the newest staple- and glue-gun tricks. She was unabashed about her passion for seeing other people’s houses—after all, what better pastime for a realtor’s wife? The South Shore was filled with Fairchild enterprises—Fairchild’s Ford, Uncle Bob in Duxbury; Fairchild’s Market, like Fairchild’s Real Estate, also in Norwell and originally owned by Tom’s grandparents. There were no Fairchilds associ-ated with the market now, but the name would go on forever. Any change would elicit an outpouring of wrath and sharp decline in custom on the part of the people who had “always” shopped there.

“Yoo-hoo! Anybody home?”

Faith flew down the stairs, glad she’d left the front door open. Marian was in the dining room, staring at the sideboard in shock.

“I know you said they took the drawer, but I suppose I didn’t believe it until now.” She put her arms around Faith.

Marian Fairchild was in her late fifties and wore outfits that varied only in regard to the fibers—wool or cotton, depending on the season.

The cardigan sweaters with grosgrain ribbon matched the A-line or pleated skirts. Today, her round-collared blouse was a bright Liberty print.

She carried one of those wooden-handled pocket-books that had coverings like slipcovers. They buttoned on and off. The tartans of winter had given way to a bright pink linen that picked up the colors of her blouse. Her sweater and skirt were pale green. Her headband matched. Tall, like all the Fairchilds, Marian had great posture and was very fit. Her hair was thick and so white, she looked like the peroxide blonde she never was. Her bright pink Coty lipstick always appeared slightly smudged, bleeding into the tiny wrinkles around her lips—and except for some laugh lines, the only wrinkles Faith had detected.

“We’ll take my car. It’s out front. Lunch first, then the house—or the other way around?”

“Either way is fine with me.”

“Then let’s eat. I was up early and I’m famished.”

The closest thing to a tearoom—which was what Faith thought of as a mother-in-law type of place for lunch, especially her mother-in-law—was in Byford itself, not far from the show house.

Over three kinds of finger sandwiches—cream cheese on date and nut bread, curried chicken salad on buckwheat walnut, and cucumber on white—and the inevitable garden salads, the two women covered everything from the robbery to what to do about Amy’s new habit of getting out of her crib several times a night: “Put her back.” Marian’s sympathy was balm to Faith’s soul; the only fly in the ointment being the elder Mrs. Fairchild’s disconcerting habit of suddenly asking, “Did they get the mother-of-pearl fish-serving pieces the Conklins gave you as a wedding present?” or “Is Great-Aunt Phoebe’s cameo ring gone? You know, the shell cameo with the head of Plato that had her name inscribed inside?” Each time, feeling masses of guilt wash over her, Faith had to say, “Yes, it’s gone. Everything’s gone. Everything.”

When they’d finished their strawberries and clotted cream, Marian summoned the waitress, who bore a striking resemblance to one of the ones at the Willow Tree, asked for the check, and announced to Faith, “Lunch is on me, dear. You need a little treat after what you’ve been through.

No, I won’t hear of it.” She put up her hand in an imperious gesture, reminding Faith of Tom’s description: “Mom was the tough one. We could never get around her. She’d do this thing with her hand like a traffic cop, and if you knew what was good for you, you just shut up and obeyed.” Faith did.

The street the show house was on was lined with cars. Marian found a parking place and they joined several other women walking up the slight hill toward the large Victorian house, site of this year’s event. Faith felt oddly like a pilgrim.

Thoughts of cockleshells and the Wife of Bath crossed her mind. Marian had stayed focused. “I think this one is to raise money for hunger. Not for hunger—you know what I mean. Each room is supposed to represent a different historical period, although I don’t know why they just didn’t stick to Victorian to match the exterior. It’s a gorgeous house.”

The perfectly restored stately Victorian had been painted a soft purple, with white trim and black shutters. A large porch wrapped around the front and it was filled with wicker furniture and flowering plants. The front garden was equally spectacular. A hedge of white lilacs separated it from the street and the fragrance brought Faith back to Winslow Street and the day Sarah died.

She reached over and looped her arm through Marian’s. Her mother-in-law smiled.

“They totally redid the gardens for this. The house belongs to a young couple. They moved to a condominium for several months while the decorators took over. They don’t get to keep anything except the window treatments—and of course the floors have all been redone, walls painted and papered. And the garden. They keep that. I wish they’d do my house.”

Faith thought of the mountain of objects filling the large Norwell Dutch Colonial. It was not exactly a decorator’s dream; more like a phantasm appearing after too much rich food at bedtime.

They had their tickets. A woman standing beside the front door and dressed exactly like Marian but in different hues took them, dropping the stubs into a beribboned basket.

“Welcome, ladies. You can tour the house in any way you wish, but we think if you start here in the foyer, moving to the dining room, then the living room and kitchen before going upstairs, you’ll get the best effect. Plan to spend a lot of time on the third floor. It’s an old-fashioned girl’s bower. The committee has a few gift items for sale there, which I’m sure you won’t want to miss.” She handed them each a booklet listing the names of the decorators for the various rooms, sponsors, and advertisers. Faith looked at the number of women roaming about on a weekday and realized that show houses meant big money.

“Oh, look, Faith, don’t you like the way they’ve stenciled the floor? For a moment, I thought it was parquet, but it’s paint. Now, that wouldn’t be hard. It’s merely a series of diamond shapes. All you need is masking tape and paint.”

“And someone to do it,” Faith commented. Her idea of do-it-yourself was dialing the phone.

The foyer, which was almost as large as Faith’s dining room, was lovely. The tall windows let in the light and the decorator had wisely left them almost bare, looping some sheer muslin across the top and letting it hang down to the floor on each side. In one corner, there was a small fireplace surrounded by the original Minton tiles in teal blue and white. The walls had been lacquered and glazed in the same blue.

Marian had a little notebook out and was busily jotting down ideas. She was a great one for gluing pinecones she’d sprayed gold onto Styro-foam forms and putting up potpourri from her garden, but Faith had yet to see her mother-in-law carry out anything more complicated. To be fair, it would be hard to find the time. Marian’s volunteer work alone constituted at least two full-time jobs. Then, she was always pitching in at the office, or rushing to help one of her brood.

Dick Fairchild had recently taken a partner, Sheila Harding, acknowledging at long last the unlikeli-hood that any of his children would take over the business. Sheila was a “crackerjack,” according to Dick: “Keeps her ear so close to the ground, I swear she’ll grow roots one of these days!” But Marian still liked to keep her hand in. Faith suspected it was more that she liked to view people’s houses, especially in her own town.

Marian leaned over and lowered her voice.

“Pier 1 pots, but they look expensive here. Besides, put anything on a sconce on the wall and people assume it’s worth a lot.”

Faith filed this tip away for much-future reference. She’d be in a parsonage of some sort for most of her life and these usually did not offer up much scope for the imagination. The Fairchilds had built a small house on Sanpere Island in Maine last summer and as far as decorating went, she was thinking IKEA.

“What a wonderful dining room. So big!” Marian exclaimed. “People had larger families in those days; even though the table is set for twelve, it could hold more.”

Here the decorator had stuck to traditional Vic-toriana—huge mirrors reflected the ornately carved dark furniture. A Boston fern the size of a small shrub stood in the bow window. Heavy fringed damask drapes in the hue known as ashes of roses—Faith had gleaned this from Marian—

framed the windows. The tassels of the tiebacks fell in carefully arranged silken heaps on the deep blue and ivory Oriental carpet.

Marian was standing transfixed by the place settings. Faith was glad she had found the time to be with her mother-in-law; she was obviously having such a good time.

Just as Faith was about to trot out her own abundant store of knowledge—the plates were early Spode—she was stunned to see Marian grab one of the crisp white napkins from the table, sending the Tiffany Audubon sterling forks clang-ing against the fruit-laden epergne centerpiece.

Stripping the ring off, Marian Fairchild flung the serviette to the ground and exclaimed, “This napkin ring! It’s Tom’s! As if I wouldn’t know it anywhere. His initials are as plain as day. And here are Ben’s and little Amy’s!” Napkins were flying every which way.

The hostess whose job it was to prevent overfa-miliarity with the decor was moving swiftly from her chair by the door to the rescue. Marian put up her hand. The woman froze, stunned by both the gesture and Mrs. Fairchild’s words: “Somebody call the police! These are stolen goods!”

Six

Faith was slightly miffed. Especially since her own napkin ring was staring her in the face. It wasn’t as distinctive as Tom’s—a large sterling re-poussé ring, originally his great-grandfather’s—

but there were her initials in an elegant script and the slight dent from the time she’d heaved it at Hope and missed, hitting the dining room wall instead.

Yes, she was miffed. She’d spent most of Saturday fruitlessly chasing all over New England; Marian simply walked into a house barely a five-minute drive from Faith’s own and came up a winner.

“Please! What are you doing!” The volunteer had come unstuck and was frantically picking up the napkins.

“tFp, Thomas Preston Fairchild. It was his great-grandfather’s name and it’s his. I’ll thank you to call the police immediately or at the least show me to a phone,” Marian said.

By now, a crowd of very interested bystanders had gathered and others were trying to squeeze through the door. Word of the ruckus was spreading quickly throughout the house: Some woman was running amok with the table settings in the dining room!

Marian Fairchild was not paying the slightest attention to anyone except the hostess, who was beginning to strike her as slightly stupid. She’d recited the names and birth dates on each ring without looking—what further proof could the woman want? Faith, meanwhile, was taking the opportunity to scrutinize the rest of the room for a Fairchild gravy ladle or the odd butter knife.

The onlookers were parted by a small, very determined figure. She took Marian by the elbow and said, “I’m sure we can straighten this all out.

These are such lovely things, aren’t they? Of course it’s a great temptation to pick them up, but why don’t I just put them back where they belong and we can have a little talk?”

Faith moved quickly next to her mother-in-law, who was ready to blow a gasket, although mo-mentarily speechless. “I’m Faith Fairchild and this is my mother-in-law, Mrs. Richard Fairchild.

It may be hard to believe, but these do belong to us. Our home was burglarized recently and somehow these, and perhaps other items, have ended up here at your show house.” She gently but firmly detached the woman’s hand from Marian’s elbow. “Is there someplace we can talk? We need to know where these napkin rings came from, and the police should be informed.” The woman was not quite ready to give up.

These little terrier types never do, Faith reminded herself. Fixing Faith with a stern eye, the woman asked. “Are you absolutely sure?”

“We’re absolutely sure,” Faith replied.

Marian had found her voice. “Faith, dear, she thinks I was trying to steal them! She thinks I’m a thief—or a lunatic!” Marian’s tone made it clear who, of the two of them, had the mental defi-ciency.

The crowd of ladies began to buzz. They would have paid twice the admission price! Conversations with those unlucky enough to have missed all this were rapidly being mentally rehearsed:

“Did you hear what happened at the Byford show house? I mean, she looked like such a nice woman, well dressed . . .”

Hearing the whispered undercurrents and needing no translation after her years in Aleford, Faith addressed the group. “I’m sure all of you have heard about the recent rash of burglaries in the area, and our house was hit. My mother-in-law recognized the napkin rings as soon as she looked at the table, and she did what any of us would do—took them back. Now, if you’ll excuse us . . .” She led the way, she knew not where, through the nearest door. It was a large butler’s pantry and she was happy to see a phone. It hung on the wall and wasn’t disguised in any cutesy, decorative way. Just a plain—she picked up the receiver—working phone. Before she dialed, she turned to the hostess, who was dogging their heels, keeping the napkin rings in sight. “I’d like to call the Aleford police and let them know about this. I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.” She was excessively polite.

“It’s Mrs. Eleanor Barnett. Yes, I think the police should be notified. Nothing like this has ever happened at one of my houses before.” Clearly, it was Faith’s and Marian’s fault.

While she punched in the numbers, Faith was aware that Marian and Mrs. Barnett were having a heated discussion sotto voce. She listened as best she could while the phone at the police station rang—and rang.

“I can’t let you take these! Even if they are yours,” the woman corrected herself hastily. “I mean, they are obviously yours, but all our antiques have been supplied by Nan Howell. She owns Tymely Treasures here in town. I have to get in touch with her.”

“Never mind.” Faith had a sudden premoni-tion. If this Nan Howell was honest, fine, but if she wasn’t, calling would mean any other things of theirs the woman might have in her possession would promptly disappear. “We’ll let the Aleford police handle this and finish looking at the beautiful job you’ve done here. Marian, we know where the napkin rings are, so let’s leave them for now.”

Marian looked as if she was about to protest, but Faith caught her eye and she got the message.

She handed the napkin rings over without another word.

Faith was speaking into the phone. “Yes, we’re positive they’re ours, Dale. They have our initials on them and our birth dates.” Charley wasn’t at the station, which accounted for the delay in answering the phone, and Patrolman Warren was having a hard time believing they had found some of their stolen items—giving a lie to Charley’s well-meant reassurances that the Fairchilds’ goods might never be recovered.

“Golly, Mrs. Fairchild! I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anybody getting their stuff back!” He promised to get the message to the chief as quickly as possible and Faith said she’d be in touch.

“The police have been informed,” Faith said emphatically. “Marian, shall we see the rest of the house?” She walked from the pantry into the large kitchen. Clutching the napkin rings, Eleanor Barnett went in the opposite direction to restore the table settings, leaving the Fairchild women with obvious reluctance. She glanced around the kitchen. Aside from some small potted herbs on the windowsill, there was nothing pilferable.

Marian spoke loudly and distinctly: “I think granite counters are getting slightly old hat, don’t you, Faith, but putting a hinged window seat along those back windows was terribly clever.” The show was over—or one of them.

As soon as the woman left, Faith said softly,

“There must be a back door. We’ve got to get to that antique shop before anyone—the police or someone from here—calls the owner. They’ll be so busy talking about all this among themselves that we may get lucky and no one will think to call the antiques store. Besides, they think we’re still here. Afterward, I want to come back and search the rest of the house.”

Marian nodded and said brightly, again in her crisp New England voice, a voice with great carrying power, “I wonder if there’s a mudroom. So handy if you have small children. And look at the garden! Did you ever see such roses? Such early blooms!” She had Faith outside and walking down the street toward the car before you could say Mario Buatta.

While Marian drove, Faith found the address of Tymely Treasures in the show house program booklet. It was on Route 62, which was nearby.

She watched the numbers, and they were almost in Carlisle before they found it—next to a dry cleaners and, from the look of the brick, dating back in “tyme” to the mid-1970s.

A bell rang merrily as Faith pushed open the door. The store was deep and narrow. Every surface was covered—paintings and prints on the walls, rugs of various descriptions on the floor, most of which was taken up by chests, chairs, tables, and whatnots—layers upon layers. One side of the room was lined with bookcases and china closets, each appropriately crammed. The other side contained several showcases filled with silver, jewelry, and small objets d’art—tchotchkes.

The afternoon sun caught a tabletop filled with cut glass. It also glinted off a group of offerings from the thirties—shiny cocktail shakers, blue etched glass mirrors, slender nymphs draped in impossible poses around clock faces. Fringed silk and paisley shawls had been draped over a row of late-nineteenth-century love seats and it wasn’t until one of the shawls moved, revealing a pleasant-faced middle-aged woman with a Dutch bob, that the Fairchilds were sure that someone was indeed minding the store.

“Hi, welcome to Tymely Treasures. I’m Nan.

Are you looking for anything special?” She was wearing a long, loose caftan and, in addition to the shawl, had adorned herself with strings of amber and cinnabar beads, several inches of brightly colored Bakelite bracelets on both wrists, and a large cameo on her ample breast.

“We’re looking for a gift—silver, or maybe a piece of jewelry.” Faith had no intention of saying anything about the napkin rings until she’d thoroughly cased the joint and formed an impression of Nan Howell.

“Over there.” She pointed to her left. “I’ll be happy to show you anything you want to see.

Take your time.” She resumed her position on the love seat and took up the book she’d been reading. It was a mystery— At Death’s Door by Robert Barnard.

Twenty minutes later, Faith realized dejectedly that while Nan Howell had lovely things, none of them belonged to the Fairchilds. The woman had gotten up twice, once to answer the phone and once to unlock one of the showcases and pull out a box of serving pieces so they could have a closer look. Marian had drifted off toward some Ben-nington pottery and Faith was trying to decide what to do next, when she was startled by Nan’s voice. She’d gotten up and was walking toward Faith.

“I bought the napkin rings. I didn’t steal them.

You are Faith Fairchild, right?” Was the woman clairvoyant? Faith remembered the phone ringing. Charley must have gotten the message. But it wasn’t Charley.

“Ellie Barnett, the woman in charge of the show house, is an old friend. She called me right away. ‘A blonde,’ she said, ‘about five six, very well dressed, accompanied by an older woman,’

so I figured it must be you.” All this had been delivered in a sympathetic but also slightly amused manner. Faith had the feeling that Nan was picturing the scene in the show house dining room.

She’d also clearly enjoyed letting the two

“sleuths” search her store, all the while knowing exactly who they were and what they were up to.

Momentarily diverted by trying to analyze the owner of Tymely Treasures—and by the flattering description of her own wardrobe—Faith was soon back on track. “Where did you get the napkin rings—and when?”

“Let’s sit down. Do you want a cup of tea?” Nan locked the front door and turned the sign around so it read closed.

She led the way to the rear of the store, which had been curtained off. Behind the curtain, there was a table with a hot plate, several chairs, and more stock. Nan put the kettle on.

“It’s a horrible experience—being broken into.

I’ve had things taken from the shop or at shows, but never from my home. It always bothers me to lose something. You know that someone you took on good faith as a customer wasn’t really, but it would be much, much worse to have it happen in one’s abode. The old ‘Your house is your castle’ thing—impregnable, safe.”

Nan was a talker, something that had not been apparent at first. She knew enough to keep her mouth shut while people were browsing, but now there was no need. This was all fine with Faith. She simply needed to steer the conversation in the right direction.

Marian had taken over making the tea. She automatically assumed tasks like this.

“You still haven’t told us where our napkin rings came from. How did they end up with you?

They were stolen last Tuesday.”

“I got them from the Old Oaken Bucket Antiques Mart near Peterborough, New Hampshire, last Friday. The receipt may have the case number on it. Anyway, it’s the first large one you come to on the right behind the front counter. Oaken Bucket rents space to dealers, most of whom don’t have, or don’t want, shops. There are lots of places like this all over New England now. Antiques supermarkets. The small, owner-operated shop may become a thing of the past. Kind of like all those chains putting the old-fashioned drugstores—you know, with the soda fountains—and small independent bookstores out of business.

People want to look at a whole lot of things without driving around. I call it the Wal-Martization of America.” Nan was off on a tangent again.

Faith wasn’t paying much attention.

Her heart was soaring. Peterborough wasn’t far.

Maybe an hour and a half. She looked at her watch. But if she was going to make it today, she’d have to go now. Unless the place was open late.

Another thought suddenly occurred to her. She hadn’t seen any of their things displayed, yet that didn’t necessarily mean Nan hadn’t purchased more items. Some could have been sold already!

“What else did you buy from that case?”

“Just the napkin rings. I needed them for the show house and they were reasonable. There was a nice gold bracelet, but the price was too high. I left an offer.”

Marian placed a mug of tea in Faith’s hand.

“Why don’t you and Tom take a drive up there?

I’ll watch the children. There’s no point in going back to the show house if Mrs. Howell”—Marian had obviously spotted the heavy gold wedding band on the woman’s ring finger, as had Faith—

“bought only the napkin rings.” This was said a bit wistfully, and Faith promised herself that she would make it her number one priority in the future to take her mother-in-law to every bedecked house possible.

Nan had been eyeing both women. “It’s not a bad idea. They stay open later now that daylight saving time is in effect, and with Memorial Day weekend coming up, you’d better check things out as soon as you can. That’s the official start of the tourist season, and plenty of folks take the opportunity to go antiquing.”

Faith was seized with a sudden rush of panic.

They had to get to the Old Oaken Bucket and they had to get there as soon as possible!

“Thank you!” She put the mug down, tea forgotten.

Marian gave Nan a warm smile. “You have such a delightful shop. I’ll certainly be back when I have more time—and about the napkin rings.

Why don’t you tell your friend Mrs. Barnett to have them at the door? The children like to go to Carlisle for ice cream, and we’ll pick the silver up on our way.”

No flies on her.

As she walked the two women out, Nan told Faith to come back the next day. “I can give you a list of trade publications where you can send photos or descriptions of your stolen things. Also suggest other places you might look.”

“We wasted almost all day Saturday going to pawnshops. We should have been checking out antiques stores!” Faith had visions of her possessions changing hands almost before her eyes.

“It’s still very early—your things could be anywhere, including pawnshops. You can’t know where—or who’s involved—except that you were obviously broken into by pros.”

The first time Faith had heard this, she had felt a modicum of pride. They’d been robbed, but by high-class thieves. Now she wished it had been by thugs who didn’t know Meissen from Melomac. Maybe they wouldn’t have known where to look or taken the sideboard drawer. These guys would have grabbed the computers, maybe a little jewelry, and run.

“Yup, pros,” Nan said.

This was getting to be another one of those phrases that Faith wasn’t sure she could hear repeated again without seriously damaging something.

The Old Oaken Bucket was certainly not your average cozy antiques shop. There was nothing oaken about it, for a start. It was a long, low cor-rugated metal warehouse with a large sign at the entrance advising patrons to lock their coats and bags in their cars; otherwise, they would have to be checked. Another sign warned patrons that the premises were protected by Acme Alarms. AND smith & wesson had been added underneath, crudely printed with a black marker. There was no welcome mat. There was, however, a bucket—a large tin pail filled with sand and another sign—park your butts here. Faith went back to the car and locked her purse in the trunk.

“Ready?” she said to Tom.

“Absolutely.” She’d had no trouble convincing him to make the mad dash to New Hampshire before the place closed. He’d been stunned, and overjoyed that they’d recovered anything, and the thought of more had put him in a high good humor.

“I told Ms. Dawson she could take the rest of the day off,” Tom told Faith on the way up. “She really is working too hard, but she insisted on staying. You know, I’ve never seen work pile up on her desk. The woman is the best secretary I’ve ever had. I mean, assistant.” The church had recently changed the name of the position to administrative assistant.

Rhoda Dawson had been pushed to the back of Faith’s mind since last Thursday and now the questions that had nagged at her then emerged with full force. Was the woman a workaholic?

Maybe she had no other life except for her job? Or maybe she was nipping in and out of the church office to size up various prospects in the neighborhood for her partners in crime. Faith wasn’t about to voice this suspicion and get lectured again. Let Tom enjoy the sight of a clean desk.

He’d never see his own that way.

The inside of the Old Oaken Bucket was as sterile as the outside. A Formica counter barred the way from the entrance to the rows and rows of floor-to-ceiling glass booths. The booths were all locked up tight and employees walked up and down the aisles with keys. Faith watched someone open a case for a customer as Tom filled out a form requiring more information than a 1040. Apparently, the customer was interested in several pieces of jewelry. They were handed to her one at a time, the watchful eye of the Bucket staff member never leaving the item for an instant. There were also video cameras mounted on the ceiling, keeping track of things. Nan’s analogy to Wal-Mart was false, Faith decided. Wal-Mart was a whole lot more trusting.

She’d instructed Tom to give a false name and address and now peered over to see if he’d complied. If the Bucket people were involved with the Fairchilds’ robbery, they might recognize the address and send them packing, Faith had explained to Tom. He’d agreed, but she should have signed them in herself. Falsehoods did not come trippingly to Tom’s tongue—or hand. At the last moment, his conscience might force his fingers to write his real name and they would miss their chance. Next to the counter blocking entry to the booths, there was another intimidating sign: we reserve the right to refuse entrance to anybody for any reason. The woman behind the counter examined Tom’s form carefully and lifted the hinged section, allowing them to pass into the main part of the store one at a time. “Go right ahead, Mr. Montgomery.” That was the name Faith had given him, not too common, not too uncommon, and not Tom’s initials. Faith breathed a sigh of relief. They were in.

Unlike Nan Howell, this woman wasn’t wearing anything over five years old. She was dressed in tight black toreador pants and a sheer white blouse. Heavily made up and her bottle-blond hair elaborately coiffed, she looked more like a cocktail waitress than the proprietor of an antiques emporium. “If you want to look at something, I have people with keys on the floor,” she added perfunctorily.

Tom nodded and let his wife precede him. She made a beeline for the cases to the right. The surroundings might be institutional, but the silver, porcelain, glass, and other objects the dealers offered turned the drab interior into Ali Baba’s cave.

“The first on the right,” Faith whispered to Tom. “This must be it.”

The shelves had been covered with deep crimson velvet and each was devoted to a different category. The top one displayed four alabaster busts. Inspired by the beauty of the gods and goddesses purloined from the Parthenon, Victorians had wanted to bring Artemis and Aphrodite even closer to home—in the drawing room or parlor. These were fine examples.

The next shelf was covered with Chinese export porcelain and netsukes. Again, all were in perfect condition, not even a hairline crack in any of the Rose Medallion.

The next shelf . . . On the next shelf was grandmother Sibley’s silver creamer and sugar bowl, the fish-serving pieces from the Conklins, a cold-meat fork from Faith and Tom’s wedding silver, an Art Nouveau picture frame they’d bought at the Marché aux Puces de Clignancourt in Paris, and Great-Grandmother Fairchild’s gold thim-ble—or so it appeared. Her initials were engraved inside. Marian had given it to Amy on her first birthday, because their initials were the same.

Faith had decided to assume this was why and not respond to any hint Marian might be subtly trying to convey. Embroidering handkerchiefs and turning out samplers were not skills she could pass on to her daughter and she didn’t intend to take up needlework at this stage in her life, no matter how simple Pix said it was to count cross-stitches. The only needle Faith plied was a basting one, and she found French tarts infinitely preferable to French knots.

She was staring, transfixed, into the case.

“Tom!” It was hard not to scream. “Look!”

“I know, I know.” He was squeezing her hand so hard, her ring was cutting into her finger, but she didn’t let go.

“It’s our silver—and that malachite pin, on the bottom shelf. It’s mine. Hope gave it to me.

Quick, find somebody with a key.”

Feigning nonchalance wasn’t easy, but the Fairchild/Montgomerys gave performances wor-thy of at least an Oscar nomination. They’d have received a People’s Choice Award, hands down.

“This is nice, dear, but the stone is small. Do you think it’s a real amethyst?” Faith was holding a lavaliere on a long, thin gold chain that her parents had given her as a teenager.

“Let’s get it—and these other things.” They’d piled the silver on the front counter and now added the two pieces of jewelry.

“Can you hold these for us while we look around some more?” Faith asked the woman, who was listing their items.

“Sure,” she said. “Take your time. We stay open until dark.” She lit a cigarette. Clearly none of the rules applied to her.

At first, it was fun. Elated by their success, the Fairchilds scanned each case thoroughly. Then it got tedious and the items began to look alike.

Hadn’t they just seen those shaving mugs? Those shelves of souvenir spoons?

“Why don’t we split up?” Tom suggested.

Faith shook her head. “You wouldn’t recognize everything, particularly the jewelry. Some of the things I never wear, or wore, I should say,” she amended sadly. “Things from when I was a kid.

Things that aren’t in style anymore.” Finally, they reached the end. They hadn’t found anything else.

“Obviously, we don’t tell her the things are stolen. She’d call whoever the dealer is, and we can forget about ever seeing anything else again.”

“So, we just buy it back?”

“We buy it back, but dicker, Tom, dicker.” He gave her a withering look. You didn’t have to tell a Yankee to bargain.

“Are you dealers?” the woman asked.

“No. But I’m sure you can do better for us.

What’s your cash price?” Tom asked. The Fairchilds had stopped at an ATM. Faith didn’t want to have to give identification with a check.

The woman looked at them with a practiced eye, appraising their clothes, wedding and engagement rings, then entered the information into her mental calculator. Sharon Fielding, who owned the Old Oaken Bucket with her husband, Jack, could spot a reproduction iron bank at twenty paces. She also knew she had a relatively well-heeled couple who weren’t going to hold out for 10 percent and risk losing the items. “Five percent for cash—since you’re not dealers. That’s all I’m authorized to give.” Case number four’s dealer—where all the merchandise had come from—gave Sharon free rein, but besides rent, she extracted a commission from the dealers. Buying low and selling high was as important to her as it was to them.

Tom knew he was being taken, but he didn’t want to risk a delay. They needed to walk out of the place with everything now—for their peace of mind and in case anyone got the wind up. Or there was also the chance that someone else might purchase some of the items.

Faith moved into action. “There were such lovely things in that case,” she said. “Does the dealer have a shop? We’d like to see more.”

“No, he doesn’t.” Okay, it was a man.

“We wanted to talk to him about several of the other pieces we are interested in, especially the tea service.” It was the most expensive item in the case—vintage Jensen silver from Denmark. “Is he local? Could we get in touch with him?”

“No, he’s in Massachusetts, but we have dealer day the second Friday of each month and he often comes.”

“Oh dear, that won’t be for a while. Why don’t you give us his name and we’ll get in touch with him directly?” Okay, a man in Massachusetts.

“We never give out names.”

Period.

They’d succeeded in narrowing things down, but male Massachusetts antiques dealers com-prised a rather large group.

On the way home, Faith realized she was exhausted—and hungry. The little tea sandwiches she’d consumed at lunch were a distant memory.