One corner of her mind was entering the familiar number; another was still berating herself mentally for not closing the garage doors. “I have to tell him what’s happened.” Once she reached him, she wouldn’t mind a cup of coffee. Her throat was so dry, she could scarcely swallow. She hoped Pix wasn’t experimenting with “European” flavors again. The hazelnut ginger had been truly loathsome.
There was no answer at the church office.
“Where is he? Oh,
She drummed her fingers on Pix’s hall table, leaving little smudges in the Old English shine as she listened. Tom had hired a new parish secretary two weeks ago. Her name was Rhoda Dawson, and Faith had been subjected to nightly reports about how lucky he was, what a treasure Ms. Dawson was, and the like. She let the phone ring a few more times. Still no answer. So, where was this treasure now?
She hung up, coffee forgotten. “Come on. The police should be there by now.”
“Do you want me to stay and keep trying?” Pix asked.
It was the logical thing to do, but Faith didn’t want to go back to the house by herself. She grabbed Pix’s hand and pulled her toward the front door. “We can try again later. I want you with me.”
They walked rapidly into the next yard. The police had not arrived yet. The house seemed un-naturally quiet. For a moment, the two women stood silently, looking at the gaping doors.
“Maybe you frightened them off. Maybe they didn’t get much,” Pix offered in a hopeful tone of voice. Faith looked at her dismally. It was an A. A.
Milne kind of thing to say. An “It’s all right, Pooh” from Piglet. Except it wasn’t.
“They must have seen me leave, or noticed that the garage was empty! Oh, why did I choose today of all days to do my shopping! And why didn’t I close the garage door?” The thought had continued to nag at her since she first realized her lapse. She was sure now that she’d locked up good and tight, as the entire town had been doing since Sarah’s death, but then she hadn’t closed the garage.
“I might just as well have left a sign on the front lawn—house empty, come and get it!” she said bitterly. She dug the toe of her shoe into the soft ground, disturbing the turf her husband was doggedly trying to nurture into something resembling a lawn.
“Don’t be silly, you couldn’t have known you’d be robbed, and those doors weigh a ton,” Pix said briskly in the no-nonsense tone she’d picked up from her headmistress at Windsor. It had worked with adolescent girls and sometimes worked with Pix’s own three children. It wasn’t working with Faith.
“Where are the police? It’s not as if they have far to come!” The parsonage was one of the houses bordering Aleford’s historic green. The police station was a few blocks farther down Main Street. What was taking them so long? She began to walk rapidly up and down the driveway. Little details were obsessing her. She’d found a brand- new book of stamps on the sidewalk in front of the library and had happily said to herself, This must be my lucky day. Luck. It all came down to that. Good luck. Bad luck.
Her overriding emotion was anger, and it was mounting as she waited. Faith was angry. Angry at the intruders, angry at the police, angry at her best friend and neighbor, whose house was intact, angry at the world. She turned to Pix. “Maybe you’d better go try to call again.”
Now Pix seemed unwilling to leave Faith alone. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, tell Ms. Dawson to get ahold of Tom—he should be at the hospital by now—and have him come home as fast as he can. I’ll be fine.” Faith spat out the word
A police car pulled into the Fairchilds’ driveway as Pix was starting to leave. Patrolman Dale Warren got out. He was carrying a clipboard.
“The chief will be along in a minute. He had to get some stuff together. Now, what do we have here?”
“That!” Faith led him to the door.
Dale was a tall young man. One of his uncles and his grandfather had been cops, too. Law enforcement was his life. He solemnly inspected the damage.
“Was it like this when you left?”
Faith looked around wildly for some sort of blunt instrument, seized by an impulse to blud-geon Patrolman Warren to death. It was all she could do to stop herself from breaking out in hysterical laughter. As she walked toward her house, Pix caught Faith’s eye. This time, the headmistress trick worked and Faith took a deep breath.
“Noooo,” she said in an overly patient tone. “It was not like this when I left.”
Dale nodded and made a note of the reply.
Next question. “What time did you leave the house?”
This, at least, made sense—more sense than the notion that she might have picked up a crowbar or an ax and whacked away at her own door.
“Shortly after Tom and Ben. Tom was dropping Ben off at nursery school and I was taking Amy to play group. It must have been around eight-forty-five.”
“Did you go back to the house during the morning?”
“No, I did my marketing, returned some books to the library, other errands.”
Faith felt the first tears of the day prick her eyes. They did not fall so much as sting. If she hadn’t gone to the library, if, if, if . . .
She’d wanted to go into the house since she’d first seen the broken door frame, and now, standing at the threshold, the urge was almost irre-sistible. Dale seemed to read her thoughts.
“Why don’t you come in and see what might be missing?”
He stood aside to let her step over the slivers of wood. His optimistic tone suggested, as had Pix’s earlier, that perhaps the Fairchilds’ door had been destroyed by someone desperate to grab a quick cup of coffee or just for the hell of it. Faith, of course, knew better. People only broke doors down when they wanted to get in and take something out. Something valuable. She started to step into the kitchen, then stopped.
“Shouldn’t we wait for Charley? Aren’t you going to want to dust for prints?”
“Oh yeah, sure. We’ll wait.” While steeped in the traditions of the force, Dale still got a little confused sometimes about procedure.
So they waited, an unlikely twosome standing in the Fairchilds’ backyard. Dale gazed up at the sky intently. Faith followed his glance. He seemed about to speak. She prepared herself for something meteorological, something cumulonimbus.
“These were not nice people,” Dale commented instead.
Was the whole day going to be like this? Faith wondered bleakly, her anger ebbing. Improbables, idiocies, platitudes? “Was it like this when you left? . . . These were not nice people.” No, not nice at all. Dale didn’t seem to expect a response.
She didn’t offer one. He was looking to the heavens again, an anxious expression on his young face. He seemed to be searching for an answer—or maybe he was planning to go fishing when his shift was over.
A few minutes later, Charley arrived with two plainclothes cops, both carrying bulky cases.
MacIsaac took Faith’s hand.
“I’m very sorry this had to happen to you.” It was the right thing to say. And the right things started happening. Suddenly, the yard was filled with activity. They shot rolls and rolls of film—photographs of the doors, the steps, the un-sightly yews to either side, which the Fairchilds had been vowing to replace since they moved in.
They dusted the stoop, the frame, the doors for prints.
“Two good ones here!” the fingerprint man called over his shoulder, peering at the molding around the outside door. “Must have grabbed it when they were finished, after he took his gloves off. Maybe carrying something and missed his footing.”
“We’ll get them, Faith. We’ll get them.” Charley stood grimly watching. He had a patrolwoman checking the area surrounding the green and questioning the neighbors. All it ever took was one break. Someone glancing out the window.
Someone strolling on Main Street, noting a car.
At last, one of the men motioned to the chief from inside the house. “We’ve taken all the pictures. Mrs. Fairchild can come in and tell us what’s missing. Just don’t touch anything. Ray hasn’t finished checking for prints.”
