Faith had wanted to know the worst since she’d arrived at the back door, but now she was loath to find out. She wanted to turn time back.
She wanted it to be yesterday. Please let it not be today; then this wouldn’t be happening. It was the way she had felt last fall when they’d lost a dear friend to breast cancer, the way it had been when Sarah Winslow died. If it’s never tomorrow, you’ll always be safe.
“Faith?” Charley put his hand on her arm.
He’d been through this countless times. “Come on. Maybe they didn’t get much.”
But they had.
The kitchen was filled with false hopes. It looked exactly the way it had when the Fairchilds had left—chairs slightly askew around the big round table set in front of the bow window facing the backyard and, beyond, the church. The dishes were in the sink, and Faith valiantly made a joke.
“You’d think they could have at least cleaned up the breakfast things.” She was valiant. She was plucky. She opened the door to the dining room.
She was devastated.
“Oh my God.” She clutched at Charley. “Everything’s gone! They even took the drawer.” The mahogany sideboard looked like a seven-year-old missing his two front teeth, only there was nothing to grin about and the tooth fairy was far away.
“Must have used it to carry the stuff. Pretty common,” the man with the camera said. He was watching his sidekick brush white powder all over the gleaming dark wood surfaces in the room. “Do you remember if the chair was pulled out like this?” He turned to Faith, who was still transfixed by the hole in her furniture.
“What? Oh, no.” She looked at the dining room chair turned away from the table, completely sideways. “They must have taken out the drawer and set it on the chair.” All the better to fill it up.
Patrolman Dale Warren was at her side with his clipboard. “Can you give us some idea of what’s missing? The quicker we do this, the quicker an APB can go out. You never know . . .” Faith wished he would shut up. The car, van, truck—whatever they’d used—was long gone and all her precious things were probably out of state by now. But, she reflected, one speeding ticket and a glance to the rear . . . Suddenly, she was all business. She’d think about how she felt later.
It was a long list. Their wedding sterling, things that had come down in both their families.
Sibleys and Fairchilds alike never seemed to have let a possession slip out of their thrifty hands, unless it was going to another family member. Family things. She’d lost all their family things. No, they’d been stolen. It wasn’t her fault. Her mind was muddled. Don’t think about it yet. The words were becoming a mantra. Keep talking, she told herself.
“A sterling silver sugar and creamer, a carving set with the initials tFp—Tom’s great-grandfather. He was named for him.” She was wander-ing. They had eaten in this room the day before yesterday. Sunday dinner. Their napkins were still on the table. Their napkins, but not their napkin rings. She swallowed hard. A thought seized her and she ran toward the china cabinet at the end of the room. She kept some silver there. The children’s christening mugs, a tray her parents had given them as an engagement gift. The tray was gone. The mugs were there. She felt a rush of happiness. They hadn’t gotten it all.
Charley was moving her toward the living room. Again there was the strange feeling that nothing had happened, that it was all a big mistake. Not a pillow was out of place, not a drawer even ajar.
“Pros,” one of the men commented.
“What do you mean?” Faith asked.
“They knew where to look. These weren’t kids.
They didn’t trash the place. I’ll bet your liquor hasn’t been touched and that they took only the good stuff— and stuff not too identifiable. Left those mugs with the names.”
He was right. One of the drawers in the sideboard held a full service of silver plate that one of Tom’s aunts hadn’t wanted anymore. Faith used it for large parties. It was all there.
They moved on to Tom’s study.
“They really made a mess in here,” the photographer warned Faith.
The room was a shambles. Books covered the floor and papers were everywhere. It was a mess, yet Faith’s practiced eye immediately detected that it was Tom’s normal mess. Saturday’s fren-zied finishing touches on a difficult sermon, the room not yet put back into the semblance that passed for order before he began the next. A bit bewildered, the police noted her assured response that nothing had been touched, and then they all left the room.
“We need to go upstairs now,” Charley said to Faith. He wished Tom were here. Where was he, anyway? Pros or no pros, MacIsaac was sure what Faith was about to see would not be a pretty sight.
“Who are these guys, Charley? State police?” Faith asked as they went upstairs. The icicle that had entered her heart was beginning to melt slightly and with it came the return of her very strong native curiosity.
“Auxiliary cops. Come when we need them for this kind of thing. Too damn often, lately.” They passed Amy’s room. Nothing. Faith breathed a sigh of relief. Ben’s room, the same.
Then she went into the master bedroom and crumbled against the wall. Her legs felt all wob-bly, as if she’d run a marathon, and she slid onto the floor, her hand grasping the woodwork. She forgot she wasn’t supposed to touch anything.
Every drawer had been pulled out and emptied, every surface swept clean. The bedspread was on the floor. Both closet doors were open.
Shoes were flung about. Clothes were pulled from the rods. Her garment bag lay open and empty. Slowly, she stood up, looking about as if she’d never seen it before, a somnambulist who’d wandered into someone else’s bedroom.
It was a large room, stretching across the front of the house. A prior occupant had papered the walls with a hand-print of poppies in rust on a warm cream-colored background. There was a roll of it left. Faith had draped yards of sheer fabric around the windows to hide the shades. The furniture was a hodgepodge of offerings from both families, plus a Judith McKie chest from Faith’s old apartment and Tom’s queen-size pencil-post cherry bed—a bed Faith had enjoyed teasing him about during their courtship, challenging his explanation that he liked having a lot of room to stretch out. Now when Ben and Amy piled in, the bed was almost too small.
It was a beautiful room, especially on days like this, when the sun streamed through the windows. A rainbow danced across the hardwood floor. Faith looked for the source. It wasn’t a diamond. A picture frame lay shattered, the sun sparkling through the broken glass, turning it into tiny prisms. Her parents’ smiling faces, torn in the wreckage, stared up at her. A leather jewelry box Tom and Faith had bought on their honeymoon in Florence had been kicked against the wall. It was empty. Empty. The room was full, but empty.
Instinctively, she reached up to her earlobes and touched the pearl stud earrings she had hastily put in that morning. She fingered the watch she was wearing. From France, a gift from Tom, it had the cartoon character Tintin and his dog, Snowy, on the face. They were in a plane and it was going down. “Help! We’re going to crash . . .” was what it said in the book. Crash.
The earrings, the watch, her wedding and engagement rings—the sum total of all the jewelry she now possessed.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” Dale Warren asked.
“No,” Faith said. “I want my stuff back.”
“Why don’t you come over to my house?” Faith turned at the words, walked to the door, and saw Pix coming down the hall. She had completely forgotten about her, but now the sight of her friend triggered the question that had been passing through her mind with greater and more urgent frequency since she’d entered the house.
“When is Tom coming?”
Pix was almost at the room. “I’m sure he’ll be here soon. Ms. Dawson left a message for him at the hospital. Holy shit, Faith!”
This was not the message. Pix stood in the doorway, wordless, immobile.
Faith seldom heard her friend swear. Things were as bad as she thought they were. She put an arm around Pix’s shoulder in a sudden reversal of roles.
Pix regained her voice. “Everything? Everything’s gone? All your jewelry?”
Faith nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak.
Dale, after recovering from the slight shock of hearing his sister’s former Girl Scout leader use foul language,
