Body in the Bookcase

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 pate (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 pate. “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 Cote 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 pate, 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 pate 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 pate de campagne, originally planned as one of the wedding hors d’oeuvres, in favor of this one. Pate de foie de volaille apparently sounded more elegant than a pate “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 Cafe, 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