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
“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.
