Body in the Bookcase

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