huge baking powder biscuits, another of the reliable offerings. The Willow Tree waitresses bore a striking resemblance to one another. Maybe it was the way they dressed—starched lime green uniforms, pleated pastel hankies fanned out like peacocks’ tails from their pockets. Maybe it was that they all seemed to be the same age, somewhere between forty and sixty.
“Are you ready to order?” she asked Faith, her eyes on Scott. He was a favorite among them and they’d long ago adopted a maternal, protective air concerning the young man. Scott seemed to have brought himself up. His mother had moved to Florida when he was in junior high, leaving him to fend for himself. Tricia told her that Scott had lived in his car one year during high school, crashing at friends’ during the coldest weather and grabbing showers where he could. Faith had never heard him mention his father.
“Your chili will be up in a sec,” the waitress said to Scott while she waited for Faith to answer.
Never having fully recovered from the sight of the white wine she’d ordered arriving with a screw top on her first visit, Faith opted for a diet Coke.
“They’ve spruced the place up since the last time I was here,” Faith commented after Scott had explained that Tricia was home giving herself a facial for practice. “The curtains are new.” Incongruously, the small windows were framed with frilly white Priscilla-style eyelet. The Willow Tree was Ben Fairchild’s favorite place to eat, not for the superlative job they did with his hot dogs, but because of the decor—a taxidermist’s paradise.
The long, low building was roughly divided into two rooms, the larger of which contained the bar.
Throughout the interior, animals, ranging from a moth-eaten fox to a moth-eaten wild turkey, had all apparently been bagged, surrendering after a last-ditch effort to cling to life. Like the waitresses, they looked remarkably similar, no matter what the species. Scott had summed their expressions up as “Come one step closer and I’ll rip your guts out.” For young Ben Fairchild, the Willow Tree offered hideous, spine-tingling sensa-tions unavailable anywhere else in his little world. Faith tried to position herself away from the glassy stares and snarling lips—or beaks—in favor of a view of the snowshoes, harnesses, and other New England paraphernalia gracing the walls, but it was impossible.
Her Coke arrived and she asked, “Did you have a nice time at Tricia’s mother’s?”
“What do you think?” Scott asked, and laughed. “Come on, Faith, we’ve known each other too long to chitchat. Now, what do you want me to do?”
“Find out who broke into my house—and the other ones, especially Sarah Winslow’s.” He choked slightly on his draft. “You don’t ask for much, do you, lady!”
“That’s what I really
She also mentioned Mr. Monstrous.
“There’s a very special place in hell for those guys, so don’t worry about it—or take it personally. He wants to pay you as little as he can get away with. They get brownie points—or, more likely, bonuses—for that. You want to get as much as you can. Admit it. You’re mad and feel entitled, which you are. The way to go? Your policy probably gives you a lump sum for the silver and the jewelry and replacement value for a bunch of the other stuff. They broke your door. Forget Home Depot. Get a really good door, dead bolt, solid brass hardware, the works. They took a pillowcase, right? Go get a really nice pillowcase. Embroidered by French nuns, whatever. This is the way it works —and it’s how you get back at guys like him, too.”
Faith sighed. Being robbed was fast becoming another full-time job. She knew what Scott was talking about, and it was true. They hadn’t even thought to shop around for a new door, but ordered a quality one—as was the one that had been destroyed. She wasn’t sure about the pillowcase, though. If not fraud, it was getting close to fibbing. But Scott was already proving her hunch correct. Home invasions: This was a world he knew, from all angles.
In her fantasies, she pictured finding a parked van with everything intact, neatly stacked inside.
She’d just have to put it all back in place. And, she reasoned, if any of her acquaintances would have an inkling of where such a van might be aban-doned, it would be Scott and Scott alone. Pix was the type who returned the change she found on the floor in the Shop ’n Save to the manager.
“Not to cast aspersions on your past, or present, but is there anyone you could ask about who might have done these break-ins?”
“I have no idea what ‘aspersions’ are and don’t want to know, but I get the drift. Yeah, I can ask around. Don’t get your hopes up, though.” Faith was beginning to hate the sound of this expression. Scott elaborated.
“There are a lot of different loops in what you might call ‘the secondary market.’ ” Aspersions or no aspersions, Scott enjoyed letting people think him barely literate, even Faith, and here he was spouting off about “secondary markets.”
“You have your druggies, who go around the neighborhood at night trying back doors until they find an open one, with somebody’s pocket-book conveniently lying on the kitchen table, counter, or hanging from the back of one of the chairs. This is what most women do, and I can tell from your face that you’re one of them.
Bingo! Grab the purse, take off, empty the money out, and throw the thing in some bushes or a Dumpster.”
“I knew I was right to go looking in Dumpsters!” Faith chortled. Tom and Charley MacIsaac had been annoyingly patronizing.
Scott raised an eyebrow and finished his beer.
Another one appeared like magic. “Kids break in the same way—trying doors late at night. Fast, in and out with whatever they see that they can sell easily. Some kids like to refine it a little. Only rip off their parents’ friends—kind of killing two birds with one stone.
“Then there are the real pros, who have it down to a state of the art. Someone knows somebody has something they want or have a buyer for.
You’re never going to get these stolen goods back or trace them. A lot of this quality merchandise gets sold at airport hotels—jewelry, artwork, antiques. It’s on the way to another continent often before the owner knows it’s gone. ‘Oh dear, what happened to my van Gogh while I was in Aruba?’
“Most B and Es are like yours. Especially the daytime ones. Case a house, wait until you’re sure it’s empty— they don’t want to see you any more than you want to see them—then strip it of the good stuff fast. The problem is that I’m not in this loop. I’m pretty careful to stay away from it, in fact. I could give you a fair idea of whose younger brother or sister might be trying the doorknobs and where you could get a nice stereo that fell off the back of a truck, but that’s about it.” Faith was disappointed. She’d been sure Scott was going to be her personal guide through this particular underworld.
“What about the fact that in all our cases, they took only old things?”
“This is funny. Not that they took the old things, but that they left the rest. Doesn’t Tom have a new computer at the house?”
“Yes, and I have a laptop, remember? You’ve seen it at work. It was home in the downstairs closet. The closet door was open, so they obviously looked in there. The TV is fairly new, too.”
“Nobody bothers with a TV anymore, unless it’s one of those digital HDTVs, and only the Donald Trumps of the world have them yet. The rest are too cheap to bother with. Kind of like taking the toaster oven.”
“Do you think it’s a waste of time going around to more pawnshops?”
Faith had told Scott about her conversation with John Dunne and now Scott went back to it.
“You know that Dunne is right. Whoever broke in has fenced everything good by now and dumped the rest. ‘Up somebody’s nose’ is a good way to put it, but it’s also true that the guy may have used the money for his rent and car payment. His kid’s orthodontia. It’s a living—not yours or mine, but it’s a living. Tax-free, except no benefits and not a steady paycheck.” Scott saw Faith’s look of disappointment and quickly added, “Still, I’d try the places in town; there are a bunch near the Jewelers Building at three thirty-three Wash-ington Street, on Bromfield, the next street.”
“I know where that is,” Faith said, happy to have something more to do.
“Even if you don’t find anything, these guys have quality jewelry. You can pick up some things. But don’t pay what they ask. Maybe I should go with you. Or Tricia can. You’ve got
‘Kick me—I’m from the burbs’ written all over your face.”
Faith resented this. “You forget, I grew up in the Big Apple. Most Bostonians wouldn’t even get off the train in Grand Central for fear of being mugged.”
“Yeah, yeah. You’re street-smart. Only, it was the apple, not the core.”
