Body in the Bookcase

to throw all her weight each time. It was exhausting, but the chair began to rock back and forth. She could have tried to tumble forward, but she hadn’t the nerve, hadn’t the courage. She’d have to watch the floor come closer and closer toward her. Better side to side. She’d never been a particularly brave woman, she realized. A thought coming into her mind, coming now at the end. There had been no call. She hadn’t been tested. She continued to move her body side to side.

She was desperate to stop, to rest—to get her wind.

Finally, she tipped over. Her head struck the bare floor and for a moment she thought she’d lose consciousness. The blackness that came rushing up was so pleasant, so welcome that she nearly gave in to it. Instead she made herself look about, feel the pine boards against her cheek, hold on to reality.

Her object was, of course, the phone. Mere steps away on a small table in the next room. By pushing with her right foot, she found, as she had hoped, that she could move an inch or so at a time. There was a chance . . . She’d have to rest, but not too much. The full weight of her body pushed her against the side of the chair, crushing her ribs. More pain. Much more.

Push, then rest, push, then rest. An infant crawling toward a toy. A crab scuttling across the ocean floor.

Push, then rest. Push, then rest. Push . . .

Two

Feeling as if she should don a little red-hooded cape, Faith slipped one last scone into the wicker basket she’d lined with a bright checked napkin.

In the center, she’d placed two small jars of her jam: wild blueberry and strawberry. The last of the fruits of the previous summer’s labors.

She opened the kitchen door and stepped out into the sunshine. It was a beautiful day to be paying any kind of call.

But she wasn’t on her way to grandmother’s house. Sarah Winslow wasn’t a grandmother.

Faith had heard her speak of a distant cousin:

“Distance has not increased our fondness” had been her precise words. Other than this, there had never been any mention or sign of family ties, except for a few faded photographs scattered about the house, a daguerreotype on the mantel and, above it, a fine portrait of a rather dour-looking eighteenth-century gentleman with Sarah’s firm chin. What would it be like to be virtually kin-less? Faith wondered. There had been times in her life, particularly during adolescence, when this notion had been quite appealing. Yet at Sarah’s age, for better or worse, Faith imagined, one wanted consanguinity. Perhaps a last chance to mend broken bridges and certainly a longing for people who knew what your parents had been like, and what you were like when you were young. Old age meant the winnowing of shared experience, until often there was only one person—yourself—who could recall a time when your hair had been its real color, when your limbs had moved freely, and when you had been able to seek comfort in a large lap after tears were shed.

Faith passed the church, its white steeple creating a sharp interruption in the seamless blue sky.

Next year was the congregation’s two hundredth anniversary at this site, and First Parish was already gearing up for the celebration. They were looking for a volunteer to write a play charting their history. Faith told the committee head they’d be better off doing those tableaux vivants, so popular in the last century—a step up from freeze tag, these tableaux depicted historic scenes as “living pictures.” It had seemed a reasonable suggestion—no lines to learn, no forced rhymes.

One suggestion had been a play in sonnet form.

Tom had laughed; the committee head had not.

Crossing the green, she became aware of her burden. She’d started off carrying the basket by the handle, but now she found it swinging forward in a motion that threatened to change her energetic steps to Shirley Temple skipping. She slowed down and looped the basket firmly in the crook of her right arm. Millicent Revere McKinley’s house, strategically situated, was coming up. Millicent, a crusty descendant through a cousin twice removed of the equestrian silver-smith, had an armchair in front of her bay window, angled to provide a view down Main Street and across the green. It was just behind her muslin curtains, so passersby could never be certain until it was too late whether Millicent had her gimlet eye trained on them. She passed the time in knitting enough mittens, mufflers, and sweaters to stock her own Congregational church’s holiday boutiques and those of several other neighboring faiths. Millicent devoutly believed idle hands were the devil’s playground, or whatever the homily was. Idle tongues, however, didn’t seem to be proscribed, and Millicent’s wagged with the best—or worst—of them.

Touching on Faith’s forebears, Miss McKinley’s unvarying response was a raised eyebrow and the emphatic declaration “Not from around here.”

The fact that Faith had managed to get involved in several murder investigations during her sojourn in Aleford was something the town took in stride. After all, many of its residents had singular, if not downright eccentric, interests.

Millicent herself devoted her waking hours to accumulating information not only about the living but also about the dead—especially the Revere family, a subspecialty being china patterns of the various branches. No, Faith’s stumbling across a corpse or two and her ability to solve the crimes were not hot topics of conversation in the aisles of the Shop ’n Save or at the Minuteman Cafe, where most town business really took place.

Faith’s ringing of the alarm bell in the old belfry at the top of Belfry Hill, the bell rung on that famous day in that famous year and subsequently only for the death of presidents, the death of descendants of Aleford’s original settlers, and of course on Patriot’s Day for the reenactment of the battle—now, that was cause for discussion, even years later. A still-warm corpse lying in said belfry and a perpetrator possibily lurking in the high-bush blueberries that grew on the hill did not matter. Even the presence of Benjamin Fairchild, an infant in a Snugli at the time and a continuing local favorite—he, like his sister, was born in Aleford—did not affect the prevailing opinion that Faith should have had the presence of mind to think of an alternative. Someone from here would have.

Faith now got past the obstacle, studiously not looking in Millicent’s direction. The woman thought she knew everything going on in town.

And she is right, Faith thought dismally. At least Millicent didn’t know where the minister’s wife was going this morning, but she’d find out eventually if she thought it mattered. Faith carrying a basket was not up there with some of what Millicent had filed away in her Rolodex lobe, a genetic quirk. This store of fact and supposition posed considerable risk at times. There was such a thing as knowing more than was good for you, although Millicent herself would never cede the point.

There were no woods to pass through on the way to Sarah’s house, though Aleford abounded in arboreal conservation land. It was one of the draws realtors touted, besides the schools. The peace and quiet, too. Suburban serenity. Location, location, location. Certainly little was stirring on Main Street this morning. The commuters had left for work, school buses had discharged their cargo, and the power walkers were on the bike path.

No wolves, either. Except for the few squirrels chattering away on the green when she walked past, Faith didn’t expect to encounter any wildlife, despite the rumors that had surfaced once again of a coyote at the Aleford dump. She was almost certain the coyote was two-legged, male, and about fifteen years old, running with a pack of like-minded mammals.

The town did have raccoons, but they wouldn’t be about now. These bandits had become more than a nuisance, with untidy nocturnal forays into garages left open and curbside trash cans.

From the few specimens Faith had seen from her bedroom window, sizes seemed to run from much larger than a bread box to slightly smaller than a Winnebago, and they were taking the recycling endorsed by their cartoon relation, Ranger Rick, altogether too seriously. The ultimate indignity had occurred when a mother raccoon took shelter in Millicent Revere McKinley’s chimney, producing offspring before Millicent could get the animal-control officer from neighboring Byford—Aleford’s force being limited to bare essentials such as writing parking tickets. Millicent confided to Faith that she was tempted to light a fire and be done with it; the noise was driving her crazy, yet for once she was afraid of public opinion. “Some people could think I was being a mite cruel.” The officer from Byford—“when he finally took the trouble to show up”—was no help, she’d added bitterly, telling her the critters would leave eventually, which they did, but it was a very long “eventually.”

Faith was strolling past Aleford Photo now, stopping to wave at Bert and Richard, who also spent their days keeping an eye on everything that happened and didn’t in Aleford center. Ren-aissance men, their moonlighting