ranged from car repair, newspaper delivery, and the sale of reli-gious articles by mail to acting as undertakers.
They also knew a whole lot about photography.
She peered in the window. As usual, there was a table up front loaded with items gleaned from their attics and basements, an ongoing, extremely eclectic indoor yard sale. She noted that the blue-sparkled bowling ball, object of young Ben Fairchild’s desire, was still up for grabs. But something new had been added. One corner of the table had been carefully cleared and the camera shop was now selling arts and crafts—macrame plant hangers, beaded chains upon which one’s spectacles might be suspended, painted rocks and the like. Aleford Photo was one of the things Faith cherished about Aleford. She could almost imagine herself in a quirky shop in Greenwich Village —the owner’s predilections determining stock, as opposed to market demand. The bowling ball was getting dusty.
Spying Faith’s basket, Bert and Richard made extremely gross eating gestures from behind the counter and beckoned her into their lair. It reminded her of the fairy tale again and she continued on her way.
James Thurber had gotten it exactly right in “The Little Girl and the Wolf.” A wolf dressed in a nightgown and nightcap didn’t look any more like a grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looked like Calvin Coolidge. And Faith firmly believed in the moral of Thurber’s fable, too—it was definitely not so easy to fool little girls as it once was, or, she added to herself, big girls, either.
All this Little Red Riding Hood mental mean-dering took her as far as the town hall. She hadn’t seen Charley MacIsaac in a while and wondered how he was doing. She’d have to invite him over for dinner soon. The fare at the Minuteman Cafe, where she knew he consumed his meals, ran mostly to things like New England boiled dinners, a culinary concept Faith had never even considered embracing, however lightly. Meat loaf or potpie on the menu meant the cook was feeling inventive.
Sarah’s house was on the opposite side of the center from the parsonage. It was at the end of Winslow Street, named for “someone everyone has forgotten,” Sarah once told Faith. Millicent, mistress of every significant and insignificant fact relating to Aleford’s past, had corrected Sarah’s unseemly lack of ancestor worship.
Winslow Street was named for Josiah Winslow, one of the stalwart band standing their ground on Aleford green that famous chilly April morning in 1775. The Winslow Farm had covered many acres in Sarah’s section of town, Millicent informed Faith, citing the appropriate tome in the Aleford History section of the town library—call number included.
It was typical of Sarah Winslow not to be caught up in the past, taking credit, as some were wont, for deeds done long ago. Faith was always amused at the way these others talked about their ancestors in the present tense, as if the bloodlines stretching ever thinner across the centuries meant immortality for all.
Winslow Street was the next left, and Faith turned the corner. Lilacs were blooming—enormous old bushes, their weight causing the white picket fences that lined Sarah’s street to lean ever so slightly akimbo; their strong fragrance filled the air. Ladies used to smell this way before their floral eau de colognes—Muget de Bois, Friendship’s Garden—were banished from store shelves by Opium and CK One. Faith pushed open the gate of the Winslow house, built by Josiah’s son, Millicent had told her, and walked up the path to Sarah’s front door. There was no bell, only a heavy brass knocker. Faith lifted it and rapped twice. There was no answer, and after waiting a minute, she knocked again. Sarah was an early riser, so Faith knew she must be up—as indeed anyone except the most infirm would be at ten o’clock in the morning in Aleford.
There was still no answer. She must be out for a walk, Faith thought, feeling glad that Sarah had recovered. She’d probably gone to the library or down the street to Castle Park, a small green area kept trimmed and tidy, where children sledded in the winter and people brought their lunches at other times of the year. Faith was tempted to keep walking in that direction and see if Sarah was there, sitting in the sun at one of the picnic tables.
But she might have taken another direction. Faith let the knocker fall one last time, then decided to go around to the rear and leave the basket in the kitchen. The jam had her have faith labels, so Sarah would know who had been there. She’d know anyway. Faith had left similar offerings in the past—in the same basket, which Sarah always conscientiously returned.
A path, faintly brushed with moss like the her-ringbone brick one in front, wound around the small house to the backyard. Several fruit trees were blooming and an ancient willow’s long yellow-green branches drooped toward the ground.
No one in Aleford ever locked their back doors, and they often neglected the front entrances, as well. Faith knocked again at the rear for form’s sake. Sarah would certainly have heard the front knocker from her kitchen. A discreet starched white curtain covered the door’s window. Faith turned the knob, pushed the door open, and stepped in.
Stepped in and gasped.
The room had been completely ransacked. All the cupboards were open and the floor was strewn with broken crockery, as well as pots and pans. Drawers of utensils had been emptied. The pantry door was ajar and canisters of flour and sugar had been overturned, a sudden snowstorm on the well-scrubbed old linoleum. A kitchen chair lay on its side. Another stood below a high cabinet, its contents—roasting pans and cookie tins—in a jumble below.
Faith dropped the basket and started shouting,
“Sarah! Sarah! It’s Faith! Answer me!
Nor was she answering. Still frantically calling the woman’s name, Faith ran through the living room, then upstairs, searching for her friend.
The scene in the kitchen was duplicated all over the house. It looked like a newsreel of the af-termath of a tornado. Things were in heaps on the floors, drawers flung on top. But there was no sign of Sarah. “Sarah!” Faith kept calling her name, not sure whether to be relieved or terrified at the woman’s absence.
A break-in. Burglars. But surely they wouldn’t have entered while someone was home? They must have seen Sarah leave. There had been no signs of life on the street, most of the residents having gone away for the day or already at work.
And from the look of things, whoever had been here had worked fast. Sarah couldn’t have been in the house. Sarah had to be all right.
In Sarah Winslow’s bedroom tucked under the eaves, the bed had been slept in, but the quilt that usually covered it was still hanging on the quilt rack next to the dormer window. The rack stood in its usual place, the spread neatly folded, a note of normalcy, but a discordant one in all this chaos.
Everything else was in total disarray. Shoes and clothes from the closet and lingerie from the bu-reau drawers had been flung onto the floor. Faith felt sick at the thought of hands touching Sarah’s most intimate things, pulling her orderly universe apart. One pillow had been stripped of its case. The other showed the faint indentation where Sarah’s head had rested; the sheet was slightly pulled back. Faith’s heart sank.
Sarah would never have left her house with an unmade bed.
But where was she? It seemed as if Faith had been in the house for hours, but she knew no more than a few minutes had passed. It was time to call the police. She instinctively looked for a phone on the bedside table beside the old four-poster—the bed in which Sarah had been born. This was a connection to the past Sarah did treasure, and she’d mentioned it several times with pride—mentioned that she intended to die in it, too.
Faith’s heart was pounding so hard, her ribs ached.
Where was the phone? There should be one next to the bed, as there was next to Faith’s, but of course Sarah wouldn’t have seen the need for more than a single instrument in the house. Instead, there was a stack of books, or the remains of one. Most were on the floor, facedown on the hooked rug, which was the only covering on the wide floorboards where Sarah placed her feet each day upon rising—had placed them for how many years?
Yes, there would be only one phone and it would be downstairs, discreetly hidden away, a concession to the exigencies of modern life, an essential intrusion. Faith went to look. A quick glance back in the kitchen revealed nothing.
Sarah’s phone turned out to be in a small book-lined den off the living room—a room that was out of sight and one Faith had neglected to enter in her rush through the house and up to the second floor.
It was there that Faith found the woman, lying on her side, tied to a chair, a gray pallor covering her face, her body still. Completely still. Incongruously, her head was resting on the lowest bookcase shelf, her shoulder wedged in among her beloved volumes.
“Sarah! No, please God, Sarah!” Faith felt for a pulse. There was none, but Sarah’s skin felt slightly warm.
