Fighting back sobs, Faith grabbed the phone on the small table just out of reach of the motionless body. She dialed 911, new this year to Aleford. Help would come. Help would come fast. Help would come too late.
She ran back to the kitchen, found a knife, and returned to the den. She sawed away at the ropes, releasing first Sarah’s hands and feet—the feet clad in soft white bedroom slippers. Then she cut the ropes from Sarah’s chest and eased the old woman’s body out of the chair and onto the floor.
There were horrible bruises on her wrists and ankles. Faith started CPR, all the while praying for a miracle. As she worked on the lifeless form, tears streamed down her face and she could scarcely keep herself from giving way to grief. This was Sarah! Sarah, her friend.
The sirens wailed and Faith jumped to her feet, rapidly running into the hall and throwing open the front door to let the EMTs in. When they all reached the den, she stood back watching, her back against a bookshelf. She prayed again, prayed that the professionals would accomplish what she could not. Sarah would breathe again.
Of course she would breathe again. She had to!
She was still warm. There was still life! Now the sobs did come and Faith turned away from the scene in front of her, pushing her forehead hard against the row of books. There had been books on the floor beside Sarah’s body. One small volume had fallen on her imprisoned hand—a leather-bound presentation copy of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s
Tom. She had to call Tom. But she couldn’t move, not with the activity that was going on so desperately a few feet away. The EMTs had put a CPR mask over Sarah’s face, using a bag to force air into the old woman’s lungs, creating an object out of an individual.
Chief MacIsaac came to the door of the room, looked around quickly, and pulled Faith into the hall. He steered her toward a chair and she sat down automatically. Standing over her, he began a series of terse questions. “When did you get here? Did you see anyone leaving? A car? A van?” He was almost as upset as Faith was, she realized.
He’d known Sarah Winslow much longer.
Faith looked at her watch. She had left her house less than thirty minutes ago. “I got here about ten o’clock. It was twenty of ten when I left the parsonage. And there was no one around here.” She shut her eyes, envisioning the quiet street, hoping for a memory of anything out of the ordinary, yet there was nothing. “No cars. Not even on Main Street, once I was out of the center.”
“How did you get in?”
“The kitchen door was open. Sarah didn’t answer when I knocked at the front and I thought she must have gone for a walk. I had brought her some scones.” Now they were lying with the rest of the mess in the kitchen.
The EMTs yelled at them to get out of the way and then raced past with Sarah on a stretcher, heading for the ambulance.
“I need to go with them,” Faith told Charley emphatically. “She needs someone with her.” He looked at her sorrowfully. “Go ahead. I’ll get ahold of Tom. We’ll meet you at the hospital.” She knew what he wasn’t saying. That Sarah wouldn’t know who was with her, now or ever.
Not wanting to believe it, Faith got in the back of the ambulance before anyone could tell her to get out. It was still a gloriously sunny day, those lilacs blooming in dooryards, but she kept her eyes on the figure in front of her. Sarah was now connected to all sorts of tubes and machines. A mint green chenille bathrobe chastely covered her nightdress. The sash was tied in a small bow. Tied by Sarah when she’d put her robe on. Sarah!
Sarah Winslow couldn’t be dead. It couldn’t be true.
Faith Fairchild hated hospitals. It wasn’t fears of her own mortality or infirmity, although these were no strangers. It was the sense of being in a parallel universe where time stopped, day and night were one, and all the inhabitants expected bad news.
She was sitting beside Tom in a large waiting room at the Lahey clinic in Burlington, the hospital closest to Aleford. Chief MacIsaac was pacing in the corridor. Several friends from the parish and some neighbors rounded out the silent group. The room was filled with similar groups of people, the only difference being size and intensity of distress. One cluster sat close together, chairs touching, the table in front of them littered with what looked like many days’ worth of empty coffee cups and half-eaten sandwiches.
One man had an unlit cigarette in his mouth. A woman slept, her head on the shoulder of an older woman next to her.
Faith remembered the vigil they had kept after her father’s sudden heart attack. She’d raced to the hospital; then everything slowed to a stand-still while they waited, and she had to look at her watch to know whether it was 2:00 a.m. or 2:00 p.m. Lawrence Sibley had pulled through, but Faith’s mother developed a permanent wariness, a watchful look that had never entirely disappeared.
Then there was the time Ben had had surgery to put tubes in his ears after a year of horrendous ear infections. It had been performed at Children’s Hospital in Boston. There, Faith had quickly felt ashamed of her nervous thoughts as she caught the murmured words of other parents in the cheerful waiting room—words like
Hospital smells.
It wasn’t just the disinfectant or lack of air moving about. It was the smell of fear, of disease, of death. She stood up and went to get some more coffee.
Sarah Winslow’s life on earth was officially declared at an end at 11:36 a.m. A young doctor came in with the news. “I’m sorry,” he said to them. “It was her heart—cardiac arrest. We would have had to have reached her immediately to have done anything, and even then it might have been too late.”
Was he saying this for her benefit? Faith wondered. Reassuring her that if she had left for Sarah’s a half hour, an hour earlier, it would still have been of no use?
“Would she have had the heart attack if she hadn’t been attacked?” Faith had to know.
“I can’t really say until we do the autopsy, but the combination of shock and the exertion of trying to reach the phone could have brought it on.” His face darkened. “Bastards! But that’s for the police . . .” After the explosion of anger, his voice trailed off. He’d failed.
Tom stood up. “I’d like to be with her for a few minutes, if I may.”
“Of course, Reverend, come with me.” He turned to the rest of them. “Anyone who wishes may come.” He smiled bleakly. “She looks very peaceful.”
So they all ended up in a curtained-off cubicle in the emergency room, jammed among a multitude of technological advances, to say a final good-bye to Sarah. A good-bye to Sarah, who in the natural order of things should have slipped off some night, years hence, in her own bed—
where she had first seen life and where she had expected to leave it.
The lights had been dimmed and all the machines turned off, but a few feet away the emergency ward was glaringly bright and noisy. Faith found it hard not to think about what was going on out there: who would survive; who wouldn’t—like Sarah.
She did look peaceful—asleep, except there wasn’t a hint of movement at her chest. The bathrobe was gone, but she was in her own nightgown, a flannel one with tiny pink rosebuds, buttoned to her throat. Her hands lay on top of the white hospital blanket. A nurse came up behind Faith and said softly, “This was in the pocket of her bathrobe.” It was Sarah’s mother’s engagement ring, an old-fashioned diamond solitaire that Sarah wore on her right ring finger. She had managed somehow to get it off and hide it. Faith slid it on Sarah’s finger, then held her cold hand.
The ring represented a small victory, but a victory nonetheless. The thieves hadn’t gotten everything, and Faith imagined the pleasure the old woman must have gotten from this in her last hours. I was not defeated and will not be—I saved my ring and will try to get to the phone. It was Sarah’s last message to her friends.
Tom said a prayer and several people wept quietly. Charley MacIsaac abruptly left the room.
Faith was too sad to cry anymore.
The Fairchilds were sitting in front of the hearth again, but tonight they were close to each other on the
