couch. Again, the children were sound asleep upstairs, but neither Faith nor Tom was in-clined to follow their example, despite how exhausted they were. Faith knew that the moment she closed her eyes, all she would see would be Sarah obscenely tied to her chair, toppled over on the bookcase shelf—dead.
“What kind of animal does something like this?
She was a helpless old woman!” It was the question Faith had been asking in various ways since they had returned from the hospital. Tom still didn’t have an answer even if Faith had been asking a real question, rather than venting her rage and sorrow.
Faith continued: “With some deaths, you can say the person has been released from suffering further pain, like an incurable illness, or there are the cases where someone’s really gone already. Then there’s the opposite— people who go quickly and don’t suffer. It’s horrible for everyone left, but not bad for them, except they’re dead, of course. But they didn’t suffer. Do you see what I mean?”
Tom nodded. He’d heard Faith on this subject before. She wanted both of them to go simultaneously some unspecified year very far in the future.
“But Sarah wasn’t sick, she didn’t go quickly, and she
“Faith, it’s horrible, but you can’t let it obsess you. There was nothing you could have done.” Tom touched upon the thing bothering her most.
“Charley said the burglars must have entered the house before dawn, expecting she would still be asleep. They may have tried other doors in the neighborhood until they found one open. Or they may have targeted Sarah.”
Nothing you could have done. Faith sat quietly for a moment, her head on Tom’s shoulder.
She hadn’t been able to do anything, anything at all. Not even provide some solace in Sarah’s last moments. She focused on her husband’s last statement.
“But the only really valuable things she had were her books, and those weren’t touched. If you had checked out the neighborhood, looked in windows, whatever, you would have seen that she didn’t have a stereo, computer. Of course, her house was the most isolated on the street, at the end, with the driveway winding around the back.
You wouldn’t be able to see a car or whatever was being loaded, unless you were back there, too.
But still, why would they want to rob her house?
It’s small, nothing to suggest fenceable goods.” They were drinking Delamain cognac and Faith poured herself a bit more. She was beginning to hope she could sleep.
“Charley mentioned there were several very old small Oriental rugs missing. And she had silver,” Tom said, reaching for the decanter himself.
“It was in a drawer in her sideboard. They took the whole drawer for convenience sake.” His tone was bitter. Somehow this disregard for a perfectly good piece of furniture kept popping into his thoughts. He was well aware of how minor the act was compared to the rest, but to ruin a perfectly good chest . . . “And there was some good jewelry. Family stuff. Her neighbor said it was in the flour and sugar canisters. Sarah thought they were a good hiding place. Better than the freezer, which was where her neighbor was keeping things. That’s how it came up.
“Thieves often prey on the elderly, believing they hide money or other valuables in their homes, not in safety-deposit boxes—it’s probably a legacy of the Depression years. Like my great-aunt Agnes with the money between the plates.” Faith remembered the incident well. She and Tom had been helping Tom’s parents and some of the other Fairchilds, who virtually colonized the area around Norwell and Hingham on the South Shore, to pack up the late Agnes’s effects. Marian Fairchild, Tom’s mother, had been ready to stack an unattractive pile of chipped Nippon plates in a box for the church rummage sale, when Tom spied a familiar-looking green piece of paper sticking out from between two of them. It turned out that several Ben Franklins were cushioning each layer of the china, a couple of thousand dollars in all.
After this, they started all over again, doing a thorough search of the house and what had already been sorted or tossed. They found more bills with the dust rags, some between carefully saved and ironed wrapping paper, and more in Baggies at the bottom of a giant box of mothballs. To this day, Marian still fretted about what might have been unknowingly overlooked and discarded.
Faith held the small brandy snifter in both hands and finished the amber liquid. The warmth hit her all at once. Her face flushed and she was suddenly very sleepy.
“Let’s go to bed, darling. And we’ll think what we can do about this in the morning.”
“Do?” Tom stood up and pulled his wife into his arms. He looked her straight in the eye. “We will give Sarah a beautiful service and hope that the police will be successful in their investigation of this terrible crime.” Drowsy as she was, Faith was well aware of the emphasis her spouse was putting on “their” investigation. “Other than that,” he continued as they climbed the stairs together, “there really isn’t anything either of us can do.”
Faith didn’t say anything. It offered the path of least resistance. Besides, she didn’t know what she could do. At least not yet.
Sarah Winslow’s death hit Aleford hard. She was a popular member of the community and widely known from her years of work at the library. She was never too busy to help a patron, and her desk sported a large sign: ask! there are no dumb questions. She was the quintessential reference librarian; someone who read dictionaries for pleasure and collected facts with the same regard for their value as a collector of Faberge eggs might feel for his objects.
It was Friday. Sarah’s funeral was scheduled for noon. The day had begun with bright skies, but dark clouds moved in about ten o’clock.
“Somehow, it makes it harder if it’s a nice day,” Pix Miller remarked to Faith. “Not that it’s any less horrible, but it would be worse if Sarah were missing a beautiful spring day.”
They were on their way to the church, having eschewed the short-cut through the parsonage’s backyard for the slightly longer but more decorous approach on the sidewalk. Ben and Amy were at Ben’s friend Lizzie MacLean’s house.
Lizzie’s mother, Arlene, had been making the kind of remark that leads other women to think another baby is being contemplated—things like
“They grow up so fast”—sigh—and “I have all these perfectly good baby clothes. I don’t know why I’m still holding on to them”—another sigh.
Faith sincerely hoped several hours with her tod-dler daughter would not cause Arlene to change her mind if she was, in fact, reaching for a First Response kit instead of toothpaste at CVS. Much as Faith adored her daughter, she was not a docile child. “Silent but deadly,” Tom called her. Left to her own devices, Amy would quietly, and win-somely, wreak untold havoc. A hairbrush in the elder Fairchilds’ VCR being the most recent episode.
“I know what you mean. If the sun is shining, all is supposed to be right with the world, and it isn’t. It’s also less of an affront if nature is in tune with our feelings. It should look the way we feel.”
“The church is going to be packed. That’s the other thing. I’m sure Sarah never had any idea how much she meant to people, how much we all loved her. She was so surprised by the party the library gave her when she retired—and the chair.
It was in the living room by the fireplace, remember? Her Wellesley chair. She was devoted to the college, and that’s what the committee picked to give her.”
The chair, Faith thought bitterly, the chair they lashed her to. The chair in which she died.
Charley had told her not to talk about any of the details of the case, and she hadn’t. She wasn’t even tempted.
“I’ve always felt so safe here,” Pix said in a disturbed tone. “I’ve always thought Aleford was different from most places. I took it for granted that I could leave my house and car unlocked.
That I didn’t have to worry about my children walking anywhere—or myself, for that matter.” Pix Miller had grown up in Aleford, as had her husband, Sam.
It was a bit difficult for Faith to understand this mentality. Only a lunatic would leave a car or door unlocked where she grew up in Manhattan, yet she, too, had never felt afraid. And now her thoughts were fearful. All Aleford was afraid, particularly its older population. Doors were indeed being locked—dead bolts installed by people who had never known what they were before.
Aleford had been violated. There had been burglaries before, yet never accompanied by this kind of
