'Yes, of course—to make the murderer, if that's who sent it, feel secure and relaxed, thereby committing some kind of blunder, like mentioning in the Shop and Save that he or she killed Cindy.
“If it wasn 't the murderer, it doesn 't matter so much, but don 't worry. I would just as soon absent myself from the scene at the moment. Not,' she added hastily for Dunne's benefit, 'that I was ever so involved in it.”
He looked at her and raised one eyebrow skeptically. This was a man who had definitely gone to the right movies as a kid.
Then Faith remembered what she had wanted to ask him. ' Why did you say before that it would be virtually impossible to trace the letter ? '
“Well, first of all the stationery is sold everywhere- in CVS or places like it. You've probably got some yourself to use when you pay bills.”
Faith didn 't, but that was neither here nor there. 'Then there's the handwriting. Of course, we'll give it to the analysts, but I'll bet you a jar of Ubet 's syrup that it was written with an ordinary #2 Ticonderoga yellow pencil with the left hand. Pretty impossible to trace, short of demanding a handwriting sample from everyone in Aleford. And the person may not even be local. We've discovered that the field of Cindy's, shall we say ‘acquaintances,' ranged pretty much over the greater Boston area. She was luckier than we've been, though ; they all seem to have alibis and pretty good ones.”
“ So · you still suspect someone local ? ' Tom asked quietly.
“ We do. Of course we'll take handwriting samples from Sam Miller and Dave Svenson, Oswald Pearson too, but I doubt they'll prove anything.'
“I really wish you wouldn't bother them. It's ridiculous to think one of them did this. Even if he was worried, Dave or Sam would come right out and tell me—or tell Tom.'
“ Please, Mrs. Fairchild, Faith if I may, let us go about this in our own way.'
“Yes, you may—call me Faith that is, but I still don't like the idea of your grilling my friends and neighbors.'
“ Well, we'll try to make it more of a saute,' Dunne quipped.
“Not funny, John,' said Faith, but she was smiling. He really was a charmer when he tried. She wondered what his wife was like, probably five feet tall and a pistol.
“Before you get ready to go, let's go over everyone you've talked to about the murder again, in the last fewdays especially. Maybe we can figure out who got the wind up.”
That reminded Faith of the sail on Saturday. Should she tell him about the conversation with Patricia? And what about Robert 's confession in the boat? She looked at Tom uneasily and he understood.
“He means everything, Faith, this isn't a time to hold back, thinking you might be betraying a confidence. I certainly don't intend to.'
“Good,' said John, eyeing Tom appreciatively. He'd never been involved in a case with a minister before and he hadn't known what to expect. It had been a long time since he had been in church himself.
Sitting in the plane, thinking about it all, Faith felt far removed and as light as the air she was speeding through. It almost seemed to have happened to someone else, or in a book she read. She sipped her scotch slowly. Benjamin wasn't asleep, but he wasn't really awake either. She had given him a bottle at takeoff so his little ears wouldn't hurt and since then he seemed content to stare out the window and listen to the muffled roar of the engines.
She returned to her thoughts. They had gone over everybody without any significant results and finally she had hurried upstairs to pack, which roughly meant putting everything Benjamin owned in a bag with a few things for herself. Until she had a baby, she never realized how fast they went through clothes. She had expected to change a lot of diapers, of course, but Benjamin turned out to be a champion at what one of the books coyly referred to as 'projectile vomiting'—like something from the space program. He was pretty much out of the stage now, but while it lasted Faith be- gan to think his childhood would be one long laundry cycle.
Tom had been downstairs phoning the airlines. They had decided that Faith could go alone after all. She had felt better and had longed for the relative safety of the Big Apple ; besides, she hadn 't known what she would do with Tom in the city, since her plan was to fill out her winter wardrobe. She had also thought he should stay in Aleford so he could tell her what was happening. As he called her mother at work she could hear his voice while he tried to explain to her that her daughter had just received what amounted to a botanical death threat in the mail. Well, if anyone could do it, Tom could, Faith thought, and realized she was going to have to keep a firm nonhysterical hand on herself.
Detective Dunne had left with the letter carefully wrapped in some kind of plastic envelope. Faith supposed they would test it for everything in the world—fingerprints, sweat, and so on. She had pointed out to Dunne that, as with the murder, the most logical suspect was Cindy herself. Poison pen letters or the equivalent were certainly in Cindy's line, but she was undoubtedly in no condition to go around pressing flowers these days.
Dunne had wished her a good trip and told her to bring back some decent corned beef. Although they hadn 't really gotten anywhere, at least something had happened and that seemed to cheer him up. Just pack little Mrs. Fairchild off to her mother's, solve the case, and then she could come home again.
John Dunne had been born and raised in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx. When his father died, the whole neighborhood, plus relatives on both sides, jumped in to fill the gap. John knew his Bronx wasn't the Bronx of his mother's childhood—she was constantly lamenting the passing of certain landmarks—but it was a good place to grow up. The fires that would erupt later werejust beginning to smolder and a long subway ride away in any case. Orchard Beach and City Island were nearby and if he wasn 't at one or the other for a family picnic, he was there to swim and hang out with his friends. Everybody knew everybody else in the few blocks that constituted his world. Then he learned to cross the bridge and discovered Manhattan. By the time he graduated from high school, there wasn't an inch of that island he hadn 't explored.
He met his wife while she was on her senior class trip to New York City, the culmination of thousands of bake sales, car washes, and raffles. Betsy was from the potato fields in northern Maine, a stone 's throw away from the Canadian border. It took Dunne months to understand everything she said and years to decipher her family's accent. On the New York trip, she had become separated from her classmates and had no idea where she was, so she walked into the closest police station, as instructed by Mrs. Greenlaw, the chaperone. Mrs. Greenlaw 's greatest fear was to lose one of her charges to the white slave trade and she understood that the latest tactic was using grandmotherly-looking old ladies in gloves and hats to lure unsuspecting girls astray.
Out of all the police stations in New York, it had to be Dunne 's. It wasn 't that Betsy was particularly beautiful, but she had something that appealed to him immediately. It was his first year on the force and his mother was after him to settle down. When Betsy walked in and asked how she could find the hotel they were staying at, he knew he'd be taking her there personally and buying her lunch on the way. Later she told him how intimidated she had been. He assumed she meant by his size, or because he was a policeman, but she confessed it was because he had been to college. His size never bothered her and if anyone thought they looked mismatched—Betsy
He sent Mrs. Greenlaw a dozen American Beauty roses the day they got engaged.
He'd never regretted marrying Betsy, even though she wouldn 't live in New York. She made him laugh, was a terrific mother, and understood him better than anyone ever had. But there was scarcely a day he didn 't miss the city. It wasn't Faith's city he missed, although a few of the quadrants intersected ; it was one of the other hundreds of New York Citys people construct for themselves. He was sorry Faith had to leave Aleford for the reason she did, but he had to admit he'd like to have been on the plane with her.
Faith 's scotch was almost gone and they would be landing in Newark soon. She was on the wrong side of the plane to see the Statue of Liberty as it descended but she did get a pretty impressive panoramic view of the New Jersey Turnpike.
She tightened the seatbelt, which she had never removed, and took the cushion from behind her head. She was thinking again about who could possibly have put the envelope in her mailbox—or rather she had been thinking about it all the time except on the rare occasions when another thought managed to creep through. Not Dave. Not Sam. So who else ? That was the question that kept nagging at her. Maybe she should have taken the Aleford phone directory and gone household by household.
Faith had ruled out Patricia after classifying her under the heading of interested worried friend. Patricia wouldn 't have spoken to Faith the way she had on Saturday if she had planned to scare her off the case with the
