asking.
Dunne looked at her intently. 'Everybody's a suspect until we have a suspect.' It was a good exit line and had never failed him yet.
MacIsaac was listening to a different drummer. A beat that kept you lingering on the doorstep.
“Oh, Tom, we'd like a list of the members of your Young People's group and anything else you think might pertain,' he said.
“No problem. I'll get everything together for you and call the station. I would also appreciate it if you could let us know when the funeral can take place. I'll be seeing the Moores this afternoon.”
Charley looked at Dunne, who obviously wanted to be in the car backing out of the driveway by now, for an answer.
“They're doing the postmortem this morning, so I'dsay Monday or Tuesday. Tuesday to be on the safe side.' He strode off purposefully.
Tom shut the door.
“Faith, what can you be thinking of? And crossing your fingers behind your back does not make a lie any less of a lie, as I believe I have told you God knows how many times before !'
“Hold on a minute, Thomas! First of all, God does know what I mean and even so I know very well what makes a lie and what doesn't. And next, I didn't see you blurting out that Dave had been here for breakfast !' Tom looked uncomfortable.
“All right, all right. I just can't believe he had anything to do with it and it may be wrong—no, I know it's wrong—but I couldn 't turn him in.'
“Besides,' Faith consoled him, 'we honestly don 't know where he is.”
Tom smiled. 'Besides, we don't know where he is.' The smile disappeared. 'What I'd like to do after I get the stuff for MacIsaac together is try to find him and get him to go to the police with me. The longer he stays away the worse it's going to look.'
“That's a great idea, Tom. I'll help you find him. He must be with one of his friends. That 's where kids always go when they run away. Not that this is your typical kid running away because he doesn 't like the curfew his parents slapped on him.'
“That's exactly what I don't want you to do. Help, that is. I want you to stay as close to home as possible until they find out who did it. `They' being the police. Honey, don 't you see? I don 't want anything to happen to you ! '
“I don't want anything to happen to me either. And nothing will. Anyway, what can I do ? Get a plaid cape and a magnifying glass? I'm simply going to keep my eyes and ears open, that's all. But first, if I don't feed this baby, we're both going to explode.”
Dunne and Charley had come to the same conclusion that Tom and Faith had and they were on their way to the Svensons to get a list of the names of Dave's friends.
“If they don't give us much, which will probably be the case, there are a bunch of other people we can ask,' Charley told Dunne.
“Well, the kid's all we have so far, so we'd better concentrate on finding him. Now how much of a problem is this Mrs. Fairchild going to be ? I know the type—couldn't wait for us to leave so she could sit down with her husband and solve the case.”
MacIsaac laughed. 'She's an intelligent woman. I don't think she's going to put herself in any danger. I doubt she'll interfere and Tom's as sensible as they come.'
“If she's so smart, too bad we can't recruit her to fill out all the damned reports and let us get away from the desk long enough to get a handle on things.”
The paperwork was Dunne's least favorite part of the job. He wasn't sure he had a favorite part, but he knew what he hated. His father had been a cop. He'd died of a massive coronary while chasing a suspect. Dunne was three years old and too young to hear the pros and cons of the business. His mother wanted him to go to college and he'd ended up at Columbia on a Regent's scholarship. He stayed for two years, developed a taste for elegant clothes and New Orleans jazz, then enlisted in the army. He knew he'd be going to Vietnam, and he wanted to do it on his own terms. When he returned from the war, he became a cop, just as he had always assumed he would. Anything else would have been boring. All the paperwork in the world could be balanced by ten minutes of action. He married and moved to Mas- sachusetts, the midway point between his family and his wife's in Maine—a bitch of a drive either way. That was ten years ago and he'd mellowed a little. This bothered him occasionally. Without the city to keep him perpetually in a state of alert, he worried he might be losing his edge, and this Aleford case didn't promise to be much of a sharpener. It was probably the boyfriend or someone like him. One look at the girl had told him that. Of course it was these easy assumptions that always turned out to be wrong. That was the fun of it.
“All right, Charley, we'll look for the kid, then I'll toss you for the reports.”
Charley looked a little askance.
“Just kidding.”
Tom called the Svensons as soon as the police left, but they either didn't know where Dave was or weren't saying anything. So he started going down the list of kids who he knew were friends of Dave in the parish. At noon, he called it quits.
“He does seem to have vanished into thin air, Faith. At any rate, if someone I spoke to does know where he is, he'll get the message that I'm looking for him and maybe he'll show up here again.”
He went upstairs, donned his collar, and got ready to go to the Moores'. They had asked Faith to come, too. She wasn't sure whether it was because they wanted to talk to her about finding the body or because she,
They left Benjamin at home with thirteen-year-old Samantha Miller from next door, whom Faith was grooming for a life of baby-sitting bondage. She fervently hoped Samantha 's shyness lasted through high school. Not that she wanted her to be unpopular, but the baby-sitter wars in Aleford made the War for Independence look like a fistfight. And the parsonage didn 't have Nintendo or big screen TV to lure anyone. Sure, the snacks were superior, but Samantha, like most teenagers, preferred Doritos and diet Coke to
Faith had fallen in love with the Moores' house the first time Tom took her there, and further acquaintance had served to deepen the passion. It was the most beautiful house in Aleford, just on the other side of the river and a short drive or long walk from the center, depending on one's time and temperament. Cindy had never walked once she got her license ; Patricia Moore only used the car for shopping.
Behind the house the garden sloped gently down to the water. When the river flooded, some of the flower beds were submerged and the old swing set that stood on the banks was an informal yardstick of the severity of the storm. One wet spring the swings had floated back and forth with the current for a week. No one had ever thought to move them or take them down now that the children were grown. They had always been there and so they stayed. Which was the case with most things in the house. Whatever found its way inside never left. The house was a fantastic, glorious muddle of the treasure and trivia of many generations.
Patricia Moore 's great-great-grandfather, Jeremiah Cox, had been a ship captain and later owner of a fleet of vessels, which, from the look of things, had never unloaded cargo except at this landing. He built the original square clapboard house, but it was Patricia's great grandfather, Martin, who added a wing here and there as his family and fortunes increased. Now it was a rambling house, painted that buttery yellow so beloved of New Englanders, with black shutters and white trim. It looked like a smaller, slightly eccentric version of Long-fellow's home in Cambridge. Patricia's grandparents had added a deep porch, which stretched across the back of the house so they could sit in their wicker rockers and watch the river go by. It wasn't screened in. Mosquitoes either never bit people in Aleford or were studiously ignored, which amounted to the same thing. Maybe everyone put repellent on behind closed doors. The first time Faith went to one of the church picnics and took out a container of Off !, the whole congregation looked as if she had whipped out a hip flask of hootch.
Tom and Faith climbed the front stairs. Patricia had seen them from the window and was opening the door. She had been born in the house and as she stepped forward to greet them, Faith suddenly imagined a whole line of Patricia's ancestors making the same gestures and smiling the same warm but not gushing smile. And Patricia's
