afternoon than that, except the Children’s Museum maybe, but we were just there, or the Aquar-ium, only I’m not in the mood for sharks.”
“Neither am I,” his wife agreed.
It was late, but Faith and Tom were still sitting up in the kitchen. They’d eaten at Figs in Charlestown, great thin-crust pizza—tonight’s the house specialty: figs and prosciutto with Gorgonzola cheese.
There wasn’t a sinkful of dirty dishes staring them in the face, but that was the prevailing mood in the room. The kids were finally asleep—wired after the museum, even Amy.
“Hungry?” Faith asked in a desultory voice. She knew the answer.
“No, thanks. Want anything to drink?” Faith thought for a moment. The occasion didn’t call for champagne. “Pour me some seltzer, will you?
The prosciutto made me thirsty. I’m going to get some paper. Maybe if we write this all down, we’ll be able to make some sense out of it.”
“I doubt it, but you get the pad and I’ll pour the libations.”
Faith was a great believer in organization. She couldn’t cook in a messy kitchen, and while she didn’t always measure ingredients, when she committed a recipe to print, everything was precise. She approached crime the same way.
“All right, let’s list the targets. In some cases, he or she was successful; in some, not.”
“Thank God,” Tom said. “But shouldn’t we list suspects? Isn’t that the way it’s usually done?”
“Do you want to help or not?” Faith was understandably abrupt after the day she’d had.
“I want to help. It was only a suggestion. Targets it is. Much easier, too.”
“That’s the idea.” Faith patted his hand. “Now, the first was Margaret, then Nelson, then Joey, then me.”
“What about the people who received the letters, and Lora?”
“For now we’ll start with bodily harm, known attempts; then we can add all the other information.” She folded the paper into columns and wrote each name at the top. “Think suspects, means, motive, opportunity—all the stuff you read about. Also, anything else that comes to mind. For instance, Margaret got one of the letters.” Faith wrote “letter” in the column, followed by “threat”—that “if you want to stay healthy” business. The Batcheldors’ letter had been the only one to contain a threat. Faith put an asterisk next to the threat and wrote, “Same wording as Lora’s calls” at the bottom of the page, after another asterisk.
She continued. “Now, in terms of suspects, it could have been anyone in Aleford. Maybe we can get at it through motive.”
“The only scenario I can think of is that Joey, or someone else in the family, came across the arson attempt too late to do anything about saving the house, hit her—maybe not with the intent to kill her—then got panicky and left when it became clear she was dead.”
“I agree, and therefore, the likeliest suspect is Joey.”
“Okay, but what about the attack on Nelson? Let’s assume it’s the same person. Nelson has said over and over that he has no idea who would have wanted to harm Margaret, so what would the murderer gain from Nelson’s death? Nelson doesn’t know anything.”
“Gain—that’s what’s missing. Usually there’s a common link there. Who would profit from Margaret’s death? Nobody. The same with Nelson’s. Unless the Batcheldors have all sorts of hidden assets.
Certainly they spent a fortune in bird seed, but apart from that, they never threw money around.”
“True, but the link may not be gain. It could simply be to avoid exposure.”
“You certainly seem to have the lingo down, darling.”
“I try. I’m switching to beer. You want one?” Faith shook her head. She wanted to keep her mind clear.
“The suspects in Nelson’s case are more limited,” she said. “The chloral hydrate had to have been ad- ministered sometime during the breakfast, which means it had to have been someone who was there.”
“It’s beginning to look more and more like Joey. He may have thought Nelson knew something—or Nelson may know something and not know he knows it.
That makes more sense than it sounds.”
“I know,” Faith said, and wrote it down. “But Joey didn’t kill himself—and he is in no condition to go scampering in the woods after me.”
Tom looked disheartened. “We do have a problem.
Unless Joey’s killer was completely unrelated to the other two crimes and that killer thinks you saw something when you discovered the body.”
“It was a person he knew,” Faith mused. “Who disliked him but might have seemed like a friend, or at least an acquaintance?”
“People in the construction field, perhaps, some of the POW! members, and from what you told me about your conversation with Gus, he might be a possibility.”
“If Gus found out that Joey had killed Margaret and tried to kill Nelson, would he have taken the law into his own hands? He wouldn’t have wanted his family’s name dragged through the courts—and the tabloids.
It’s also possible that it was Joey all along who sent the letters to try to intimidate POW!
“I can’t believe Gus Deane would kill anyone, though. Especially a family member.” Tom sipped his beer slowly.
“He was at the breakfast, remember. And he adores Bonnie. If he thought Joey was hurting her in some way . . .” Faith was scribbling madly. “And what about Bonnie herself? She’s very tough. Suppose she found out what Joey had been up to?” Faith added her name. Bonnie had been at St. Theresa’s. She’d been wearing a voluminous snuff-colored skirt with a wide apron of blue-striped mattress ticking—plenty of room for pockets. Plenty of room to hide a bottle of medicine.
“And you? What would these people have against you?” Tom asked.
“I must be getting close to the truth—which leads me to my plan.” She hadn’t intended to tell Tom, but they were in this together now. “I want to give whoever it is another chance, but before you say anything, this time it would be perfectly safe. I’d be a decoy, let it be known that I do know something. But have John or Charley in the pantry or wherever.”
“You must be out of your mind!” Tom exploded.
Faith was disappointed. She’d thought he understood.
“Tom, it’s the only way to stop this. Someone else may get killed.”
“And it’s not going to be you.”
Faith kept quiet. Tom finished his beer.
“Well, what have we learned?”
“Besides the fact that I married a crazy woman?” He tempered his remark with a long kiss.
“Besides that.”
“One of our killers, if there are indeed two, was someone at the Minuteman breakfast. Although, the notion that there are two seems unimaginable.” Faith was casting her thoughts back to Patriots’
Day morning, assembling the cast of characters: Gus, Joey, Nelson, Bonnie, Brad . . .
“Brad Hallowell. We haven’t talked about him.”
“How does he fit into all this?” Tom had slipped his arm around his wife’s shoulders. She smelled good—
having put Amy to bed, Faith had a whiff of the corn-starch powder she used for the baby mixed in with her Arpege.
“Suppose
“What about the attack on Nelson?”
“Nelson knows Margaret was meeting Brad at the house. Maybe Brad has a ski mask, too, and was ca-vorting in the bog with them. Brad is satisfied now that Nelson is too terrified to say anything and is letting him live. He may be certain there’s no evidence to tie him to the crime.”
“And he made the calls to Lora and threw the brick?”
“Yes—and cut the hoses on the excavator. Joey would never damage his own property, unless he really did
