Katherine Page - Body in the Bog

“No, no one expressed anything other than thanks for my words of comfort. I wouldn’t have expected otherwise. I’ve known Gus all my life,” Millicent replied.

Faith was feeling better. “And that would be . . .” Millicent smiled sweetly and left.

It was hard to find food in the suburbs, unless you wanted to drive to Waltham, which had unaccountably become the mecca for innovative, excellent chefs outside Boston or Cambridge. To get a quick meal, you had to settle for a chain or choose warily from the menu at the Aleford Inn. They went to the inn. Sam ordered some scotch for himself and sweet vermouth for his wife and asked Faith what she wanted. She knew enough not to order the house wine and joined Pix in some vermouth—but dry.

The trick with the inn was to avoid anything with a foreign name or fancy sauce. No chicken à la Ver-sailles or scrod with hazelnut sorrel cream. Scrod simply broiled accompanied by the inn’s thick-cut french fries, the skin left on, was delicious, though, and all of them ordered the same thing. They opted for the vegetable of the day, carrot pennies, rather than the house iceberg-lettuce salad with Thousand Island dressing.

They’d tested those waters before. When the food arrived, Faith ate hungrily.

“Remember, just a memorial service and maybe a few words at the grave,” Pix was reminding Sam. The Millers had a plot on Sanpere Island in Maine, where Pix’s father was buried. It was a lovely cemetery surrounded by birch and evergreens. Faith thought it might not be a bad place to end up. Her thoughts were determinedly morbid. Joey was only a few years older than Tom and she. But then they weren’t going to get themselves killed. Not that Joey had chosen this course, but something he did had led to murder. His murder.

“Who do you think killed him?” she asked Sam straight out.

Sam took the question in stride. He chewed reflectively.

“I wish I could think it was someone from away.” He used the term the natives on Sanpere applied to anyone not born there—a category distinct from summer people and tourists; people who lived there but weren’t from there.

“But you don’t.”

“No, I’m afraid I think it’s someone he knew well; someone we all know. But damned if I can come up with who that someone is.”

Faith and Pix nodded their heads simultaneously in agreement. They looked like the ornaments people put in their cars’ rear windows. They bobbed again.

Someone they all knew.

The funeral was as sad as—and even more crowded than—the wake. Cars lined the side streets near the church. There were also a number of pickups and vans with the names of various local construction companies. Joey’s colleagues had come to pay their last respects. Inside the church, Faith half-expected the pallbearers to be followed by a contingent of hard hats, uniformed like a police funeral. The police were there; both Charley and John sat in a pew near the door. As Faith and Tom walked by toward the front of St. Theresa’s, John leaned out. “Are you going to be home later this afternoon?”

They would be now and told him so.

It was a long service. Father Reeves was accompanied by the priest from Joey’s old church in Somerville, who drew tears when he described Joey as an altar boy, Joey in CYO. Faith tried not to think about what Scott Phelan had told her the night of the Fletchers’ dinner party. Maybe Joseph Madsen’s feet had strayed from the path, but they were there once, and this could be one of the reasons his mother was crying so hard.

The interment was in a cemetery in East Boston, where his grandparents lay at rest. Tom was going, but told Faith she should pick up the kids and stay home.

Enough was enough.

She spent the afternoon engaged in quality time, aware that she hadn’t exactly been piling up points for her motherhood merit badge. She read to Amy until she went down for her nap. Ben was doing Legos on the floor next to them. It was a baby book, he’d declared, but Faith knew he was listening intently as the Poky Little Puppy made his distinctive way through dogdom.

Tom came home. It had started to rain as soon as they reached the cemetery, of course, he told her. A sodden spring. It meant a hot, dry summer everyone said—the same people who knew the wind velocity merely by glancing at a swaying branch. The catering company was air-conditioned; the parsonage was not.

Faith figured on doing a lot of cooking. She would, in fact, be doing a lot of cooking this week. They’d accepted several jobs and had a wedding the following weekend.

She looked out the front window. The rain hadn’t reached Aleford yet, but Detective Lieutenant Dunne had. He was coming up the front walk, covering the distance in several fewer steps than most. She opened the door before he could knock.

“Good, you’re home,” he said, and walked in.

“Tom, too?” There was a distinct note of hope in his voice.

“Tom, too,” Faith assured him.

Tom had told Faith that Dunne had been in East Boston, as well. It was hard for him to be unobtrusive, but he’d remained at a distance from the main body of mourners.

He sat down, removed his raincoat, but refused Faith’s offer of nourishment, as usual. The man must eat like a horse when he got home, she thought. Some form of nourishment was preventing any withering away of flesh from his immense frame. She’d been to the state police barracks and aside from some ancient, moldy-looking sandwiches in a machine next to one that dispensed soft drinks, there wasn’t a scrap of food in evidence. She pictured Dunne’s wife, who Faith had heard was a mere slip of a woman, valiantly stirring large pots and turning a spit with huge haunches of meat. Faith was so distracted by her mental images, she almost missed John’s first words.

“I have to get back right away, but I want to talk to you about Saturday.”

Faith figured as much.

“Are you absolutely sure you were being stalked? It wasn’t an animal—or a kid playing some kind of game?”

“If it was a kid, it was a very weird one,” Faith said, then went through the whole experience again—the way the person had stopped when she did, speeded up—and hid.

“It seems as if someone thinks you know something. Do you?” John’s question was direct and forceful. “This is no time to hold back, Faith.”

“I do have several theories. Tom and I spent Saturday night going through every possibility we could think of, but I’m sure I haven’t missed anything and I’ve told you or Charley everything.” It was true—and frustrating.

“So what did you and Tom come up with?” Dunne leaned back in the wing chair. It didn’t creak, but it looked full.

Tom gave him a synopsis of the various suspects.

“Nothing makes sense. Murder doesn’t make sense.

It’s an act against nature, against the divine order of the universe, but the most likely possibility is that there were two killers: Joey Madsen and then Brad Hallowell. Faith thinks Brad may have developed serious psychological problems as a result of his involvement with some violent fantasy computer games.”

“He seems to view life as one giant monitor screen and doesn’t distinguish between reality and RAM,” she told John.

“And you think he was your would-be assailant?”

“I don’t have any evidence, but yes, I think he was,” she replied. No evidence yet, she added to herself. After Tom’s reaction to her decoy plan, she knew what Dunne’s would be. Not telling him about a future possibility wasn’t, strictly speaking, withholding information—at least not in Faith’s book.

John stood up to leave. “You notice anything at the Madsen wake or funeral?”

Faith shook her head. “Nothing, except a truce has been declared between POW! and the Deanes. Bonnie Madsen wasn’t particularly cordial to me, but that’s understandable since she might have some powerful feelings regarding the person who discovered her husband’s body. I don’t think it had to do with my opposition to Alefordiana Estates. Millicent has called a meeting for tomorrow night to suggest to the membership that all efforts to halt the development of Beecher’s Bog cease for the present. Depending on how people react, the truce might be over.” But Joey wouldn’t be around to find out. He wouldn’t be around to make his fortune, either.