Katherine Page - Body In The Belfry

“I like the fish image. Maybe you could work it into a sermon.”

They moved out of the study toward the kitchen. Tom turned to Faith, " I'm convinced the key to the whole thing is one of those pictures. You're sure you didn't recognize anyone ? "

“It was an odd context, but I'm sure." Faith had been mentally undressing Aleford 's male population ever since her discovery.

“It's very puzzling. And what about the joints in the box ? Although it wasn't enough to suggest an opium den. And then there 's the money—it might not have been blackmail ; she could have been selling pot.”

Faith sighed. " I wish we'd hear from Dave, then maybe we could get somewhere.”

But Dave didn't call and the next morning was the funeral.

Faith stood in the cemetery, shivering in the bright sunshine. Tuesday was as glorious a day for Cindy's funeral as Friday had been for her death. Yet Faith was cold despite the warmth of her Lauren suit. The shrill orange and red of the sugar maples and the black clothes of the mourners reminded her of Halloween. All Hallow 's Eve. The night when the dead rise from their graves.

There is nothing quite so silent as a burial.

All the birds must have already gone south, Faith thought.

Then Tom 's solemn, measured voice cut through the air.

He was reading the Wordsworth and it was beautiful; Patricia had been right : A slumber did my spirit seal ; And I had no human fears: She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years.

Poor Cindy, thought Faith. So young. Death must have been the last thing on her mind. She was completely alive, grabbing at life with amoral abandon. She deserved something for the way she lived, but was it death l They were lowering the casket now. Faith pictured Cindy still beautiful, lying in its satin interior in her wedding gown. Somewhere her would-be groom, Dave Svenson, was at large. It was all quite impossibly morbid and melodramatic. Faith gave her arm a surreptitious pinch to remind herself she wasn't in some Victorian time warp.

Even the cemetery contributed to the illusion. It was an old one, of course. People were always coming to make rubbings of the headstones for notions of interior decoration, which Faith had never understood. Virtually every home in Aleford had one or two of the most lugubrious examples framed in the hallway—all those skulls with the wings of angels and drooping willows. The oldest section of the cemetery, by the river, blended well with the motifs of the headstones. Actual drooping willows grew so thick they blotted out the sky above. The lawn was mostly moss. In the summer the dark shade and damp, warm ground below gave it the lush sultry feeling of a bayou, quite alien to its Puritan roots. Despite the obvious romanticism, Faith preferred the newer section.

Here the trees had not yet reached the stage where they blocked the light, and the grass was green, very green. There were pretty white benches and plantings kept up by the Evergreens. Last year, shortly before Benjamin was born, she often used to stroll here, too unsteady for more ambitious walks. It was peaceful and suited her slightly philosophical musings on beginnings and endings. Unlike its murky neighbor, it was a cemetery in which one could believe life would go on forever. Today, at the end of Cindy's life, those spring thoughts seemed a long time ago.

Faith looked around at the people gathered at Cindy 's grave : the Moores ; youth group members, looking scared and awe-stricken ; parishioners ; friends of the Moores ; just about everybody else in Aleford not in one of the other categories ; and a few obvious reporters. Only the putative chief mourner was absent.

In fact he wasn't. As Tom moved onto Wordsworth 's second stanza, Dave Svenson was gazing down on the assembled group through binoculars from a small hill north of the cemetery. Unlike Faith, he was not thinking about what Cindy was wearing. In fact, he found it hard to believe it was Cindy, but he knew that the lowering of the casket and those clods of earth that fell upon it were once and for all signaling an end to some part of his life—for better or worse.

Since leaving the Fairchilds on Saturday morning, he had been staying with various friends. He managed to call his parents, but did not tell them where he was so they wouldn 't have to tell any lies to the police. His mother had cried, but she didn 't advise him to turn himself in. He knew he had made the right choice.

All his friends were trying to piece together what they knew and what they heard that the police knew, but so far it was a total mystery. No one, least of all Dave, could figure out why Cindy had been killed. And especially why she had been killed in such a strange way. The Alliance might have been buying the tramp theory—or saying so—but none of Dave 's friends were.

He had spent most of his time with Steve, who lived on the outskirts of town. Steve's parents had bought a farm in Aleford during the sixties, intending to live off the land. Now in the eighties, they found themselves making a small fortune selling chèvre and wild mushrooms to New York and Boston specialty stores. Dave had been living in their barn and eating whatever Steve could sneak out to him. He was heartily sick of goat cheese and hoped he would never have to eat it again. It was fine for his Swedish relatives, but he frankly preferred Velveeta (a fact that, had it come out at the time, might have taken the edge off Faith's partisanship).

So Dave stood under the gaily colored tent of leaves that in another time and setting might have been his bridal canopy.

He focused his binoculars on indlvidual faces : his parents, dour and Ibsenesque; the Moores harder to read, a mixture of confusion and something that might have been sadness. Faith looked as if she was thinking of something else and Reverend Fairchild just perfect, serious, but not fake either.

Dave was so intent on the scene before him that he did not hear the branches snapping behind him. He was leaning against a tree trying to figure out what exactly he was feeling besides relief and fear when the biggest hand he had ever seen in his life came down hard on his shoulder. He froze.

“Dave Svenson?" the hand's voice asked quietly. "Yes," said Dave, figuring it was pointless to argue or run.

“ My name is Detective Lieutenant John Dunne. I've been looking for you.”

Dunne was happy. He was seldom disappointed. They just couldn't stay away. You could count on it. They always turned up for the funeral.

Down in the cemetery, the group had dispersed. Manyof the mourners, or more accurately, attendees, had returned to the Moores' house for the traditional funeral baked meats—in this case, thimbles of dry sherry and tea sandwiches. Faith eyed the sandwiches suspiciously. Anchovy paste on trustless triangles of white bread and maybe some egg salad spread a tenth of a millimeter thick. Still, people were managing to put away quite a lot of them. What would they do with real food ? Faith asked herself. If ever a demand existed, it was here.

She took some sherry in a fragile glass and looked at it appreciatively. Sandwich glass, the exquisite blownthree-mold variety. Just what she would have expected at the Moores. It was lovely not to be disappointed. In a way, the sandwiches matched the setting and occasion, too, but there was such a thing as going too far. She walked over to the window seat, covered with chintz roses, and sat down to think a few wistful thoughts.

It was still a, beautiful day and people were strolling in the garden. It was not really a mournful occasion, but there was an undercurrent of tension, not lessened by Charley MacIsaac 's presence at the funeral and now back at the house. He joined Faith, balancing a tiny Spode plate heaped with sandwiches and something that was not dry sherry in a tumbler. Faith smiled up at him.