Katherine Page - Body In The Belfry

“ Pix ! You must believe me ! I'm as sure of Sam's innocence as I am, well—of yours or mine!”

Pix looked at her in the eye. "That's better," she said, then added, "but I wouldn 't be so sure of mine if I were you.”

Faith gasped.

“Just testing," Pix said wickedly.

Faith closed the door and wondered if all her parish duties would end up making her feel like she'd just had one of her mother 's talking tos. In any case, she was not sure what she had done for Pix, though Pix had certainly opened her eyes on a few things. At least Faith had cheered her up; the Pix who left was quite different from the one who arrived. But then it might have been the brandy. Now the main thing to do was find out what sort of case the police had against Sam. She doubted that John Dunne would figuratively throw the cuffs on someone without pretty solid evidence.

Tom called again at noon. The police were being terrifically considerate. MacIsaac was letting him stay with Sam and Dunne had just gone out to get them all some meatball subs to eat. Faith almost gagged. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment.

Dave had been released and was home sleeping. He had been tearfully relieved before discovering that Samhad been arrested, then he had burst out in an angry denunciation of Cindy. Nobody stopped him.

Before he got off the phone, Tom told Faith that just after they had arrived at the station Sam had confessed that Cindy, parish Young People 's President and former record holder for perfect attendance at Sunday School, had been blackmailing him for several months.

And they call New York "Sin City," Faith thought as she hung up.

What had started out as a moment of sweet passion had rapidly turned into a nightmare of lust and a web of deceit for Sam. At least this is the way he thought of it. Faith thought it was an apt but harsh description when she had pieced the whole story together with what she learned from Pix, what Sam told Tom, and even a few details from Charley MacIsaac who couldn 't resist a snide comment about people who drove around in highly visible cars.

Sam had offered to drive Cindy home after church one sunny June Sunday when she had complained of a sore ankle. Somehow the silver Porsche 'had ended up on one of the birch-lined dirt roads near town conservation land and somehow before too long Cindy and Sam were lying under the silver green leaves.

Poor Cindy, thought Sam. She had had a rough time of it, losing her parents so young, and face it, Patricia and Robert were a bit stiff. Not like him. She told him she could talk to him, really talk to him, and thanked him with touching humility for what she hinted was the sublime sexual experience of her life.

Sam didn't smoke, but he had wanted a cigarette as he lay nestled in the ferns with Cindy 's lovely head resting on his shoulder, her long dark hair spread down his chest entwined in the dark hair there—sure there were a few gray ones coming in, but that's what maturity meant.

She made him feel seasoned, like fine-grained oak, not old. Hell, not old at all.

By the next week he knew he was hooked. He couldn't stop thinking about her—the sunlight, the smells, the sex. But he didn 't call. She was a kid, or if not exactly a kid, she certainly was engaged to be married, and to someone Sam liked very much. Dave had been their babysitter and was like a member of the family.

He pushed the whole thing from his mind and began to go up more often to the house in Maine. Each June as soon as school was over, Pix packed up the kids and the Land Rover and took off for their cottage on Penobscot Bay, where she spent the summer blissfully making beach plum jelly and raising money for the local ambulance corps.

One Friday night in early July, when he went into the garage loaded with his L.L. Bean suitcase plus all the food Pix couldn't find on the island, there was Cindy in a halter top, shorts, and not much else sitting in the front seat of the car waiting for him.

He stopped going to Maine as frequently, or rather he went, but it was further south, to motels in Old Orchard Beach and Ogunquit where they would make love feverishly, then eat lobster on the docks. He didn't know whether he was happy or not about the way things were going, but he knew he was alive. He also didn't know that while he slept Cindy had set the timer on her camera, artfully draped herself around him, and taken several shots which she neatly labeled with his initials, the date, and name of the motel.

Toward the end of July, Cindy changed abruptly. Suddenly she began to make jokes. She started to call him "my old codger" and "Father Time," at first affectionately and then less so. When he was tired, she did not attempt to hide her annoyance. He was no longer the partner in control, the teacher, the wise veteran. He wasthe supplicant, the controlled. She would cancel dates at the last minute or demand to go back early. He wanted to end things, but for a long time could not bring himself to do it. The memory of the early days was still fresh and Pix was away. Cindy was company, if increasingly bad company.

In early August he decided his nerves could not take it anymore. He was not cut out to cheat on his wife and he had intended all along to go to the island for two weeks. It was a logical time to break things off once and for all.

But Cindy had no intention of breaking things off. She was getting a bit tired of him, she told him, but it was pleasant to have an older man take her to dinner occasionally and as for the sex, she liked to keep her hand in, so to speak. She had laughed mockingly at him. He was furious and his intentions of letting her down gently vanished. So did her lightly amused manner. After he had lost his temper and let her know just what a conniving bitch she was, she had told him in a few pithy sentences that if he ever tried to break off with her, Pix would know everything. Cindy had kept a record of the names and dates of every place they had gone. She said she had taken the carbons from the motels and places they ate on occasions when he was supposed to be out of town on client's business. "And I've got more than carbons on you, something more negative, let's say," she had threatened. She would also make sure his partners knew. Not that they would care much, but he would look like a fool, she said, " Which of course is exactly what you are, Mr. Goodwrench.”

She had taunted him all fall, even phoning the house. Thursday afternoon she had called his office demanding that he take her to dinner. He called Pix with a feeble excuse and they had driven to Hawthorne-by-the-Sea. Sam had a theory that in big restaurants you were more anonymous, except in this one he forgot about the loudspeaker system they used when your table was ready. It had never occurred to him at any time with Cindy to use an alias. It would have been no use anyway, he realized later. She would just have had more to blackmail him over.

They sat at one of the windows overlooking the ocean and watched the waves and the skyline of Boston shimmering in the distance. It should have been supremely romantic. Absentmindedly Sam bit into a popover, the house specialty. It tasted like sawdust. He looked at Cindy. She had ordered the most expensive things on the menu and was consuming her oysters Rockefeller with gusto. Sam felt like throwing up.

“I can't live this way. I'm going to tell Pix myself.”

“And what about your partners ? " Cindy asked mildly.

“They screw around all the time. This isn't going to change anything, and even if it does, I don't care anymore," Sam said wearily.

Cindy just smiled. It made him a whole lot more nervous than any of her threats.

“Just think about it, Sammy. Really think about it. And I need some more wine to go with the lobster." He was home before midnight and slept with the blessed relief of someone about to be let out of jail. The next morning Cindy called the house at seven o'clock. Fortunately he happened to pick it up. "Hello, Sam, is Samantha there? This is Cindy. There 's something I want to tell her—and show her." Sam's throat closed and at first he could not speak. Stupidly, of all the things he thought she could do to him, this was the one that he had never considered. His kids. Perhaps he thought she had had some humanity after all. Defeated, he said, "All right, what do you want?"