The Body in the Gazebo (9 page)

What was this summer going to be like? In her mind the two events—the damage to the Sanpere house and Theo’s disastrous grades—had somehow merged together as the reason why they had to go to this new island. It might not make sense, but it was how she felt.

Why couldn’t Theo just do his schoolwork and then go have fun afterward! That was why he kept failing. All that fun. He needed more serious friends, although Scooter was awfully nice. But a friend who would keep him from his weaknesses. A friend like the Professor.

Father had just said that Theo must get it through his head that he would have to make his own way in the world. Theo had laughed and said that was exactly what he intended to do—enter the business world like his father. He’d quoted former President Coolidge, “The business of America is business.” Ursula knew this was one thing father and son agreed on—and on what a great man the new President, Herbert Hoover, was. Father had replied, “That’s all very well, but you have to be a college man, son. You have to be a Harvard man, like all the Lyman men.” Theo had answered that he knew that, although from the amount of money his barber on Dunster Street was making on the stock market, maybe college wasn’t so important these days. In the next breath, he’d said he was kidding and his father had laughed. Told him to get some tips. “He shaves some pretty wealthy faces and my broker’s is one of them, I’ll have you know.”

Ursula had hoped the talking-to would end on this cheerful note. Maybe Theo would have time to take her to the new Marx brothers movie, but Father got agitated about Theo’s grades again and her brother rushed by her so fast she couldn’t wiggle out in time to stop him.

She hoped he could wiggle out of the trouble he was in and make it a good summer. He just had to. Suddenly Ursula felt trapped by the big vase and struggled to slip out. Tossing her hair back over her shoulders and away from her flushed face, she decided she was too old for this kind of behavior and wished she could get back the talismans she’d placed in the jars that even now she could barely reach—a pearl button she’d found on the street, a British sixpence, the ticket from the first symphony concert she’d attended, and all those lines of poetry she’d written on tiny scraps of paper—offerings to oblivion. It would be impossible to retrieve them now without tipping the vases over.

The front door banged shut. Theo was gone. Her eyes filled with tears.

P
ix looked at her nails. She vaguely remembered that it was supposed to mean something if you looked at them with your fingers stretched out or curled into the palm—like wearing your circle pin on the correct side of your blouse collar. Somehow the manicurist had transformed them into perfect pink shells—and the same with her toes. She really should have them done more often.

And now she knew why people loved getting massages. She’d been so relaxed she’d dozed off. And that facial! Last night as she carefully applied her makeup—mouth and eyes—the glowing face in the mirror looked five, no ten, years younger. She felt positively sybaritic. And not at all like herself. Well, there was a reason for that . . .

She picked up her phone and, conscious of her nails, carefully dialed Faith.

“I was just going to call you! Your mother is doing so well. We had a nice, long visit this afternoon, and when I left Dora said she was going to get her up longer tomorrow and into her big chair after they do their constitutionals in the hallway. How was the massage? And the in-laws?”

“It’s been wonderful. Cissy is the planner and she seems to have thought of everything. Yesterday was fun—and the massage was terrific. We’d all been together almost constantly since we arrived, and she was sensitive enough to tell everyone that for last night, we’d all go our own ways.”

“Smart lady. This bodes well for the future, especially when it comes to sharing grandchildren. What did you and Sam do?”

“Absolutely nothing. Long walk on the beach and then a room service dinner on the patio we have right outside our room.”

“This doesn’t sound like the Sam and Pix Miller I know. Are you sure you didn’t squeeze in something educational or strenuous?” Faith laughed. “Sounds romantic, however, so perhaps there was some exercise after all? I know you’re blushing, Pix.”

Pix was.

Faith continued. “But what was it you wanted to tell me? Your mysterious bigger-than-a-breadbox item.”

“Oh Faith, you know that line from
Casablanca
when Bogart says, ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine’?”

“Of course.”

“Well, of all the weddings in all the towns in all the world, Dr. Stephen Cohen has walked into mine.”

“What on earth are you talking about? Don’t tell me you know him?”

“It was when we were in college, and yes, I know him.”

“But isn’t that a nice coincidence? A sign that this match was meant to be? One of those serendipitous cosmic coincidences? Unless he was and is a total jerk.”

“No, the opposite, in fact. But Faith, I
knew
him.”

“Are we talking about ‘know’ as in, say, the biblical usage?”

Pix raised her voice, “Oh honey, yes, I’m all ready to go. Just checking on Mother with Faith. Everything’s fine.”

“Sam came in?”

“Yes—and yes to your other question. Gotta run, talk to you later.”

Faith closed her phone and looked out the window. Barring a blizzard, the daffodils would be in bloom for Easter, less than three weeks away. She found herself unable to alter her gaze, or move her body away from the spot where she’d been standing while she was on the phone. Cliché that it was, truly life was way stranger than fiction. No one could have made this up. Myrtle, aka Pix, Rowe Miller, her best friend and next-door neighbor and currently starring as the mother of the groom in a swanky resort in Hilton Head, South Carolina, had, in her distant past, slept with the father of the bride.

R
iveting as both Ursula’s saga and Pix’s still to be revealed were, Faith turned her thoughts to assembling a chicken dish, a variation of coq au vin, for dinner before picking up Ben from his clarinet lesson—thank heavens it wasn’t something large like a tuba or loud like drums—and Amy from a friend’s, where she was working on a science project. Faith sometimes thought all she’d ever remember about her children’s school years were science projects. They seemed to pop up with alarming frequency and require an endless amount of time. Fortunately the papier-mâché model of the inner ear was being constructed at someone else’s house this time. Faith was still finding Popsicle sticks from the scale model of a cyclotron that Ben made in fifth grade. Could that be right? Maybe she was confusing it with the scale model of the Alamo for history. She was in no hurry to see her children grow up and go off on their own, but she greeted each vacation from school and school-related tasks as a reprieve, with summer the best of all.

When Faith returned with kids, Tom was home ahead of them, and from the bleak smile he gave them as they came through the back door, she knew the news from the bank hadn’t been good. She hustled the kids off to do homework and put the chicken in the oven. It was comfort food. The Fairchilds liked dark meat, so she had used the whole legs, adding carrots, onions, parsnips, and some garlic before dousing it with red wine and seasoning it with fresh sage and a small amount of salt and pepper. Covered, it baked in the oven for an hour before she took the foil off to brown it. She was serving it tonight with potatoes she’d steamed, sautéed in oil and butter, before liberally sprinkling it with more sage.

“There’s no question,” Tom said. “The money was taken out of the account at intervals over about nine months or so using an ATM, and all from the one at the Aleford branch. Five hundred dollars is the limit that can be withdrawn in one day and that was the amount of each transaction. Twenty in all. The last one was made the night before we left for Maine in December.”

“Merde!” She reverted to the strong French epithet she’d adopted when the kids were little, but old enough to understand, and mimic, the English ones. She had been hoping that the withdrawals would have occurred when Tom was verifiably somewhere else. “And the others? None when you were in the hospital?”

Tom shook his head. “Several when I was recuperating at home, but I was up and about. It’s not a long walk to the bank.”

Faith sighed. The parsonage, like the church, bordered the Aleford green, as did several old houses plus the historic tavern where the minutemen may have bolstered their courage by hoisting a few that April morning. Main Street snaked around the side and kept going straight through the town. With good binoculars, you could see the bank at, memorably enough, 1776 Main.

“When did the withdrawals start? That should tell us something.”

“Just about a year ago. I have all the dates.”

“Have there been any new employees at the bank during this time? It seems to me there was a new teller that winter.”

“No new tellers, just several from other branches who filled in when someone was sick or had another reason for missing work. And they’d have no way of knowing my PIN. I’m the only one. No other changes in the additional employees, either.”

“What about checking the tape from the surveillance camera?”

Again Tom shook his head.

“Mice chewed the wires. They didn’t discover it until January. Nothing had recorded since the previous year.”

This was a perennial hazard in rural Aleford. The Ganley Museum’s cameras were always being attacked by rodents with a taste for what Faith imagined was a well-aged blend of plastic and metal—provocative with a hint of fruitiness.

Her husband looked exhausted and Faith decided the rest of this conversation could wait while he stretched out on the couch before dinner. He could watch the news. That would put things into perspective.

“Why don’t you catch
The News Hour
while I finish dinner? We’re not going to solve this now.”

But we will, she added to herself.

Both kids somehow seemed to have developed their own versions of the Vulcan Mind Meld at too early an age, and during dinner Faith kept up a steady stream of conversation about Ursula’s childhood reminiscences in order to keep Ben and Amy from figuring out that something was terribly wrong. It had been an effort at first, but soon they were all talking about what it must have been like in the predigital age. And then they got on to the Great Depression. Ben was filled with facts and figures.

“Thirteen million people lost their jobs. And they had these places called ‘Hoovervilles,’ after the President, where homeless people lived in cardboard cartons and slept under blankets made out of newspapers. They called them ‘Hoover Blankets.’ The day all the banks failed was called ‘Black Tuesday,’ but my history teacher said it isn’t true that a lot of the rich guys who’d lost all their money jumped out their office windows. Maybe just a couple. She also said that even though a lot of those rich people did lose all their money, a lot held on to it and made even more.”

Faith was impressed, both with her son and his teacher. Amy’s mouth had dropped open.

“They only had newspapers for blankets! Why didn’t the rich people buy them real ones?”

Tom and Faith looked at each other. One of those unanswerable questions, then as now.

“Well, sweetheart, they weren’t thinking straight,” Tom said.

“Or kindly,” Amy added emphatically.

As Ursula, whom Faith had come to regard as a kind of Yankee Sheherazade, told her tale, the parallels between the summer of 1929 and the current economic situation were eerily similar—the ever-widening gap between rich and poor with the middle swallowed up in the process.

After dinner, Ben retreated to work on a story he was doing for extra credit in English. Bless the compelling practice teacher, Faith thought, and slightly uneasily added, and hormones. Amy was taking a shower at her mother’s insistence. Eliminating her daughter’s morning one might help her make the bus on time.

Tom had gone into his study only to emerge fifteen minutes later to make a cup of tea for himself.

“Want one?’

“No, thanks,” Faith said. “But I’ll keep you company with some milk and broken library books I brought home from work.”

Understandably Tom looked puzzled.

“Cookies Niki’s making for the fund-raiser,” Faith explained.

Before the water molecules boiled, Tom’s did. He was up and pacing around the room.

“I go back and forth. Resign—or not? Replace the missing funds . . .”

Faith gasped. Ten thousand dollars was a rather large chunk of change. And resign? This couldn’t be happening . . .

“Except,” Tom said, “both could be taken as an admission of guilt.”

The little bird on the kettle was whistling. Faith made the tea.

“Tom, no one in the parish possibly believes you took the money. Maybe they think there was a careless error, but not malicious intent.”

“Tell that to Sherman Munroe. The way he looked at me in church yesterday you’d think I was keeping a mistress in a fancy condo at the Ritz.”

Tom’s notions of what things cost were delightfully naïve. Faith had always paid for her own clothes and gifts for her husband from a separate account that she’d had since before her marriage, setting it up again when she moved to Aleford. Faith had curbed her youthful label fetish over the years, but still, if Tom had known what the deceptively simple little black dress Faith had worn to a recent party cost, he’d faint.

“The missing money might cover two nights. You and your mistress will have to scale down.”

Tom reached for a cookie.

Faith reached for a pad of paper and a pencil.

“You’re not going to get anything done tonight on your sermon, so let’s make a start on finding out who’s really responsible. Eventually this will lead to the money, and although I’m sure it’s long gone, whoever it is will have to replace it—and then some.” Faith was thinking jail time.

“You’re right. I can’t concentrate on anything else.”

“Walk me through the whole thing. Where do you keep the Discretionary Fund records, the list of amounts? And where do you keep the checkbook and ATM card? Here or at the church?”