The Body in the Moonlight (8 page)

The kitchen door swung open and Tom walked into the hall.

“Oh, Tom…” She reached for those broad shoulders and thought that after she hugged him very hard, she might allow herself a tear or two—anger, frustration, and fear called for no less.

“Have to run, honey. Lucas Prendergast is at Mass General and I promised I'd stop by. There's a book I want to bring him.”

“Then you won't be home for dinner?” It took a good thirty minutes to get to the hospital. Then figuring in parking, the visit, and thirty minutes back, Tom wouldn't be home until the kids' bedtime. Luke had been battling lung cancer since early last spring and was in for another surgery. She knew Tom needed to go, but she needed him, too. She quickly blurted out what had been on Have Faith's answering machine.

“It'll blow over,” Tom said, trying to sound reassuring. She had followed him into his study. He was running his finger over a shelf of volumes, searching for the right title. “I had it here last week. Marian Wright Edelman's
Lanterns
. Ah, here it is!” He plucked the slender book from its place and started out the door. “Restaurants, caterers—any business that concerns food is always contending with stuff like this. Remember the problem with your black bean soup when you were doing that
Scarlet Letter
movie shoot?”

Faith did remember. Remembered it all too well.

“But nobody died. It was Ex-Lax added after we'd put the food out. Unpleasant, but not life-threatening.”

He was halfway out the door. “There's nothing you can do about this, though. You'll just have to accept it.”

This was Tom talking? Talking to the wife he claimed to know so well, he felt as if they were one person—a sweet concept, she'd always thought when he murmured it in her ear, but not one she'd ever fully accepted. Do nothing? Faith?

When her food had been altered on the movie set, she'd had no choice but to find out who did it or risk losing the business that had just started again in its new locale. There was no choice this time, either, if she wanted to retain her good name—and perhaps for some other reasons, as well.

She closed the outside door on the empty space where her husband had been and went upstairs to wake Amy from her nap. Holding her little girl, warm and still muzzy with sleep, Faith stood at the window and watched Tom cross back over to the church, where he'd left his car. Maybe it was her imagination, but he seemed slightly stooped, as if he dared not look up to heaven right now.

 

Niki was furious.

It was Tuesday morning. The premises of Have Faith had been given a clean bill of health. Faith had asked Niki to come to work to talk about the situation. To talk about the disastrous situation.

“Assholes. All of them. What do they think? That we pride ourselves on poisoning our customers? State-of-the-art techniques. Strychnine in the Stroganoff,
Amanita bisque? Have Faith takes on a whole new meaning. Maybe we should add ‘Food Testers Supplied Free of Charge'?”

Faith started to laugh. Niki had the right attitude.

“Look, the game dinner is Saturday night and the birthday party next Monday. We'll use the time to test some new recipes. We're always complaining we serve the same things because we never get a chance to try anything different. Here's our chance.”

Niki wasn't letting go so easily. “Sure, sure. Wonderful. We'll cook up a storm. Nothing we can do about it.”

Faith was getting tired of hearing this. She didn't reach for the file where she kept notes for new dishes. Instead, she sat down at the counter and tore off a blank sheet of paper from the pad she kept there.

“I keep coming back to motive.”

Niki sat down, too, her eyes sparkling, and passed Faith a pen. “I might have known you'd decided to solve this thing yourself. Does Tom know what you're up to?”

No—and doesn't care, Faith started to say. “No—and I don't want him to” was what came out. “Millicent hinted that Gwen might have jilted someone who then killed her—the old ‘If I can't have her, nobody can' rationale.”

“That's good, but don't those guys usually kill themselves afterward, too? And don't they broadcast it all over? Run up with a gun, scream out, ‘I love you, baby,' kill the poor woman, then turn it on themselves?
That's all you hear about these days. I read about one nutcake in New York recently who waited for his former girlfriend's wedding day, then shot her as she was getting into the limo. Killed himself, too, but not soon enough.”

What Niki said made sense—an abusive ex would have been more noticeably on the scene. Of course, the police might have information they weren't sharing about a stalker/killer, but somehow Faith thought she would have heard about someone like this, possibly from Jared.

“Poison is supposed to be a woman's method. Any possibilities there?” Niki asked.

“I think it's become an equal-opportunity modus operandi, but Millicent did suggest that Gwen could have been killed by a jealous female.”

“There have to be a bunch of those around,” Niki said, a little too enthusiastically for Faith's current frame of mind. “The woman was gorgeous. Not flashy, but very, very sexy. On Saturday night, most of the men in the room had their tongues hanging out every time she hit the dance floor, and if looks could kill, she'd have been murdered hours earlier by any number of wives.” Niki chattered on. “But this was a premeditated crime. You just don't happen to have cyanide in your purse.”

Faith had thought of this. And what about the almond cookies in the dessert? Did the murderer get lucky, or did he or she know the menu in advance? It had been no secret, yet aside from Paula and a few
others on the committee, no one outside Faith's own staff was familiar with what would be served. There had been an article in the
Aleford Chronicle
about the party, though.

“Remember the write-up about the event in the paper a couple of weeks ago? Paula wanted to be sure people knew about the auction, and there may have even been a few tickets left for sale then. It mentioned the main course and the dessert.”

“Which means our murderer reads the town paper and must live in Aleford. That narrows the field a bit—at least from the greater Boston area.”

“Although, it would be a pretty safe bet bringing cyanide.” Faith had done some research on the Net and decided it would have been in the form of a white granular powder. “There was bound to be something it could be sprinkled on. Mixing it into the sugar bowl is one tried-and-true method. Supposedly, Lizzie Borden did this before delivering the forty-plus whacks.”

“That's a relief. Glad to know her parents didn't suffer.”

“But the point is, the murderer could have mixed it into almost anything we served and it would have looked like grains of sugar or salt. I need to find out what it would have tasted like. Bitter, I think, so the dessert made the most sense. To the murderer, that is.”

“I think we'd better split up for a while,” Niki suggested. “I'll test recipes—no desserts, thanks—and you snoop around. You're better at it and have already been in trouble with the police, while aside from a
moving violation or two, I can still look my mother straight in the eye. I think she does suspect I'm not a virgin, though.”

Niki Constantine came from a large Greek-American family in Waterdown, and the lack of Mrs. in front of her daughter's name was a source of constant sorrow and anxiety to her mother. Niki herself had no intention of settling down. Her taste in men was eclectic, and at the moment she was dating a future venture capitalist at the Harvard Business School, a carpenter, and an unemployed musician. She'd repeatedly told Faith that the man of her dreams was a biker who could cook and that she was holding out for him.

“If someone doesn't find out what happened to Gwen, we won't have a business,” Faith said glumly, recognizing the logic of Niki's proposal. “I have to find out more about Gwen herself. Did you ever see her around town at any of the clubs?”

Niki shook her head. “I have a friend who's into the art scene, and it seems like there's some important opening every night. That's her social life—and she isn't doing badly. Since Gwen worked at a gallery, it must have been the same for her.”

“And music. Jared has season tickets for everything from the Handel and Haydn Society to the Berklee Performance Center. I know, because he offers them to us when he can't go. Apparently, Gwen was as much of a music lover as he is.”

Faith had been so caught up in the way Gwen's death affected her that she hadn't been giving enough
thought to Jared, and she felt a stab of guilt now, a sharp one. The two had been well matched, and he was suffering acutely. She hadn't wanted to intrude, but now she admitted to herself that perhaps this was because she really didn't want to talk about Gwendolyn Lord, not even to comfort Jared, her friend. She'd call and let him know that he could come for dinner, or just drop by to talk anytime.

“I should go to the gallery. Talk to Jared's cousin and anyone else who works there. I can't start quizzing Jared, but I really don't know much about Gwen—where she grew up, how long she's been in Boston. I didn't really read the obit. Maybe there's something between the lines. Other than this, I'm not sure what else to do.”

“I would think it would be obvious,
mon ami,
to anyone with your powerful little gray cells,” Niki said in an atrocious accent. “You had a roomful of mystery writers. Pros! Find out what they think—and you know that they're all weaving Gwen's death into some sort of plot. For them, life
is
art.”

Faith felt better than she had since Saturday night. “It is
you
with the mighty brain cells. I'll start right away. With Anson L. Scott. He's the closest—and certainly a master of devious plots.”

 

The mystery writer sounded sincerely delighted to be hearing from Faith, and she made an appointment to see him the following morning. When she promised to bring some doughnut muffins
and other treats, he declared himself “counting the minutes, which threaten to pass at an agonizingly pedestrian pace.”

She called Jared, too, but he was not up to seeing anyone, even Tom and Faith.

“I still can't believe it,” Jared said. “And the police haven't been able to find out a thing. They keep coming here with more questions. It's like a nightmare. Who were Gwen's friends? What do I know about her past life? They're trying to make it seem like she had something to hide—or that I do. I finally screamed at one of them to get out, so they sent someone else. He's enormous, and at first I was terrified to have him in the room, but at least he's more sensitive. I feel like he really cares about what happened. It's not just a job.”

“I think I know who that is. Detective Lieutenant John Dunne—and he is the best. You can trust him completely.”

Faith thought John would be amused to hear the recommendation, but it was true. She might not always see eye-to-eye with him, yet she never doubted his sincerity and absolute devotion to a case. It wasn't just a job. His hair would be less gray and he'd have fewer lines in his massive forehead if it were.

“Gwen was a simple person. She loved art and music and me,” Jared started to sob. When he'd collected himself, he said, “She was ambitious and she would have had a wonderful gallery of her own someday. I was prepared to back her, but she said she wanted to do it herself. She'd saved quite a bit—I was
amazed, in fact—and was sure she could find some silent partners, besides me. But for now, she felt she still had a lot to learn from Nick. Oh, Faith, it was all going to have been so perfect. I'm sorry. I have to hang up now.”

“We love you, Jared. Come when you're ready.” Faith heard him put the phone down and did so herself, feeling inexpressibly sad. Life would never be perfect for Jed, no matter what happened in the future. There would always be Gwen, always that body lying on the floor. The unperfect ending.

 

Suitably, Anson Scott lived at the end of a long, twisting road in the northern part of Aleford, bordering on Byford. The woods came up to the pavement and had been carefully cultivated to remain deep and impenetrable. Branches from towering oaks formed a canopy over the drive and filtered the sunlight. The mystery writer's house was large and sprawling, designed at the height of the Arts and Crafts movement. The slate roof appeared to have been draped over the brown-shingled outside walls. A long eyebrow window ran across the third story, duplicating the roofline. Faith walked up to the elaborately carved oak front door and rang the bell. The writer himself answered almost immediately.

“Mrs. Fairchild, lovely to see you. Come in, come in. My humble abode.” He swept his arm out, an indication of both welcome and proud ownership.

Faith hadn't told him why she wanted to see him, afraid he might refuse. Now she thought it appropriate
to say something right away, but she was dumbstruck at the home's interior. There was no entryway or foyer. She'd stepped directly into the living room. The walls were painted red—red with a great deal of gold. They shimmered above the dark wainscoting and were interrupted on two sides by a bank of leaded-glass windows. A stained-glass medallion with a single ruby poppy was centered at the top of each. The floors were covered with brilliant Orientals, azure, crimson, purple, deep orange. True to the period, the furniture consisted of Morris chairs, Stickley tables, and glass-fronted bookcases, in addition to extraordinary single pieces by master craftsmen Faith couldn't identify. A fireplace large enough to provide shelter for a family of four filled one end of the room. The opening was surrounded by tiles that, taken altogether, formed a forest frieze of green, blue, lavender, ocher, and brown. The tree trunks seemed to recede as she looked, while the cloudlike branches fell forward. She realized that the room forced an awareness of color, perhaps because it was dark, the beamed ceilings low, and the light from outside dimmed by the leaded windowpanes.