The Body in the Gazebo

Chapter 4





Ursula pulled her arms out from beneath the light throw Dora had spread over her and folded her hands together. She was stretched out on the chaise. The signal was clear. She was ready to pick up her tale.

“There was a catastrophic winter storm on Sanpere in 1929. Trees came down all over the island and it took many months to repair the damage, and even so just the worst of it. There were several large tamaracks near our house, and with their shallow roots, I imagine they must have been the first to go, stoving in the entire back roof. A big pine took care of much of the front. Father was able to arrange for a temporary fix to keep the weather out, but for the rest he had to wait his turn. As long as he was going to have to do such major repairs, he decided to enlarge the kitchen and add two more bedrooms over it plus a new bath that Mother had been wanting for ages. I was excited about the plans until I heard it meant we wouldn’t be able to be there for the summer.”

Faith nodded in commiseration. The idea of Sanpere in the summer without Ursula and her family was akin to the swallows giving Capistrano a miss in March.

“Father rented a very large house on Martha’s Vineyard that one of his friends from the Somerset Club owned. The man and his wife were taking their daughter, who was just out, to England. No doubt her mama wanted to capture a title for the family. People did in those days.”

“Consuelo Vanderbilt,” Faith commented.

“Oh yes, the poor Duchess of Marlborough. Her life could have been written by Edith Wharton. In any case, the house on the Vineyard was much grander than either of our houses and I began to feel very guilty at how much I was enjoying the summer.”

Ursula’s family belonged to the Teddy Roosevelt school of rustication, Faith reflected. Plunges into the frigid deep at dawn, hearty hikes, plain food—as much simple living as money could buy.

“The cottage—that’s what the owner called it—was in Oak Bluffs at the end of a long dirt road. It was set overlooking the water with open fields on one side and forest on the other. There were stairs down to the beach and the water was quite warm. I can still smell the beach roses, the same Rosa rugosas we have in Maine, but the scent was stronger, or perhaps that’s a trick of memory. Along the front of the gray-shingled house, there were rows of hydrangeas with blooms the size of beach balls—quite impossible, but again that’s how I see them in my mind’s eye. Behind the house there was a massive garden with vegetables as well as flowers. The gardener told me it had been planted before construction was finished so it would look as if it had always been there. The house must have been about twenty years old and there were wide porches and verandas that went around it—we sat out there for tea and often in the evenings. I’m sure the whole thing would now be judged an architectural monstrosity with all sorts of conflicting styles—Arts and Crafts eyebrow windows, Gothic turrets, a Federalist widow’s walk—but I adored it. My room was in one of those turrets and at night I could hear the sea and the faint rustle of eelgrass in the soft wind. The weather was perfect that summer. No storms. Blue skies and just the right amount of wind every day. The sailors were in heaven.”

She reached for her water glass.

Faith said, “Let me get some fresh water for you, or would you like juice?”

“Water is fine.”

“I’m not tiring you, am I?”

“Not at all, Faith dear. I haven’t felt this well in weeks.”

After she drank some water, Ursula continued. She was talking a bit more quickly now, as if she wanted to get to a certain point before stopping for the day. The almost dreamlike reminiscence gave way to narrative. Faith was pulled in once more. Ursula’s description had been so vivid that Faith could clearly visualize the house and surrounding landscape.

“Mother liked it that Father was able to be with us more than he could when we spent the summer in Sanpere. He would often take a Monday to make a long weekend, spent a week in July and planned another in August. Despite the drive and the ferry, it was easier to get to the Vineyard than to The Pines. There was always someone coming or going. With so much space, Mother indulged her love of company. Her sister, my aunt Myrtle, visited a few times with my cousins, who were between Theo and me in age. The two sisters were very close. The flu epidemic in 1918 had taken their parents and their two younger brothers. We used to skip rope to ‘I had a little bird / Its name was Enza / I opened the window / And in-flu-enza.’ We had no idea what it meant and that millions had died, including our relatives. Mother never said anything. People didn’t—at least in our family. Illness was never mentioned. I discovered what happened when I was older and living out in Aleford.”

Faith was only too aware of this early-twentieth-century pandemic. The H1N1 swine flu had been the same strain as “the Spanish Flu” or “la Grippe” and there had been some tense weeks before the vaccine was available for the Fairchild children when a cough or slight fever was anxiously watched.

“Other friends of Mother’s from the Fragment Society would arrive, and of course my parents knew many people from town who summered on the island.”

“Town.” Faith was amused at Ursula’s Brahmin reference. “Town” always meant “Boston”—as if no other existed.

“Life on Martha’s Vineyard was much more social than life on Sanpere. There were Theo’s Harvard friends coming for the weekend or dropping in from their parents’ places on the island. Father wasn’t so keen on all of them. He didn’t care for Charles Winthrop, who was older and in a rather fast set at the college, or a girl named Violet Hammond. She wasn’t at Harvard, only men in those days. Father did like Schuyler Jessup, who was a great pal of Theo’s. Scooter—he was always called that—was often around and usually brought a girl named Babs Dickson, whose parents were friends of Father and Mother’s, with him. They later married. She was one of those athletic young women who always seemed to have a tennis racquet or a golf club in her hand. She wasn’t in college, but some sort of finishing school. I have no idea what she could have been doing there in those days. Certainly not learning to embroider and curtsy. Her father thought college courses put too great a strain on a woman’s mind. Such nonsense. What did he think? Her brain would suddenly explode? He didn’t seem to mind her straining her body, and I remember thinking how beautifully she moved—very feline, and with all this pent-up energy.

“The weekends Father stayed in town, the group would always come down. At night they’d roll up the rugs in the living room and dance. Mother didn’t mind. And all day long they kept the Victrola going. Rudy Vallee, Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong. There was a piano, too. Someone always seemed to be playing it. Scooter was the best. He had a very pleasant voice. Whenever I hear certain Cole Porter songs, they take me back to that summer.”

Ursula gazed across the room at the large window. Faith had the feeling that it had become a kind of screen and Ursula was watching these figures from her childhood cavort across the sunlight.

“Theo had passed his English literature course on the condition that he write several papers over the summer. But he had failed mathematics, so would have to repeat it. Father hired a tutor, a serious young man who had just graduated and was entering the law school in the fall. He was from the Midwest, an only child, and neither parent was living, so he had to make his own way in the world—a scholarship student, which was rare in those days. He’d been the teaching assistant in Theo’s medieval history class, and Father was convinced that their study sessions were the reason Theo had passed, and he was no doubt right. Theo called him ‘the Professor’ and soon everyone, even Father, did. I remember the first time I saw him. He had the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen—brown with tiny flecks of gold.”

This brought a smile to Faith’s face. A crush. Growing up, she’d had many herself.

“There weren’t any children my age, and except for the people I’ve mentioned, no one was living at the house that summer besides the servants, although those who were local went home at night. I didn’t mind. There was the whole outdoors to play in and my books to read indoors, and out. I also learned a new language—Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language. I thought it was great fun. There was an extremely high percentage of hereditary deafness on the island dating back to the eighteenth century, peaking in the mid-nineteenth, but still quite prevalent, especially in Chilmark, well into the twentieth. The gardener was deaf, as were several of the kitchen help. One of them, who was very young and very pretty, made rather a pet of me. I learned to sign by watching the servants talk—all of the ones from the island used it, even the ones who weren’t deaf. When I became adept, which was rather quickly—children pick up these things so much more easily than adults—I discovered that they liked my mother, feared my father, and thought Theo and his friends were very funny.

“I thought all the grown-ups were endlessly fascinating and I became very clever at finding places where I could observe them undetected. Under the piano in the living room was a good place. And then there was my own special place—not so much a place from which to watch people, but a kind of fort I’d made for myself underneath the rhododendrons next to a gazebo. It was quite an elaborate one that the owners had had constructed in the woods—more like a summerhouse or folly—a screened-in octagon with a wide bench around the sides. When I first happened upon it, I thought it belonged in something like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, but upon reflection I decided it was more suited to Grimm. It was set away from the main house, deep in the woods down a dark, narrow path, nothing like a garden gazebo. It became my favorite spot. That hiding place by the gazebo . . .”

“You just don’t trust me, Father! Dash it! The Professor’s a good chap and I’m all for helping him out, but I don’t need a tutor down at the Vineyard this summer. I’m more than capable of writing the papers myself, and as for the math, I would have passed the exam if I had felt better.” Theo stopped short. He didn’t want to go into the reason for the monstrous headache that had caused the numbers to swim before his eyes and the feeling that he might retch at any moment, which kept him from putting down what little he did know on the paper before him. It had been foolish to go off with Charles, but it was only going to be for a quick bite at Jim’s Place in the Square, and then Violet had appeared with a friend. It would have been rude not to ask them to a show in town and supper afterward.



Violet. Theo tried to concentrate on what his father was saying. It should have been easy. The old man was shouting. But he kept seeing Violet’s face—that impossibly alabaster skin, ruby lips, flashing sapphire eyes. He wished he were a poet. Maybe he’d give it a try. “Thine eyes like pools of melted sky.” Not bad. Not bad at all.



“Theo! Have you heard one word of what I’ve been saying?”



“Of course, sir. You think I’m a ‘wastrel’ and need a watchdog. I give in. I’ll let the Professor keep my nose to the grindstone.”



Theo had absorbed enough from his English courses to know he had muddled any number of metaphors. He found himself trying hard not to smile. His father was right. He wasn’t taking all this seriously. Slacker fellows than he was had graduated. It had been important to protest at the start, but Theo knew this was one he couldn’t win so there was no need to drag the unpleasantness out.



Theodore Artemus Lyman—he’d given his son a different middle name, Speedwell, which seemed enormously ironic at the moment—sighed heavily and got up. “See that you do. I’ll be getting weekly reports, and those papers must be submitted to the college by the end of July.”



“Don’t worry, Father. It’s going to be a wonderful summer.”



“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Mr. Lyman muttered as his feckless son escaped out the door.



Ursula crouched lower behind one of the tall blue and white Japanese porcelain jars that stood in the hallway on either side of the library door. Soon she wouldn’t be able to fit into the space between the jar and the wall—it was getting to be a tight fit—and one of her favorite hiding places would be gone. You could hear everything that was said in the library, especially if the door hadn’t been closed all the way as today. She loved the jars, with their misty scenes of landscapes that came straight from one of Andrew Lang’s fairy-tale collections. She leaned her cheek against the jar’s cool surface and closed her eyes, gently tapping the rim. She imagined that the soft, clear note was a temple gong and shadowy figures were moving in a rapid wave toward a shrine.



She leaned back against the wall and opened her eyes, in no hurry to move. School was over for the year and the house was in an uproar of cleaning and packing. Most of the rooms would be shut, the furniture draped like so many ghosts. Father would dine at his club and only use his library, one sitting room, and his bed and dressing rooms.



Poor Theo! It was a shame that he’d have to spend his summer studying, but Ursula was glad the Professor would be with them. When she had been introduced to him, she’d immediately asked him if he liked birds, and instead of answering “Only songbirds, kiddo,” as Scooter had, the Professor had replied, “All birds or specifically shore, meadow, or woodlands?” He wouldn’t be working with Theo every minute, and she’d already packed the Leitz binoculars she’d asked for and received for her birthday plus her little life-list notebook bound in bright red Moroccan leather, hoping he would join her when she searched for new sightings to add.



She was worried about what the storm on Sanpere had done to her things—her bedroom was in the back of the house, which had received the worst damage. Was her fern collection safe? She’d spent hours neatly pressing, labeling, and gluing them into a scrapbook. And what about the abandoned birds’ nests she’d found and arranged on a shelf in her room? For all she knew they could be in a sodden heap in the middle of the floor. It was exciting to go to a new place, but she wished they could go to Sanpere for just a little while, even if they had to stay elsewhere. Her father had promised a full account of her things. He was going up in August to check on the work. She sighed. It was a long time to wait.



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.



Pix 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.

Riveting 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?”

“They’re all together in a file in my office at the church. Together with the bank statements, which are in a binder. The ATM card is slipped under the plastic thing that separates the checks from deposit slips in the checkbook wallet.”

“And everything is sitting there in one of your file drawers, clearly labeled? Easy for anyone to access when you’re not there?”

“Not so easy. It’s one of the locked file cabinets and you’d have to know which one, plus have the key.”

“Okay.” Faith felt they were getting somewhere. “You keep the file cabinet keys on your ring with the keys to your office, the church, and the house?”

Tom looked down. “I’m afraid I keep those keys in one of my desk drawers.”

“Unlocked?”

“Unlocked.”

He looked guilty as sin. Faith got up and hugged him from behind, resting her chin on his head. He always smelled so good. A clean, slightly citrus soapy smell and something ineffable that was Tom.

“Obviously, this is a problem that goes with the turf. Trusting humankind.” She wouldn’t have him any other way, but it was going to hurt him now.

She began to think out loud. “Still, although this widens the field of suspects”—adding to herself, The entire congregation plus passersby—“we should focus on people who have been in and out of your office in the past year with some frequency. People who would know where you kept the checkbook and card, as well as the keys.”

She sat back down and picked up the pencil.

Tom looked better. He reached for another cookie—the white lettering on the chocolate icing read, The Hunch. Faith took it as an omen.

“Albert, although I can’t imagine—”

Faith interrupted him. “Yes you can. Think Dorothy Sayers, ‘Suspect everyone.’ ” She wrote down, “Albert Trumbull, parish administrative assistant.”

“All right. Next. James came on board as associate minister a year and a half ago when Walter retired.”

For most of his career in the ministry, Walter Pratt had divided his time between First Parish and teaching at Andover Newton. He’d never wanted to assume the top job, telling Tom he was “content to watch from the sidelines.” This was a false description of his active involvement. When Walter died suddenly of a massive coronary, Tom had taken it not only as a personal loss, but a loss of part of the parish’s history. More than once since Saturday’s meeting with the vestry, he’d wished Walter were by his side still.

Faith wrote down, “James Holden, associate minister.”

Quickly Tom ticked off, “Lily Sinclair, our Div School intern—she arrived about a year ago, as I recall, and left in the beginning of this January for her last semester. Eloise Gardner, education director. I suppose we have to include the sexton, Eli Brown, he’s in and out of my office. And the vestry. Some have a more visible presence than others.”

“Sherman, for example.”

“Sherman, for example,” Tom agreed grimly.

It wasn’t a long list, except for the vestry, which was composed of five individuals elected by the congregation plus the senior and junior wardens. Faith put those names on the bottom of the sheet. Meetings weren’t held in Tom’s office, so she’d ask him at another time to take a look and see if any of the names, other than Sherman’s, popped up as people who’d been around more than the others.

She took his mug and made him another cup of tea.

Action was obviously the antidote for this poisonous situation. Yet, Tom couldn’t be directly involved. Which left . . .

“Anyone working directly with you probably knows you keep keys in your desk drawers. Or if they don’t, it would be the first place anyone would look. I think the next step is getting to know Albert, James, Lily, Eloise, and even Mr. Brown”—the sexton was pushing eighty and was usually called “Mr. Brown,” as a sign of respect, Faith supposed—“a whole lot better. I’ll start digging.”

If it weren’t for that fact that this was her beloved who was involved, she’d be greeting the prospect with pleasure. Incurably curious, she had already started to speculate on what might be under the rocks she turned over.

Pix knew she looked good even before her appreciative husband gave a low whistle when she came out to the patio where he was reading the morning paper. They’d had a leisurely breakfast before she went to get dressed. Faith had nixed Pix’s dubious collection of jeans, many of them hand-me-downs from her boys once they shot up, all of them worn at the knees from gardening. The jeans she put on today were new and fit like a second skin, making her long, shapely legs look even more so. She was wearing a royal-blue tank top with a large, oversized broadly striped shirt in blue and white, the tails tied around her still slim waist. Kind of like Sandra Dee in one of those Tammy movies, Pix had thought when Faith demonstrated the way she believed the outfit worked best.

There was a wonderful place in Brooklin, Maine—Blossom Studio—that made glass beads, which were transformed into exquisite forms of jewelry. Sam had given her a simple gold neck wire with a large frosted Nile-green bead. She’d put that on at the last minute, and some makeup.

She’d only been away from Aleford for three days, but it felt like a month, a very pleasant month.

The Cohens had been coming to Hilton Head since Rebecca was born and Pix recognized kindred spirits in their desire to show off the place they loved. It was the way she felt taking guests around Sanpere for the first time. Today Stephen and Cissy had arranged an ecotour by boat with a captain knowledgeable not only about the Low Country’s natural life but its history as well. The boat was large enough for all of them, but small enough to get close to the osprey, herons, ibis, egrets, and perhaps, away from the inlets and marshlands, dolphins. They’d be on the ocean heading for a picnic lunch on Daufuskie Island, one of South Carolina’s Gullah Sea Islands.

Walking toward Sam, she’d flashed back to another time many, many years earlier when she’d emerged dressed and ready to go. She’d known she looked good that time, too, and the man—a young man, not long out of his teens—had whistled, too.

“Wow,” he’d said. “I thought you were going to be a dog. Brian never said, I mean, excuse me, this is coming out all wrong, sugar. Let me start over.” She’d been instantly charmed by his soft Southern accent, laughed, and taken his arm. His comment didn’t sound all wrong to her, not at all.

When her roommate at Brown had first suggested Pix come with her for Green Key Weekend at Dartmouth, Pix had refused. Mindy was from Savannah, and she’d met Brian when she’d gone home for the holidays. They’d been seeing each other since—or rather “keeping company.”

“You can’t sit and pine for that Sam Miller all weekend. It was time you two went your separate ways. I mean, you’ve known him your whole life, right? Isn’t that kind of like incest? Besides, why should you be the one to mope around the dorm when he’s the one who gave you that sad old line about needing some space? I swear, any man that says that to me is going to see some space—outer space.”

Pix hadn’t been able to contradict her. Everything she’d said was true.

“You need a real man, not one of these ice-cold Yankees. Brian’s roommate, Steve, sounds perfect for you. Real outdoorsy. He said to bring your skis. He’s premed. You’d never starve as a doctor’s wife.”

“Whoa,” Pix had said. “If I do go, and I’m not saying I will, isn’t it a little too soon to be planning a trip down the aisle?”

“It’s never too soon for that, darlin.’ ”

Considering that Mindy was Phi Beta Kappa and applying to law schools, she wasn’t just going for her MRS degree. But she had told Pix the beginning of their sophomore year when they’d started rooming together that although she planned to have a career, a successful one, there was nothing more important in life than being a good wife and mother.

From the Class Notes, Pix knew that Mindy had achieved all three of her goals, or so it seemed on paper. After graduation, they hadn’t stayed in touch.

Several of the girls on her floor had raised an eyebrow when she mentioned she was going to Green Key at Dartmouth—one said something vague about testosterone and be prepared to run—but the more Pix had thought about it the more she’d decided Mindy was right. Sam Miller wasn’t the only fish in the sea. And the more she’d gone over their last conversation when he’d said he wanted some space, wanted to see other people, the madder she got. Yes, they had known each other a long time—not their whole lives, just since middle school. But so what?

Walking toward her Dartmouth date, who was not short, as she’d feared, and very good-looking, she’d been glad she’d gone.

Just as this Hilton Head time was starting to pass in a rapid blur, that weekend had been a blur—except a blur of parties with lots of dancing. There was always plenty of some kind of delicious fruit punch at the fraternity houses, and she’d been amused by traditions like the raucous “chariot” races with fraternity members serving as the chariot horses, charging across the college green while onlookers pelted them with water balloons and eggs.

She never did go skiing, and by Sunday, she’d convinced herself that Steve, not Sam, was the real love of her life. She had a vague recollection of explaining this at length to Mindy Saturday night while sipping a lot of that yummy punch. She’d awakened with a start, and a headache, late Sunday morning in Steve’s room, in Steve’s bed.

They’d talked on the phone a few times and he was supposed to come down to Providence when Brian did. And then she was supposed to go to Hanover for some spring skiing. They never saw each other again and it was a pleasant memory of the kinds of things one does in youth and never again. Pix avoided all and any kinds of punch for many years.

The following summer she was home in Aleford running the tennis program at a local day camp. Early one evening—one of those perfect summer evenings when the light is so long it makes everything look like a stage set—Sam Miller knocked on her door, got down on one knee, held up a ring, and said, “I’ve been a complete idiot. First forgive me, and then marry me.”

Which they did right after graduation the following June at First Parish with the reception at Longfellow’s Wayside Inn.

When she’d seen Stephen Saturday she’d recognized him immediately, despite a receding, and gray, hairline. Mark had always referred to his future father-in-law as “Rebecca’s father” or “Dr. Cohen.” Steve had been premed when Pix knew him, but the country was filled with doctors with that last name. It had simply never occurred to her that the two were one and the same. Yes, her Steve—well, not really hers—was from the South, but in that insular way of her fellow Northeasterners, she tended to think of Dixie as one large cup.

She’d also been afraid she might have been mistaken. Context is everything, and she’d been finding as she grew older that more and more frequently people were looking familiar. She’d thought she saw her mother’s dear Norwegian friend on the subway a month ago. It seemed an impossibility, but she was still about to greet her when she realized it wasn’t Marit at all. Context. People greeted her and she knew she knew them, but from where? PTA days? Volunteering at Rosie’s Place? Sanpere?

Yet, it had only taken a few seconds to be absolutely sure who Stephen Cohen was, and had been.

“I want to call Faith about Mother, since we’ll be gone all day and I doubt our cell phones will work on the water. Would you go down in case they’re already waiting? I won’t be long.”

Sam gave her a kiss, and then another.

“You want to blow this off? Just you and me today?”

Pix smiled. She supposed she was having what people called a “second honeymoon”—with at least one man.

“That would be terribly rude, but I’ll take a rain check.”

As soon as he was out the door, she called Faith, who was at work but said she had a moment to chat.

“Now, tell me everything, Ms. Miller. To think, you have a past I know nothing about! You sly little minx!”

Pix told her everything.

Faith reacted with enthusiasm. “I’m glad you kicked up your heels a little—that time and whenever else in your flaming youth. Clearly Sam was the one, but you needed to find out you could be the one for somebody else, too.”

“It was all a long time ago,” Pix said, “and I’m pretty sure those Dartmouth boys were pouring every known kind of alcohol into the punch bowl, but it happened and I’m not sorry. Not about that weekend.”

“Then what?”

“Oh Faith,” Pix cried. “He doesn’t remember me!”