The Body in the Bonfire (2 page)

Faith knew all this. Patsy and she had had their own “dialogues on race,” but hearing it again and in this context was profoundly depressing—and energizing.

“Okay. So what's the plan?” Faith wanted to drive straight to the campus and search every room for rope.

“We had to come up with someone who could be on campus and do some effective sleuthing. I'd only be invisible at the school if I put on a maid's uniform and cleaned the boys' rooms, but since
they don't have maids—one of Mansfield's rules is that the kids have to clean their own rooms—that was out. Plus, my court calendar is packed for the next few weeks. And Daryl himself was out. The moment someone saw him entering or leaving another student's room, he was sure he'd be accused of something. There was really only one choice—you.”

Faith beamed. This was the kind of praise she rarely received. Her husband, the Reverend Thomas Fairchild, tended to look upon his wife's past involvement in a series of murder cases as hazardous to her health—and, his wife suspected with good reason, hazardous to his standing in the parish. Faith knew congregations inside and out as the daughter and granddaughter of men of the cloth. Her resolve to avoid the fabric had dissolved when she met and fell in love with Tom. Seven years and two children later, she was still in Aleford, far, far from the Big Apple, her native home and previous site of her catering business, Have Faith. She had no regrets, only cravings.

“It was Daryl who came up with the idea of using Project Term to get you on campus. It gives you a legitimate reason for being there, and the cooking class had actually been suggested. He's one of the student representatives on the committee that offers and approves projects.”

“Cooking for Idiots. If I can't teach a course like that, I should get out of the business.” What had seemed like a burden she didn't even want to
think about assuming was quickly becoming an exciting challenge.

“Daryl will take the course, so you'll be able to stay in close touch. He told me he has a couple of ideas of who's behind this—and it may be more than one person. Apparently, there's a very popular history teacher who has a kind of cult following. A guy named Paul Boothe. Daryl's not sure how it ties in—Boothe's an old-fashioned liberal type—but there are vibes. When you go really far left and really far right, sometimes the circle meets. Then there's the whole drug thing. Kids with money can get what they want, and out of control is out of control. He had to leave for dinner before he could go into it. You'll be able to talk to him more.”

“Okay, but there's one thing I don't get.”

“What's that?”

“I'm no Bill Gates, but I have E-mail. When you send a message, the recipient knows who's sent it from the return address. You did say he's been getting racist E-mails, right? So why hasn't he been able to figure it out from the address?”

Patsy nodded. “I thought of that immediately, too, but Daryl said it's really very easy to conceal your identity on the Internet. You simply subscribe to one of the free services, like Hotmail, and use an alias.”

Faith frowned. She had to learn a whole lot more about this stuff before Ben surpassed her—and he was getting close. Tom was hopeless. He'd finally given in and was using a word processor
to write his sermons, but for an adventuresome spirit, he was approaching the no-longer-new technology with trepidation. As was her father, who was still writing out his Sunday offerings in longhand, wiggling his fingers and saying, “These are my computer.” Faith thought her father should simply admit he couldn't type, but she could excuse this small affectation in a man so otherwise without pretense. Unlike these two throwbacks to the scriptorium, her mother, Jane, a real estate lawyer, had her own Web site. Faith wrested her thoughts from the information highway back to the present track.

“When does Project Term start?”

“Next Wednesday. Everybody's knee-deep in exams now. The kids have until next Monday to sign up. Daryl thinks he can maneuver some of his suspects into taking your class. I'm not sure how, but if anyone can do it, he can.”

Faith was relieved. She'd thought Patsy would announce the first class was tomorrow. Now she'd have a week to prepare—for both her Mansfield jobs.

“Niki's away, but this is a slow time of year for me. I don't know why more people don't give parties in January and February to relieve the doldrums, but they don't.”

“Too depressed,” Patsy suggested. “I might want to be invited to a soiree during these inhuman New England winters, but I sure as hell couldn't bestir myself to give one. It's a colossal
effort these dark days just to turn up the thermostat. Anyway, where's Niki? I hope someplace warm.”

Niki Constantine was Faith's assistant, and she'd announced last summer that she would be hanging up her toque for a few weeks to go someplace she'd never been before and do things she'd never done. Faith had pointed out that Niki might have trouble with the latter category, but the former would present no problem. As Niki often complained, the farthest she'd ever been from Watertown, Massachusetts, where she'd been born and raised, was to a cousin's wedding in Cincinnati. Interesting, yet not the stuff of dreams.

“She's in Australia. It's summer there. We got her first postcards from Sydney yesterday. Mine was an oversized one with a picture of a grinning crocodile, and Niki wrote, ‘Haven't seen the real thing, but happy to report
have
met a Crocodile Dundee, or should say, “Dunme.” There is nothing not to like about this place.' Then there was a line or two about her circadian rhythms being messed up, since it was six in the morning Australian time and three o'clock yesterday afternoon in Boston, and how she'd misplaced yesterday and hoped the biological clock thing wouldn't mean she'd get pregnant, only her mother would be glad—marriage first, of course. Niki gets a lot on a postcard. She'd done a spectacular harbor tour, saw Tom and Nicole's house—what a per
fect couple, not the Hollywood norm!—plus had time to find the Rocks, actually a shopping center where she bought an
akubra
—a hat to us. Then she must have met her bloke, because she signed off with ‘Why don't we have pubs?'”

“I love that girl!” Patsy exclaimed. “She is wasted in the kitchen. She should have her own TV show. Just Niki sitting in some big old easy chair talking. I would watch it all the time.”

“I agree, except for the ‘wasted in the kitchen' part. I don't know what I'd do without her. I told her to take off as much time as she wanted, and apparently she is. Tom's postcard was pithy. It featured a scantily clad Australian beauty and said, ‘Travel is broadening. May stay awhile.' The kids' cards had native flora and fauna and mentioned kangaroos. I guess you don't really believe in them until you see one, or so Niki says.”

The waiter appeared with the bill. Patsy snatched it, despite Faith's protests, and for a minute or two they went through the typical woman thing, until Patsy said, “Just say thank you,” which Faith did and it was all over.

Out on Holyoke Street, Faith asked, “What happens next? Do I call Daryl or the school or what?”

“You don't do a thing. Someone will get in touch with you.”

Faith sighed as the enormity of what was going on hit her hard.

“I hope I'll be able to do something. It's so hor
rible. The E-mails and the clippings started last fall, you said. And the noose was Monday?” Faith wanted to be sure of the timing.

“Yes. January fifteenth.” Patsy paused. “Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday.”

 

“What do you know about Mansfield Academy?” Faith lifted her head up from her husband's shoulder. They were sitting on the couch before a fire. The kids were asleep, even and especially Ben. Pix Miller, her closest Aleford friend and next-door neighbor, had once told Faith that she had never thought about the fact that at some point her kids would stay up later than she and her husband, Sam, did, until it happened. Pix, possibly with a thought to cushioning blows, frequently added items to this “Things I Never Thought to Think About” list. Not being able to walk around in underwear or anything but opaque nightclothes until they all left for college was another. Faith was treasuring these nights with Tom and planned to keep putting Ben, and later Amy, to bed at 7:30 as long as she could get away with it—sixth grade, seventh grade?

Last year, the grown-up Fairchilds had found themselves in a downward spiral. Parish duties, Faith's work schedule, and the kids were claiming all their time. Then a tragedy threatened to pull Faith and Tom even further apart. When they had almost reached bottom, they found they were actually clinging to each other, and the relief was
something Faith knew she would never take for granted. Hence the blazing hearth and this precious time alone. She knew they were working at their marriage—the phrase had such a utilitarian sound—and she knew she'd never give up on the job.

Tom had poured some cognac for them, and now he took a reflective sip of the Rémy Martin before answering his wife. Questions like this, which seemed to come out of the blue, never came out of the blue where Faith was concerned. Something was up.

“Sumner Phelps graduated from Mansfield.”

Faith was not surprised. Sumner was a member of First Parish's vestry, and private school was written all over his Brooks Brothers wardrobe. He had a Massachusetts accent so broad, it suggested a parody. But it wasn't. Sumner was the real thing.

“He got me invited to do a chapel talk the first year I came here, and either I bombed or they stopped using the town's settled clergy”—Tom loved the archaic term—“because that's the one and only time I've been there. Sumner filled me in on the school's history before I went. Mansfield itself is old, but the present school is relatively young. They celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary last year. Remember, the kids marched in the Patriots' Day parade?”

“Yes. Proper navy blue blazers, gray flannels, and striped ties. They looked like they were
dying in that heat. But what's with the two Mansfields? What happened to the first school?”

“It had never been one of the big-name schools—Sumner didn't tell me this, of course—no Choate or Exeter. It probably would have drifted along with an increasingly incompetent faculty—you know the whole private school thing, especially in those days, was that a teacher should be paying
them
for the privilege of being there—plus the enrollment was dwindling and tending toward misfits who'd been rejected by better schools. But there are a lot of schools out there like Mansfield used to be that are still surviving. No, Mansfield had the misfortune, or fortune, depending on who you are, to have a financial officer who managed to deplete the endowment in a very short period of time, acquiring a very nice château in Switzerland in the process. When it was discovered—and the miscreant out of reach—Sumner and some of the other alums realized the only thing to do was put the school on the market.”

“And Robert Harcourt bought it?”

“Robert Harcourt bought it, kept the name for historical or sentimental reasons—”

“Or because it was a condition of sale,” Faith remarked, interrupting him.

“That, too. Anyway, he immediately embarked on a vigorous campaign to attract staff, students, and fill the empty endowment coffers. He was amazingly successful, according to Sumner, and
it's true that Mansfield has a decent reputation now. Harcourt was smart, young, and energetic. It was the seventies, so he used all the right buzzwords, but he made it clear there wasn't going to be any of that Summerhill nonsense. Teachers have great leeway in designing their own courses, yet they're still expected to cover all the basic, and rigorous, material little Chandler will need to get into Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. Now, are you going to tell me why this sudden interest in Mansfield? They take a few day students from town, but surely you're not planning to send Ben there?”

For a moment, the idea of Ben in high school obscured all rational thought. He'd have hair on his legs—and other places. She wouldn't be giving him baths anymore, so his body, which she now knew as well as her own—or Tom's—would become a sudden mystery, along with a lot of his thoughts. His voice would change. He'd have to use deodorant.

“So?” Tom kissed the top of his wife's head, nestled conveniently close. Her blond hair, just grazing her chin in its current cut, smelled like her shampoo, her perfume, and very faintly of the lemon chicken they'd had for dinner.

Faith leaned forward and poured Tom some more cognac.

“You might want this.”

“That bad?”

“That bad.”

By the time Faith had finished telling Tom about Daryl Martin and what she proposed doing, it was very late. The fire had burned down into smoldering embers that popped unexpectedly from time to time, but neither Tom nor Faith had put another log on, even when Tom had risen in anger, pacing about the room.

“You
have
to try to get him to go to Harcourt—or the police. You and Patsy can't be responsible for what might happen otherwise. And what about his parents? Don't you think they have a right to know what's been happening to their child?”

They had been over this several times.

“You
know
that was my first thought—and Patsy's—but Daryl is seventeen. He's not a child. It's his decision. Patsy said he was even more determined that his parents not know than that the authorities not be informed. He told her it would kill them to find out that Mansfield isn't the utopia they believe it to be. Patsy is pretty sure his parents, who, she pointed out, live in one of the most racist cities in the country, have no illusions about the school. But she had to admit that it would be a blow to them. Daryl even got a little angry and said he'd hire Patsy as his lawyer and then she'd have to keep quiet. That's how passionate he is about all this.”