The Body in the Bonfire (21 page)

Faith remembered the noise Zach had heard. The one she, intent on the screen, hadn't.

“There may have been someone in the kitchen of Carleton House when we were looking at the computer. Whoever it was couldn't have seen the lists, but we were talking about them.”

Lorraine looked interested. “So it could have been a student, specifically James Elliot or Sinclair Smith, or both.”

“Yes, they would have been the right height, but the person was bent over, so whoever it was could have been taller than I remember.”

She hadn't mentioned P.B. before, but now was the time, and she told Lorraine about the teacher.

“He lives in the house, too, right?”

“Yes.” It was all so unbelievable.

“Daryl Martin seems pretty much in the clear on everything. He would have wanted the laptop with all that information about Sloane Buxton's other activities to get to us.”

“That's what I thought, too,” Faith said.

“Although, as we know all too tragically, kids who are victimized can turn against the perpetrator, with terrifying consequences. But Daryl doesn't fit the profile, except for that one remark he made in your class. These kids usually talk
about getting even to other kids and unless this school is extremely tight-lipped, there was none of that from Martin or anybody else.”

Faith was aware that each dorm had had meetings with faculty and someone from the police after Sloane's body was discovered. She realized now it was not simply to help the Mansfield students deal with the situation but to get information, too.

“Piece of work—Buxton,” Lorraine said.

“An understatement,” Faith said ruefully. She told the detective about how Sloane had tried to frame Daryl for the Harcourt theft. For a moment, there was a flash of the old Detective Kennedy.

“And there was a reason you didn't tell the police this?”

Faith thought of Sloane's parents. How pathetically happy his mother had been with her birthday gift, her flea-market find.

“Yes, there was a reason.”

Lorraine sighed. “I'm beginning to understand why you make Dunne so crazy—and maybe why he doesn't hate you.”

She could have said “why he likes you,” Faith thought in annoyance, but she'd take what she could get.

“I have to get back, and I'll bet your husband is there by now. Let's go.”

They put their dishes in the sink and rinsed them. They were women—and besides, Faith was still afraid of Mrs. Mallory.

“Poor Dr. Harcourt. This is devastating for him,” Detective Kennedy said as they walked back to Carleton House.

Faith remembered the conversation she'd overheard. No need to speak ill of the dead. But devastating as it might be, his wife's death had solved a major problem for the headmaster.

 

Only the police were at the scene—and Tom, who immediately rushed over to his wife and hugged her hard.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes and no.” Zach's answer. He was onto a good thing.

“I understand. Let's go home. Obviously, your class, and all classes, have been canceled. Once again, the teachers are meeting with the kids, and I imagine the efficient Ms. Reed is at her phone. But Charley says this was clearly an accident. She tripped.”

Charley himself walked over, and after also asking Faith how she was, he said, “Ridiculous shoes. Boots, whatever. Heels a mile high and as thin as spaghetti.”

Faith thought of the L.L.Bean boots that were standard winter footwear for the ladies of Aleford and said, “Zoë liked to dress fashionably.”

“Well, it killed her,” Charley said bluntly.

On that note, the Fairchilds left, walking out into the cool sunshine.

“Harcourt was here when I arrived,” Tom
said. “He's a mess. I told him to call me, and I think he might. He just kept saying over and over, ‘What am I going to do without her?' Connie Reed was trying to console him—you still have the school sort of thing—but I don't think he even heard her. She was looking pretty bad herself.”

But Faith wasn't listening, either. She was thinking of Zoë's dark cape. Her assailant had been dressed in something dark, something woolen from head to toe. It could have been a cape. Had it been Zoë listening in the kitchen? Or someone else? Someone who could have borrowed his wife's cape easily? And—the thought that had been hovering just beneath all the others since she'd discovered the body rose to the surface—what was Zoë doing at Carleton House this morning?

“Faith, Faith!” someone called as the Fairchilds were getting into their car. It was Winston Freer. He rushed over.

“I was going to call you. You poor dear. How ghastly for you!” His eyes were round with concern. For once, he didn't seem to have an appropriate quotation.

“Thank you, but I'm all right now. It was a shock at first….” Faith's voice trailed off.

“Glad to hear it. Then we'll say three o'clock, shall we? I bought some sinful cookies from the Lakota Bakery in Arlington and we'll have cucumber sandwiches. So very Oscar Wilde.”

For a moment, Faith had no idea what the man
was talking about; then she realized he still expected her to come for tea that afternoon.

She opened her mouth to speak, to put it off, yet she couldn't disappoint him. Marian was bringing Amy back at four and Ben was going to a friend's house straight from school, which Faith had arranged in order to have tea with the professor. She reluctantly pushed the thought of a house empty of children and the possibility that Tom might have an hour or two to spare to the back of her mind and said, “See you at three.”

He gave her directions and bustled off.

“You are a very, very good person,” Tom said.

 

By three o'clock, Faith was feeling better. She'd had lunch with Pix and they'd talked mostly about Dan. Dan
had
gone to Tom, and then, at Tom's urging, he had told his parents everything. Apparently, the Millers had talked long into the night, and while Pix was still inclined to throw all the electronic devices in the house onto the recycle heap at the landfill, she had given in to both her husband and her son. The computer could stay, but the time Dan could use it and for what would be regulated until his parents felt he could regulate himself.

“The eBay thing is hard for me,” Pix had told Faith. “It seems like such a waste of his money, but Sam pointed out that he had collected stamps when he was Dan's age and that if there had been an eBay in those dark ages, he would have traded on it.”

“Two against one?” Faith had asked. “Were you feeling outnumbered?”

“A little, but that's not unusual when you live with two males. I really miss Samantha. She's coming home this weekend.” Samantha Miller was a sophomore at Wellesley.

They talked about what had been going on at Mansfield and Faith realized with a start that she hadn't filled Pix in on the racist attacks on Daryl. She gave her a lightning-fast version of recent events and was rewarded by her friend's look of total astonishment.

“What do you think Zoë Harcourt was doing at the dorm this morning?” Pix asked finally.

“I think she must have thought Sloane had something incriminating in his room that the police had overlooked. The room isn't sealed anymore. Or, maybe she'd spent the night—or early morning—with Paul Boothe. He definitely had a thing for her, and it's my impression that that was enough for Zoë to reciprocate.”

“But what a chance to take! The students could have seen her.”

“I would imagine that added spice to the whole thing—and it wasn't that great a chance. She simply had to wait until they left for chapel.”

“It's really very sad. I met her a few times when the library was raising money for the endowment. The Harcourts attended some of the events. This was before your time. She was very pretty and very funny. Such a pointless way to
die. Not that there's a way that has a point, but you know what I mean. Accidental death. It wasn't meant to be.” She stared at Faith. “Don't tell me you think—”

“That it might have been? Well, yes, I do.”

 

Winston Freer lived in what had been a gatehouse, a Victorian dollhouse. Inside, it was more like a hunting lodge crossed with the Folger Library. The living room was paneled in walnut, a bust of the Bard stood on the mantel of a fieldstone fireplace, and the walls were hung with more Shakespeariana—a copy of the Chandos portrait, a nice oil of the Hathaway cottage—and English hunting prints. Prints like Sloane's, Faith realized. Could the boy's have been a gift from his teacher, or had Sloane sought to emulate the master? Tea was laid in front of a blazing fire. Faith would just as soon have dispensed with the flames, but the Darjeeling with lovely comestibles soon blunted any bonfire images. And Winston was a delightful host. They talked about living in a microcosm, a parish and campus having much in common. Faith told him about her resolve not to marry a minister and how it had given way almost at once when she'd met Tom.

“I don't think my wife minded living here. We didn't have children of our own, so the boys were a welcome substitute. I lost her fifteen years ago. We met when we were students. Our whole lives
were academic. Heidelberg. In the spring. I'll never forget it.”

Faith was surprised. She'd assumed any study abroad would have taken the man to that “blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.” She was about to say as much, but Winston rambled on.

“She was studying German—which she taught here for years, very well, too. I was doing research on Heine.” His eyes got a bit misty, Faith patted his hand. She couldn't imagine what it would be like to have Tom gone and didn't intend to try.

“Our parents were both from Bavaria. We had that in common—and so much else.”

Winston was younger than he looked, Faith thought. His parents had probably come just before the war. Lucky to get out. Winston must have been named after Churchill. She looked at her watch. It was getting late. She had studiously avoided any mention of the recent deaths at Mansfield. She didn't want to think about them, and Winston hadn't brought them up. Perhaps it was the memory of his wife, but his next remark was definitely an allusion to Zoë and Sloane.

“Who would have thought that two of the best and the brightest would be cut down in one week? ‘What a piece of work is a man!' The boy, especially the boy—so perfect.”

“Maybe not all that perfect,” Faith ventured. Winston had been a source of campus gossip before.

His reaction startled her. He clapped his hands
over his ears and said shrilly, “I don't want to hear any of that. I know people are saying he was involved with drugs, but it's a lie. He would never sully himself that way.”

Faith changed the subject. “Only February to get through. Somehow, even if the weather is terrible, March is easier.”

“February? Oh yes, today's the first. I put in mounds of bulbs last fall. If the squirrels, deer, and other fauna haven't eaten them all, you must come and see my garden when the daffodils are in bloom.”

“I'd love to,” Faith said. “But I'm afraid I have to leave now. My mother-in-law is arriving at four and I don't want to keep her waiting.”

“Mustn't keep a mother-in-law waiting.” Winston's humor was restored.

“Would you mind if I freshened up before I left?” Why didn't she say “bathroom” or “toilet”? “Freshened up” was such a euphemism. The fact was that she had to pee—all that Darjeeling. But Winston was so refined.

“Of course not. Down the hall on your right.” He took a Florentine from the cookie plate and bit into it with obvious satisfaction.

Faith walked down the hall, passed a door on her left, and went farther, opening the next one to her right. It wasn't a bathroom. It was Winston's study, and two things dominated it: a large portrait of a woman Faith assumed had been his wife—and a Nazi flag.

She shut the door quietly behind her. She'd been a fool. Winston and Sloane. Soul mates. Or the boy a willing acolyte. She could hear the filth Winston must have poured into young Buxton's ears. How he was the flower of Aryan youth and the Daryls of the world had to be exterminated like the vermin they were. And Zach. Zachary Cohen, a Jew. There was no Shakespeare here. The books were mostly in German—one exception,
The Hitler We Loved and Why
by Ernst Zündel, jumped out at her. It was a White Power Publication. She knew all this existed, but at the same time, she really
didn't
know, or hadn't wanted to believe it did. She believed it now. There were also several shelves of Mansfield yearbooks, neatly arranged by year. Freer had been one of the holdovers—and his wife, the German teacher. The yearbooks stretched back to the early sixties. She found last year's quickly, and Daryl's picture had indeed been neatly incised. So neatly, the boy on the next page peered through, and until you turned the page, the hole was not apparent. She went to the desk and opened the drawers. Coils of rope were in the largest one at the bottom.

Why had Freer used Sloane? A test, or simply logistics? A bit hard to get into the dorms, and perhaps the man was not computer-literate enough to figure out how to hide his tracks in E-mails, although a computer sat on his desk. Those E-mails to Sloane from Freer. She had assumed
they were about tutoring or other school-related work, but of course they were commands—“Repeat the exercise,” one had read. And Sloane had followed the professor's orders, not blindly, but with his eyes wide open. Attacking his victim with newspaper clippings, E-mails, the noose—bayonets plunged into Daryl's body over and over again.

She'd seen enough. She took out her phone, blessing technology, and rapidly called Chief MacIsaac and Patsy Avery. She didn't want to tackle this one alone. She told Patsy to call Harcourt's office. He wouldn't be in shape to deal with this, but Connie would.