Sitting in the plane, thinking about it all, Faith felt far removed and as light as the air she was speeding through. It almost seemed to have happened to someone else, or in a book she read. She sipped her scotch slowly. Benjamin wasn't asleep, but he wasn't really awake either. She had given him a bottle at takeoff so his little ears wouldn't hurt and since then he seemed content to stare out the window and listen to the muffled roar of the engines.
She returned to her thoughts. They had gone over everybody without any significant results and finally she had hurried upstairs to pack, which roughly meant putting everything Benjamin owned in a bag with a few things for herself. Until she had a baby, she never realized how fast they went through clothes. She had expected to change a lot of diapers, of course, but Benjamin turned out to be a champion at what one of the books coyly referred to as "projectile vomiting"—like something from the space program. He was pretty much out of the stage now, but while it lasted Faith be- gan to think his childhood would be one long laundry cycle.
Tom had been downstairs phoning the airlines. They had decided that Faith could go alone after all. She had felt better and had longed for the relative safety of the Big Apple ; besides, she hadn 't known what she would do with Tom in the city, since her plan was to fill out her winter wardrobe. She had also thought he should stay in Aleford so he could tell her what was happening. As he called her mother at work she could hear his voice while he tried to explain to her that her daughter had just received what amounted to a botanical death threat in the mail. Well, if anyone could do it, Tom could, Faith thought, and realized she was going to have to keep a firm nonhysterical hand on herself.
Detective Dunne had left with the letter carefully wrapped in some kind of plastic envelope. Faith supposed they would test it for everything in the world—fingerprints, sweat, and so on. She had pointed out to Dunne that, as with the murder, the most logical suspect was Cindy herself. Poison pen letters or the equivalent were certainly in Cindy's line, but she was undoubtedly in no condition to go around pressing flowers these days.
Dunne had wished her a good trip and told her to bring back some decent corned beef. Although they hadn 't really gotten anywhere, at least something had happened and that seemed to cheer him up. Just pack little Mrs. Fairchild off to her mother's, solve the case, and then she could come home again.
John Dunne had been born and raised in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx. When his father died, the whole neighborhood, plus relatives on both sides, jumped in to fill the gap. John knew his Bronx wasn't the Bronx of his mother's childhood—she was constantly lamenting the passing of certain landmarks—but it was a good place to grow up. The fires that would erupt later werejust beginning to smolder and a long subway ride away in any case. Orchard Beach and City Island were nearby and if he wasn 't at one or the other for a family picnic, he was there to swim and hang out with his friends. Everybody knew everybody else in the few blocks that constituted his world. Then he learned to cross the bridge and discovered Manhattan. By the time he graduated from high school, there wasn't an inch of that island he hadn 't explored.
He met his wife while she was on her senior class trip to New York City, the culmination of thousands of bake sales, car washes, and raffles. Betsy was from the potato fields in northern Maine, a stone 's throw away from the Canadian border. It took Dunne months to understand everything she said and years to decipher her family's accent. On the New York trip, she had become separated from her classmates and had no idea where she was, so she walked into the closest police station, as instructed by Mrs. Greenlaw, the chaperone. Mrs. Greenlaw 's greatest fear was to lose one of her charges to the white slave trade and she understood that the latest tactic was using grandmotherly-looking old ladies in gloves and hats to lure unsuspecting girls astray.
Out of all the police stations in New York, it had to be Dunne 's. It wasn 't that Betsy was particularly beautiful, but she had something that appealed to him immediately. It was his first year on the force and his mother was after him to settle down. When Betsy walked in and asked how she could find the hotel they were staying at, he knew he'd be taking her there personally and buying her lunch on the way. Later she told him how intimidated she had been. He assumed she meant by his size, or because he was a policeman, but she confessed it was because he had been to college. His size never bothered her and if anyone thought they looked mismatched—Betsy was just a little over five feet and indeed a pistol—it wasn't something they said to John's face.
He sent Mrs. Greenlaw a dozen American Beauty roses the day they got engaged.
He'd never regretted marrying Betsy, even though she wouldn 't live in New York. She made him laugh, was a terrific mother, and understood him better than anyone ever had. But there was scarcely a day he didn 't miss the city. It wasn't Faith's city he missed, although a few of the quadrants intersected ; it was one of the other hundreds of New York Citys people construct for themselves. He was sorry Faith had to leave Aleford for the reason she did, but he had to admit he'd like to have been on the plane with her.
Faith 's scotch was almost gone and they would be landing in Newark soon. She was on the wrong side of the plane to see the Statue of Liberty as it descended but she did get a pretty impressive panoramic view of the New Jersey Turnpike.
She tightened the seatbelt, which she had never removed, and took the cushion from behind her head. She was thinking again about who could possibly have put the envelope in her mailbox—or rather she had been thinking about it all the time except on the rare occasions when another thought managed to creep through. Not Dave. Not Sam. So who else ? That was the question that kept nagging at her. Maybe she should have taken the Aleford phone directory and gone household by household.
Faith had ruled out Patricia after classifying her under the heading of interested worried friend. Patricia wouldn 't have spoken to Faith the way she had on Saturday if she had planned to scare her off the case with the rose.
Pix ? It just didn 't seem to be her style.
Style was the key to it—style and personality. It was someone who read too many bad novels. Someone with time on his or her hands. Someone like Cindy or someone who liked Cindy ? Faith was playing around with the words. Someone like Millicent Revere McKinley ?
As Faith brought this to the front of her mind, she realized it had been lurking behind the parlor curtains for a while. Millicent was the type, all right. She didn't like Faith and certainly wouldn 't mind alarming her, but was it such a strong dislike ? And how to classify her ? Murderer ? Worried friend ? Nut ?
Faith couldn 't believe Millicent was the murderer ; she had been one of Cindy's few supporters, but as for sending the rose, it seemed just up her white-picketfenced alley. And not because she was worried about Faith. Nor did Faith think she was nuts—well, maybe a little nuts. No, Millicent resented somebody else having a poke in her pond. This conclusion made Faith feel a lot better and she resolved to call Tom as soon as she got to the apartment and ask him to tell Dunne—somehow she still couldn 't think of him as "John." It was too simple.
Faith 's father was waiting for her at the gate and until she saw his tall, calm figure looking completely out of place in the airport chaos, she hadn 't realized how happy she was to be out of things for a while. To let go and be a child again. He caught her up in a bear hug that threatened to squish Benjamin and said, "Faith, what on earth is going on up there ? “