“But what was she doing there?” Nelson was truly dazed now.
“We were hoping you might have an idea.” Nelson shook his head. “She was going to leave early and she did say she was meeting someone. But that was normal. I can’t imagine why she would have gone into that house. It’s not even near any of her spots.” Tears were running out of his puffy red eyes and dripping off his nose. He made an ineffectual wipe at them with his pajama sleeve.
“Did she say who she was meeting?” Tom asked.
“No, but it was probably one of our usual group.
They all want to go with Margaret. She’s so knowl-edgeable.”
Tom noticed Nelson was still speaking in the present. For a moment, the three men sat in a row in Margaret’s room. Nobody said anything. Charley stood up.
“I have to get down to the station and file a report.
Believe me, I realize how painful this is for you, but you’ll have to wait for the body to be released before you can have a service. There has to be an autopsy.” Nelson winced.
“As soon as you feel up to it, we’ll talk about plans for the funeral,” Tom said. “Meanwhile, I’m going to go downstairs and get us some coffee, maybe a little breakfast. Come and show me where things are.” Nelson shuffled off obediently, a pathetic figure in his nightclothes.
“I’ll be in touch,” Charley said quietly to Tom. “Let me know if he thinks of any reason at all, however far-fetched, why she could have been there, and get him to give you a list of the names of the people who went birding with her.”
“Okay. One question, though. Is an autopsy really necessary? I would have thought he could have been spared that when the cause of death is obvious.”
“We all know it’s Margaret because of the binoculars, but the state doesn’t, and there could be other things.”
“Like what?”
“I’d rather not say unless I have to,” Charley replied in an uncharacteristically cryptic manner, and Tom had to be satisfied with that.
By dawn, word of Margaret’s death had spread as rapidly as the fire had through the fresh lumber the night before. It wasn’t long before friends and neighbors were appearing at Nelson’s door with food and words of comfort. He’d changed out of his pajamas, and Tom left him sitting in the kitchen with the Scotts, the Batcheldors’ closest friends. Nelson continued to have no idea why Margaret had been roaming about the Deanes’ house in the wee hours of the morning.
He did give Tom a list of the names of habitual birders, though. He was obviously still in shock, breaking down when each new arrival offered condolences.
Tom left, secure in the knowledge that Nelson would be as fine as circumstances permitted now that the well-oiled machinery of care in a small place like Aleford had slipped into gear. By sundown, Nelson Batcheldor would have enough food in his freezer for the rest of the year.
The town had just started to react to the shock of Margaret’s death and the fire when word leaked out that in addition to Margaret’s remains, the police had found remnants of a sizable container of gas by the body.
Margaret Batcheldor, an arsonist!
Tom called Faith from the church office with the news. A parishioner had called him with the rumor and he’d checked it out with the police. Faith was stunned, yet as she hung up the phone, she couldn’t help but remember Margaret’s odd attire in the woods, as well as her obvious militancy at Friday’s POW!
meeting. Fighting fire with fire? Could she have intended to destroy one of the Deane properties as a warning against further development? Margaret always made it absolutely clear that she thought birds, and the other inhabitants of Aleford’s woods, pas-tures, and ponds, were just as, if not more, important than people. She certainly thought them more valuable than property. But if so, the gesture had gone wrong—very, very wrong. Faith imagined Margaret, perhaps in her ski mask again, dousing the beams with gas and then igniting them. Unaccustomed to an activity of this sort—it was not like rubbing two sticks together—she must have been terrified by the ferocity of the blaze, then overcome by it. It was too tragic.
Faith suddenly felt angry. Why hadn’t Margaret’s husband or her friends realized how close to the edge she was? Surely Millicent, of all people, must have known.
Millicent. All this business of taking a stand, the constant invocation of the sacred past. Faith had heard that after she and Tom had slipped out of the POW!
meeting, there had been a lengthy discussion about possible courses of action, including not-so-subtle allusions to the stores of powder and guns Colonial inhabitants had hidden in these very woods in the weeks preceding that famous April morning. Presumably this was all in reference to the historic nature of Beecher’s Bog, but maybe Margaret hadn’t seen it that way. Maybe she took it as a call to action. What were the Batcheldors up to? Or Margaret on her own?
Faith had heard that Margaret ruled the roost at the Batcheldor house. It was entirely possible this very determined woman had decided to act solo.
Faith strode to the phone. The kids were not due home for another hour. She wanted to hear what Millicent had to say. Before she could get to it, it rang.
Tom’s voice sounded weary—more weary than simply from losing last night’s sleep. Sleep deprivation was something parents actually began to get used to, or at least pretended to.
“Somebody threw a brick and shattered Lora Deane’s living room window last night. She came home about midnight and found it. She’s pretty hysterical and has told her grandparents what’s been going on. She went there immediately.”
“I was afraid of this. It was only a matter of time before whoever’s been calling her would get tired of phone games and move on to more exciting stuff. So, she’s going to the police after all.”
“Her grandfather has taken charge and was trying to reach Charley when he got called out to the fire.
This morning, they’ve all been so upset about the house that the brick hasn’t seemed as important, but apparently Gus did tell the police. She said her grandfather was mad as hell that she hadn’t come to her own family right away.”
“Well, at least she’ll be safe with them.”
“I hope so,” Tom said glumly, and hung up.
Tuesday morning had dawned gray and gloomy. A fine rain was falling, which observers were sure would soon change to the kind of steady downpour that meant mud season. By midmorning, the few spring bulbs in bloom hardy enough to venture forth had been squashed back to the earth. Aleford was drenched. It was also scared. Rumors were flying faster than a speeding musket ball. Much faster. Not only theories about the fire and Margaret, but also word about the poison-pen letters. By the time Faith heard about them in the post office, the original seven recipients had grown to fifty and the relatively mild language had become Howard Stern material. She did what she could to correct the story, but no one believed her. No one wanted to believe her. They were battening down the hatches in the face of a storm and they didn’t want someone coming along telling them not to worry—especially an outsider, and a New Yorker at that. Probably didn’t seem like much to her, New York being the hellhole it was, but Aleford knew better.
They weren’t right about the letters—there were only five in alclass="underline" Scotts, Batcheldors, Millicent, Brad Hallowell, and Pix—but they were right about the depth of the crisis. By evening, there wasn’t a house that had not both literally and figuratively set out the emergency candles and flashlights, and cooked up plenty of food—prepared for the worst. The thunder-storm had moved up the coast and more news had spread. Margaret Batcheldor might be a charred corpse, but she hadn’t burned to death. A ferocious series of blows on the back of the head had killed her, not the fire.
Margaret had been murdered.