Tom, bless his heart, got right to the point.
“Lora has been receiving some threatening phone calls.”
Faith turned to the young woman. “What do they say?”
Lora swallowed hard and took a gulp of coffee.
“The third one came about dinnertime. They’ve all been the same. A man’s voice tells me to get out of Aleford if I want to stay healthy. Tonight he said, ‘Get out soon.’ I was sitting in my apartment and I suddenly got so scared, I had to talk to someone, and Reverend Fairchild was the only person I could think of.” Faith wondered why Lora had not sought solace from her own spiritual leader, Father Reeves. At well over sixty, he was balding and paunchy, no match for Tom Fairchild’s good looks, but a resource that should have occurred to Lora. Tom, the only one? Faith knew she hadn’t spoken out loud, but Lora volunteered the answer as if the question had been asked.
“I couldn’t go to Father Reeves, because—and I know this is an awful thing to say about a member of the clergy—I wasn’t sure I could count on him not to tell my grandfather. I knew I could trust you not to repeat what I said to anyone.”
Well, it made sense, and it also put the kibosh on any inclinations the Fairchilds might have to go to the police, or to Lora’s grandfather, for her own good.
Lora Deane was from an old Aleford family. Not old in Millicent Revere McKinley’s book—she traced her ancestors to the famous silversmith’s door and beyond. According to Faith, Millicent’s ancestors were the forward-thinking ones who had adopted Puritan garb and Congregationalism well before the Flood.
Lora’s family had come to this country from Germany in the mid-nineteenth century and had headed straight for Aleford, where they found employment as farm la-borers and servants. Named Deane when the original name was misspelled by some official along the way, they weren’t too sure where in Germany the family had originated. Nor did they much care. They were Americans and eager to make the most of their new country through hard work. They put their money into land and now owned a few good-sized chunks of Aleford, besides several businesses, mostly in the building trades. Lora’s grandfather Cyrus Deane, called
“Gus” for so much of his life that only his wife, Lillian, ever used Cyrus, ruled the current clan with an iron fist—never mind the velvet glove.
“If my grandfather found out, he’d go nuts and make me move in with them. He wants me to, anyway,” Lora explained further.
Faith was firm. “But you have to take these phone calls seriously and find out who’s behind them. If you tell the police, they can help you get the phone company to put a tracer on your line.”
“I know that, but I can’t believe anyone would really want to hurt me. Besides, I’m pretty sure I know who it is.”
“Who?” Faith and Tom asked the question simultaneously.
“Well, actually two people.”
Faith’s image of the nursery school teacher was becoming seriously skewed. Two people who might be threatening her?
“One is my boyfriend, or I should say ex-boyfriend, Brad. Brad Hallowell. Do you know him?”
“I’ve met his parents at various functions. They moved to Aleford shortly after I did, almost six years ago. He was in college at the time. I think I know who he is, but I’m not sure.”
“You’re not missing much,” Lora said bluntly.
“He’s good-looking. I think that’s what attracted me, but all he can talk about are his computers or whatever cause he’s latched onto at the moment—Save the Field Mice, whatever.”
If Faith was surprised to discover the teacher more interested in the life of the flesh than the life of the mind, she did not show it. Only her husband might have caught the one eyebrow raised a millimeter.
“He was very upset when I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore. If you can believe it, he backed his car right over the cold frames where I was starting the children’s flower seeds. He isn’t much for children.
That was another problem—but he could have respected their work!”
Respect was a key concept in Miss Lora’s room, appearing on banners, spelled out in dried legumes, and on the leather key ring Ben had made Tom for Christmas. Faith had received a slogan-free looped pot holder.
“But why would he want you out of Aleford? It sounds as if what he really wants is to get back together,” Faith said.
“Oh, he knows I’d never go back with him, so now he goes out of his way to be nasty. You should see the looks he gives me. It sends chills down my spine. He’d just love to mess up my life and get me all upset.” It did sound plausible, and if it was Brad Hallowell, perhaps Tom could have a quiet word with him. Faith made a mental note to make some discreet inquiries about the young man.
“You said there were two,” Tom prodded in a low, sincere voice. Lora looked at him adoringly. Faith was used to this.
“The other person is my brother-in-law, Joey. Joey Madsen.”
Now this was a surprise. A scorned lover was one thing, but a member, albeit by marriage, of the Deane family!
“Why would you think it was Joey?” Tom asked.
Faith was too surprised to talk. Joey Madsen was the prime cause of the fury she’d felt when she’d come home from the selectmen’s meeting. If there was one person in town Faith herself was tempted to threaten, by phone, letter, or eye-to-eye, it was Joey Madsen.
Lora’s father, Cyrus Deane, Jr., had been married twice. Over twenty years ago, as a relatively young widower with four children ages eight through twelve, he’d immediately remarried. Lora was born a year later, and the second Mrs. Deane decided she had more than enough children to raise. After Cyrus’s un-timely death two years ago, Carolyn Deane had moved to California to escape the cold of New England, much to the Deane family’s bewilderment. They couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Carolyn had recently remarried.
Joey Madsen had married the oldest daughter from Cyrus’s first family, Bonnie. He’d joined one of the family businesses, Deane Properties, and had recently formed his own company, the Deane-Madsen Development Corporation. Tonight, his presentation of Deane-Madsen’s latest project before the selectmen had been the reason for a packed room—and Faith’s subsequent agitation.
Despite their climatic partisanship, New Englanders started looking for harbingers of spring in February. Faith’s friend and next-door neighbor Pix Miller had called her excitedly one late-February morning to announce the sighting of her first robin—quivering on a telephone wire that was encased in solid ice from the latest storm. Spring meant the turning over of new soil, and the turnees fell into diametrically opposed camps. On one side were the passionate gardeners, armed with tools from Smith & Hawken, clutching the latest book by Roger Swain, the Victory Garden man. On the other were local developers who started digging foundations and framing as soon as nature permitted, anxious to get their houses up and sold before the killing frosts of autumn. One group hear-kened to the ping! sound of a shovel hitting a rock in the unforgiving loam of the region; the other to the chorus of chain saws clearing the way for naturalistic foundation plantings. Good hedges, preferably fast-growing Canadian hemlocks, made good neighbors.
Joey Madsen had purchased a large tract that most of Aleford had mistakenly assumed was town conservation land. It included a bog, woodlands, and meadows. Joey planned to reduce them to one common denominator—enormous houses on postage stamp–sized lots. Five and six bedrooms, baths to match, exercise rooms—and gazebos. “California colonials,” he called them, clustered in a planned community with shared pool, cabana, and tennis courts. In short, Alefordiana Estates.