The Body In the Belfry by Katherine Hall Page Page A

Doritos and diet Coke to tarte tatin and Faith’s secret recipe puff pastry cheese straws.
    Faith had fallen in love with the Moores’ house the first time Tom took her there, and further acquaintance had served to deepen the passion. It was the most beautiful house in Aleford, just on the other side of the river and a short drive or long walk from the center, depending on one’s time and temperament. Cindy had never walked once she got her license; Patricia Moore only used the car for shopping.
    Behind the house the garden sloped gently down to the water. When the river flooded, some of the flower beds were submerged and the old swing set that stood on the banks was an informal yardstick of the severity of the storm. One wet spring the swings had floated back and forth with the current for a week. No one had ever thought to move them or take them down now that the children were grown. They had always been there and so they stayed. Which was the case with most things in the house. Whatever found its way inside never left. The house was a fantastic, glorious muddle of the treasure and trivia of many generations.
    Patricia Moore’s great-great-grandfather, Jeremiah Cox, had been a ship captain and later owner of a fleet of vessels, which, from the look of things, had never unloaded cargo except at this landing. He built the original square clapboard house, but it was Patricia’s great grandfather, Martin, who added a wing here and there
as his family and fortunes increased. Now it was a rambling house, painted that buttery yellow so beloved of New Englanders, with black shutters and white trim. It looked like a smaller, slightly eccentric version of Longfellow’s home in Cambridge. Patricia’s grandparents had added a deep porch, which stretched across the back of the house so they could sit in their wicker rockers and watch the river go by. It wasn’t screened in. Mosquitoes either never bit people in Aleford or were studiously ignored, which amounted to the same thing. Maybe everyone put repellent on behind closed doors. The first time Faith went to one of the church picnics and took out a container of Off the whole congregation looked as if she had whipped out a hip flask of hootch.
    Tom and Faith climbed the front stairs. Patricia had seen them from the window and was opening the door. She had been born in the house and as she stepped forward to greet them, Faith suddenly imagined a whole line of Patricia’s ancestors making the same gestures and smiling the same warm but not gushing smile. And Patricia’s grandchildren and probably great-grandchildren, too, would watch her and inherit the legacy of this graciousness. Her two children, Rob and Jenny, had. Cindy hadn’t.
    Faith’s small apartment in New York had been the last word in stripped-down High Tech. The only color had been the flowers delivered by Madderlake each week. Yet she coveted every square inch of Patricia’s house, from the patchwork quilts on the spool and four-poster beds to the china closets crammed with export porcelain, and set after set of Limoges wedding china.
    They sat down in the living room and Faith stopped her usual envious inventory to listen.
    Patricia started right in with plans for the funeral.
    â€œWe would have wanted things to be simple in any
case, Tom, and the fact that it was murder makes that seem all the more important somehow,” she said.
    â€œNot that it’s something to be ashamed of, my dear,” Robert interjected.
    â€œOh, no,” Patricia responded, “It’s just that there will probably be a lot of newspaper reporters and people who don’t even know us. So we thought a brief service now and a memorial service sometime in the spring.”
    Patricia looked very tired and drawn. So did Robert. Faith was used to seeing them hale and hearty. The Moores looked remarkably alike. Or perhaps, Faith mused, it was true that married people grew to look like