The morning of one"s child"s birthday always dawns with joy. There"s a moment of thanks, a moment of quiet reflection: looking back over the years, antic.i.p.ating the years to come. Then the day comes galloping in, starting in Ben"s case with a flying leap into his parents" bed. "Happy Birthday! Happy Birthday to me!"
Night brings a return of that morning mood and the supine position. May tenth was drawing to a close and Ben was five years old. Faith was lying down on the couch. Tom was in the study working on a sermon ent.i.tled "Beginning Anew." "I can work in spring and the quality of mercy," he"d told her.
Sticking to the formula of one guest for each year of the child"s life, Faith had still found Ben"s birthday party more enervating than the large society wedding she"d catered recently. The children seemed to multiply and were everywhere at once. Fortunately, it had been a beautiful, warm day and the party was outside. Tom had been on the other end of the camcorder most of the time-why he was working now. Fix brought the dogs over at Ben"s request, as a special treat, then left with them soon after, when one child reacted with terror, not delight.
Faith sat up. Ben would start kindergarten in the fall. It was going too fast. Although, in a few more years, she 247 ".
wouldn"t have to worry so much about day care....
She missed Tom. It had been sixteen days since Nelson had tried to kill her. She had found herself counting immediately afterward and hadn"t stopped. She and Tom had instinctively been spending as much time as possible together and with the kids. Maybe he"d like a beer. Maybe he was ready to go to bed.
She walked into his study and came up behind his chair, kissing the top of his head.
"That"s nice," he murmured, then stood and took her in his arms. The study door burst open. They sprang apart like guilty lovers. It was deja vu all over again, except the woman in Tom"s arms was his wife and the woman at the door wasn"t.
It was Millicent Revere McKinley.
"You"ll never guess!"
That was obvious.
"Oh, the front door was open and I saw the light on in here when I came up the sidewalk. I a.s.sumed you were working." She gave them both a reproving look. "Such wonderful news!"
Faith didn"t mind playing along. It had to be pretty important for Millicent to come barging in like this.
"What is it?"
"We own Beecher"s Bog! That is, the town owns it, always has!"
"But why didn"t we know before?" Tom asked.
"I"ll start from the beginning. Apparently, the town only leased the land to the Turners. Originally, it was going to be the site for the Poor Farm, which was why the town didn"t want to sell it all. The Turner family could build a farmhouse on the small lot they did own and would retain ownership of that, but the rest was to revert back to the town after Roland Turner"s death. He could leave his house to his heirs, but not Beecher"s Bog and the surrounding fields. He was farming it in those days and getting cranberries from the bog. Later descendants made quite a profitable business of it."
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"How could it have taken so long to discover this?" Faith was extremely disappointed in Millicent-Millicent, who had ferreted out virtually every detail of Aleford life since the town was incorporated in 1713.
"Roland lived to be a very, very old man. Ninety-eight or ninety-nine. By then, the Poor Farm was located elsewhere. Anyway, during his life, neither he nor anyone else in his family brought up the life-tenancy question, in the hope that the town would forget about it, which it did. During the war, many papers were destroyed and there must have been a great deal of confusion." When Millicent said "the war," it was not WW II, the Big One, or the Vietnam War, but the one and only one as far as she was concerned-the War of Independence.
This was all very interesting, but Faith was still in the dark.
"It would certainly have changed things if we"d known about this sooner," she said bitterly.
"But they only found the papers today!" Millicent protested.
"Who found what papers, where?" Tom asked.
"The Turners were too honest, or too nervous, to destroy the papers detailing the agreement. They hid them in the house, in one of the kitchen walls. You know the restoration work has been continuing. Today they were replacing some of the plaster and found the tin box with the doc.u.ments."
"You mean the men working for the Deanes?" Faith was astonished.
"I mean Eddie Deane himself. Gus just called."
There was a Bronze Musket plaque in here for somebody, maybe the whole family.
"Now, I have a million more people to tell. Isn"t it thrilling?" And she was off into the night to spread the news, not unlike her ill.u.s.trious ancestor.
Faith and Tom went back to what they had been doing. After a while, Faith observed, "That does it, then. The bog has been saved. The ident.i.ty of the poison-pen writer and 249.
murderer revealed. The mystery of Lora"s double life solved. The only thing we"ll probably never know is what was in Millicent"s letter, her guilty secret."
"I think I can help solve this one, if you promise not to get mad at me for not telling you sooner. Believe it or not, the whole thing completely slipped my mind."
"I believe it. Now tell! I knew Charley was giving you all sorts of inside information!"
"The letter contained no words, only a number, Seventy-four."
"Of course. I should have known. Her age! Seventy-four. Her guilty secret! She should be shouting it from the top of her gabled rooftop. Besides, these days it"s nothing. Millicent will still be Millicent twenty years from now."
Faith paused a moment to reflect on this daunting thought-with the happy realization also that Millicent"s secret was hers. No more vague allusions to the 1940s as dark ages.
She settled back into Tom"s arms, another thought uppermost in her mind.
"You know, we made a very good team, darling, although you tended to be a little too cautious-and forgetful."
"A team?"
"As in Nick and Nora Charles, for instance."
Tom made a face. "I could never drink that many martinis and still function, but now that the kids are older, we might consider getting a dog-say a wirehaired terrier?"
Faith smiled. Definitely a very good team.
250.
end.