Alice had a busy day Monday that included a library trustee meeting as well as lunch with Judith Perkins in Windsor and then a couple of hours with the rest of the Ladies Aid Society, cleaning up from Old Home Day. They had made $252, which was a new record.
It was a lovely day, less hot than it had been. The rain on Saturday had cleared things out and taken the humidity and heat with it. She thought she could detect a single, glittery note of autumn, cool and clear, and she lingered on the green, which was almost back to normal.
She stopped at Collers’ for a bag of sugar and walked home slowly, anticipating a still and silent house since Mildred had the day off. But she knew when she reached the side gate that Arthur was waiting for her. This time, he’d balanced a small stick on the post. It was a trick he’d used before in their acquaintance and though anyone else would have assumed it had fallen from a tree or been left there by the wind, something about the angle alerted her immediately. She felt a quick pang of caution and this time, she didn’t discount it. Whatever Arthur was up to, he wasn’t telling her the whole story. And whether she was actually in danger from him or not, Arthur’s presence here in Bethany signified danger for someone. Because Alice knew a lot of things about Arthur, she could easily be swept up in that danger if she wasn’t careful.
Thinking, she took the sugar to the kitchen, slipped a small paring knife into the pocket of her dress, picked up the Sunday Times, the day’s Rutland Herald, and the weekly edition of the Bethany Register and tucked them under her arm, and then walked cautiously through the garden, unable to resist the urge to deadhead a lily as she passed. She went to the little café table at the back of the garden and finished reading the papers while she waited. There was much of interest in the news today. She was almost done when he stepped out of the bushes.
“Hello, Arthur,” Alice said. “It’s lovely to see you again so soon.”
“And you, my dear.” He kissed her cheek and they stood there together listening to the sound of the water. He looked utterly innocent, dressed in a seersucker jacket and trousers and a snowy-white shirt. “Well done, by the way, playing along the way you did when we ran into you. And we really do want to have you to the house for dinner.”
“Of course, you know acting was always one of my strengths, Arthur. And as for dinner, I’d love that. Please let me know if you need recommendations for carpenters or plumbers or any of that sort of thing.”
“Yes,” he said. She could hear the impatience in his voice, though. He had something to tell her. She waited.
“I have the information you asked for, about this Warren.” He had something interesting. Alice could tell by the way he said it. Warren. “As soon as I mentioned his name, my contact at Boston PD knew who I was talking about. It was quite the story. He’s from a good family. Father has a furniture company and was a bit of a war hero as well, it sounds like. In any case, this Franklin Warren, well, he bucked his parents’ expectations. He got a good degree from Tufts and then he decided to become a policeman. Did all right, became a detective when he was twenty-five. But his parents didn’t like it and they liked it even less when he married an Italian girl named Maria Fortunato. Met her when her parents’ restaurant in Little Italy was robbed. His parents all but disowned him. They’d only been married a year or so when he came home to find her stabbed to death in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor. At least that’s what he said. She was pregnant too. Terrible business. His fellow officers immediately put him under the microscope. He said he’d been out jogging but hadn’t seen anyone at the track, and he behaved strangely, they said. Couldn’t stop crying. Something about his behavior seemed off to them. He was probably a day or two away from being charged when two things happened. The first was that they found blood that didn’t belong to her in the kitchen. Wrong type. It wasn’t his type either. And then an alibi came through for him. A couple of boys from the Tufts track team said they’d seen him jogging during the time she’d been killed. He’d done nearly six miles around the track and when he was done, he spent some time stretching. He was there almost two hours, so it covered the time. He couldn’t have done it. Or at least was very unlikely to have done it.”
“Poor man,” Alice said, shaking her head. “He’s not a murderer. I can tell you that.”
“Anyway, he quit his job. Couldn’t stand working with the men who’d accused him. He went out west for a year, no one knows exactly what he was doing. He came back to Boston and somehow or other he got this job up here. Anyway, it seems like he’s beyond suspicion at this point, though they’ve never made an arrest—it’s still an open case—but you might like to be careful just the same.”
Alice nodded. “Thank you, Arthur. I appreciate that.”
“You’re welcome. And now, I have a favor to ask of you.”
“Oh yes, I thought you might,” Alice said, raising her eyebrows.
“Do you know what it’s about?” Arthur looked genuinely surprised.
“Yes, Arthur, I think I do. It’s about this, I believe.” She folded the newspaper to the story she’d just read and held it up. “The story’s on page six of the Rutland Herald. This writer, Kalachnikov, has settled not far from Bethany. A remote cottage in the woods. He’s a Soviet dissident, isn’t he, ostensibly on our side, but you, Arthur, are here to keep an eye on him. Just in case.” She couldn’t resist giving him a triumphant grin. She felt very proud of herself.
Arthur laughed out loud. “I can’t put anything over on you, old girl. That’s right. It’s not so much him we’re interested in, you see. Although, you never know. But anyone who might visit him would certainly be of interest to us and with your connections in the state, well, you might see or hear something that could be useful. You’ll tell me if you do? Using the old methods.”
“I will,” Alice said, keeping the promise light. She didn’t know yet what she would and wouldn’t tell Arthur Crannock. “You know, I have an old friend who lives near him. Cecilia. We were bosom buddies in college. I can make something of the connection, I think. Yes…”
“I knew I could count on you.” He winked at her. “No contact with subject unless unavoidable. Background only, right? I’ll be off, but we’ll see you soon. Wanda will call you up about a date for dinner.”
“See you soon, Arthur.” She waited until he was gone and then she sat down again and reread the article that was actually of interest to her. Not the one about Anatoly Kalachnikov.
She had known about Anatoly Kalachnikov for weeks now. The famous writer, a dissident who had defected after a literary festival, had settled in Vermont back in the winter. This was interesting, but not as interesting to Alice as the fact of Kalachnikov’s residence in combination with the very small item at the bottom of page nine of the Bethany Register.
State Police Detective Lieutenant Thomas Johnson had no comment in the case of a Washington, DC, man shot to death in his newly purchased home in Bethany in May. Additionally, Franklin Warren, the newly arrived state police detective from Boston posted at the Bethany barracks, refused to give this reporter a comment. The shooting happened in the house on Downers Road May 6, but police appear to have made no headway in the case.
Bethany real estate agent Harry Best reported that Armstrong, a State Department employee, had bought the house in January, and was anxious to assure the Bethany Register that he does not believe there is rampant crime in Bethany. “No interested parties should be dissuaded from buying a lovely summer property in Bethany,” Best said. “This was probably a fluke.”
Alice glanced over at Franklin Warren’s house, where the driveway was empty. Surely he was out detecting. Alice would talk to him and hopefully he would find out who had stolen the cartridges so Bob Coller would have to apologize to poor Richie.
As she walked back slowly through the garden, Alice found that her spirits had improved. Arthur thought he’d put one over on her, but he hadn’t. She would do what he asked and she would watch and wait and try to figure out what had happened to Samuel Armstrong. Had it been Arthur? Or was Arthur just interested in who it had been? She wasn’t sure yet.
There was still a dark and heavy mood hanging over the town, but for the first time in a long time, Alice had a real purpose, a life-or-death one. She intuited, if she did not know for sure, that her own fate, and perhaps Arthur’s as well, depended on how she handled what came next.
She stopped to take a beetle from the leaf of one of the tall zinnia plants in the side border.
Carefully, making sure she did the job completely, she crushed it between her fingers and flicked the corpse onto the gravel path.