The Body in the Snowdrift Read Online Free Page A

a heart full of goodwill toward all Fairchilds. Don’t worry.”
    â€œI’m not worried,” her mother said serenely. “I just know how it is.”
    â€œBut you adored Gran and Granfa—and what about Chat!” Faith’s aunt Chat was her father’s youngest sister and the only one who had ever been around much.His two older sisters were Faith and Hope. It was a long-standing Sibley custom to name the girls in each generation Faith, Hope, and Charity. Faith had a sneaking suspicion that Jane had stopped having children when she did to avoid the possibility of the appellation. Aunt Faith had died of breast cancer before Faith was born, and Aunt Hope lived near Seattle, a childless widow. Chat, who had never married, had been and was a major presence in her nieces’ lives. She now lived just outside the city, in New Jersey, after retiring from the very successful ad agency she’d started. Most of her friends assumed the flight into Jersey was a temporary aberration, but it had been several years now, and they were forced to cross the Hudson when they wanted to visit her—an undertaking more daunting to a New Yorker than crossing the Atlantic. Gran and Granfa (Hope had invented the latter name at age two) had lived long enough for both Sibley granddaughters to know and love them. These three very important relatives and a bunch of second cousins once and more removed made up the Sibley side.
    Since Jane was an only child, Faith hadn’t grown up in the kind of clan Tom had. The Fairchilds numbered Dick, Marian, and their four: Tom, his older sister, Betsey, along with her husband, Dennis, and their sons, Scott and Andy, and Tom’s younger brothers, Robert and Craig, plus Craig’s new wife, Glenda. Marian and Dick came from large families, and the aunts, uncles, and cousins were as numerous as Winnie-the-Pooh’s friend Rabbit’s relations. Tom had been surprised at Faith’s paucity of kin. Although he denied it vigorously, Faith knew he associated it with the city. Whenthey’d first met and engaged in those heady conversations typical of couples falling madly in love—the desire to know everything about one’s beloved: favorite color, favorite song—Tom kept coming up with queries about her childhood. “But where did you play?” he would ask. He’d regaled her with tales of lazy summer days spent building rafts on the North River and winters filled with sledding, skating, and ice fishing. She’d countered with Central Park and the rink at Rockefeller Center, followed by hot chocolate at Rumpelmayer’s, but he had remained skeptical.
    â€œOf course I’m very close to Chat,” Jane Sibley said. “I’ve been lucky to have three wonderful sisters-in-law—and Gran and Granfa were very special to me. But I wasn’t used to en famille gatherings so en masse. Forty assorted Sibleys at my first family Thanksgiving almost caused me to cancel our wedding plans and elope. There were…well, so many of them and they were so bumptious—you know what I mean.”
    Faith did. Jane was not a hugger. Faith had married into a family of huggers and had been converted, but she understood her mother’s early dismay. For all her high-powered wheeling and dealing in the business world, the confidence that exuded from every pore as she strode into a boardroom, Jane Sibley was actually quite shy.
    Faith tried to explain her reluctance about the birthday bash. She’d successfully avoided the topic with Hope. “It’s a little of that—the ‘so many of them’ part—but it’s more the kinds of interactions that take place when they’re all together. It’s as if they are all still living at home and relating to one another the waythey did when they were children. Somewhere along the line, roles were assigned, learned—and no changes in the script, please. Not Tom, of course.”