The Body in the Boudoir Read Free

roses, and hydrangea with a faint celadon cast to it. The roses ranged from iceberg white to warm pink, with a few nodding toward apricot to warm up the pale stone pillars. They’d lucked out with the weather, warm for January and no snow. January was an iffy month for a wedding, but the couple had wanted to take advantage of the three-day weekend. She was a native New Yorker, but he was from Massachusetts, which meant out-of-town guests. From what Faith had gathered, the groom’s first introduction to his future in-laws was also one of his first trips to the Big Apple. It had been hard not to show her surprise.
    New York City was not simply the city of her birth but the city she adored. She’d been to Paris, London, Madrid, Rome, even Boston—surely the groom had been to that city, and how could he possibly prefer paltry Boston Common to Central Park’s acres? Yes, she’d enjoyed exploring all those other cities—she’d done Boston in a day—but whenever she’d stepped off the plane, or train, back home, she felt not a sense of relief but a sense of excitement. She could never live anywhere else.
    Granted, her upbringing hadn’t been that of a typical New Yorker, if such an animal existed. Her father was a man of the cloth, with a large congregation in a church that was also, like Riverside, a landmark, but on the east side of Manhattan. Jane Sibley, née Lennox, was descended from those canny Dutch who’d made real estate history with a few baubles and beads. The family had remained rooted in Manhattan ever since. Quickly deciding that the impoverished divinity school student she’d met through his sister, a fellow classmate at Barnard, was a similar once-in-a-lifetime chance, Jane had said yes, but . . . The “but” was the stipulation that he find a parish in the city—she didn’t care where so long as she recognized the zip code—and they invest as soon as possible in their own place. Jane didn’t know what sort of parsonage the future might hold, but she knew she wanted to be able to move the furniture around when she wished and paint the walls purple should the spirit move her.
    By the time Faith was born, her mother was making a quiet name for herself as a real estate lawyer—“quiet” since the Lennoxes, especially Jane’s mother, belonged to the school that believed mention in the press should be restricted to marriage and death. The Upper East Side bargain duplex Jane had pounced on as soon as Lawrence accepted the call to his current pulpit was as far from Mosses from an Old Manse as one could get while still sporting a turned-around collar.
    Hope had followed almost a year to the day after Faith, and there the Sibleys stopped. Accommodating in all respects to the wife his secular side unabashedly worshipped, the Reverend Lawrence Sibley would not budge on the family tradition, established not long after Noah stepped on dry land, that called for Sibley girls to be named Faith, Hope, and Charity, in that order, subsequent female issues’ names unspecified. The oldest male in each generation was Lawrence, followed by Hosea and Luke. Faith had questioned her father and various other Sibleys as to the origin of the male naming tradition. “Lawrence”? The other two, overtly biblical—yes—but where did her father’s name, and all the Lawrences preceding him, come from? No one had ever provided a satisfactory answer. The conundrum was an indicator of the insatiably curious little girl she’d been—and still was. It was the type of question she used to mull over first in Sunday school and then in church to entertain herself during the boring parts.
    Despite the spacious apartment—each girl had a room of her own—and location—steps away from the park, also Park and Madison—growing up as a preacher’s kid, a PK, resembled growing up in a fishbowl, no matter how holy the