The Christening Day Murder Page 11

  I lingered over her resume. It was typed on one of those mechanical typewriters that you only see in set pieces nowadays. A single error was erased and typed over. I guessed that Wite-Out was not yet a gleam in its inventor’s eye.

  She had gotten her bachelor’s degree at Penn State a year before applying for the Studsburg job, and spent the academic year as a permanent substitute in a school near home. Included in the resume was her high school and a few sum mer jobs that indicated a person who enjoyed spending time with children. One summer she had been a camp counselor.

  It took some searching to find a piece of information I wanted rather desperately, Candida Phillips’s address. Since envelopes weren’t included, and her address was not on her canceled checks, I found it only because during the school year she wrote a letter to Terence Scofield to request permission to take her classes on a trip to Watkins Glen. At that point I decided maybe Mr. Scofield was “superintendent” of schools. His response was not in the file, but remembering Mrs. Mulholland’s description of the young teacher in jeans, I assumed that was the class trip she had been referring to.

  The letter of request was typed in traditional business-letter style, starting with Miss Phillips’s home address on the right and concluding with “Very truly yours” at the end. I copied down the address with glee.

  There wasn’t much else in the file except for two “To Whom It May Concern” letters of recommendation for Candida Phillips. Obviously she would need references from her year in Studsburg for future employers, and there was probably an arrangement with the county office to send copies of these letters on her request.

  One letter was written by Scofield, who thought she was a “fine young woman, well liked by students, able to get along with staff.” I guessed that meant Mrs. McCormick, although it might have meant with him. The other letter was written by Mayor Fred Larkin, who said she had made Studsburg’s last year a productive and memorable one for the junior high school.

  J.J. Eberling’s name was never mentioned anywhere in the school file.

  Considering the fact that Mayor Larkin had interviewed her before hiring her and written her a reference, it seemed hard for me to believe that he had completely forgotten her existence. But he had been quite specific when he told me that even though the classes had become much smaller, they had had to keep Mr. Dietrich that last year. And both he and Henry Degenkamp had been on the interview committee, so both of them knew when I asked for people who worked in Studsburg and lived elsewhere that Candida Phillips was the kind of person I was looking for. So it was possible that one or both of them had killed her and buried her in the church basement. What made that hypothesis implausible was that Ellie Degenkamp seemed to be in on the deception. It was she who stopped her husband from talking about scandals, she who locked eyes with him when I asked about day workers. It’s hard to look at people in their eighties and see them as killers.

  As long as I had the records in front of me, I went through other files from that last year. The tax rolls were in one folder, and I went down the alphabetical list, which was somewhat shorter than Carol Stifler’s list of addresses. The amounts of the taxes were low enough to be laughable. I guessed you could have bought a house in Studsburg for what I pay in property taxes in Oakwood today. Still, with what they were paying their teachers, you couldn’t expect houses to be very expensive or taxes to be high. A quick run-through confirmed that J. J. Eberling’s property taxes were the highest in town, which wasn’t very surprising. And I was pleased to note that St. Mary Immaculate donated fifty dollars a year to pay for garbage collection “and other sundries.”

  I found a few other interesting things in the tax file. Luther Simpson was granted a delay in paying his second-quarter taxes. Simpson, I recalled from my visit to Fred Larkin, was the owner of the large farm in Studsburg. It occurred to me that spring is when farmers do their planting, when they have all their big expenses. Perhaps the Simpsons were unable to find the money to pay their taxes in the spring, and they put it off till harvesttime, when they would take in the bulk of their income for the year. I had a sense of the hard times farmers face, especially small ones. Elsewhere on the list were other notations of delays granted. Next to one name someone had written in ink: “Pd. J.J.E.” The name was that of a woman. The amount was very small, only forty dollars, but if you’re old and poor, that’s probably enough to feed you for a month; at least it was at that time. My list from Carol Stifler showed the woman to have died two years later after having moved to an address c/o another name.

  There were also several property tax amounts crossed out in ink, with lower numbers substituted. I knew it was possible to argue for reduced taxes, but it seemed strange for people who were on the verge of moving away to go to the trouble.

  Probably the reason the list was shorter than my address list was that so many people had already left town. After going through all the names once, I decided the time had come to track down Candida Phillips.

  15

  The house was still standing, which gave me an additional lift. It was about the size of the one I own, on a nice piece of property with an old car sitting in the driveway. The mailbox at the curb had the name Thurston painted on it. When I rang the bell, a woman in her sixties answered.

  I introduced myself, and she acknowledged she was Mrs. Thurston. “I’m trying to track down a young woman who may have roomed here a long time ago.” I saw her eyes brighten and her face look expectant. “Her name was Candida Phillips.”

  “Candy!” she said excitedly. “Come on in. Do you know where Candy is?”

  Whoopee! Fireworks went off inside me. “I’m afraid not,” I said, trying to keep my own excitement in check.

  “She most certainly did live here, and when she left, she promised to keep in touch, but we never heard from her again.”

  I followed her into a bright, shiny kitchen, and we sat at the table. This was obviously a person who had known and liked Candy Phillips, and I decided to go with my instincts and take her into my confidence.

  “Mrs. Thurston, I just learned Candy’s name a couple of hours ago, and I’m trying to find out as much as I can about her. The only information I have is that she taught school in Studsburg in the year before the town was flooded and that she lived here sometime during that year—”

  “The whole year,” she interrupted.

  “Then you knew her well.”

  “Oh yes, real well. We just loved Candy.”

  “I’m not sure,” I said hesitantly, reluctant to burst her balloon, “but I think the body they found in the Studsburg church may have been hers.”

  “Oh no.” She clapped a hand over her mouth and looked at me with frightened eyes. “I knew something was wrong when she didn’t come back that last night. Who could ever have wanted to kill Candy?” she said, dropping her hand and reaching for a tissue. “She was the dearest person you can imagine.”

  “I don’t know. But I want to find out.”

  “Would you mind if I called my daughter?”

  “Of course not.”

  “She knew Candy better than anyone.” She dialed a number and, without any introduction, began to explain that a woman was here asking about Candy Phillips. “Well, drop everything,” she said. Then she hung up. “It won’t take her a minute. Monica waited so long to hear from her. She just couldn’t believe Candy would leave and forget us.”

  As she stopped speaking, I could hear the front door open and a woman’s voice called, “Hello? I’m here.”

  Her name was Monica Anderson, and she was the youngest person I’d met since starting the investigation. She must have been about forty.

  “Of course I remember Candy,” she said. “She was the brightest light of that awful year. My dad died, and Mom had to rent out a room to make ends meet, and she was sure she was going to get a thief who had loud parties and dropped her clothes all over the house, and then Candy came and she was like a gift to us.”

  “I really needed the mo
ney,” Mrs. Thurston said, “but after a few months, I would have let her stay on for nothing just to have her around.” She turned to Monica. “This lady thinks Candy may be the body they found in that old church.”

  “Oh, no, not Candy,” the daughter said, her face resembling her mother’s as she had heard my suspicion.

  “Tell me about her,” I said gently.

  And prodding each other, reviving each other’s memories, they did. Candy had come to them through a realtor with whom they listed the rental room, terrified of putting an ad in the paper, not knowing how to turn down someone they found undesirable, not even sure how to identify such a person. Candy had come with a large, battered suitcase and a bright new train case that had a mirror in the top when you opened it. She had moved into the smallest bedroom in the house sometime before the school year started—“She had a lot of preparation,” Mrs. Thurston said—and she just became part of the family.

  “Did she have a car?” I asked.

  “Oh yes,” Monica said. “It was an old Volkswagen with the two little windows in the back. It must have been as old as I was.”

  “She needed it to get to school every day,” Mrs. Thurston said. “And she washed it every Saturday, even in the rain.” She laughed, and I felt myself drawn into the circle.

  “Would you like to see her room?” Monica asked.

  I said I would and we went upstairs. The room still looked as though it was made for a single person. There was a bed, a dresser, a night table, and a scarred old oak desk. It was a corner room, and there was a window on each outside wall. Crisp white curtains hung in two tiers down to the sill.

  “It’s almost the same as when she was here,” Monica said. “Except we got a new mattress finally so company didn’t break their backs. The lamp is different; I think the old one died. She used to sit at that desk and mark papers at night. I’d come in sometimes and we’d talk. She was like an older sister to me. Except we never fought.”

  “And she helped you with your homework,” her mother said.

  “She was a wonderful teacher. She had a gift for explaining things so they were clear. Everything she explained to me was easy to learn. I used to wish I could go to school in Studsburg.”

  We had informally sat down, mother and daughter on the bed, I on the desk chair. “Did she have visitors?” I asked.

  They looked at each other. “Not that I recall,” Mrs. Thurston said.

  Monica shook her head in agreement.

  “But she must have had friends.”

  “Well, I used to say that to her. I would say, ‘Candy, a girl like you should go out with people your own age, even if it’s only a movie on Saturday.’ ”

  “But there was no one,” I said.

  “Well,” the mother said. She looked at her daughter as though Monica were still too young to hear what was coming. “She fell in love, you know.”

  “She did?” Monica said.

  Mrs. Thurston looked troubled. “He never came here for her. She would drive off and meet him somewhere.”

  “Did she confide in you?” I asked with hope.

  “Only to say he was wonderful and special and older than she. And of course, I got the distinct impression that he wasn’t available, if you know what I mean.”

  “She never said a word to me,” said Momea, as though part of Candy’s obligation under her lease had been to tell Monica all her secrets.

  “Well, I wouldn’t have expected it,” her mother said. “It wasn’t the kind of thing I would have wanted her to talk to you about. You were a child, and you had enough problems in your own life at that point that you didn’t need any more.”

  I stood and took a last look around the room. As I started out, they followed me. The upstairs hall was covered in beige carpet, and there were family pictures on the walls. Monica had her own family now.

  “Do you have any snapshots of Candy?” I asked as we went downstairs.

  “I’ll get the album,” Mrs. Thurston said, and she went back up.

  16

  The pictures were old, but they were clear and sharp. They showed a girl with short, fluffy hair and a smile that could go a long way with interviewers. She always seemed to be moving. There was Candy, barefoot and in jeans, washing her car with young Monica, Candy getting out of the vintage Volkswagen, Candy jumping for a basketball, Candy and Mrs. Thurston carrying out food for a backyard picnic. There were also winter shots: Candy in a heavy coat and boots, shoveling the driveway, Candy and Monica making a snowman, Candy caught unawares reading a letter as she carried the mail to the house. Mrs. Thurston had not exaggerated Candy’s helpfulness.

  “She’s awfully pretty,” I said.

  “And that was the least of it,” Mrs. Thurston said. “It was that wonderful spirit she had.”

  “I want to be completely honest with you.” I looked at both of them. “I’ve learned more from you than from anyone else I’ve talked to. I spoke to at least two men from Studsburg who knew Candy worked there that last year, and they said nothing about her, as though she didn’t exist. I don’t know why, and I think if I’m going to find out anything at all about who killed her, I need to know more.”

  “I’ll tell you anything I can remember,” Mrs. Thurston said. “But there isn’t much more. I didn’t know that much about her.”

  “Did she ever mention anything about her family? Her parents? Even her grandparents?” I still had the miraculous medal to explain, the initials A.M.

  “Her mother had died, maybe a year or two before she came here, and she never ever talked about her father. I just assumed he’d died a long time before, maybe before she got to know him. She’d talk about high school sometimes, or maybe it was college, but if she mentioned any names, I forgot them a long time ago.”

  “Do you have any idea where she was going when she left Studsburg?”

  Mrs. Thurston rested her chin on a hand as she tried to remember. “She did have a job, I’m sure of that. She started looking for one almost as soon as she got here.”

  “She went to Pennsylvania,” Monica said. “I’m sure of it. She must have left us a forwarding address, Mom.”

  “Well, I just don’t know. She said she’d get in touch when she was settled, and somehow I feel she fixed it up with the post office so I wouldn’t have to do the forwarding.”

  And so letters with telltale return addresses wouldn’t arrive at the house, I thought. “Did she leave at the end of the school year?”

  “Around then, yes.”

  “And she took everything she had with her?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Did she drive the old car?”

  Mrs. Thurston looked uncertain. “I suppose she must have.”

  “She didn’t, Mom. It broke down, don’t you remember? Right at the end of the school year.” Monica turned to me. “She’d only paid fifty dollars for it, and she got that back when she sold it.”

  “Who’d she sell it to?”

  “A mechanic down at the garage. I remember going by and seeing those two windows in the back.”

  “So she took a bus or train wherever she was going when she left.”

  “She did, yes,” Mrs. Thurston said. “I remember now. We drove her to the bus stop. Monica was with me. I had to fight back the tears.”

  “So you dropped her at a bus stop and never saw her again,” I said. “Was that June or July, or isn’t that a fair question after so many years?”

  “It was after school let out. She had a chance for an apartment or a room somewhere, and she wanted to move in. I wish I could remember where. But that wasn’t the last time we saw her. She came back for the Fourth of July.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  “I remember!” Monica said excitedly. “She said she wanted to go to the big party at Studsburg. They were having fireworks that night.”

  Mrs. Thurston nodded her head. “That’s right. She asked if she could stay just the one night, and I said sure, she could.”

 
“Did she?” I asked, feeling a little breathless.

  “Well, that’s the whole thing. She came that afternoon, and I think I drove her over to Studsburg at some point, but she never came back.”

  “Did you look for her?” I asked.

  “She told me … She said not to worry if she didn’t get back before morning. I had the feeling she was going to see … you know … her friend for the last time, and maybe that’s why she thought she’d be late. I was sure she’d be back, because she’d brought a little suitcase with her.”

  “A duffel bag,” Monica interrupted. “She had a little duffel with her when she came to the house.”

  Her mother smiled. “So I was sure she’d be back, but when she didn’t come the next day, I tried to call Studsburg, only all the phones were disconnected. Well, I left Monica by herself and I drove over there to see if I could find Candy.”

  “Was anyone in town?”

  “There were soldiers there, putting up one of those chain link fences. They certainly worked fast. I talked to a soldier, and he said everyone from town was gone. They’d been gone since noon. I should have called the police, shouldn’t I?” She looked pained, regretting a decision that would have made no difference anyway. Candy was probably dead and buried by the afternoon of the fifth.

  “I understand your reluctance,” I said.

  “If she was with him … If he was looking after her …”

  “I know.”

  “It just seemed strange that she never came back for the duffel.”

  “I bet we’ve still got it.” Monica was on her feet. “Where would it be? The basement? The attic?”

  I shared the excitement. She was jubilant, nearly jumping up and down.

  “The attic,” Monica said, running for the stairs. “I’m sure we’ll find it.”