The Christening Day Murder Read online

  “I got a B,” he said finally.

  “In the test? That’s good. That’s wonderful. You worry too much.”

  “If I don’t worry, I don’t work hard. You want me to ask how it’s going?”

  “Ask away.”

  “Solve the homicide yet?”

  “I’m not even sure how many homicides there were. But I know whose body I found in the church. I haven’t told the sheriff yet.”

  “Probably won’t make much difference unless he’s up for election. You pin it on anyone?”

  “I’ve got two, maybe three suspects, but nothing holds together. There’s no obvious motive. Her name was Candida Phillips and she was a schoolteacher, just hired for the last year of the town’s existence. Her landlady told me Candy fell in love with someone that year, an older man who was probably married. Two older married men who had interviewed her for the job ‘forgot’ she worked in town that year, and one of them warned the other one I was on my way to his house. The second one, the former mayor, lied about who was teaching that year.”

  “So they know something. Could one of them have done it?”

  “Either one of them could have. They were both at the Fourth of July town picnic, and they were probably at the fireworks that night. It wouldn’t have been too hard to slip away, meet her downstairs in the church, and shoot her during the fireworks. I think that’s how it happened, a shot during the fireworks.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then he stuffed her body in the opening, sealed it up, and came back outside.”

  “When did he open up the place where he was going to bury her? That had to take time. You don’t do that in ten minutes flat.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe during the afternoon after Maddie’s baptism.”

  He looked at his watch. “Drink up. Let’s run over there while it’s light.”

  “I got you interested,” I said.

  “I was interested from the start. I just didn’t have the time to think about it.”

  There were still some people milling around the town, especially around St. Mary Immaculate. On the short drive over I had told Jack about J.J. Eberling, who had to fit into this somehow, although the strongest connection I could find was the missing last issue of the Studsburg Herald. Whether Joanne Beadles figured into anything connected with Candy Phillips’s murder, I just couldn’t say.

  We went down the stairs on the left-hand side of the church as I had two weeks earlier at almost the same time of day.

  “See how the back of the church is curved? That’s why I couldn’t see whoever it was who was at the opening.”

  “But you could hear him.”

  I thought about it. “I didn’t really hear him moving the rock or scraping around. He must have done that earlier. What I heard was a ping, something metallic falling. I haven’t told you about that.” I took it out of my change purse and handed it to him. “It’s a miraculous medal. Look at the date.”

  He whistled. “More’n ninety years old.”

  “It doesn’t fit anyone who lived in Studsburg. There was only one person with the initials A.M., Amy Mulholland, and she was eleven years old at the time. She’s Amy Broderick now, and I met her this morning.”

  “You really have been busy.”

  We walked along the hall till we came to the opening. A few people stood in front of it, making comments on the murder. We waited till they went up the stairs and then moved closer.

  “It looked to me as though her hand was pointing out,” I said. “Maybe she was clutching the medal. I think it may be what he came back for.”

  “Hard to believe she could have hung on to it for thirty years, Chris. There couldn’t’ve been any flesh left.”

  “Then he could’ve found it on the floor, picked it up, and dropped it when I called.”

  “You called?”

  I thought about it to get the chronology right. “No, I heard the ping first. Then I called, just to let whoever it was know that someone was there. That’s when he took off up those steps.” I indicated the ones just beside us.

  “So he knows you were there and he knows the sheriff doesn’t have the medal or he would have said something aboutit.”

  “You’re telling me he knows I have it.”

  “Seems kind of obvious.”

  “But he doesn’t know who I am, Jack.”

  “He could have gotten your plate number.”

  “It’s possible,” I said. “My impression was, he just got away as fast as he could.”

  “I worry about you, Chris.”

  That gave me a nice chill. I got down on my haunches beside him. The police had cleaned the opening out, scraping all the gook off the floor. Jack tried to move the stone. I could see it wasn’t easy.

  “He had to have tools to open this up,” he said.

  “He took them with him. I heard a metallic clatter before he ran, and there wasn’t anything here when I got here.”

  “And he knew exactly what he was looking for.”

  I looked at the miraculous medal. “Which means it identifies him. If I could only figure out how.”

  We went up the stairs and outside. I showed Jack where the athletic field had been, where the woods were where Fred Larkin had proposed to his wife, where Main Street was. We walked over and looked at the bridge.

  “Somewhere around there, J.J. Eberling was handing out the Studsburg Herald that last day until he changed his mind.”

  “Something made him change it.”

  We left the Main Street bridge and walked back toward the church.

  “Something was going on in that town, Jack,” I said. “When I met Amy this morning, she said her mother said she was sorry she’d ever mentioned that teacher. Somehow Candy Phillips was involved with someone in Studsburg, like the mayor or J.J. Eberling, and there’s a wall of silence around them. The only way I can think to break through are with people who didn’t live in town or with the children.”

  “Who are now adults.”

  “But they haven’t been warned to keep quiet. I’ve got Amy’s brother’s phone number. He lives near New York and he was in Candy’s eighth grade.”

  “Maybe that’s the way to go.” He gave me his hand as we mounted the slope.

  In the car I took out the sixth grade class picture that Amy had given me that morning and showed it to him in the glow of the dome light.

  He held it for a long time, looking at Candy’s smiling face. “That’s when it breaks your heart,” he said.

  Maybe that’s why I loved him.

  We found a nice restaurant for dinner, and I told him the rest of what I knew. He took down Joanne Beadles’s name and thirty-year-old address and said he’d do what he could to locate her. Then I gave him the names and Studsburg addresses of the two men who seemed to be hiding something from me, Larkin and Degenkamp, and for good measure, J.J. Eberling’s as well. I wanted to know if any of them had owned a .38-caliber handgun on the Fourth of July thirty years ago. While he was writing everything down, he said he’d also check Candy’s pension with Albany.

  Although I spent a lot of time telling him what I knew, I listened very carefully to his questions. Jack is always concerned with the kind of details I tend to push away because I can’t explain them, hoping they’ll just drop into place by themselves. The opening in the wall was a big problem for him. The stone was heavy, and although it could be moved by one person—he had done it himself as I watched—there was obvious preparation involved in using that opening as a grave. At the very least, the stone had to have been loosened before the homicide, and tools had to be used to accomplish it. Otherwise, the killer would have been gone from the picnic or fireworks for a very long time.

  “Maybe he was,” I said. “Maybe they’re all covering for him.”

  “But why?”

  “Maybe they liked him. Maybe they hated Candy for some reason.”

  “Maybe she found out something she wasn’t supposed to know.”

  “
Something you could kill for?”

  “Chris, somebody put a bullet in her. Find out why and you’ll probably find out who. You said she may have had a married lover. Maybe she was pregnant.”

  “She wasn’t.”

  He looked at me without asking.

  “The coroner thought she wasn’t, but I found something that really convinced me. She had an open box of Tampax in the duffelbag she carried. If you go away for a day or two and just pack underwear and socks, you don’t bother putting in your Tampax if you’re pregnant.”

  “Agreed. So he wanted to break it off, and she was threatening to tell his wife.”

  Mayor Larkin? Henry Degenkamp? But Ellie Degenkamp was in on the secret, whatever it was. And if it had been her husband, she wouldn’t have had to prompt him not to talk about it. He would have known that himself. J.J. Eberling? Certainly something had happened between him and Joanne Beadles. Had it happened with Candy, too, only she couldn’t be bought off?

  “I feel like I know so much and there are still so many questions,” I said.

  “You do know a lot. You’re probably miles ahead of the sheriff.”

  “The sheriff and I care about different things.”

  He put his hand over mine. “What do you care about?”

  “I’m so glad you came upstate today,” I said.

  We got back to the hotel in that sweet, lazy haze that a good meal and some wine seem to conjure up. Everything I had imagined about hotel rooms turned out to be true. Somehow when you close the door and there’s nothing except that big bed and the guy you’re crazy about, the soporific effect of the wine easily transforms into a need, a slow burn, an ache to couple, even if it’s what you did this afternoon.

  Jack is the first man in my life, the only one. I don’t know how it would be with anyone else, and when I’m with him, I don’t care. Even when I’m not with him, I don’t care. What we do together is very right and very special.

  20

  The motel had a good Sunday brunch starting at eleven. Jack and I are both early risers, and we decided to spend a couple of hours using our muscles. We drove to the river near Studsburg, parked, and started walking upstream, away from the dam that had been built to flood the town.

  Most of the land was farmland with very few buildings, just an occasional farmhouse and barn. Next to almost every house was a huge dish to aid television reception. The river that in normal times supplied the water that created the lake that had been Studsburg was well down from its banks. The drought had been going on for two years, and I wondered how the farmers were faring. We stopped walking finally as the land began to slope downward, neither of us wanting to climb back up once we got to the bottom. Instead, we turned around and went back to where we’d parked. From there, Jack drove in the other direction, to the dam that had been built thirty years earlier. Today there was barely a trickle coming through.

  “They built it for flood control,” I said. “Instead of indiscriminate flooding, they directed the water into the Studsburg basin. Look at it now.”

  “You can deal with a problem, but you can’t forecast it. It’ll rain again; you can be sure of that.”

  Almost as sure as that the sun would set this day, that we would kiss and say good-bye, that we would hunger for each other. We got back to the motel with just enough time to change for brunch.

  I decided to use the phone in the room before we checked out rather than add to my growing debt at the convent. I took my list out and found Father Hartman’s number. He was in the rectory and came to the phone.

  “I have something to tell you in confidence,” I said.

  “Is it about the body in the church?”

  “I think I know who it was. The town hired a teacher for the top three grades for that last year.”

  “That’s right. Mr. Dietrich left for another job. She was new at teaching, but she did very well. Phillips,” he said.

  “Then you knew her.”

  “I knew her, I knew Mrs. McCormick, I knew them all. Are you telling me someone murdered her?”

  “I think so. Father, I heard that J.J. Eberling used the rectory after his Main Street office was closed down.”

  “That’s true, but we rarely saw each other. I gave him a room on the ground floor that I never used, and usually I wasn’t aware of whether he was in it or not. Sometimes I’d hear his typewriter clacking—he wrote a column, you know, besides editing the paper.”

  “I heard.”

  “But if it was quiet, I had no way of knowing if he was there. People would drop by to leave their stories, but it was like a separate little business. We didn’t interfere with each other.”

  “Father, I know about Darlene Jackson and Joanne Beadles.”

  He was quiet. Then he said, “I knew you would hear. As far as I’m concerned, it was all rumor. No one ever talked to me about it. No one ever brought charges.”

  “Do you think J.J. could have killed Candy Phillips?”

  “You’re asking for my opinion. I don’t think he did. And beyond that, I never heard a whisper connecting him to her.”

  “Just one more thing,” I said. “Do you have any recollection of a Studsburger with the initials A.M. who was born in 1898?”

  “In 1898,” he repeated. “Someone in his sixties when the town ended. Offhand, I can’t think of anyone.”

  “Could it have been someone who left town a couple of years earlier?”

  “Tell you what. I carried all the church records to the chancery when I left Studsburg. I’ll take a run up there and go through the baptismal records.”

  “I’d really appreciate that.” I had assumed they were put away safely somewhere. Records of baptisms and marriages are often used to establish facts that may not be recorded by government agencies or have been lost. People really rely on church records.

  We had to check out soon, and I wanted to spend some time with Jack before he left. As I picked up my address list to put it in my bag, something just below “Hartman” caught my eye. Mayor Fred Larkin, wife Gwen. I stared at the name.

  “Her name isn’t Gwen,” I said aloud.

  “Whose?”

  “The mayor’s wife. He called her Evvie. He said Evvie didn’t like his smoking. She’s Gwen on the list.”

  “So he changed wives. Lots of guy do it.”

  “Jack, Carol Stifler keeps this list updated. She wouldn’t forget to change the name of the mayor’s wife. And that’s not all.” I was feeling excited. When you discover someone’s been lying to you, it gets the juices going. “He talks as though there’s only been one wife. He told me he’d met her in the eighth grade. He didn’t say ‘my first wife,’ he said ‘my wife.’ That isn’t something I could have gotten wrong. He’s keeping it secret that he’s not married to Gwen anymore.”

  “OK, so he got divorced, and in his generation, you don’t do that kind of thing. Is he Catholic?”

  “Yes. He was married in St. Mary Immaculate.”

  “So that’s it. He did something the church says he shouldn’t have, and he’s ashamed. He doesn’t want all his old friends to know about it.”

  I ran it through my mind. Sometimes people are called by one name early in their lives and by another later because the first name goes out of fashion. But as I conjured up the image of Evvie Larkin, I could now see what hadn’t really made an impression on me when I met her, that she was younger than her husband, substantially younger. He could never have met Evvie in eighth grade, because she would have been in kindergarten, and eighth graders don’t hold hands with little kids. “He’s hiding something,” I said aloud. “It’s what one of the nuns said. There are three liars. One of them is a killer, or protecting a killer.”

  Jack looked suddenly very sober. “When you get that look, I get the feeling you’re on to something.”

  “Something’s wrong there, Jack. Maybe this is the break I’ve been waiting for.”

  “Can I escort you back to the convent before I leave? To make sure you get th
ere in one piece?”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “No, you can’t. And don’t make me promise to keep out of trouble.”

  “I’m calling you there tonight.”

  “OK.”

  “And you’re calling me tomorrow when you get home.”

  “I will.”

  “And if I don’t hear from you, I’ll have the state police out looking for you. I’m not kidding, Chris.”

  “You’ll hear from me.”

  After Jack left, I drove back to the convent. Several of the nuns had visitors, and a number of people were crowding into the shop. I went to the kitchen to offer my help, but it was too late to scrape vegetables for dinner, and all the breakfast dishes had been washed and put away hours ago. I didn’t feel much like sitting in my small room, so I walked over to the chapel and sat in a pew. A family was walking through, looking at the windows and the altar. The wife was carrying a bag with the name of the convent on it, so I knew they had bought some preserves. They talked in the low tones people often reserve for churches and they smiled at me as they passed, feeling the friendship of strangers visiting the same place.

  When they left, I lighted my three candles and went back to the pew. Alone, I planned my itinerary for the next day. I had to find out what had happened to Gwen Larkin.

  I was still in the chapel when the nuns arrived for evening prayers. I left with them, walking slowly back to the Mother House for dinner. There are curious rituals in a convent. In this one as in mine, each nun had her own little drawer in the community room where she kept her napkin ring and her mug. On weekdays her mail would be left in that drawer. As a guest, I had no drawer, but I had thought to bring along a mug for my coffee as I had brought my own towels, sheets, and soap. The mug was handy after dinner when we sat in front of the TV and drank coffee. The program of choice that evening was “60 Minutes,” after which the nuns left to shower and get ready for bed. In a convent with younger nuns, the older ones may leave first, but there were no younger nuns here, and by eight o’clock they had all been awake for fifteen hours. Some of them had slipped away during the program to get to bed early.

  I was about to leave myself when a nun I didn’t know came into the room and called me. “You’re wanted on the phone,” she said.