The Christmas Night Murder Read online

  “Did you know her family?”

  “Not too well.”

  “Why is that?”

  “We used to go to my house after school most of the time. When they built the new high school, they located it more centrally than the old one and it was closer to where I lived.”

  “Were you ever in her house?”

  “A few times.” She didn’t seem to want to elaborate.

  “Did you meet her grandmother?”

  “Oh yes. She used to take us places sometimes, when we were younger.”

  “Her mother?”

  “I met her. I knew her best when I was younger. She was healthier then, in better shape. Later on—she kind of stayed in her room a lot.”

  “Julia’s father?”

  “I used to see him at church, but he wasn’t home when I was at their house. He worked in the city or something. I knew him to talk to, but I can’t tell you much about him.”

  “Did Julia talk about him?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “And her brother, Foster?”

  “I met him. He was away at school a lot.”

  “Private school?”

  “Yes. Maybe out of state. Foster was…I think Foster was a big problem in that family.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “He was trouble in school. I think he may have been seeing a psychiatrist at one time. He was one of those kids who was just, you know, difficult.”

  “Did Julia talk about him?”

  “Sometimes. I think she was happier when he was away. That’s the way it seemed to me.”

  Everything she said was so guarded, so incomplete, as though she were protecting each person she talked about by revealing nothing of importance. She didn’t know them well, she couldn’t say much about them, she didn’t remember. But her face looked strained, her dark eyes haunted.

  “Was anyone in that house hurting Julia?” I asked.

  Her face crumpled into tears. “I don’t know,” she sobbed. She dug in the pockets of her robe and pulled out a tissue. “I’m awfully sorry. I didn’t know it was going to do this to me. Maybe it’s just that I had a tough night and it’s hard remembering. It happened at Christmas.”

  “I know.”

  “I shouldn’t do this in front of the baby.”

  I kept myself from smiling. Four days after giving birth she was enough of a mother to feel she should watch her behavior before her sleeping infant daughter. There was something wonderful about that.

  “She’s sleeping,” I reassured her.

  “Yes.”

  I didn’t want to ask the question again, but I wanted an answer to it and her reaction told me she had some strong feelings on the subject.

  “Julia was a reserved person,” she said finally, her emotions under control. “She was just as real as anyone else, she had a good time, she slept over at my house, she went to football games, but there was an air of quiet about her. She was the girl everybody’s mother loved and it wasn’t put on; she was really that way. When she told me she thought she might want to enter St. Stephen’s as a novice, I wasn’t really surprised.”

  “Do you remember when she started talking about it?”

  “Maybe our junior year. A lot of the girls were making trips to visit colleges that summer and I asked her what she was going to do, and she said she’d been thinking of becoming a nun. It turned out she’d already visited up there, but she’d never told me. She must have gone with her mother or her grandmother, so I guess she’d been thinking about it for a while.”

  “Did you stay friends during your senior year?”

  “Oh yes.” She seemed surprised that I might have thought otherwise. “And I don’t think she changed much. We still had fun together and went places, but we had this sense—at least I had a sense—that it was all coming to an end, that next year we would go our separate ways. It made me feel sad.”

  “Was she sad?”

  “I don’t think so. I think she was really looking forward to entering the convent. She would say, ‘Miranda, we’ll see each other, I promise.’ But I wasn’t sure. I know it sounds crazy, but I think I started missing her before she even left.” She laughed at herself and her face lighted up. She had unblemished skin, clear of makeup this morning, and it looked the way all the ads want you to believe you’ll look if you use their many products.

  She hadn’t answered my indelicate question yet and I was still afraid to push her, but I wanted an answer before her mother came to visit or the baby woke up.

  “It sounds like you had a wonderful friendship,” I said.

  “We did.”

  “And you probably knew her better than anyone else.”

  She nodded, then drew her robe around her as though there were a chill in the room when in fact it was on the warm side. “There was something else. There may have been a boyfriend.”

  “When?” I asked.

  “Just before—the summer before she went into the convent.”

  “You said ‘may have been.’ ”

  “Julia sometimes told stories, fantasies. It took me a while to catch on that they weren’t true. She always sounded as if she meant it, but later she would laugh and say forget it, it was just a story.”

  “What kind of stories?”

  “Oh, you know the kind of things kids make up, that they were adopted at birth and it wasn’t their real family. Julia said things like that sometimes; it wasn’t her real father, it wasn’t her real mother. The only one that was really related was her grandmother. That didn’t make any sense, of course.”

  But if her father was doing something terrible to her, that could have been her way of separating herself from him, denying the relationship.

  “What about her brother?”

  “She didn’t talk about him much. Besides, he was away a lot when we were in high school.”

  “Tell me about the boyfriend.”

  “Well, that’s just it. I don’t know whether it was real or one of her fantasy stories.”

  “You mean a girl getting ready to enter a convent made up a story about a boyfriend?”

  “I wish I could tell you for sure that it was or wasn’t true. I just don’t know.”

  “And she started talking about him shortly before she entered St. Stephen’s.”

  “That summer. I’m pretty sure.”

  “What did she say about him?”

  “Crazy things. He came to her at night. She met him in the woods. She saw him in her dreams.”

  Was it her way of describing her father? For the hundredth time I wished I had access to her diary. “Did he have a name?”

  “I don’t think she ever told me a name. She used to call him her doubter, her sweet doubter, that was it, because he doubted she would go through with her novitiate.”

  “Then he was waiting for her,” I said.

  “He may have been. If he existed.”

  “Miranda, you knew the boys in high school. Could it have been one of them?”

  She shook her head slowly. “I would have heard. You can’t keep something like that a secret in a town like Riverview.”

  “Did you ever get the feeling that this relationship was giving her second thoughts about entering the convent?”

  “I did, yes. But I think she felt she’d gone too far to turn back, that she’d committed herself and she would have to go through with it.”

  “All she had to do was say no,” I said sadly.

  “I told her that. She loved the convent. She said the grounds were beautiful and the buildings were old and solid and the nuns were so nice.”

  “She was right. Do you remember the last time you saw her?”

  “It was before I left for school. I had to go up early for freshman week. Her family invited me for a farewell dinner.”

  “Who was there?”

  “All of them.”

  “Even the brother?”

  “Yes. We ate very formally in the dining room. Her father was in a great mo
od. They gave me a terrific gift, a piece of luggage to take to school. It was a wonderful night.”

  “How was her mother?”

  “Pretty good. She kept saying how she was going to miss Julia and her husband kept saying, ‘We’ll see her every weekend, Serena.’ I used to hear my mother’s friends talk about her sometimes, how she was having problems, going into a hospital, but that night she seemed pretty good.” Miranda smiled at me. “You should have heard what my mother was saying about my going away to school. You’d think I was running away forever.”

  “Did you stay in contact with Julia after that?”

  “A little. We wrote a couple of letters. It was really my fault that it petered out.” Her voice was filled with remorse. “I was having a great time at school and the work was harder than I expected and I just didn’t take the time. I wish I had.”

  “Do you remember what she wrote about?”

  She glanced over at the sleeping infant in the bassinet. “She told me how she spent her days, how early she got up in the morning and how early she went to bed at night. She mentioned one or two girls who were novices that year and talked about a nun who was the novice mistress. That was probably all in the first letter. I know it took me a long time to answer because her letter had been so full of information that I didn’t want to just write a few silly lines that didn’t say anything; I wanted to write the kind of letter she wrote to me. So it took a while and then she wrote back. I have a feeling that was her last letter.”

  “Was it the same kind of letter?”

  “I guess so.” She looked uncertain. “No, I think in the last letter she talked about some of the people at the convent. And her mother. She said her mother wasn’t well again.”

  That would certainly fit with what I knew. “You remember anything else?”

  “That must be where she talked about the priest.”

  I felt a prickle along my skin. “Father McCormick?”

  “Hudson River McCormick. That’s what she called him. She said she’d been talking to him about her mother. I remember feeling kind of relieved that she was doing that, talking to a professional, I mean. I never dreamed what was really going on.”

  I let it pass. “Did she mention the boyfriend?”

  “I’m not sure. It was a long time ago.”

  Seven years. “I appreciate your help, Miranda.”

  “She wrote about someone else,” she said as though it had just occurred to her. “A nun that she liked very much, somebody older.”

  “Would you recognize the name?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Sister Clare Angela?” I said, not wanting to be too direct or suggestive.

  “That kind of rings a bell,” Miranda said without much conviction.

  “Sister Mary Teresa?”

  “That sounds more like it. Yes, I think that’s the one.”

  It was nearly noon and I wanted to go before her mother came. “Miranda, when I asked you a little while ago if someone in the Farragut family may have been hurting Julia, you became very upset. Do you think you could tell me why?”

  Her face clouded, but she stayed in control. “She used to say things that didn’t make sense, that men were brutes, that they liked to hurt women. I asked her how she knew that and she said she just knew. She wasn’t the kind of girl who would read violent books. I think she must have seen something—or experienced it herself. Maybe her father beat her mother, and when the mother was gone he did it to Julia. Maybe her brother lost control. But there was something. Two suicides in two months?”

  It was a question neither of us could answer.

  “You’ve been very helpful,” I said. “And your baby is very beautiful. I hope you have a wonderful New Year.”

  “Thank you. I hope you sort everything out. Would you like to see Julia’s letters?”

  “If you have them.” Her offer surprised me.

  “I’m sure they’re with my college things. My mother can show you where they are. She’s just coming up the walk. If you go back with her, it’ll give me time to get dressed. She hates to see me like this at lunchtime.”

  22

  Sunny Gallagher was one of those beautiful women who can tramp around in the snow and end up looking like an ad for a fur coat. It was her good looks her daughter had inherited and they had matured well. She took me to her house, which was only a few blocks away from her daughter’s but in a more expensive neighborhood. Here the houses had larger plots and two-car garages. Inside she had the evidence of many years of marriage and home ownership, a crowded china cabinet, a living room furnished with traditional pieces, carpeting with a few worn spots. The Christmas tree was soaring, rising into a cathedral ceiling that was hung with evergreen branches. The scent of Christmas was everywhere.

  “There’s a carton in Miranda’s closet that has all her college notebooks and papers,” Sunny said. “I can bring it down here if you like.”

  “Whatever is convenient.”

  “Why don’t you come up with me? I may need some help.”

  We went to a second floor with greenery on the balcony railing. In Miranda’s room, a sweet room with a lot of white and well-taken-care-of furniture, there were candles with lightbulb flames at every window and more greenery on the sills. Sunny went to the closet and hauled out a fair-sized carton.

  “This is it. I can get it to the stairs and maybe we can both get it down.” She pushed it to the top of the stairs and we bumped it down to the bottom. Then she pushed it into a large, sunny family room at the back of the house.

  I thanked her and got to work, first removing a top layer of spiral notebooks, each labeled with the name and number of a course. Not anxious to wear out my welcome, I didn’t linger over what I considered irrelevant. Sunny was eager to get back to her daughter’s house and oversee the fifth day of her granddaughter’s life.

  “Did you know Julia?” I asked as I dug deeper in the carton.

  “Ever since the girls became friends. Ten years anyway. Maybe more.”

  “Were you surprised when Julia decided to enter a convent?”

  “Not really. Julia was always a quiet child. She didn’t seem to have much interest in boys and she liked to help out at the church. And there was the problem with her mother.” She said it as though I were already familiar with Serena Farragut’s life.

  “Did you know Serena?”

  “A little.”

  I had reached a folder of what looked like essays. Miranda had analyzed a Yeats poem, attempted a short story, and described a professor of philosophy in three typewritten pages. But there were no letters, and I laid the folder on the rug near the notebooks and textbooks I had piled on the floor.

  “The grandmother was quite a woman,” Sunny volunteered. “Mrs. Cornelius Farragut. A very grand lady who was what my father used to call a pillar of the church. She may have been born in that house on Hawthorne Street, I’m not sure, but I know she brought up her son there. That was before my husband and I moved to Riverview.”

  “But he lived elsewhere for a while, didn’t he?” I asked, turning the pages of a scrapbook with pressed flowers and invitations to dances and snapshots of college kids.

  “I don’t know where he lived before he moved back with her. Her husband had died and she didn’t want to give up that big old house, although I once heard what the heating bill was and I don’t think we could have afforded it for one winter season.”

  The scrapbook had nothing I was interested in and I set it aside. “It’s a beautiful house,” I said, “from the outside. I don’t blame her for wanting to keep it.”

  “Walter’s family moved back when Julia was a child, four or five. She became friends with Miranda in third grade, I think.”

  “I heard that Foster was a problem.”

  “There was a streak of violence in him. When children are young, you never know whether it’s something they’ll outgrow. Of course you hope so and you give children the benefit of the doubt, especially when the parents s
eem to be sympathetic. But Foster didn’t outgrow being a bully and a petty thief. Walter was able to hush things up, to make set-dements so people wouldn’t press charges.”

  “So there was never any official record of what he’d done.”

  “Absolutely nothing. And Julia never talked about him. It was as if she had no brother, as if she just wanted him to go away and not exist anymore.”

  Her description was chilling. “Do you think he might have hurt Julia?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me. But don’t expect to get anyone in that family to confirm anything. Walter always looked the other way and old Mrs. Farragut probably thinks to this day that her grandchildren are the world’s most perfect people. Personally, although I’m no expert on why people crack up, I always thought Serena couldn’t handle that boy, and going off to a nice quiet sanitarium was her way of avoiding the problem.”

  The letters were in the bottom of the carton, about an inch of them tied with ordinary string. I took them out. “You may be right,” I said. “It sounds like an unhappy family.”

  “I think it was. I think that poor girl did everything she could to separate herself from them, and when the convent failed, she did what her mother had done. It was very tragic.”

  “Did you go to Julia’s funeral?”

  “Miranda and I both went. I was surprised only two nuns came.”

  “The family wanted it that way. They asked that the convent not come out.”

  Sunny shook her head. “Sad.”

  “I have the letters.” I put everything else back and stood up. There were several letters in the pack, most of them from names I did not know. But the Julia Farragut letters were together at the bottom, the first letters Miranda had received in college. I put the rest of them on top of the carton. “I’ll give these back,” I promised.

  “I hope they tell you what you’re looking for. That priest has been missing for days now, hasn’t he?”

  “Since Christmas Night.”

  “I don’t know why they left her alone that night,” she said, as though we were still talking about Julia. “A delicate, disturbed child. Somebody should have been looking after her.”