The Christmas Night Murder Read online

  She looked at it carefully. Then she took an envelope out of her bag and put the strip under the street address. “Aunt Mary had a very old-fashioned way of writing numbers, kind of schoolteacherish, like the numbers you see on the wall in the first grade. These don’t look like that. They’re much rounder. Look at the difference in the twos.”

  She was right. The two in the address made an angle at the line. The two on the strip of paper was looped. Someone else had written the numbers on the strip and given them to her.

  “Thank you, Ann-Marie. You’re absolutely right.” I had finally asked a good question.

  25

  I sat across the street from number 211 and watched the house. Around four-thirty lights went on in the front window of the living room. A few minutes later lights went on upstairs, then again in another room. The house now had a comfortable, lived-in look. Next door in the Belvederes’ house lights were going on at almost the same time. This late winter afternoon their driveway was empty. Either the family was out and their lights were also going on automatically or the cars were put away in the garage at the end of the long drive. Maybe their son had gone back to wherever he lived now that Christmas was over. Tomorrow evening he would probably be celebrating New Year’s Eve with his friends as I would like to be doing.

  When I got cold enough, I got out of the car and crossed the street. I was wearing snow boots, but I didn’t need them for the sidewalk, which was clean in both directions, or for the front walk to the porch or for the driveway. Instead I walked around the right side of the house, through still-undisturbed snow, leaving prints as I went.

  Just even with the ground were basement windows. I knelt and looked inside one, then another. At this hour there wasn’t enough natural light to let me see very much. I continued to the back. It was a deep house from front to back and, like many Victorians, had many protuberances, small extensions of rooms. One near the back was off the kitchen. I skirted it and came to the rear.

  It was dark now and I took my handy flashlight out of my bag. It was small and lightweight and produced only a narrow beam of light, but it was enough to let me see flower beds and keep from tripping.

  Along the back of the house I could see the windowed extension to the kitchen the Corcorans had built. And between that and the corner of the house where I was standing was an old outside staircase that led to the third floor, where a door opened off a small landing, perhaps the entrance to the servants’ quarters from a time when a staff lived upstairs but didn’t mingle with the family. From Julia’s window yesterday, I had mistaken these stairs for a fire escape.

  I put my foot on the first step to see if it was icy. It wasn’t. The sun had done its work today. Holding the light in my hand, I went cautiously up the stairs.

  “Who’s that?” a man’s voice called from below, stopping me dead and frightening me.

  I turned around carefully. “My name’s Christine Bennett,” I called down into the darkness. “I mean no harm.”

  “Come down here.”

  I descended, feeling very scared. He had not identified himself and no one could see us from the street. “Who are you?” I said, reaching bottom and stopping more than an arm’s length away. The man was carrying a more powerful flashlight than mine, which he turned on me as I stood there.

  “I’m Warren Belvedere. I live next door. My wife saw a light back here. Want to tell me what you’re doing?”

  Not an easy question to answer, but I felt a little less afraid. “I’m trying to figure out what happened to the missing priest.”

  “Well, you’re looking in the wrong place, and if you aren’t careful, you’ll get yourself—”

  “Warren?” a woman called. “Are you all right, Warren?” It was Marilyn Belvedere, holding a coat together as she lifted her feet awkwardly to tramp across the snow.

  “It’s Chris Bennett, Mrs. Belvedere,” I called.

  “My Lord! What are you doing back here with a flashlight?”

  “I just wanted to see the house.”

  “Why don’t you both come inside? It’s freezing out here.”

  Her husband waited till I had walked past him before he followed us, as though to ensure that I not spend another minute looking around. We went inside through a door along the side of the house that led to a small room off the kitchen, where we took our boots off and carried them through the house to the front door. Warren Belvedere took my coat and hung it in the closet along with his and his wife’s. Then we went back to the room where she and I had talked on my visit on Saturday.

  “Tea?” she asked with a smile.

  “I’m going upstairs,” her husband said irritably. “I’m tired of this whole business. The priest isn’t here. The Farraguts haven’t lived here for years. I’m sorry the girl killed herself, but if I’d been brought up in that family, I probably would’ve considered it myself.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because everyone there was nuts,” he said angrily. “The mother—”

  “Warren,” his wife said.

  “The son, the father who paid off the whole police department to keep his son out of trouble—”

  “Warren, you don’t know that’s true.”

  “Don’t I? You mean you don’t know that’s true because you don’t want to believe it. He destroyed property, he was a common thief, he put his hands where they didn’t belong.”

  “Go upstairs, Warren, and leave us alone.”

  “Don’t rush me. I just want this to be over. The Farraguts are gone, the girl is dead, and no one in this town left that damn Jeep out there. I don’t know who you are”—he faced me—“but if I catch you around here again sneaking around with a flashlight, I’ll call the police first and tell them there’s a prowler. Is that clear?”

  “Very clear, Mr. Belvedere.”

  “Enjoy your tea,” he said bitterly, and left the room.

  “Warren’s just a little edgy,” his wife said nervously. “I’ll be right back with the tea.”

  “I don’t need tea. I just want a little information.”

  She sat down, looking wilted.

  “The house next door has an outside entrance to the third floor,” I said.

  “I think Mrs. Farragut rented it out for a while after her husband died. She didn’t like being alone and she didn’t want to give up the house. It used to be the maids’ quarters in bygone days.”

  “Did the Farraguts use it for anything?”

  “They had a live-in maid sometimes, kind of on and off. There wasn’t any maid that Christmas,” she added as though she sensed where I was going.

  “The night Julia committed suicide, when did you know something was wrong?”

  She looked around as though to assure herself that her husband was out of earshot. “I heard sirens and then an ambulance pulled up and a police car, I really can’t tell you which came first. But those flashing lights were on for a long time, I remember that.”

  “And who was home at the Farraguts’ that night?”

  “As far as I know, only Julia and her grandmother.”

  “You told me you saw Walter Farragut come home after the police had been called.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I wonder how you could have seen him. Wouldn’t he normally have driven up the driveway on the far side of the house and gone inside through the side door?”

  She thought about it for a moment. “Normally, yes. But I’m sure I saw him rush up the front walk. He must have seen the ambulance and parked his car on the street. Yes, that’s what happened. The ambulance was in the driveway when he came home.”

  “And the police car?”

  “Out front. I’m sure of that because I could see it through the front windows.”

  It made sense. The other possibility was that Walter had left the house when the body was discovered and made a conspicuous return when the police and the ambulance attendants could see him. “What about Foster?”

  “I didn’t really see him
come home. I wasn’t watching for anyone. I was concerned about what was happening. To be honest, I thought at first that old Mrs. Farragut had had a heart attack. I had no idea it was Julia.”

  “Did you go over to see what was happening?”

  She didn’t answer right away. Her face was tight, her forehead pinched. “Warren did,” she said.

  The way she said it, the way she looked when she said it, made me wonder. I took a calculated risk. “I heard a rumor that Julia was murdered,” I said.

  Her hand moved spasmodically, pushing a small dish harmlessly to the carpeted floor. “I never heard that. Who told you that?”

  “The nun who was murdered yesterday morning.”

  “I can’t imagine—what would make her think such a thing?”

  “She knew Julia well. Julia had a great desire to live. She was also a devout Catholic.”

  “The police said it was suicide.”

  “Your husband mentioned that Walter Farragut had bought off the Riverview Police Department.”

  “Warren’s just upset. He says things he doesn’t mean. No one was home that night except the grandmother. You can’t believe that an old woman…And she loved Julia. She adored her.”

  “She loved her grandson, too, didn’t she?”

  “Of course. What does that have to do with anything?”

  It might have a lot to do with her motive to protect either him or his father, but I didn’t want to discuss it with her. “I’m not sure,” I said evasively. “I was curious about something else. The grandson—was Foster Serena’s maiden name?”

  “Foster was his mother’s maiden name.”

  I looked at her. “You mean he wasn’t Serena’s son?”

  “Oh no. I thought you knew that, but I suppose not many people did. Walter had a son by his first wife. After she died, he married Serena. Foster must have been four or five when they married. Old Mrs. Farragut always attributed his problems to losing his mother when he was so young.”

  A line in one of the letters to Miranda came back to me. The brother I never had. She had never thought of him as her brother. It cast a new light on what Julia had told Angela about her mother losing a baby boy. “So Foster and Julia were half brother and sister.”

  “That’s right. But no one talked about it. As far as the Farraguts were concerned, they were a family.”

  But not to Serena, I thought. Serena had taken on the task of raising another woman’s son, a boy she could not control, in the home of a mother-in-law who loved him and probably excused much of his behavior, and with a husband willing to pay off the police to keep the son on the street and his record, not to mention the Farragut name, clean. It occurred to me that the offense that had finally put him behind bars had very likely occurred in another jurisdiction, where Walter had carried no influence.

  My heart ached for both of them, mother and daughter, Serena and Julia. What a mess Julia had been born into. No wonder she had lived for the day when she could escape. What had she written to Miranda? She wished her mother could have come to St Stephen’s with her.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Belvedere,” I said.

  “If I knew where your priest was, I would tell you.”

  “I’m sure you would.” I meant it. “Did anyone in that house ever talk about him?”

  “Never. But we heard about it. It’s hard to keep things like that a secret. Serena never said anything. By the time Julia went to the convent, Serena was spending most of her time at home. I went over once in a while to talk to her, to sit with her, but it wasn’t the same.”

  It hardly could be. The grandmother would be there, depriving Serena of privacy.

  “I watched her decline,” Marilyn Belvedere said sadly. “I watched her slip away.” She looked at her watch. “I’m afraid I must ask you to leave. It’s nearly dinnertime now and Warren doesn’t like his dinner late.”

  I wasn’t surprised. I thanked her again, got my coat and boots at the front door, and walked down to the street. The old Farragut house was alive with light. Only the third-floor windows were entirely dark.

  I crossed the street and got into my car. I wanted to complete my circle of the house, but I was afraid to agitate Warren Belvedere. For all I knew he was peering out of an upstairs window, watching me. I wasn’t ready to call his bluff about the police, not now, not in this town.

  But there was something about the house, something I knew or almost knew, as though a fact had already registered in my brain and I had failed to recognize it. That empty house with its windows all lit up was trying to tell me something.

  I had no idea what. I started the motor and made a U-turn, driving slowly toward the center of Riverview. I needed a warm place to think and I didn’t want to return to the convent. Threats or not, I was going to have to go back to the Farragut house again and shake loose what my mind was concealing from me.

  26

  I ended up back at Father Grimes’s rectory. He gave me his living room and promised no one would bother me. Then he went upstairs.

  I took out my notebook and looked over what I had just learned from Marilyn Belvedere. No one else had even hinted at the relationships in the Farragut family. If the Farraguts had moved to 211 Hawthorne Street with a ready-made family of one son and one daughter, it was easy to see why no one would suspect that the children were born of two marriages. And since there seemed no limit to the lengths Walter would go to protect his son, one could only wonder whether that included harming his daughter as well.

  Backward and forward, backward and forward. I flipped back to where I had copied Sister Mary Teresa’s long number onto a line on my page. Someone had written it for her, someone who wanted to make sure it would not be easily identified because it gave access to something. Not a locker or a post office box, not any credit card that I had been able to dig up, not a phone number, because it was too long and the first three numbers were not an area code and the dashes were in all the wrong places.

  What happened next was like standing in a museum looking at a painting that was only pieces of color, and then seeing it again from a certain distance or in a certain light and the pieces come together and take on a form. My mind was still thinking about backward and forward and I started to read the number from the right instead of the left. It ended with -50. If you started with the zero, you had 05-1837-. And suddenly there it was. The dashes were meant to confuse, not to aid: 518 was the area code for Albany and the upper Hudson Valley! I stood up and ran to the kitchen, where the housekeeper was putting the finishing touches on Father Grimes’s dinner.

  “May I use your phone?” I asked breathlessly.

  “Right over there, dear. Is something wrong?”

  “No. I’ve just never seen a phone number this long or one that starts with a zero.”

  “You dial the zero first if you need the operator.”

  “Why would she need the operator?”

  “Who?”

  “The person making the call.”

  “My grandchildren call home with a special number that makes it collect. My son told me about it. They can call from anywhere in the country, any phone at all, and they don’t have to pay for it.”

  No one had called Mary Teresa two nights ago. She had made the call herself and it would never appear on the convent’s bill. I dialed the long number and heard a ring. I had no idea what I would say if someone answered.

  After the third ring, I heard a pickup. Then a strange, genderless, robotic sounding voice said, “Leave your name and number. I’ll get back to you.”

  I hung up, then dialed St. Stephen’s. They found Joseph for me and I told her what had happened.

  “You mean Mary Teresa could have telephoned this person every day and we’d never see it on our bill?”

  “That’s right. Something in this number must tell the telephone company it’s collect. And since she could dial it without going through an operator, whoever was on the switchboard wouldn’t even know she made a call.”

  “An
d you have no idea who the person is?”

  “I don’t even know whether it’s a man or a woman. It sounds like one of those computer voices and it doesn’t identify itself.”

  “We’ll have to find out who that number belongs to.”

  I looked at my watch. “It’s too late for me to get Jack. He’s on his way home now. But this has to be our killer.”

  “It’s hard to believe that a prison inmate could have a telephone and answering machine in his cell.”

  “Which means we’re back to Walter. Or old Mrs. Farragut. Maybe she took the messages.”

  “Let’s give it some thought, Chris.”

  “I’ll see you later. I still have some things to clear up in Riverview.”

  The housekeeper got a hug from me and I accepted a cookie from her to tide me over till I had time for dinner. Then Father Grimes came down and I had to rebuff his invitation to stay for dinner. I was too keyed up to eat and I wanted to get back to the Farragut house to see if I could figure out what it was that I almost knew.

  I retrieved my coat from the living room and put my notebook back in my bag. As Father Grimes helped me on with my coat, I heard the furnace kick on under the floor I was standing on. The whole downstairs was pleasantly overheated and I couldn’t quite see why more was needed.

  “Is that the furnace?” I asked him.

  “Probably not to heat the rectory. The rectory and the church are one building with one furnace and several heating zones. We have to make sure the pipes don’t freeze in the church basement, so we’ve got a zone down there that we keep warmer than the rest of the church overnight.”

  “I see,” I said. “Thank you, Father.” I buttoned my coat as I ran.

  —

  This time I didn’t park on the street. I drove up the driveway and shut my lights off as soon as I had a good look at where the garage was. Then I inched my way forward, past the side door where the drive was canopied and on to the back of the house. There I turned off the motor and got out of the car as quietly as possible. The house to the left was some distance away, but I didn’t want to alert those people any more than I wanted Warren Belvedere after me.