The Christening Day Murder Page 21

  “You were Candy’s father,” I said.

  His face changed. An eyelid throbbed. He said nothing, but he didn’t move. Finally he said, “That’s a lot of nonsense and you know it. You say anything about this and I’ll sue you for everything—”

  “I’ve seen her birth certificate.” Another lie, but in a good cause.

  “Keep your voice down,” he said angrily.

  “Then talk to me. A New York City policeman has all the documentation ready to turn over to the sheriff’s office.”

  He looked around as though his nonexistent neighbors might be gathering nearby to hear my defamation of him. “Come inside, and don’t say a word till I tell you.”

  I followed him into the room with the aerial photo and the trophies. He left me there and went to talk to his wife. While he was gone, I found the framed diploma he had gotten from Syracuse University in the year of Candy’s birth. I was standing in front of it when he came in and closed the door behind him. A moment later I heard the outside door close as his wife left the house, sent, no doubt, on a useless errand.

  “I’m sure you didn’t know she was your daughter when you interviewed her for the teaching job,” I said.

  “I didn’t.”

  “Phillips is a fairly common name, and she didn’t live in Erie, where Shirley had lived.” I watched him flinch as I said the name. “So I assume she told you while she was teaching.”

  “She did.”

  “And she wanted something from you because you had never acknowledged her.” And probably never helped her mother, I thought without saying it.

  “She wanted something I couldn’t give her,” Larkin said miserably.

  “Something you couldn’t give her. So you lured her to the church on the Fourth of July and killed her during the fireworks. You knew Father Hartman had opened a vault in the wall downstairs, and to make it easier, he had even left the sealing material down there. All you had to do was shoot her and stuff her body in the opening, knowing it would never be found. When you saw the article in the Herald the next day, with the piece about Father Hartman’s time capsule, you made J.J. Eberling stop distributing the paper.”

  “Where did you find that paper?” His face furrowed into deep lines that hadn’t been there before, as though all the worries of a lifetime had descended upon him at this moment to take their toll.

  “J.J. distributed a few copies before you stopped him.”

  “That bastard. After all the favors I’d done for him over the years, all the rough edges I’d smoothed over, he fought with me about that paper.”

  “That paper was very important to him,” I said. “He’d promised it to everyone in town. They were all looking forward to driving down Main Street for the last time and picking up the yearbook edition of the Herald.”

  “You’re right about that. He saw it as his swan song.”

  “By the way, the Degenkamps saw you fighting with J.J. that morning. They knew it was about the paper, because he wouldn’t give them a copy when they asked, and he had a stack of them right there. And Henry Degenkamp knew who opened the grave in the basement of St. Mary Immaculate. You drove to Ithaca last Monday after I talked to you to warn him to keep quiet. He died a few hours later.”

  “And I suppose I’m responsible for that, too. You listen to me, young lady. You may have found out I was Candy’s father, but you haven’t got another thing right, and you’ll never prove I killed her, because I didn’t.”

  It came to me in a replay of a moment a few evenings earlier. In the pictures in the Herald I had only tried to pinpoint Larkin. Now I could see as though it were in front of me a nighttime photo with Gwen Larkin’s place at the table empty.

  “Your wife killed her,” I said.

  He slumped into a leather chair. “I fathered a child and I never acknowledged her,” he said. “I gave Shirley a hundred dollars, which was a lot of money in the thirties, believe me. I didn’t have any more. She left school and I never saw her again. Twenty-four years later, a teacher showed up and claimed to be my daughter. There was nothing I could do. If I tried to get rid of her, she would make our relationship public. I was on tenterhooks that whole year. Finally she had the gall to go to my wife and tell her I was her father.”

  “The gall to say who her father was,” I said softly.

  “She had no right to destroy my wife’s life,” he raged.

  “So your wife killed her. Did she use Degenkamp’s gun?”

  “It wasn’t like that.” He ran his hand through his thick silver hair. “Candy was the one who did the luring. I was supposed to meet her in the church basement during the fireworks. I suppose she came back from wherever she’d gone to. But Gwen said she’d go instead, that if she told Candy she couldn’t be embarrassed by the disclosure, maybe she’d just go away and leave us in peace. It was Candy who brought the gun. They fought over it, and Gwen got it and shot her. Then she shoved the body in the opening and sealed it up. She took Candy’s purse so nothing was in there to identify her in case the engineers accidentally opened the grave. She kept the damn thing in the house. I used to come home and see her going through it. The shooting made her crazy. That’s the truth of it. She started drinking. One night in the winter, she took the car and ran it into a tree. After the funeral I burned the purse.” He closed his eyes.

  “And the gun?” I asked.

  “I disposed of it. I went to a city dump and threw the parts in. It’s gone.”

  No one would ever know what it was that made Gwen Larkin crazy. Perhaps it was the shooting. Perhaps it was all the revelations of that year, that her husband had had a lover, that he had fathered a child, that he had abandoned both the mother and the daughter, that someone might find out. I found myself believing his story that Gwen had committed the murder, but neither the way it happened nor whose gun it was, but the questions were moot. I had reached a point where I so identified with Candy that I could not imagine her to be murderous. And even if she had had a gun, I couldn’t believe she would ever have used it.

  “What did she want from you?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s over. It’s gone.”

  “I suppose it was about the payoff to the general,” I said, watching his eyebrows rise, his eyes widen. “Everyone in town knew something was going on between you and Candy, but no one would say anything because of the deal you and J.J. Eberling made to get the town flooded.”

  “You know about that.”

  “Even today, Mr. Larkin, they pretend they don’t know who Candy was, that you weren’t seen with her in your car.”

  “Then how do you know?”

  “I talked to the children. The children loved her.”

  “I could have loved her,” he said, “if she hadn’t been so angry. I did everything I could to make it right. Nothing worked. You think I’m a bad person. It wasn’t like that. I was a young man, a boy, away at school. The girl I loved was somewhere else. I longed for her and I transferred my affections momentarily to someone else. I had no intention to ruin her life. I gave her the money to help her—to do something. What happened afterward was a nightmare. It ruined her life, her daughter’s, my wife’s, even mine. Everyone lost.”

  “Except the people of Studsburg. They were all winners, weren’t they?”

  “Leave it alone, Miss Bennett. It’s all over now.”

  “Not quite,” I said. Then I left.

  32

  I paid the nuns what I thought fair and what they thought was bountiful. Then I bought a hefty supply of their jams and drove home. I called Deputy Drago and told him to try to find a dentist for Candida Phillips at the last address she had lived in in Pennsylvania before coming to Studsburg. Within a few days he had a match. I didn’t tell him anything else.

  After the body was identified, Fred Larkin claimed it as mayor of Studsburg and gave Candy the burial she deserved. I attended, although he was less than happy about it, and when I tried to pay for part of the cost, he said he had taken
care of it himself. He and I and a local priest were the only people in attendance.

  On one day when I had the time, I called Ginny Beadles Carpenter and found out she had already heard from Joanne. She thanked me with some emotion. I called Mrs. Thurston and told her that the X rays confirmed what we suspected about Candy. We had a nice talk and I sent my regards to Monica.

  I called Amy Mulholland Broderick and told her much the same thing. The day before, I had slipped the sixth grade photo into a strong cardboard envelope and mailed it back to her.

  The toughest call to make was to her brother.

  “Why would anyone ever want to kill a doll like that?” he said.

  “It was very complicated,” I told him. “It involved old indiscretions and new greed.”

  “Greed, I can understand,” he said lightly.

  “Greed, it was,” I said.

  I visited my cousin Gene at the Greenwillow residence for retarded adults, bringing him several miniature cars for his collection to make up for my absence of several weeks. Gene is very forgiving, and I suspect I always get more out of my visits than he does.

  Melanie and I made a date for dinner, and Jack drove up and met the Grosses in a happy Saturday night get-together that we all enjoyed. And one afternoon I got a call from Carol Stifler that Maddie and the baby were there and could I come right over. Between bouncing and crooning, I asked Carol to send a message to old Mrs. Stifler that if the rains ever came, I wanted to know about it before the church was completely submerged. She promised to let me know.

  The snows came before the rains, inches and then feet of it upstate. It was evening-out time for the weather. With the first thaw, a heavy rain came. One evening Carol Stifler called and said the word upstate was that only the steeple was still visible, and with the river rising, it wasn’t likely to be seen much longer.

  I got a huge supply of Jack’s sister’s chicken and mushrooms and a chocolate cake as well and brought it up to the convent one afternoon, having told them it and I were coming. We feasted happily, finishing off with the wonderful cake. The next morning, after prayers and breakfast, I drove to Studsburg for the last time.

  The little sign with the arrow had washed out, but I recognized the road to the old town. The rain had stopped, but there was a tremendous runoff according to the local weather forecaster, and the church would be completely underwater very soon, even without additional precipitation.

  Although it was a weekday, there were a handful of cars parked near the basin rim. There was even a van with the call letters of a local TV station. I got out and walked the last hundred or so feet. Below me was a lake, still well short of its bank, but deep enough to have hidden any trace of the town except for the cross of the steeple of St. Mary Immaculate. I felt a terrible sadness, for Candy, for her killer, for all the people driven by greed who had helped in their tiny ways to make her death happen. Way off beyond the Simpsons’ farm I could see the river water backing up into the lake. The payoff dam was doing its duty.

  “I thought you might come.”

  I turned without surprise to see Father Hartman. “I hoped you would be here.”

  “I was here the first time the church went underwater and the first time the tip of the steeple emerged. I won’t see it again. At least, I hope I won’t.”

  “I have something of yours.” I opened my change purse and took out the miraculous medal. “Your mother’s name was Annette Manning.”

  “I thought you would find out eventually. Thank you, Chris. I’ve missed this. My mother died young, in her fifties, and this came to me. I’m glad it was you who found it.”

  “Henry Degenkamp saw you that night. I think he told Fred Larkin, but they kept it to themselves.”

  “It was a kind of round-robin blackmail of which I was reluctantly apart.”

  “Tell me if I have it right,” I said. “J.J. Eberling made a deal with a general, who he probably knew through his father, to flood Studsburg instead of the neighboring farm area so that he would profit greatly and everyone else would profit some.”

  “J.J. owned more property in Studsburg than most people knew. He owned all the park area behind the church. He’d bought it up years ago, or his father had, when the local industry dried up. He had hopes of luring business to the town, but when he realized that was a dying dream, he lucked into this other way of getting rid of his unsalable property.”

  “And since Fred Larkin knew all about it, and also about J.J. ’s indiscretions, he could twist J.J.’s arm if he had to, like the morning after the murder when he found the article about your time capsule.”

  “That was probably all the leverage he needed.”

  “Candy was Larkin’s daughter from a casual affair in college in the thirties, and he never helped her mother or acknowledged his daughter.”

  “Both of which enraged her.”

  “So she threatened to expose his paternity if he didn’t come clean on the payoff and get the town to pull out of it.” The payoff had been the one thing Fred Larkin had never talked about.

  “She was a girl who had worked hard for what she had, put herself through school with the help of a mother who nearly worked herself to death to keep them going. She hated greed, especially greed at the expense of other people, taxpayers like herself and her mother.”

  “I wonder,” I said, “how she knew about the deal in the first place. She was an outsider.”

  “I told her.”

  “Yes, of course. And you were the reason her threat against Larkin failed.”

  “We were lovers,” Father Hartman said, perhaps for the first time aloud. “And Fred Larkin found out.”

  I pulled my hasty sketch of Studsburg out of my bag and unfolded it. Joseph had said I needed it more than she did. For her, it had all been a question of geography. She had placed the medal on the sketch of St. Mary Immaculate, which was a brisk walk from the athletic field.

  “She used to park her car at the athletic field during ball games and visit you in the rectory.”

  “That’s right. How do you know all this?”

  “Everybody saw her car there. It couldn’t have been much of a walk to the church.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “Did Candy know about the time capsule?”

  “It was her idea. She had a powerful interest in history. She wanted to be remembered.” His voice broke and I looked away.

  “I’m told it was Gwen Larkin who killed her,” I said. “I’d guess Fred came to you and confessed everything he knew to keep you from talking. In return, he kept quiet about your relationship with Candy. Even when I saw him the last time, he never said a word. I think a lot of people in Studsburg may have known, or guessed. At first I thought it was Larkin they were all protecting. After a while I decided it was you. They guessed you’d made a clean break with Candy and they wanted you to go in peace.”

  “You’re right about everything, Chris. We fell in love in the spring, an accident as these things always are. It was the happiest time of my life, and the only time I broke my vows or was tempted to. When school was over, Candy left. That was supposed to be it. I didn’t even have her new address. Except that she wanted to be there that last morning to put the coins in the opening in the basement. But she never came. When I went down on the fifth, I couldn’t understand why she would have sealed up the hole without putting the coins in. I thought she was trying to tell me something that I wasn’t smart enough to figure out. I tried to get in touch with her, but I was never able to.”

  “And then you found out what happened when Fred Larkin came to you and confessed.”

  He was silent.

  “It must have been a powerful urge that made you open that grave in the church last fall.”

  When he responded, his voice was strained. “I wanted to see for myself. I had agonized for thirty years over her death and her life, over the fact that she hadn’t had a proper burial, the fect that I really caused her death.”

  “You didn’t, Fat
her.”

  “If we hadn’t had our relationship, she might have been able to carry off her crusade against the Studsburg payoff. But Fred Larkin learned about our affair, and he told her he would make it public if she carried out her threat. She was protecting me by keeping quiet. Before I became part of it, there was a kind of balance of power between Larkin and Eberling. I knew all the rumors—I don’t have to tell you how I knew; I’m sure you can guess—but I wasn’t part of it. With our relationship, I was drawn into the circle. The balance now included me. Candy lost her leverage.”

  I opened my bag and took out the two letters I had found in Pennsylvania. “These are yours. I promise they’ve never been opened.”

  He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and held it to his eyes. “Thank you,” he said. “It’s so long ago and I behaved so badly and I loved her so much.”

  There was a sudden shout from a cluster of people near the edge of the basin. We looked toward the lake. The tip of the steeple was just disappearing as the water lapped over it. The TV crew was at work with its camera, and nearby I could see a young woman, her hair carefully sprayed in place, her coat a beautiful, photogenic shade of blue, standing with a microphone.

  We walked to the edge, keeping out of the way of the crew and the other onlookers. In a few seconds, I could no longer find the spot in the water where the steeple had been.

  I turned to Father Hartman as he crossed himself.

  Almost immediately the TV crew started to pack their equipment in the van, and the woman in the blue coat conferred with someone before walking away from the bank of the lake. For them the story was over and they would look ahead to the next one. The other onlookers also lost interest pretty quickly. We were alone, an ex-nun who had solved an unhappy puzzle and an aging priest whose rather handsome features were starting to show the effects of time, and perhaps of much more.

  “I’d like to ask you a favor, Father,” I said in the welcome silence. “I wonder if you would hear my confession.”