The Christmas Night Murder Read online

  At one-thirty we walked down Pine Brook Road with our neighbors, the McDonalds. We were all feeling good, and Midge and I were giggling like children. At our house, we called a lot of good nights and Happy New Years and Jack and I went inside. Our Christmas tree was still fragrant in the living room and the fireplace had that after-fire smell that I like so much, smoke and burned wood; let no one dare tell me they’re a hazard to my health.

  “Great party,” Jack said.

  I was about to agree with him in decisive but tipsy terms when we heard the phone ring. “Hudson,” I said, my heart doing terrible flips. I dashed for the kitchen and answered.

  “I have a collect call for anyone from Sister Dolores in Riverview,” the operator said. “Will you pay for the call?”

  Not surprising. Sister Dolores wasn’t likely to have more than fifty cents or a dollar with her and she might already have spent it for coffee to stay awake. “Yes, I will,” I said, fear clawing at me.

  “Chris,” Sister Dolores said loudly, “I’ve been trying you all evening. He’s awake! He’s talking!” I could hear the excitement in her voice, the exuberance.

  “Thank God,” I responded, turning to Jack and making a circle of my thumb and forefinger, then brushing my eyes.

  “It’s still touch and go. The doctor doesn’t want us to be too optimistic, but who listens to doctors at my age?”

  “Dolores, I’m so happy. I’m just so happy. What did he say?”

  “What else? Merry Christmas.”

  31

  The Saturday after New Year’s we all got together at St. Stephen’s to visit with Hudson. It was a second Christmas and a celebration of his return to the living. He still looked frail and there were bandages on his hands and feet and a pair of crutches resting against the stone fireplace near where he was sitting, but it was the old Hudson smile and his eyes were bright.

  We had introductions to make and catching up to do before anyone ventured to talk about the events of the last two weeks and those of seven years ago. Arnold and Harriet Gold had joined us for the day and Arnold and Hudson had plenty to talk about.

  “I don’t know, Chrissie,” Arnold said, turning to me. “This is the first case you didn’t ask for my good counsel. I must be getting old and useless.”

  “Two words no one will ever apply to you, Arnold,” I countered.

  “She didn’t even ask me for much,” Jack agreed. “And when I could have been helpful, looking up that collect phone number, I was away from the station house and she had to do it all herself.”

  “We Franciscans are pretty resourceful,” Joseph said. “If I do say so myself.”

  “Say it all you want,” Hudson said. “If not for Chris, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “How did Tom Belvedere get you to Riverview?” I asked.

  “I gather he knew where I was staying in Buffalo and followed me on the thruway. I don’t know why he didn’t take me when I called from Albany. Maybe he lost his nerve; maybe I was parked too close to a lot of other people. He couldn’t count on my stopping again, but I did, to change my clothes, and that time I parked farther from the building and took my clothes with me so I could change.”

  “We had dogs in the parking lot, Hudson. They made it look as though you’d walked in a circle.”

  “Sort of a circle. I started for the building with my suit over my arm and I heard someone call my name. There was a guy there wearing a ski mask or half a mask. I asked him who he was and he said he wanted to talk to me about Julia Farragut. I was feeling kind of confused. I didn’t like the ski mask, although it was cold enough to wear one, but it didn’t occur to me he’d been following me. I thought it was a chance meeting, and not a very auspicious one. I said why didn’t we go inside and have a cup of coffee and he said he had a better idea, and I could tell from the way he said it, it wasn’t going to be better for me. I asked him if he was Foster Farragut and he said it didn’t matter who he was, so I assumed I had guessed right. It never entered my mind that he was Tom Belvedere. Julia had talked about him as the sweetest person she’d ever met and this man was anything but sweet. He was angry and determined and he had a gun.”

  “Did you see it?” Jack asked.

  “I felt it in my side and I didn’t want to call his bluff, in case it wasn’t a bluff, and it wasn’t. I saw it later. It wasn’t very big as guns go, but he was very close. We were walking along the side of the building—he’d said not to go inside—and when we got to the back, I just kept walking onto the snow behind the building and the parking lot. He started asking me about my relationship with Julia, what I knew about her brother, and I said there were a lot of things I couldn’t answer, but I could assure him I had been a priest and a friend to her and that was it. That wasn’t the answer he wanted. He wanted an admission of intimacy and I couldn’t give him that. We went back to my car, but I managed to drop some of what I was carrying, just to leave a trail. I didn’t know what he had in mind, but I knew he was dangerous. When we got back to my car, he made me lie down on the floor in the back and he tied me up and covered me with a blanket.”

  “Had he come prepared for that?” Joseph asked.

  “He had rope in a duffel bag he was carrying and a knife that looked like it could cut through steel. Even if I thought he might not use the gun in a public area, the knife looked pretty lethal.”

  “So he drove,” I said.

  “He drove and I lay in the back of what has to be the most uncomfortable vehicle I’ve ever been in—my own.”

  We laughed.

  “For what it cost, you’d think they’d do something about that backseat floor.”

  “And then when he took you out, you were at 211 Hawthorne Street.”

  “In the garage. We went up some stairs outside the house to the top floor and we spent a long, unpleasant night together up there.”

  “More than one,” I said.

  “Pretty near a week. He kept me hungry and thirstier than I’ve ever been and about as dirty as I ever want to be, but I don’t think he really set out to kill me. I think he thought I’d tell him what he wanted to hear and he’d let me go. But after a couple of days he seemed to change his mind. When he threw me in that shed, I began to lose hope.”

  “Did you think he was Foster the whole time?” I asked.

  “After a while I stopped thinking straight about anything,” he said, coming close to admitting despair. “But since I was in the Farragut house, it seemed logical to assume that. But the questions didn’t all make sense. He asked me about Julia’s suicide and I couldn’t tell him anything. Sister Clare Angela never told me about it. It was Joseph who wrote. Whatever my thoughts, it truly didn’t occur to me that she had been murdered.”

  “She was going to expose Foster,” I said. “I haven’t seen her diary, but Jack’s been in touch with the Riverview police and they told him it was very revealing.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Hudson said.

  We will never know what she confessed to him, but I am sure he must have tried mightily to get her to speak up about what was happening in that house.

  We celebrated Christmas again that day, opening the wonderful, handmade gifts Hudson had carried with him from Wyoming. My gift was a pair of dolls dressed as bride and groom. I will treasure them forever.

  —

  We were about to leave when Angela came to me and said someone was waiting to talk to me. I went to the door of the Mother House and saw Marilyn Belvedere standing in a fur coat and boots.

  She gave me a tentative smile. “They told me you would be here today. I wanted to explain some things to you.”

  I found a quiet place for us and she folded her coat over another chair and sat. She was dressed in a dark suit adorned with a diamond brooch and she looked uncomfortable, as though she didn’t know how to behave in a convent.

  “I wanted you to know why I didn’t tell you the whole truth,” she said.

  “I understand. It was your son.”

  “It wa
s fear. After Julia’s death, Mrs. Cornelius Farragut came over one day and said the night Julia died Tom had been ranting about her being murdered. She knew that that wasn’t true, she said, and she knew there had been a relationship between Tom and Julia that might have led to bloodshed. She said she had proof of that, although she never showed us any. She said if Tom went to the police or ever told anyone anything foolish about what happened in her house on Christmas Night, she would have him arrested for Julia’s murder.”

  “And you believed her.”

  “We couldn’t take a chance. He’s our son.”

  “So she protected her grandson, whom she must have suspected was a killer.”

  “Don’t you see? Those two children were her only grandchildren, the only children of her only son. She wanted the Farragut line to continue. Seven years ago it looked like it was ending. She was willing to forgive Foster for killing Julia so that Foster would continue the family.”

  “Did Walter Farragut know what was going on in that house?”

  “I don’t think so,” Marilyn said. “I think Serena knew and didn’t tell him. He should have sensed it, but it wasn’t the first time a parent looked the other way. And I’m sure Mrs. Farragut knew. There wasn’t anything that happened in that house that she didn’t know.”

  “I’m sorry about your son. He got caught up in something that led him down two terrible paths.”

  “I know. He never meant to hurt anyone.” Her voice wavered.

  “But he did, Marilyn.”

  “He loved Julia. He couldn’t bear to think she had been hurt.”

  There had been a lot of preparation in Tom Belvedere’s kidnapping of Hudson, years of preparation, including the special phone number he gave to Mary Teresa. “The only people who hurt her were in her family,” I said, “and old Mrs. Farragut more than any of the others. If she knew and did nothing, she’s partly responsible for Julia’s death. It was a terrible waste of a young life.”

  Marilyn put her coat on. “I wish I could have told you,” she said. “Perhaps that nun would still be alive. That was an accidental death, you know. She died of a heart attack.”

  I didn’t say anything. She had just admitted being part of a conspiracy to withhold information on a capital crime, and now she had made a second homicide into a death by natural causes. Perhaps when she and her husband were done, they would convince themselves that Hudson had tied himself up and locked himself in the shed to die.

  I walked her to the door and said good-bye.

  —

  “He’s as good as you promised,” Jack said as we drove south after Sister Dolores’s second Christmas dinner and Hudson’s first.

  “I didn’t know how much I’d missed him till I saw him today. Arnold had a lot to talk to him about, didn’t he?”

  “About law on the reservations. I thought Arnold was going to offer to go back to Wyoming with him and set up shop there. If he wants to work for nothing, he can probably be employed for the rest of his life.”

  “He does that here,” I said wryly.

  “I’ll tell you, being around all those nuns really brings back my misspent childhood. When I talk to you, I can believe all nuns are sweet old ladies like Sister Dolores. Twenty, twenty-five years ago, man, that was a different story. We had one nun at my church we used to call Sister Merciless.”

  “Jack,” I objected.

  “I can still feel the back of her hand. Didn’t you ever notice that scar on my—”

  “Jack!” I was giggling in a most undignified manner.

  “All I did was—”

  “What? What could you have done to deserve the back of her hand?”

  “She asked me a question and I forgot and said, ‘Yes, Sister Merciless.’ ”

  “You didn’t.”

  “A momentary lapse. Hey, am I perfect? Are you perfect? Who on this earth is perfect?”

  “I guess that’s it,” I said. “Tom wasn’t. Sister Mary Teresa wasn’t. Old Mrs. Farragut wasn’t.”

  “That’s why there was a Christmas Night murder.”

  “But that heating system. That was pretty close to perfect.”

  “That’s why there weren’t two.”

  For Jenni and Bill

  from whom I have learned so much

  The author wishes to thank

  Ana M. Soler, James L. V. Wegman,

  Camari Gaines, Marsha Kugelman, and Greg Pinto

  for their much-needed information.

  Also by Lee Harris

  Published by Fawcett Books:

  THE GOOD FRIDAY MURDER

  THE YOM KIPPUR MURDER

  THE CHRISTENING DAY MURDER

  THE ST. PATRICK’S DAY MURDER