The Christmas Night Murder Read online

  “Well, there was that business about refurbishing the rectory.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “It was very silly, really. It had to be done. The wiring was shot and the plumbing was lousy.” She made a face over her choice of words. “It’s not as if Father McCormick was putting velvet covers on the chairs. The fire department told him he’d better do something about the wiring, and then the plumbing gave out about the same time. But no one would harm a priest over something like that, and ten years later to boot.”

  I had to agree with her. “Were there people in the parish who objected to the work being done?”

  “Oh, there was some nastiness. It didn’t amount to much and a collection was taken and the job was done. I had a few days when I couldn’t use the kitchen sink, but we were all better off when it was taken care of.”

  “Do you remember who made the fuss?”

  “Oh, that nasty Mr. Abbott. I know I shouldn’t say that. Father McCormick said he was a fine man with a lot of problems. But Father McCormick always saw the best in people. As Father Kramer does,” she added, lest I think she favored one priest over the other.

  “Anything else you remember, Mrs. Pfeiffer?”

  She pursed her lips and looked thoughtful. “Well—no, I don’t think so. Everything went smooth. I’m sure of it.”

  “Does he write to you?” I asked.

  “Oh my, yes. He never forgets my birthday. He sends me a lovely card at Christmas. Sometimes they’re made by the children or by some Indian artist or something. He’s a thoughtful man, but you know that.”

  “Any letters?”

  “Once in a while.”

  “Do you remember when he left?”

  “Yes, I do. We had some party for him. It was really lovely.”

  “Do you remember when that was?”

  “Let me see. It was cold and there was snow. It was before Christmas, I’m sure of that. Father Kramer was here for Christmas that year. I think Father McCormick wanted to have Christmas at his new parish. That was so nice of him, bringing Christmas to those poor people out there.”

  “Was it sudden when he left?” I asked.

  “Well, for me it was. It came so out of the blue, but I expect he’d been thinking about something like that for a long time.” She flashed a smile at me. “It was pretty sudden when you left, too, you know.”

  And I’d been planning it for a year and thinking about it even longer. “Thanks an awful lot, Mrs. Pfeiffer. You’ve really been very helpful.”

  “Anything I can do. You two young people go out and look at our pretty village. I’ll have your lunch at noon. How’s that?”

  “Terrific,” Jack said.

  We buttoned up and went out into the cold.

  —

  The village really was something to look at. Houses were decorated, stores were decorated, the streets in the center of town looked fantastic. Children in colorful snowsuits ran alongside women in warm coats and boots, sporting yesterday’s presents on an arm, around a neck, perched on a head. In fact, some of the boots looked pristine to me, as if they hadn’t yet slogged through the inevitable slush.

  We walked around, looking in a craft shop, a china shop, a little knitwear store, buying nothing but having a good time. When we found a pay phone on a corner, Jack called the state police and asked if there was news. There wasn’t. Hudson and his ATV had vanished from the face of the earth.

  “You want to hunt up this guy Abbott?” Jack said after he told me the nonnews.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It seems so unlikely, so farfetched. Someone who complains you’re spending too much money when you’re repairing wiring and plumbing is just a tightfisted old guy who complains when his wife buys a new dress after five years. He isn’t someone who kidnaps a priest. You know, when Mrs. Pfeiffer said that my leaving the convent came as a surprise to her, I realized I was very much in the same position as Hudson. I kept it all to myself except when I talked to Joseph or Father Kramer. I didn’t sit around gossiping to the nuns and I don’t think Hudson did either.”

  “Want a cup of coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  We went inside a coffee shop we were passing and sat at one of several empty tables. I ordered cocoa and Jack got his midmorning caffeine fix, something I teased him about.

  “I think she was telling the truth,” Jack said.

  “Me, too.”

  “I’ll get someone to check on those rest-stop phones, but it may take awhile, Chris. So let’s take another look at the other possibility, that your friend, Father Hudson McCormick had a reason why he didn’t want to show up at the convent yesterday, and when he got to the rest stop, whatever was bothering him got the better of him and he just couldn’t push himself to complete his journey.”

  “So he dropped the clothing to let us know he’d gotten that far and that was it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there’s no reason for it. What could be so threatening about St. Stephen’s?”

  “That’s what we have to ask Sister Joseph.”

  5

  We didn’t get back to the convent until almost two o’clock. Our lunch at the rectory stretched out, not unpleasantly, as Father Kramer joined us at twelve-thirty. It was clear he had no desire to discuss Hudson, but he was genuinely interested in Jack and me and wanted to know more about Arnold Gold, whom he had spoken to yesterday for the first time at any length.

  I was happy to tell him how we had met during my first investigation. Arnold had been a very young attorney at the time the crime was committed forty years earlier and had represented one of the men charged with the murder. During my investigation and after, we had gotten to know each other quite well and become very fond of each other, so that last August he had given me away at my wedding. That he was an old-style liberal who would defend anyone who needed a lawyer only added to his appeal.

  Finally we excused ourselves and drove back to St. Stephen’s. With the college students away and the postulants, novices, and many nuns spending the holiday with their families, the grounds were even quieter than usual. We parked and walked over to the Mother House, where we were told that Joseph was upstairs in her office. A call to her was greeted with an invitation to join her and we went up the wide stone stairs, worn smooth by generations of women, to the office of the General Superior.

  “I’ve heard nothing,” Joseph said as we came in, “but I made a phone call this morning to the church in Buffalo that Hudson was visiting. The priest who answered—not Hudson’s friend but a new curate who met him—is certain Hudson received at least one and possibly two phone calls while he was there. I said I had called yesterday when we were waiting for him, but he said these calls came before Christmas.”

  “I don’t suppose the caller left a name or a message,” I said hopefully.

  “He didn’t need to. Hudson was there both times and took the calls.”

  “So they came from a man,” Jack said.

  “And that’s about all I can tell you.”

  “But someone besides you knew he was there.”

  “So it seems. It isn’t much to go on, and maybe it’s meaningless. I don’t know how long he was planning to spend in the east, but I’m sure he has friends besides us. Maybe someone wanted to know when he could come to dinner.”

  She had been sitting at the long table that took up most of the room, the remains of her lunch on a tray at one end, piles of papers nearby. Now she stood and walked to the window behind her desk. “If the police think that Father Hudson McCormick changed his mind at a rest stop a few miles from here and decided to go into hiding instead of visiting us, they are wrong.”

  “I agree with you,” Jack said. “With your permission, I’d like to walk around for a while and talk to some of the nuns.”

  “Of course you may.”

  “I think Chris wants to talk to you, and you’ll both be more comfortable with me somewhere else.”

  Joseph smiled. “Come back
and join us for coffee.”

  “You don’t need to ask twice. Detectives need at least two cups of strong coffee to kick-start their hearts each morning.”

  After he closed the door, Joseph sat down again. “I don’t know how you managed it, but you found a wonderful man. He didn’t have to leave, but you want to ask me questions that you think will be embarrassing.”

  “I think you’re holding something back,” I said honestly. “I wasn’t here the year that Hudson left. I never said good-bye to him, except when I left for graduate school in the fall and then I was sure he was going to be here when I got back, either for Christmas or in the spring. I think he thought he’d be here, too.”

  “He did.”

  “But he left before Christmas.” I stopped. I have known Joseph for sixteen years. She is intelligent, thoughtful, clever, and difficult to fool. She is not a person who needs things spelled out for her. All the things I didn’t say were superfluous. She knew exactly what I was driving at, knew that I had watched her avoid telling a lie to Arnold Gold last night, knew that I wanted an answer because it was futile to try to solve a puzzle if you don’t have all the pieces.

  “You’re right, I am holding things back. No year is uneventful, you know that. Looking back I can’t recall a year without a crisis—a death in the villa, an automobile accident, a series of thefts—you remember that all as well as I do. They pass and we’re smart enough not to dwell on them. We set them aside and they become memories, sometimes even humorous ones, if we’re lucky. The year that you were in graduate school was no exception. We had our annual crisis and you were never told because there was no need for you to know.” She made it sound as though the plumbing had failed once again or Harold, the handyman, had fallen off a ladder and been hospitalized.

  I didn’t think for one moment that it was something as simple as that. “Is there a need for me to know now?”

  “Hudson wasn’t involved, Chris. For years he wanted to go out west and do the kinds of things he’s been doing for the last seven years. The opportunity came and he took it, as he should have. I don’t think it’s necessary to rehash events of a long time ago. What has happened to Hudson—if anything has—has happened now, yesterday. I don’t know how to get the police to take his disappearance seriously, but I’m convinced that someone has done something to him. He’s not a man to walk away from his friends without a phone call, certainly not an hour after he called to say he was on his way.”

  For the first time in all the years I had known her, I felt a chasm between us. There was something she knew that she would not tell me, but in spite of that she seemed to want me to try to find out what had happened to Hudson. “Was Sister Clare Angela superior that year?”

  “Yes, she was. We lost her two years ago. You were still here then.”

  “I remember.” A woman in her sixties, she had died of breast cancer. “Joseph, I’m as concerned as you are, but I’m at a standstill. I know what kind of car he was driving and what the license-plate number is, where he was roughly late afternoon on Christmas Day, but the trail ends there. I haven’t the faintest idea how to proceed, where to look, whom to ask. A man disappears without a trace, leaving only a couple of pieces of clothing behind—and we don’t even know for sure that it was his clothing, only that the owner of the clothing walked away from his car and back to it. A small circle is all we have and circles lead nowhere.”

  “You’re right. There’s nothing we can do.” She sounded as though she had come to a decision. “It’s best to leave it in the hands of the police, at least for the time being. Why don’t we go downstairs and find that husband of yours and see if we can rustle up some coffee?”

  —

  I found that husband of mine over near the chapel talking to Sister Dolores, who had created our Christmas dinner. I stopped short and retreated. Sister Dolores lived in the villa with several other retired nuns. She would remember not only Hudson McCormick’s last year at St. Stephen’s, but all the years he served the convent.

  I took a quick turn off the path to another that led to a college building so they could have a private conversation. As a member of the detective squad, Jack spends a lot of his time asking questions, and I didn’t want to interrupt. Instead I took a circuitous route back to the Mother House and helped get our coffee things together.

  Jack didn’t get back for another fifteen minutes. He had probably walked Sister Dolores wherever she was going, to the villa most likely, and when he joined us for coffee, he didn’t say a word about his conversation with her or with anyone else. Joseph, too, had dropped the subject of Hudson and talked to us about Jack’s law-school classes, my teaching, Oakwood, and my friend Melanie Gross.

  “How do you find the commuting?” she asked Jack as she poured second cups of coffee all around.

  “Worse than before but not as bad as it could be. Since I’ve been working ten-to-sixes, I miss the worst of the rush hour in the morning, and at night I go right from the station house to school. I get home pretty late, but I have someone waiting up for me, which is nice.”

  Joseph smiled. “Yes, it is. I remember all those years when Chris made her monthly trip to Oakwood to visit her aunt and cousin, and I always looked at my watch a hundred times when I knew she was on her way home. Once in a while she didn’t make it as planned.” She smiled.

  “One flat tire,” I said, remembering, “one snowstorm that left me sitting in a gas station till the snowplow came through, one accident I witnessed and stayed to talk to the police.” There had been so many years, so many trips. “And once I ran out of gas and found that prayer had its limitations.” We all laughed.

  After the second cup, we got ready to go. The day was nearly over, the winter sun setting. We said our good-byes and put our coats on. We were almost out the door when a somewhat breathless Angela found us.

  “Telephone,” she said urgently to Joseph. “Father Thomasevich from Buffalo.”

  “Don’t go,” Joseph said. She looked around, then dashed into the kitchen where the nearest phone was. She wasn’t gone long. When she came back she looked ravaged. “He’s the priest I spoke to earlier,” she said, “the one who recalled one or two calls for Hudson. He just spoke to the other curate in the rectory. Apparently there was also a call when Hudson wasn’t around to take it and the caller left a message. It was something like ‘Don’t expect the nuns of St. Stephen’s to save you.’ ”

  6

  Jack did the driving. We weren’t talking about it. There was nothing to talk about. Joseph would not give us another scrap of information about Hudson’s last year at the convent. Jack phoned the state police before we left and told them about the telephoned threat in Buffalo. The police said they would look into it. There was still no trace of Hudson or his vehicle.

  Lights were on everywhere and there was a sprinkling of snow on the windshield. I was trying to think of what I could throw together for dinner, considering that we would arrive home much later than I had anticipated.

  “She didn’t tell you anything, did she?” Jack said out of the blue.

  “Nothing.” I recounted what Joseph had said about annual crises. “What about you?”

  “Boy, was my personal charm wasted on that bunch.”

  I laughed. “What did Sister Dolores say?”

  “She told me how she came to St. Stephen’s fifty-seven years ago and how she remembered the first time she saw you and how wonderful you were and how smart, and how bad she felt when you decided to leave but she knew it was for the best. I thought she was going to give me a rundown on everyone who’d ever lived in the convent. When I asked about Father McCormick, she didn’t exactly clam up, but she said all the polite things and nothing else. I think if we’re going to have any luck with this, we’ve got to get someone up there to open up and maybe let us read the letters he wrote.”

  “Can you find out if there’s a police file on Hudson?”

  “I can try, but I’m not going in till Monday and I don’t
want to ask anyone else to do the digging.”

  “Then it’ll have to wait for Monday,” I said.

  —

  The house was freezing and the refrigerator not very accommodating, but Melanie Gross had shoved a note under the door inviting us to potluck if we got home in time. What Mel calls potluck is my idea of a feast. A phone call assured us the invitation was still open. So while our house heated up we walked down the block to the Grosses’ and shared a wonderful dinner of leftovers and a good evening of conversation.

  With the Grosses’ permission, I had given their children small Christmas presents when they came over before the holiday to see our tree. I had also visited one late afternoon when they were lighting the menorah for Hanukkah and had stayed for potato pancakes fresh from the pan and a gambling game that we all played on the floor with a dreidel, a four-sided spinning top with a different Hebrew letter on each side. You become a winner or loser depending on which face is up when it comes to rest. My Hanukkah present from the Gross children had been a solid chocolate dreidel, which hadn’t lasted long in my house.

  We talked about everything from a crazy case Hal was handling to the disappearance of Hudson McCormick, and finally, at ten o’clock, we went back to our warm little house and our big, comfortable bed. I promised to sleep late and Jack promised to make pancakes and we both promised to do nothing over the weekend but enjoy ourselves.

  That was the one that got broken.

  —

  After my promised late rising and Jack’s promised pancakes, I went out shopping to fill my refrigerator and pantry. I was still new enough at shopping for two that I took pleasure in buying larger sizes and quantities. Jack is a big eater, although he complains that the uniform he hasn’t worn for several years except to official occasions is too tight on him. Besides being an accomplished cook himself, Jack has a sister who started a catering company a couple of years ago and often gave him gourmet leftovers and new products to sample. Although he no longer lived in Brooklyn, he still worked there and she managed to drop off goodies at the station house. As an only child who was orphaned at fourteen, I think families are wonderful and I am thrilled to be part of one that is so warm and caring. Even if it puts calories into us.