The Christening Day Murder Page 4

  “But you don’t think so.” I could see the idea troubled him.

  “The army wasn’t there the last few days. They finished their work at the end of June. The whole town was empty and very quiet those first days of July. There were only a handful of Studsburgers left in their homes.”

  At that moment I really had not thought of getting involved in the investigation. At home I had a class that I taught; in New York I had the work I did for Arnold Gold; in my personal life I had Jack Brooks. But I couldn’t deny my curiosity. “Do you remember the last days of Studsburg, Father Hartman?” I asked.

  “With great clarity, as I’m sure most of the residents would. You’re not likely to live through two such occasions in one lifetime.”

  “I noticed that the interior of the church had been stripped bare. When was that done?”

  “While we were still there. The army extended our stay to the Fourth of July to accommodate the young Stifler couple, who were expecting their first child—but of course, you know them.”

  “I went to high school with Maddie.”

  “I see. But they worked, the army, that is, till the end of June as scheduled to prepare for the eventual flooding of the village. All that was left in the church that last day was my cassock. The congregation stood during the mass because the pews had been taken out about a week earlier. I bought one, by the way, and took it to my next parish as a memento.”

  “So did Mrs. Stifler. I remember seeing it when Maddie and I went to her house. What I’m really asking is, could someone have buried a body in the church before the day of Maddie’s christening?”

  He shook his head slowly. “I don’t see how. The men working there were around all the time.”

  “But not at night. A soldier could have come back at night.”

  “True, true.” He thought about it. “But they were billeted some distance away, and bused in and out. Getting from the barracks to the church—with a body—I just can’t see how that could have been done. And as I said, I was in the church every day. I was watching the army’s progress even though I wasn’t officially overseeing it.”

  “What about after the Fourth?”

  “We were out of there. That was the agreement, and as far as I know, everyone adhered to it. There weren’t that many people left anyway. All the stores had already closed, and most of Main Street had been bulldozed. I had my bags packed and I left the day after the christening, I’d say along about noon.”

  “Do you remember if you said good-bye to the others?”

  “To all of them. They all seemed to drop by the rectory on their way out of town. It was very emotional.”

  “I’m sure it must have been.”

  “Well, we seem to have narrowed down when this killing happened.”

  “Not that it matters,” I said. “But if it couldn’t have taken place before the christening and if the army got everyone out the next day, then it must have happened on the Fourth of July, day or night.”

  “Oh, they got us all out on schedule. I didn’t stay around the area, but several parishioners wrote to me, and some of them described the wire fences the army put up to keep people out while they bulldozed and cleaned up. Knowing the army, I wouldn’t be surprised if they kept a guard there at night.”

  It sounded logical to me, too. “I know there was a picnic after the baptism,” I said.

  “Oh yes, a great celebration in the yard behind the church.”

  “Then people must have gone in and out of the church to use the bathroom or get water.”

  He looked thoughtful. “Why do I think they didn’t?” he asked out loud. And then, almost immediately, he came up with the answer. “They’d already shut off the water in the church and taken out the plumbing. No, no one went into the church after the baptism, not that I could see anyway. They used the bathroom and the kitchen in the rectory that day.”

  “And where was the rectory?”

  “Right behind the church. I used to go in through the back door.”

  “That must be near the stairs to the basement.”

  “Right next to one set of stairs, yes.”

  But someone could easily have walked away from the group and gone into the church through the front door, which was completely hidden from the view of the picnickers. Which led me back to the uncomfortable assumption that one of the guests at the baptism had been a killer, and another had been a victim.

  I decided not to pursue it any further. Surely the Stiflers would have known if one of their guests disappeared. And that Christmas card list Carol Stifler had mentioned—someone on that list would have let her know that a husband, wife, parent, or child had dropped from sight. It wasn’t worth thinking about.

  “Tell me, Father, how is it that the army didn’t bulldoze the church along with all the other buildings in Studsburg?”

  “That was due entirely to the intervention of the bishop.”

  “How interesting.”

  “St. Mary Immaculate was one of the oldest Catholic churches in the state. As you saw this morning, it wasn’t all that big, but it was architecturally very fine, a graceful building. When the bishop heard that it was going to be razed along with everything else in Studsburg, he flew into a rage. There were stories in the local papers, debates, speeches. That was before the time of sit-ins and demonstrations, but a lot of people, not just parishioners, agreed with the bishop.”

  “And the army gave in?”

  “They sent some engineers out to look the building over, and they decided it was sturdily built and probably wouldn’t crumble underwater. We had to agree to strip the inside of anything made of wood or fabric, but that was a small price to pay. He was quite a man, Bishop O’Rourke,” Father Hartman said, his eyes narrowing and a little smile playing on his lips. “I believe he said once that the day would come when the church would rise again. At the time I thought he meant it metaphorically.”

  I felt a chill course through me. “It seems he was right.”

  “You know, when I heard the level of the lake had dropped and the cross at the top of the steeple was visible, I drove down here one day to see it.”

  “I can understand why. It’s an amazing thing to have happened. Bishop O’Rourke isn’t alive anymore, is he?”

  “Not for many years. I think he felt that preserving that church was the culmination of a life’s work.”

  My glass was empty, and the ice in Father Hartman’s was half-melted. “I ought to get upstairs,” I said. “I have a long trip tomorrow.”

  “The Stiflers told me you used to be a Franciscan sister.”

  “I was. I left my convent last spring.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. We seem to lose so many of the best these days.”

  “It was a decision I reached over a long time with a lot of soul-searching.”

  “I’m sure it was,” he said with a smile, but I knew I represented a loss to him, a loss to the church.

  I was really too tired to talk about it, so I said good night and went up to my room.

  “Yeah—hello,” Jack’s voice said, his weariness audible.

  “It’s me. Still hitting the books?”

  “Oh, hi, Chris. Yeah, I’m knee-deep. I’ll probably take a sleep break soon. I’m glad you called.”

  “I may leave a little later tomorrow than I planned. Something crazy’s happened.” I told him, listened to his amazed response. We talked for a few minutes more and I heard him loosen up. I could see him at his desk in the room that was his entire apartment minus the small bedroom. I had been lucky in so many ways to find him, luckier still that he had been the first man in my life. The thought of going out with many men, of building small relationships with accompanying intimacies and seeing them clashed for whatever reasons men and women fail to come together, was very daunting to me. Jack had simply been there, not as a potential suitor, which might at that time have terrified me, but as a source of information and help. That we had become lovers was still a wonder to me.

>   By the time we hung up, he sounded wide-awake, more interested in the thirty-year-old murder than the test the next night. I told him to forget the murder, and I tried to do the same. I wasn’t exactly successful.

  It made the front page of the local morning newspaper on Monday. I was mentioned and had the distinction of seeing my last name misspelled. Maddie called early and asked me to drop over before leaving. First I had a leisurely breakfast. Father Hartman was nowhere around, and I was sorry I hadn’t said a more formal good-bye the night before.

  With only one small bag to pack, I was ready to check out a little after nine. I turned in my key at the desk and went out to my car.

  Something drew me back to Studsburg. I knew there was nothing to see, that the police wouldn’t let anyone into that church until they were satisfied they had scraped up every crumb of evidence, and that might take some time considering the condition of the opening under the stairs. But I drove there anyway.

  Two sheriff’s cars were parked outside the church. I left mine at the edge of the town and walked down the slope. I was dressed to be comfortable for several hours of driving, jeans and flannel shirt under my coat. As this was my first fall and winter out of the convent, I had not yet acquired a winter jacket to go with the pants that I wear when I’m home. I live happily on a small income that is many times what I lived on during the fifteen years I spent at St. Stephen’s. You can survive winter easily without a jacket as long as you have a warm coat, and you need a coat when you go to work in New York.

  “This is a crime scene, ma’am,” a tall, weathered, uniformed man informed me as I approached the church.

  “I wondered if the body had been identified yet,” I said.

  “No word on that. The coroner’s doing an autopsy sometime today. You aren’t the lady who found the body, are you?”

  “I am.”

  “They get your name right in the paper?”

  “No, but it doesn’t matter.” I smiled, and he smiled back.

  “Well, there isn’t much I can tell you right now except I can’t let anyone in the church.”

  “Do you mind if I walk around the town?”

  “Be my guest.”

  I started off for the little bridge Henry Degenkamp had pointed out to me Sunday morning. The land was flat here, the old riverbed a slight running indentation. I stepped into it and felt a small difference in texture, a gritty sandiness. Off to my right, the once residential area of Studsburg sloped upward. I saw where I had been on Saturday afternoon, the place where I had met the Degenkamps.

  Ahead of me, the little bridge he had pointed out yesterday morning was now quite close. Reaching it, I had a sense of how narrow the river had been at this point, and how narrow, too, the street that crossed it. It was a beautiful old bridge. I took hold of one side and lifted myself up onto it. It felt as sturdy and stable as any country bridge that still handled traffic.

  From the center of the bridge I turned in a full circle. This was Main Street where on both sides there had been shops that supported life, probably a grocery, a gas station, a coffee shop, a bank. Looking up Main Street as it rose along the hill, I could see two perfect rows of tree stumps. It had been a town that cared how it looked, even if no one saw it but its own, a group of people who remembered their friends with round-robin letters and Christmas cards, some of whom returned after thirty years for a baptism in the old church. But among them there had been a cold-blooded killer who had planned his crime and executed it virtually in plain view of the townspeople.

  I jumped down off the bridge and started back toward the church, wondering what terrible event, what anger, what resentment, had motivated a mortal crime. Love, money, jealousy, or something so terrible that I could not imagine it.

  The deputy waved to me as I passed on my way to my car.

  “Gosh, I’m sorry you missed Frank,” Maddie said when I had taken off my coat. “He had to get back to work, so he took off at five this morning. I’ll be leaving after lunch. Then Richie can sleep as we drive. Mom tells me your name was in the paper this morning.”

  “All I did was find the body,” I said. “I hope the coroner figures out pretty quick who he was.”

  “It just can’t have been a Studsburger,” Carol Stifler said. “Harry and I went over and over it last night. Nobody was missing after Maddie’s christening. The mayor even dittoed address lists and gave them to everyone in town. If somebody had disappeared, the post office would have sent a Christmas card back or I would have gotten a note saying so-and-so was gone. Nothing like that happened.”

  “Well, whoever it is, he’s stirring up quite a dispute right now between the coroner and the sheriff,” her husband said.

  “What kind of dispute?” I asked. I hadn’t turned on the television set in my room this morning, so all I had was the morning paper, which had nothing new in it.

  “They’re both just basking in the glory of your discovery, Kix. I expect the sheriff’s going to parlay this murder into a windfall for his department. And the coroner the same. He’s on his way back from Buffalo with a team of reporters at his heels. They both seem to be enjoying the limelight.”

  I felt disgusted. “I just hope they do their jobs.”

  “In their own sweet time, I expect. They have nothing to gain by hurrying.”

  “Do you have pictures of Studsburg as it used to look?” I asked.

  “Tons of them,” Carol Stifler said. “But I didn’t bring them with me. If you want to see them, come on over someday and we’ll sit down together. Harry and I still live in the same house we had when you and Maddie were in school.”

  “Maybe I’ll give you a call.”

  “I can see this has unsettled you, dear.”

  It had, and I was even more unsettled at the prospect of seeing two county officials try to enhance their public offices at the expense of some poor soul who was dead. “It certainly hasn’t dimmed the happiness of this occasion,” I assured her. “I wish I could stay longer, but I have to be on my way. Maybe I’ll call you and we’ll look at those pictures.”

  “It would be my pleasure.”

  We all hugged and kissed, and the cousin in whose house we were gave me a care package with enough party leftovers to keep me eating the rest of the week. Maddie walked me out to the car, and we gave each other a final squeeze. Then I took off.

  6

  When I gave Deputy Drago my phone number, I foolishly expected him to call me and tell me what he had learned from the autopsy. Looking back as I stuffed myself that evening with goodies from the baptism celebration, I knew my optimism had been rather naive. As far as Deputy Drago was concerned, I was nothing more than the person who had accidentally discovered the body. I was not on his list, long or short, of people to be briefed.

  I was pretty sure the coroner would have completed his autopsy sometime that day, and equally sure that the sheriff’s department would know the results. When I finished eating, I called the sheriff’s office. Deputy Drago was there, and he came on the line when he heard my name.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked cordially.

  “I wondered if the body had been identified.”

  “Well, it hasn’t been, but we’ve gotten a little surprise. It wasn’t a he. It’s the body of a woman.”

  “A woman!”

  “That’s right. The coroner estimates she’d have been in her twenties, possibly early thirties, about five six, and probably weighed a hundred twenty or a hundred twenty-five pounds. Well built. And the coroner’s pretty sure she wasn’t pregnant.”

  “How can he know all that if there isn’t much besides bones?”

  “Well, partly from the bone structure. She was wearing a pair of men’s Levi’s, and from the size of the hips, he figures she was a well-proportioned woman. And her sneakers were a woman’s size seven.”

  “Was there a purse or wallet in that opening?” I asked.

  “Nothing that could identify her. No rings, no jewelry, nothing. The coroner’s
sending X rays of her teeth to all the local dentists in the area, but we’re not too optimistic. If she went to one, he might be dead now, and who knows what happened to his files?”

  “Was there a dentist in Studsburg?”

  “Didn’t seem to be. The sheriff knew the town pretty well when he was younger. Said there weren’t any doctors or anything like that. Folks used to go to another town for that kind of stuff.”

  “Do you know how she died?” I asked.

  “She was shot. We found the bullet in the silt on the floor, a typical round-nosed lead bullet like the ones they used back in the fifties and sixties. Comes from a .38-caliber revolver. It works well up close, but it’s kind of inaccurate at distances. She was shot pretty close. The bullet doesn’t mean much, though. Lots of folks around here have a handgun.”

  “What about missing persons?” I asked, reaching for my last straw.

  “I checked that out myself, Miss Bennett. Just doesn’t seem to have been any reported around that time. We don’t get a lot of missing-person reports around here, and the ones we get, they usually show up later on their own.”

  I sighed. “So it’s kind of a dead end,” I said.

  “Looks like it.”

  “Deputy Drago, Studsburg had a mayor. I don’t know who he was or where he moved to, but he would probably know everyone who lived in town. And the priest, Father Hartman. I’m sure he’d remember everyone in his parish. Or he’d know where the records are kept.”

  “Right you are, ma’am. We’re a pretty modern office up here, and we’re looking into everything, I promise you.”

  “I’m sure you are. I didn’t mean to imply that you weren’t.” I felt a little guilty. Sometimes when you have a connection to the New York Police Department, it’s easy to feel that any other law enforcement group is inferior. I hoped he wouldn’t feel insulted.

  “So you just let us do our job, and if anything turns up, I’m sure you’ll hear about it.”

  I thanked him and hung up. I didn’t think I’d hear about anything without a prod.

  I stayed downstairs till ten and watched the news on several channels. Sure enough, the story had reached New York. Standing before a large seal, and flanked by the American flag and some other flag I didn’t recognize, the coroner appeared in a brief clip announcing the surprising finding that the mystery body was that of a young woman. Lights flashed as he spoke, and seemed to infuse him with spirit. He was a rotund man with jowls and little left of his hair, but his pleasure at being in the spotlight was evident.