The Christening Day Murder Page 9

  Henry shook his thinly haired old head. “It’s too long ago for me to remember a newspaper.”

  I switched to my other area of interest. “Do you remember any young women in their twenties who worked in Studsburg and didn’t live there? Maybe someone who was new to the area?”

  They looked at each other as though eye contact would help them remember. “I can’t think of a soul,” Ellie said.

  “Maybe a teller at the bank,” I prompted. “Maybe someone who worked in the grocery. Could there have been a secretary in the administration building?”

  Ellie laughed out loud. “You make Studsburg sound like New York City. There wasn’t any administration building. Fred Larkin worked out of his basement, and I’m sure his wife did his typing, all three sheets of it every year. We were only a town of five hundred before the decision came down, and after that, we were a little less every week. We had volunteers for the fire department, and if we needed a policeman, we’d get one from the next town or the state police, or maybe the sheriff’s office would send someone over. We just didn’t need outsiders.”

  “You think that girl they found worked in the bank or the store?” Henry asked.

  “I don’t know where she worked. I don’t know if she worked. All I know is she had something to do with Studsburg, and someone killed her. Can you think of anyone who could help me?”

  “It can’t have been anyone we knew,” Henry said. “And if we didn’t know her, nobody else would know her. You couldn’t walk down the street that last year without bumping into the whole population. There just weren’t that many people left at the end.”

  “You look unhappy,” Ellie said to me.

  “I am. I keep thinking it’s someone everyone knows and isn’t aware of, someone …”I looked at my watch. It was nearly noon, and I didn’t want to be invited for lunch. “I’m going to drop in on Mayor Larkin. Maybe he’ll remember.”

  “I don’t think Fred’ll help you any more ’n us,” Ellie said.

  I got up and started to say good-bye when something occurred to me. “Did you know J.J. Eberling?” I asked. “I mean more than just to recognize.”

  “Wasn’t a friend,” Henry said, “but we knew him. He published that paper you were talking about.”

  “I wonder where he had it printed after they closed down his press.”

  “No idea,” Ellie said.

  “Oh, there was a big printer in the next town, Steuben Printers or something like that,” Henry said.

  “I don’t think Steuben did it, Henry.”

  “Well, thanks anyway.” I shook their hands and left them on the porch.

  When you leave the New York metropolitan area, all the radio stations that you’re used to gradually fade out until they’re inaudible. Except for the fact that it’s hard to find news, it isn’t much of a loss. By chance I tuned in to a central New York station that played fifties music and found myself getting lost in sentimental ballads. As I picked my way through unfamiliar roads, hoping I was traveling in more or less the right general direction, I sensed the suitability of the old music. I was going back in time again to when all the gray heads had color and all the old bodies had vigor and someone was angry enough to kill a young woman.

  Carol Stifler’s list indicated that Fred Larkin had moved a couple of times since the end of Studsburg, but he had stayed in western and central New York State. Now he lived on a country road that hadn’t been paved for a while in a brick house with an old red barn behind it. I pulled into the long driveway and got out of the car.

  As I approached the front door, it opened and a man with a beautiful head of gray hair smiled at me.

  “Afternoon,” he called.

  “Mr. Larkin?”

  “The one and only.”

  “Hi,” I said, offering my hand. “I’m Christine Bennett.”

  “You must be the young lady who’s trying to figure out that awful murder.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Sheriff’s office came and asked some questions. They mentioned your name.”

  We walked inside and he took my coat.

  “If they’ve already been here, I guess there’s nothing new you can tell me.”

  “Probably not, but I’ll do my best. Can I get you a glass of something?”

  “No, thanks.”

  An attractive woman with salt-and-pepper gray hair and an enviable figure came in the room.

  “My wife,” Larkin said.

  I stood and shook hands with her. “Glad to meet you, Mrs. Larkin.”

  “I’ll just let you two talk,” she said. “Call if you want anything, Fred.”

  The mayor smiled after her affectionately. “ Well, let’s hear it.”

  “Do you remember Joanne Beadles?” I asked, pretty certain the sheriff hadn’t asked that question.

  The name didn’t seem to faze him. “I can tell you right off there wasn’t a Beadles living in Studsburg, not as long as I lived there. And I lived there forty-four years.”

  “Joanne worked for J.J. Eberling.”

  “Ah, J.J.” Larkin smiled. “Great man, J.J. He’s gone now, you know.”

  “I heard.”

  “And this Joanne worked in the newspaper office?”

  “She was the Eberlings’ housekeeper. She worked in their home.”

  “Those girls came and went,” he said. “I wouldn’t have any way of keeping track of them. They didn’t go to our school or our church or buy in our stores. I’m afraid I couldn’t help you.”

  “But you knew J.J.,” I said.

  “Oh, sure. If you lived in Studsburg, you couldn’t help knowing him. He was one of our most distinguished citizens. Did a lot for the town. Fine gentleman.” He took a pipe off the end table beside him and started filling it slowly from a worn leather pouch.

  “Mr. Larkin, I think the person who was buried in the church was someone who didn’t live in Studsburg but had some connection to the town or to someone who lived in the town.”

  “That’s why you asked about Joanne.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, as I said—” he began to puff on the pipe as he held a lighted match over the bowl “—there were any number of girls and women who held day jobs. I don’t have any idea how you could find their names today.”

  The aroma of the tobacco reached me as he finished speaking. “That’s nice,” I said.

  “Well, Evvie doesn’t like it very much. But since she’s not in the room …”He raised his eyebrows elfishly.

  “What about other people who worked in Studsburg? I understand there was a Mrs. Castro in the rectory.”

  “Yes, there was, and Mrs. Castro was sixty if she was a day.”

  I hadn’t expected to hear she was otherwise, but I wanted him to know I knew a few things about the town. “What about the bank or the grocery store?”

  “Emily Vandermark was about the only woman I know who worked in the bank, and they shut that down pretty fest when people started moving out. Poor Emily was out of a job, and she left town. She’d worked there a good twenty years.”

  “And the grocery?”

  “That was the original mom-and-pop establishment. Pete and Grace Gilhooley ran that, with their kids helping out as they got older. That was the post office, too, by the way. And pretty near the civic center, if you know what I mean.”

  I could imagine. “Then you can’t think of any young woman who worked in Studsburg and lived somewhere else.”

  “Not offhand.”

  “Maybe someone who came from somewhere else,” I suggested. “Someone who was new in town that last year.”

  “Why would anyone come to a town that was being put out of business?” he asked.

  I had no answer. “Maybe one of the young men in town had a girlfriend from out of town. She could have come to Studsburg just to see him.”

  “And he killed her?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Hard for me to think of boys and their girlfriends after so long a t
ime.”

  “Mr. Larkin, did you get the last copy of the Studsburg Herald from J.J. Eberling?”

  “I’m sure I did.”

  “The thick one, with all the pictures.”

  “I must have,” he said. “I got the Herald every Tuesday and Friday of my life.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  He waved the pipe. “Somewhere,” he said. “I don’t think I could put my hands on it without a search.”

  “Do you remember what time you left Studsburg that last day?”

  “I was one of the last to go. That was my town, and I felt it my duty to stay till the end. I have to admit, it was a tearful parting.”

  I was feeling pretty down myself at that point. If I could believe him and Mrs. Eberling, both he and J.J. had stayed till the end. Mrs. Eberling had spoken of her husband as the captain of a ship. In my mythology, ship captains stay till the last man is gone. “I thank you for your help, Mr. Larkin,” I said, getting up. “I guess it’s a blind alley. I just hate to think of a young woman being buried in potter’s field.”

  “I’m sure that won’t happen. I’ll ask around and get some contributions to give her a decent burial.”

  “That’s very nice of you. May I send you a check for the fund?”

  He patted my shoulder. “Let’s wait till the sheriff finishes his investigation. Would you like to see a picture of Studsburg taken from the air?”

  “Very much.”

  He took me to a wood-paneled room with a fireplace. There were sports trophies on the mantel and family pictures on the walls. Frederick Everett Larkin’s framed sheepskin hung among them.

  “A friend of mine took it from a helicopter that last year. It’s as clear as they come. You can see almost every building in town.”

  The photo was large and mounted over the fireplace. The church dominated the near left center, and I could make out Main Street and the famous bridge. “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  He picked up a pointer and touched the photo. “That’s where I lived. And here’s J.J.’s house. Big, wasn’t it?”

  “And handsome.”

  “Here are all the stores on Main Street—the bank, the general store. Here’s the old coffee shop. They made the best pie you ever tasted, and a meat loaf that’d knock your socks off. Here’s the one and only gas station in town. That’s the playground right here. See the bleachers? J.J. bought ’em for us. We had some great ball games there. Here’s Simpson’s Farm, this big, open space. You ever taste fresh-picked corn?”

  “Once or twice.”

  “Nothing like it, nothing in the worid. Here’s the road that came through town, this little ribbon. What a beautiful place that town was. And here’s the school I went to and my kids went to, and there’s the little grove of pines where I asked my wife to marry me.”

  “Were you married in St. Mary Immaculate?” I asked.

  “You bet.”

  “Thank you for showing it to me, Mr. Larkin. And for the guided tour.”

  “My pleasure. The best years of my life were spent in that town. Let me walk you to your car.” The nostalgic trip through Studsburg had invigorated him. His voice was strong and he moved with youthful agility.

  I stuck my head in the kitchen and said good-bye to Mrs. Larkin. Then I put my coat on and we walked outside.

  “Nothing like it,” he said. “This is a pretty place we live in now and we have a nice life here, but that town was special. I can’t tell you the grief when we heard it was going to be flooded. We fought it, of course, but the little people never win those battles.”

  The wind was blowing now. “Were you at the baptism for the Stiflers’ baby on the Fourth of July?” I asked.

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  I had known he was there, because Carol had pointed him out in pictures in her album. “Were you and your wife both from Studsburg?”

  “Met her when I was in the eighth grade.”

  My hand was on my car door. “The school,” I said. “Who were the teachers?”

  “In my memory there were never a hundred kids in the whole school at one time. What we did was, we had teachers who took several classes. Mrs. McCormick must have taught there forty years. I had her, and my son had her.”

  “Did she live in town?”

  “No, I believe she drove in from somewhere every day.”

  “And who were the others?”

  “Mr. Dietrich was the other one. That last year the classes shrank down to almost nothing, but we had to keep him on.”

  “And that was it?”

  “That was it.” He held out his hand and we shook.

  As I backed out of his drive, he stood watching me, and he waved as I reached the road.

  In a little while I was on my way to the convent.

  12

  I was troubled enough by some of the things Fred Larkin had said to make a small detour and drop into the sheriff’s office. Deputy Drago was just putting on his hat to go out, and I reminded him who I was and we shook hands.

  “I just talked to Fred Larkin,” I said.

  “The mayor of the old town?”

  “Yes. He said your office had already questioned him.”

  “I did it myself. We looked up his name in the records, and I drove out last week and saw him.”

  “Did you mention my name to him?” I asked.

  We had been walking out to the parking lot. Now he stopped and looked at me. “Why would I do that?”

  “He said someone from the sheriffs office had mentioned my name.”

  “No, ma’am,” he said firmly. “First of all, I don’t go telling people I’m questioning police business, and secondly, I can’t think of one good reason why I would have done it in this case.”

  “Thanks, Deputy. That’s all I wanted to know.”

  Which meant the Degenkamps had called Fred Larkin after I left.

  The car seemed to have a will of its own. Without thinking about where I was going next, I found myself on the little road that led to Studsburg. There were no cars parked at the edge of town, no people walking the streetless streets, snapping pictures of buildings that had vanished more than a quarter century ago. There was just a windowless church rising from the depths of a lake that had dried up.

  I stood at the edge for a while and then scrambled down the slope. The crime scene tapes were gone, and the sign warning me to ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK was staked near the entrance. I took the dare and entered. It was late enough that the sun was nearly down, and without my flashlight, I would have been in trouble. But the floor, if anything, was cleaner than the last time I’d been there. Perhaps they had swept it up, looking for some clue to the man who had unearthed the body.

  I walked to the sanctuary, pleading silently for some insight on where to go from here. If Fred Larkin had seen my name in a newspaper article, he would have used that as a reason for knowing about me. But he made up a lie to explain his slip when he recognized my name. It told me he was nervous. The Degenkamps had warned him that I was on my way. Fred Larkin knew something. Or maybe the Degenkamps did, and didn’t want Larkin spilling the beans on them.

  I remembered that when I had asked them if they knew any young women in their twenties who had worked in Studsburg, they had looked at each other in a way that I had interpreted as prodding their memories. Now it seemed that what they were doing was warning each other to keep silent. There was someone, and both the Degenkamps and the Larkins knew who it was. Which meant I was on the right track if I could just figure out which of my many lines of questions was the right one.

  It was getting late, and I wanted to reach the convent in time for dinner. Using my flashlight, I went back to my car and then drove south.

  The nuns were just leaving chapel when I got there. I sat at dinner with Sister Concepta, who quickly set an additional place for me. The nuns at the table were full of questions, my investigation having sparked their interest and set them all thinking. As we ate, they speculated on
who, how, and why.

  “If it was a boyfriend killing his girlfriend,” Sister Gracia said, “I think it’s a dead end. He’ll have covered his tracks, married someone, made a new life. Today he’ll be a respected citizen, a good father, someone no one would ever suspect had committed a murder. His friends will probably give him testimonials,” she finished wryly.

  “Even if you don’t find him and bring him to justice,” Sister Concepta said, “he may suffer from what he did. He may have a terrible conscience.”

  Sister Gracia waved away the possibility. “People live with their consciences better than we’d like to think. And guilt rarely leaves a mark that we can see. If it did, the police would have an easier job. Unfortunately, guilt isn’t like a scar or a tattoo or a scarlet A.”

  I felt she was right. Without some overt mark, I could not identify the guilty conscience in someone I spoke to. I had already made at least one mistake of judgment, putting the Degenkamps in the safe-and-honest category.

  “You’re right about the girlfriend,” I said. “But it seems to me there has to be more to it than that. The coroner said the woman wasn’t pregnant, which is the first thing you think of as a motive, especially thirty years ago. It has to be something else, something these older people are trying to keep from me. What could all of them have had in common?”

  “The occult,” one of the other nuns said. “A witches’ coven. God forbid,” she added, crossing herself.

  It didn’t seem likely. I listened as they let their imaginations take hold. Nothing they proposed really grabbed me. When dinner was over, I helped with the washup and then set the tables for tomorrow’s breakfast. It wasn’t much, but it gave someone old enough to be my mother the chance to take it easy while I was able to burn off the energy I’d stored while sitting on my duff in the car most of the day.

  When I was done, I put my coat on and walked over to the chapel. Usually when I visit a church, I light three can dles, for my mother, my father, and my Aunt Margaret. I hadn’t done it for a while, so I did it now, leaving a contribution in the box. Because we were schooled strictly in safety, I sat in a pew till the candles burned down, which took about half an hour. While I waited, I drained my mind of everything to do with the Studsburg murder. I thought instead of Jack, of how happy I was when we were together.