The Christmas Night Murder (17 page)

I knew instantly what I had done. I had lost the page on which Sister Mary Teresa kept the scrap of paper. If it had been stuck there randomly, nothing was lost, but if there was some mnemonic on one of the facing pages, I had blown a lead. I stood there for a moment, stunned, trying to recover from my blunder. Then I shook hands with Ann-Marie and left her with Joseph.

The kitchen was empty and I used the phone there to call Jack.

“Absence must not be working on your heart,” he said cheerily. “It's after two. I thought you'd call earlier.”

“Absence is working on my heart and every other organ, including my brain. I've just done something so dumb, so unimaginably stupid—”

“Stop,” he ordered. “Knocking yourself will get you nowhere. The difference between you and me is that you admit your mistakes; I keep them secret. You wouldn't want to hear some of the things I've done on the job. During one case—”

“Don't tell me. If you have time, I'd like you to call the Riverview Police Department and ask a few questions about Julia Farragut's suicide. The nun who was murdered yesterday told her grandniece she thought Julia was murdered.”

“Hey, you
are
making progress.”

“It may be wishful thinking, Jack. Mary Teresa didn't want to believe Julia killed herself. Since no one was home the night she died except her grandmother, I have to wonder about it. But there should have been an autopsy, right?”

“Should have been. But remember, it's a small town where everybody knows everybody else and the police will bend over backward not to hurt the feelings of a suffering
family. And you won't have the experienced pathologists you get in New York and other big cities. I doubt you get many suicides or homicides up there. But let me give them a call. You want to know if they ruled out the possibility of homicide, right?”

“Right.”

“I'll do what I can.”

“You know, I think part of the problem in this case is that there are three different police departments working on various aspects of it. The state police found Hudson's clothes, our local police were called in when Sister Mary Teresa was found dead, and the Riverview police were in charge when Julia died, however that happened.”

“They also found Hudson's vehicle in front of the old Farragut house.”

“Right, but it's seven years later. I wonder how much continuity there is and whether all these police departments talk to each other very much.”

“Hard to say. Let me get on it.”

I sat at the long kitchen worktable and reviewed my options. I had talked to just about everybody I could think of except for Foster Farragut, and even if I could find him, if his grandmother allowed me to see him, I couldn't imagine it would be productive. He was now a promising suspect for two or three crimes and would have a cover story that I was sure Mrs. Farragut would support. He would say he wasn't home the night Julia died, he went directly to his grandmother or a new apartment when he was let out of jail, and he was sound asleep when Mary Teresa was murdered. The chances of finding a witness at the thruway rest stop were too small to calculate. If anyone at St. Stephen's had seen or heard anything the night Mary Teresa was murdered, she would have come forward; of that I was absolutely certain. And Mrs. Belvedere's recollections of the night Julia died supported suicide. I took my notebook out of my bag and turned pages, looking for something, anything that would tell me where to go next. Miranda. Miranda Santiago had offered the letters to me and her mother had let me look through the carton myself. I couldn't have asked for more cooperation. If I had learned
anything from the letters, it was that Julia, at least when she wrote to her friend, had envisioned a long life.

Then there was the boyfriend, the fantasy boyfriend who doubted she would stick it out as a novice. In a way he had been right, but surely not the way he had expected. Had he hoped she would leave St. Stephen's and fall into his waiting open arms? Did he exist?

And who would know? That was the question. I picked up my things and left word in the switchboard room that I was going to the villa. Joseph had spoken to them and the police had questioned them yesterday morning, but the local police were not interested in the disappearance of Hudson McCormick or a suicide that had taken place in another town seven years ago. I was interested in everything. I believed everything was related.

Every nun now living in the villa had known me since I was fifteen. The group sitting downstairs greeted me and invited me to sit with them. I sensed they had been talking about Mary Teresa.

“We heard Mary Teresa's niece was coming,” Sister Dolores said.

“She's here. I talked to her a little while ago.”

“She was good to Mary Teresa,” Sister Caroline said. “She sent her CARE packages.”

“Did the niece call?”

There was general agreement that she did.

“Did any of you ever answer the phone when somebody else called?”

“An old student,” one of the nuns said. It went without saying that a student would be female.

“No male callers?”

There were a lot of shrugged shoulders.

“Was anyone here answering on Saturday or Saturday night, the day before we found her?”

“I was,” Sister Caroline said. “It was a pretty slow day. She didn't get any calls. I'm sure of that.”

At that moment a nun stuck her head around a corner into the room and asked for me. “Telephone,” she said. “Want me to ring some bells?”

“No, thanks.” I ran, laughing, to an old black phone on a table just outside the community room and picked it up.

“Glad they found you,” Jack said.

“That was fast.”

“Tells you how long and detailed my conversation was. You're not gonna love the Riverview Police Department the way you love NYPD. I got a lieutenant who's old enough to remember the Julia Farragut suicide and enough of an old boy that he won't talk about it.”

“You got nothing out of him?”

“Very little. The family asked that it not be discussed to spare their feelings. I gather Walter wanted the records sealed, which he couldn't really do, but the police do their best when a citizen makes a request. It's not as if they were legally sealed by a court. You just can't get anyone to tell you anything.”

“Sounds like he wielded a lot of power.”

“Who knows what was going on? I did get him to say there had not been a full autopsy because it wasn't indicated Julia had been disturbed, she had lost her mother a little while before, and it looked like the Christmas blues got her down.”

“He said that?”

“Almost in those words.”

“What you're telling me is that some professional looked at her body, decided she'd died by hanging, and let it go at that.”

“I'd guess that's pretty much what happened. Don't even think about exhuming the body. There isn't a chance in hell of getting that.”

“I know.”

“I asked if there was anything new about Father McCormick. He said there was nothing, that they were keeping the vehicle in case the priest turned up and wanted it back. The feeling I got was they'd sock him with a big fat storage fee.”

“I feel stonewalled,” I said.

“I can see why. You gonna let this go for a while and come home to someone who loves you?”

“I can't, Jack. We've lost a nun and we don't have Hudson back and I've got to do something because the police won't.”

“Like what?”

“Like I'm just going to have to start at the beginning
again. And I'll have to be smarter and tougher the second time around.”

“Smarter I can probably live with. Do you think you could go easy on tough?”

“For you, my love, anything.”

“Just not tonight.”

“Maybe tomorrow. If I'm lucky.”

I went back to the nuns. They were in better spirits now. We talked for a little while, exchanging anecdotes about Mary Teresa. Then I went back to the Mother House.

They had given Ann-Marie an empty room to stay in till Mary Teresa's funeral. Her aunt would be buried with other nuns in the St. Stephen's cemetery as soon as the body was released.

I found Ann-Marie in her room. “I have to ask you something,” I said, hoping she wouldn't think I was crazy. “Is it possible your aunt had a credit card?”

She laughed. “Aunt Mary? Aunt Mary hardly knew what money was. She had no use for it. The convent took care of her needs and I sent her little things after my mom passed away. What would she want with a credit card?”

“I don't know. I found a scrap of paper in her room yesterday with a long number on it.”

“Could it be a telephone number?”

“It's much too long for that. And it doesn't look like a phone number.”

“I wouldn't know.”

I thanked her and went to Joseph's office. “Do you have a credit card?” I asked her.

“Still thinking about that number?”

“Yes. Maybe someone gave her a credit card to thank her for keeping in touch about Hudson.” I didn't believe it, but I had to try everything.

“I have one for the convent. It helps to keep our accounts straight.” She got it out for me and put it on the table.

It had thirteen digits. Mary Teresa's number had fifteen. Joseph picked up the phone and called someone. “How many digits does your American Express card have?” she asked. She listened and said, “Thank you.” She hung up. “Fifteen.”

“That could be it.”

Joseph picked up the phone and did some calling. Finally she said, “This is Sister Joseph, General Superior at St. Stephen's Convent. One of our members, Sister Mary Teresa Williams, died yesterday. I want to know if there is an unpaid balance on her account.” She read off the number on my scrap of paper. “She's checking,” she said to me.

I waited tensely. If we could find out who was paying her bills…

“Yes, I am.” She listened. “You're certain about that?…Well, thank you very much.” She hung up. “The number isn't one of theirs and Sister Mary Teresa Williams has no account with them.”

“I should have known it was too easy. Maybe it's one issued by another company.”

“Chris, your friend Melanie. She must have some cards.”

“I guess so. We don't shop together much, but…Let me call her.”

Mel was there and I asked her the crucial question.

“I have every card you could ever want. Saks? Bloomie's? Lord and Taylor? I even have Neiman Marcus, if you feel like splurging.”

“It's not for me, Mel. I'm trying to identify a number I found scribbled on a piece of paper. What I really want to know is how many digits your cards have to give me some idea of the source of this number.”

“I'll count.” She had a Visa card with sixteen, which was three more than Joseph's Visa card, two gasoline credit cards with eleven each, and eight digits for the department-store cards. Not one number had the fifteen digits of Mary Teresa's. “How'm I doing?” she asked after the last count.

“You're doing fine. I'm not. Maybe it doesn't mean anything.”

“I talked to Jack last night. Poor guy's lonely, Chris.”

“So am I.”

“He's coming to dinner tonight.”

“Oh thanks, Mel.”

“Shall I tell you what we're having?”

“Please don't. I don't think I can bear it.”

“Come home soon.”

I promised her I would and hung up.

“Sounds like you didn't find a match.”

“It's amazing, isn't it? There must have been ten numbers and not one was fifteen digits long.”

“We'll figure it out, Chris. I got a call from Detective Lake a little while ago. The autopsy has been completed. Mary Teresa wasn't strangled, as we thought. She was suffocated and suffered a heart attack.”

“Suffocated?”

“Her attacker probably tried to keep her from screaming and clamped his hand over her mouth and nose. She put up a struggle.”

“I never thought otherwise,” I said. “I'm going back to Hawthorne Street, Joseph. That's where Julia died, that's where someone left Hudson's car. I think the answers are there if I can just think of the right questions to ask.”

“Why are the answers there?”

I wasn't really sure. It was something about the house. I kept feeling the house was trying to tell me something. “It's the source,” I said. “It's where the trouble started and ended. It's a feeling, Joseph, and I'm at the point where all I have is a feeling.”

“You have much more than that.”

“But I can't put it together.” I put my bag on my shoulder. “See you later,” I said.

I stopped at Ann-Marie's room on my way out. “I know it's hard to tell with numbers,” I said, “but do you think your aunt wrote this?” I showed her the strip of paper I had found in the Bible.

She looked at it carefully. Then she took an envelope out of her bag and put the strip under the street address. “Aunt Mary had a very old-fashioned way of writing numbers, kind of schoolteacherish, like the numbers you see on the wall in the first grade. These don't look like that. They're much rounder. Look at the difference in the twos.”

She was right. The two in the address made an angle at the line. The two on the strip of paper was looped. Someone else had written the numbers on the strip and given them to her.

“Thank you, Ann-Marie. You're absolutely right.” I had finally asked a good question.

I sat across the street from number 211 and watched the house. Around four-thirty lights went on in the front window of the living room. A few minutes later lights went on upstairs, then again in another room. The house now had a comfortable, lived-in look. Next door in the Belvederes' house lights were going on at almost the same time. This late winter afternoon their driveway was empty. Either the family was out and their lights were also going on automatically or the cars were put away in the garage at the end of the long drive. Maybe their son had gone back to wherever he lived now that Christmas was over. Tomorrow evening he would probably be celebrating New Year's Eve with his friends as I would like to be doing.

When I got cold enough, I got out of the car and crossed the street. I was wearing snow boots, but I didn't need them for the sidewalk, which was clean in both directions, or for the front walk to the porch or for the driveway. Instead I walked around the right side of the house, through still-undisturbed snow, leaving prints as I went.

Just even with the ground were basement windows. I knelt and looked inside one, then another. At this hour there wasn't enough natural light to let me see very much. I continued to the back. It was a deep house from front to back and, like many Victorians, had many protuberances, small extensions of rooms. One near the back was off the kitchen. I skirted it and came to the rear.

It was dark now and I took my handy flashlight out of my bag. It was small and lightweight and produced only a narrow beam of light, but it was enough to let me see flower beds and keep from tripping.

Along the back of the house I could see the windowed
extension to the kitchen the Corcorans had built. And between that and the corner of the house where I was standing was an old outside staircase that led to the third floor, where a door opened off a small landing, perhaps the entrance to the servants' quarters from a time when a staff lived upstairs but didn't mingle with the family. From Julia's window yesterday, I had mistaken these stairs for a fire escape.

I put my foot on the first step to see if it was icy. It wasn't. The sun had done its work today. Holding the light in my hand, I went cautiously up the stairs.

“Who's that?” a man's voice called from below, stopping me dead and frightening me.

I turned around carefully. “My name's Christine Bennett,” I called down into the darkness. “I mean no harm.”

“Come down here.”

I descended, feeling very scared. He had not identified himself and no one could see us from the street. “Who are you?” I said, reaching bottom and stopping more than an arm's length away. The man was carrying a more powerful flashlight than mine, which he turned on me as I stood there.

“I'm Warren Belvedere. I live next door. My wife saw a light back here. Want to tell me what you're doing?”

Not an easy question to answer, but I felt a little less afraid. “I'm trying to figure out what happened to the missing priest.”

“Well, you're looking in the wrong place, and if you aren't careful, you'll get yourself—”

“Warren?” a woman called. “Are you all right, Warren?” It was Marilyn Belvedere, holding a coat together as she lifted her feet awkwardly to tramp across the snow.

“It's Chris Bennett, Mrs. Belvedere,” I called.

“My Lord! What are you doing back here with a flashlight?”

“I just wanted to see the house.”

“Why don't you both come inside? It's freezing out here.”

Her husband waited till I had walked past him before he followed us, as though to ensure that I not spend another minute looking around. We went inside through a door
along the side of the house that led to a small room off the kitchen, where we took our boots off and carried them through the house to the front door. Warren Belvedere took my coat and hung it in the closet along with his and his wife's. Then we went back to the room where she and I had talked on my visit on Saturday.

“Tea?” she asked with a smile.

“I'm going upstairs,” her husband said irritably. “I'm tired of this whole business. The priest isn't here. The Farraguts haven't lived here for years. I'm sorry the girl killed herself, but if I'd been brought up in that family, I probably would've considered it myself.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because everyone there was nuts,” he said angrily. “The mother—”

“Warren,” his wife said.

“The son, the father who paid off the whole police department to keep his son out of trouble—”

“Warren, you don't know that's true.”

“Don't I? You mean
you
don't know that's true because you don't want to believe it. He destroyed property, he was a common thief, he put his hands where they didn't belong.”

“Go upstairs, Warren, and leave us alone.”

“Don't rush me. I just want this to be over. The Farraguts are gone, the girl is dead, and no one in this town left that damn Jeep out there. I don't know who you are”—he faced me—“but if I catch you around here again sneaking around with a flashlight, I'll call the police first and tell them there's a prowler. Is that clear?”

“Very clear, Mr. Belvedere.”

“Enjoy your tea,” he said bitterly, and left the room.

“Warren's just a little edgy,” his wife said nervously. “I'll be right back with the tea.”

“I don't need tea. I just want a little information.”

She sat down, looking wilted.

“The house next door has an outside entrance to the third floor,” I said.

“I think Mrs. Farragut rented it out for a while after her husband died. She didn't like being alone and she didn't
want to give up the house. It used to be the maids' quarters in bygone days.”

“Did the Farraguts use it for anything?”

“They had a live-in maid sometimes, kind of on and off. There wasn't any maid that Christmas,” she added as though she sensed where I was going.

“The night Julia committed suicide, when did you know something was wrong?”

She looked around as though to assure herself that her husband was out of earshot. “I heard sirens and then an ambulance pulled up and a police car, I really can't tell you which came first. But those flashing lights were on for a long time, I remember that.”

“And who was home at the Farraguts' that night?”

“As far as I know, only Julia and her grandmother.”

“You told me you saw Walter Farragut come home after the police had been called.”

“That's right.”

“I wonder how you could have seen him. Wouldn't he normally have driven up the driveway on the far side of the house and gone inside through the side door?”

She thought about it for a moment. “Normally, yes. But I'm sure I saw him rush up the front walk. He must have seen the ambulance and parked his car on the street. Yes, that's what happened. The ambulance was in the driveway when he came home.”

“And the police car?”

“Out front. I'm sure of that because I could see it through the front windows.”

It made sense. The other possibility was that Walter had left the house when the body was discovered and made a conspicuous return when the police and the ambulance attendants could see him. “What about Foster?”

“I didn't really see him come home. I wasn't watching for anyone. I was concerned about what was happening. To be honest, I thought at first that old Mrs. Farragut had had a heart attack. I had no idea it was Julia.”

“Did you go over to see what was happening?”

She didn't answer right away. Her face was tight, her forehead pinched. “Warren did,” she said.

The way she said it, the way she looked when she said
it, made me wonder. I took a calculated risk. “I heard a rumor that Julia was murdered,” I said.

Her hand moved spasmodically, pushing a small dish harmlessly to the carpeted floor. “I never heard that. Who told you that?”

“The nun who was murdered yesterday morning.”

“I can't imagine—what would make her think such a thing?”

“She knew Julia well. Julia had a great desire to live. She was also a devout Catholic.”

“The police said it was suicide.”

“Your husband mentioned that Walter Farragut had bought off the Riverview Police Department.”

“Warren's just upset. He says things he doesn't mean. No one was home that night except the grandmother. You can't believe that an old woman…And she loved Julia. She adored her.”

“She loved her grandson, too, didn't she?”

“Of course. What does that have to do with anything?”

It might have a lot to do with her motive to protect either him or his father, but I didn't want to discuss it with her. “I'm not sure,” I said evasively. “I was curious about something else. The grandson—was Foster Serena's maiden name?”

“Foster was his mother's maiden name.”

I looked at her. “You mean he wasn't Serena's son?”

“Oh no. I thought you knew that, but I suppose not many people did. Walter had a son by his first wife. After she died, he married Serena. Foster must have been four or five when they married. Old Mrs. Farragut always attributed his problems to losing his mother when he was so young.”

A line in one of the letters to Miranda came back to me.
The brother I never had.
She had never thought of him as her brother. It cast a new light on what Julia had told Angela about her mother losing a baby boy. “So Foster and Julia were half brother and sister.”

“That's right. But no one talked about it. As far as the Farraguts were concerned, they were a family.”

But not to Serena, I thought. Serena had taken on the task of raising another woman's son, a boy she could not control, in the home of a mother-in-law who loved him and
probably excused much of his behavior, and with a husband willing to pay off the police to keep the son on the street and his record, not to mention the Farragut name, clean. It occurred to me that the offense that had finally put him behind bars had very likely occurred in another jurisdiction, where Walter had carried no influence.

My heart ached for both of them, mother and daughter, Serena and Julia. What a mess Julia had been born into. No wonder she had lived for the day when she could escape. What had she written to Miranda? She wished her mother could have come to St Stephen's with her.

“Thank you, Mrs. Belvedere,” I said.

“If I knew where your priest was, I would tell you.”

“I'm sure you would.” I meant it. “Did anyone in that house ever talk about him?”

“Never. But we heard about it. It's hard to keep things like that a secret. Serena never said anything. By the time Julia went to the convent, Serena was spending most of her time at home. I went over once in a while to talk to her, to sit with her, but it wasn't the same.”

It hardly could be. The grandmother would be there, depriving Serena of privacy.

“I watched her decline,” Marilyn Belvedere said sadly. “I watched her slip away.” She looked at her watch. “I'm afraid I must ask you to leave. It's nearly dinnertime now and Warren doesn't like his dinner late.”

I wasn't surprised. I thanked her again, got my coat and boots at the front door, and walked down to the street. The old Farragut house was alive with light. Only the third-floor windows were entirely dark.

I crossed the street and got into my car. I wanted to complete my circle of the house, but I was afraid to agitate Warren Belvedere. For all I knew he was peering out of an upstairs window, watching me. I wasn't ready to call his bluff about the police, not now, not in this town.

But there was something about the house, something I knew or almost knew, as though a fact had already registered in my brain and I had failed to recognize it. That empty house with its windows all lit up was trying to tell me something.

I had no idea what. I started the motor and made a
U-turn, driving slowly toward the center of Riverview. I needed a warm place to think and I didn't want to return to the convent. Threats or not, I was going to have to go back to the Farragut house again and shake loose what my mind was concealing from me.