The Thanksgiving Day Murder

by Lee Harris

  The beach was empty today. Aunt Meg used to joke on summer days when one other person was there that it was crowded. Today I was the crowd. I walked around the cove to the end, then turned and came back again, feeling refreshed. Then I went home.

  It was late afternoon now. Sandy would be leaving for home soon, or perhaps to work out at a gym or take in a movie. I picked up the phone and called him.

  “Hello?” He was still answering the line himself.

  “It’s Chris. Has anything happened?”

  “Very little. I’ve come to a decision, Chris. I was going to call you when I got home. I want to end our investigation.”

  “What do you mean?” I was aghast. It was impossible to stop now.

  “Just what I said. It’s over. Send me a bill for whatever expenses my initial five hundred hasn’t covered and let’s call it a day.”

  “Sandy, what’s happened?”

  “Nothing’s happened. Nothing’s going to happen. Natalie is gone. I’ll never see her again. I’ve had a long time to get used to it. I think the time has come to get on with my life, as they say. I want to meet new women, get back in the swing of things.”

  “Sandy, something’s happened that you haven’t told me.”

  “What has happened is that I’ve had a change of heart.”

  “I have to tell you, if you drop this, I intend to turn over everything I’ve learned to the detective in charge of the police investigation.”

  There was a pause. Then he said, “Do what you have to. It’s over.” Then he hung up.

  It wasn’t over for me. There was no doubt in my mind he had gotten a phone call with some kind of information he couldn’t handle and he didn’t want to go any further. But I had to. Natalie Gordon was a real person who had disappeared, and whether she was alive or dead, I had to find out the truth. I got my notebook and looked up the numbers of the upstate New York newspapers. I called the daily first and asked for the advertising department.

  “I put an ad in your paper to run from yesterday through the weekend. My name is Christine Bennett.”

  “Oh yes,” a girlish voice said. “The pictures of the woman.”

  “That’s the one. Have you had any calls about it?”

  “Not that I know of. Didn’t you have a telephone number in the ad?”

  “I did, but I wondered whether anyone had called you with questions or information.”

  “I don’t think so. Let me check my desk.” She moved papers around and then came back. “I don’t think so, Ms. Bennett.”

  I thanked her and called the weekly.

  “You know what?” a youngish male voice said when I asked my question. “Someone here on the paper recognized one of those pictures.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. He got pretty excited about it. Said he remembered her well.”

  “Do you know who it was?”

  “One of the big editors. Can you hold on?”

  “Sure.”

  He put me on hold and my spirits rose. I could hardly contain my excitement. I was practically counting seconds when a voice said, “Roger Belasco.”

  “Mr. Belasco, this is Christine Bennett. I understand you recognized a picture I ran in your paper, a woman I’m looking for.”

  “Oh yes, right. You got the name wrong and the hair’s a little off, but I’d recognize that face anywhere. There was no mistaking that nose. I think her father broke it. It was a sad situation. I went to high school with her about a hundred years ago.”

  “What name do you remember her by?”

  “That’s Connie Moffat. Lived down the road from us. I think she left town after high school.”

  “Does she have any relatives left in town? Any old boyfriends? Girlfriends?”

  “Well, the people who brought her up moved away, although I think they may have kept the old house as a summer place. There are probably plenty of guys who remember her, girls, too. They’re women now, of course. A lot of our class stayed on in the area.”

  “Do you know where the family is?”

  “I can probably find out. Want to give me your number?”

  I recited it.

  “What’s happened? She run away or something?”

  “She disappeared. It happened the Thanksgiving before last at Macy’s parade.”

  “So if she was kidnapped, I guess you’ve got a million suspects, most of them under the age of ten.”

  “That’s the way it looks.”

  “Ms. Bennett, if I cooperate with you, will you give us an exclusive on the story? If you find her, is it ours first?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I’ll get back to you.”

  He called back in the evening, after I’d eaten dinner. The family that had taken Connie in after her parents died were cousins named Lewellyn. They had moved to Albany some years ago, but the old house was still owned by them, and Mrs. Lewellyn came out in the summer pretty regularly. He gave me a number.

  “Were you in Connie’s class?” I asked.

  “Maybe a year ahead of her.”

  “May I ask you how old you are?”

  “Forty-two on my next birthday.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Belasco. I can’t tell you how helpful you’ve been.”

  “Just don’t forget our agreement.”

  “Don’t worry. You’ll hear from me.”

  I called the number in Albany and a woman answered.

  “Mrs. Lewellyn?”

  “Yes.” It was a sweet voice with a questioning tone.

  “My name is Christine Bennett. I’ve been looking for Connie Moffat.”

  “Oh yes, Connie. Are you a friend of hers?”

  “Not exactly. Do you know where she is?”

  “I haven’t seen or heard from her in years.”

  “Do you know how many?”

  “Oh, quite a few. Three, four, five maybe.”

  “Could I come up and talk to you, Mrs. Lewellyn?”

  “I wouldn’t mind. I don’t know what I can tell you.”

  “If I pick you up in Albany, could you direct me to your summer house?”

  “I can take you there, but the heat isn’t turned on. It’s pretty cold.”

  “I just want to see it. Are you free tomorrow?”

  “Let me see.” She sounded like an older woman, a voice that had had years of use, concern in every syllable. “I have some things I have to do in the morning.”

  “I couldn’t get there before eleven-thirty.”

  “Eleven-thirty’s fine. It’ll take another hour or so to get there.”

  “I’ll bring lunch.”

  —

  It would be painful, but I knew I had to talk to Sandy. He didn’t answer his phone at first, allowing the machine to take over. But when he heard my name, he picked up.

  “I talked to Roger Belasco,” I said.

  “I see.”

  “Sandy, whoever she was, she was your wife and she loved you.”

  “I know that. I’m just finding all this very difficult to accept. Belasco called this afternoon, and what he told me has left me pretty shaken. I already know more than I want to know, and I don’t want any more revelations. I have certain memories and feelings that I’d like to preserve, so you’ll have to understand if I decline to participate in any further investigation.”

  “I do understand. But I’m part of this now. I can’t set it aside and pretend it’s over.”

  “You do what you have to, Chris. I have a lot of thinking to do.”

  I knew it wouldn’t help, but I said it anyway. “Don’t think, Sandy. Just remember. For a time in your life, you had something very nice, both of you.”

  “Sure,” he said, and I was dismissed.

  —

  I left after breakfast and took the Thruway, no scenic routes for me today. Today was business, business at my own expense since Sandy had removed himself from the search. It was easy to see why he was upset. He had been taken in and he was hurt and embarrassed, afraid to find
out what other secrets his second wife had kept from him.

  But there was another possibility that now occurred to me, a more sinister one, one I didn’t want to entertain but had to, that in spite of what he had said last night, he had learned some or all of this while he was married to Natalie, that he himself had done away with her when he discovered the truth, that the truth I was about to uncover might point to him as a killer.

  Mrs. Lewellyn’s directions from the Thruway exit were clear and easy to follow. At twenty to twelve, I drove up her driveway. She came to the door with a smile. I went up the path and introduced myself, shaking her hand. She asked me in, but this wasn’t the time for being sociable.

  Ten minutes later we were on the road.

  I explained as we drove. She hadn’t seen any of the papers I had advertised in, so everything I said was new.

  “You mean Connie’s married?” she said, when I told her about Sandy.

  “She married a very nice man about two years ago.”

  “Well, isn’t that nice. She deserved a few good breaks, poor thing.”

  “I understand you brought her up.”

  “After her mother died. Her father left the family, and the mother died a year or so later. We’re cousins, the Lewellyns and the Moffats. She was a skinny thing with clothes that didn’t fit and an attitude you wouldn’t believe. She was a handful, I’ll tell you.”

  “How long did she live with you?”

  “Till about the day she graduated from high school.” She laughed.

  “And then she took off?”

  “Like a bat out of hell, my husband used to say.”

  “This house we’re going to, is that where she lived?”

  “All the time she was with us. I can even show you her old room, but it’s a lot changed since then.”

  “Tell me about the last time you saw her.”

  “Oh my.” She thought about it as though she were going through a mental calendar, trying to fit it into the chronology of her life. “Well, it’s a few years ago, let me put it that way. I was sleeping upstairs and something woke me up. I went to the window and saw something moving downstairs. I went and got my husband’s old shotgun and went down in my nightie. I opened the back door, the door to the garden, and there she was.”

  “What was she doing?”

  “Just kinda standing there. I said, ‘Connie, my goodness, why didn’t you tell me you were coming?’ and she said, ‘I didn’t know I was till I got here.’ You know, that must have been the year of the tulip disaster, and that was about five years ago, I think. Or maybe it was after that, the next spring. Well, four or five years, I can’t be sure.”

  “Did she say anything about herself, what she was doing?”

  “She said she had a good job in New York, but she wouldn’t give me an address. Said she just wanted to see the old place again. I never took Connie for sentimental, but you never know about people, do you?”

  “It was night when she came?”

  “It was dark. I don’t recall if I looked at the clock.”

  That had to be when she and Martin Jewell spent a weekend together upstate. She had taken his car while he slept and driven up to the house for old times’ sake. “Did you ever see her around Thanksgiving?” I asked.

  “Never. Not since she left. I’m not usually at the house that late in the year anyway. It’s too cold.”

  We kept up the chatter till we reached the house. Mrs. Lewellyn had a lot of memories she was happy to talk about. Connie had had a simply awful childhood, till she came to live with the Lewellyns, that is. Poor little thing once had her nose broken when she sassed her daddy. Her mother wasn’t much good either and left nothing but debts when she died.

  “Did Connie ever go to Indiana that you know about?”

  “Not when she was living with us. I don’t know what she’s done since. We kept up a little after she went to New York, got a Christmas card most years, and then it stopped. I thought once she was going to get married—that must’ve been almost twenty years ago—and for all I know, she did, but she never told us. There’s your turnoff just up ahead.”

  The conversation ended there and I concentrated on getting us where we were going. It was a pretty house set far enough back from the road so you could hardly see it till you reached the end of the drive. There were lots of tall evergreens as well as bare deciduous trees and shrubs, and the house itself looked very old. I asked her about it as I turned off the motor.

  “Oh yes, it goes way back. Early eighteen hundreds, is what we’ve been told. That’s why I hate to give it up. The kids love it, too, so one of them’ll probably take charge of it. I just hope they keep up with the flowers.”

  We got out and she led the way to the front door. Inside it was almost as cold as out, and she had warned me in advance that the water was turned off to keep the pipes from freezing, so we couldn’t use the sink or toilet. We had eaten on the way and stopped to wash before we got here.

  I was quite charmed by the house. There were old timbers along the living room ceiling, and the well-cared-for floors were uneven in a way that indicated age. The kitchen had been carefully modernized, leaving old beams bare with kettles hanging from them.

  I followed her up the steep, narrow stairs to the second floor, where there were four bedrooms, the last and smallest having belonged to Connie. There was a big oval rag rug on the floor and what looked like a handmade quilt on the bed, a lovely room for a single person. There wasn’t much in it that would tell me anything about Connie because it had been occupied by other people in the decades since she had left. Down the hall was the bathroom, an ancient claw-foot tub surrounded by a plastic shower curtain prominent against the wall.

  “Years ago I decided we should get a new tub,” Mrs. Lewellyn said, “but my friend started telling me that the old claw-foot ones fetched a fortune now, so I left it. Makes it look awful old, though, doesn’t it?”

  “It looks lovely. I think this is a wonderful house.”

  “Well, I don’t know what else I can tell you.”

  “Where did you see Connie that last time when she came at night?”

  “Down back. I’ll show you.”

  She held on to the banister going down, her feet side-ways on the narrow treads, and I followed suit. She took me to a back door that she opened with a key. We stepped outside onto a concrete patio that was cracked with age.

  “She was over there near that tree, the big oak at the edge of the grass. I saw her from up there.” She stepped away from the house and pointed up.

  I walked across the patio, then over to the tree. Any of the windows on the back of the house would have a view of this tree, and probably most of the lawn between the tree and the patio. I went back, circling what looked like a moss-covered flower bed.

  “That’s the tulips,” she said as I neared. “I got a whole bucket of bulbs one fall and planted ’em till my knees hurt. Then the damn squirrels came and tossed them around the place. I was madder’n hell,” she said, using language I hadn’t expected from her. “My knees’ll never forgive ’em.”

  “And you’re not sure when that was.”

  “It’s gotta be three or four years ago.”

  “Did you replant the tulips?”

  “I did, and we put a netting over the place to keep the squirrels away. It worked. You should see those tulips in the spring.” She looked cold, although the day was mild.

  “Why don’t we go somewhere for a cup of hot coffee?” I suggested. “Then we can go back to Albany.”

  “That’s all? You’re finished here?”

  “I’m finished,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her that I was only starting.

  27

  “I think we have to try it, Jack.”

  It was the same night. I had come home late, worn out from a day at the wheel. “I think Connie or Natalie or whatever her name was hid something there, maybe when she sent the postcard to Dickie Foster. There are still two small keys on the ring. Mayb
e she buried a lockbox or suitcase. She came back a year later, or sometime later, I’m not exactly sure when, to make sure her secret was still intact. Whatever it is, it’s going to answer all the questions we have.”

  “Let’s go up on Saturday.”

  —

  After I checked with Mrs. Lewellyn, I let Roger Belasco at the weekly newspaper know. She wasn’t happy at the prospect of having her beautiful tulips dug up a second time, but I promised I would pay to have a gardener replant her bulbs, or new ones if she chose.

  We got up at six on Saturday and drove up to Albany to pick her up. She was ready and we wasted no time setting out for the country house. We had a pickax and shovels in the trunk, but we needn’t have bothered. Mrs. Lewellyn’s garage had a great assortment of tools. At eleven-thirty, with a representative of the newspaper looking on, we set to work.

  I have to admit my heart broke every time a bulb was unearthed. Some of them were already showing fresh spring shoots, and Mrs. Lewellyn took each one fondly, wrapped it, and put it in a box in the garage. The recent weather had not been cold enough to freeze the ground solid, and once we were through the top layer, the earth wasn’t very hard to move. Not that it was easy, because it wasn’t. We stopped to eat at Jack’s suggestion (cops are always hungry), stopped to rest, stopped to chat with the newspaperman, whose name was Joe Belasco, Roger’s son. Eventually young Joe, either embarrassed at watching Jack and me work or bored with doing nothing, picked up a shovel of his own and joined in.

  He was the one who called, “Hold it,” sometime after we had gotten back to work after breaking for lunch.

  “What is it?” Jack and I said almost in chorus.

  “Hit something. Maybe a rock, but there haven’t been any rocks for a while.”

  “OK,” Jack said. “Let’s just take a look.” He was all cop now, his voice a monotone, all business. He bent down where Joe pointed with the shovel and started pulling the earth away with his gloved hand as I knelt and watched. “Here we go. It’s not a rock. It’s—” He pulled some more earth. “Looks like a bone of some kind. Maybe a rib.”