The Christmas Night Murder

by Lee Harris

  The nuns were coming out of the chapel after evening prayers as I parked my car in the lot. I waited for the last of them to enter the Mother House and then followed them in. Joseph spied me right away and joined me as the rest of the nuns went into the dining room.

  “I know a lot more,” I said, “but I don’t know where Hudson is and I don’t know who’s responsible for his disappearance. But I have feelings about things that I didn’t have, or didn’t have very strongly, before this afternoon.”

  “Let’s get trays and we’ll eat and talk in my office.”

  We went back to the kitchen and filled two trays. It was a Sunday-night pasta supper with a salad of many-colored greens, grapefruit to start with, and a pudding dessert. Jack isn’t a pudding man; he’s a hard-dessert person who likes to chew, so I enjoyed the chance to eat something I don’t make at home anymore.

  We carried our trays upstairs as Joseph talked about her afternoon with the nuns in the villa. They were a tough lot, she said, but they were terribly shaken—indeed, everyone was, but she worried about them the most.

  In her office, we sat across the long table from each other and I pulled out my notebook, which I had filled with comments after each interview. “Walter Farragut is married to a much younger, very good-looking woman and lives in a modern house that had to cost a fortune,” I began. “I really got nothing of substance from him, but later on in the afternoon I talked to his mother again and she let me see pictures of Julia. There’s a strong resemblance between her and Walter’s new wife.”

  “I see.”

  “I can’t avoid it, Joseph. I don’t want to think it and I don’t want to think about it, but I feel something terrible went on in the Farragut house and I keep coming back to the father.”

  “You think he was abusing her.”

  “I think it’s possible.”

  “And that’s why she came to St. Stephen’s.” The idea clearly troubled her, both ideas: that he was doing something and that Julia came to the convent to get away from him.

  “It makes sense. And I have to believe her mother knew or suspected what was going on. She couldn’t handle it and had a nervous breakdown sometime before that last year of her life. Mrs. Belvedere, the neighbor, knew it. Then, seven years ago, she took her life.”

  “Poor soul. Do you think the grandmother knew what was happening?”

  “Maybe not at first. She occupied a separate apartment in the house, about as far, by the way, from Julia’s room as she could be. According to the neighbor, she kept to herself much of the time, which gave me the feeling that they were almost two separate families living in different parts of the same house. But she was very fond of Julia. They were both in the house the night Julia killed herself. It was the grandmother that found her and also found the diary she was writing in.”

  “A diary. Then there is—or was—a document of her feelings. I don’t suppose she showed it to you.”

  “She didn’t show it to me and I’m convinced she never showed it to the police. I think she took it out of Julia’s room before the police came. When she read it, she may have found out for the first time what was really going on, and once she knew, she couldn’t show it to anyone because it would implicate her son in behavior so terrible that making it public would destroy him.”

  “Without question.” She put her fork down. “It makes a kind of poetic sense, too, doesn’t it? The natural father does the molesting and the spiritual father is blamed. Which leaves us with one inescapable suspect.”

  “And that makes me very uneasy,” I said. “I just can’t come to terms with a man of Walter Farragut’s position kidnapping Hudson. What did he do with him? And why would he do it now and not seven years ago?”

  “Hudson left very suddenly, before Julia died, remember. If her diary does tell terrible secrets, her father may have felt threatened after he read it.”

  “But if he was molesting her, he didn’t need a diary to tell him what had happened.”

  “True, but Hudson’s return put pressure on him. There was always the possibility that Hudson would somehow let the world know what had happened.”

  “Or Mrs. Farragut might have felt he was threatened.”

  “Surely you don’t think an elderly woman—”

  “I don’t, but she’s involved in this somehow, Joseph. The telephone call to Sister Mary Teresa.”

  “I asked the sisters who answered the phone at the villa yesterday if they remembered Mary Teresa receiving a phone call, from anyone, man or woman. No one answered a phone call for her.”

  The system at the villa was the same as that in the Mother House. When a call was routed there from the main switchboard, the nun assigned to answering the phone would ring bells for the person called. Each nun was assigned a different number of bells.

  “And I checked with Angela,” she went on, “and she doesn’t remember anyone asking for Mary Teresa. So we really don’t know any more than we did this morning.”

  “But we do,” I said. “We have a picture of that family now, as they were seven years ago, the grandmother who lives her own life but owns the house and subtly rules the family, the father who has an obscene relationship with his daughter, the son who is forever in trouble—maybe because he knows what’s going on between his father and his sister—the mother who knows and can’t control it and finally kills herself, and the daughter who loses at every turn, first because she’s her father’s victim, then because she can’t maintain her novitiate, and finally because she loses her mother.”

  “It’s a terrible picture.”

  “Do you think I’m wrong?”

  “I think you’re very likely to be right.”

  “But it doesn’t tell us where Hudson is. If Walter Farragut has him, he’s put him somewhere where his new wife doesn’t know about it.”

  “He would know the trains, wouldn’t he?” Joseph said.

  “Of course. He still lives in the Hudson Valley, where they run. He gets rid of Hudson, drives the car to the Corcorans’, gets out, and walks down to the station. It’s closed for the night, so no one is there to recognize him. When his train comes, he gets on, pays the conductor, and goes home.”

  “There’s one thing we’ve been neglecting in all this. Assuming Walter Farragut has followed Hudson from Buffalo to the rest stop where the clothing was found, after he and Hudson drive away in Hudson’s car, what happens to the car Walter was driving?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “I’ve thought about it, but I keep turning up in a dead end. It’s almost as though there had to be two people involved in the kidnapping so that one could drive the other back to pick up the extra car. I just can’t think who that person could be. As much as Mrs. Farragut may want to protect her son, I don’t think she would do it. I don’t even know if she has a driver’s license. And I doubt he would involve his new wife.”

  “I agree. He wouldn’t let her know anything of this sordid past of his.”

  “So how did he do it?” I said, more to myself than to Joseph.

  Joseph got up and went to her desk. She came back with a book that she set down in front of me. It was the Bible I had taken from Sister Mary Teresa’s night table.

  “Have you looked through it?” I asked.

  “Very quickly. It’s filled with remembrance cards that go back over fifty years. There’s one for every nun that died at St. Stephen’s since she came here and many for people who were probably friends and relatives. There are also scraps of paper with notes on them, although I have to admit I couldn’t decipher most of them.”

  “May I take it with me?”

  “I hope you will.” She was about to go when the phone on her desk rang. She went over and answered it. “Yes,” she said with a smile. “She’s right here.”

  I took the phone and Joseph picked up the trays and left the office. “Jack?”

  “You get back all right?”

  “Circuitously. We’ve been having supper off trays and rehashing the day. Hav
e you eaten?”

  “Forget food. I’ve got something for you.”

  “What?”

  “The Oakwood cop who found Walter and Foster Farragut for me through the DMV and some extra digging was intrigued enough to call the prison to check on Foster. He got a Christmas reprieve, Chris. Foster Farragut’s been a free man since seven A.M. on Christmas Eve.”

  19

  Everything was now different. Instead of one suspect, there were two. If Foster Farragut had been freed on Christmas Eve, early in the morning on Christmas Eve, he would have had time to track Hudson on Christmas Day, perhaps by driving to Buffalo and waiting outside Hudson’s church until he left in his very visible vehicle. A car wouldn’t be hard to obtain if his father gave him one, which wouldn’t surprise me. It’s pretty easy to make a case for needing one; almost anywhere Foster might want to work would require a car if he lived outside a big city. The question of where Hudson was now was still not answered, but Foster would know the Riverview area, and how the trains worked, as well as his father. There was even the possibility that the two men had been in it together. And if they had, the problem of retrieving the second car was neatly solved.

  But I had no proof, no evidence, no witnesses, and I didn’t know where to find Foster. It was likely, guilty or innocent, that his whereabouts would be known by his father and his grandmother, but I didn’t think I had much chance of getting either one to tell me what I wanted to know. Mrs. Farragut had gone further in discussing the events of seven years ago than she had meant to; next time I saw her, she would be on guard. And I had a feeling Walter would throw me out if I turned up at his doorstep again.

  I called Mrs. Belvedere to ask her for the name and phone number of Miranda Gallagher’s mother, but there was no answer, so I turned to Sister Mary Teresa’s Bible. The remembrance cards led me nowhere. They were just dozens of roughly two-and-a-quarter-by-four-inch cards with a picture of Jesus or Mary on one side and the name of the deceased followed by a prayer on the other. The oldest ones intrigued me. The quality of the paper was different, the pictures in black and white or shades of brown instead of in color, the edges occasionally scalloped. Age had given them a delicate fineness; they seemed more than paper cards. Some had a silky finish; some were almost translucent. In the course of forty or fifty years they had become artifacts.

  But they were not leads. I turned to the several scraps of paper on which notes were written. Some had names, perhaps the names of new nieces and nephews: Ethan, Erin, Ann-Marie, a name here, a name there. One slip had the name George and an address in New York, but no last name or indication who George might be or when the notation had been made. I set it aside with little hope of figuring out what it meant.

  On a page in the Book of John, where the story of Mary Magdalene returning to the tomb occurs, there was a slip of pink paper with a long number written on it, too long for a Social Security number. It looked more like a credit-card number, but that would be impossible for a nun, except perhaps for a superior who might have to charge things for the convent. I didn’t think Sister Mary Teresa had ever been in the position of buying in quantity.

  I flipped to the pages that are reserved for family entries. Sister Mary Teresa had listed her parents with their birth and death dates, her sisters and brothers, her own name and birth date, and a string of other names that I took to be children of her siblings. There was a page folded into the book with additional entries, several marriages and more names and birth dates. None of them meant anything to me except the names of her Syracuse family. Everything was lettered carefully and, I thought, lovingly.

  Finally I closed the book and sat staring at the windows of Joseph’s office. There was nothing about Hudson in the Bible, nothing about Julia except for the remembrance card, nothing about Foster or Walter Farragut or about old Mrs. Farragut.

  I was sitting there trying to think what to do next when Joseph tapped on the door and came in. I told her about Foster Farragut.

  “That does change things,” she said. “It gives him the one thing we thought he didn’t have, the opportunity to follow Hudson.”

  “I’m sure his father and grandmother know where he is.”

  “And won’t tell us.” She walked to the window behind her desk and looked out into the dark sky. “I’ve learned something, Chris. When you’ve come to me in the past and asked for my help, even though I sympathized with the victims and their families, I was able to look at the facts you brought me with enough detachment that I could ask the right questions and see how pieces of information fit into the puzzle. But now I am utterly unable to look at the case because I’m inside it; I’m part of it. Hudson is my brother and my friend, and I feel a sense of panic at what may have happened to him, what may be happening right now. I realize at this moment how much I admire you for the work you’ve done. You become part of every case you investigate and yet you’re able to see facts, to distinguish between important and trivial, and eventually to dig out or uncover or produce the essential piece of evidence that leads to a solution.”

  I felt embarrassed by her tribute. “We’ll do it this time, too, Joseph. And don’t forget that when I’ve done it in the past, it’s always been with your help. You’ve steered me in the right direction and made me see things that were often right in front of me but that were invisible because there’s more to vision than a good pair of eyes and a willingness to look.”

  “We’ve been friends for a long time, haven’t we?” She said it with a half smile.

  “We’ve known each other sixteen years.”

  “And became friends somewhere along the way in that rather circumscribed manner that nuns have friendships.”

  “I think we’ve known each other very well but differently from the way I’ve come to know some women that I’ve met over the last year and a half.”

  “You must talk to them about a whole universe of different things.”

  “I do. And sometimes I’m surprised at the candidness of what they say—and what they expect me to say. In a way friendship with other nuns was about shared ideas, while friendship with my neighbors is often about shared experiences.”

  “But it must include ideas, too,” Joseph said.

  “It does, but the ideas seem to come as an extension of the experiences. The talk about food or gardens or the school system, where to buy a child a certain piece of clothing or what a pediatrician has said, somehow that leads to a discussion of ideas, of styles or medicine or educational philosophy.”

  “I see what you mean. Our discussions of ideas often led to shared experiences, not the other way around.”

  “Exactly. And while I know more about some of the women in Oakwood, more, in fact, than I’d like to know,” I admitted, “it doesn’t mean that I know them; I just know about them, a lot of facts that don’t always add up to knowing a person. And although there are many things I don’t know about you, and never will, I know that we’re friends. I trust you the way I trust Jack.”

  “Yes.”

  I wondered if she were thinking, as I was now, of Julia Farragut. She was still a stranger to me, a collection of memories and vignettes, of conflicting perceptions, of carefully filtered reports. I needed to know her better. There had to be some essential facts about her that were missing or hidden in the diary, facts crucial to her suicide, facts that would lead us to Hudson McCormick’s kidnapper.

  “But you’ve made close friends, Chris. I met one of them.”

  “Melanie Gross. And it started with a chance meeting during our early-morning walks.”

  “And led to cooking,” Joseph said with a smile.

  “And a lot of other things. Gardening. When Jack and I went away on our wedding trip, she watered my vegetable garden.” Like Mrs. Belvedere and her next-door neighbor. “She’s the first Jewish woman I’ve ever known well. Her children are really the first ones I’ve played with as an adult. I’ve even baby-sat for them when Melanie couldn’t find anyone else in an emergency.”

&nbs
p; “Shared experiences.”

  “That led to shared ideas.”

  “Chris, do we know anyone who was a friend of Julia Farragut?”

  “I know of one who still lives in Riverview. I think I can get to her tomorrow.”

  “Perhaps that’s what we need, someone who shared experiences with Julia, someone Julia may have confided in or who may have some ideas of her own about what was going on in that house.”

  “I’ll find her,” I promised. “First thing tomorrow morning.”

  —

  I thought a lot that night about our conversation on friendship. I had been a very young fifteen when I came to St. Stephen’s, surely much younger than any fifteen-year-old I might run into at the supermarket in Oakwood today, and Joseph had been twice my age or more, a self-possessed young woman who had seemed generations older than I. I had been orphaned and then separated from the only family I knew through circumstances completely beyond their control, and although I had wanted to enter St. Stephen’s as a novice, it had all happened in an untimely and unhappy way, with no preparation to speak of, no time to say good-bye to school friends and teachers, to neighbors’ dogs, or favorite thinking places. What had eased me into my new life had been Joseph’s unfailing gift of herself, her being there, her listening and caring. I attributed my wholeness and well-being, my very sanity, my evolution into the well-adjusted person I believe I am, to her. At some point she had become my spiritual director. Had our friendship preceded or followed that? I wasn’t sure, but I knew the watchword as well as anyone else: Be careful of particular friendships.

  In the secular world there was nothing to worry about. If Melanie Gross and I spent hours together talking or sewing or cooking or shopping or gardening, there would be no eyebrows raised in Oakwood, no talk, no concern that our relationship was anything but “normal.” At night Mel would go back to her husband, and I, until a few months ago, to my own house, to a phone call from Jack or a shared weekend. But at a convent such “particular friendships” could not be tolerated. A nun was expected to spread her friendships around lest intimacy take on a dreadful new meaning.