The Christmas Night Murder

by Lee Harris

  “Father McCormick.”

  “Aunt Mary thought he was a fine person. She really never said anything bad about anyone she knew.”

  “Do you remember anything she said about why she thought Julia was murdered?”

  “She said Julia had a great desire to live and she was a very good Catholic. And she said that Julia was a little wisp of a girl—that’s how she put it—and anyone could have killed her and made it look like suicide.”

  I recalled the snapshot of Julia with Miranda Gallagher. It was true that Julia was slight, but it must be a lot harder to fake a hanging suicide than one with a gun. The story we had been told was that no one was home with Julia except her grandmother. “This man your aunt mentioned, if you think of anything…”

  “It wasn’t someone she knew. It was someone she talked to once, I think. Anyway, she couldn’t have known many men at St. Stephen’s.”

  “Did she talk about this again? About Julia and her theory, about anything to do with it?”

  “She didn’t dwell on it. Sometimes she would say, ‘It’s this many years since that poor girl died.’ That’s about all.”

  “And the man?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What I think, Ann-Marie, is that Mary Teresa kept in touch with someone—or he kept in touch with her—after Julia’s death. She may have told this person, whoever he is, that Father McCormick was coming to St. Stephen’s on Christmas Night.”

  “And this man kidnapped the priest?” Her eyes were wide and bright.

  “I believe someone who knew Father McCormick was driving to St. Stephen’s was responsible for his disappearance. After the kidnapping, when I started asking questions, he may have arranged to meet Mary Teresa at the convent at night to find out if she was saying things that would incriminate him. It’s possible she confronted him with questions he couldn’t or didn’t want to answer.”

  “And he killed her.”

  “If that’s what happened, I would say she was an exceptionally brave woman.”

  “Her mind was going, you know. For the last year, maybe longer. She would ramble. Sometimes she didn’t know what year it was.” She sounded very sad.

  “But not always,” I said. “I was with her when she became her old self, when her mind cleared and she spoke with authority.”

  “It would be nice to think that she died in a battle with evil.”

  “I believe that she did.”

  “Sister Clare Angela would be proud of her. They were good friends. Did you know her?”

  “Very well. I was a nun here when she was the superior.”

  “She was a tough old gal, wasn’t she? My father used to say she ran a tight ship. It’s all different now, isn’t it? This Sister Joseph, she’s different, she’s a different generation. Do you know her well?”

  “I think I feel about Sister Joseph the way your aunt felt about Sister Clare Angela.”

  “You’re friends. When did you leave the convent?”

  “A year and a half ago.”

  “A lot of nuns leave now, don’t they? I hear about it all the time. Even friends of mine who went in a few years ago are out. It isn’t like the old days. Do you think you would have left if Sister Clare Angela was still the superior?”

  The question caught me by surprise. I had never thought about it, never considered whether what I wanted to do was a function of a particular time, a prevailing attitude, a certain individual occupying a position of authority. I touched my wedding ring, my husband’s gift to me on that beautiful August day, and said, “I don’t know.” What shocked me was that I really meant it.

  —

  I took Ann-Marie to Sister Mary Teresa’s room in the villa. The police had gone through it yesterday morning after her body was found, and after I had finished my quick, surreptitious search. I had not been there since. The police had left the room very much as I remembered it, but then Sister Mary Teresa did not have drawersful of clothes to rummage through, trinkets, jewelry, and such things that you would find in a secular woman’s room.

  Ann-Marie took a brief look in the closet, opened a few drawers, and touched the papers on the desk.

  “The convent will recycle the clothes,” I said. “Nothing will be wasted. When the police return her medals, I’m sure you’d like to have them. And Sister Joseph has some of the personal things that I’m sure you’ll want to keep, her missal and Bible—”

  “Yes, I should take those.”

  “Let’s go to her office.”

  Joseph had everything in one place. “Was there anything you needed?” she asked me.

  I knew she meant the Bible. “I think there was a little scrap of paper,” I said, realizing too late that I should never have brought Ann-Marie here until I checked through Mary Teresa’s things once again.

  Joseph handed me the Bible and I leafed through it. The scrap that I wanted was sticking out, the unattributed number starting with 67-. “Here it is.”

  And then I did one of the stupidest things I have ever done in my entire life. I pulled it out of the Bible and put it in my purse.

  24

  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 w
asn’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.