The Christening Day Murder

by Lee Harris

  At the bottom, a low-ceilinged hall ran to my right, curving along the rear of the building. Almost immediately I came to a doorway. From the little light that entered through the high windows, I could tell this was the hall where meetings and bingo games took place. Like the upstairs, it had been stripped of the stage that would have been built at one end. The floor here was slimy underfoot, and I walked carefully back to the hallway. Suddenly I heard a little ping, as though something small like a coin had fallen on the concrete floor. I stopped and flashed my light farther ahead, but I couldn’t see much because of the curve of the building.

  “Hello,” I called. “Anyone there?”

  In answer, I heard a metallic clatter, as though someone were gathering up tools, and then the footsteps of someone running.

  “Who’s there?” I called. But the footsteps were already hurriedly mounting the stairs at the far end of the hall. I kept walking. I passed another doorway, probably the furnace room. I raised my flashlight and saw the stone stairs along the far wall. Lowering the beam, I spotted something on the floor near the interior wall that supported the stairs. It looked like one of the rectangular stones that formed the walls down here. I wondered if it had become loose from thirty years underwater.

  But it didn’t appear that way. There were chunks of mortar on the ground around the stone, as though someone had just dug it out. When I had nearly reached it, my light caught something gold on the floor. I picked it up and pocketed it. Then I sat on my heels and pointed the flashlight into the opening under the stairs.

  I drew in my breath and said, “Oh no,” and at the same moment, I crossed myself.

  Inside the exposed opening, dirty and fleshless, was all that remained of a body that had been underwater for three decades.

  4

  It was surely the first time in a long time that Studsburg had seen flashing lights and tan uniforms. I had had to go back to the motel to find a telephone, and after calling the police, I telephoned Maddie to tell her what happened. When I got back to the church, Mr. and Mrs. Stifler were just arriving.

  Mrs. Stifler looked frightened. “Maddie said you found a body, Kix. Is it someone we know? A guest of ours?”

  “I think it’s someone who was killed before Studsburg was flooded,” I said. “I’d better find the police. They’ll want to know how I found it.” I excused myself and went into the church.

  It was the sheriff’s department that had responded to my call, and deputies had already cordoned off the two stairways with long strips of yellow plastic bearing the ongoing inscription CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS, but the man at the top of one let me through when I identified myself. At the foot of the stairs, two uniformed men were on the floor peering into the opening in the wall.

  “I’m Christine Bennett,” I said. “I called in the report.”

  “Deputy Drago,” one of the men said, rising to his feet. “Thanks for dropping by. I’d like to write down anything you can tell me while it’s fresh in your mind.”

  I retraced my brief walk down the far stairs, into the meeting room, and down the hall, recalling the sound of tools clanging and of running footsteps.

  “Man or woman?” he asked.

  “I didn’t see, but if I had to guess, I’d say a man. It sounded kind of heavy. It certainly wasn’t a woman in heels.”

  “That’s a pretty heavy stone for a woman to move. So you didn’t see him at all?”

  “Not even a shadow. He must have heard me—” I looked down at my sneakers and shook my head “—or maybe he saw the beam of my flashlight. No, wait a minute. I heard him and I called hello.”

  “He answer?”

  “No, he ran.”

  “You always carry a flashlight?” he asked.

  I took it out of my bag. It was small and lightweight. “I need it sometimes at night.”

  “You touch anything there?”

  “Nothing. I just got down to look in the opening, and then I got up and left to call you.”

  He looked down at his notes. “You said there was a car parked at the edge of the town when you got there. Was it still there when you left?”

  “It was gone.”

  “Did the person you heard go up the stairs have enough time to get to a car while you were down here?”

  I had thought of that on my way over. “I don’t think so, but I’m not sure.”

  “You didn’t by any chance see or hear the car leave, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “So this guy could’ve left on foot, and some other person might have been walking around town while you were down here.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Which means three people could have been here at the same time, not two.”

  “That’s right. It’s even possible that whoever was down here didn’t leave right away. It was getting dark, and there are probably plenty of little nooks and crannies right in the church where he could have hidden.”

  The deputy thought it over. “And left after you drove away.”

  “Either that or he could still be here.” The Stiflers weren’t the only ones who had arrived. Someone hiding in the church or outside in the shadows could easily merge with a group arriving by car.

  “We did a pretty thorough search upstairs when we got here,” Deputy Drago said. “No pews for him to hide under anymore. Outside’s another story.”

  While we were talking, the photographer had arrived and was busy taking pictures on his hands and knees. Although the opening in the wall was just as I had left it, I had avoided looking into it.

  “Do you suppose that body’s been there for thirty years?” I asked now.

  “Gotta be,” the deputy said. “This is the first time anyone’s seen this town since it was flooded. I grew up knowing it as a lake.”

  “It must have seemed like such a safe place to bury someone,” I mused.

  “You’re right about that,” he agreed. “This was no spur-of-the-moment murder. It must’ve taken a lot of work to get that stone loose, then get the body down here and seal it up again.” He closed his notebook and stuck his pen back in his pocket. “It’ll be a bitch to figure out, I can tell you. I don’t envy the county coroner this one. That body’s little more than a pile of bones.”

  “I know.” An hour ago when I had gotten down to look inside the opening, the first thing I’d seen was a skeletal hand protruding slightly, as though it had rested on the stone and then dropped into the space the stone had occupied when it was moved.

  “Hey, Tony?” someone called.

  “Right here,” Deputy Drago said.

  “We’re to take it to the hospital morgue. The coroner’s in Buffalo visiting his daughter. Be back tomorrow morning.”

  “OK with me. You finished yet, Gary?” he asked the photographer.

  The man with the camera got up off the floor, his clothes dirty from the drying muck. He brushed them carelessly. “I’ll need some more shots when you get it out, but you can move it now if you want.”

  “The coroner’s people here yet?” Deputy Drago asked.

  “On their way,” the other uniform said.

  They came down the stairs as he finished speaking. When they saw the remains—I couldn’t really think of that mass of bones as a body—they groaned and swore.

  “Damn thing’s gonna fall apart when we move it,” one of them said. He looked at the stretcher and shook his head. “What we need for this one is a plastic bag.”

  Drago walked over to them. “Keep your eyes open for any jewelry that could identify him. I don’t know how the hell anyone’s gonna figure this one out.”

  The man holding the stretcher laughed. “You can crawl in there when we’re done and have a look.”

  “Thanks,” Drago said sarcastically. “You can bet I will.”

  “Hey, Tony,” the man with the stretcher said. “There’s a sneaker in here. Look at this.” He pulled a dirt-encrusted shoe out of the opening and scratched his fingernail over the back of it.
“Keds! Can you beat that?”

  Drago looked at it, then turned around and saw me. “Look, Miss Bennett, you may as well go. If we have any more questions, we can call your hotel.”

  “Fine.”

  “And thanks for your cooperation.”

  I took a piece of paper out of my bag and scribbled my name and home telephone number on it. “I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know what the coroner finds out. I mean, if he has any idea who it is.”

  “Sure thing. But I wouldn’t expect too much from this one. If someone had reported this guy missing thirty years ago, it’d be one thing. But I have a feeling this is a John Doe that’s gonna end up in potter’s field.”

  “You will check the records from back then, won’t you?”

  “You can count on it.” He smiled. “Good night now.”

  I said good night and went up the far stairs.

  The Stiflers were still in the church near the front door, where the police were holding back the curious. They looked very unhappy, and I went over to talk to them and reassure them that there was no connection between today’s baptism and the gruesome discovery in the basement. They seemed to feel responsible, as though in some way today’s celebration had caused the discovery.

  “I just can’t believe it,” Mrs. Stifler said. “Do they know who it is?”

  “No idea at all.”

  “How terrible.” She shook her head.

  “Let’s get back,” her husband said. “Maddie’ll be having fits.”

  I smiled as we left the church. If anyone in this world is together, it’s Maddie Clark. The day she has fits is the day the world falls apart.

  “Come back to the house, Kix,” Mr. Stifler said. “Let’s all have a cup of coffee and calm down.”

  It sounded like a good idea, and I followed them in my car. When Maddie heard the story, her eyes lit up. “Fun,” she said with the kind of excitement I remembered from years ago. “I get baptized and someone gets knocked off. Are we missing any relatives, Mom?”

  “Maddie, really,” Mrs. Stifler said with quiet exasperation, making me smile. They had learned to get along with each other, but Maddie still provoked the old feelings in her mother.

  “How many people were at Maddie’s christening?” I asked when we had sat down with coffee mugs and a plate of tempting cakes left over from the afternoon’s celebration.

  “Forty, would you say?” Maddie’s father said, looking at his wife.

  “Just about.”

  “I had the feeling the whole town had been invited.”

  “Well, they were, but most of them had left by then,” Mrs. Stifter said. “Some more came in the evening for the fireworks, people who had moved in the area. We were supposed to be out of Studsburg by the last of June, but the middle of June came and I hadn’t given birth yet, and that nice colonel in the Army Corps of Engineers was very sympathetic. And besides, everyone wanted to celebrate the Fourth in Studsburg. What was his name, Harry?”

  “Uh … Wright, I think.”

  “Yes, Colonel Wright. That’s it. He was a nice young man, and his own wife had had a baby not long before, and he sympathized with my problem. We had our new house already, but it was far away and I wanted my own doctor and the hospital I was used to, and Father Hartman for the baptism. Colonel Wright said a few days one way or the other wouldn’t matter.”

  “We’d all known about this move for a year,” Harry Stifter added. “And a lot of people just wanted to get out and get on with their lives. So they’d already moved away.”

  “But some who stayed in the area came back for the christening, Harry. The Rogerses? Remember?”

  “That’s right. And the Davidsons. They’re all in the pictures, Kix, everyone who was there.”

  Mrs. Stifler turned toward me suddenly with a dark look. “You don’t think that one of our guests killed that poor soul in the church basement, Kix, do you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But it must have been someone familiar with Studsburg, someone who could walk around and not be singled out as a stranger.”

  “No one in that town was a stranger,” Harry Stifler said. “I grew up there and I knew everyone, even the peculiar old birds that kept to themselves. When I married Carol, she moved into my parents’ house until we could afford a place of our own. We found out pretty quick that Maddie was coming along, and right about then we heard what they were going to do with the town, so it made sense to look for work somewhere else, which I did.”

  “How many of the old Studsburgers did you keep in touch with?” I asked.

  “Oh, lots of them,” Carol Stifler said. “We had a round-robin letter for about ten years until it petered out, and I had a huge Christmas card list. Several of the old people went to old-age homes, and others went to live with their families, I remember. That reduced the list a little. I still keep in touch with a lot of them, you know. Like the Degenkamps. They must have been about our age thirty years ago, don’t you think, Harry?”

  “Just about.”

  Carol Stifler laughed nervously. “I really don’t think old Henry Degenkamp murdered anyone, Kix.”

  But, of course, that was exactly the trouble when you knew all the possible suspects. They were all so nice. They were all your friends. You’d trusted them with your problems, your children, perhaps even your money. “I don’t either,” I said. “Anyway, I’m sure the sheriff’s people will take care of it.”

  The truth was, I thought the sheriff’s office probably wouldn’t take care of it. There had been such a casual attitude in the treatment of the remains, and Deputy Drago was pretty skeptical about the coroner turning up any useful information from an autopsy. What they had found, Deputy Drago had said, was little more than “a pile of bones.”

  It hurt and troubled me. After I’d had my coffee and the requisite piece of cake, I said good night and drove back to the motel. During the drive I kept thinking about the person, the soul, if you will, that had inhabited the pile of bones in the church basement. He had been a living, breathing person, and his life had been taken from him deliberately by a killer who had schemed cleverly, either killing him and dragging his body to the church basement or luring the unsuspecting victim down there to be killed. Whoever he was, he deserved better.

  5

  I parked my car and walked through the front entrance of the motel.

  “Christine,” someone said in a surprised voice, and I turned to find Father Hartman beside me.

  “Hello, Father. I didn’t know you were staying here, too.”

  “Have you heard what happened?” he asked.

  “Yes. I’m afraid I’m the one who found the body. I’ve just given a statement to the police.”

  “It’s all over the news. Do they have any idea who it is?”

  “Not unless they found some identification after I left. I kind of doubt that they will. Thirty years underwater hasn’t left much to identify.”

  “Come and join me for a drink,” he said. We were standing not far from the bar.

  “Thank you, I’d like that.”

  He ordered a Scotch on the rocks, and I asked for a glass of dry sherry. We sat at a small table designed more for intimate couples than an ex-nun and a graying priest nearing retirement.

  “They said on the news flash that the body had been found in the church basement.” His face showed his undisguised distaste.

  “Someone had chiseled out a stone in the wall supporting the stairs. The body was inside. I think it could have stayed hidden forever if the killer hadn’t gone looking for it. I’ve been trying to figure out why he came back after all these years.”

  “Maybe to reassure himself that the body was still there and wouldn’t be discovered by the tourists that are visiting Studsburg these days.”

  “He could have seen that just by looking at that stone wall. Maybe there was some identification in there that he wanted to retrieve, or maybe he just couldn’t keep away from the scene of his crime.”


  “They say that about killers,” Father Hartman said.

  “I wonder when it happened,” I mused.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the body’s been underwater for thirty years, but we don’t really know when the murder happened. That’s an old church, isn’t it?”

  “Very old.”

  “The person could have been killed forty or fifty years ago, or even more.”

  “Yes, you’re right. I hadn’t thought of that.” The priest frowned, looking thoughtful. After a moment he shook his head. “No, I’m afraid you’re not right, Chris. It couldn’t have happened before I came to Studsburg.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because after I’d been there a couple of years—I really can’t pinpoint the date—we noticed some disintegration in those supporting walls under both stairways, and I had them completely rebuilt. I can assure you there was nothing under those stairs. Certainly there wasn’t a body.”

  “That narrows it down then, doesn’t it?”

  “Substantially. And let me say something else. I’m a priest. I was in my church every day. I was everywhere in that church. I would surely have noticed a moved stone in the basement or fresh concrete or whatever they use to hold those stones together. If it happened during my tenure, it happened at the end.”

  “It must be hard to think of someone in your parish as a killer,” I said.

  “They were all good people, hard workers, the best of neighbors. I’ve never had a parish I liked better.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t a member of the parish,” I said. “If there were army men around those last months, one of them could have done it.”

  “I suppose that’s a possibility,” he said thoughtfully.