The Christening Day Murder (10 page)

By that time it was after eight, and I sensed that we all needed a respite from Studsburg.

“I’m going home,” I said. “We’ve worn ourselves out and come up with nothing. Let’s just sleep on it.”

They assured me they had enjoyed seeing all the old faces again and promised to keep the paper handy. Harry got my coat, and I put it on and got my keys out of my bag.

“Don’t you have a pair of gloves, dear?” Carol said. “It’s gotten very cold out.”

I knew she was right. When I had arrived a couple of hours ago, the temperature had already begun to fall. So I reached into my pocket for the first time since my awful discovery in the basement of St. Mary Immaculate.

It was like a replay of that night. As I pulled my glove out of my pocket, something fell with a ping onto the tile floor
of the Stiflers’ foyer. Carol moved quickly to retrieve it as the sound rang a strong bell in my memory.
I
had picked something up off the floor of the church basement as I approached the opening in the wall
.

“Is this yours?” Carol asked, handing me something.

I took it in my hand. “It’s from the church,” I said, “from St. Mary Immaculate. It was on the floor that night when I found the body.”

“You mean the killer dropped it?” Harry said.

“Either that or the body did. The hand was extended toward the opening.”

Carol made a face of distaste.

“Well, let’s see what it is,” Harry said.

The thing was small, thin, oval, slightly dirty, and gold. I rubbed a fleck of caked mud off it. “It’s a miraculous medal,” I said. Although it couldn’t have been more than half an inch long, the engraving on it was a familiar one, the Virgin Mary standing atop a globe representing the world, her foot crushing down a serpent. Medals that size are often family gifts to a newborn, while a larger one might be given to a child at confirmation. Like many Catholics, I wear one myself. “He must have come for it, and when I surprised him, he dropped it and ran.”

I turned it over and rubbed the underside. “There’s something here. Initials, I think.” I moved closer to the light. “ ‘A.M.,’ ” I read.

“I’ll get the list.” Carol dashed away.

“There’s a date, too, I think. It looks like …” I shook my head. “I don’t believe this. The numbers are eight, twelve, ninety-eight. It must mean 1898. That’s more than ninety years ago.”

“So it couldn’t have belonged to the dead girl.”

“But she could have ripped it off her killer, and he may not have discovered it was missing until the next day, when it was too late to go back for it.”

“Here’s the list,” Carol said. “Take your coat off, Kix.
I’m not letting you go till we figure out whose medal that is.”

I tossed my coat on a chair and sat down beside Carol.

“Here are the M’s,” she said, pointing to the first one on her list, Carl Marsden. In parentheses next to his name was the name of his wife, Marian. She moved her finger down the column. All the men’s names were later in the alphabet than C, and none of their wives’ names began with A. We checked the children’s names, which were also listed, and found an Amy Mulholland.

“Do you remember her, Harry?” Carol asked. “It could have been her grandmother’s medal.”

“The Mulholland kids were young. I don’t think she was more than ten or twelve. How old was that girl in the church supposed to be?”

“Twenties,” I said.

“Not a likely match. There’s a big difference between a ten-year-old girl and a twenty-five-year-old. That coroner may not be very experienced, but I’d think he could tell ten from twenty.”

“Even so,” Carol said, “I’m going to call the Mulhollands.” She took the list and went into the kitchen. We listened quietly as she deftly made conversation with a woman she hadn’t known very well and hadn’t seen for three decades, starting with her recent visit to Studsburg and how all those wonderful memories had come back. Harry laughed out loud at one point. But when she started asking about the Mulholland children, it was clear they were alive and well.

“Amy lives in Rochester,” she said, returning to the living room, “and teaches kindergarten.”

“So we’re still sure it wasn’t someone who lived in town,” I said. “Maybe Joanne Beadles had a grandmother whose initials were A.M. Let’s see what the sheriff’s office finds out. We’ve done enough for one day.”

I put my coat back on and thanked them for everything. This time I put the medal carefully in my change purse. It
was the only piece of solid evidence that anyone was likely to find.

   The new piece of evidence had complicated the picture, rather than simplifying it. The miraculous medal could not have been given to the victim either at birth or at any other celebration. Assuming only average competence, the coroner could not have mistaken a twenty-year-old woman for one in her sixties—any more than he could have mistaken the remains of a ten-year-old for those of a twenty-year-old. So the medal was originally owned either by someone in the victim’s family or by her killer. Perhaps she had grabbed for him as he attacked her, breaking a chain he wore and clinging to the medal in death.

But that would pretty much rule out J.J. Eberling. First of all, he wasn’t Catholic. Secondly, he was dead. True, his daughter could have dug up the body, but having met her, I didn’t think she had. But if J.J. Eberling hadn’t killed the woman in the church, what was his reason for holding back the last copy of the
Studsburg Herald
in the library’s collection? And why had he handed them out that last day and then not given the final issue to the library?

Nothing made sense. All I was sure of was that J.J. Eberling had had more than an eye for the young girls who worked in his home. Darlene Moore’s story had been very compelling, and I was sure Joanne Beadles had been subjected to the same abuse as her predecessor. But had the outcome been murder?

As I thought about the case, about the photographs in the album and the newspaper, I began to feel a strange sensation of displacement. When I saw the old pictures, I began to imagine how those young people looked today, and when I met people, like the Eberlings and Darlene Moore, I tried to see them as they had been in the last days of Studsburg. I smoothed out wrinkles and colored gray hair. I wanted to feel them as young people. It was as if they had two separate existences, a now life and a then life, with nothing between
but a black lake, and the time between those two lives was exactly the span of my own life, which had been anything but a dark lake.

Lying in bed with a flurry of old snapshots racing through my head, I knew that to make sense of what had happened, to come to some satisfactory and satisfying conclusion to this case, I would somehow have to draw the two lives together and make them one.

   I willed myself to sleep longer than usual the next morning. Until I heard about Joanne Beadles’s dental X rays, I was at loose ends.

The phone rang at nine, as I was finishing my coffee. I carried the cup to the phone.

“Kix? This is Carol Stifler. Am I too early?” She sounded wide-awake and eager.

“It’s never too early.”

“Harry called his mother last night. They never got a copy of the last
Herald.
”

“Really,” I said. I felt a little prickle. “Did they leave town when you did?”

“That’s just it, they didn’t. They helped us pack that morning and load our car. We had a long drive, and I wanted to get the baby to our new apartment as soon as possible. Harry’s parents were just moving a few miles away, and most of the furniture had already been moved. I remember the water and electricity were going to be turned off at noon, no matter what, and Harry’s mother wanted to go through the house one more time after we left to make sure she had everything she wanted to take with her. She thinks she left just before noon.”

“Maybe J.J. Eberling was gone by then.”

“Mom doesn’t think so. She told Harry she was sure he’d promised to be on the Main Street bridge till everyone in town was gone. He’d promised a terrific last paper.”

“Well, he certainly delivered that,” I said.

“She also said there were people standing around the bridge looking for him.”

“Then sometime between when he gave you your paper and when your in-laws left Studsburg, he changed his mind about distributing it.”

“Isn’t that peculiar?” Carol said. “I mean, he must have known what was in it when he sent it to the printer. Unless he looked through those pictures that morning and found something.”

“Carol, I really appreciate Harry’s calling his mother about this.”

“Well, we both think you’re more likely to dig up the truth than the sheriff’s office.”

I agreed, but I wanted to hear from Deputy Drago anyway. Sooner or later it would be evidence like a dental match that would confirm the identity of the body.

While floating in my special limbo, I scrubbed down my house, making up for missing my morning walk. I was just about to take out Aunt Meg’s precious china from the china cabinet to wash it when the phone rang.

“Miss Bennett, this is Deputy Drago. I’ve got some news for you.”

“Yes, go on.”

“We found Dr. Sorenson’s files in another dentist’s office. Dr. Sorenson retired about fifteen years ago, and he went back through the files himself. Joanne Beadles was one of his patients, just as you surmised. But her X rays absolutely rule out her being that body.”

“I see.”

“And it looks like we’ve heard from all the dentists in the area, and they’re all a negative. So as far as we’re concerned, she’s still a Jane Doe.”

“Is that the end of your search?” I asked.

“We’ll look in a wider circle for a dentist, but frankly, if that woman lived in or around Studsburg, it stands to reason she went to someone around here. People don’t drive a hundred miles to have a tooth filled.”

“And if she came from somewhere else?”

“Then we’ve got the whole country to consider, and that’s kind of much. By the way, since you mentioned the Beadles woman, I took the liberty of looking her up in the old files. She was never reported missing that I can find.”

“I guess I got some bad information,” I apologized.

“Hey, I’m glad you cared enough to come forward,” he said. “And if you hear anything else, you know where to find me.”

I was somewhat cheered by his turnaround; at least if I reached a point where I needed help, he might give it. But the dentists had confirmed my suspicion that not only was the body not that of a Studsburger, it might belong to someone who was only passing through the area. And Carol Stifler’s call had reinforced my feeling that J.J. Eberling was somehow involved in the murder. Which left me knowing a few facts but still pretty much in the dark.

I knew I owed Darlene Moore a call to tell her the body wasn’t Joanne Beadles. She was home, and she listened with little comment to my brief explanation.

I asked her a few more questions, but she didn’t add much to what she had told me during my visit. She had gotten her job through the high school placement office, and she didn’t know who had had the job before her. As for Joanne, Darlene had told her why she was quitting, but Joanne had laughed and said she could handle anything.

What I was left with was more of a mystery than I had started with, and also a problem. I had unintentionally picked up a piece of hard evidence, and I knew it was my duty to turn it over to the sheriff’s office, but something in me rebelled. With all the fanfare, neither the sheriff nor the coroner had turned up anything except the bullet and the clothes on the body. If I gave the sheriff the miraculous medal, he’d probably make a media event out of it. It would make him look good when he’d done nothing to deserve it, and it probably wouldn’t advance the case.

Instead, I called Arnold Gold.

“You turn something up?” he said when he came on.

I told him briefly what had happened and then explained about the medal. “Am I obliged to turn it over to the sheriff?” I asked.

“I get the feeling you’re asking the wrong question. Let’s talk about a hypothetical situation. Someone picks up something at a crime scene and puts it away and forgets it. Is that aboutit?”

“That’s it exactly. Hypothetically,” I added.

“It’s not unreasonable for a person to put something in a pocket and forget it for months. Didn’t you ever stuff a couple of dollars in a pocket at a toll booth and put the coat away till fall? Happens to me all the time.”

I smiled at Arnold’s reasoning. Strange as it may seem, it was very unlikely to happen to me, because I am so used to walking around with almost no money in my wallet after years of leaving the convent with fifty cents in my pocket. If I were missing a couple of dollars, I’d know right away. “It sounds possible,” I said hesitantly to allow his reasoning to continue.

“Why would this hypothetical person not want to turn this evidence over to the law enforcement people?”

“Because they’re dragging their feet, Arnold. Because I know more than they do at this point. Unfortunately, what I know doesn’t come together.”

“Nothing comes together till the last paragraph, Chrissie,” Arnold said in what I had come to recognize as his style. “And since you know my general opinion of law enforcers, I’d say the longer that hypothetical piece of evidence stays lost, the better off it is. As long as I don’t need it to defend a client.”

“I promise you don’t.”

“So where do you go from here?”

“With J.J. Eberling dead and no hot prospect for an X ray match with anyone living in town, I think I ought to talk to someone who was likely to know most of the people who worked in Studsburg even if they didn’t live there.”

“And who’s that?”

“The mayor,” I said.

“Go to it, girl.”

I was on the road early Thursday morning, passing signs for towns with names like Roscoe and Deposit and my own favorite, Fishs Eddy. By ten o’clock I was already approaching Binghamton. Getting an early start had not been difficult; what had been tough was telling Jack I might not be back for the weekend.

At Binghamton there are several options open to the driver. You can swing north toward Syracuse and the thruway or continue west along 17 toward Elmira, which was my intended route. Or, I discovered, I could do neither and head northwest toward Ithaca. Ithaca was where the Degenkamps lived, according to Carol Stifler’s list, and with a sudden change of direction, I opted for that. An hour later I was just outside the Cornell campus.