The Christening Day Murder (16 page)

“You mean like a boyfriend?”

“Maybe.”

“Not that I can remember. But I was only eleven. I wasn’t
out much at night, except to go to baseball games. She went to those, too. You’d see her car in the lot near the field. You couldn’t miss it. It was an old Volkswagen with two little windows in the back. I bet it’s in a museum now.”

Her husband and son waved as they passed. They had been downstairs, probably to see where the body was found. It struck me that if you drove a distinctive car in a very small town, you couldn’t very well park in front of your lover’s house or everyone would know about it in ten minutes. But if you parked in front of the grocery store and walked down the block to where the newspaper was published, people would assume you were in the grocery store. And if you parked near the baseball field, you could easily slip away to the wooded area that was nearby. I remembered the aerial photograph of the town that Fred Larkin had showed me. He had pointed out the playing field and then moved the pointer just a bit to show me the woods where he had proposed to his wife. It wasn’t a big town, and you could probably walk from one end to the other in less than twenty minutes.

“Do you remember where that baseball field was?” I asked.

“Sure.” I followed as she walked away from the downtown area. “You can’t see anything now that would give you a clue, but it was over that way where it’s pretty flat. We had bleachers and everything. My brother used to play ball there.”

“And wasn’t there a wooded section somewhere near it?”

“That was off to the right. Let’s see. Look at that. I think they’ve left all the tree stumps there.” She pointed, and I saw them for the first time, like a field of piles. “It was very beautiful in the summer, very lush.”

“You said your brother played ball. Is he older than you?”

“Two years. He was in the eighth grade that year. He was the last class to graduate from Studsburg.”

“Do you think he’d talk to me.”

“Jerry? Sure. Why wouldn’t he? He was a terror, my
brother. But he doesn’t live upstate anymore. He lives near New York.”

“SodoI,” I said.

She took a small notebook out of her bag, flipped it open, and wrote on it. “You know, when I went over to pick up the class picture last night, my mother said something very odd. She said she wished she hadn’t mentioned that schoolteacher to you—she’d forgotten Miss Phillips’s name—that it could only stir up trouble. Do you have any idea what she was talking about?”

“Not yet, but I hope I will pretty soon.”

“That was a funny year as I remember it,” Amy said as she handed me the slip of paper with her brother’s name and phone numbers. “My father was already working in Rochester, which was a terrible commute, but they stayed in Studsburg till the end. They had put the house up for sale for a while when my father started commuting, but they didn’t sell it. I guess they stayed because they wanted Jerry to graduate.” She laughed. “Maybe they were afraid no other school would have him.”

“I’d appreciate your doing me a small favor,” I said. “Please don’t tell your mother I intend to talk to your brother about Miss Phillips.”

“There is something funny going on, isn’t there?”

“All I know is, I haven’t been able to find an adult to talk about her, even people who were responsible for her coming to Studsburg.”

“I wonder why.”

Her husband and son turned the corner of the back of the church and waved. As they got close, the boy said, “You should go down there, Mom. What a weird place that is where they found the body.”

“I’ll be right with you,” Amy said. She turned to me to shake hands and stopped, her hand raised. “You think that body in the church was Miss Phillips, don’t you?”

“I’m sure of it.”

“My God. And you think my parents know something about it?”

“They know something; I don’t know what. It’s something that seems to everyone’s benefit to keep secret. If I can find out why, maybe I’ll find out who killed her.”

She shook hands with me at last, and I took it to mean that she would not alert her parents.

“Will you let me know?” she said.

“I promise.”

I had sat in my spare, quiet room at the convent last night trying to figure out how to find Virginia Beadles.
If
she had married in the area, I might be able to locate her marriage license. But to do so, I might have to go through fifteen or twenty years of licenses. Since the ownership of the coffee shop had changed more than once since her marriage, I decided that was likely to be a dead end. Instead, I made it to the one bank in town minutes before they closed at noon.

I was getting pretty skilled at locating the oldest person present, and I made for a gray head at a desk. He turned out to be the manager, but he had no idea who Virginia Beadles was.

“When did you say she worked here?”

“I’m not sure, but it could have been as much as thirty years ago.”

“Well, I’ve been here for eight, and as I look around, I don’t see anyone who has that kind of longevity.”

“Maybe one of the tellers would remember someone who retired and still lives in the area,” I suggested.

“Good idea.”

I waited while he asked an older woman who was putting things in order. Even at a distance I could see her smile. He came back to his desk with something written on a scrap of paper.

“I hope you’re not a bill collector,” he said.

“I’m just trying to find Ginny Beadles. We have a connection from a long time ago.”

He dialed, and I listened to him make easy conversation with a stranger, something I have never learned to do. Finally he told her he had a “a lady here who’s trying to find Virginia Beadles, but she doesn’t know her new last name.” He listened, and I could hear the voice in his earpiece. He wrote something, said a few more comfortable phrases, and hung up.

“There you go.” He pushed the paper toward me. “I’d guess she lives about twenty minutes from here.”

I almost said, “Thanks a bunch,” but I couldn’t quite form the words.

Virginia Beadles had become Mrs. Mike Carpenter. I took a chance and drove there.

There are places in this country where you don’t have to be rich to own a house. Where land is plentiful, it is often cheap, and old houses they call a “fixer-upper” or a “handyman’s special” go for a song. The house the Carpenters lived in needed a carpenter without the capital. It needed a couple of coats of paint and probably some structural work. The front porch sagged, and you would have had a hard time finding a line that was perpendicular to the ground. Still, it had two stories, and I guessed it was more comfortable to live in than an apartment. A thin woman with very blond hair was picking up in the front yard when I parked at the edge of the road. She was wearing gray pants and old sneakers with a black jacket zipped up to the neck. She looked up and watched me approach.

“You lost?” she said.

“I hope not. I’m looking for Virginia Carpenter.”

“That’s me. I win the lottery or something?”

“Not that I know of. My name is Chris Bennett. I’m really looking for your daughter, Joanne.”

Her face sobered. “I don’t know what you mean. I don’t have a daughter.”

“Joanne Beadles,” I said.

“What’s your business here?”

“Mrs. Carpenter, a body was found a couple of weeks ago in the church in Studsburg.”

“That’s not my daughter,” she said quickly.

“How do you know?”

“What makes you think it’s Joanne?”

“It isn’t Joanne,” I said. “I know that.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“I’m a friend of some people who lived in Studsburg. I’m trying to find out who the woman was who was buried in the church. The sheriff isn’t trying very hard.”

“The sheriff never tries very hard except when he’s up for election.”

“Could we talk about Joanne?”

She looked at her left wrist, which was empty. “You got the time? My watch is broke.”

“It’s one.”

“He’ll be back soon. I can’t talk when he’s here.”

“If he comes, I’ll say I saw your milk can out front and I wondered if it was for sale.”

“It ain’t.”

We went inside. Before she sat down, she added wood to an iron stove in the corner of the living room. As I watched, the flames became visible through a small glass window in the front of the stove. She did something and a fan went on, carrying the warmth to the sofa where I was sitting.

“Is your daughter alive, Mrs. Carpenter?” I asked when she had sat down.

“Of course she’s alive. Why wouldn’t she be?”

“Can you tell me where she is?”

She looked down at the floor. The roots of her short blond hair were completely gray and her face was lined, although I didn’t think she was even seventy. “No, I can’t tell you. And I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I want to know about J.J. Eberling.”

“I don’t know about him. She worked for his wife.”

“Do you remember for how long?”

“A few months. Maybe more.”

“Did she talk to you about it?”

“She didn’t talk to me about anything.”

“But she was living at home at that time, wasn’t she?”

She didn’t answer. She reached for a pack of cigarettes and lit one, blowing smoke away from me, but the current of hot air from the wood stove brought it gently back. “She lived with me. For a while.”

“And then?”

“He got her a place to live.”

“Mr. Eberling?”

“Who else? We didn’t know the kind of people who could pay for extra apartments.”

“Why do you think he did that, Mrs. Carpenter?”

“Why do you think? Do I have to draw you a picture? She was his—” She broke off and inhaled sharply. It was almost a sob. She drew on the cigarette and turned to me, smoke issuing from her mouth. “Did you ever lose a child, Miss Bennett?”

“I lost a mother. When I was about your daughter’s age.”

“That can be rough,” she said. “I know. Joanne didn’t lose me. It was the other way around.”

“You think she was his girlfriend.”

“It doesn’t make it any nicer to put it that way. He was keeping her. A man thirty years older than her.”

“Did you ever ask her about it?”

“Sure I asked her. She was my daughter. She said she knew how to push him around and she told him she wanted to have her own place to live and he gave it to her.”

“Maybe it was true,” I said.

She smiled bitterly. “Sure. A nineteen-year-old kid knows how to push around a rich man and make him spend money on her. Only one way I know to do that.”

“You think she was pregnant?”

“I don’t know what I think.”

“Where is she, Mrs. Carpenter?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you’re sure she’s alive.”

“I’m not sure of anything anymore. I just know she was alive the last time I saw her.”

“When was that?”

She puffed on the cigarette. “She came back to me one day. Looked nice, had a nice outfit on. She was a nice-lookin’ kid, my Joanne. She said she was goin’ away. Wouldn’t say where, just she was goin’ away. She asked if I wanted to come with her.”

“She invited you to come along?”

“You could call it inviting me, yeah. She said the Eberlings were movin’ out of town—they were gonna flood it, everybody knew that—and she couldn’t work for them anymore. So she was leavin’. I said, ‘Tell me what’s goin’ on, Joanne. What’s goin’ on with you and that man? I won’t get mad at you, just tell me.’ She said it was nothing.”

“And that was it? She just left?”

“She gave me something.” She tamped out the cigarette in the ashtray next to her.

I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. “What did she give you?” I said finally.

“Money.”

“I see.”

“A lotta money. She pulled it out of her purse like she had it ready in case I said I wouldn’t go with her. It was ten hundreds. A thousand bucks.”

“That was a great deal of money.”

“You know how long I had to work to make a thousand bucks?”

“A long time.” If Studsburg was paying a teacher four thousand, it was a cinch the bank was paying a lot less than that for tellers.

“Anyway, that was it. She said good-bye, no kiss, no nothin’. Just good-bye. I never saw her again.”

“Did you report her missing?” I asked. I already knew she hadn’t. Deputy Drago had checked that.

“I called the police without giving my name. I asked how you report a missing person. The cop said you had to wait a coupla days because most people show up. Then he asked how old the person was, and when I said nineteen, he said you know adults can go where they please. I got the feeling he wasn’t too anxious to look for anyone if he could get out of it.”

“So that was it.”

“No, that wasn’t it,” she said irritably. “That was my kid, my only child, and I loved her, believe it or not. I said some things to her that last time I shouldn’ta said and I was sorry for it, but it was too late to take it back. I wanted to find her. So I went to the Eberlings—I found their new house, I don’t remember how—and I said I was Joanne’s mother and I wanted to know where she was. The woman was there and she said Joanne had quit a couple of weeks ago and they hadn’t seen her since. So I came back at night when I figured he’d be there and I said I knew about the apartment and I knew about what was going on and I wanted to know where my daughter was.”

I felt a surge of admiration for this woman who had obviously been alone in the world, obviously cared for her daughter, and had fought off her intimidations to confront a local god. “What did he say?” I asked.

“He said if I pursued this nonsense—that’s just how he put it—if I pursued this, he would get his lawyers after me, he would sue me for everything I had, and he would see to it that I never worked in this area again. He was a big guy—at least he looked pretty big to me, standing there in front of this house of theirs—and I’ll tell you, he scared the shit outa
me. I couldn’t afford a lawyer, I couldn’t prove anything. All I knew was my daughter was gone and I had a thousand dollars in cash she’d given me. That was it. And the cops weren’t too anxious to help. What would you have done?”

“I don’t know.”

“I kept the money for a long time. I figured she’d be back when she needed it. But she never did come back. So when Mike and me bought this house, I put it into the down payment.” She waved her hand toward the wall. “So that’s it. You’re lookin’ at it.”