The Christmas Night Murder (15 page)

It was a question neither of us could answer.

“You've been very helpful,” I said. “And your baby is very beautiful. I hope you have a wonderful New Year.”

“Thank you. I hope you sort everything out. Would you like to see Julia's letters?”

“If you have them.” Her offer surprised me.

“I'm sure they're with my college things. My mother can show you where they are. She's just coming up the walk. If you go back with her, it'll give me time to get dressed. She hates to see me like this at lunchtime.”

Sunny Gallagher was one of those beautiful women who can tramp around in the snow and end up looking like an ad for a fur coat. It was her good looks her daughter had inherited and they had matured well. She took me to her house, which was only a few blocks away from her daughter's but in a more expensive neighborhood. Here the houses had larger plots and two-car garages. Inside she had the evidence of many years of marriage and home ownership, a crowded china cabinet, a living room furnished with traditional pieces, carpeting with a few worn spots. The Christmas tree was soaring, rising into a cathedral ceiling that was hung with evergreen branches. The scent of Christmas was everywhere.

“There's a carton in Miranda's closet that has all her college notebooks and papers,” Sunny said. “I can bring it down here if you like.”

“Whatever is convenient.”

“Why don't you come up with me? I may need some help.”

We went to a second floor with greenery on the balcony railing. In Miranda's room, a sweet room with a lot of white and well-taken-care-of furniture, there were candles with lightbulb flames at every window and more greenery on the sills. Sunny went to the closet and hauled out a fair-sized carton.

“This is it. I can get it to the stairs and maybe we can both get it down.” She pushed it to the top of the stairs and we bumped it down to the bottom. Then she pushed it into a large, sunny family room at the back of the house.

I thanked her and got to work, first removing a top layer of spiral notebooks, each labeled with the name and
number of a course. Not anxious to wear out my welcome, I didn't linger over what I considered irrelevant. Sunny was eager to get back to her daughter's house and oversee the fifth day of her granddaughter's life.

“Did you know Julia?” I asked as I dug deeper in the carton.

“Ever since the girls became friends. Ten years anyway. Maybe more.”

“Were you surprised when Julia decided to enter a convent?”

“Not really. Julia was always a quiet child. She didn't seem to have much interest in boys and she liked to help out at the church. And there was the problem with her mother.” She said it as though I were already familiar with Serena Farragut's life.

“Did you know Serena?”

“A little.”

I had reached a folder of what looked like essays. Miranda had analyzed a Yeats poem, attempted a short story, and described a professor of philosophy in three typewritten pages. But there were no letters, and I laid the folder on the rug near the notebooks and textbooks I had piled on the floor.

“The grandmother was quite a woman,” Sunny volunteered. “Mrs. Cornelius Farragut. A very grand lady who was what my father used to call a pillar of the church. She may have been born in that house on Hawthorne Street, I'm not sure, but I know she brought up her son there. That was before my husband and I moved to Riverview.”

“But he lived elsewhere for a while, didn't he?” I asked, turning the pages of a scrapbook with pressed flowers and invitations to dances and snapshots of college kids.

“I don't know where he lived before he moved back with her. Her husband had died and she didn't want to give up that big old house, although I once heard what the heating bill was and I don't think we could have afforded it for one winter season.”

The scrapbook had nothing I was interested in and I set it aside. “It's a beautiful house,” I said, “from the outside. I don't blame her for wanting to keep it.”

“Walter's family moved back when Julia was a child,
four or five. She became friends with Miranda in third grade, I think.”

“I heard that Foster was a problem.”

“There was a streak of violence in him. When children are young, you never know whether it's something they'll outgrow. Of course you hope so and you give children the benefit of the doubt, especially when the parents seem to be sympathetic. But Foster didn't outgrow being a bully and a petty thief. Walter was able to hush things up, to make set-dements so people wouldn't press charges.”

“So there was never any official record of what he'd done.”

“Absolutely nothing. And Julia never talked about him. It was as if she had no brother, as if she just wanted him to go away and not exist anymore.”

Her description was chilling. “Do you think he might have hurt Julia?”

“It wouldn't surprise me. But don't expect to get anyone in that family to confirm anything. Walter always looked the other way and old Mrs. Farragut probably thinks to this day that her grandchildren are the world's most perfect people. Personally, although I'm no expert on why people crack up, I always thought Serena couldn't handle that boy, and going off to a nice quiet sanitarium was her way of avoiding the problem.”

The letters were in the bottom of the carton, about an inch of them tied with ordinary string. I took them out. “You may be right,” I said. “It sounds like an unhappy family.”

“I think it was. I think that poor girl did everything she could to separate herself from them, and when the convent failed, she did what her mother had done. It was very tragic.”

“Did you go to Julia's funeral?”

“Miranda and I both went. I was surprised only two nuns came.”

“The family wanted it that way. They asked that the convent not come out.”

Sunny shook her head. “Sad.”

“I have the letters.” I put everything else back and stood up. There were several letters in the pack, most of them
from names I did not know. But the Julia Farragut letters were together at the bottom, the first letters Miranda had received in college. I put the rest of them on top of the carton. “I'll give these back,” I promised.

“I hope they tell you what you're looking for. That priest has been missing for days now, hasn't he?”

“Since Christmas Night.”

“I don't know why they left her alone that night,” she said, as though we were still talking about Julia. “A delicate, disturbed child. Somebody should have been looking after her.”

We drove back to Miranda's house and I picked up my car. It was past noon and I wanted a quiet, warm place to read the letters.

I sat in Father Grimes's study and opened the envelope with the earlier date. Father Grimes was out and the housekeeper insisted on making a tray for my lunch, but it hadn't come yet and I wasn't feeling hungry for anything except the contents of Julia's letters.

The paper she had written on was a fine quality white with her monogram on top of the first sheet. The date was late September, the handwriting clear and flourished, as though written by someone with artistic talent. As Miranda had described, the letter detailed the life of a novice at St. Stephen's. Julia's activities were all very familiar to me from the five A. M. rising for morning prayers to the household charges, classes, reading, and early bedtime. She mentioned names that I knew, among them Angela, whom she liked and admired, and Sister Clare Angela, the superior, whom she found somewhat distant. In this first letter there was no mention of Sister Mary Teresa, but “Father Hudson River” earned a few lines indicating her respect for him.

She said her parents and grandmother had been to visit the previous Sunday and how glad she was to see them. In the next sentence she wrote that she had heard nothing from her “Sweet Doubter” but that she hadn't really thought she would.

When she had pretty much covered all aspects of her new life, adequately and rather eloquently, I thought, she asked a bunch of questions for Miranda to answer. What
was she studying? What were the professors like? Was she dating as she had said she would or was she sitting in the dorm thinking of Tony? (I assumed that was the Tony Miranda had eventually married.) The tone and the questions were very eighteen-year-oldish. She sounded like a sweet young girl enjoying and sharing a new experience, nothing more or less. From what she said I could not have determined whether she would stick out her novitiate or give it up at the end of a year as some girls did. She certainly didn't seem unhappy or stressed or ill or suicidal.

The second letter was quite different. The first page was a rapturous comment on Miranda's first letter to her. On the second page she returned to life at St. Stephen's, but the tone was more sober. She was starting to become introspective, to ask herself questions, to think about how she fit into the religious community. Father McCormick was helping, and he was helping, too, to work out unspecified problems that she had not felt free to discuss with anyone before. Then there was Sister Mary Teresa,

a woman, I suppose, about Grandma's age but whose life could not have been more different. She has taken an interest in me, I'm not sure why, but I am grateful for it. Sometimes when I sit by myself on a bench behind the chapel and think of where I am going, I feel that forty years from now I would like to be like this lovely woman, lending a hand to a novice. And then I laugh because it's so far away and there is so much to come in between and who knows if there will even be novices by then! But I hope so. It's a good life, Miranda.

But further along her upbeat tone cooled. Grandmother Farragut had told her her mother was not well. The doctor was changing the medication and maybe it would have a good effect; everyone hoped so. Father McCormick was wonderful.

I think of him more as the big brother I never had than as the counselor I know he is. And I need a counselor now. I need something to get me through these difficult days. I am so worried about my mother. I should have
taken her with me to St. Stephen's. She would like it here, That's silly, isn't it?

There was a break in the letter at that point, and when Julia picked it up again, she dated it a few days later. The handwriting was now less perfect. It sprawled as though the writer were in a great hurry. She mentioned her mother again, then said she had not been sleeping well, that she had had disturbing dreams and often woke up confused. Sister Mary Teresa was there to help and Father Hudson River had not failed her. She had even received a card from her “Sweet Doubter” and that had helped to cheer her.

There wasn't much more. I could tell from the date that the terrible night of Thanksgiving was not far away, that the worst—or second worst—night of her young life was just ahead of her.

There was a knock on the door and the housekeeper came in with my lunch, a bowl of good-smelling soup, a sandwich, some fruit, cookies, and coffee. Father Grimes was well taken care of. I thanked her and she left quickly.

As I ate I read the letters a second time. Then I looked at them page by page, inspecting the handwriting. The deterioration was striking. When I compared the first page of the first letter with the last page of the second letter, I could hardly believe they had been written by the same person.

I finished my lunch, expressed my thanks, and drove back to St. Stephen's. Upstairs in the superior's office I showed the letters to Joseph and told her how I had spent my morning.

She looked up from the second letter and her face was masked in sorrow. “What is clear is that she was confused and she recognized her confusion. This letter may have been her last or only attempt to get the truth out.”

“The truth about her brother,” I said.

“And now the brother is out of prison and shopping for groceries with his grandmother. I wonder how much his grandmother knows.”

“Everything Julia committed to her diary. She knew Julia had been writing in her diary before she committed suicide. I'm sure she read those pages after hiding them from the police.”

“We'll never see those pages, Chris. Even if we knew for certain that they existed and that Mrs. Farragut had them, if she's kept them secret this long, she would destroy them before she would let anyone read them. If you saw the two of them together today, it means she's helping her grandson back into society, and I can't fault her for that. It's certainly better than abandoning him. The question is whether he kidnapped Hudson and, if so, what he's done with him.”

“And why he may have killed Sister Mary Teresa.”

“That may not be too hard to explain. Suppose Foster befriended her after Julia left St. Stephen's, or after Julia died. Only two nuns went to the funeral. They must have been very visible and would surely have spoken to the family and signed the book. Julia may have spoken of Mary Teresa when she was home. From these letters it's clear there was a bond between them. If Foster wanted to keep tabs on the goings-on at St. Stephen's, especially what was happening to Hudson, what better way than to keep in touch with a nun who was fond of Julia and who may well have believed the story about Hudson?”

“I asked her about it,” I said, remembering her response. “She said Sister Clare Angela had said it should never be discussed.”

“And Mary Teresa would never disobey Sister Clare Angela's caution, not after seven years, not even with a change of circumstance. Let's look further. Whoever was abusing Julia, whether it was the father or the brother, that person knew she had never told anyone. If she had, someone—a friend, a teacher—would have done something about it.”

“I agree,” I said. “Miranda Gallagher would have told her mother. What Julia did was try to handle it herself by leaving the house. Only it was too late. She'd been hurt too badly to help herself.”

“But Foster knows Julia didn't talk about it. If she had told Mary Teresa, Mary Teresa would have brought it to the attention of Sister Clare Angela or the Farraguts. There was no seal of the confessional on her conversations with Julia. Only a confession to a priest is sealed. So Foster feels safe. He stays in touch with Mary Teresa and one day she writes and tells him that Hudson is coming to visit. She also
knows, because we all knew, that he was stopping in. Buffalo on Christmas Eve to visit friends.”