The Mother's Day Murder (8 page)

“Thanks, Doctor,” Officer Malcolm said.

The doctor looked startled. She stood beside the girl’s body and watched as we left the room.

9

There was a police car outside our house when we got back. Officer Malcolm thanked us and dropped us off on the driveway.

“I thought for a moment I just wasn’t recognizing her,” Joseph said as we walked toward the front door. “But that’s not Tina. I’ve never seen that girl before and she looks nothing like Tina. I’ll call her home when I get back to St. Stephen’s and make sure everything’s all right.”

“Joseph, I’d like you to stay overnight. I would have given you our guest room but it’s where Tina—or whoever she is—stayed and the police asked us not to touch it till they’ve had a chance to look at it. Jack and I are paying for your motel room and I think you’ll be very comfortable there. There are some things we should talk about.”

She looked at her watch. “If you think it’s important, I’ll stay.”

“I do. You can call St. Stephen’s and tell them. And call the Richmonds also. It looks like the detective is here, so I’ll have to answer more questions. Let’s go inside.”

The detective was upstairs looking at Tina’s room. Jack came down and I told him what had happened.

“This is weird. Is Sister Joseph staying over?”

“Yes. I told her I wanted to talk to her.”

“I’ll be going out in a while to get the makings of dinner so you two can be alone. Does she have any idea who this girl was?”

“None.”

“Well, they’re taking prints off the ax they found. I think it’s ours. They think it’s ours, too. Who the hell can that girl have been?”

“She was carrying Tina’s ID. I looked in the room before I was told not to. Tina’s Social Security card is in her bag.”

“I hope the real Tina is alive and well.”

“Joseph is checking on that now.”

It turned out to be rather a longer conversation than I had anticipated and before Joseph was off the phone, the detective came downstairs.

“You must be Mrs. Brooks,” he said affably. “I’m Detective Joe Fox. Sorry it took me so long to get here but they couldn’t find me.”

“That’s OK.” I offered my hand and we shook.

“Can we sit somewhere and have a little chat?”

“Let’s try the dining room,” I said.

We sat down at the table, which I used more for arranging my notes than for eating, and he took out his notebook and pen.

“Have you heard about the identification of the body?” I asked.

“Not yet. That’s where you just came from, right?”

“The dead girl is definitely the one who stayed here
for the last three nights, but Sister Joseph, the Superior of St. Stephen’s Convent, says it isn’t Tina Richmond.”

“Well, that’s a nice turn of events. I take it she’s here for me to talk to.”

“She’s on the phone now, talking to the real Tina Richmond’s parents.”

“Who live in New Jersey,” he said, looking at a page in his book.

“That’s right.”

“Well, I’ll be talking to her when you and I get finished.”

He went through everything Officer Malcolm had gone through and then said, “Wayne Malcolm tells me this young lady had some kind of problem that you refused to talk about.”

“Detective, at this point, having found out that the girl I thought was Tina isn’t even Tina, I don’t think I should talk about something that involves other people and was probably a total fantasy anyway. And if there’s any truth to it, does it involve the real Tina or this poor dead girl?”

He looked at his notebook, which lay in front of him on the table, and frowned. “I see your point, but the story might help us find out who this ‘poor dead girl’ is.”

“I don’t think so. I think it may just hurt the reputation of people who have nothing whatever to do with this girl.” I was trying to be as vague as possible. I certainly didn’t want him to suspect that Sister Joseph was the person I was protecting.

“I’ve talked to your husband,” he said. “He won’t say anything about it either.”

“What he knows he heard from me. He’s not a primary source.”

“I’ll let you go on this for the time being. But if I have to come back, I promise you I won’t be Mr. Nice Guy the second time around.”

“Fair enough.”

“Let’s see if Sister Joseph is off the phone.”

He came with me into the kitchen. The phone was on the counter and Joseph wasn’t there. We went into the family room and Joseph stood up as she saw us.

“I’m Sister Joseph,” she said.

“Detective Joe Fox. Would you like to come with me, Sister?”

I went outside and found Jack still rummaging through the garage.

“You done?”

“For the time being. He’s in the dining room with Joseph. You want to run your errand now so we won’t all starve?”

He gave me a grin. “I’m on my way. And I promise you, nobody will starve.”

The detective left about fifteen minutes later. He said he was finished with the bedroom upstairs, that he had removed everything he needed from the room. Joseph offered to stay there, to save us the expense of the motel, but I felt she would be more comfortable by herself.

I knew Eddie would be up soon and I wanted to get as much of our conversation out of the way as possible before he joined us. We sat in the family room and I asked about her phone call to the Richmonds.

“Tina is there—I talked to her—and she has no idea who would be masquerading as her. She said one thing
that was interesting. A few weeks ago she lost her pocket-book. It contained her wallet with a small amount of money, and some identification. She said her Social Security card was there. She thought she might receive the wallet back, minus the money—that often happens, you know; the thief throws away the bag after he’s robbed it—but it never came back, and just this week she applied for a replacement.”

“Where did this happen?”

“She said it was on a day that she was taking classes at the college.”

“So another student might have walked off with it.”

“That’s right. But she has no idea who that could be, or even if it was a student. She said she was carrying books so she didn’t notice it wasn’t on her arm.”

I knew exactly what she meant. When Eddie was born, I had to carry so many things, I found that occasionally I left my bag behind because other weights took its place on my arm. “The body that we saw a little while ago, you’re sure that wasn’t a student at the college?”

“I’m not sure. I know I said I’d never seen her before, but I really meant that wasn’t Tina. I couldn’t swear I’ve never seen that girl. But she isn’t a novice at St. Stephen’s.”

“Do you usually know all the students?”

“I do usually recognize them. This is very difficult. I’ve been thinking about that poor child, wondering if she might be a student, if she might be someone from town who drops in and listens to lectures. That happens, you know.”

“Someone will report her missing,” I said.

“When she came to you she was dressed in our novice’s habit?”

“Yes. I recognized it immediately when I opened the door. And Tina’s Social Security card was in her handbag. And a newspaper clipping of Tina’s parents with their picture.”

“So there was enough information that this young imposter could have posed as Tina.”

“Where did she get the habit from?”

“I suppose it’s not all that difficult to snatch one from the laundry.”

“You know,” I said, thinking about the days that Tina was here, “I suggested to her that she say her morning and evening prayers. The first morning, she woke up fairly late. In fact, I went upstairs after Jack left and rousted her.”

“So she might not have been on a nun’s schedule.”

“Yesterday she made a point of telling me she had said her prayers.” I opened my notebook. “Joseph, I have to tell you what this girl, whoever she is, said was a problem in her life. It involves you and this is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to talk to you about.”

“Go on.” She looked her usual implacable self. If she had any idea of what was coming, I certainly could not see any traces.

“This girl, I’ll call her Tina, told me that she was your natural child.” I had decided to say it as briefly as I could. The details, if Joseph wanted them, would come later.

“That’s quite an accusation,” she said.

“I want you to know, before you say anything else, I have not discussed this with the police. Neither has Jack.”

“Thank you. When is this birth supposed to have happened?”

“She said she was twenty.”

“Twenty years ago. Yes, that’s very convenient. I wasn’t at St. Stephen’s twenty years ago.”

“I see.” I didn’t know where to go from there. Of course, I wanted answers because in the answers might be something that would lead us to the killer of the girl who was still nameless. But I didn’t want Joseph to feel that she owed me an explanation of where she was and what she was doing twenty years ago. “If you don’t want to talk about it,” I said, “I’ll—”

“I think we must talk about it. There’s a dead girl in the hospital morgue, a girl who came to you and might still be alive if she hadn’t. She’s not likely to have fingerprints on record anywhere. I don’t suppose at her age she joined the army or the FBI. So finding out who she is and why she’s dead and who might have killed her aren’t going to be easy.”

“But your life is your business. When she told me this wild tale, I thought it was just that, a wild tale. I was hesitant about letting her stay here because I thought she might be psychotic, but she acted fairly normal. Until this morning. It appears that she took our ax out of the garage and chopped down a tree down the block and across the street, a tree that’s been the subject of a lot of neighborhood dissension.”

“Yes, my life is my business. As yours is yours. I don’t look forward to seeing it displayed publicly and talked about by strangers. Where did this girl say she was born?”

I turned a page in my notebook. “At Good Samaritan
Hospital in some town in Ohio. I have it here somewhere.”

“I know the hospital,” Joseph said. “I was a patient there once.”

I felt a cold shudder. “She said—” I swallowed. “She said she was adopted through God’s Love adoption agency.”

“But what we don’t know is whether this girl was speaking for Tina or speaking for her real self. And that’s crucial.”

“I agree. It would be easy enough to find out if Tina was adopted.”

“And what agency handled the adoption. Shall we start there?”

“Let’s.”

Joseph went to the kitchen and made the call. While she was talking, I heard Eddie talking to himself upstairs. I went up, got him out of his crib, and brought him down. I got a glass of milk and a couple of pretzels and took him to the family room to eat and drink. Joseph got off the phone just as he was getting started.

They made some conversation and Eddie offered her one of his pretzels, an act of generosity that surprised me. She assured him she wasn’t hungry and he went back to his snack.

When he was finished, we went outside, taking two summer chairs to the sandbox so we could continue our conversation.

“Tina is their natural child,” Joseph said, “the third of five children. She was born in New Jersey.”

“Then our nameless stranger was talking about herself, not about Tina.”

“Tina?” Eddie said.

“Tina’s gone home, Eddie.”

“OK,” he said. “Bye-bye.”

Joseph smiled as she watched him. “You do have to be careful, don’t you?”

“Very.”

“Well, why don’t we refer to your mysterious visitor as Anita? That’s the other name spelled backwards with an extra a.”

“Good idea.” I moved my chair a little distance away from the sandbox. “Joseph, what would motivate this stranger to concoct a story like the one she told me?”

“I can’t imagine. It’s hard to blackmail a nun who doesn’t have a great deal of money to pay. And what could she have wanted from you? You and Jack would never pay her.”

“None of that is clear. She said she lived in fear of you, that you had realized the relationship between you and that you might do something terrible to her.”

“That’s preposterous, don’t you think? I never met her. And if what she said was true, would she think I might hurt my own child?”

“If your position was threatened.”

“She certainly doesn’t sound very stable.”

“Joseph, I told the police that Anita had a problem but I refused to tell them what it was. Now that I have your denial, if they come back and ask again, I’ll tell them I have nothing to say.”

“I certainly appreciate that, but I don’t want you spending a night in jail on my behalf.”

“It would complicate my life, no doubt about it,” I said lightly. “Do you want me to continue to look into this?”

“I think we have a duty to try to find Anita’s killer. Whoever she is, whatever stories she’s told, she didn’t deserve what happened to her.”

10

Jack came home a little while later and told us in no uncertain terms that he was busy in the kitchen and not to be disturbed. He carried in two bags of groceries from our fancier supermarket, more food than I could imagine all of us eating twice over. Eddie wanted to see what Daddy was doing so I took him inside for a minute to watch Jack putting things in the refrigerator—and hiding them from me as he did so.

“No fair opening this,” he ordered.

“Yes, sir. I think we’ll take a walk and keep out of your way.”

“Sounds like a good idea.”

The rest of us set off for the nearby beach. Oakwood is on the Long Island Sound and a group of homeowners, including us, own a private beach on a quiet cove. It was still too cool to consider a dip, but it was always a nice place to walk and Eddie loved the sand.

The sun was shining when we got there and the air was warm and breezy. Eddie sat down in the sand and started to pull off his shoes.

“He certainly knows what he wants,” Joseph said.

“He sure does.” I took the shoes and socks and let him frolic.

“I think I should fill you in on some of my life, Chris, so that you can see the connections and lack of connections between me and the story this young woman told.”

“Joseph, I don’t want you to tell me anything that you would prefer to keep to yourself.”