Corpus Christmas

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

WARNER BOOKS EDITION

Copyright © 1989 by Margaret Maron

All rights reserved.

Mysterious Press books are published by Warner Books, Inc.,

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue

New York, NY 10017

Visit our Web site at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
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First eBook Edition: May 2009

ISBN: 978-0-446-55751-1

Contents

Copyright Page

Prologue

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Epilogue

THE CRITICS COME BEARING RAVES FOR
CORPUS CHRISTMAS
AND MARGARET MARON

“One of the field’s sharpest writers. Her spare, elegant prose and flair for characterization are showcased in CORPUS CHRISTMAS….
A fine read.”

—Greensboro News & Record

“A Christmas gift for mystery fans, as full of surprises and as satisfying as a rich holiday dessert.”

—
Southern Pines Pilot
(NC)

“Impressive… strongest on characterization and atmosphere.”

—Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

“Maron writes with wit and sophistication.”

—USA Today

“There is no one who delivers more pure enjoyment than Margaret Maron.”

—San Diego Union-Tribune

“Her characters spring to life.”

—Boston Globe

“No writer is better at conveying a sense of place than Maron.”

—Cleveland Plain Dealer

By Margaret Maron

DEBORAH KNOTT NOVELS

Storm Track

Home Fires

Killer Market

Up Jumps the Devil

Shooting at Loons

Southern Discomfort

Bootlegger’s Daughter

SIGRID HARALD NOVELS

Fugitive Colors

Past Imperfect

Corpus Christmas

Baby Doll Games

The Right Jack

Bloody Kin

Death in Blue Folders

Death of a Butterfly

One Coffee With

SHORT STORY COLLECTION

Shoveling Smoke

I
N THE MID
-1820
S
E
RICH
B
REUL’S GRANDFATHER
parlayed three leaky river barges and the opening of the Erie Canal into a modest fortune. During the Civil War, Erich Breul’s
father added a second fortune running blockades. Erich Breul himself was the first of his family to be sent to Harvard—primarily
to learn the art of managing money— and his postgraduate trip to Europe was meant to complete the family’s transformation
from flannel cap to silk hat in three generations.

Like many young scions whose lives were destined for the administration of settled wealth, Erich had developed a taste for
fine art during his college years and Europe provided an ideal opportunity to pursue that interest.

To the elder Breul’s dismay, young Erich’s proposed year stretched to eight. Fortunately, Mr. Breul was healthy and vigorous
at the time and he was prepared, within reason, to indulge his son’s acquisition of culture. Times were changing and Mr. Breul
was shrewd enough to change, too.

In Europe Erich immediately grasped what his freebooter father only dimly sensed: Culture could purify and legitimize the
crude and occasionally bloody foundations that too often underlay even modest financial empires.

Yet it was more than that.

Young Erich Breul genuinely liked pictures and he made a substantial effort to cultivate an eye for adventurous art, especially
since his allowance did not stretch to safely pedigreed old masters. He disdained the stuffy salon painters and also avoided
the impressionists, thinking them too superficial. Instead, he was instinctively attracted by that mixture of dignity and
daring found in the work of expatriate Americans like Whistler and Sargent. He had his portrait painted that first winter
by the young Italian virtuoso, Giovanni Boldini; and although a sympathy for noble sentiment drew him to intimist painters
like Tranquillo Cremona and Arcangelo Guidini, his passion for bravura technique led him as far afield as Adolphe Monticelli.

In later years he liked to think he would have bought a Van Gogh had he seen that artist’s work.

For eight years, crates of pictures arrived on the piers of New York with predictable regularity. A bewildered Mr. Breul paid
the freight. He might not understand his son’s preoccupation with collecting art but he continued to underwrite the expense
since young Erich had, while collecting Ferdinand Hodler in Switzerland, also collected Fraulein Sophie Fürst, a distant cousin
with a sizable dowry and trim ankles that flashed beneath her proper skirts.

When the newlyweds finally followed their treasures to America in 1887, Mr. Breul established them at 7 Sussex Square. Sophie
decorated with late-Victorian opulence and Erich turned the cavernous ballroom into a personal art gallery.

As was the fashion in those days, pictures were hung in the salon style popular in Europe. In frames monumentally carved and
gilded, they were stacked on the walls from chair rail to ceiling, one above the other, with little consideration for size
or shape and with almost no space between each frame.

The collection spilled into the formal drawing room, leaped the great hall to the library and dining room, and still continued
to grow: George Inness; Henry Creswell; William Carver Ewing; and Walter Sickert, a student of Whistler’s with whom Erich
had caroused in London before his marriage to Sophie. Almost by accident he acquired a decent Chandler Grooms and a better
than average John La Farge.

Old Mr. Breul thought it a deplorable waste of money but he loved his son and for Christmas one year even gave him a set of
Winslow Homer’s marine drawings which had caught his eye and reminded him of his blockade-running days.

Despite Erich Breul’s continued passion for pictures, he did not disappoint his father’s hopes once he was home. He may have
lacked his grandfather’s gritty pioneer spirit and his father’s ruthless zest and acumen but he eventually shaped himself
into a dutiful businessman and, after the crash of 1893, even managed to recoup most of the losses.

Only one child was born of his happy union with Sophie Fürst. In due time Erich junior grew to manhood, attended Harvard like
his father, and departed for his own
wander jahr
in Europe, where he was struck and killed by a team of runaway horses in a narrow Paris street two days before his twenty-second
birthday.

Three months later, still dazed by his death, Sophie stumbled in front of the electric trolley that ran along the bottom of
Sussex Square.

When his son’s effects arrived from Europe, Erich Breul was touched to find a few crude pictures in his steamer trunks. It
didn’t matter that the pictures were dreadful— Erich could remember some mistakes he himself had made when he first began
collecting—the tragedy was that the boy’s life had been cut short before his eye could mature.

Heartbroken, he’d stored his son’s possessions next to the trunk that held his memorial to Sophie: her nightdress, her autograph
album, a lace handkerchief that still breathed the faint trace of her toilet water, along with a hundred other intimate bits
and scraps that he couldn’t bear to give away.

There was no question of another marriage for him, another child. He drew up a will that would turn 7 Sussex Square into a
museum to house in perpetuity the pictures he’d collected; and although he continued to function—to work, to dine with friends
at his club, to refine his collection—when the great influenza epidemic of 1918 struck, he succumbed almost gratefully.

Thursday, December 10

S
NOW WAS PREDICTED BY SUNDAY AND A CHILL
morning rain had drenched the city streets but it had stopped by ten A.M. when Rick Evans arrived at Sussex Square, that
little gem of urban felicity down in the East Twenties. He paused a moment, propped his tripod on the wrought-iron fence which
enclosed the tiny park, uncapped the lens of the camera slung around his neck, and slowly panned the area.

Unlike the broad avenues of commerce where New York’s glamorous stores were bedizened with tinsel and glitter, Christmas down
here approached in a resolutely nineteenth-century fashion that was less intimidating to someone born and reared in a small
college town in Louisiana. The solid townhouses that ringed Sussex Square were built of stone, not wood; but most wore heavy
wreaths of fresh evergreens, waxed fruits, and lacquered nuts that gleamed in the weak winter sunlight with a homelike familiarity.

Number 7 was twice as wide as any of its neighbors and bore a small brass plaque that informed passersby that this was the
Erich Breul House, built in 1868 and open to the public since 1920.

Rick Evans focused carefully on the brass plaque, then retrieved his tripod and walked up the broad marble stoop to the recessed
doorway, a doorway so imposing that he automatically wiped his boots on the outer mat before entering the marbled hall.

Black velvet ropes, looped through brass stanchions, formed a walkway to a long Queen Anne tavern table where a middle-aged
docent sat with a cash register on one side and a selection of brochures, books, and postcards on the other. The docent looked
up from her knitting and peered at him in nearsighted hopefulness; but when the young man’s camera case and folded tripod
came into focus, her smile faltered with disappointment. Only that photographer she’d been told to expect; not a paying sightseer
wishing a tour of the house.

From an alcove at the rear of the vaulted entrance hall, a young black woman saluted him with a friendly wave of her steno
pad as her high-heeled boots clicked through a doorway that had once led to the butler’s pantry but was now the director’s
office.

On the left, midway the depth of the hall, stood a bushy fir tree, at least ten feet tall, but dwarfed by the massive proportion
of the carved marble fireplace. The tree was surrounded by open boxes of ornaments, a tall aluminum stepladder, tangles of
candle-shaped tree lights, and three women dressed in urban-casual woolens. As Rick Evans approached them, the light floral
scent of their perfumes mingled with the fir’s woodsy aroma and for a moment he felt himself unaccountably, profoundly homesick
for Louisiana and Christmas in his mother’s house.