The Christening Day Murder (26 page)

“Sergeant Brooks.”

“Jack, it’s Chris.”

“Hi. What’s up?”

“I’ve got it all now. There’s just one document I’d like to research. Do you think you can get me a birth certificate from fifty-seven years ago?”

“What city?”

“Erie, Pennsylvania,” I said, reading from the address on the letter from Syracuse. “Candida Phillips. The mother’s name was Shirley.”

“Anything special you want to know?”

“The father’s name.”

“I’ll call you tonight. You be at the convent?”

“Yes.”

“Talk to you then.”

I left a five on the table and took the suitcases to the car.

   I was sitting with the nuns in the community room when he called. The television set was on, but only one or two were watching. Some were reading the paper, one doing
embroidery, one writing a letter. I had told them I was pretty sure I knew who and why, and I was sorry, I couldn’t talk about it. When I was called to the phone, I was glad to leave them.

“OK,” Jack said without introduction. “You were right on the year and the mother. I can’t help you on the father. It’s recorded as unknown. I take it that doesn’t surprise you.”

“It doesn’t surprise me at all.”

“So where to now?”

“To see the father,” I said.

Fred Larkin opened the front door and stood barring my way in. “I think we’ve had our last conversation, Miss Bennett. So if you’ll just turn yourself around and get in your car and go back to where you came from, we’ll both be better off.”

“You were Candy’s father,” I said.

His face changed. An eyelid throbbed. He said nothing, but he didn’t move. Finally he said, “That’s a lot of nonsense and you know it. You say anything about this and I’ll sue you for everything—”

“I’ve seen her birth certificate.” Another lie, but in a good cause.

“Keep your voice down,” he said angrily.

“Then talk to me. A New York City policeman has all the documentation ready to turn over to the sheriff’s office.”

He looked around as though his nonexistent neighbors
might be gathering nearby to hear my defamation of him. “Come inside, and don’t say a word till I tell you.”

I followed him into the room with the aerial photo and the trophies. He left me there and went to talk to his wife. While he was gone, I found the framed diploma he had gotten from Syracuse University in the year of Candy’s birth. I was standing in front of it when he came in and closed the door behind him. A moment later I heard the outside door close as his wife left the house, sent, no doubt, on a useless errand.

“I’m sure you didn’t know she was your daughter when you interviewed her for the teaching job,” I said.

“I didn’t.”

“Phillips is a fairly common name, and she didn’t live in Erie, where Shirley had lived.” I watched him flinch as I said the name. “So I assume she told you while she was teaching.”

“She did.”

“And she wanted something from you because you had never acknowledged her.” And probably never helped her mother, I thought without saying it.

“She wanted something I couldn’t give her,” Larkin said miserably.

“Something you couldn’t give her. So you lured her to the church on the Fourth of July and killed her during the fireworks. You knew Father Hartman had opened a vault in the wall downstairs, and to make it easier, he had even left the sealing material down there. All you had to do was shoot her and stuff her body in the opening, knowing it would never be found. When you saw the article in the
Herald
the next day, with the piece about Father Hartman’s time capsule, you made J.J. Eberling stop distributing the paper.”

“Where did you find that paper?” His face furrowed into deep lines that hadn’t been there before, as though all the worries of a lifetime had descended upon him at this moment to take their toll.

“J.J. distributed a few copies before you stopped him.”

“That bastard. After all the favors I’d done for him over
the years, all the rough edges I’d smoothed over, he fought with me about that paper.”

“That paper was very important to him,” I said. “He’d promised it to everyone in town. They were all looking forward to driving down Main Street for the last time and picking up the yearbook edition of the
Herald.”

“You’re right about that. He saw it as his swan song.”

“By the way, the Degenkamps saw you fighting with J.J. that morning. They knew it was about the paper, because he wouldn’t give them a copy when they asked, and he had a stack of them right there. And Henry Degenkamp knew who opened the grave in the basement of St. Mary Immaculate. You drove to Ithaca last Monday after I talked to you to warn him to keep quiet. He died a few hours later.”

“And I suppose I’m responsible for that, too. You listen to me, young lady. You may have found out I was Candy’s father, but you haven’t got another thing right, and you’ll never prove I killed her, because I didn’t.”

It came to me in a replay of a moment a few evenings earlier. In the pictures in the
Herald
I had only tried to pinpoint Larkin. Now I could see as though it were in front of me a nighttime photo with Gwen Larkin’s place at the table empty.

“Your wife killed her,” I said.

He slumped into a leather chair. “I fathered a child and I never acknowledged her,” he said. “I gave Shirley a hundred dollars, which was a lot of money in the thirties, believe me. I didn’t have any more. She left school and I never saw her again. Twenty-four years later, a teacher showed up and claimed to be my daughter. There was nothing I could do. If I tried to get rid of her, she would make our relationship public. I was on tenterhooks that whole year. Finally she had the gall to go to my wife and tell her I was her father.”

“The gall to say who her father was,” I said softly.

“She had no right to destroy my wife’s life,” he raged.

“So your wife killed her. Did she use Degenkamp’s gun?”

“It wasn’t like that.” He ran his hand through his thick
silver hair. “Candy was the one who did the luring. I was supposed to meet her in the church basement during the fireworks. I suppose she came back from wherever she’d gone to. But Gwen said she’d go instead, that if she told Candy she couldn’t be embarrassed by the disclosure, maybe she’d just go away and leave us in peace. It was Candy who brought the gun. They fought over it, and Gwen got it and shot her. Then she shoved the body in the opening and sealed it up. She took Candy’s purse so nothing was in there to identify her in case the engineers accidentally opened the grave. She kept the damn thing in the house. I used to come home and see her going through it. The shooting made her crazy. That’s the truth of it. She started drinking. One night in the winter, she took the car and ran it into a tree. After the funeral I burned the purse.” He closed his eyes.

“And the gun?” I asked.

“I disposed of it. I went to a city dump and threw the parts in. It’s gone.”

No one would ever know what it was that made Gwen Larkin crazy. Perhaps it was the shooting. Perhaps it was all the revelations of that year, that her husband had had a lover, that he had fathered a child, that he had abandoned both the mother and the daughter, that someone might find out. I found myself believing his story that Gwen had committed the murder, but neither the way it happened nor whose gun it was, but the questions were moot. I had reached a point where I so identified with Candy that I could not imagine her to be murderous. And even if she had had a gun, I couldn’t believe she would ever have used it.

“What did she want from you?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s over. It’s gone.”

“I suppose it was about the payoff to the general,” I said, watching his eyebrows rise, his eyes widen. “Everyone in town knew something was going on between you and Candy, but no one would say anything because of the deal you and J.J. Eberling made to get the town flooded.”

“You know about that.”

“Even today, Mr. Larkin, they pretend they don’t know who Candy was, that you weren’t seen with her in your car.”

“Then how do you know?”

“I talked to the children. The children loved her.”

“I could have loved her,” he said, “if she hadn’t been so angry. I did everything I could to make it right. Nothing worked. You think I’m a bad person. It wasn’t like that. I was a young man, a boy, away at school. The girl I loved was somewhere else. I longed for her and I transferred my affections momentarily to someone else. I had no intention to ruin her life. I gave her the money to help her—to do something. What happened afterward was a nightmare. It ruined her life, her daughter’s, my wife’s, even mine. Everyone lost.”

“Except the people of Studsburg. They were all winners, weren’t they?”

“Leave it alone, Miss Bennett. It’s all over now.”

“Not quite,” I said. Then I left.

I paid the nuns what I thought fair and what they thought was bountiful. Then I bought a hefty supply of their jams and drove home. I called Deputy Drago and told him to try to find a dentist for Candida Phillips at the last address she had lived in in Pennsylvania before coming to Studsburg. Within a few days he had a match. I didn’t tell him anything else.

After the body was identified, Fred Larkin claimed it as mayor of Studsburg and gave Candy the burial she deserved.
I attended, although he was less than happy about it, and when I tried to pay for part of the cost, he said he had taken care of it himself. He and I and a local priest were the only people in attendance.

On one day when I had the time, I called Ginny Beadles Carpenter and found out she had already heard from Joanne. She thanked me with some emotion. I called Mrs. Thurston and told her that the X rays confirmed what we suspected about Candy. We had a nice talk and I sent my regards to Monica.

I called Amy Mulholland Broderick and told her much the same thing. The day before, I had slipped the sixth grade photo into a strong cardboard envelope and mailed it back to her.

The toughest call to make was to her brother.

“Why would anyone ever want to kill a doll like that?” he said.

“It was very complicated,” I told him. “It involved old indiscretions and new greed.”

“Greed, I can understand,” he said lightly.

“Greed, it was,” I said.

I visited my cousin Gene at the Greenwillow residence for retarded adults, bringing him several miniature cars for his collection to make up for my absence of several weeks. Gene is very forgiving, and I suspect I always get more out of my visits than he does.

Melanie and I made a date for dinner, and Jack drove up and met the Grosses in a happy Saturday night get-together that we all enjoyed. And one afternoon I got a call from Carol Stifler that Maddie and the baby were there and could I come right over. Between bouncing and crooning, I asked Carol to send a message to old Mrs. Stifler that if the rains ever came, I wanted to know about it before the church was completely submerged. She promised to let me know.

The snows came before the rains, inches and then feet of it upstate. It was evening-out time for the weather. With the first thaw, a heavy rain came. One evening Carol Stifler called
and said the word upstate was that only the steeple was still visible, and with the river rising, it wasn’t likely to be seen much longer.

I got a huge supply of Jack’s sister’s chicken and mushrooms and a chocolate cake as well and brought it up to the convent one afternoon, having told them it and I were coming. We feasted happily, finishing off with the wonderful cake. The next morning, after prayers and breakfast, I drove to Studsburg for the last time.

The little sign with the arrow had washed out, but I recognized the road to the old town. The rain had stopped, but there was a tremendous runoff according to the local weather forecaster, and the church would be completely underwater very soon, even without additional precipitation.

Although it was a weekday, there were a handful of cars parked near the basin rim. There was even a van with the call letters of a local TV station. I got out and walked the last hundred or so feet. Below me was a lake, still well short of its bank, but deep enough to have hidden any trace of the town except for the cross of the steeple of St. Mary Immaculate. I felt a terrible sadness, for Candy, for her killer, for all the people driven by greed who had helped in their tiny ways to make her death happen. Way off beyond the Simpsons’ farm I could see the river water backing up into the lake. The payoff dam was doing its duty.

“I thought you might come.”

I turned without surprise to see Father Hartman. “I hoped you would be here.”

“I was here the first time the church went underwater and the first time the tip of the steeple emerged. I won’t see it again. At least, I hope I won’t.”

“I have something of yours.” I opened my change purse and took out the miraculous medal. “Your mother’s name was Annette Manning.”

“I thought you would find out eventually. Thank you, Chris. I’ve missed this. My mother died young, in her fifties, and this came to me. I’m glad it was you who found it.”

“Henry Degenkamp saw you that night. I think he told Fred Larkin, but they kept it to themselves.”

“It was a kind of round-robin blackmail of which I was reluctantly apart.”

“Tell me if I have it right,” I said. “J.J. Eberling made a deal with a general, who he probably knew through his father, to flood Studsburg instead of the neighboring farm area so that he would profit greatly and everyone else would profit some.”

“J.J. owned more property in Studsburg than most people knew. He owned all the park area behind the church. He’d bought it up years ago, or his father had, when the local industry dried up. He had hopes of luring business to the town, but when he realized that was a dying dream, he lucked into this other way of getting rid of his unsalable property.”

“And since Fred Larkin knew all about it, and also about J.J. ’s indiscretions, he could twist J.J.’s arm if he had to, like the morning after the murder when he found the article about your time capsule.”

“That was probably all the leverage he needed.”