The Christening Day Murder (6 page)

“Was there a dentist in Studsburg?”

“Didn’t seem to be. The sheriff knew the town pretty well when he was younger. Said there weren’t any doctors or anything like that. Folks used to go to another town for that kind of stuff.”

“Do you know how she died?” I asked.

“She was shot. We found the bullet in the silt on the floor, a typical round-nosed lead bullet like the ones they used back in the fifties and sixties. Comes from a .38-caliber revolver. It works well up close, but it’s kind of inaccurate at distances. She was shot pretty close. The bullet doesn’t mean much, though. Lots of folks around here have a handgun.”

“What about missing persons?” I asked, reaching for my last straw.

“I checked that out myself, Miss Bennett. Just doesn’t seem to have been any reported around that time. We don’t get a lot of missing-person reports around here, and the ones we get, they usually show up later on their own.”

I sighed. “So it’s kind of a dead end,” I said.

“Looks like it.”

“Deputy Drago, Studsburg had a mayor. I don’t know who he was or where he moved to, but he would probably know everyone who lived in town. And the priest, Father Hartman. I’m sure he’d remember everyone in his parish. Or he’d know where the records are kept.”

“Right you are, ma’am. We’re a pretty modern office up here, and we’re looking into everything, I promise you.”

“I’m sure you are. I didn’t mean to imply that you
weren’t.” I felt a little guilty. Sometimes when you have a connection to the New York Police Department, it’s easy to feel that any other law enforcement group is inferior. I hoped he wouldn’t feel insulted.

“So you just let us do our job, and if anything turns up, I’m sure you’ll hear about it.”

I thanked him and hung up. I didn’t think I’d hear about anything without a prod.

I stayed downstairs till ten and watched the news on several channels. Sure enough, the story had reached New York. Standing before a large seal, and flanked by the American flag and some other flag I didn’t recognize, the coroner appeared in a brief clip announcing the surprising finding that the mystery body was that of a young woman. Lights flashed as he spoke, and seemed to infuse him with spirit. He was a rotund man with jowls and little left of his hair, but his pleasure at being in the spotlight was evident.

In a separate, briefer clip, the sheriff, in full regalia, announced that a thorough search had begun to learn the identity of the body, starting with dental records. And, I thought sadly, probably ending with them.

   I taught my class on Poetry and the Contemporary American Woman on Tuesday morning and then drove home, thinking about the woman. What if she had a perfect set of teeth and had never seen a dentist? What if the records were gone? How could a young woman so anger someone that he would kill her?

Besides the possibility of identification through dental records, there was one other thing in favor of discovering the woman’s identity. If anyone in the area remembered a young woman missing thirty years ago, all the publicity would surely awaken those memories. Perhaps it was best to wait and see what happened.

   Jack called Tuesday evening when he got home. “Not bad,” he said when I asked him about the test. “Just a hell
of a lot of work studying for it. I really needed yesterday. You get that upstate murder solved yet?”

“I have not yet begun to investigate,” I paraphrased, “and I probably won’t.”

“If I know you, you’re champing at the bit to dig into some old files.”

“I wouldn’t even know what files to look for, Jack. The sheriff’s office is sending X rays of the woman’s teeth to local dentists, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s a dead end after so many years. And Maddie’s parents are sure no one from Studsburg was missing after Maddie’s baptism. So if it wasn’t a Studsburger, how are we ever going to put a name on her?”

“You’ll think of a way,” he said lightly.

“The truth is, I’m troubled that the coroner and the sheriff are using this to promote themselves. I keep imagining this poor dead girl as a person, someone who had something to do with Studsburg and met her death there, a violent, planned death.”

“That’s the way sheriffs and coroners act, honey. They don’t live exciting lives like mine, so they—” My laughter stopped him. “You making fun of my exciting life?”

“Just enjoying the image. Listen to me, Jack. Suppose the day I left St. Stephen’s, someone had stopped my car and killed me and hidden the body. No one in Oakwood would miss me, because no one knew me and no one knew I was coming.”

“Your friend Sister Joseph would call, and eventually, when she couldn’t find you, she’d report you missing.”

“Suppose I left the convent in anger.”

“OK. I get your point.”

“And thirty years later some kids pull a rock away from a cave along the Hudson, and there are my bones. I had no family to worry about me. Maybe I had no job to go to. There are people like that, Jack!”

“I get the drift. There are some holes—like the fact that you own a house and have to pay taxes on it—but yes, it
could be that kind of person. So what was she doing in the basement of that church with a killer?”

“I wish I knew.”

“And your friend’s parents said no one was missing.”

“Either they’re wrong or the woman wasn’t a Studsburger.”

“I knew you weren’t going to let this alone,” he said.

“She deserves a decent burial, Jack. I think I’ll just go over that list Mrs. Stifler has.”

“Can you squeeze me in this weekend?”

“You bet.”

   If the body was still news upstate, it certainly wasn’t in New York. It had been good for about ninety seconds of TV notoriety, and now it was gone. I went out for an early walk on Wednesday morning, hoping to think the situation through, but I met my neighbor Melanie Gross, and we walked and talked together.

“Any chance Hal and I can meet the boyfriend?” she asked. I had told her about Jack a couple of weeks earlier. “Or are you keeping him all to yourself?”

“I’d love you to meet him.”

“How about dinner at our place some weekend?”

“Fine. I’ll talk to him when I see him Saturday, and we’ll get together on a date.”

We speeded up a bit—Mel is a runner and I’m a walker, so a little cooperation and compromise are necessary in our friendship—and talked about town politics, an almost endless source of conversation and not a little sniping. When we got back to Pine Brook Road, Mel left me at my driveway and continued on to her own. I went inside and made myself breakfast. If I called Deputy Drago, he would have every right to be annoyed. But I knew I wasn’t going to get a call from him unless he had specific information that would identify the victim. I sat with my coffee, trying to justify my involvement in a case that was none of my business. She wasn’t a friend or a relative of the Stiflers. In all probability, she wasn’t even a Studsburger. There was a good likelihood
she wasn’t a Catholic. The killer had just chosen the church because it was the only building that wouldn’t be destroyed by the Army Corps of Engineers, and everyone who lived in the town knew that.

She was nothing to me, just an unfortunate person who had met her death in the basement of St. Mary Immaculate thirty years ago. My only connection to her was a coincidence, that I had meandered through the church at the same time that her killer had returned to view his handiwork.

I finished my coffee and went to the phone. The county coroner was too busy or too unimpressed with my name and lack of credentials to answer my call. Someone else spoke to me, a woman with a gentle manner and an upstate edge to her speech. She assured me the coroner was doing
everything
he could to find the killer of the young lady. When I pressed her on what everything amounted to, I got what was apparently the party line: There had been an autopsy, and the coroner had “gone public” to see if anyone “out there” had some knowledge of the deceased.

In other words, he’d done the minimum required of his job, and he’d had a little free publicity besides. That put him in the same corner as the sheriff. Ordinarily I try not to be judgmental, but it looked as though both departments had pretty much given up. If something dropped in their laps, they might act on it, but there wasn’t going to be any aggressive investigation. No one had reported her missing thirty years ago. No one cared then, no one cared now. She was a pile of bones that had been dumped in a basement wall.

When I got off the phone, I went back to the kitchen table. I sat facing the window to the backyard. Today it was a bleak wintry gray. That girl might have been my mother’s age. Were she alive today, she might have a large family, including grandchildren. We had talked about John Donne yesterday in my poetry class, and a line flitted through my head: “Every man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind.”

What other connection did I need?

* * *

“This was our house,” Carol Stifler said, the photo album half on her lap, half on mine. “Really my in-laws’ house, but we had nowhere else to live when we were married, and Harry was afraid to commit himself until we could afford it. We were very careful with money in those days.”

“It’s a pretty house,” I said.

“It was built around the turn of the century. I guess it’d be about a hundred years old now. Seems a pity, doesn’t it?”

I said something in agreement. She had been pleased to get my phone call this morning, and I had driven over for lunch and a session with the album. The pictures were moving slowly, because each one evoked memories and conversation. “The Degenkamps said they lived just down the street.”

“Yes, they did. I have a picture of their house somewhere. Oh, here it is.”

“That must be the tree they told me about.”

“Studsburg had beautiful old trees. What a shame to lose all that.”

“Do you have any pictures of downtown?”

“Lots.” She flipped several pages. “Here’s Main Street from the bridge. And here are all the shops. Oh, look at that. I’d forgotten Marilou’s Fabric Shop. Just a little hole in the wall, but she had all the most wonderful patterns, and thread to match all the fabrics. And if you couldn’t put a zipper in, she’d do it for you for practically nothing. I wonder what happened to her.”

“Wasn’t she on your Christmas card list?”

“Yes, she was, but she and her husband moved to Florida, and we lost touch after a few years. Anyway, she isn’t your mysterious body. I’m sure Marilou was forty or more when I knew her.”

I turned the pages quietly for a while. The church was there, and the rectory beside it. There was a little redbrick schoolhouse and a general store with the words
POST OFFICE
in the window. There were vintage houses of interesting de
sign and old frame houses that looked as though they were on the verge of falling down. There were fields planted with vegetables and even a shot or two of an old farmer plowing with a horse-drawn plow. I had difficulty believing some of the pictures had been taken in the twentieth century.

Then there were people. Several pictures showed Father Hartman shaking hands with parishioners in front of the church. There were women at meetings, men at dinner, young men in football uniforms.

“They didn’t have a high school in Studsburg, so all the kids went to the one in Denham. That’s where I’m from. Harry and I met in the Denham high school.”

“Carol, do you have a list of names and addresses?”

“I even have the original,” she said. “But it’s all faded. Harry made me a new one. I’ll go get it.”

She came back quickly with several sheets of paper. The original list was a very faded pink or purple, and the new one looked as though it had been typed.

I looked at the newer version. Many names had handwritten notes beside them: died 3/7/66; moved to St. Andrew’s Home; moved in with daughter, see Violet Hawkins.

The Degenkamps, too, had a note beside their name. “Moved in with son, Eric.” Eric’s address preceded Henry and Ellie’s and had been changed twice. It was a very organic list. Hardly any entry remained unchanged from the original.

“I can get you a copy,” Carol offered.

“I would appreciate that.”

“Harry can do it tomorrow. I’ll drop it in your mailbox Friday morning.”

I handed the pages back to her. “Carol, you must have been in your twenties the year you lived in Studsburg.”

“I was. Just twenty when we were married.”

“Did you know most of the girls in Studsburg who were your age?”

“I knew some of them. I had my own friends in Denham, but I knew a few in Studsburg.”

“And none of them disappeared after Maddie’s christening?”

She shook her head. “I wish I could help you.”

“Maybe your husband can. He grew up in Studsburg. He should remember all the girls in town. He said last weekend he knew everyone. Can I call him tonight?”

“Of course you can.” She closed the album and took the address lists back. “I’m glad you’re looking into this. Burying a body in a church like that is a desecration.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to wait till Friday for the list. Carol Stifler had run out after I left and had it duplicated. That evening she and Harry knocked on my door about eight o’clock, carrying a cake and a fresh copy of the list. I made coffee and we talked.

“Well, you’re right,” Harry said. “I did know everyone in town, and I remember all the people I grew up with.” He took the list he had just brought for me, pulled a pen out of his breast pocket, and slid it down the first column of names. “The Bakers had a girl named Linda. She got married about a year after I did.” He pointed to an inserted address. “Linda Eastman was a little older and left Studsburg before I did. Doesn’t she live somewhere around here, Carol? I think we ran into her last year.”

“New Rochelle,” his wife said. “She had an envelope full of pictures of her granddaughter. I thought we’d never getaway.”

He went down the alphabetical list, accounting for every child of every parent. Even if the coroner’s estimate of the victim’s age was off by ten years, there was no one in Studsburg who could have been buried in the basement of St. Mary Immaculate.