The Christmas Night Murder (12 page)

I don't know what I expected, but as I drove away I felt disappointed. I had wanted the house to speak to me, to tell me something that I couldn't figure out for myself, and it had not. All that I could see was that Julia had lived in a large, prized room, that if her brother had been home that night and had been in his room, he should have heard something, but if he was out and his grandmother was in her own private quarters, poor Julia could have cried for help and no one would have heard her. Even if Foster were home, if he had been listening to music the way a lot of aficionados do, he would not have heard the noise at the end of the hall.

I left Mrs. Belvedere at the start of the walkway to her house. A second car had joined the first one in her driveway and two men were looking under the hood of the car farther up.

She moaned when she saw them. “My son's been having car trouble since he came home. I hope he gets it taken care of this time.”

The second car had
MIKE'S AUTO BODY SHOP
painted on the side. “I guess this is the season when batteries die,” I said.

“That's just what I told him. Well, you can't tell your children anything.” She smiled as if we shared a secret, but I was a lot closer to her son's age than to hers.

Now, in the car, I decided to see if Mrs. Farragut would talk to me again. I found the retirement community with no difficulty and parked in the visitors' area. There were children around today, probably because on Sunday Americans visit their families.

Mrs. Farragut answered on the first ring. She looked conflicted
about seeing me there, but she hustled me inside. “Do we have anything else to talk about?” she asked.

“One of our nuns was murdered last night.”

“I heard about it. Personal safety is a problem everywhere. Even here, we're careful at night.”

“The nun was your granddaughter's mentor, her friend, her confidante.”

“Then I suppose you'd better look to your missing bad priest.”

I was getting a little tired of having Hudson dumped on for everything. “He had no more reason to kill her last night than he had seven years ago.”

“Miss Bennett—sit down, sit down, I can't stand having a conversation standing in the middle of the living room—I don't know where your priest is and I don't know how I can help you find him.”

“Can you help me find out what drove Julia to take her life?”

“What difference does it make now? It's over. I believe you have to move on in life. It's what I've been trying to do.”

“I think she may have been terribly sorry for saying what she did about Father McCormick.” I had said the same thing to her son and not gotten very far.

“I'm sure what Julia said was true.”

“Did she leave a note?”

“No, she did not.” A rapid-fire answer, stated sharply.

I began to detect her scent again, so sweet in contrast to her words and manner. “Can you tell me who was home when she ended her life?”

“I was. I was in my own apartment having a cup of tea and writing thank-you's for Christmas gifts.”

“And your son?”

“He was out for the evening.”

“Can you remember where?”

“Miss Bennett, it's seven years. I didn't know at the time and I don't know now. Walter was a grown man and led his own life.”

“And Foster?”

“He was out, too. Please don't ask me where he was. No
one ever knew where Foster was.” She said it sadly, acknowledging failure.

“I know where he is now,” I said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“He's in prison. He's been there for the last year and a half.”

“You know too much for your own good, young lady.” But she didn't usher me out. In some strange way, she was glad to be talking to me about all this.

“Do you have a picture of Julia?” I asked, the thought just occurring to me.

She got up and went to a shelf that had at least a dozen framed pictures and picked up three. “This was the last, when she was at St. Stephen's.” In it Julia was wearing the habit of a novice and she stood with each hand hidden in the opposite wide sleeve, but she was smiling. Something about the face gave me a start.

“This was her high-school graduation picture.”

There was no doubt now. Even wearing a white cap and gown, Julia and the present Mrs. Walter Farragut looked enough alike to be sisters. I handed the picture back.

“And this was Julia with some friends during her last year in high school. The girl on the left is Billie something and the one on the right is Miranda Gallagher. She's married now,” she said sadly.

The name rang a bell. I had overheard a telephone message about a Miranda only an hour ago. The mother's name was…I couldn't remember. But I would keep Gallagher in mind. A good friend might fit a lot of missing pieces into my holey puzzle.

“She was a beautiful girl,” I said, handing the last picture back.

“And kind and sweet and thoughtful and devoted. I will never stop missing her.” There was no sharp edge anymore; there was only grief. The lined face had given up the fight to look young and spirited. Slowly, looking at each picture, she replaced them on the shelf and then sat down again. “It was the darkest day of my life.”

“I can understand that.”

“She had her mother's face. Serena was a beautiful woman.”

“I don't pretend to understand why a person, especially a young one, would take her life, but when I spoke to your son this afternoon, he said Julia wasn't suicidal. He said she had a strong will to live. What happened that Christmas, Mrs. Farragut?”

“I'm sure you know that as happy a time as Christmas is for most of us, it is deeply depressing for others. They think of how it used to be, where they were, who they were with, those missing who will never return, and they become unhappy to the point of hurting themselves. I think that's what happened to our Julia.”

“What was she doing that evening?”

“Reading. Writing in her diary.”

“She was writing in her diary and she didn't leave a note?”

“I told you. There was no note.”

“What became of her diary?”

“I don't know.”

“Did you show it to the police?”

“I'm sure we must have.”

I knew immediately that she was lying. If they had given the diary to the police, she would have said so unequivocally. What she had said was a hedge. “Do you have it here?”

“I do not.”

A girl about to take her life is writing in her diary and doesn't leave a note. She doesn't need to because the reason is contained in those pages, maybe in the very last one, maybe in all the pages taken together. “I would like to see it, Mrs. Farragut,” I said softly.

“I don't know where it is. It's probably been destroyed.”

Hardly. If this woman had possession of it—and she was the person who had found the body, so she must have seen it—she wouldn't have let it go. She certainly wouldn't have destroyed it.

“You know why she killed herself, don't you?” I said, again softly.

“I gave you the reasons. She had lost her mother, she had lost her vocation, she had nearly lost her mind with grief. I shouldn't have left her alone that night. I should have sat with her, talked to her, held her hand, and assured
her things would get better because they would have. I am an optimist. You can't reach my age without being one. If I blame anyone for Julia's death, it's myself. I failed her when she needed me most. You must go now, Miss Bennett, and I don't think you should come back. I've told you everything. There isn't any more. You know everything now, including my responsibility in Julia's death. I have nothing more to say.” She stood and went to the door. Today she was wearing a blue suit with a white blouse. The jacket was a loose, interesting weave with gold buttons, four pocket flaps, and piping around all the edges and on the hem of the skirt that just covered her knees. A gold choker with a diamond flower was partly visible in the vee of her blouse. She was a well-to-do woman whose money had failed to buy her peace.

I thanked her and said good-bye. I'm not sure she said anything. I think she was glad the interview was over, that she hadn't lost control and spilled the secrets she had kept for so long, not just from me but from the rest of the world, including the police of Riverview, who, I was sure, had never heard of, much less seen, Julia Farragut's diary.

I racked my brain all the way back to the convent to think of the name of the woman who had called the Corcorans. Finally I decided it wouldn't make any difference if I remembered it because she was probably listed under her husband's name. I would have to call Mrs. Belvedere or try every Gallagher in Riverview, something I found distasteful. While I'm not exactly a shy person, there are tasks I really don't like to do; calling strangers to find a particular person is one of them. Jack had told me about detectives who sit at a phone and make a case. He laughed and called them telephone detectives, but what a talent.

The nuns were coming out of the chapel after evening prayers as I parked my car in the lot. I waited for the last of them to enter the Mother House and then followed them in. Joseph spied me right away and joined me as the rest of the nuns went into the dining room.

“I know a lot more,” I said, “but I don't know where Hudson is and I don't know who's responsible for his disappearance. But I have feelings about things that I didn't have, or didn't have very strongly, before this afternoon.”

“Let's get trays and we'll eat and talk in my office.”

We went back to the kitchen and filled two trays. It was a Sunday-night pasta supper with a salad of many-colored greens, grapefruit to start with, and a pudding dessert. Jack isn't a pudding man; he's a hard-dessert person who likes to chew, so I enjoyed the chance to eat something I don't make at home anymore.

We carried our trays upstairs as Joseph talked about her afternoon with the nuns in the villa. They were a tough lot, she said, but they were terribly shaken—indeed, everyone was, but she worried about them the most.

In her office, we sat across the long table from each other and I pulled out my notebook, which I had filled with comments after each interview. “Walter Farragut is married to a much younger, very good-looking woman and lives in a modern house that had to cost a fortune,” I began. “I really got nothing of substance from him, but later on in the afternoon I talked to his mother again and she let me see pictures of Julia. There's a strong resemblance between her and Walter's new wife.”

“I see.”

“I can't avoid it, Joseph. I don't want to think it and I don't want to think about it, but I feel something terrible went on in the Farragut house and I keep coming back to the father.”

“You think he was abusing her.”

“I think it's possible.”

“And that's why she came to St. Stephen's.” The idea clearly troubled her, both ideas: that he was doing something and that Julia came to the convent to get away from him.

“It makes sense. And I have to believe her mother knew or suspected what was going on. She couldn't handle it and had a nervous breakdown sometime before that last year of her life. Mrs. Belvedere, the neighbor, knew it. Then, seven years ago, she took her life.”

“Poor soul. Do you think the grandmother knew what was happening?”

“Maybe not at first. She occupied a separate apartment in the house, about as far, by the way, from Julia's room as she could be. According to the neighbor, she kept to herself much of the time, which gave me the feeling that they were almost two separate families living in different parts of the same house. But she was very fond of Julia. They were both in the house the night Julia killed herself. It was the grandmother that found her and also found the diary she was writing in.”

“A diary. Then there is—or was—a document of her feelings. I don't suppose she showed it to you.”

“She didn't show it to me and I'm convinced she never showed it to the police. I think she took it out of Julia's room before the police came. When she read it, she may
have found out for the first time what was really going on, and once she knew, she couldn't show it to anyone because it would implicate her son in behavior so terrible that making it public would destroy him.”

“Without question.” She put her fork down. “It makes a kind of poetic sense, too, doesn't it? The natural father does the molesting and the spiritual father is blamed. Which leaves us with one inescapable suspect.”

“And that makes me very uneasy,” I said. “I just can't come to terms with a man of Walter Farragut's position kidnapping Hudson. What did he do with him? And why would he do it now and not seven years ago?”

“Hudson left very suddenly, before Julia died, remember. If her diary does tell terrible secrets, her father may have felt threatened after he read it.”

“But if he was molesting her, he didn't need a diary to tell him what had happened.”

“True, but Hudson's return put pressure on him. There was always the possibility that Hudson would somehow let the world know what had happened.”

“Or Mrs. Farragut might have felt he was threatened.”

“Surely you don't think an elderly woman—”

“I don't, but she's involved in this somehow, Joseph. The telephone call to Sister Mary Teresa.”

“I asked the sisters who answered the phone at the villa yesterday if they remembered Mary Teresa receiving a phone call, from anyone, man or woman. No one answered a phone call for her.”

The system at the villa was the same as that in the Mother House. When a call was routed there from the main switchboard, the nun assigned to answering the phone would ring bells for the person called. Each nun was assigned a different number of bells.

“And I checked with Angela,” she went on, “and she doesn't remember anyone asking for Mary Teresa. So we really don't know any more than we did this morning.”

“But we do,” I said. “We have a picture of that family now, as they were seven years ago, the grandmother who lives her own life but owns the house and subtly rules the family, the father who has an obscene relationship with his daughter, the son who is forever in trouble—maybe because
he knows what's going on between his father and his sister—the mother who knows and can't control it and finally kills herself, and the daughter who loses at every turn, first because she's her father's victim, then because she can't maintain her novitiate, and finally because she loses her mother.”

“It's a terrible picture.”

“Do you think I'm wrong?”

“I think you're very likely to be right.”

“But it doesn't tell us where Hudson is. If Walter Farragut has him, he's put him somewhere where his new wife doesn't know about it.”

“He would know the trains, wouldn't he?” Joseph said.

“Of course. He still lives in the Hudson Valley, where they run. He gets rid of Hudson, drives the car to the Corcorans', gets out, and walks down to the station. It's closed for the night, so no one is there to recognize him. When his train comes, he gets on, pays the conductor, and goes home.”

“There's one thing we've been neglecting in all this. Assuming Walter Farragut has followed Hudson from Buffalo to the rest stop where the clothing was found, after he and Hudson drive away in Hudson's car, what happens to the car Walter was driving?”

“I'm not sure,” I said. “I've thought about it, but I keep turning up in a dead end. It's almost as though there had to be two people involved in the kidnapping so that one could drive the other back to pick up the extra car. I just can't think who that person could be. As much as Mrs. Farragut may want to protect her son, I don't think she would do it. I don't even know if she has a driver's license. And I doubt he would involve his new wife.”

“I agree. He wouldn't let her know anything of this sordid past of his.”

“So how did he do it?” I said, more to myself than to Joseph.

Joseph got up and went to her desk. She came back with a book that she set down in front of me. It was the Bible I had taken from Sister Mary Teresa's night table.

“Have you looked through it?” I asked.

“Very quickly. It's filled with remembrance cards that go
back over fifty years. There's one for every nun that died at St. Stephen's since she came here and many for people who were probably friends and relatives. There are also scraps of paper with notes on them, although I have to admit I couldn't decipher most of them.”

“May I take it with me?”

“I hope you will.” She was about to go when the phone on her desk rang. She went over and answered it. “Yes,” she said with a smile. “She's right here.”

I took the phone and Joseph picked up the trays and left the office. “Jack?”

“You get back all right?”

“Circuitously. We've been having supper off trays and rehashing the day. Have you eaten?”

“Forget food. I've got something for you.”

“What?”

“The Oakwood cop who found Walter and Foster Farragut for me through the DMV and some extra digging was intrigued enough to call the prison to check on Foster. He got a Christmas reprieve, Chris. Foster Farragut's been a free man since seven A.M. on Christmas Eve.”