The Mother's Day Murder (18 page)

“Seen enough?” he asked as I stared at the last page.

I said, “Yes,” with my heart pounding.

“They had what you’d call a special relationship. For
my father it lasted forever. They never got as close as my mom and dad did, but they never got as far apart either.”

“They were cousins,” I said softly, feeling an incredible pain. “I have a cousin I’m very close to.”

“I think I’ve told you everything,” he said.

“Yes.” I could hardly find my voice. “I think you have.” I handed him the small album, almost reluctant to let it go. “It’s late for me to be up. I should be getting back to the hotel.”

He took my hand and held it. “I’m glad you came. I haven’t looked at those pictures for a long time.”

His wife came out of the kitchen just as I had buttoned my coat. I wished them both well.

Back at the hotel I called Jack and told him much of what I had learned. The older sister, Betty, I had ruled out completely as the mother of Randy Collins. But Hope was a definite possibility, in spite of the fact that her roommate denied she had ever been pregnant. I told him a bit of my conversation with Little B., but not all of it.

“Doesn’t sound like he added much,” Jack said.

“Not so far as who gave birth to Randy.”

“Any chance it could have been Sister Joseph?”

I gave what must have sounded like a moan. “I can’t rule it out, but it’s very unlikely.”

“But who would have been the father?” Jack asked. “She took a leave to be with a sick cousin, she got a full-time job. You can’t tell me she had an affair with someone she met at work. I may not know her as well as you but I can tell you she’s not the kind of woman who’d bed down with a guy she met on the job.”

“She isn’t, and she didn’t. At this moment, the sister’s the best possibility. She even had a phone in her own name and her roommate had one in hers.”

“So she could have listed herself as Katherine Bailey.”

“Right.”

“Maybe I can trace the number for you.”

“The phone number? After twenty years?”

“Just a maybe. Let me see what I can do. And I have a suggestion. Your idea that Randy’s mother could be one of Sister Joseph’s sisters is a very good one. Have you thought that maybe it could have been someone at work? Someone who knew she was a nun and would be going back?”

“It crossed my mind. Maybe I’ll go back to Fine and Houlihan tomorrow morning. Then with luck I can get on the same plane I didn’t take tonight.”

“I think it’s worth your while asking.”

“How’s my little sweetheart? Did he ask for me?”

“Nah. We had a guy evening, good dinner, coupla beers. Your name never came up.”

“I love you, too,” I said, stifling a giggle.

19

It was a good suggestion to follow up on. From the size of Fine and Houlihan, there could have been several people working in the clerical and administrative parts of the business. I had seen a number of people at computers when I walked from reception to Mr. Fine’s office. Twenty years ago those computers would have been typewriters and maybe there would have been fewer of them, but there was certainly the possibility that two or three other people had worked in the area when Joseph was there. And no doubt they all knew each other, talked to each other, probably even lunched together.

I took a shower and curled up on the bed with a couple of pillows behind me, my notebook on my lap. If Hope McHugh had been Randy’s mother, what did that tell me about who had murdered Randy? Nothing, I thought. The idea that Hope had found out that Randy was at my house and had come to Oakwood from Ohio was so preposterous, so incredible, I put it out of my mind. The only way that Randy’s natural mother might be her killer was to believe that the mother knew who Randy was, where she was living, and had followed her to Oakwood with a gun intending to threaten Randy or
do harm to her. Eventually, even if it were possible, it was beyond the limits of probability, not to mention the fact that murdering one’s child was inconceivable to me.

But Detective Joe Fox could make a good case that Joseph was both the mother and the killer. As he would see it, Joseph would be so concerned with her position as Superior of St. Stephen’s that she would do anything to protect herself from exposure of the truth. And he could concoct a scenario in which Randy had spoken to Joseph and told her of their purported relationship, after which Joseph had come down to Oakwood Sunday morning and killed Randy. Perhaps he would even decide that I was the carrier of the information. If he checked my phone bill, he would find a long call to St. Stephen’s, the one I had made to Grace. In his mind, that could have been a call to Joseph. All calls were routed through the switchboard so there was no record of who had been the final person to pick up. And since the nuns had refused to cooperate with him, he had no reason to believe that Grace was the person I had spoken to.

None of these ideas gave me much hope. I got up in the morning thinking the same thoughts that had been running through my mind as I fell asleep the night before. After breakfast, I optimistically checked out, put my bag in the trunk of my little car, and drove to Fine and Houlihan.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Fine is out of the office today,” the receptionist said when I came in.

“Is Mr. Houlihan here?”

“He is but—” She looked at her watch. “Let me see if he has time for you.”

Apparently he did because she led me through the
center work area to an office the size and shape of his partner’s, but at the other end of the row.

“Miss Bennett, is it?” Jerry Houlihan asked expansively. He was one of those good-looking Irishmen with an enviable head of white hair, very blue eyes, and a wonderfully warm smile. He could probably sell me anything if I stayed with him long enough.

I shook his hand and started to tell him about my visit with his partner yesterday, but he interrupted me.

“I know all about it. Abe and I had a chitchat before we went home last night. It was Katherine Bailey you were asking about, is that right?”

“Yes, it was.”

“Lovely young lady. They don’t make ’em better than that. You know she was a nun?”

“I’m a friend of hers, Mr. Houlihan. I’ve known her for a long time.”

“Wonderful girl. What can I tell you about her?”

“Actually, I wanted to ask about other young women who worked in this office at the same time as Katherine.”

“You’re out to tax my memory, I see.”

“Maybe there are records you could check. Maybe there’s someone in the office from—”

He was shaking a finger at me. “I never forget a face. I never forget an employee. Tell me what you’re looking for.”

“Women who worked here at the same time as Katherine. Maybe someone who quit while she was here, maybe someone who was pregnant, maybe someone who became ill and couldn’t work.”

“In the year that Katherine Bailey was here.”

“Yes.”

He dropped his head forward and closed his eyes. I
had the sense of a human information retrieval system at work. He took a pencil and wrote on a sheet of paper in front of him. When he came out of his reverie, he picked up the phone and pressed a button. “You wanna come in here, Myra? I’ve got a little job for you.”

A woman in her thirties, nicely dressed but not looking like a New York executive secretary, appeared at the door a second later.

Houlihan handed her the sheet of paper. “Try looking for these names in the old file. They worked here maybe twenty years ago.”

Myra took the paper and left without a word. Jerry Houlihan offered me coffee and went to get it himself. We talked a few sips’ worth when he came back and then Myra turned up with the files.

“Good girl,” he said appreciatively and with a distinct lack of sensitivity that seemed to go right by Myra. “Here we go. Carla Higgins. I remember Carla. Nice girl, nice looking. Worked here for a while, left for a while, came back, stayed a couple of years, then left forever. Want to have a look?”

I reached over for the folder, hoping there might be a picture of her, but there wasn’t. “What did she look like?” I asked.

“Tiny little thing, petite, you’d probably say. Five feet tall if she stretched. Cute as a button.”

“Do you recall why she left?”

“She found a job that paid better somewhere, didn’t like it, and came back to our happy family.”

I smiled. He was a bit of a character. I flipped through the file but found nothing that would make her a possible mother for Randy Collins. If she was only five feet
tall, Mrs. DelBello would have remembered her size. “Do you know if this address is current?” I asked.

“I’d have to guess that it isn’t, but that’s where she was living last time she set foot in our office.”

I jotted down the address although I didn’t intend to visit there unless she turned out to be the most likely of the prospects and I had time to spare.

He took the folder and handed me a second one. “Ginny Forster. I loved that girl but she couldn’t spell ‘the.’ She was everybody’s friend. If you needed an aspirin, Ginny had one for you. If you cut your finger, she had a Band-Aid. I think she used to fix up some of the girls with old boyfriends of hers—not Katherine, of course, but the others. A heart as big as an elephant.”

I listened to the description with enjoyment and looked at her file. Like the previous one, it told me nothing relevant to the birth of Randy Collins. “What did she look like?” I asked.

“Oh, medium height, I’d say, medium hair, not too dark, not too light, pleasant, outgoing, slim, a smile that made you feel good. If she could’ve spelled, I might’ve married her myself, except, of course, I was already married to the most wonderful woman in the world.”

“I see she left in April of that year,” I said.

“Sometime in the spring, that’s what I remember.”

“Do you remember why?”

“One of those boyfriends panned out, I guess. She decided to get married and he didn’t want her to work. Kind of outdated outlook, but who am I to criticize the young?”

“She was still slim when she left?” I asked.

“Never changed, that Ginny. What a lovely girl.”

I wrote down the address. Her married name had
been added, perhaps because they had to send her tax statements the following year. I handed back the folder and waited.

“And here’s the one you’ve been waiting for.” He gave me a big grin and handed the third folder to me. “Barbara Sawyer. She worked here for a couple of years, got herself pregnant, came crying to me about it, asked if she could stay on. A lot of places wouldn’t have let her, you know, but Abe and I talked about it and decided what the hell. It was better that she work as long as she could than go on welfare. So she stayed till she was bulging and then she left. She even came back afterward.”

“Did she keep the baby?” I asked.

“Now, that’s a good question. She didn’t come back here for maybe six months so I kind of assumed she was home being a mother. But when she started working again, she didn’t talk about the baby at all and we didn’t ask out of politeness. She got married eventually; that’s her address right there on the first page. Haven’t seen her for a while but as far as I know, she’s still married, has a couple of kids, and I think she’s got herself a nice life.”

“I’d like to talk to her,” I said.

“I wish I could figure out what you’re after.” He looked at me with a face that said: Tell me.

“I really can’t discuss it,” I said. “I’m sorry. This is between Katherine and me.”

“Well, then I won’t push. You take the address and phone number and maybe Barbara’ll talk to you. Her married name is there, too, right under Sawyer.”

I found it and wrote it down, “Phillips.” I looked at my watch and decided I’d better get going. I wanted
very much to make that plane this afternoon and get back to Jack and Eddie.

Before I left, Mr. Houlihan called the number for Barbara Phillips, talked to her, and said I would be coming within the half hour. Then I dashed.

It was a small house with a basketball hoop at the side of the driveway. The woman who opened the door was in her forties, wore little makeup, and had on jeans and a red man-tailored shirt. The shirt was the only bright thing about her. She had a sallow complexion and her hair was faded, strands of gray visible throughout. We were about the same height so she fit the description Mrs. DelBello had given me.

We sat in her living room and I took a deep breath before beginning. “I want to ask you some questions about a painful time in your life, Mrs. Phillips.”

“What do you mean, painful?”

“You gave birth to a child about twenty years ago.”

“Oh my God.”

“I’m not going to spread this around, but I need to know about it for the sake of someone else.”

“How did you find out?”

“Mr. Houlihan told me. I asked if anyone worked in the office that year who might have been pregnant.”

“It was a long time ago. I haven’t talked to anyone about it for years.”

“Where did you have the baby, Mrs. Phillips?”

“In the hospital. Good Samaritan.”

“Did you keep her?”

“Her? I had a boy.”

I could have kicked myself for being so stupid, for
asking a question that assumed something I didn’t know. “What?” I said.

“I had a boy, not a girl.”

“Did you keep him?”

“No. I gave him up. I was single—I guess you know that already. My mother couldn’t help out and I couldn’t work if I had to take care of a baby.”

“What adoption agency did you use?”

“Uh, I had a lawyer handle it. I didn’t go to an agency.”

“Do you know who adopted your baby?”

“We decided to keep the whole thing quiet, anonymous. The lawyer has the name, but I never saw it. They came from out of state is what I remember.”

“Have you ever heard from your child?”

“No, never.”

“Have you made any effort to find him?”

“No.” She looked sad and troubled. “Why do you need to know this?”

“It’s very complicated. It has to do with an adopted child that was born twenty years ago at Good Samaritan Hospital. I don’t think it was your child, but I want to get as many facts as I can. Did you see your baby before you gave him away?”