New Year's Eve Murder (6 page)

There was no smell but there was no heat either, and it was cold enough that a body could be well preserved. I pulled the door shut and backed away.

The little restaurant seemed the likeliest place to find a phone and have a chance to sit and munch on something. I didn't count on having every pair of eyes turn to me as I walked inside, but I ignored them and went over to the pay phone, not far from the cashier's station and within hearing of almost everyone sitting at a table.

I cracked open a fresh roll of quarters and dialed the familiar number of St. Stephen's convent. The woman who answered wasn't my friend Angela, who was probably off today, but a nun from the Villa, the home of the older, retired nuns. I took a minute to be sociable—it wasn't her fault I was a nervous wreck—and then asked for Sister Joseph, my closest friend and the General Superior of the convent.

A moment later I heard her calm, reassuring voice. “Chris, how good to hear from you. How's our baby?”

“Fat and happy and smiling.”

“That's wonderful. Will you be bringing him up here for a visit?”

“In a couple of weeks. Joseph, I have a favor to ask of you. It's quite urgent.”

“Yes, of course. Go on.”

“I'm at a pay phone and I think everyone in this little restaurant is watching me. Do you know Bladesville?”

“I've driven through it once or twice. It's an hour from here, I would think.”

“Can you meet me in the Bladesville Family Restaurant?”

“As soon as I can.”

I was saying, “Thank you,” when she hung up.

I took my coat and hat off and sat at a table as far from other people as I could manage. Now that I knew Joseph was on her way, I recognized that I was hungry. The sole waitress came over to my table, greeted me, and handed me a menu with far too many choices for my diminished attention span.

“We have a few specials,” she said. “A salad plate with tuna, shrimp, and egg, a—”

“That sounds great,” I said, the word tuna making my decision for me.

“And to drink?”

“A glass of milk. Skim if you have it.”

“I think we do. Be right back.”

I wasn't in a hurry. I checked my watch again and sat back. I hadn't thought to bring a book along, hadn't imagined there would be time to read. I was sorry I hadn't taken at least a section or two of the
Times.
I took out my notebook and opened it. There were all my notes from conversations with Kevin and Ada and Rachel and Jill and Mrs. Halliday. I could see how one piece of information led to another, how I had ended up in Bladesville, a town I hadn't heard of three days ago when Susan became a missing person to those closest to her.

I made some notes from memory on my conversation with the Donaldsons. Susan had turned up five or six months ago, her hair was different from the picture, she wore heavy shoes. A friend in the area had mentioned the farm to her.

“There you go.” The waitress set down a beautiful salad, a roll and butter, a glass of skim milk.

I set aside the notebook and started to eat. I hadn't realized how hungry I was. The food was really very good and I ate it slowly, knowing that I was now enjoying the best part of the day.

“You look marvelous.” We hugged and Joseph slid into the chair next to mine. “I see why you were so secretive on the phone. You were practically addressing everyone here.”

“Thanks so much for coming. I'm in the midst of a search for a missing young woman and I can't take the next step alone.” I filled her in, and she agreed we were better off going into the house together. I had already paid my bill so we went outside, hopped into my car, and drove back to the Donaldson farm.

“It's certainly away from the crowds,” Joseph said, as we got out of the car. “Do you have any idea why she would want to spend time here?”

“No idea that makes any sense. I'm glad you thought to wear boots.”

“Well you can't go far from the Mother House without them. Harold's busy getting the walks clear. Classes start again tomorrow, and the students will be coming back today.”

The college is on the convent grounds, a small liberal arts school where I taught English for a number of years as a nun. “I don't think anyone's plowed here for a long time. There were tire tracks before I came so I assumed that was the driveway. But there's no car anywhere that I could see.”

Joseph looked around. “Might be one in that old barn.”

We walked up the steps to the front porch. “Ready?” I asked.

“Go ahead.”

I opened the door and we stepped in. I called a couple of times but there was no answer, no sound of any kind. “This must have been the living room,” I said as we entered a large room to the left of the door. Most of the furniture was gone, probably moved to the Donaldsons' new home, but a few old pieces were arranged rather haphazardly on the bare, dusty floor.

Joseph walked back to the dining room. “Nothing here either,” she called. “Just an old chandelier that's seen better days.”

I followed her and looked around the bare room. I could see where a rug had covered a rectangle on the floor; the wood was two distinct shades of brown, the outer rectangle bleached. I glanced around. Joseph was gone.

“Don't come in here, Chris.” Joseph's voice came from somewhere beyond the dining room.

Cold as it was, I felt a chill. “What is it?”

“I think I've found her.”

“Oh, God.”

Joseph appeared in the doorway, her face pale. She put her hand on the wall. “It looks as though she was bludgeoned.”

“Oh, Joseph.” I went over to her. “I think I need to take a look. Stay here.”

Her color had come back and she followed me into the kitchen. The body lay sprawled face-down on the floor on the left side of the kitchen among overturned chairs, broken dishes, a couple of pots and pans—indications that the poor victim had not accepted her fate without a fight. Blood was splattered on the walls and had run across the floor in thin streams, where it had frozen in ugly reddish-brown, three-dimensional trails.

What little skin that wasn't hidden by her hair had a
grayish pallor. One hand was beneath her, the other extended, its color a bluish-black that made me shiver.

On the right side of the room near the outside wall, about halfway into the kitchen, was a tall cast-iron woodstove with a tubular chimney that rose vertically, then made a sharp right turn and went through the wall, a pretty reliable source of heat if you had wood to feed it. And against the wall near it was a makeshift bed, a pillow, and blankets and flannel sheets that might or might not have covered a thin mattress. When the weather had gotten cold, Susan had moved into the kitchen. I knew better than to disturb a crime scene, but I made my way carefully to the stove and touched it.

“Ice cold,” I said.

“Not surprising. It's almost as cold in here as outside. You just don't feel the wind. I don't know how they'll determine when she died.”

“She came up here three days ago. She was looking for someone or going to meet someone.”

“It looks like she found him. Or he found her.”

“Joseph, before I report this to the police, I want to take a look around the house. Even if they find anything, they'll never tell me and I know enough not to disturb what's here.”

“Let's go to it.”

I took a last look around the kitchen. On the table where she had had her last meal was an ancient manual typewriter with no paper in it. I didn't see anything that looked like a suitcase or a knapsack or a woman's handbag. On a small table near the door there were some pens and pencils but no paper, no newspaper, no letters. I led the way out of the room.

We went upstairs where there were several bedrooms, most of them empty, and a bathroom that would have been harboring the worst of the microscopic world if it
hadn't been so cold. One bedroom had obviously been Susan's. There was a bed now stripped of its mattress and blankets, an old dresser that had some clothes in it but nothing else, a closet with a few wire hangers on a rod and some old shoe boxes, all empty, on the floor among assorted scraps of tissue paper and brown wrapping paper.

“Just some socks and underwear in the dresser,” I said. “No letters or papers.”

“She must have moved most of her things downstairs.”

“If there was anything else. She couldn't have spent a lot of time here. She had a job, a boyfriend, family and friends.”

“Perhaps it was a weekend retreat,” Joseph said.

“But why?”

“That's what you'll have to find out. That's what will lead you to her killer.”

We went back downstairs and looked around the living room and dining room again. Even the coat closet near the door was empty. I went back to the kitchen and looked around. A down jacket was lying on the floor near the makeshift bed. I stepped carefully over rivulets of blood and reached for it.

There were gloves in the pockets, a dirty tissue, and a few coins. The gloves were gray knitted wool, the index finger of the right hand starting to fray at the tip. “Right-handed,” I said. “Do you see a wallet or purse anywhere, Joseph?”

“I've been looking for that but I haven't found any. The killer must have taken it with him.”

“To make it look like a burglary.”

“Or to keep us from confirming her identity. The killer may have thought she wouldn't be found till spring and by then no one would be able to identify her.”

“No one can identify her now with her head bashed in
that way. Well, maybe her face was spared.” I made my way carefully back to the doorway. I was thinking that if they wanted to compare fingerprints, Ada and I had all but obliterated them from Susan's desk. Perhaps there were things in Kevin's apartment that hadn't yet been polished away by a zealous housekeeper.

We left the house without saying anything. In the car, I thanked her for coming. “I couldn't do it myself.”

“You knew she was in there dead.”

“I suspected it. I had terrible feelings about this.”

“It's better to know, Chris. It's better than not knowing.”

I backed out and turned onto the road. “But her mother,” I said. “How am I going to tell her mother?”

Bladesville shared a sheriffs department with the next town. They took us back to the farmhouse in a deputy's car, two brown-uniformed deputies, neither of whom wanted to be the only one to go into the house any more than I had, although one of them was old enough to have seen some bodies in his career. They left us in the car with the motor running as they went in. They didn't stay long; they came out looking pretty grim and a lot grayer than when they went in. The older of the two, Sergeant Holzer, called the county police from the car. Then he drove us back to the sheriffs office and took our statements.

It took a long time because there were a lot of calls to be made, to the local coroner, to a county detective who was attending a wedding somewhere and would have his Sunday ruined, to poor Farmer Donaldson who would rue the day he opened his door to me. He had rented the farmhouse illegally. The property had been condemned because of safety hazards and was, in the opinion of the local building inspector, likely to fall down at any moment.

I was asked, of course, how I happened to be at the farmhouse, who I was looking for, who had put me onto the Bladesville address, and so on. I gave the deputy the name and phone number of the Brooklyn detective whose case it was, and he, of course, was off on Sunday and apparently not carrying a beeper wherever he was spending his afternoon. Frustrated, the deputy spent time on the phone talking to someone else who read from the file and said it would be faxed over later when the fax machine was free.

Someone else interviewed Joseph, who had very little to say but left her interviewer looking rather uneasy. She was wearing the brown habit of the Franciscan order, and I heard the officer assure her he was a good Catholic and very sorry to be taking her time. I smiled at his discomfort. He was probably remembering some terrible incident from his rambunctious childhood when he had felt put upon by a nun in his classroom.

It was finally over, and Joseph and I spent a little time together talking before we went off in opposite directions. I tried to reach Arnold but no one answered. I had just about enough time to get myself back to Oakwood and bathe and nurse my lovely baby, so I went out to the car and started for home. The worst had happened, and I hoped the police would be inspired to get to work now even though it was too late to find Susan alive.

“Glad you made it,” Jack said as I came inside the house. “I was starting to worry.”

“We found her dead,” I said, taking my coat off quickly. There was a lot to do.

“We?”

“I called Joseph when I found the door open.”

“So the worst happened.” He took my coat and hung it in the closet as I ran to find Eddie. He was crying in the family room, hungry, tired, ready for his evening attention.

I had very little free time for the next hour, but Jack called the precinct and asked that no one notify Susan's parents and boyfriend until we had made the first call. Whoever he spoke to wasn't sorry to give up that most unpleasant part of his duties.

Jack had something in the oven when I came home, and when I finally put Eddie to bed about an hour and a half after walking into the house, we sat down to one of his great meals, roast beef with real Yorkshire pudding. I was so hungry I gobbled it up, hardly uttering a word till I was through.

“I'm glad Sister Joseph came to help. You could have called the police, you know.”

“I kept thinking there'd be nothing in the house, I'd get Farmer Donaldson in trouble for illegally renting the
house—which I did—and they'd think I was nuts. Joseph drove over and we went inside together.”

“It must have looked pretty terrible.”

“It did, but there wasn't any smell. There was no heat and the body was frozen.”

“So there wasn't much deterioration.”

“I couldn't really tell. She was lying face-down so all I saw was one bluish-black hand, her jeans, her sweater, and her hair. Someone bashed her head in. I hope there's enough of a face left for identification.”

“There are other means,” Jack said. “By the way, Melanie brought over some cookies.”

“Bless her heart. Where does she get the time now that she's teaching?”

“She said she just got going this afternoon and never stopped. We should have them over one of these evenings, Chris. I think you two miss each other, and I always enjoy talking to Hal.”

“She'll need a sitter,” I reminded him.

“You're right. I forgot.”

We had usually gone over to the Grosses'. It was so easy, just lock the front door and walk down the street. “I'll talk to her. You're right, I really miss her. I haven't been walking in the morning since Eddie came.” Mel and I had met during our morning outings over two years ago.

“You'll walk in the spring.”

“I've got to call Arnold, Jack. I think he's the best person to talk to the Starks. The cookies'll have to wait.”

“You think walking in on the body is the hard part,” he said solemnly. “Then you start making the phone calls and find out what's really tough.”

He was right. I went to the phone with a heavy heart.

“You found her body?” Arnold said, full of disbelief.

“Yes. I'm sorry. It was in a farmhouse up the Hudson.”

“This is terrible. I don't know how this could have happened. How did you come to this place, Chris?”

“I had a conversation with Susan's old schoolteacher. Susan told her things, private things, that she doesn't seem to have told anyone else. What she told me fitted right in with what the owner of the car Susan borrowed said, that wherever Susan was going, it was about fifty miles from Brooklyn. I followed up on it and found the farmhouse. Sister Joseph drove over to go inside the house with me. I couldn't do it alone.” Arnold knew Joseph, having met her—and talked to her with great pleasure and admiration—at our wedding.

“Have the Starks been notified?”

“Jack asked the police to hold off. Would you like me to do it?”

“I'd like anyone in the world to do it, but I think it's my duty as a friend.”

“I'm so sorry, Arnold.”

“Did you find the car up there?”

“I didn't see it on the property. There's a chance it's in one of the farm buildings.”

“Thanks, Chris. We'll talk.”

I didn't envy him the next ten minutes of his life.

We talked about it as we ate Melanie's wonderful cookies.

“She had a secret life, Chris,” Jack said. “She may have been involved in something sordid or illegal, and whatever it was she handled it from that house upstate.”

“You're thinking drugs?”

“Could be. Doesn't have to be. Maybe it was a relationship. How did she find that place anyhow?”

“The farmer said someone she knew up there told her the house was empty.”

“That's a lot of doors to knock on,” he said, thinking like a cop. “Everyone in Bladesville and all the surrounding towns.”

“You mean someone she knows steers her to a lonely farmhouse and then kills her?”

“It's an idea. If you hadn't hit on that schoolteacher, no one would have found her till the farmer started showing prospective buyers the house. It could have been a long time.”

That was true. The better portion of the property had been sold; the farmhouse was certified unlivable. “And by the time they found her, no one would even associate her body with a missing Brooklyn girl.”

“That's probably how he looked at it. Not a perfect crime, but damn close.”

“But it didn't happen that way, Jack. He didn't count on my talking to Mrs. Halliday and finding the body three days after the murder. I think the police have a pretty good chance at this one.”

“Let's hope so.”

Arnold called about nine o'clock. “This has to be one of the worst days of my life,” he said, sounding far from his usual chipper self. “They've typed the blood and it's Susan's. Ada and Ernie are looking around for things in the house that might have Susan's prints on them.”

“Kevin's apartment might be a better place to look. Has he been notified?”

“Yes. I called him myself. He's as broken up as Ada and Ernie.”

Or a good actor, I thought uncharitably. “Arnold, does anyone have any idea what Susan wanted a lonely farmhouse for? She rented it five months ago and paid for six months in cash.”

“Well, I certainly don't know. Maybe Kevin does but he's not talking, and I can't get anything out of Ada and Ernie now, I'm sure you understand why. And I think they're finding this as mysterious and unexplainable as lam.”

“She has some connection up there, Arnold, a friend who lives around there and knew about the empty farmhouse. Now that's not just a person who drives down that road. It's someone who knows the area.”

“I'm sure you're right, Chrissie, but my brain won't take any more of this today. And believe it or not, I have to be in court first thing tomorrow morning.”

“OK. We'll talk another day. Let me know if anything turns up.”

Monday was back-to-work day. Jack was off to Brooklyn to the Six Five and Mel was off to the town school where she had a one-year appointment. I was going back to teaching at a local college, but happily, I didn't have to think about that for a couple of weeks. My teaching consisted of one course that met on Tuesday mornings, and my mother's old friend Elsie Rivers had promised long ago to baby-sit. It was an ideal arrangement. She was trustworthy and grandmotherly and close by. Tomorrow, when I went to my obstetrician for my six-week checkup, I would drop Eddie off for the first time and see how everything worked out. I was sure it would go well.

But today it was just the two of us, with perhaps a late afternoon visit from Mel. Jack wouldn't be home for dinner because his evening law school classes were resuming, and that meant returning to the late nights we had grown accustomed to since shortly after we had met. I got the house in shape, checked with Elsie about tomorrow, took Eddie out for a walk in the cold winter air, and, after his two o'clock feeding, lay down for a
well-needed nap. I was awakened after three by the telephone. It was Arnold.

“The coroner upstate decided not to ask the Starks to identify the body,” he said. “There isn't much of a face left.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“So they'll try for prints. Kevin had a bunch of things he was sure she had held, so they're using those to find a match.”

“What about DNA?”

“Takes a long time but they may do it anyway. If they can match prints, that's good enough. They've already got the right blood type. Ada doesn't have the faintest idea who Susan might have known up in that part of New York State. Neither does Kevin.”

“Arnold, Kevin knows that something was bothering Susan and he won't talk about it. But he might know more than he lets on.”

“I'll pass that along.”

“Do the police have any leads?” I asked.

“Not that I've heard. I'm afraid you and the deputies up there did a great job of obliterating any tire tracks.”

“I thought of that when it was too late.”

“Well, don't worry about it.”

“Do you want me to keep working on this, Arnold? I can leave Eddie for several hours at a time.”

“Let's wait and see what the sheriff comes up with.”

For the moment that seemed the best way to go. I had a doctor's appointment tomorrow, which would keep me in the area but wouldn't stop me from thinking. Very little stops me from thinking besides fatigue. I wanted to come up with a lead to the person who had told Susan about the Donaldson farmhouse. If she had a relative in the Bladesville area, her parents would know. If there
were a friend that she talked about, Kevin would know. Unless Kevin himself were the friend.

Mel and her kids dropped over after four, and we all sat in the family room while the adults talked and the two school-aged children played. I had picked up some toys recently so they wouldn't be bored to tears when they visited, and their newness seemed to keep them happily occupied. I was learning pretty quickly that there was more to being a mother than caring for a baby.

“The cookies are great,” I told Mel.

“I made a million of them, but there's only half a million left twenty-four hours later. I really love being back in the classroom, but I hate the idea of living out of the microwave.”

“I can understand that. Especially since your home-cooked food is super-good.”

“But you know, I've lost some weight since I started to teach. There aren't as many sweets in the house to nibble on. All those years of running and what finally took the pounds off was going back to work!”

“I just hope not taking my morning walk won't affect me the other way.”

“You were born thin, Chris,” Mel said, with a sigh. “And I wasn't. Tell me about your trip upstate.”

I had told her the essence of it over the phone, which was half the reason she was here. Now I told her the rest and finished by saying how much I would like to figure out who had suggested the farmhouse to Susan.

“Maybe a retired teacher,” Mel said. “She had a good relationship with one. Maybe she had a good relationship with another.”

“OK, that's something to think about. Keep talking. You've already got one idea more than I have.”

“There's always an old boyfriend. Her mother might remember a name for you.”

“Why would a young person want to live in a village of five hundred or so up the Hudson, away from the big city and all his friends?”

“Maybe there's a commune up there. And you know, a lot of young families have turned to farming to get away from the big city and return to the earth.”

“I hadn't thought of that.”

“Or maybe he's artistic, a writer or a painter, and he wants peace and quiet and can't afford the city. New York's pretty expensive.”

“You're right, it is. Go on, Mel. You're really doing well. I should turn this case over to you.”

“Hardly. When would I work on it? From midnight to six
A.M.
?”

The plight of the working mother. We talked for a while, and then it was time for both of us to look after our children. Mel held Eddie and talked to him before she left, and he clearly loved it. I walked Mel and her kids to the front door and watched them skip down Pine Brook Road. Then I went back to Eddie and started our evening hour.

When he was happily asleep, I ate some leftovers from the weekend. When Jack came home later, I would sit with him while he ate. It amused me that there were now three family members, all of whom had different schedules. During the fifteen years I had been a nun at St. Stephen's, I had lived by the general schedule of the convent. We awoke at the same time, had morning prayers at the same time, performed our charges, taught our classes, came and went in the most efficient way possible. My life had now turned topsy-turvy.

I read a book as I ate, then took care of the dishes and grabbed the
Times.
The new family room was set up so that it was in a separate heating zone. I could keep Eddie
warm upstairs and myself warm in the family room while leaving the kitchen, dining and living rooms cool. It even made sense now for Jack to have his late dinner in the family room so as not to have to heat the kitchen and the rest of the downstairs. I am a born penny-pincher, and doing things like this gives me, if not pleasure, at least satisfaction.

I sat back with the paper and started to read. The door was closed to save the heat and it took a moment before I realized the phone was ringing in the kitchen. I tossed the paper aside and dashed.

“Hello?”

“Chris? This is Jill Brady. We heard about Susan at work today.”

“Yes. I found her body yesterday, upstate, about fifty miles from Brooklyn.”

“The police came and interviewed us. I'll have to call them but I thought you'd like to hear first.”

“Hear what?” I couldn't imagine what she had to tell me.

“I walked by my garage this evening on my way home. The car's been brought back.”

“The car you lent to Susan?”