The Christening Day Murder (18 page)

Jack is the first man in my life, the only one. I don’t know how it would be with anyone else, and when I’m with him, I don’t care. Even when I’m not with him, I don’t care. What we do together is very right and very special.

The motel had a good Sunday brunch starting at eleven. Jack and I are both early risers, and we decided to spend a couple of hours using our muscles. We drove to the river near Studsburg, parked, and started walking upstream, away from the dam that had been built to flood the town.

Most of the land was farmland with very few buildings, just an occasional farmhouse and barn. Next to almost every house was a huge dish to aid television reception. The river that in normal times supplied the water that created the lake that had been Studsburg was well down from its banks. The drought had been going on for two years, and I wondered how the farmers were faring. We stopped walking finally as the land began to slope downward, neither of us wanting to climb back up once we got to the bottom. Instead, we turned around and went back to where we’d parked. From there, Jack drove in the other direction, to the dam that had been built thirty years earlier. Today there was barely a trickle coming through.

“They built it for flood control,” I said. “Instead of indiscriminate flooding, they directed the water into the Studsburg basin. Look at it now.”

“You can deal with a problem, but you can’t forecast it. It’ll rain again; you can be sure of that.”

Almost as sure as that the sun would set this day, that we would kiss and say good-bye, that we would hunger for each other. We got back to the motel with just enough time to change for brunch.

I decided to use the phone in the room before we checked out rather than add to my growing debt at the convent. I took my list out and found Father Hartman’s number. He was in the rectory and came to the phone.

“I have something to tell you in confidence,” I said.

“Is it about the body in the church?”

“I think I know who it was. The town hired a teacher for the top three grades for that last year.”

“That’s right. Mr. Dietrich left for another job. She was new at teaching, but she did very well. Phillips,” he said.

“Then you knew her.”

“I knew her, I knew Mrs. McCormick, I knew them all. Are you telling me someone murdered her?”

“I think so. Father, I heard that J.J. Eberling used the rectory after his Main Street office was closed down.”

“That’s true, but we rarely saw each other. I gave him a room on the ground floor that I never used, and usually I wasn’t aware of whether he was in it or not. Sometimes I’d hear his typewriter clacking—he wrote a column, you know, besides editing the paper.”

“I heard.”

“But if it was quiet, I had no way of knowing if he was there. People would drop by to leave their stories, but it was like a separate little business. We didn’t interfere with each other.”

“Father, I know about Darlene Jackson and Joanne Beadles.”

He was quiet. Then he said, “I knew you would hear. As far as I’m concerned, it was all rumor. No one ever talked to me about it. No one ever brought charges.”

“Do you think J.J. could have killed Candy Phillips?”

“You’re asking for my opinion. I don’t think he did. And beyond that, I never heard a whisper connecting him to her.”

“Just one more thing,” I said. “Do you have any recollection of a Studsburger with the initials A.M. who was born in 1898?”

“In 1898,” he repeated. “Someone in his sixties when the town ended. Offhand, I can’t think of anyone.”

“Could it have been someone who left town a couple of years earlier?”

“Tell you what. I carried all the church records to the chancery when I left Studsburg. I’ll take a run up there and go through the baptismal records.”

“I’d really appreciate that.” I had assumed they were put away safely somewhere. Records of baptisms and marriages are often used to establish facts that may not be recorded by government agencies or have been lost. People really rely on church records.

We had to check out soon, and I wanted to spend some time with Jack before he left. As I picked up my address list to put it in my bag, something just below “Hartman” caught my eye. Mayor Fred Larkin, wife Gwen. I stared at the name.

“Her name isn’t Gwen,” I said aloud.

“Whose?”

“The mayor’s wife. He called her Evvie. He said Evvie didn’t like his smoking. She’s Gwen on the list.”

“So he changed wives. Lots of guy do it.”

“Jack, Carol Stifler keeps this list updated. She wouldn’t forget to change the name of the mayor’s wife. And that’s not all.” I was feeling excited. When you discover someone’s been lying to you, it gets the juices going. “He talks as though there’s only been one wife. He told me he’d met her in the eighth grade. He didn’t say ‘my first wife,’ he said ‘my wife.’ That isn’t something I could have gotten wrong. He’s keeping it secret that he’s not married to Gwen anymore.”

“OK, so he got divorced, and in his generation, you don’t do that kind of thing. Is he Catholic?”

“Yes. He was married in St. Mary Immaculate.”

“So that’s it. He did something the church says he shouldn’t have, and he’s ashamed. He doesn’t want all his old friends to know about it.”

I ran it through my mind. Sometimes people are called by one name early in their lives and by another later because the first name goes out of fashion. But as I conjured up the image of Evvie Larkin, I could now see what hadn’t really made an impression on me when I met her, that she was younger than her husband, substantially younger. He could never have met Evvie in eighth grade, because she would have been in kindergarten, and eighth graders don’t hold hands with little kids. “He’s hiding something,” I said aloud. “It’s what one of the nuns said. There are three liars. One of them is a killer, or protecting a killer.”

Jack looked suddenly very sober. “When you get that look, I get the feeling you’re on to something.”

“Something’s wrong there, Jack. Maybe this is the break I’ve been waiting for.”

“Can I escort you back to the convent before I leave? To make sure you get there in one piece?”

I couldn’t help laughing. “No, you can’t. And don’t make me promise to keep out of trouble.”

“I’m calling you there tonight.”

“OK.”

“And you’re calling me tomorrow when you get home.”

“I will.”

“And if I don’t hear from you, I’ll have the state police out looking for you. I’m not kidding, Chris.”

“You’ll hear from me.”

   After Jack left, I drove back to the convent. Several of the nuns had visitors, and a number of people were crowding into the shop. I went to the kitchen to offer my help, but it was too late to scrape vegetables for dinner, and all the breakfast dishes had been washed and put away hours ago. I didn’t feel much like sitting in my small room, so I walked over to the chapel and sat in a pew. A family was walking through, looking at the windows and the altar. The wife was carrying a bag with the name of the convent on it, so I knew they had bought some preserves. They talked in the low tones people often reserve for churches and they smiled at me as they passed, feeling the friendship of strangers visiting the same place.

When they left, I lighted my three candles and went back to the pew. Alone, I planned my itinerary for the next day. I had to find out what had happened to Gwen Larkin.

I was still in the chapel when the nuns arrived for evening prayers. I left with them, walking slowly back to the Mother House for dinner. There are curious rituals in a convent. In this one as in mine, each nun had her own little drawer in the community room where she kept her napkin ring and her mug. On weekdays her mail would be left in that drawer. As a guest, I had no drawer, but I had thought to bring along a mug for my coffee as I had brought my own towels, sheets, and soap. The mug was handy after dinner when we sat in front of the TV and drank coffee. The program of choice that evening was “60 Minutes,” after which the nuns left to shower
and get ready for bed. In a convent with younger nuns, the older ones may leave first, but there were no younger nuns here, and by eight o’clock they had all been awake for fifteen hours. Some of them had slipped away during the program to get to bed early.

I was about to leave myself when a nun I didn’t know came into the room and called me. “You’re wanted on the phone,” she said.

I followed her to the phone in the foyer.

“Miss Bennett?” a man’s voice said.

“Yes, it is.”

“This is Ken Parker at Steuben Press. I’ve done some calling around about J.J. Eberling.”

“Yes,” I said eagerly.

“I can’t give you specifics and I probably shouldn’t say anything at all, but I heard a couple of things. It’s all rumor and speculation, you understand, and I can’t say too much because I don’t want to get my pants sued off me, but the word is, there was a payoff.”

“J.J. Eberling paid someone off?”

“That’s about all I can tell you. You were right when you said people were beholden. That’s the absolutely right-on-the-target word for it. I don’t know how you’ll crack it, but keep me out of it, OK? Good night, Miss Bennett.”

He hung up before I could return his farewell. A payoff. To whom? And why? The only money I knew about was the thousand dollars J.J. had given to Joanne Beadles, and Joanne had given to her mother. Was that the payoff he was talking about? What could a nineteen-year-old girl have known or done to warrant a payoff? Had there been more—paid to other people? I hoped Jack would be able to find her—if she was still alive.

And for yet another time I wondered if I was chasing the wrong man.

Carol Stifler’s list reflected her penchant for organization. Next to each death there was a date, or an approximate date. And next to each new address was the date of the move. So I knew where Fred Larkin had lived and when he had moved to each new address. He had lived in his current house for twenty years, and I guessed that he had lived there with his current wife. That left two addresses that covered ten years, and both of them were in the central part of the state. That gave me the start of my Monday morning itinerary. I would start west and work my way east, eventually getting home by evening. Tuesday morning I had a class to teach.

By nine
A.M
. I was in the county building of the nearer address. It was the second one Larkin had lived in, but it made sense to start close. Since I had a time frame, my search was limited to the years he had lived there. I found a sympathetic young woman who got me started. I went through all the recorded divorces in the eight-year period Fred Larkin had lived in the county. There was no mention of his name.

Then I tried the deaths. Plenty of people had died in those eight years, but none of them was Gwendolyn Larkin. I got in my car and drove east.

At my second stop, the county seat in the Larkins’ first post-Studsburg home, I had only two years of records to scan. There was no divorce here either, and I moved on to the deaths. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for. Less than a year after leaving Studsburg, Mrs. Gwendolyn
Larkin had died an accidental death. I wrote down the date and then found the sheriff’s office.

It wasn’t the first time I had tried to get hold of old police records, and it wasn’t the first time I was given a runaround. No one wants to go looking in dusty old files, and I couldn’t hang around all day waiting for someone to find time to do me a favor. I finally persuaded someone that Mrs. Larkin was a very important person to me and I needed to know how she had died. He looked at his watch meaningfully before he agreed to go down to the basement to look up the file on her death.

I was getting hungry myself at that point, but I didn’t want to give up if there was a chance I could learn something. I knew that in a pinch Jack could get me the information, but it might take time, and although all the important events had happened decades ago, I felt pressed to learn as much as I could as fast as I could, as though I were working against some deadline that was rapidly closing in on me.

The officer was gone quite a while, and I sat part of the time and walked around part of the time, hoping he hadn’t ducked out on me.

He hadn’t. He finally came through the door with a file folder in his hand. I stood up and walked to the counter while he took his place behind it.

“Gwendolyn Larkin, husband Fred?” he said.

“That’s it.”

“Car accident.”

“Was anyone else hurt?”

“Only one vehicle involved. No one else in her car.”

“How did it happen?”

“It was winter, icy stretch, car went off the road, hit a tree.”

“And they’re sure no one else was in the car with her?”

“Ma’am,” he said with unctuous politeness, “in an accidental death there’s an investigation. Also an autopsy. Mrs. Larkin was at the wheel. It was twenty-nine years ago and she wasn’t wearing a seat belt. Given the details in the accident
report—road conditions, auto damage, speed—I’d estimate it didn’t take her more than a couple of seconds to die after the car made contact.”

“Thank you.”

“Can I have my lunch now?”

   I got a sandwich near the courthouse and then drove east. I wasn’t sure where I was going. I knew I had to confront Fred Larkin with Candy Phillips, and there was enough time today to do that. Eventually I would have to drive into Pennsylvania and see if I could find the place that Candy’s letters were forwarded to, but it was much too late to think about that today. Then I remembered Amy Broderick’s brother, Jerry Mulholland.

I had sort of been waiting to call him from home. Now I decided to try his office number instead of waiting for tonight. I pulled into a gas station, filled the tank, and used their pay phone.

“Mulholland,” a voice answered.

I told him who I was.

“Oh yeah. Amy said you’d be calling. Want to stir up old memories, I hear.”

“I hope they’re still good and sharp. I’m interested in what you remember about your eighth grade teacher.”

“You mean the delectable Miss Phillips.”

I smiled. He sounded like a nice guy and he didn’t mind being called. “Tell me what you remember.”