By the time Jack came home that night, I had already called Joseph and arranged to drive up to St. Stephen’s the following day. Except for Joseph, none of the nuns had seen Eddie, and I knew they wanted to. Jack and I had been married at St. Stephen’s but when Eddie was born, my mother-in-law’s choice for the location of the baptism prevailed. We had it at Jack’s old church in Brooklyn, and only Joseph came down to join us. So this was a good opportunity to show off my beautiful son and get the benefit of Joseph’s discerning point of view in a case where she had actually seen the crime scene.
“You think the nuns’ll spoil Eddie rotten?” Jack asked as he ate his late dinner.
“Probably. He deserves that once in a while, don’t you think? We’re both such tough parents.”
“Tough, yeah. Gets me wondering about those abuse cases we keep hearing about, how the hell people do it.”
“I know.”
“OK, tell me about the case. Susan herself turned up on your doorstep. That must have been a shock.”
“It was. I wasn’t sure whether to let her in or not, but I did.”
“And she didn’t tell you enough to put your finger on a killer or you wouldn’t be going up to St. Stephen’s tomorrow.”
“That’s about it,” I said. “She told me some interesting stuff but she left out a lot.” I filled him in on the pluses and minuses as he ate.
“She thinks this woman steered her into a job and a relationship? It’s eerie and I can’t see a reason for it. Both those things turned out well. Made Susan happy.”
“That’s right.”
“So it doesn’t look like there was any evil intent. But what’s the purpose? What did D.D. Butler get out of it?”
“Maybe she was going to get something out of it on New Year’s Eve.”
“And it backfired,” Jack said.
“But not with Susan,” I reminded him. “With someone else.”
“You think she was a one-woman do-good organization? And one of her missions went sour?”
“I don’t know. I’m hoping Joseph comes up with something. Let me tell you who I’d like to talk to even though I know I won’t be able to: I’ve never laid eyes on Susan’s father. Remember New Year’s Day when we were all going nuts trying to figure out where Susan was? Her father went to his office because, we were told, when he’s worried, he likes to work. I wonder how he spent New Year’s Eve.”
“Good point.”
“And when I asked Susan where she had spent the night before New Year’s Eve—you remember the discussions about whether she was home and they just didn’t see her or whether she disappeared from her doorstep when Kevin dropped her off—she said, as though it was the most unimportant question she’d ever been asked, that she’d spent the night at her parents’. That really bothers me. Even if her bedroom was around a corner—and it is; I saw it—don’t you hear a toilet flushing or a shower running?”
“I think the Starks said, or at least her mother did since no one’s talked to her father—that they were out that day, that Susan could have gotten up earlier or later and left without being seen. If it was later, they wouldn’t have heard a shower running.”
“I don’t like it,” I said. “Susan told me she got to the farmhouse before eleven. It was supposedly her first trip up there. It had to take an hour and a half from Brooklyn.”
“Easily.”
“Looking for roads, driving in unfamiliar territory. I’m uneasy about it,” I said. “I’m just wondering if Ada lied to protect Susan. Or to make it a more complicated case.”
“Anything’s possible.”
I looked at my notebook with its underlined unanswered questions. Susan knew about D.D. long before the letter inviting her to Bladesville. How did she know? Why wouldn’t she tell me?
“Susan and D.D. connected before the letter Susan admits receiving a few weeks ago inviting her up to Bladesville on New Year’s Eve. She won’t say what the connection was, whether it was letters or meetings or phone calls. I told her I wouldn’t help her unless she gave me the missing information.”
“Getting tough, I see.”
“Well, I’m the mother of a son. You have to be tough with sons, don’t you?”
“Ah,” my gun-toting, hard-boiled husband said, “not this year. Maybe when he’s put in twelve months.”
I leaned over and kissed him, then left the table for a minute. When I came back I handed him the envelope with D.D.’s published short story. “I don’t exactly recommend this for bedtime reading, but it may give you some insights into D.D. Butler’s character.”
He took a quick look at it and put it back in the envelope. I didn’t envy him the task of reading it.
“What a downer,” he said at breakfast the next morning. “That story. Woman with a dark soul. Can’t say I’d visit her in a lonely farmhouse after reading that.”
“I doubt whether Susan read it.”
“You showing that to Sister Joseph?”
“I don’t know.” It was something I had thought about. “I can show it to her and she can exercise her own judgment on whether she wants to read it or not.”
“Well, say hello to her for me.”
I promised I would. Later on in the morning, I packed Eddie into the car and drove to the convent.
Someone had put a pale blue ribbon tied in a huge bow on a stake in front of one of the parking spaces outside the Mother House, and I glided into it with a smile. “Looks like we have a welcoming committee, Eddie,” I said, but Eddie was fast asleep. I got him out of the car and slung my bag and his bag over my shoulder and managed to get a grip on the little seat. I didn’t have to carry them more than a few steps, because the nuns were on the lookout and three came running to help me. I ended up with only my shoulder bag as everything else, including Eddie, was whisked into the Mother House.
“Chris, you look wonderful,” Angela said, as I took my coat off. She had a firm grasp on Eddie, who seemed happy to continue sleeping on her shoulder.
“Not as thin as before.”
“Oh, you’ll get back. You were never one to sit idle. But what a beautiful baby he is. I hope he wakes up before you leave so I can see the color of his eyes.”
“I’m sure he will. Let me get his snowsuit off.”
“He’s so wonderfully warm,” Angela said. “And he smells like an angel.”
“You can have him back,” I promised.
We carried him up to Joseph’s office so she could have a look before we got down to work. I was interested that she seemed very pleased to see him and touch him, but was less enthusiastic about holding him. I had never had much interest in babies myself before I became pregnant. They had been cute and appealing from a distance, but nothing in me had craved the closeness of holding one in my arms.
When the introduction had been completed, Angela took Eddie away and Joseph and I sat at the end of her long table, opposite each other, to eat lunch off the trays that awaited us.
“I’ve really been on pins and needles waiting to hear from you,” she said. “I’ve seen that kitchen in Bladesville in my dreams.”
“So have I.”
“I gather from what you said on the phone yesterday that you’ve come a long way since discovering the body.”
“But not all the way. There are huge gaps in what I know and I’m not sure how to fill them in.”
“Then let’s start at the beginning.”
I did in my usual way, referring to my notes, backtracking occasionally, answering a question here and there. I had D.D.’s short story with me, and I handed it across the table as I came near the end of my own story. Joseph slid it out of the envelope and began to read it, her face, which is as clear and smooth and benign as any I have ever seen, wrinkling with distaste.
“Not a very happy woman,” she said, setting the story aside.
“It doesn’t appear that way, does it?” I finished up with Susan’s surprise appearance and what she had told me.
“Certainly the most interesting things that Susan said concern D.D.’s involvement in her life and the fact that she spent the night before New Year’s Eve at her parents’.”
“Why is that last so interesting?” I asked, having thought so myself.
“The way you tell it, Susan had no compunctions about admitting she slept at the Starks’. If I interpreted your telling of it correctly, she might actually have said, ‘Good morning, Mom,’ before she left the house.”
“That’s just the way it came across to me.”
“It’s possible that she didn’t see them, of course. I wonder if she left a note. Kevin was supposed to pick her up there that afternoon, wasn’t he?”
“That evening, I’d guess. He called in the afternoon and she wasn’t there.”
“Can we account for Susan’s father’s whereabouts that day?”
“I’ve never spoken to him, Joseph. I’ve never laid eyes on him.”
“I think you should. He may not grant you an interview but I think you should try to get one. You’ve talked to everyone else we know about, certainly many more people than the police have, and that’s a gaping hole. Perhaps he has nothing to add, but if there’s something peculiar about Susan having slept at home that night, he might just drop it accidentally and you would have a juicy bit of information.”
“I’ll give it a try.”
“You know, ideas are swirling around in my mind as we talk, some of them a bit far-fetched, some not quite so. Now that you’ve spoken to Susan, now that you’ve learned her admitted connections to D.D. Butler, I think you ought to explore each of them some more. Just ask a simple question of each: Why that particular job? Why Kevin?”
“The job was advertised in the Times,” I said.
“And D.D. could have heard about it that way. I still think it’s a good question to ask.”
I know better than to argue. If I could get Kevin to talk to me, to tell me where and how he met Susan, some link might turn up. “I’ll give Kevin a call.”
“And in all these brain swirlings I keep coming back to the Donaldsons, Farmer Fred and his wife. A woman comes to the door, gives them an obviously false name, and they rent out their condemned farmhouse for six months’ rent in cash. Go back over your notes, Chris. Review your recollections of your meeting with that couple. There’s something there, I’m sure of it.”
“What about Teddy?” I asked.
“Yes, Teddy. Teddy the artist, who has a friend who’s a real estate agent. Teddy, who drives D.D. to shop for groceries because she’s stuck without a car. Teddy, who is allegedly told not to turn up on New Year’s weekend. It could all be true. I think if Teddy killed D.D., we need a motive. To listen to his tale, he’s a good friend, a very helpful person. If he got tired of being either, why not just tell her?”
It sounded perfectly reasonable. D.D. could have posed no threat to Teddy; she couldn’t get to him without his help. She had obviously not asked the D’Agatis for assistance in getting around. “It’s just that Teddy had opportunity, even if we can’t think of a motive. He could have gone there at night, turned his car lights off, killed her, and driven away without anyone seeing him.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. He said D.D. was planning something. He didn’t know what, just a feeling he had. And he said she might have been writing something, as her mother claimed.”
“She must have been doing something all those months in that farmhouse.” Joseph is one of those people who think that time wasted is life wasted. “Did the police find anything she had written?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing, nothing, nothing. Chris, this young woman had a plan. A couple of people have told you that, and I think they’re right. The plan involved having Susan visit on New Year’s Eve, possibly having another person visit the same day, possibly not. Find out where Kevin was. Find out where Susan’s father was. Think about the Donaldsons. And two other things. D.D. Butler seems to have been a disturbed young woman. Did this happen suddenly, or is there a history that her family is keeping secret? And the other thing is magazines. There seem to be several magazines in this case. You’re close now. The more I think about it, the closer I believe you are.”
I didn’t bother saying I had no idea what she was talking about. “Would you like to finish the story?” I asked.
“Leave it with me for a few minutes. I’ll bring it down with me. You have plenty of visiting to do, I’m sure.”
I gathered up my notes. “Joseph, I have a question to ask you on a very different subject. If a woman nursed her baby in a car or in a sheltered place outside her home, how do you think the nuns would feel about it?”
The question was clearly a surprise and caught her imagination. She smiled. “I think their feelings would run from negative to, ‘Can’t you think of something else to complain about?’ Have you been trying to formulate a policy for yourself?”
“I nursed Eddie in my car and got hauled to a local police station.”
Joseph laughed. “Chris, what a story. I hope you asserted your maternal rights.”
“I did, but I didn’t have to. New York State has a law protecting me, but the sheriffs deputy was unaware of it.”
“I’ll bet your husband knew about it.”
“And Arnold Gold. They let me go with great embarrassment.” I took myself downstairs so she could look at D.D. Butler’s story.
I wasn’t sure who was entertaining whom. Everybody seemed to be giggling, including Eddie.
“You’d better bring him back when he’s old enough to eat my cookies,” Sister Dolores, a resident of the Villa, the home for retired nuns, said. “I’ve got a bag of them for you, but this little one doesn’t have the teeth for them yet.”
“Or the digestive system,” I said. “Thank you for baking.” I opened the bag and sniffed, the smell nearly driving me wild. “I’d better lock these in the trunk for the trip home.”
“Don’t be so quick to leave. It’s a beautiful day. You could show your little son around the convent and drop in on the Villa. I know a few people who’d love to say hello.”
So we did. And when it came time to nurse him, I found a quiet, empty room and closed the door. After what Joseph had said, I was sure it wouldn’t offend her, but I preferred not to find out whom it might upset.
Just before we left, Joseph found me and gave me back the envelope with the story. “It’s hard to believe anyone published this,” she said. “I may not be a literary critic, but it strikes me as rather trashy.”
“I feel the same way.”
“But I think there’s more to it than that. With hindsight, I think D.D. was playing a little prank, signaling her plans. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are useful clues in this story, especially in her lists of people, if you can decipher them.”
“I’ll certainly try,” I said.
Joseph bent and planted a kiss on Eddie’s cheek. “Have a safe drive home.”