The Christening Day Murder (13 page)

“I think I understand.”

“It’s easy to look the other way when someone’s been good to you. He sure as hell didn’t do anything good for us. He was the son of a military man, you know, and he came in here all the time like a general commanding his troops. You would have thought he owned the place. It disrupted our business and got our employees angry. He had no respect for anything except his own work, and he expected people to move over and bow down because he was J.J. Eberling. My father was doing him a big favor—I’m sure we lost money on that job—but you’d’ve thought it was the other way around. Tell you what. Give me your number and I’ll do some calling around.”

I wrote down the convent number and my own back in Oakwood.

“You staying with those nuns?” he asked.

“Just while I’m in the area.”

“Nice bunch of ladies. My wife buys their jams and jellies every year.”

“Where would I find Studsburg’s records if I needed them?” I asked.

“Good question. I think I heard someone say they’re in the county building. You know where the sheriff’s office and the court are?”

“I’ve been there.”

“That’s it.”

“Thanks, Mr. Parker.”

“I’ll do my best.”

   The silence outside his office made me feel almost lightheaded. I drove to the motel and had a second breakfast in the coffee shop. Although we’d been talking about J.J. Eberling, I felt certain that the word “beholden” could apply just as well to Mayor Larkin. They were both good men to the people in their town, and I didn’t have the time or resources to find the potential one or two people from Studsburg who might have had a gripe against them. I needed to find people who didn’t live there but knew the town.

I opened my notebook and turned pages while I sipped coffee. Mrs. Castro, the rectory housekeeper, wasn’t likely to be alive. Nor was Mrs. McCormick, who had taught school for forty years. The other teacher was Mr. Dietrich, no first name. Fred Larkin had said Mr. Dietrich stayed on that last year even though enrollment was way down. He hadn’t said how old Mr. Dietrich was or how many years he had taught in Studsburg.

I paid my bill and found a phone directory near a bank of coin phones. There were enough Dietrichs listed to make my task embarrassing. The thought of calling half a dozen people and asking for a man whose first name I didn’t know—and who might not even be alive—gave me pause.

Then I remembered the name Mulholland. On Tuesday evening Carol Stifler had called someone named Mulholland when we were trying to figure out who the miraculous medal belonged to. Mrs. Mulholland had had a school-age daughter named Amy. The list was in my bag. I gathered together enough quarters for a few minutes conversation, and dialed.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice answered.

“Mrs. Mulholland?”

“Yes, it is. Who’s this?”

I told her.

“Oh yes,” she said. “Carol Stifler called the other night. Wasn’t that something about the body?”

“Mrs. Mulholland, the Stiflers said you had a daughter about ten or twelve that last year.”

“Yes, Amy was in school then.”

“I’m trying to reach a teacher from the Studsburg school. Amy didn’t happen to have Mr. Dietrich, did she?” I had decided that a woman was more likely to teach the younger classes, leaving Mr. Dietrich the upper half of the school.

“No, Mr. Dietrich left the year before. He’d been there awhile, and the town—what was left of it—didn’t feel they could pay him full salary.”

My heart sank. “Then Mrs. McCormick taught the whole school?”

“Oh no. They got a new teacher just for that last year to teach the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. Amy had her.”

My heart had begun to pound. “Do you remember anything about her?” I asked. “Her name? Anything else?”

“Amy would remember her name, I’m sure. All I remember is that she was young, just out of school, I think, so we were able to pay her next to nothing, which was all the town could afford. Kind of a pretty thing. The kids all loved her. I remember she wore blue jeans and sneakers once when she took them on a class trip.” She laughed. “Who could forget something like that thirty years ago?”

It was one of those moments when you want to grab someone and start dancing. I didn’t have a name, a reason, or a whisper of proof, but I was sure I had my victim. Mrs. Mulholland had given me Amy’s phone number, which I couldn’t call till late afternoon as Amy was teaching, but that didn’t stop me. I drove to the county building to find some old records.

The people in the records office weren’t exactly delighted to hear my request, but after I filled out a form and waited my turn, a woman took me down to a basement room where old files were kept. The files for most of the towns in the county, she explained, were kept right in each town, but since in this case the town didn’t exist anymore, the records had been transferred to the county. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had asked to see these, but she knew where they were kept.

It was dark and empty down there till she turned on some lights, and the air was musty. There were only a handful of boxes for Studsburg, and they were labeled by year. If the number of records was any indication of population, Studsburg had dwindled noticeably in the course of the twentieth century. I had no interest in any but the last year or two, and those files were all in one box.

I looked at headings on folders till I found the files for the last two years. It was all there, ads placed in several newspapers and carbon copies of letters written to a variety of college placement offices explaining the need for a junior
high teacher with a valid New York State license for a period of one year, not renewable. The town offered a salary of four thousand dollars plus a few benefits. If the file was complete, only four people applied. Their letters and resumes testified to their desire to teach in a small town, their ability to handle three classes at three different levels, their willingness to cooperate with the community, and their commitment to good education. Of course, all of them loved teaching junior high school students more than any other age level. They sounded spirited and dedicated, their personalities rising from the old typewritten pages. I would have hired any one of them myself.

Only one of the candidates was ever interviewed. (The town sprang for the round-trip fare.) Her name was Candida Phillips, and according to her resume, she lived in Pennsylvania and was twenty-three when she applied. She was interviewed by a committee consisting of the mayor, Henry Degenkamp, Terence Scofield, Irwin Kaufman, and, in what I decided was a sop to the education profession (but not necessarily to women), Mrs. Adele McCormick, the only other teacher. It was obviously a town run by its men.

The reports of the five interviewers were in the file. The mayor found Miss Phillips to be “pleasant, clean, well-mannered, appropriately dressed, and having an agreeable disposition.” Mr. Degenkamp also found her looks and manners acceptable and added that “she has the vigor and enthusiasm necessary to control the age group.” Messrs. Scofield and Kaufman echoed their colleagues’ favorable opinions in slightly different language, and Mr. Kaufman mentioned that Miss Phillips, “being young and unattached, can afford starting salary and will surely have no difficulty finding employment next year with her additional experience.” Mr. Scofield found “Candy to be an exemplary young woman who seems eager to accept the challenge Studsburg’s junior high will offer her.” My eyebrows rose as I read his opinion.

By far the most interesting report came from Adele McCormick,
who must have conducted the most searching interview of the lot. She determined Miss Phillips to be “well educated and knowledgeable in both pedagogical theory and relevant subject matter. She is personable and answers difficult questions with a demeanor that belies her age.” I made the assumption that the “difficult questions” were asked by the gentlemen, probably out of curiosity and for no reason connected to the job. I certainly knew which of the five I would select for my committee.

The job was apparently offered to Miss Phillips on the spot following a brief huddle out of her earshot, and she accepted as quickly as they made the offer. A copy of the contract was in the folder, signed by Fred Larkin, Mayor. I guessed that in a town of five hundred, the mayor functioned as superintendent of schools and maybe as principal as well.

The minutes of the meeting were taken by Mrs. McCormick, who, as the only woman present, was the obvious choice for recording secretary. I wondered if she had also typed the men’s reports.

Miss Phillips was paid twice a month, as was Mrs. McCormick, and the canceled checks were there for me to see. There were deductions for social security, which made me gasp; they had increased more than tenfold in the intervening years. Ditto for the Blue Cross/Blue Shield deductions. I knew what Arnold Gold paid for mine in the present. A pittance was taken off for pension, and I made a note to ask Jack to check with Albany to see if Candida Phillips had contributed after that year. If I was building a case, I wanted a good one.

I lingered over her resume. It was typed on one of those mechanical typewriters that you only see in set pieces nowadays. A single error was erased and typed over. I guessed that Wite-Out was not yet a gleam in its inventor’s eye.

She had gotten her bachelor’s degree at Penn State a year before applying for the Studsburg job, and spent the academic year as a permanent substitute in a school near home. Included in the resume was her high school and a few sum
mer jobs that indicated a person who enjoyed spending time with children. One summer she had been a camp counselor.

It took some searching to find a piece of information I wanted rather desperately, Candida Phillips’s address. Since envelopes weren’t included, and her address was not on her canceled checks, I found it only because during the school year she wrote a letter to Terence Scofield to request permission to take her classes on a trip to Watkins Glen. At that point I decided maybe Mr. Scofield was “superintendent” of schools. His response was not in the file, but remembering Mrs. Mulholland’s description of the young teacher in jeans, I assumed that was the class trip she had been referring to.

The letter of request was typed in traditional business-letter style, starting with Miss Phillips’s home address on the right and concluding with “Very truly yours” at the end. I copied down the address with glee.

There wasn’t much else in the file except for two “To Whom It May Concern” letters of recommendation for Candida Phillips. Obviously she would need references from her year in Studsburg for future employers, and there was probably an arrangement with the county office to send copies of these letters on her request.

One letter was written by Scofield, who thought she was a “fine young woman, well liked by students, able to get along with staff.” I guessed that meant Mrs. McCormick, although it might have meant with him. The other letter was written by Mayor Fred Larkin, who said she had made Studsburg’s last year a productive and memorable one for the junior high school.

J.J. Eberling’s name was never mentioned anywhere in the school file.

Considering the fact that Mayor Larkin had interviewed her before hiring her and written her a reference, it seemed hard for me to believe that he had completely forgotten her existence. But he had been quite specific when he told me that even though the classes had become much smaller, they had had to keep Mr. Dietrich that last year. And both he and
Henry Degenkamp had been on the interview committee, so both of them knew when I asked for people who worked in Studsburg and lived elsewhere that Candida Phillips was the kind of person I was looking for. So it was possible that one or both of them had killed her and buried her in the church basement. What made that hypothesis implausible was that Ellie Degenkamp seemed to be in on the deception. It was she who stopped her husband from talking about scandals, she who locked eyes with him when I asked about day workers. It’s hard to look at people in their eighties and see them as killers.

As long as I had the records in front of me, I went through other files from that last year. The tax rolls were in one folder, and I went down the alphabetical list, which was somewhat shorter than Carol Stifler’s list of addresses. The amounts of the taxes were low enough to be laughable. I guessed you could have bought a house in Studsburg for what I pay in property taxes in Oakwood today. Still, with what they were paying their teachers, you couldn’t expect houses to be very expensive or taxes to be high. A quick run-through confirmed that J. J. Eberling’s property taxes were the highest in town, which wasn’t very surprising. And I was pleased to note that St. Mary Immaculate donated fifty dollars a year to pay for garbage collection “and other sundries.”

I found a few other interesting things in the tax file. Luther Simpson was granted a delay in paying his second-quarter taxes. Simpson, I recalled from my visit to Fred Larkin, was the owner of the large farm in Studsburg. It occurred to me that spring is when farmers do their planting, when they have all their big expenses. Perhaps the Simpsons were unable to find the money to pay their taxes in the spring, and they put it off till harvesttime, when they would take in the bulk of their income for the year. I had a sense of the hard times farmers face, especially small ones. Elsewhere on the list were other notations of delays granted. Next to one name someone had written in ink: “Pd. J.J.E.” The name was that of a woman. The amount was very small, only forty
dollars, but if you’re old and poor, that’s probably enough to feed you for a month; at least it was at that time. My list from Carol Stifler showed the woman to have died two years later after having moved to an address c/o another name.

There were also several property tax amounts crossed out in ink, with lower numbers substituted. I knew it was possible to argue for reduced taxes, but it seemed strange for people who were on the verge of moving away to go to the trouble.

Probably the reason the list was shorter than my address list was that so many people had already left town. After going through all the names once, I decided the time had come to track down Candida Phillips.