The Christening Day Murder by Lee Harris Read Free Book Online Page B

she’d report you missing.”
    “Suppose I left the convent in anger.”
    “OK. I get your point.”
    “And thirty years later some kids pull a rock away from a cave along the Hudson, and there are my bones. I had no family to worry about me. Maybe I had no job to go to. There are people like that, Jack!”
    “I get the drift. There are some holes—like the fact that you own a house and have to pay taxes on it—but yes, itcould be that kind of person. So what was she doing in the basement of that church with a killer?”
    “I wish I knew.”
    “And your friend’s parents said no one was missing.”
    “Either they’re wrong or the woman wasn’t a Studsburger.”
    “I knew you weren’t going to let this alone,” he said.
    “She deserves a decent burial, Jack. I think I’ll just go over that list Mrs. Stifler has.”
    “Can you squeeze me in this weekend?”
    “You bet.”
       If the body was still news upstate, it certainly wasn’t in New York. It had been good for about ninety seconds of TV notoriety, and now it was gone. I went out for an early walk on Wednesday morning, hoping to think the situation through, but I met my neighbor Melanie Gross, and we walked and talked together.
    “Any chance Hal and I can meet the boyfriend?” she asked. I had told her about Jack a couple of weeks earlier. “Or are you keeping him all to yourself?”
    “I’d love you to meet him.”
    “How about dinner at our place some weekend?”
    “Fine. I’ll talk to him when I see him Saturday, and we’ll get together on a date.”
    We speeded up a bit—Mel is a runner and I’m a walker, so a little cooperation and compromise are necessary in our friendship—and talked about town politics, an almost endless source of conversation and not a little sniping. When we got back to Pine Brook Road, Mel left me at my driveway and continued on to her own. I went inside and made myself breakfast. If I called Deputy Drago, he would have every right to be annoyed. But I knew I wasn’t going to get a call from him unless he had specific information that would identify the victim. I sat with my coffee, trying to justify my involvement in a case that was none of my business. She wasn’t a friend or a relative of the Stiflers. In all probability, she wasn’t even a Studsburger. There was a good likelihoodshe wasn’t a Catholic. The killer had just chosen the church because it was the only building that wouldn’t be destroyed by the Army Corps of Engineers, and everyone who lived in the town knew that.
    She was nothing to me, just an unfortunate person who had met her death in the basement of St. Mary Immaculate thirty years ago. My only connection to her was a coincidence, that I had meandered through the church at the same time that her killer had returned to view his handiwork.
    I finished my coffee and went to the phone. The county coroner was too busy or too unimpressed with my name and lack of credentials to answer my call. Someone else spoke to me, a woman with a gentle manner and an upstate edge to her speech. She assured me the coroner was doing
everything
he could to find the killer of the young lady. When I pressed her on what everything amounted to, I got what was apparently the party line: There had been an autopsy, and the coroner had “gone public” to see if anyone “out there” had some knowledge of the deceased.
    In other words, he’d done the minimum required of his job, and he’d had a little free publicity besides. That put him in the same corner as the sheriff. Ordinarily I try not to be judgmental, but it looked as though both departments had pretty much given up. If something dropped in their laps, they might act on it, but there wasn’t going to be any aggressive investigation. No one had reported her missing thirty years ago. No one cared then, no one cared now. She was a pile of bones that had been dumped in a basement wall.
    When I got off the phone, I went back to the kitchen table. I sat