Cynthia Manson (ed) (42 page)

“I don’t mind,” she said. “But I don’t
know if I can tell you anything more.”

“Your father either wrote or called
you before he died,” said Bethancourt simply.

Her eyes widened a little. “How do
you know that?” she asked.

“The note that he left was addressed
only to your mother, yet you were very dear to him. I’ve been thinking it all
over, and my guess is that you know what happened that night, the night Renaud
Fibrier died, that you knew before you heard from your father. You know because
you were there.”

She did not look at him, nor did she
speak.

“Did Renaud rape you?” Bethancourt
asked softly.

She flung her head up in surprise
and pain, and tears started in her eyes. “Yes!” she said, almost defiantly. “If
that’s what you came to find out: yes, he did. He held a knife to my throat and
threatened to kill me if I didn’t do what he said. I was terrified. . . .”

“I’m sorry,” said Bethancourt. “I’m
truly sorry.”

She had begun to cry again, and she
wiped the tears furiously from her face. “How did you know?”

“He raped another girl once, in
France,” answered Bethancourt. “I couldn’t think why your father would have
killed him. After all, he knew he was a bad sort long before that weekend. But
it wasn’t until tonight, when I realized your father had communicated with you
separately, that I thought of the answer.” He paused. “Your father must have
come down to the kitchen for something and found you.”

“Yes. He couldn’t sleep and came
down for some milk.”

“There was the knife,” continued
Bethancourt, “the one Renaud had used to threaten you, still lying where he
cast it aside afterward. Anyway, when your father came down, you were in shock.
He must have taken you upstairs and then come back down. The attic must have
seemed a good temporary hiding place. What I can’t understand is why he didn’t
remove the body later.”

“He tried,” she answered, “when he
went back in September. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. I expect it was
pretty awful by then, and he lost his nerve. That’s what he said, anyway. He
knew he’d have to do it before Christmas, but then he was called away, and
Grandmother went up to the attic early....”

“I see,” said Bethancourt. “Of
course, you knew nothing of that. He would have been careful to keep it from
you.”

She nodded slowly. “He wrote me
about it before he— before he killed himself.”

Bethancourt sighed. “Then there’s
only one thing more,” he said. “That night, after your father took you upstairs
and then came back down, what did he do?”

She stared at him uncomprehendingly.

“Did he confront Renaud and stab
him? Or did he merely remove the knife that was already there and hide the body,
so that no one would ever know what his beloved daughter had done or what had
happened to her to make her do it.”

There was a long pause. Maureen
raised her eyes to gaze at him levelly, the tears still wet on her face. Then
she lifted her chin, and said, “I loved my father very much. He died so that
this murder would never be connected with me. I will not make his sacrifice
useless. He killed Renaud Fibrier. Renaud raped me, and my father killed him
for it. That is what happened.”

“I understand,” said Bethancourt. “Thank
you for talking with me.” He rose and reached for his overcoat. In silence, she
accompanied him to the door. He paused there for a moment, thoughtfully drawing
on his gloves.

“Does your mother know you were
raped?” he asked.

She shook her head violently. “No
one knows.”

“It’s a horrible thing,” he said. “Sometimes
it can be very difficult to deal with. If you ever need to talk about it, well,
my number’s in the phone directory.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you
very much.”

Outside it was still raining.
Cerberus stepped over a puddle and bent to sniff the base of the lamp post.
Bethancourt stood for a moment, watching the rainfall in the light from the
street lamp. Then he sighed and looked at his watch.

“A bad business, old thing,” he said
to the dog. “Sometimes I wonder what I do it for. Come on then, Cerberus, it’s
time to meet Maria and give her Christmas present to her.

FATHER CRUMLISH CELEBRATES CHRISTMAS – Alice Scanlan
Reach

“Eat that and you’ll be up all night
with one of your stomach gas attacks.” Emma Catt’s voice boomed out from the
doorway of what she considered to be her personal sanctuary—the kitchen of St.
Brigid’s rectory.

Caught in the act of his
surreptitious mission, Father Francis Xavier Crumlish hastily withdrew the
arthritic fingers of his right hand which had been poised to enfold one of
several dozen cookies cooling on the wide, old-fashioned table.

“I—I was just thinking to myself
that a crumb or two would do no harm,” he murmured, conscious of the guilty
flush seeping into the seams, tucks, and gussets of his face.

“It would seem to me that a man of
the cloth would be the first to put temptation behind him,” Emma observed
tartly as she strode across the worn linoleum flooring. “Particularly a man of
your age,” she added, giving him a meaningful look.

The pastor swallowed a heavy sigh.
After Emma had arrived to take charge of St. Brigid’s household chores some 22
years ago, he had soon learned to his sorrow that her culinary feats were
largely confined to bland puddings, poached prunes, and a concoction which she
called “Irish Stew” and which was no more than a feeble attempt to disguise the
past week’s leftovers.

So he was most agreeably surprised
one day when Emma miraculously produced a batch of cookies of such flavorful
taste and texture that the priest mentally forgave her all her venial sins. And
since it was Father Crumlish’s nature to share his few simple pleasures with
others, he promptly issued instructions that, once a year, Emma should bake as
many of the cookies as the parish’s meager budget would allow. As a result,
although St. Brigid’s pastor and his housekeeper were on extra-short rations
from Thanksgiving until Christmas Eve, many a parishioner’s otherwise cheerless
Christmas Day was brightened by a bag of the sugar-and-spice delicacies.

Now, today, as the priest quickly
left the kitchen area to avoid any further allusions to his ailments and his
advancing years, the ringing of the telephone was entirely welcome. He hurried
down the hallway to his office and picked up the receiver.

“St. Brigid’s.”

“It’s Tom, Father.”

Father Crumlish recognized the voice
of Lieutenant Thomas Patrick “Big Tom” Madigan of Lake City’s police force and
realized, from the urgency in the policeman’s tone, that his call was not a
social one.

“I’m at the Liberty Office Building,”
Madigan said in a rush. “A guy’s sitting on a ledge outside the top-story
window. Says he’s going to jump. If I send a car for you—”

“I’ll be waiting at the curb, Tom,” Father
interrupted and hung up the phone.

“Big Tom” Madigan was waiting
outside the elderly office building when Father Crumlish arrived some minutes
later. Quickly he ushered the priest through the emergency police and fire
details and the crowd of curious onlookers who were gazing in awe at the
scarecrow figure perched on a ledge high above the street.

“Do you know the man, Tom?” Father
asked. He followed the broad-shouldered policeman into the building lobby and,
together, they entered a self-service elevator.

“And so do you, Father,” Madigan
said as he pressed the elevator button. “He’s one of your people. Charley
Abbott.”

“God bless us!” the pastor
exclaimed. “What do you suppose set Charley off this time?” He sighed. “The
poor lad’s been in and out of sanitariums half a dozen times in his thirty
years. But this is the first time he’s ever tried to do away with himself.”

“This may not be just one of Abbott’s
loony notions,” Madigan replied grimly. “Maybe he’s got a good reason for
wanting to jump off that ledge.”

“What do you mean, Tom?”

“Last week a man named John Everett
was found murdered in his old farmhouse out in Lake City Heights. He was a
bachelor, lived alone, no relative—”

“I read about it,” Father
interrupted impatiently. “What’s that got to do—”

“We haven’t been able to come up
with a single clue,” Madigan broke in, “until half an hour ago. One of my
detectives, Dennis Casey, took an anonymous phone call from a man who said that
if we wanted to nab Everett’s murderer we should pick up the daytime porter at
the Liberty Office Building.”

“That’s Charley,” Father nodded,
frowning. “I myself put in a good word for him for the job.”

“Casey came over here on a routine
check,” Madigan went on as the elevator came to a halt and he and the priest
stepped out into the corridor. “He showed Abbott his badge, said he was
investigating Everett’s murder, and wanted to ask a few questions. Abbott
turned pale— looked as if he was going to faint, Casey says. Then he made a
dash for the elevator, rode it up to the top floor, and climbed out the
corridor window onto the ledge.”

“But surely now, Tom,” Father
protested, “you can’t be imagining that Charley Abbott had a hand in that
killing? Why, you know as well as I that, for all his peculiar ways, Charley’s
gentle as a lamb.”

“All I know,” Madigan replied
harshly, “is that when we tried to ask him a few questions, he bolted.” He ran
a hand over his crisp, curly brown hair. “And I know that innocent men don’t
run.”

“Innocent or guilty,” Father
Crumlish said, “the man’s in trouble. Take me to him, Tom.”

When Father Crumlish entered the
priesthood more than forty years before, he never imagined that he was destined
to spend most of those years in St. Brigid’s parish—that weary bedraggled
section of Lake City’s waterfront where destitution and despair, avarice and
evil, walked hand in hand. And although, on the occasions when he lost a battle
with the Devil, he too sometimes teetered on the brink of despair, he
unfailingly rearmed himself with his intimate, hard-won knowledge of his
people.

But now, as the old priest leaned
out the window and caught sight of the man seated on the building’s ledge, his
confidence was momentarily shaken. Charley Abbott had the appearance and
demeanor of a stranger. The man’s usually slumped, flaccid shoulders were rigid
with purpose; his slack mouth and chin were set in taut hard lines; and in
place of his normal attitude of wavering indecision, there was an aura about
him of implacable determination.

There was not a doubt in Father
Crumlish’s mind that Abbott intended to take the fatal plunge into eternity.
The priest took a deep breath and silently said a prayer.

“Charley,” he then called out
mildly, “it’s Father Crumlish. I’m right here close to you, lad. At the window.”

Abbott gave no indication that he’d
heard his pastor’s voice.

“Can you hear me, Charley?”

No response.

“I came up here to remind you that
we have been through a lot of bad times together,” Father continued
conversationally. “And together we’ll get through whatever it is that’s
troubling you now.”

The priest waited for a moment,
hoping to elicit some indication that Abbott was aware of his presence. But the
man remained silent and motionless, staring into space. Father decided to try
another approach.

“I’ve always been proud of you,
Charley,” Father said. “And never more so than when you were just a tyke and
ran in the fifty-yard dash in our Annual Field Day Festival.” He sighed
audibly. “Ah, but that’s so many years ago, and my memory plays leprechaun’s
tricks. I can’t recall for the life of me, lad—did you come in second or third?”

Again Father waited, holding his
breath. Actually he remembered the occasion clearly. The outcome had been a
major triumph in his attempts to bring a small spark of reality into his young
parishioner’s dreamy, listless life.

Suddenly Abbott’s long legs, which
were dangling aimlessly over the perilous ledge, stiffened, twitched. Slowly he
turned his head and focused his bleak eyes on the priest.

“I—I won!” he said, in the
reproachful, defensive voice of a small child.

“I can’t hear you, Charley,” Father
said untruthfully, striving to keep the tremor of relief from his voice. “Could
you speak a little louder? Or come a bit closer?”

To Father Crumlish it seemed an
eternity before Abbott’s shoulders relaxed a trifle, before his deathlike grip
on the narrow slab of concrete and steel diminished, before slowly, ever so
slowly, the man began to inch his way along the ledge until he came within an
arm’s reach of the window and the priest. Then he paused and leaned tiredly
against the building’s brick wall.

“I won,” he repeated, this time in a
louder and firmer tone.

“I remember now,” Father said, never
taking his dark blue eyes from his parishioner’s pale, distraught face. “So can
you tell me why a fellow like yourself, with a fine pair of racing legs, would
be hanging them out there in the breeze?”