Free The Christening Day Murder by Lee Harris

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    When I had hung up my clothes, I went downstairs and offered myself at the kitchen. A nun in her mid-sixties turned away from the sink and smiled at me.
    “You must be Christine Bennett. I’m Sister Concepta. You don’t have to do a thing, but if you want to, there are potatoes and carrots to peel.”
    I sat at an old butcher block and worked, perversely enjoying the opportunity to do on a large scale what I dislikeddoing at home on a very small scale. Sister Concepta seemed happy to have company. We talked about the convent and then about the Studsburg murder. The nuns had visited St. Mary Immaculate a few weeks ago when the county engineer had proclaimed it safe. They had gone in a bus and prayed inside. No one, of course, had imagined what lay buried in the basement.
    Together we cooked the nuns’ dinner.
    “We have some wonderful grapefruits a friend sent up from Florida,” she said. “And for dessert, some lovely ice cream. I hope you like vanilla fudge.”
    “I like everything,” I said.
    When the meat and vegetables were cooking and the tables set, Sister Concepta took me for a walk around the convent grounds. There were a couple of acres of farmland now planted with winter rye. The nuns prided themselves on being self-sufficient when it came to vegetables and berries. She showed me a small orchard of old apple trees, the blueberry bushes, the strawberry field covered with salt hay for the winter, and the raspberry canes. We looked in at the store, and I admired the hand-labeled jars arranged neatly on shelves. Finally we went together to evening prayers.
    Although I had not left St. Stephen’s because of matters of faith, my faith was presently undergoing some questioning and some revision. Without consciously making a decision, I had stopped attending mass on a regular basis during the summer. And since the first time Jack and I had made love several weeks ago, I had not gone to confession. As each week passed, I became more confused about my need to confess what was clearly a sin in the eyes of the church, while, at the same time, I became more comfortable with my physical desires and my physical and emotional relationship with Jack. I knew that sex didn’t automatically mean we were destined for a lifetime relationship, but on the other hand, it meant, for me, a wholly exclusive relationship for as long as it lasted, and I hoped—I believed—that Jack felt the same.
    As I entered a pew in the rear of the chapel, in this place that reminded me in spirit of the convent that I had loved so much and for so long, I felt a hope that I could reconcile both parts of my life. As I joined the nuns singing “Here I Am, Lord,” I experienced a closeness to my religious past that I had not felt in any of the churches I had attended since leaving St. Stephen’s.
    I spent a very enjoyable dinner and evening with the nuns, who kindly asked me nothing about my life as a sister, and instead, perhaps because they were more interested, talked about the body buried in St. Mary Immaculate. They also routed me to the town where the Eberlings lived and agreed with Joseph’s estimate that it was no more than thirty miles from the convent to Studsburg.
    I joined the nuns for morning prayers at five-thirty and then for breakfast. It was too early to leave, so I helped clean up the breakfast dishes and do some housework. At nine I got in the car and started off.
    It wasn’t hard to find. The Eberlings had exchanged a big old Victorian for a modern, architect-designed home of the early sixties. Somehow I expect large, expensive houses to be in wealthy suburbs of big cities, but that isn’t always true. There were several houses of the same stature along the road, many with walls, gatehouses, and long private roads to compounds invisible from the road. The Eberlings’ house was one of those, although there was no gatehouse and I turned in to the drive without a security check. I had intentionally not announced my