Corpus Christmas Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1989 by Margaret Maron

  All rights reserved.

  Mysterious Press books are published by Warner Books, Inc.,

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  www.twitter.com/grandcentralpub

  First eBook Edition: May 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-55751-1

  Contents

  Copyright Page

  Prologue

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Epilogue

  THE CRITICS COME BEARING RAVES FOR CORPUS CHRISTMAS AND MARGARET MARON

  “One of the field’s sharpest writers. Her spare, elegant prose and flair for characterization are showcased in CORPUS CHRISTMAS…. A fine read.”

  —Greensboro News & Record

  “A Christmas gift for mystery fans, as full of surprises and as satisfying as a rich holiday dessert.”

  —Southern Pines Pilot (NC)

  “Impressive… strongest on characterization and atmosphere.”

  —Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

  “Maron writes with wit and sophistication.”

  —USA Today

  “There is no one who delivers more pure enjoyment than Margaret Maron.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Her characters spring to life.”

  —Boston Globe

  “No writer is better at conveying a sense of place than Maron.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  By Margaret Maron

  DEBORAH KNOTT NOVELS

  Storm Track

  Home Fires

  Killer Market

  Up Jumps the Devil

  Shooting at Loons

  Southern Discomfort

  Bootlegger’s Daughter

  SIGRID HARALD NOVELS

  Fugitive Colors

  Past Imperfect

  Corpus Christmas

  Baby Doll Games

  The Right Jack

  Bloody Kin

  Death in Blue Folders

  Death of a Butterfly

  One Coffee With

  SHORT STORY COLLECTION

  Shoveling Smoke

  Erich Breul House.Built ca. 1868, “modernized” for Erich Breul and his Swiss bride by architect Theodet Stanford in 1886. Impressive use of native Vermont marbles. Interesting, if uneven, collection of late 19th-century American and European art. Also, authentic late-Victorian furnishings that will overwhelm your senses. Contribution suggested. Open Tu–F 10 A.M.–5:30 P.M., Sa 10 A.M.–1 P.M. 7 Sussex Sq. 212/555-3378.

  Excerpted from Slicing the Big Apple—

  A Pocket Guide to New York City © 1989.

  Prologue

  IN THE MID-1820S ERICH BREUL’S GRANDFATHER parlayed three leaky river barges and the opening of the Erie Canal into a modest fortune. During the Civil War, Erich Breul’s father added a second fortune running blockades. Erich Breul himself was the first of his family to be sent to Harvard—primarily to learn the art of managing money— and his postgraduate trip to Europe was meant to complete the family’s transformation from flannel cap to silk hat in three generations.

  Like many young scions whose lives were destined for the administration of settled wealth, Erich had developed a taste for fine art during his college years and Europe provided an ideal opportunity to pursue that interest.

  To the elder Breul’s dismay, young Erich’s proposed year stretched to eight. Fortunately, Mr. Breul was healthy and vigorous at the time and he was prepared, within reason, to indulge his son’s acquisition of culture. Times were changing and Mr. Breul was shrewd enough to change, too.

  In Europe Erich immediately grasped what his freebooter father only dimly sensed: Culture could purify and legitimize the crude and occasionally bloody foundations that too often underlay even modest financial empires.

  Yet it was more than that.

  Young Erich Breul genuinely liked pictures and he made a substantial effort to cultivate an eye for adventurous art, especially since his allowance did not stretch to safely pedigreed old masters. He disdained the stuffy salon painters and also avoided the impressionists, thinking them too superficial. Instead, he was instinctively attracted by that mixture of dignity and daring found in the work of expatriate Americans like Whistler and Sargent. He had his portrait painted that first winter by the young Italian virtuoso, Giovanni Boldini; and although a sympathy for noble sentiment drew him to intimist painters like Tranquillo Cremona and Arcangelo Guidini, his passion for bravura technique led him as far afield as Adolphe Monticelli.

  In later years he liked to think he would have bought a Van Gogh had he seen that artist’s work.

  For eight years, crates of pictures arrived on the piers of New York with predictable regularity. A bewildered Mr. Breul paid the freight. He might not understand his son’s preoccupation with collecting art but he continued to underwrite the expense since young Erich had, while collecting Ferdinand Hodler in Switzerland, also collected Fraulein Sophie Fürst, a distant cousin with a sizable dowry and trim ankles that flashed beneath her proper skirts.

  When the newlyweds finally followed their treasures to America in 1887, Mr. Breul established them at 7 Sussex Square. Sophie decorated with late-Victorian opulence and Erich turned the cavernous ballroom into a personal art gallery.

  As was the fashion in those days, pictures were hung in the salon style popular in Europe. In frames monumentally carved and gilded, they were stacked on the walls from chair rail to ceiling, one above the other, with little consideration for size or shape and with almost no space between each frame.

  The collection spilled into the formal drawing room, leaped the great hall to the library and dining room, and still continued to grow: George Inness; Henry Creswell; William Carver Ewing; and Walter Sickert, a student of Whistler’s with whom Erich had caroused in London before his marriage to Sophie. Almost by accident he acquired a decent Chandler Grooms and a better than average John La Farge.

  Old Mr. Breul thought it a deplorable waste of money but he loved his son and for Christmas one year even gave him a set of Winslow Homer’s marine drawings which had caught his eye and reminded him of his blockade-running days.

  Despite Erich Breul’s continued passion for pictures, he did not disappoint his father’s hopes once he was home. He may have lacked his grandfather’s gritty pioneer spirit and his father’s ruthless zest and acumen but he eventually shaped himself into a dutiful businessman and, after the crash of 1893, even managed to recoup most of the losses.

  Only one child was born of his happy union with Sophie Fürst. In due time Erich junior grew to manhood, attended Harvard like his father, and departed for his own wander jahr in Europe, where he was struck and killed by a team of runaway horses in a narrow Paris street two days before his twenty-second birthday.

  Three months later, still dazed by his death, Sophie stumbled in front of the electric trolley that ran along the bottom of Sussex Square.

  When his son’s effects arrived from Europe, Erich Breul was touched to find a few crude pictures in his steamer trunks. It didn’t matter that the pictures were dreadful— Erich could remember some mistakes he himself had made when he first b
egan collecting—the tragedy was that the boy’s life had been cut short before his eye could mature.

  Heartbroken, he’d stored his son’s possessions next to the trunk that held his memorial to Sophie: her nightdress, her autograph album, a lace handkerchief that still breathed the faint trace of her toilet water, along with a hundred other intimate bits and scraps that he couldn’t bear to give away.

  There was no question of another marriage for him, another child. He drew up a will that would turn 7 Sussex Square into a museum to house in perpetuity the pictures he’d collected; and although he continued to function—to work, to dine with friends at his club, to refine his collection—when the great influenza epidemic of 1918 struck, he succumbed almost gratefully.

  “… August and my cycling tour up the Rhône (along with that amusing adventure in Sorgues-sur-l’Ouvèze with those bohemian chaps) was, until now, my favorite month, although the autumn lectures at Lyons’s Palais des Arts were as edifying as you had hoped, Papa, and my French is much improved. But now I am in Paris, the queen of cities! I still cannot believe I am here, here in the cultural center of the universe with my own snug rooms in Montparnasse. Notre-Dame! Montmartre!Dites-moi, mes parents, however did you force yourselves to leave? And yet, as the days shorten, shall I confess one small misgiving? Will you laugh at your grown-up son for his weakness? How I shall miss our jolly Christmas this year! Should I live to be a hundred, dear Papa and Mama, I shall never forget the roaring fires in every hearth, every room bedecked with garlands of holly and ivy, the smell of cinnamon and ginger and roasted goose wafting from the kitchen below to the nursery on high, and in the main hall, such a tree that to a little lad seemed to tower up to the heavens, each branch a-blaze with candles and bejeweled with Mama’s glass angels….”

  LETTER FROM ERICH BREUL JR., DATED 11.5.1912.

  (From the Erich Breul House Collection)

  I

  Thursday, December 10

  SNOW WAS PREDICTED BY SUNDAY AND A CHILL morning rain had drenched the city streets but it had stopped by ten A.M. when Rick Evans arrived at Sussex Square, that little gem of urban felicity down in the East Twenties. He paused a moment, propped his tripod on the wrought-iron fence which enclosed the tiny park, uncapped the lens of the camera slung around his neck, and slowly panned the area.

  Unlike the broad avenues of commerce where New York’s glamorous stores were bedizened with tinsel and glitter, Christmas down here approached in a resolutely nineteenth-century fashion that was less intimidating to someone born and reared in a small college town in Louisiana. The solid townhouses that ringed Sussex Square were built of stone, not wood; but most wore heavy wreaths of fresh evergreens, waxed fruits, and lacquered nuts that gleamed in the weak winter sunlight with a homelike familiarity.

  Number 7 was twice as wide as any of its neighbors and bore a small brass plaque that informed passersby that this was the Erich Breul House, built in 1868 and open to the public since 1920.

  Rick Evans focused carefully on the brass plaque, then retrieved his tripod and walked up the broad marble stoop to the recessed doorway, a doorway so imposing that he automatically wiped his boots on the outer mat before entering the marbled hall.

  Black velvet ropes, looped through brass stanchions, formed a walkway to a long Queen Anne tavern table where a middle-aged docent sat with a cash register on one side and a selection of brochures, books, and postcards on the other. The docent looked up from her knitting and peered at him in nearsighted hopefulness; but when the young man’s camera case and folded tripod came into focus, her smile faltered with disappointment. Only that photographer she’d been told to expect; not a paying sightseer wishing a tour of the house.

  From an alcove at the rear of the vaulted entrance hall, a young black woman saluted him with a friendly wave of her steno pad as her high-heeled boots clicked through a doorway that had once led to the butler’s pantry but was now the director’s office.

  On the left, midway the depth of the hall, stood a bushy fir tree, at least ten feet tall, but dwarfed by the massive proportion of the carved marble fireplace. The tree was surrounded by open boxes of ornaments, a tall aluminum stepladder, tangles of candle-shaped tree lights, and three women dressed in urban-casual woolens. As Rick Evans approached them, the light floral scent of their perfumes mingled with the fir’s woodsy aroma and for a moment he felt himself unaccountably, profoundly homesick for Louisiana and Christmas in his mother’s house.

  He propped his tripod against the opposite side of the fireplace and smiled diffidently at a kind-looking brunette whose graying hair was tied back with a red silk scarf. “Is Mrs. Beardsley here?” he asked.

  “Is God in his heaven?” the woman replied in an unexpectedly deep voice.

  “Oh Helen, you’re awful!” giggled a shorter, round-faced woman.

  “Shh!” a third woman warned.

  Sensible leather heels tapped down the wide marble staircase at the right of the hall as Mrs. Gawthrop Wallace Beardsley, senior docent at the Breul House, descended triumphantly, followed by a man in dark green coveralls whose face was obscured by the boxes he carried.

  “We found them,” she said, bustling over to the group. “I knew we had more decorations than these.” Her all-seeing gaze fell upon Rick Evans and she halted to consult the old-fashioned gold watch on her wrist. “Mr. Evans. Surely I told you the tree would not be ready to be photographed until after lunch?”

  Rick fiddled with the lens cap on the camera still slung round his neck. “Yes, ma’am,” he admitted, “but I had some free time and I thought maybe I could shoot some of the ornaments individually or something? I mean, aren’t some of them pretty special?”

  His voice trailed off in uncertainty.

  The deep-voiced woman with the kind face took pity on him. “Yes, they certainly are special. Melissa, show him one of Mrs. Breul’s glass angels.”

  Melissa, the widow of Dr. Higgins Highsmith Jr., whose many trusteeships had once included the Erich Breul House, plucked an ornament almost as delicate as she herself from its nest of tissue. From girlhood, Sophie Fürst Breul had collected dozens of fragile glass Christmas tree ornaments, charming souvenirs of carefree winter visits to relatives in Germany and Austria.

  This particular angel had been blown from a pearly, opalescent glass and its features then hand-painted in soft pastels. Its robe was pale green and, incredible after so many years, fragile glass hands still held to those rosebud lips a gilt paper trumpet stamped with stars.

  “Over a hundred years old!” marveled Melissa High-smith. “And it’s only frayed a bit here.” Her wrinkled fingers sketched a circle around the trumpet’s flare without actually touching the tattered edge.

  “Do be careful,” Mrs. Beardsley warned.

  Her words were meant for the man, who was trying to set down his load of boxes without tipping them, but Mrs. Highsmith guiltily replaced the angel in its tissue as the deep-voiced woman stepped forward to help Pascal Grant.

  Carefully, the workman straightened the boxes until each right corner was square with the one below, then turned to Mrs. Beardsley for approval with such innocent expectation that Rick automatically lifted his camera to his face to shield himself from so much physical beauty.

  He knew that the Breul House contained basement quarters for a live-in handyman, but had not yet met him. In listing the people who worked there, his grandfather had hesitated at Pascal Grant’s name and murmured something about a lamb of God, one of His poor unfortunates, which had led Rick to expect someone defeated or with an obvious physical handicap. A crippled alcoholic, perhaps.

  Instead, now that the boxes no longer hid the man’s face, Rick saw someone who looked like one of Sophie Breul’s angels stepped down from a Christmas tree.

  Pascal Grant was slender and finely built—even the coarse green coveralls he wore could not disguise that—with eyes as blue as the Virgin’s robes and golden hair like spun glass. He had a thin, well-shaped nose, a rounded chin, and a
n upper lip so short that his mouth was seldom fully closed.

  It must be those parted lips that made him look so innocent and young, thought Rick, twisting the barrel of his portrait lens until Grant’s seraphic features filled the viewer. Too, the janitor seemed to keep his head tilted down so that when he spoke to anyone he had to look up from beneath level sandy brows like a child looking up at an adult.

  He was looking now at Rick. “Hello,” he said in a voice as light and sunny as his smile, and held out his right hand as if they were at a formal dinner. “You’re Mr. Munson’s grandson. You’re going to take new pictures of everything. I’m Pascal Grant.”

  Puzzled, Rick lowered the camera and extended his own hand. “Rick Evans.”

  He was surprised by the unexpected strength of the janitor’s grip, and noted that Grant’s hand was calloused and that his fingertips were grease-stained beneath the ragged nails.

  The women smiled approvingly at Rick. Even the patrician Mrs. Beardsley softened. “This is Helen Aldershott,” she said, gesturing to the tall, deep-voiced woman. “And Melissa Highsmith, whom you’ve just met.”

  “So pleased,” murmured Mrs. Highsmith, taking his hand between both of hers.

  Her thin, arthritic fingers flashed with accumulated diamonds and he sensed that several of the rings were too loose, as if fashioned for younger, less gnarled hands. He wondered briefly how many generations of Highsmith fingers those rings had adorned.

  The round-faced giggler and her shusher were Mrs. Dahl and Mrs. Quinones.

  “Now then, Mr. Evans,” Mrs. Beardsley said briskly. “Perhaps you can help Pascal bring down the last load? I don’t possess quite the stamina I once had.”

  “You’re amazing and you know it, Eloise,” said Mrs. Aldershott. “You must have been from the basement to the attic a dozen times this morning. It’s enough to tire anyone.”

  “I’ll be glad to help,” Rick said politely.