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Overview
During a swimming accident, nine-year-old Sebastian Duncan stops breathing. While others attempt to resuscitate him, he has a near-death experience, wherein he meets his mother, who died the previous year from an overdose of sleeping pills. She tells Sebastian that her own death was not the suicide that people believed it was and that he must return to tell his grandmother that she was in fact murdered.
At the insistence of Sebastian's grandmother, chief investigator Arlene Flynn is assigned the task of re-opening the year-old case to determine whether the death was the suicide it was originally believed to be or if there is a very clever murderer on the loose. Did the boy actually have a legitimate near-death experience, or did he simply suppress some memory of the murder, only to have the trauma of his accident bring it back up to the surfact? With no evidence to indicate murder, no credible witness making such a claim, and a great deal of political pressure, Arlene Flynn must tackle the most challenging case of her career in H. Paul Jeffers's thrilling What Mommy Said.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466882508 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/30/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 364 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
What Mommy Said
A Novel
By H. Paul Jeffers
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 1997 H. Paul JeffersAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8250-8
CHAPTER 1
A Mass for the Dead
"The sadness of death gives way to the bright promise of immortality."
Still, after all the years since the authorization by the Vatican for the replacement of Latin as the language of the Mass in the United States, Arlene Flynn did not feel comfortable hearing English spoken from the altar.
"Lord, for your faithful people, life is changed, not ended."
The celebrant was also unfamiliar to her. In her judgment much too young and good-looking to be a priest, Father Robert Brennan had come straight from St. Joseph's Seminary upstate to the old redbrick pile that was Sacred Heart, keystone of the Roman Catholic Church in Stone County. Tall and slender, with lush brown hair, he bore a remarkable resemblance to the actor who had portrayed Superman in several movies. He had arrived the week after Easter, the last time she had been to Mass.
Had her sweet neighbor, Mrs. Alice Carew, not passed away, Christmas Eve Mass would have been the initial opportunity for Father Brennan to place the Communion wafer on Arlene Flynn's tongue, Rome's permission for communicants to take the Host into their own hands being an innovation toward modernization of the Church that went, in her view, too far.
"When the body of our earthly dwelling lies in death, we gain an everlasting dwelling place in heaven."
As the Mass for the Dead continued, her thoughts drifted from the white-draped casket of her neighbor to the graveyard behind the church, the final resting place of her parents. Before entering the church, she had spent several moments with Michael and Margaret Flynn, for whom all of the choir of angels, of which this handsome young priest was now speaking, had proclaimed their glory in the lovely and mysterious chanted cadences of the religion of the old catechism of strict nuns, patient brothers of a teaching order, and aged priests who saw to the schooling of Mike and Maggie's girl and her brother, Timothy.
The young priest declared, "The Mass is ended. Go in peace."
As the congregation replied, "Thanks be to God," she said the same.
"Go in peace to love," the priest intoned, making a cross in the air with his hand, "and serve the Lord."
Standing, she watched tearfully as Alice's coffin and the slowly moving pairs of the old woman's few survivors moved up the long aisle toward the front door and out to a waiting hearse. It and three black limousines would convey her and her meager mourners to burial far away in a cemetery in Brooklyn. There she would lie next to her cherished husband, whom she had introduced to Arlene Flynn through old photographs shown while remembering the old days over coffee and a wonderful crumb cake.
Among the last out of the church, she found herself shaking hands with the priest and startled by his greeting.
"A very good morning to you, Miss Flynn. But, alas, it is a melancholy one."
"Yes, it is," she said with a puzzled look.
He smiled. "You're wondering how I recognized you." The smile stretched into a grin. "Obviously, it was not from seeing you at Mass on Sundays."
Blushing, she felt as chastened as if a nun had rapped her knuckles with a ruler.
"There's no mystery," he said, beaming. "Alice spoke of you often and fondly when I called on her during her illness. She showed me a photo of herself and you taken at an amusement park."
"Alice loved Ferris wheels."
"She talked a great deal about you. She was very proud to call you her friend. I've also seen your picture in the Stone County Clarion. Apparently, there's not been a crime in Stone County that Arlene Flynn, special investigator for District Attorney Aaron Benson, has not had a major role in solving."
"Some of my best friends are reporters. They function in the mistaken belief that if they say nice things about me, I'll help them get their speeding tickets fixed."
"Will you be going to Brooklyn for the interment?"
"I'd like to. But I do have to get back to work."
"Oh yes," he said solemnly, "I read that you're in charge of investigating the murder of that poor woman up at the lake on Sunday. I'll pray for your speedy success in finding the killer."
"Thanks. I'll need all the help I can get."
"When will I see you at Mass again? I hope I won't have to wait till Christmas."
"You have spent time talking to Alice!"
"She told me I could count on two things at Christmas Eve Mass — a gift of one of her crumb cakes and Arlene Flynn trying not to be noticed in the very last row. With her passing, I shan't have the former. I'll pray that God will see to the latter."
She watched as a gleaming wooden coffin went in the hearse.
"If Alice were here," she said sadly, "she'd call that a big waste of money, just to stick her in the ground."
"Obviously you don't agree. I know who paid for it."
As the door of the hearse closed, she sighed. "I'm going to miss that feisty old girl."
"You'll see each other again," he said. "You believe, as I do, that death is merely a transition. If not, you wouldn't have taken time away from your case to come here this morning."
CHAPTER 2Dumb Death Speaks
Although the modest split-level ranch-style house she had left a couple of hours ago had been painstakingly furnished, perhaps overly, she entered it with a gnawing feeling of emptiness that grew as she ascended to her bedroom to change from an old black dress and black shoes bought expressly for the funeral into more sensible clothes for the office. The sensation was not unfamiliar. She could count on it overtaking her whenever she returned from Mass. But it also manifested itself when she investigated a murder, which was, she had discovered, as solitary an undertaking as confronting one's shortcomings before God. No matter how many people might be around her at the scene of a homicide, she felt as alone as she did in church. Each occasion required examination of one's soul.
On the bed, awaiting her return from saying good-bye to her friend Alice, lay the sensible clothing she had long ago learned to wear to work: tan slacks, a loose white short-sleeved blouse, a sport jacket with large pockets, and a pair of low-heeled shoes that would not kill her feet if she had to walk a great distance and that she would not mind ruining if she had to trudge in a muddy field in order to have a look at a spot picked by a killer with a body to dump, as one had sometime the past weekend.
The woman had been discovered by a pair of weekend hikers from the city on Sunday afternoon at almost exactly the hour at which Father Brennan had been administering the last rites to Alice Carew.
Slipping out of the funeral dress, she reflected on the coincidence of the priest rushing to Alice's bedside to dispel all the fears of the moment of death, ministering soothing ointments and the comforting promises of resurrection in Christ, while the other young man had found in the second frail old woman a need to inflict the terrors of dying by strangulation with the woman's knotted stockings.
All the evidence glimpsed by her practiced eyes at the site where the body had been dumped had pointed to the killer having been a youthful male, as murderers usually proved to be. In the sorry history of the world, homicide had been an overwhelmingly male endeavor. At what moment in the life of a boy, she wondered as she put on the blouse, could he step across the line to become a murderer? Why not go into the priesthood, as Father Brennan had? Why become a killer and not a doctor? Why not a scientist, a teacher, or any other pursuit that enhanced life and respected it? Why not a cop?
The shoes she had set out had been worn on Sunday. Four days later, they were dried and stiff, but brushed to the highest shine possible after hours slipping and sliding in the muck and mire of the northeastern shore of Crane Lake. As usual, she had not been at the crime scene long when her boss arrived.
As ever, District Attorney Aaron Benson had appeared out of place, crisply dressed in a gray suit and with his hair combed as neatly as that of an altar boy. In ten years of working for him, he seemed not to have aged a day, whereas she was constantly discovering alarming new strands of gray infringing on reddish hair her high school annual had described twenty years earlier as the crowning glory for the girl listed in the book as most likely to become a movie star in roles for which Maureen O'Hara had grown too mature. That she had chosen to attend John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City to become a cop had been the talk of her first class reunion. By the tenth-year reunion, she had earned the gold shield of detective third grade of the New York Police Department. At the twentieth, no one had needed to be told she had become District Attorney Aaron Benson's chief investigator. She had tracked down and helped him convict several murderers.
Sunday night, he had asked, "What have we got?"
They had a great deal. The strangled woman had been for a time in a room that had dark blue carpeting. Fibers adhering to her nude body were evident even without a microscope. The body had been driven to the edge of the lake in a car that left the unmistakable imprint of balding tires.
"The killer is a local," she said. "He'd have to be to know this godforsaken spot."
A general psychological criminal profile based on studies by the FBI suggested he would be in his twenties or thirties and in good physical shape. Intelligence probably rated above average. One did not kill and get away with it undiscovered without some smarts. Somewhere along the line, he had probably formed a love-hate feeling for women, which more than likely found its root in fear of them, especially of older women, perhaps imbued in him by his mother or a mother surrogate. Whoever was his father would not have been around much to make a difference. The killer would probably be found to be living alone, this deduction drawn from the unlikelihood of a murder being committed in a home into which a companion might suddenly appear. His abode probably would be in an area in which chances were minimal that he might be observed by a passerby or neighbors whose prying eyes might watch him and ponder what bulky thing he was putting in his car on a Sabbath morning, and why. His job would prove to be a menial one, providing nothing extra in the way of pay to put fresh tires on his car, if he worked at all. "No friends," she continued. "Likely to have had a brush or two, or more, with authority, going back to school days. I wouldn't be surprised to turn up an arrest record in police computer files."
She felt certain he had known the woman he killed.
"Unfortunately, the victim has yet to be identified," she had told the DA. "Once I do that, I'll know the man who did this, and you'll chalk up another murder conviction."
So far, routine procedures to name the dead woman, including fingerprint check, had been fruitless. A story in the Clarion on the discovery of the body had produced nothing in the way of a lead. Nor had her partner garnered a clue.
"It's as if this little old lady never existed," Detective Peter Sloan had reported the previous afternoon. Slouching into her office, his face had been as earnest and worried as a hound's, but unlined. "Nobody has filed a missing person's report. There's been no notice at the post office of anyone's mail backed up."
"Which tells us she was either a widow," Flynn replied, "or was what my mother used to call —"
"An old maid?"
"A 'spinster lady,' actually. That means she probably lived alone and kept to herself, which is what women like her usually do. As to the mail, what would she get? Utility bills arrive the first of the month. Two weeks ago. A Social Security check comes on the third, if she got one. State welfare assistance? Maybe she wasn't even eligible. If she owned her home, she wouldn't get it, or food stamps. Her children, if there are any, may live elsewhere and would have no way of knowing anything was amiss."
"My mom lives upstate," Sloan said, settling hs lanky frame on the corner of her desk. "I call her every couple of days."
"Not all sons are as good as you, Sloan. But we could hear from a family member any minute. It's only three days since the body was found."
"That's right," the detective said sourly. "And that brings us to the first tenet in the catechism of the Arlene Flynn Church of Homicide Investigation. I remember the day you instructed me in it. I was so fresh out of college that the ink on my degree in criminalistics was still damp. My first day in this job two and a half years ago, you said to me, 'If you haven't solved a murder in three days, Sloan, odds are you never will.'"
Her smile formed crinkles at the corners of her eyes. "Has it been only two and a half years? Then you're long overdue for lesson two of the catechism: 'Forget the first lesson.'"
Sloan barked a laugh.
Smiling, she asked, "Has our beloved friend and brother in righteousness, the good Dr. Plodder, sent over his autopsy report on the victim?"
Sloan grunted. "Are you kidding? It's only been three days. But so what? We know how she died. The bastard choked her with her own stockings."
"You never know what tales a corpse might tell you," she said. "I've got something to do first thing in the morning. When that's done, I'll pay a visit to Zeligman's charnel house and see if I can goose the report from the lovable old fart."
As promised, having changed from the black dress worn to Alice Carew's funeral, she arrived at the basement mortuary of Stone County Medical Center, where Dr. Zeligman practiced the catechism of his religion. On the left as she faced his desk was a quote from the poet e.e. cummings:
Dumb death
we all inherit.
The other quote was an inscription she had seen often on the wall of the medical examiner's office in New York City:
This is the place where death delights to help the living.
Jowlish, gray-haired, rumpled, red-eyed, and the picture of the meaning of avuncular, Dr. Theodore Zeligman clutched a mug of coffee as if he were a priest handling a chalice of wine that he was about to transubstantiate miraculously into the Blood of Christ. He peered owlishly over the tops of half-moon spectacles.
"I know why you're here," he grumbled. "You've come about the woman up at the lake. Cause of death: strangled from behind with a pair of nylon stockings. She struggled, reaching back and scratching her killer. There are skin scrapings under her nails. No sexual assault. Age: seventyish. She had cancer and about six months to live. If she had initiated a treatment program a year ago, she could have been in remission. She probably lost fifty pounds in that time. Have you identified her yet?"
"Not a clue. I was hoping you might help on that score."
The coroner removed his glasses, tilted back in a squeaky swivel chair, and folded surprisingly delicate hands across his ample belly. "I can't give you a name. But somebody upstairs in hospital records should be able to."
Flynn jerked with surprise. "Really?"
Zeligman pinched the bridge of his bulbous nose where the glasses had left marks. "The X rays show the woman had had a hip replacement. Judging by the scar tissue and other indicia that I won't bore you with, I'd say the surgery was three, maybe four years ago."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from What Mommy Said by H. Paul Jeffers. Copyright © 1997 H. Paul Jeffers. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Prologue: The Other Side,
Part One: Sorrow for the Dead,
1. A Mass for the Dead,
2. Dumb Death Speaks,
3. The Woman in Blue,
4. Exchange of Vows,
5. On Traitor's Lair Road,
6. Scales of Justice,
7. An Exchange of Questions,
Part Two: Morse's Maxim,
8. The Companionship of Death,
9. Data Bank,
10. Legacies,
11. Web of the Spider,
12. God and Mr. Carnegie,
13. Flynn's Laws,
Part Three: Groping Toward the Light,
14. Saturday's Child,
15. The Boy Who Died,
16. Country Houses,
17. Going into Overtime,
18. A Stilly Night,
19. On the Seventh Day Even God Rested,
20. Never Buy a Car Built on a Monday,
Part Four: RSVP,
21. The Banker's Account,
22. The Gossip's Story,
23. The Coroner's Report,
24. The Deadly Potion,
25. The Artist's Sketch,
Part Five: Whoever You Are,
26. Who's There?,
27. The Fond Deceiver,
28. Messages,
29. Strategies,
30. Night Shift,
31. Carnival,
Part Six: Flynn's Law,
32. The Press Passer,
33. Getting to the Light,
34. Detour,
35. Touch and Go,
36. Precept Thirteen,
37. Guessing Game,
Part Seven: Awakenings,
38. It's a Crime,
39. Angry Words,
40. Music by Mozart,
41. Right Way Up,
42. Prescription for Murder,
43. Daddy's Little Girl,
Epilogue: The Convalescent,
Books by H. Paul Jeffers,
Copyright,