Familiar Friend

by Cristina Sumners

  Contents

  Title Page

  Praise page

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  About the Author

  Also by Cristina Sumners

  Copyright Page

  Divine Praise for the Suspense Novels of Cristina Sumners

  THIEVES BREAK IN

  “The setting is seductive, the writing pleasurable, the characters congenial, the atmosphere cozy and the thrills muted.”—Los Angeles Times

  “It is the author’s success in cozy knitting—a sufficiently intricate plot, satisfying characters, mildly adventurous picturesque setting—that attracts my admiration. . . . A satisfying who-done-it.”—Mystery News

  “Cristina Sumners’ inspired Divine Mystery series may well be the answer to a cozy fan’s prayers—a touch of humor combined with a well-conceived plot.”—Peninsula Post

  “This rich, intricate story is one to savor. Sumners’ narrative powers are such that everything comes alive.... Sumners’

  second divine mystery is simply divine.”—Romantic Times

  “A real treat . . . literate, fun and filled with pleasantly eccentric characters.”—Booknews from The Poisoned Pen

  “Dazzling . . . Sumners is so skilled.... Characterization is really at the service of the plot.”—Drood Review of Mystery

  CROOKED HEART

  “A winner . . . [for those who] thrive on Jan Karon’s Mitford novels and Adriana Trigiani’s Big Stone Gap series.” —Sante Fe New Mexican

  “Intelligent, bold and refreshing.”—Publisher Weekly

  “Smart, engaging writing in what one can only hope is the beginning of a series.”—Booklist

  “Witty dialogue and subtle humor . . . Happy sleuthing guaranteed.”—Drood Review of Mystery

  “Compelling . . . will appeal to fans of Jan Karon’s Mitford tales.”—Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

  “Sumners’ insight into human nature is so swift that the book becomes a psychological roller-coaster ride. She examines the hearts of her characters through the magnifying glass of theology—and she knows her stuff. This is Jan Karon in a muscle shirt.” —Carolyn Haines

  “Sinfully enjoyable! Cristina Sumners has created a rare pair: two smart, quirky sleuths with heart—and soul.” —Sarah Graves

  “The Reverend Kathryn Koerney is a hoot and a half, the type of priest even an atheist could love . . . This unorthodox sleuth keeps the plot hopping in a fast, witty, suspenseful page-turner.” —Parnell Hall

  “A clever traditional mystery with engaging characters and an idyllic locale.”—Deadly Pleasures

  “Introduces two appealing and all-too-human sleuths who join in solving an increasingly complex mystery of murder and mistaken identity. Well-written and fast-paced.” —Episcopal Life

  “A welcome addition to the mystery scene.” —Anniston (AL) Star

  “Outstanding.”—Christian Century

  Yea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me. Psalms 41, verse 9 King James Translation

  This book is for my son, who turned twenty-one the week I finished it.

  Tim, always remember three things:

  I love you.

  I’m proud of you.

  The future belongs to you.

  Acknowledgments

  The time has come to pay tribute to the splendid town of Princeton, New Jersey. I lived there for two years while I finished up my undergraduate degree at Vassar College by taking courses at Princeton University and transferring the credits to Vassar. The Seven Sister colleges, you see, in the years before they and the Ivy League universities went co-ed, kept losing their students when they upped and married Ivy League guys before they graduated, so the Seven Sisters figured out this transferal-of-credits scheme.

  Princeton in the mid-seventies was a great town; I loved it. So much so that I modeled the town of Harton after it as just about everybody knows who is familiar with Princeton and has read my first novel, Crooked Heart. This book returns to Harton after taking my two detectives, Tom and Kathryn, to England for the action of novel number two, Thieves Break In.

  This book also very much involves their parish church, St. Margaret's, which is modeled after Trinity Church in Princeton, where I was confirmed at the ripe old age of twenty-six. I grew up a Presbyterian and still have a great respect for that church: it taught me the value of excellent preaching, to name only one thing. But I fell in love with the Middle Ages when I read Chaucer in college, and I kinda thought I wanted to become a Catholic. But having grown up terribly Protestant, I didn't think I could go all the way to Rome, so I settled for becoming a high church Anglican. I was at Princeton at the time, so I took instruction from the University chaplain, was confirmed at Trinity Church, and spent my first two worshipping years as an Episcopalian there, learning those heretofore unfamiliar hymns (and weren't they glorious!) and growing accustomed to the liturgical year (I can still remember the fragrance of the evergreens they used to deck the place in Advent; Trinity Princeton has the best sense of festival of any parish I have ever had the good fortune to live in). As you can tell, I cherish a fondness for that parish to this day, some thirty years later.

  Which is why I hope they'll forgive me for planting a dead body in “their” driveway. But that's how I got my start writing murder mysteries. The only blot on my life in Princeton was that I was unhappily married; I went for marriage counseling at the University's Roman Catholic Chaplaincy, Aquinas Institute. That wasn't as crazy as it sounds; one of the priests there, a lovely man named Walter Nolan, had been happily married, but his wife had died, so he had become a Catholic priest. At the time I lived in Princeton he had quite logically become Aquinas Institute's resident marriage counselor. I'll be forever indebted to him because, with his compassionate understanding, he helped me break free from my dead-end marriage. But I digress.

  My appointments at Aquinas were at nine at night, and afterward I took the shortcut home through the Trinity Church driveway. One witchy October night, when the air was fresh and wicked and all the shadows were dancing, as I reached the darkest part of the drive, I thought to myself, “This would be a perfect place to find a body!”

  Well, you see, I'd read Nancy Drew as a child and then switched to Agatha Christie at about ten, and then progressed to Rex Stout and on to Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy Sayers and P. D. James, so what can you expect?

  So I went home and started to write a novel about a young woman who was miserably married and was coming home from a marriage counseling session and found a body in her church driveway. The story of how this became not my first novel but my third to be published is long and complicated, and I won't bore you with it.

  But I do want to tell you how it got to be twenty-five years between the beginning of that novel and my first novel getting published. I didn't have faith in myself. I worked on it in bits and pieces of spare time, but I said to myself that I couldn't justify spending real time on it because it was ju
st a fantasy. People like me don't turn into published novelists. I'm telling you this so that you don't do the same thing to yourself.

  If you have an idea for a novel, SIT DOWN AND WRITE IT! Have faith in yourself. Do not cheat yourself out of a quarter of a century of a writing career, as I did.

  Oh, and get yourself a great agent. I did. Her name is Linda Roghaar, and she is worth her weight in sapphires.

  CHAPTER 1

  The destruction of Tom Holder was carefully planned. Joel took months producing a suitable scheme.

  He began with the principle that a man should be attacked at his weakest point. Studying Holder, his life, and his activities as best he could from a careful distance, Joel soon decided that Holder’s weakest point must surely be Mrs. Holder. Louise.

  The woman dressed like a bag lady. Mismatched articles of clothing hung off her dispiritedly, as if they knew they had no business being together. The hems of her skirts were amazingly uneven. Her blouses were so many decades out of date that they could not have been obtained anywhere but thrift shops. Sweaters and jackets were dragged inefficiently over these blouses so that sometimes the arms were fully into the sleeves and sometimes not. Frequently these ensembles were tied together with dreadful knitted scarves that seemed to be of the lady’s own making.

  It was obvious that her husband earned enough money as Harton’s police chief to keep her in proper clothes; for one thing, they lived in a perfectly respectable house. Small, and nothing fancy, but a good, middle-class house, not a slum. And of course the man dressed decently himself. Joel concluded that Mrs. Holder must actually choose to dress the way she did, and therefore she must be seriously touched in the head.

  It was necessary, therefore, to observe the wife, even strike acquaintance with the wife, without the husband knowing these overtures were being made, and since the husband was a policeman, some subtlety was called for. One of the first things that occurred to Joel was that he could not possibly stalk Mrs. Holder in his own car.

  He had not yet decided whether he would, in the end, reveal himself to Holder as his tormentor or whether he would prefer to remain forever tantalizingly anonymous. If he wanted to leave the latter option open, it was important that Louise not be able to furnish any information that might lead to him. Therefore he could not follow her around, learning her schedule and habits, perhaps ultimately park in front of her house and pay a call, or strike acquaintance in order to work some scam on her, unless he abandoned his own conspicuous car for some more forgettable vehicle.

  So it was that early on a crisp autumn morning Joel drove to Newark Airport, parked his red LeBaron convertible in long-term parking, and caught a shuttle bus to the car rental cluster. Guarding against the possibility that at some future point an attempt might be made to trace his movements all the way back to this relatively innocuous beginning, he timed his arrival well. He wanted to go unnoticed, lost in the early morning rush hour, and he hit it exactly on time. Every line at the Avis counter was three deep in drowsy travelers who had arrived on the various red-eye flights from the West Coast.

  None of the lines appeared shorter than the others; wanting another criterion for choice, Joel glanced at the clerks behind the counter. He would choose the one least likely to pay any attention to him, the one most likely to be doing the job on autopilot.

  Joel had been reared in reasonable affluence. As in most places in America, that meant he had been reared in mostly white neighborhoods, gone to mostly white schools and a mostly white college, and worked in mostly white workplaces. He was afflicted, therefore, with that almost universal American racism, that faint, unacknowledged, embarrassing, never-to-be-admitted assumption that black people are, on average, just a bit less bright than white people are. So he got in the line where the clerk behind the counter was a young black woman. In fairness to him, it should be said that his racism was exacerbated by his conservative taste in hair fashion; the front half of the girl’s head was covered in golden cornrows and the back half was an explosion of orange frizz. And she was wearing purple dangling earrings that were at least five inches long, for heaven’s sake, and shiny.

  What Joel did not realize was that the earrings were shiny because they were made of titanium, which cost a pretty penny indeed, and Loreen Sanchez could afford them because she was not just one of the clerks at the Avis office at Newark Airport, she was the manager, and therefore drew a hefty salary. In fact, at twenty-two, Loreen was the youngest manager of a major airport Avis office in the country, and she had earned that position because she was as sharp as eight barrels of tacks. Joel had picked the wrong line.

  “Good morning, sir! How can I help you?” Loreen beamed at Joel with her “red-eye smile,” a nice combination of bracing friendliness and sympathy; she’d been working on it for years and it was very good. It made customers feel she understood how miserable they felt.

  They went through the routine: he wanted a midsized sedan, no, he didn’t have a reservation; he needed it for two weeks, yes, he’d be bringing it back to Newark, no, he didn’t need insurance, he’d be insuring it with his regular insurers in Harton.

  All the while these uninspiring transactions were going on, Loreen Sanchez’s mind was ticking fast. It was perfectly clear to her that this customer had not been on a plane all night. He had none of the signs, and if anybody knew the signs, Loreen did. People didn’t get off the red-eye with trembling hands and eyes ever so slightly wide with excitement. This guy was wired, and it wasn’t because he’d been drinking coffee all night. This wasn’t caffeine; she knew caffeine. This was something else. And it was something wrong.

  He lived in Harton; that was about an hour and a half drive from the airport; obviously he owned a car, because he had a car insurer in Harton. If he needed a spare because his own was in the shop, it would have been a hell of a lot easier to rent one in Harton. He’d driven, or taken a taxi, all the way to Newark to rent a car other than his own. That seemed to indicate some need for secrecy. It could be something as relatively innocent as an affair, which would have been none of Avis’s business. But if the guy was going to rent an Avis car and do something illegal with it, it could turn out to be very much their business. Not that they could be held accountable, strictly speaking, but still…

  Risking the customer’s impatience, Loreen gave him a huge smile, begged his pardon, gathered up his papers, and said she’d be back in a moment. Retreating to the office where she couldn’t be seen, she made a photocopy of his driver’s license and insurance card and then wrote a few terse sentences on the photocopied sheet, a practice she invariably followed when a customer made the hair move on the back of her neck. She then put the piece of paper in a special file.

  She returned to the counter with yet another smile, the customer’s license and insurance card, Avis’s rental papers, and a set of car keys, and handed them over.

  The customer took these items from her with an urgent haste that only served to exacerbate her misgivings. He managed, barely, to throw her a breathless “thanks” over his shoulder as he stalked hastily away.

  Out in the parking lot, Joel felt as though he’d escaped from something, but he wasn’t sure what. The way that black girl had looked at him! As if she suspected him of something! But that was stupid, she couldn’t have known anything, he was just renting a car. He gulped in huge lungfuls of the cold, welcome air, and strode along the rows of identical trunks until a number painted on the asphalt told him he had arrived at the beginning of his vengeance.

  CHAPTER 2

  It was one of those magic nights that October frequently produces in New Jersey. The leaves made speckled golden haloes around the streetlights, and the air was sharp and restless. Mason Blaine marched briskly down the sidewalk that ran along the shadowy street where he lived. He congratulated himself on his habit of walking to and from the campus as long as the weather was good. Some of those lazy young fools on the faculty drove everywhere. Stupid of them. They’d only get fat and unfit. And they mi
ssed the pleasure of being alone on a night like this, walking along, crunching the first fallen leaves underfoot, enjoying the rustling dark. It was nights like this that Halloweens were made of. A witchy night. That little breeze, stirring the leaves. Nights like this, you could see why people used to believe in elves. All those movements in the shadows, if you were the fanciful type—Out of the corner of his eye Blaine caught a movement that did not seem to fit into that kind of fancy. He turned to see what it was, but too late.

  An annihilating blow struck the back of his head; he actually heard the crunch as his skull buckled like a broken egg, but thanks to the effect of shock, and the fact that he was unconscious if not dead by the time he hit the ground, he felt no pain.

  The figure holding the crowbar stood for a moment hoping a wild heartbeat would subside. Deep breathing was supposed to help. Everybody said deep breathing helped. But it was taking too much time, and there was no time to waste. Quick: to the car parked at the curb. Open the trunk. Put the crowbar back in. Close the trunk. Drag the body onto the floor of the backseat. Close the door gently. Get in the car. Drive away discreetly. It was a quiet neighborhood. Keep it quiet.

  An intermittent breeze bestirred the leaves to confidential whispers among themselves, and beyond the reach of the streetlights the shadows were alive with the movements that had reminded Mason Blaine of elves.

  It was lost on Tracy. She was walking home from her session with Father Edwards, and her brain was too heavy with trouble to notice the mischievous air. Everything was awful. It was so bad, she could hardly believe it. She wondered how long she could endure it. And when she couldn’t endure it any longer, what then? Divorce was no more a viable option than murder. You couldn’t break a promise you made to God. Or before God. But wasn’t every promise made before God? Was marriage that particular? Wasn’t—No. Never mind. No good speculating. Divorce was out. There could be no escape that way.