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coat. As this was my first fall and winter out of the convent, I had not yet acquired a winter jacket to go with the pants that I wear when I’m home. I live happily on a small income that is many times what I lived on during the fifteen years I spent at St. Stephen’s. You can survive winter easily without a jacket as long as you have a warm coat, and you need a coat when you go to work in New York.
    “This is a crime scene, ma’am,” a tall, weathered, uniformed man informed me as I approached the church.
    “I wondered if the body had been identified yet,” I said.
    “No word on that. The coroner’s doing an autopsy sometime today. You aren’t the lady who found the body, are you?”
    “I am.”
    “They get your name right in the paper?”
    “No, but it doesn’t matter.” I smiled, and he smiled back.
    “Well, there isn’t much I can tell you right now except I can’t let anyone in the church.”
    “Do you mind if I walk around the town?”
    “Be my guest.”
    I started off for the little bridge Henry Degenkamp had pointed out to me Sunday morning. The land was flat here, the old riverbed a slight running indentation. I stepped into it and felt a small difference in texture, a gritty sandiness. Off to my right, the once residential area of Studsburg sloped upward. I saw where I had been on Saturday afternoon, the place where I had met the Degenkamps.
    Ahead of me, the little bridge he had pointed out yesterday morning was now quite close. Reaching it, I had a sense of how narrow the river had been at this point, and how narrow, too, the street that crossed it. It was a beautiful old bridge. I took hold of one side and lifted myself up onto it. It felt as sturdy and stable as any country bridge that still handled traffic.
    From the center of the bridge I turned in a full circle. This was Main Street where on both sides there had been shops that supported life, probably a grocery, a gas station, a coffee shop, a bank. Looking up Main Street as it rose along the hill, I could see two perfect rows of tree stumps. It had been a town that cared how it looked, even if no one saw it but its own, a group of people who remembered their friends with round-robin letters and Christmas cards, some of whom returned after thirty years for a baptism in the old church. But among them there had been a cold-blooded killer who had planned his crime and executed it virtually in plain view of the townspeople.
    I jumped down off the bridge and started back toward the church, wondering what terrible event, what anger, what resentment, had motivated a mortal crime. Love, money, jealousy, or something so terrible that I could not imagine it.
    The deputy waved to me as I passed on my way to my car.
       “Gosh, I’m sorry you missed Frank,” Maddie said when I had taken off my coat. “He had to get back to work, so he took off at five this morning. I’ll be leaving after lunch. Then Richie can sleep as we drive. Mom tells me your name was in the paper this morning.”
    “All I did was find the body,” I said. “I hope the coroner figures out pretty quick who he was.”
    “It just can’t have been a Studsburger,” Carol Stifler said. “Harry and I went over and over it last night.
Nobody
was missing after Maddie’s christening. The mayor even dittoed address lists and gave them to everyone in town. If somebody had disappeared, the post office would have sent a Christmas card back or I would have gotten a note saying so-and-so was gone. Nothing like that happened.”
    “Well, whoever it is, he’s stirring up quite a dispute right now between the coroner and the sheriff,” her husband said.
    “What kind of dispute?” I asked. I hadn’t turned on the television set in my room this morning, so all I had was the morning paper, which had nothing new in it.
    “They’re both just basking in the glory of your discovery, Kix. I expect the sheriff’s going to parlay this murder into a windfall for his department. And the