Corpus Christmas Read Online Free

graciously at his audience.
     “A very merry Christmas to you all,” he said and clicked the switch Pascal Grant had rigged.
    “Ah!” everyone exclaimed, as the tree blazed forth in all its Victorian glory.
    Fourteen senior suburbanites, in from Connecticut for the day and fresh from touring the Theodore Roosevelt birthplace a short
     walk away, had gathered in the entry hall for a guided tour. Several began taking pictures of each other in front of the Christmas
     tree.
    “Your tree is much prettier than Teddy’s,” one of the women told Mrs. Beardsley.
    Pascal Grant paused in the act of carting away the ladder and storage boxes. “Hey, Rick,” he said. “Want to see my window
     now?”
    Rick Evans made a show of looking at his watch. “Sorry, Pascal, but I’d better finish taking pictures of the tree.”
    Yet when he saw the open disappointment on the other’s face, he relented. “Tell you what, though. Why don’t I come a little
     early tomorrow, around four? You can show me then, okay?”
    “Okay!” Grant nodded happily.
    * * *
    At the top of the house, Roger Shambley lifted his massive head from a letter that had been misfiled in a cabinet with some
     of Erich Breul’s business papers.
    “
Sorgues?
” he muttered to himself, remembering that name from a biography he’d once read. “August of 1912? Hmm… now wouldn’t that be
     something?”
    He looked past the circle of bright light in which he sat, out to the dim stretches of attic crammed with boxes and trunks,
     and wild surmises filled his head.
    “
Silent, upon a peak in Darien,
” he jeered at himself.
    And yet—!
    In another attic several blocks southeast of the Breul House, a different discovery had just been made.
    While renovating their old, but newly purchased, red brick row house in the East Village, Daniel and Gigi DeLucca had found
     a rusty tin footlocker pushed up under the eaves of the fourth-floor attic behind stacks of
National Geographic
s
.
    “Old books?” he’d wondered.
    “Old clothes,” she’d guessed.
    The hasp was rusted tight. “Blackbeard’s treasure,” they decided and, lustily chanting, “Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest,
     Yo-ho! Yo-ho!” they had hauled it downstairs and pried it open with a crow-bar.
    Inside they found an unpleasant musty odor and four little bundles wrapped in stained newspapers.
    “Pigeon bones?” she asked as she finished unwrapping the first bundle.
    “I don’t think so,” he said and carefully laid the second bundle back in the chest as if afraid it would explode.
    It was a tiny mummified figure, entwined in what looked to the man like a shriveled grapevine but that the woman instantly
     recognized as an umbilical cord.
    They left the last two bundles for the police.
    Lieutenant Sigrid Harald arrived shortly after an assistant from the medical examiner’s office. “I’m no Dr. Oliver when it
     comes to bones,” said Cohen, referring to one of the country’s leading experts on human skeletal remains, “but off the top
     of my bead, I’d say all four are human and all died within hours of their births.”
    “When?” asked the tall, gray-eyed lieutenant. “How the hell do I know?” Cohen answered testily. They looked at the dates on
     the yellowed newspapers in which the four pathetic remains had been wrapped. The earliest was March 4, 1935; the latest was
     April 1, 1947.
    “Look there, Lieutenant,” said Detective Jim Lowry.
    He showed her a flaking page of newsprint that headlined the allied invasion of North Africa. Overlaying a map with arrows
     pointing to Algiers were four faded brown ovals that looked very much like old fingerprints made by bloody adult fingers.

    Their Christmas card that year depicted Father Christmas in his long red robes and furred hood as he warmed himself before
     a roaring fire. Inside was a verse from Sir Walter Scott, one of Mr. Breul’s favorite authors:
    Heap on more wood!—the wind is chill:
    But let it whistle as it