Stillness in Bethlehem

by Jane Haddam

  The one thing Sharon didn’t like about it was the walk home. Sharon walked home because Susan used the car on Sundays to go up and visit her mother in New Hampshire. Sharon and Susan didn’t visit together because Susan’s mother wouldn’t let them. Sharon could have asked Susan to pick her up at the church—Susan never stayed that long in New Hampshire—but it seemed like an unnecessary bother when it was perfectly safe to walk. The problem was, in order to get home, Sharon had to go down Main Street to Carrow and down Carrow to the Delaford Road, and when she did that she passed Candy and Reggie George’s house. The problem with passing Candy and Reggie George’s house was that the same thing was always going on inside it: Reggie was beating Candy into a pulp. The first time Sharon had heard this, she had done what she knew was the right thing to do. She’d marched straight home and called the cops. She even had to give Franklin Morrison credit. He’d come out. He’d thrown Reggie in jail. He’d taken Candy to the hospital. He’d done everything he could do without some cooperation from Candy herself, and Candy refused to give it. Sharon didn’t know if Vermont had a mandatory-charge law for battering or not—she had never been entirely sure what happened after Reggie and Candy had been carted off to their separate public institutions—but she had come to realize this: Without Candy’s cooperation, mandatory-charge law or not, it was going to be impossible to convict Reggie. The second time she had called, Franklin Morrison had asked her if she really wanted him to come out, and Sharon hadn’t blamed him. The time Franklin had come out, Reggie had put a load of buckshot in his knee that had messed him up for weeks, and what had he got to show for it? It was so frustrating, it made Sharon want to scream. Candy made Sharon want to scream. How could you go through life with so little self-respect? How could you get out of bed in the morning weighed down by so much fear?

  Tonight, things were quieter than usual, but not quiet. Sharon wondered if they had gotten an early start. Candy seemed to be moaning. Reggie seemed to be slapping something, but not human flesh. Sharon thought what she was hearing was the sound of a belt being slapped against a wooden table. She stopped under cover of the Georges’ evergreen hedge and listened for a while, but that was all she could hear. She was glad she could hear Candy moaning. If she hadn’t been able to hear Candy doing anything, she would have been worried she was dead.

  She knocked snow off her boots and got moving again, through the dark, down the road, toward home. It wasn’t far. The house she shared with Sharon was on the northeast corner lot at the intersection of Carrow and Delaford, if you could call that an intersection. Sharon supposed that it was, but using that term for it bothered her. Intersections had sidewalks and streetlamps and stoplights.

  Half a mile past Candy and Reggie’s house, Sharon started to jog, and she jogged the whole last three-quarters of a mile, right down her driveway to her back door. The lights were on all over the house, meaning Susan was home. Sharon hopped up the back porch steps and let herself into the mudroom, humming a little under her breath. The humming was not a good sign. It was “The Wearing of the Green,” and the only times Sharon had ever heard “The Wearing of the Green” was at funerals.

  She stuck her head into the kitchen and said, “Susan?”

  Susan came into the kitchen from the dining room on the other side. She must have been in the living room and heard Sharon coming up. “Get on in,” she said. “It’s cold out there. How was your class?”

  “Class was fine.” Sharon had kicked off her snow boots and left them to lie on the drip-dry grate. Now she shoved her parka onto a hanger and came sock-footed into the kitchen. Susan was putting on a kettle of hot water for tea. There was fresh bread in the middle of the kitchen table, on a board with a knife and a tiny crock of butter at its side. It was this sort of thing that made Sharon’s commitment to Susan so absolute. This sort of thoughtfulness. This sort of care.

  “Class was fine,” Sharon said again, sitting down. “It’s coming home I don’t like.”

  “I know.”

  “It wasn’t half as bad as usual, believe it or not. Or maybe it was worse. She was moaning in there. I kept standing there in the snow, trying to make sure I could hear her breathing. Which I couldn’t do, of course. Just moaning. I suppose that’s good enough.”

  “You did what you could, Sharon. If you want, we can call Franklin Morrison again.”

  “No, that’s all right. What good would it do?”

  “Maybe it would do some good for you.”

  Sharon shook her head. “I’ll be fine. What about you? How was New Hampshire?”

  “The way New Hampshire always is,” Susan said, light and tight. “I had my problem with my mother long before I had you. Or anybody like you. If you know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean.” Sharon sighed. “Do you ever wonder about it? The way people are, I mean. Candy and Reggie. Your mother.”

  Susan smiled. “The men I knew in New York before I met you? I don’t wonder how jerks get to be jerks, Sharon. They just are.”

  “Do you think Candy is a jerk?”

  “I think anybody who can’t take care of herself is a fool. Especially any woman. Come on now. There must be something we can talk about that isn’t depressing. What went on in town today?”

  Sharon pulled the bread to her and cut a slice. The kettle began to boil and Susan turned to take it off the stove. Susan had a perfect jawline, tight and well-defined, flawless. Susan was flawless all over, in spite of the fact that she was getting on to forty. Sharon ate bread and butter and watched Susan pour them both some tea.

  “Well,” she said, “Jan-Mark Verek is apparently finished grieving, or he likes to work when he grieves. You remember how he was painting a portrait of Dinah Ketchum?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Well, now he’s painting one of Cara Hutchinson. At least, according to Cara Hutchinson he is. She was all over town with it this morning. She’s supposed to go up there tomorrow for a sitting, and she can hardly contain herself.”

  Susan looked amused. “He’ll make her look like a lot of puke-green blobs on a piece of recycled paper. Do you think she’ll mind?”

  “I don’t even think she’ll notice. She’s already gotten him to give her the grand tour. She was all over town about that, too. How wonderful the house was. How he keeps Tisha’s office practically as a shrine.”

  “Horse manure,” Susan said.

  “I’m with you.” Sharon put too much sugar in her tea, because she always put too much sugar in her tea. “Still, it had me worried, for a bit. About what Tisha might have left lying around her office that Jan-Mark hasn’t bothered to clean up yet.”

  “I don’t think Tisha left things just lying around her office. She was much more organized than that.”

  “I know,” Sharon said. “Maybe there isn’t anything we can talk about without getting depressed. Do you want to get thoroughly down?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’m going to get you thoroughly down anyway. I ran into Franklin on my way to class today. In the pharmacy. I was buying Blistex and wishing we were in Florida.”

  “Franklin can’t get me thoroughly down,” Susan said. “For a cop, he’s almost a nice man.”

  “Well, nice or not, he was just beside himself today. And I’ll bet you can’t guess why.”

  “You’re right. I can’t guess why.”

  Sharon cut another piece of bread and buttered it. “Well,” she said, “it seems that his hero is in town. The man he most wants to meet. The absolute paragon of law enforcement. The wet dream of every small-town lawman from here to Arizona—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Gregor Demarkian,” Sharon said. Then she put her bread down on the bare wood of the table and said, “I don’t know if he’s here because Franklin asked him here or if it’s just a coincidence or what, but we’ve got those two deaths that were very nicely put down to hunting accidents—especially the one of them—and now we have People magazine’s favorite exp
ert on murder as well. I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon, Susan, and I just don’t like the way it stacks up.”

  3

  What Stu Ketchum didn’t like was the way his rifles looked, stacked up on the floor of the gun room the way they were now. Ever since his mother had been found in the snow at the side of the road and Franklin Marshall had come back here to find Stu’s Browning .22-caliber semiautomatic Grade I rifle gone from its place on the wall, Stu had been taking his rifles down and putting them back up again, over and over, as if, if he did it enough times he could make the count finally come out right. Finding out that Dinah had not been killed with one of his guns had not helped. It had made him feel just a little less sick, but it had not really helped. Stu didn’t know what would help. Sometimes he thought he had invented a new kind of therapy, shot therapy, weapons therapy, whatever you wanted to call it. Sometimes he would take all the rifles down from the wall and go out into the yard and shoot holes in the side of his barn. Fortunately, there wasn’t much of anything in his barn.

  It was now seven o’clock in the evening, and not only were Stu’s guns all on the gun-room floor, but his ammunition was there, too, and his special sights and his tripods and his skeet traps and all the rest of it, all the paraphernalia of using guns for a hobby. Looking at it all piled up like this made him feel dizzy and bewildered. Thinking about himself shooting at things made him feel sick. He kept expecting the missing gun to show up, by magic or by sleight of someone’s hand, and not to notice it until it was too late. He kept expecting to find himself standing outside by the barn pumping bullets into wood and suddenly recognizing the gun he was holding as the one that killed Tisha Verek. He tried to count the number of men he had killed in Vietnam and couldn’t. It didn’t feel like the same thing.

  He felt a breeze on his hands and looked up to see that his wife, Liza, had come to stand in the doorway. Behind her, the wood stove in the kitchen seemed hot enough to be glowing. Stu dropped the cartridge he’d been holding and straightened up.

  “Yes?”

  “What do you mean, yes?” Liza said. “Aren’t you going to come inside? Aren’t you going to eat anything?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You haven’t been hungry for weeks. That’s not the point. You have to eat.”

  “I’ve been thinking it all through again, the day they died. I’ve been trying to make it make sense.”

  “I don’t see why you think you can make it make any more sense than the police have. Come inside and eat.”

  “Why doesn’t it bother you?” Stu asked her, but he’d been asking her that for two weeks solid now and getting no good answer. It didn’t bother her because it didn’t bother her. Dinah had been her mother-in-law. Liza hadn’t had much patience for her when she was alive. Tisha Verek had been nothing at all. Stu tried to fathom it and couldn’t. His gun. His mother. It all seemed much too connected to him.

  “I don’t like you out here fooling around with those guns,” Liza said. And then she retreated, back into the kitchen, back behind her door. It had been that way between the two of them since Dinah died. Maybe it had been that way between the two of them forever.

  Stu got up, picked his stainless-steel Plainfield Model Ml gas-operated semiautomatic out of the pile, found a clip for it and loaded. Then he went out into the yard and positioned the gun on his shoulder. This one was more like a machine gun than a standard semiautomatic. It looked like a machine gun, too. It made a lot of noise when it fired.

  Stu sighted along the side of the barn, aiming at nothing in particular, wanting only to hit wood and cause damage. He pressed the trigger and listened to the splintering of wood in the darkness, the groaning of old boards, the moaning of the wind.

  It had been two weeks now since his mother had died, and he had finally come to a decision, one of the few real decisions he had ever had to make in his life. He was going to have to go through with it no matter how Liza felt and without consulting good old Peter Callisher. He was going to have to do it on his own and that was all there was to it.

  He pulled the trigger again, listened to the splintering of wood again, thought of them both out there in the snow with the small holes from .22-caliber bullets leaking blood into the ground.

  He thought about himself out here shooting up the barn.

  He thought he was probably going crazy.

  Four

  1

  WHEN FRANKLIN MORRISON HAD first come up to Gregor Demarkian in The Magick Endive, Gregor had been sure that the man was just another avid reader of the local paper, a slightly less sophisticated specimen than either of his two waitresses who wanted to shake the hand of the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. It wasn’t the kind of thing Gregor had ever imagined happening to himself back when he was still with the FBI. While he was there, he’d made the media often enough—if you head task forces chasing serial killers in a country full of crime-story fanatics and horror-movie junkies, that is inevitable—but it had been as an officer of the organization, the designated human face of a faceless institution. What had been happening to him since he first walked into Bennis Hannaford’s father’s house three years ago and found a dead body lying on the study floor was different. If it had been just that body in Bennis Hannaford’s father’s house, it might not have mattered. Bennis Hannaford’s family was rich and well-connected—in Philadelphia. The rest of the country had been interested mostly because the Hannaford house had forty rooms and the Hannaford girls had all “come out” in extravagant style and one of Bennis’s brothers was what old George Tekemanian back on Cavanaugh Street called “a corporated raider.” It was the second extracurricular murder that really got the ball rolling. Gregor had taken that one on for a friend of Father Tibor’s. That friend just happened to be John Cardinal O’Bannion, the most publicly flamboyant and outrageously controversial Catholic prelate in the country. Gregor wouldn’t have guessed it beforehand, but Catholics are much better than debutantes at making a man famous. There are fifty-two million of them from one end of the country to the other, and even the ones who haven’t been to Mass in twenty years are passionately interested in the Church. A lot of other people are also passionately interested in the Church, either in romantic attachment to their prettified images of pre-Vatican II ritual or from outright hostility. The Hannaford murder had gotten him a two-page spread in People magazine. The murder he investigated for John Cardinal O’Bannion got him on the cover, and on the covers of Time, Life, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, and The Ladies’ Home Journal. It also got him on all three networks and into two of the three best-selling supermarket tabloids. After that, it really got crazy. More extracurricular murders. More publicity. Gregor thought every once in a while about the original Hercule Poirot, who had wanted so badly to be famous and who wasn’t, really. Poirot should have lived in America in the second half of the twentieth century, where the publicity machine is all cranked up and ready to go, where “legends” have become something Directors of Market Research invented three of before breakfast. Gregor seemed to have become one of these “legends.” Esquire wanted to interview him. So did Vanity Fair. He had received three invitations to appear on Ted Koppel’s Nightline. God only knew what any of these people expected him to talk about. He didn’t break confidences, his life wasn’t all that interesting and he couldn’t talk with any authority about the Catholic Church. He didn’t even believe in God. What frightened him was the way it had gotten out on the street, especially in smaller towns. People stopped him. People touched him. Once a man in a plaid sports jacket and high-top Reebok shoes had grabbed him by the lapels and demanded to know his “secret.”

  Standing in The Magick Endive, watching Franklin Morrison talk to Bennis and Tibor with all the deference of a B-movie butler taking directions from the lady of the manor, Gregor had wondered uneasily if what was about to happen was going to be weird. Nothing very weird had happened to him so far, except for the man in the high-top Reeboks, but he had heard of such t
hings. Actresses gunned down by men they had never met. Talk-show hosts invaded by deranged fans who knew how to use a set of burglar’s tools. A television anchorman assaulted in a manner so bizarre it became the stuff of real legend—not hyped—within hours of the anchorman’s escape. Fame was not only instantaneous in America, it was dangerous. It was especially dangerous for anyone whose name was connected in any way with violent death. The author of a series of best-selling novels about slash-and-run murders. The star of an Oscar-nominated movie about covert operations in Vietnam. The cop who had brought in the evidence that finally convicted a famous mob boss in Miami. It was sickening what had happened to some people—and always the wrong people. The last time the violence-sickened public had gone for the throat of a killer was when Ruby killed Oswald. Since then, the killers had been perfectly safe. The television newswoman who produced a ground-breaking report on battering had to have her mailbox checked routinely by the bomb squad. No one was out to assassinate Jeffrey Dahmer.

  Actually, Franklin Morrison didn’t seem to Gregor to be a prime candidate for the role of nutcase. He was too old—if there was one thing Gregor had learned in twenty years in the FBI, it was that most stranger-to-stranger violence is committed by men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five. Most acquaintanceship violence is committed by men in that age group, too, but Gregor didn’t have to worry about that. Franklin Morrison wasn’t an acquaintance. He wasn’t in very good shape, either. That was another thing about stranger-to-stranger violence. Acquaintanceship violence usually had a drug or alcohol element to it. Stranger-to-stranger violence, at least of the most serious kind, usually had a workout element to it. When Gregor had first noticed that, he had thought he was losing his mind. Then another agent had made the same observation, and the connection had become impossible to ignore. Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacey—fat or thin, in shape or out, it was remarkable how many serial killers and other assorted nasties worked out. The only one Gregor could remember who definitely hadn’t had been David Berkowitz. Gregor didn’t think that counted. He had always been uncomfortable with the verdict in the Berkowitz case. He was sure enough that Berkowitz had committed the crimes he had been charged with. He was also sure that Berkowitz was no psychopath. Gregor Demarkian knew the difference between a psychopath and a lunatic.