by Jane Haddam
“Hello,” Gregor said.
Franklin Morrison shook his head. “I suppose we sound like a pack of hicks to you. I guess we might as well. We are a pack of hicks.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t exactly say that,” Lee Greenwood protested.
“The only reason you wouldn’t is because you don’t have the sense God gave the rear end of a mule.” There was a small gate between the desks and the narrow front of the room. Franklin pushed it open and motioned Gregor inside. “Come take a look at the world’s most expensively outfitted hick cop shop. We got computers. We got labs. We got nationwide information hookups. We got anything you care to name, and the day those two women died I was sitting here feeling sorry for myself because we never got to use any of it. I’m seventy-two years old and I still don’t know a damn thing about a damn thing.”
Gregor looked around at the interior of the office, at the desks and the computer terminals, at the paper scattered around. What this police department needed was people. A dispatcher. A clerk. Somebody to take care of the paperwork housekeeping. He drew out a desk chair and sat down in it.
“Do you have a mobile crime unit?” he asked Franklin Morrison.
Franklin Morrison laughed. “I’ve got an MCU any station in New York City would die for. I’ve got a lab—”
“A lab?”
“Set up for fiber analysis, earth analysis, I don’t know what. Got this kid, Mary Dempsey’s oldest, goes to MIT on scholarship now. When I need something done, I pay him and he comes down and does it.”
“Do you need the lab often?” Gregor couldn’t imagine Bethlehem as a hotbed of crime. He couldn’t imagine Bethlehem as a hotbed of anything, except the terminally colonial.
But Franklin Morrison was nodding. “Traffic accidents,” he was saying. “And at least one outbreak of cabin fever every February, some asshole gets snowed in up in the hills and gets tanked up and decides life isn’t worth living. We could ask the staties to run the tests for us, but what for?”
“Rather not ask the staties for anything,” Lee Greenwood put in.
Franklin Morrison scratched his head. “Of course, sometimes the staties are useful. Like with these shootings here. I think we’d have had no end of trouble with those if we hadn’t had the staties standing by, ready to step in. They took the heat, if you get what I mean.”
“They did the tests and they made the pronouncements and whatever they said, it wasn’t your fault.” Gregor nodded. “But I’m surprised. I’d have thought you’d want to use that lab of yours when you had the chance.”
“We did,” Lee Greenwood said.
Gregor raised an eyebrow at Franklin Morrison and watched the chief blush.
“We didn’t tell anybody about it,” Franklin Morrison said, “but we ran the same tests here the staties ran down-state. Just to be sure, if you get what I mean.”
“Just to be sure of what?” Gregor demanded.
Lee Greenwood jumped in. “Franklin thought the state police were leaping to conclusions before they had any real evidence,” he said, “and I know what he meant, because I sort of felt that way, too. They hardly looked at anything at all before they decided we had hunting accidents.”
Gregor looked from Lee Greenwood to Franklin Morrison and paused. “Did you find anything different from what they found? Did you find any reason to doubt their conclusions?”
“No,” Lee Greenwood said.
Franklin Morrison had been standing near the gate he’d let Gregor in through. Now he pulled out a chair and sat down, moving his bulk carefully, and propped his feet up on an open desk drawer. In some men, that would have constituted attitude. In Franklin Morrison, Gregor thought, it was fatigue. Franklin Morrison was an old man. His feet hurt.
“Tisha Verek,” Franklin said, “was shot at nine-forty-one on the morning of Monday, December second, with a Browning .22-caliber semiautomatic Grade I rifle we now know belonged to Stuart Ketchum, son of Dinah Ketchum, who was also shot that morning but with a Marlin Model 70P Papoose—which also happens to be a semiautomatic and also happens to be a twenty-two, but a twenty-two long. Meaning the ammunition would not have been interchangeable. Anyway, both women were hit twice, once in the shoulder and once in the neck. We have a time for Tisha Verek because her husband says he saw her fall. We don’t have one for Dinah Ketchum because she wasn’t found until hours later, but we do have her schedule for the day, and the possibility is that she was shot close to the same time Tisha Verek was.”
“Are twenty-twos what people use to shoot deer?” Gregor asked.
“They’re a little light, but women use them sometimes. And flatlanders will use anything. We had the kid run the tests and the staties ran the tests, but I knew that Browning bullet just by looking at it. Stuart has a whole collection of guns out there. He puts in a lot of target practice and he likes to have company.”
“Meaning you’ve shot the gun yourself,” Gregor said.
Franklin nodded. “When we first saw this mess, I thought Stuart had gone round the bend, had some kind of delayed Vietnam syndrome and shot them both, but it couldn’t have been Stuart. He was with Peter Callisher all morning and the two of them went up to Tisha’s together. If you believe Jan-Mark Verek—and I only sort of half do—they got there within minutes of Tisha’s going down. Most people in town think Jan-Mark killed Tisha himself, stole Stu’s gun and just did it, but most people in town would do anything they could to get rid of Jan-Mark Verek. As a matter of principle.”
“Was he opposed to the Nativity Celebration, too?”
Franklin shook his head. “He’s just a general pain in the butt, that’s all. Speaks with a phony accent you can hear the Brooklyn under with no trouble at all. Goes berserk if anybody crosses his property, which means he goes berserk on a regular basis, because when it’s minus six with the wind chill and hip deep in snow, people take shortcuts. Then there’s the money. Jan-Mark isn’t so good about money. Remembering to pay people what he owes them, I mean. Most of the people up here who run small businesses or do personal work—chopping cordwood or raking leaves or painting houses—don’t have much of a cushion. If they put in the time, they expect to get paid.”
“He sounds altogether charming,” Gregor said. “Is there anything else wrong with him?”
“Probably. We just don’t know about it yet. So, Mr. Demarkian, you want to look at this stuff I’ve got for you.”
Gregor stood up. “I will if you want me to. You still have to understand that this isn’t the kind of evidence I’m used to dealing with. I mean, I’ve dealt with it, of course, but I’ve always relied on other people’s reports.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Franklin Morrison said. “So have I. But it isn’t the physical stuff I want you to see right this minute. I’ve got the Dempsey kid coming in; when he gets here he can walk you through that. It’s something else. I want your opinion about a probability.”
“A probability?”
Franklin Morrison took his feet off the open desk drawer, got up and went to the wall at the back of the room. The wall was blank, and along the top of it was a shade roll of the kind Gregor remembered from elementary school, the kind that pulled down to reveal a map of the United States. This one pulled down to reveal a map, too, but it was an extremely detailed map of the village and township of Bethlehem, Vermont, complete with roads, hills, woods and houses, with property lines clearly marked. It was in color, too. Franklin Morrison was very proud of it.
“Come here,” he told Gregor Demarkian. “I want to show you something very odd.”
Six
1
GEMMA BURY BELIEVED UNRESERVEDLY in the primacy of experience—believed, to be precise, that the emotional response of a person experiencing something was infinitely more important than any matter of fact related to that something in life. Putting it into words was damn near impossible, but acting on it was not. Acting on it made Gemma Bury’s life a hundred times easier than it might have been. It saved her a lot of work, too. She believ
ed the conspiracy theories in Oliver Stone’s JFK—in spite of the distortions everybody else seemed to find in it—because Oliver Stone’s JFK expressed the way the Kennedy assassination felt to her better than the Warren Report. She believed in astrology, too, at least in the sense of thinking that her destiny was at least partially controlled by the stars (and her menstrual cycle by the moon). It didn’t matter to her that the stars were not actually in the places that astrologers said they were. Gemma didn’t know where astrologers said they were. She didn’t know where astronomy said they were, either. It just felt right, this connection to the universe, this vast undifferentiated primal muck of space and time. Fortunately, Gemma never seemed to feel anything flagrantly opposed to common sense, such as that gravity wasn’t operating one day. She never went tripping out a tenth-story window, trusting the emotions that told her she could float. What she did do was write a lot of theology, both in the seminary and after she came to take up her position as pastor of the Episcopal Church in Bethlehem, Vermont. This theology had a great deal to do with Love, in the twentieth-century use of the term. It also had a great deal to do with sex, but Gemma never put it that way. Gemma thought of herself as a very natural personality. She enjoyed sex the way the ancient Greeks had—as an activity, not an identity—and liked to believe she had a lot in common with the Wife of Bath. What bothered her was that, since the deaths of Tisha Verek and Dinah Ketchum, she was becoming more and more convinced that her parishioners saw her the same way, and that wouldn’t do at all. What was really frightening was that they seemed to have known about her affair with Jan-Mark Verek all along. The phone in the rectory had started ringing only minutes after the news of Tisha Verek’s death had reached the village, and gone on ringing almost every hour of every day of the two weeks since. It was now two o’clock on the afternoon of Monday, December 16th, and Gemma’s head was aching. The little old ladies were driving her crazy, that was the truth. They were also having the time of their lives. Nothing this exciting had happened in Bethlehem since the Great Depression had given the Celebration its start.
There was a big evergreen wreath in the window of Abigail’s Fine Cheeses, and Gemma sat behind the wheel of her little Volvo, staring at it and wondering how long she could go on sitting in her car on Main Street before somebody stopped to ask her what was wrong. She’d left the rectory half an hour ago because she hadn’t been able to stand the idea of staying in it one more minute. Every time the phone rang, she wanted to scream. Every time Kelley asked her a question, she wanted to scream, too. She hated being around Kelley these days. She had hated it since the conversation they had had just before Tisha’s death, but she had begun to hate it more and more afterward. It was all mixed up. What did a philosophy of experience mean if you didn’t know what you were experiencing? She didn’t want to be near her phone. She didn’t want to be near Kelley Grey. She didn’t want to be near Jan-Mark, never mind in bed with him, where all she could remember was a hairy, boozed-out torso with sagging skin and too much flesh around the middle. She had driven out there today, before she’d come into town, and ended up parked by the side of the road, nauseated.
Abigail’s Fine Cheeses was right across the street from the Bethlehem News and Mail. The Bethlehem News and Mail was lit up more brightly than the town park and on fire with activity. The Bethlehem News and Mail was always like that, even on the day after they put out an issue. Peter Callisher was some kind of throwback to the nineteenth century, a capitalist baron with a stable of wage slaves. Either that, or they were having orgies in there. Gemma Bury thought of Tisha hinting and hinting about the points of resemblance between Tommy Hare and Timmy Hall, and found herself getting nauseated all over again.
If I go on like this I’ll never get anything done, Gemma told herself. Then she popped the door to her car and swung her legs out into the road. Main Street had been closed off to traffic at one, as it was on every day when an actual performance of the Nativity play was scheduled. Gemma didn’t have to look out for cars or worry about being crushed by a farm vehicle on its way to the Grange. She stretched a little in the cold air and shut the car door behind her. She didn’t bother to lock it because nobody but tourists ever locked anything in Bethlehem, Vermont. There were people on the street, but nobody around she knew, which was a blessing.
She crossed the street, walked down the sidewalk on that side very carefully so she wouldn’t slip on the patch of black ice that had begun to form on the surface, and then crossed the intersection that brought her to the front door of the Bethlehem News and Mail. Main Street was not quite straight. Gemma had to make a little arc to get where she was going, and when she got there and stood on the highest of the concrete steps, she could look back over her shoulder and see the park and the settings for the play as if they were on a distant stage, presented for her amusement. She knew the other place you could do that—the top floor of the Green Mountain Inn. If she’d been interested in the Nativity story, she would have rented one of those rooms and watched the spectacle from above. It was one of the worst drawbacks of living in the rectory that she had no view of the town at all.
She stamped her feet on Peter Callisher’s L. L. Bean flying-duck welcome mat, gave herself one more chance to change her mind, and then tried the door. It opened easily, in spite of the magnetic seal Peter had installed to save on heating bills and turn himself at least a light environmental Green. Gemma stepped through into the big room and looked around. Not many people were there. The paper would have been sent to the printers at noon, for distribution tomorrow. Timmy Hall was sweeping up. Amanda Ballard—whom Gemma had cordially hated from the moment they met—was filling out a form at the front desk. Cara Hutchinson was leaning against the counter and babbling. Peter was nowhere to be seen. Gemma shut the door behind her. Cold air had been pouring in around her calves.
“It was just absolutely the most wonderful thing,” Cara Hutchinson was saying, presumably to Amanda Ballard, although it was hard to tell. Amanda didn’t seem to be paying much attention. She must have been paying some, however, because Gemma could see she was agitated. Amanda was usually very careful to keep the hair over her right ear, so that the lack of earlobe and the stunted little end didn’t show, but when she got excited she forgot. She had forgotten now, and had her hair firmly behind both ears.
“You know,” Cara told her, “when I went up there today, I was half-convinced he was going to have me pose nude. I mean, he hadn’t said anything like that yesterday, but what did that mean? He might have assumed I’d understand. After all, everybody knows about artists. So I went up there and I’d absolutely made up my mind, I really had, that I was going to do it if that was what I was supposed to do. I am going away to college next year. I don’t intend to spend all of my life in some backwoods town that doesn’t understand Art. Never mind Literature. I was reading The New York Review of Books in the library the other day, and you wouldn’t believe the stares I got from practically everybody.”
“Mmm,” Amanda Ballard said.
“Well,” Cara took a deep breath, prepared to go on.
Amanda looked up, saw Gemma at the door and put down her pen. Gemma smiled. She did not say what she wanted to say, which was that if “practically everybody” had been staring at Cara Hutchinson in the library the other day, it wasn’t because Cara had been reading The New York Review of Books. It might have been because Cara was muttering to herself, which Gemma had seen her do when she read, but that was something else again. Amanda was rubbing the side of her neck with the flat of her hand and looking quizzical.
“Gemma,” she said. “Cara is Jan-Mark’s latest local model.”
“So I’ve gathered,” Gemma said.
“It’s really been the most wonderful experience,” Cara repeated, with a trace of a smirk in her voice that could have been detected by a deaf woman. “He showed me his wife’s office. His late wife’s office. He keeps it like a shrine.”
“She was a bad woman,” Timmy Hall said suddenly. �
�She was Evil.”
Amanda picked up her pen again. “All right,” she said. “I think we all have that established. I’m sorry, Gemma. All anybody ever talks about around here is Tisha and the shootings. And now that Gregor Demarkian is in town—”
“My old ladies keep talking about Gregor Demarkian,” Gemma said. “You’d think Peter Falk had arrived to shoot an episode of Columbo. Did Franklin Morrison really hire him to look into Tisha Verek’s death?”
“You can’t hire him,” Cara Hutchinson said. “He doesn’t take money, except sometimes he asks for donations to some Armenian refugee relief society or this homeless shelter in Philadelphia. The Archdiocese of Colchester gave twenty-five thousand dollars to the homeless shelter last year after all that mess with the nuns being killed around St. Patrick’s Day. Or maybe it was one nun. I don’t remember. But I’ll tell you—”
“He’s here to attend the Celebration, just like everybody else,” Amanda said, cutting Cara off. “You can read all about it in the paper tomorrow, Gemma. When Peter found out he was here, he put a story right on page one. About his being here, I mean, and with a picture. We tried to get an interview, but it didn’t work out.”
“He doesn’t give interviews,” Cara Hutchinson said.
“Did you want to see Peter?” Amanda asked. “He went upstairs to lie down, but he wouldn’t mind coming back again. He only lies down when he’s bored, anyway. I could call upstairs and get him.”
“I wish he’d let me write something for the paper,” Cara said. “It wouldn’t have to be about Art exactly. I mean, I know that won’t sell papers in Bethlehem, Vermont. It could be about Tisha’s office and be all hooked in with the shootings. She has the most interesting office, really, with all these pictures in it of children who killed people when they were children and then some pictures of the children grown up. It’s very interesting, really.”