by Jane Haddam
Up at the front of their single-file line, Bennis had stopped, checked their tickets again and started to turn. “This is it,” she said. “Second row up. No problem at all. I’m going to have to do something really spectacular for Robert Forsman to pay him back for this.”
“Please,” Tibor said, “Bennis, listen to me. Nothing too spectacular.”
“I was thinking of sending him a nice inscribed Rolex watch.” Bennis gestured at the bleachers. “Twenty-one, twenty-two and twenty-three. Next row up. You want to climb or use the stairs?”
“I will use the stairs.”
The “stairs” were slightly modified, closed-fronted bleacher slats in the center of the stand. Gregor watched Bennis watch Tibor walk over to them, step up one step, and start coming down the bleacher back to them. Then she climbed to the second row herself and shook her head.
“It’s been crazy all day,” she told Gregor. “He keeps trying to make me eat. I mean, he’s always trying to make me eat, they all do, that’s half of what Cavanaugh Street is all about, but not like this. We went to this little performance the grade school was giving and I ate six of these enormous chocolate chip cookies—the size of dinner plates, Gregor, I’m not kidding—and he kept trying to make me eat two more. And then when I wouldn’t, he got mad at me.”
“Mmm,” Gregor said.
“I think it’s the stress,” Bennis told him. “I always did think he was under too much pressure. I just hadn’t realized how far it had gone.”
“I have seen the camels,” Tibor said, seating himself between Bennis standing on their own bleacher and Gregor standing on the ground. “We are right where the animals come, it is very good. I still cannot see where they come from in town.”
“There’s a field back there somewhere,” Bennis said brightly.
Tibor ignored her.
Gregor climbed up, sat down, and decided to remove his coat. In spite of the fact that it was more than fairly cold outside—the forecast was for snow and more snow over the next three days—in the bleachers it was actually warm. The space heaters and the fans and the specially made tent with its air flaps worked. Gregor looked across the park and saw that now that he was sitting down, one of the two stands of tall evergreen bushes effectively cut off most of his view of the animal passage. Since he didn’t want to see the animals coming in and out anyway, he didn’t worry about it.
Gregor got his little map out of his pocket, unfolded it on his knees and waited. Bennis sat down, looked at Tibor and finally turned to Gregor. She had to talk over Tibor’s head, but there was nothing for it. Tibor was staring glumly in the direction of the gazebo, ignoring them both. The gazebo was lit up with colored spotlights and dressed in distressed wood and evergreens. Gregor didn’t think it looked much like Palestine, but he did think it looked nicer than it had the day before, when it had apparently been in some kind of rest state. The whole town had apparently been in some kind of rest state. Now it looked energized.
Gregor held his map up, looked around to see that they were still more or less alone, and decided that Tibor and Bennis had once again made him much too early for something he had only wanted to be on time for. Tibor was bad, but Bennis was the worst Gregor had ever known. She had once gotten him to the dentist forty-five minutes before his appointment. He waved the map in the air and acquiesced when Bennis reached out to take it.
“It’s very nice,” she said politely. “You’re learning to draw better. Donna would be proud of you.”
“Yesterday you were chomping at the bit for some sort of mystery,” Gregor told her. “Today, all you can do is insult my drawing.”
Bennis handed the map back. “I don’t understand why it’s such a mystery. Now all that about the guns. What were you saying back at the Inn? Both of them took two hits, in the shoulder and the neck. That seems like a mystery to me. Do you suppose it was some kind of gangland hit?”
“In Bethlehem, Vermont?”
Bennis shrugged. “It sounds like that sort of thing. With the two guns, I mean. I suppose I don’t understand why any ordinary person would have two guns.”
“To make the deaths look unrelated?” Gregor suggested.
“Well, yes, Gregor, I understand that. But you wouldn’t think of it, would you? I mean, if you were a normal person.”
Gregor was about to say that if you were a normal person, you wouldn’t kill two people in cold blood on a bright shiny morning at the beginning of December, but that wasn’t fair, and he knew it. What Franklin Morrison had told him had made him a little uneasy, but it had fallen far short of convincing him that Bethlehem had a pair of premeditated murders on its hands. The similarity of the wounds was bad, but there was still no motive to be found, or at least no motive that he liked. Franklin liked defense of the Nativity Celebration. The townspeople he talked to liked Jan-Mark Verek at the end of his rope. Nobody had the faintest idea why anybody would want to kill Dinah Ketchum—and yet, if there was going to be grounds for a murder investigation here, that was precisely the person who had to have been murdered. Without that, Bethlehem might have had a murder—the murder of Tisha Verek—but unless something more definite showed up than what they already had, they wouldn’t have a murder investigation. Gregor had read dozens of novels in which the fictional detective had had a lot less to go on than Franklin Morrison had here, and yet had gone on to bring a murderer to justice, but life wasn’t like that. You had to have someplace to start. Gregor handed the map back to Bennis, insisting.
“Look at this,” he said. “Look at it carefully. Those little bubble things on the lines are stone walls.”
Bennis held the map in her hands and stared at it dutifully.
“Well,” she said. “So what?”
Gregor reached over Tibor and tapped the map at the place it said “Episcopal Church Property.” Tibor didn’t appear to notice.
“The state police,” Gregor said, “argued for two different gunmen causing two different hunting accidents for a number of reasons, but one of them was time. They said that there was no time for one person to have stolen a gun from Stuart Ketchum’s house, shot Tisha Verek, and then gotten to Dinah Ketchum and shot her, too—”
“I thought they didn’t know what time this Dinah Ketchum was shot,” Bennis said. “That was in the paper.”
“I know, but all that means is that they’re not sure in which order and all the rest of it. The two women were shot close enough together to present no differences in forensic examination even after having been discovered very close to the times of their deaths. Therefore the time differential can’t be huge.”
“Yes, but Gregor, you’re still talking about—”
“Bennis, I know. My feeling is that the state police were looking for any excuse they could find not to call these two deaths murders—at least, that’s my feeling now that I’ve seen what Franklin Morrison had to show me—but there’s nothing to say I’m right. It’s not like this was a poisoning, where I would have some specialized knowledge. Franklin Morrison doesn’t have any specialized knowledge at all. So we went looking for an explanation even an idiot couldn’t shake and we found one. Look at the walls.”
“I’m looking.”
“According to Franklin, the stone walls are lined on both sides by tall evergreen trees, but the walls themselves are the broad flat kind, not the pudding-stone bumpy sort that tend to be narrow. Delaford Road is lined with trees on both sides, too, and very wooded for several feet in off the shoulder anyplace past the Ketchum Road turnoff and for maybe half a mile or so before. All anybody would have had to have done was to park out of sight in the trees across the road from where the stone wall and the Verek driveway meet the Delaford Road close together, walk up the wall to the Ketchum house, steal a gun, and walk back again along the wall. Whoever it was could have been fairly sure of not being seen, at least according to Franklin. The trees would have provided good cover and the time of day would have ensured there wasn’t much to need cover from. There was no sno
w on the ground. The barnyard around the Ketchum house is dirt, and the ground had been more or less stiff with frost for weeks. When it’s all over, he gets back in his car—”
“But Gregor, it’s crazy. Why go to all that trouble? And where did he find Dinah Ketchum? He couldn’t have left her in his car and then toted her out another—how far along the Delaford Road?”
“Six miles. Don’t trust my scale.”
“I wouldn’t,” Bennis said. “If you really want to know the truth, I think this sounds nutsier than what I was telling you yesterday. And you accuse me of having a whodunit mentality.”
“I know,” Gregor said, “but there’s a problem.”
“What’s that?”
“If one person was responsible for both those shootings—and I know why Franklin Morrison wants that to be true; the hits are mind-numbing any other way—then whoever did it had to go through the process I’ve just described to you at some point.”
“You mean it could have been two separate hunting accidents, or one double murder, but it couldn’t have been two hunting accidents caused by the same person.”
“There’s always the town’s favorite explanation,” Gregor said. “It could have been one hunting accident and one murder.”
“But you don’t like that.”
“Do you?”
“Since when have you ever considered my opinions on law enforcement to have any more validity than a rogue troll’s?”
“I’m talking about common sense here, Bennis. When you put your mind to it, you have a great deal of common sense. Apply that common sense to this. One hit to the shoulder. One hit to the neck—to the throat, to be precise.”
“Gregor—”
On the seat between them, Tibor stirred. While Bennis and Gregor had been talking, and not noticing, Tibor had been shedding layers of clothes, all from beneath his cassock. His sweater had come off first, then his flannel shirt, then a pair of thick cashmere mufflers. He now looked twenty pounds lighter than he had when they had arrived, and strangely depleted. His chest had gone from convex to concave.
Down in the park there was a great deal of movement, a shifting of lights, a flurry of men and women in thick woolen robes and rope cinctures getting in place. Gregor looked up to see two women taking their places to Bennis’s right. One of them was relatively young but not very attractive. Her hair was dark and her look was sullen. The other had to be in her late thirties or early forties, with salt-and-pepper hair and tiny crease lines at the corners of her eyes. She was not sullen at all, and the thick, brightly colored wool of her coat—tangerine orange, for God’s sake—spoke of serious money. The unattractive sullen one sat down, shucked her parka and stared resolutely out into the park. The one in the tangerine orange coat looked the three of them over and smiled. Gregor knew that smile. It was the smile of a woman who had read last week’s paper.
“How wonderful,” the woman in the tangerine coat said. “A seat so close to Peter Callisher’s favorite person, Gregor Demarkian.”
“Say it louder, why don’t you?” the sullen one said. “Maybe you can talk the crowd into making life perfectly miserable for him.”
“I hope I’m not trying to make life perfectly miserable for anyone,” the one in the tangerine coat said. Then she held out her hand to Bennis Hannaford. “I’m Gemma Bury. I’m the priest at the Episcopal Church here. This is my assistant, Kelley Grey.”
“Bennis Hannaford,” Bennis said.
“It says here they take down the bleachers every night and put them up again every evening,” Tibor said, biting his lip as he stared at his brochure. “If you’re the Episcopal priest here, you must live in town. You must know.”
“Know what?” Gemma Bury was puzzled.
“Why they take the bleachers down and put them up again all the time.”
“Oh. Well, that’s because if they don’t, there are people in town who complain that they can’t use the park, and tourists who complain that the bleachers make the place look less like New England, and all kinds of things. It makes things a lot simpler just to take them down and put them up.”
“I do not think simpler is the word for it,” Tibor said. “I do not think it is simple at all. It shows a lack of cooperation that is not a good sign for the enterprise.”
Gemma Bury raised an eyebrow. “Is that what this is, an enterprise?”
“To Father Tibor, almost everything is an enterprise.” Gregor Demarkian nodded politely at Gemma Bury and waited, but nothing happened. Gemma did not seem inclined to pursue this or any other conversation. She took a brochure of her own out of one of her voluminous pockets and flipped it open. “This is going to be very interesting,” she said. “I’ve never actually seen the Nativity play before. I’ve always meant to go, but I’ve just never had the chance. I’ve always thought the Christian Nativity myth was one of the more beautiful stories to come down to us from the ancient world.”
“Winter solstice,” Tibor muttered under his breath.
After that, it might have gotten sticky, but fortunately there wasn’t enough time. The bustle around them had grown louder as people arrived from the inns and motels and buses, all looking frantically for their seats. The noise from the center of the park grew louder, too. A huge cluster of children ranging in age from about three to about ten—as far as Gregor could tell—had gathered to the side of the gazebo and begun to sing. The words floated in the air above them all like a benediction.
“O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie.”
Tibor pulled a brown paper bag out of his cassock pocket and handed it to Bennis.
“Here,” he said. “This is chocolate cake, Bennis, very good. I had it sent up with room service. Eat it and it will make up for you because you have not had any dinner.”
Gregor folded his arms across his chest and let himself drift into the sound of children’s voices, Christmas music, thoughts of Gemma Bury and her odes to the winter solstice, anything at all—as long as he didn’t have to let himself think about Tibor thinking about Bennis’s diet. Assuming that Bennis was on a diet.
It was impossible.
2
Gregor Demarkian had heard a great deal about the Bethlehem Nativity play over the years, and a great deal more over the last few weeks, and he knew that it was supposed to be much like the Passion play staged every ten years at Oberammergau, only more frequent. The point of such a comparison was to indicate that the production was professionally done, of a quality more likely to be found on Broadway or in London’s West End than in a small hamlet in Vermont. Reflection would have made it clear that that was necessary. No rankly amateur production could have attracted the crowds this one consistently did, not even with the rest of the town thrown in for atmosphere. According to the brochure, the play had had the same director for the last ten years, who had apprenticed with the previous director for ten years before that. It was all very well put together and carefully planned, with spontaneity limited to the fringe operations and the naturally effervescent enthusiasms of local craftspeople presented with a captive buying public. For some reason, none of this seemed to have sunk into Gregor Demarkian’s brain. The play ended up shocking him—with its power, with its elegance, with its flawlessness. It helped that most of the words had come from the King James Version instead of some earnest playwright’s pen, and that the young girl playing Mary was so luminous. At one point during the Annunciation, Gregor thought Mary was actually going to float. She seemed naturally farther above the ground than the young man playing the angel. She moved with a slightly stiff, slightly awkward grace that gave her infinite dignity. Gregor almost found himself falling in love with her the way he had once fallen in love with the women in the movies he had seen as a child, sitting in a darkened place far from home and spiritually transported to another dimension. The livestock and histrionics came and went without affecting him. He found it hard to pay attention to anything else when Mary was in sight, whether she was speaking at the moment or n
ot.
Standing up at the intermission—there was only one, fifty minutes after the play’s start, lasting twenty minutes, giving anyone who wanted to a chance to use the portable bathrooms that had been set up in a vacant lot on a side street near the Carrow Street intersection—Gregor found Tibor just as enthralled as he was, so that it hardly mattered that Bennis was not.
“She is just the way I would have expected the Holy Virgin to be,” Tibor said, nodding solemnly, “except that she is blonde and a girl of that place and time would not have been. But that is all right. It is the way she moves. It is a combination of vulnerability and invincibility. It is a miracle.”
“It is an injury,” Bennis said cynically. “She’s hurt.”
“What are you talking about?” Gregor demanded.
“She’s hurt,” Bennis repeated. “It’s her back. Don’t look at me like that. I’ve thrown my back out often enough. I ski. That’s how you move when your back hurts when you walk. Assuming you can move at all.”