Stillness in Bethlehem

by Jane Haddam

  Divine retribution. Peter rubbed his eyes, then put his hands back down on the desk he was sitting at and looked out over the newsroom. The fluorescent lights were on above his head. Outside, the sun was straining its way through the clouds and not having much success. It looked like it was going to snow. Peter didn’t think he’d stayed up all night without sleep for years.

  Peter didn’t know if Amanda ever had. She was sitting at the desk she had staked out as “hers,” playing with a pencil and looking about ready to fall over, her blonde hair pinned to the top of her head. Timmy kept moving back and forth across the room, always coming back into her orbit, never letting himself get too far out of it. Timmy had always trusted Amanda.

  “The printer isn’t open until nine o’clock,” Peter called across to Amanda. “That’s what comes of taking the low bid instead of using someone used to newspapers.”

  “Most of the time,” Amanda said reasonably, “we don’t need somebody used to newspapers.”

  “I have to go lie down now,” Timmy said. “I’m very tired.”

  Peter was sure Timmy was very tired. He was sure they all were very tired. He almost wished he’d listened to old Mrs. Johnson’s advice, delivered when she was shrugging herself into her coat to make her own way home.

  “This isn’t Boston,” she’d told them. “You won’t do anybody any good staying up all night and making yourselves sick. You should all go get your rest and start again in the morning.”

  Right. Timmy was waiting by Amanda’s desk, hesitating, looking miserable and a little frightened. Amanda gave him a tired smile and said, “You go and lie down any time you want to. You don’t need permission.”

  “Maybe I’m supposed to work,” Timmy said.

  “You’re supposed to work during normal working hours. This was special. It was a favor you did the newspaper. You get paid extra. You don’t have to do it until you die.”

  “Did we call Mrs. Jeanings? Did we tell her I was here?”

  “I told her,” Peter said. “I told her about Gemma Bury, too.”

  “I shouldn’t make her worry,” Timmy said. Then he looked around helplessly, and Amanda got up to find him his coat. When she did, Timmy brightened, and Peter felt himself go queasy. There really was something about watching the two of them together that was unsettling. Amanda found the coat under Peter’s and her own on the rack and handed it over. Timmy touched the place where her hand had been with a thoughtful expression on his face.

  “Mrs. Jeanings will keep me up,” he said with a sigh. “Mrs. Jeanings will want to know all about it.”

  “Tell her we’re putting out a special edition of the paper,” Amanda told him.

  “Mrs. Jeanings won’t care. Mrs. Jeanings will want to know how I feel about it. She always wants to know how I feel about everything.”

  “She means well.”

  “I know. She makes good eggs, too. And she gives me Marshmallow Fluff.”

  Timmy went plodding to the side door, his coat open, his hands hanging motionless at his sides. Peter didn’t think he’d ever seen a fully normal person walk with his hands like that. When he got the door open, Timmy turned and looked at the two of them, grinning, and said good night. Then he plodded out and closed the door behind himself. Peter heard him go through the vestibule and out the door.

  “I wish you hadn’t talked me into hiring him,” he told Amanda. “He gives me the creeps.”

  “He’s just a little retarded,” Amanda said. “He does a very good job. He’s very conscientious. And he’s more responsible than half the back-to-the-land refugees we hire. Can we go back to sleep now?”

  “We’ve got to make arrangements for the printing.”

  “We can leave a note for Sally or Jonathan. One of them can drive the mechanicals over.”

  “I don’t want to leave a note for Sally or Jonathan. I want to—I don’t know what I want to do. I don’t think I’ve had this much fun in ages.”

  Amanda cocked her head, giving him the strangest look. “Is that what this is to you? Fun?”

  Peter was astonished. “Why not?”

  “Well,” Amanda said, “for one thing, the poor woman is dead. I didn’t like her much, but she is dead. For another thing, she probably wouldn’t have been dead if you hadn’t given her those tickets. In fact, if Franklin Morrison is right instead of the state police and Tisha Verek’s death wasn’t a hunting accident, then just maybe Gemma Bury is dead because she came to talk to you. If you see what I mean.”

  “No.”

  Amanda rearranged a few things on her desk. She had gone back to it after she’d found Timmy’s coat. She looked slumped, sitting in the chair. There was nothing on her desk to rearrange.

  “I know what you were talking about when she was here,” she said. “You were talking about lawsuits. Like Tisha Verek’s lawsuit. And about how Gemma was going to file one.”

  “So?”

  “So that was what started all the trouble the last time, wasn’t it? I mean, with Dinah dead and all the rest of it, people seem to have forgotten all about it. And they gossip. They really love to gossip. So they keep talking about who was sleeping with Jan-Mark and who wasn’t—”

  “Maybe that’s the connection,” Peter said. “Maybe they’re both dead because they were sleeping with Jan-Mark Verek.”

  Amanda shot him another strange look and then got up again. With one thing and another she had been bopping up and down like one of those flamingo water dolls. She shoved the papers on her desk into the long center drawer and said, “I think I’m going to go back to sleep now. For at least a couple of hours. Are you going to tell Gregor Demarkian what she came here for?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to tell him she was sleeping with Jan-Mark Verek?”

  “Yes again.”

  “That’s good,” Amanda said.

  She went to the side door without bothering to pick up her coat—she was going upstairs, not outside—and stepped just into the vestibule, where a small manila envelope lay, the one with the single copy of the paper the printer always sent over before delivering the bales. It must have been there last night when Peter came in, but he hadn’t noticed it.

  “Throw that to me,” he told her, and she did. Then she gave him another of her odd looks and said, “I think you ought to tell Gregor Demarkian everything. I really think you should.”

  Peter didn’t know what exactly that was supposed to mean, but he was much too tired to care.

  2

  When Jan-Mark Verek first started his affair with Reggie George, he thought no more of it than he would have thought of deciding to have a banana for breakfast instead of an apple. In the New York City art world scheme of things, where Jan-Mark had spent almost all of his adult life, that was about the level on which such a decision would have to be considered. Jan-Mark had had affairs with a lot of people, male and female, over the years. It had annoyed him no end that Tisha had refused to do the same. To Jan-Mark, sex was a wonderful game with lots of variations to keep it from getting boring. It wasn’t so much natural—the natural was always boring, like tofu and alfalfa sprouts—as naturally available. To be attractive and refuse what attractiveness offered you was like winning the lottery and refusing to pick up the money. It didn’t make any sense. It didn’t even make any sense when picking up the money was dangerous, as it was with Reggie. Jan-Mark was beginning to think Reggie was very, very dangerous. He hadn’t thought so in the beginning. There was nothing about Reggie to remind him of the few examples of rough trade he’d picked up in the Port Authority back in the days when he hadn’t been so all-fired paranoid about AIDS. At the start, Reggie had seemed to Jan-Mark like just another rustic country boy who swung both ways, not so unusual this close to the third millennium. After a while, Jan-Mark had begun to pick up little things. An attitude here. A comment there. A sudden swift kick to the side of a table that resulted in a broken table leg. They had been going at it for six months now and Jan-Mark Verek had t
o admit it. Reggie George was a certifiable mess.

  Lately, Jan-Mark had begun to wonder if Reggie might be dangerous in a way more subtle than the obvious one, if what he had to fear from this yokel was less an outburst of rage—although that was coming; that was surely coming—than an indiscretion. Bisexuality might be par for the course in SoHo, but Jan-Mark was not stupid enough to believe it would be accepted with equanimity in Bethlehem, Vermont. It would be a wonderful excuse for an orgy of released repressed hostility, if that was the way to put it. Everybody up here hated him anyway. They’d just love to find a way to make his life a living hell. They’d made it hard enough over his affair with Gemma, which he had always known was an open secret, even if she had not. They probably hated art. Jan-Mark thought it might be about time to go back to the city, where homosexuals were of the out-of-the-closet, unconflicted, normal variety and bisexuals were as common as fast-food joints on an urban strip. He wished Tisha were still alive, so that he could tell her all about all of it and be comforted by the familiarity of one of her patented tantrums.

  Last night, Jan-Mark had seen Reggie for an hour starting at seven-thirty, a quick roll and knock around while Reggie’s wife was off being in that idiotic play. Much later, he had seen Reggie again, unexpectedly, well after midnight, when Reggie came to tell him about Gemma Bury being dead. Reggie should have called, but he hadn’t wanted to, maybe because it was a kind of victory. Jan-Mark had three lovers and now two of them were dead, leaving Reggie to rule the roost alone. Or something. Jan-Mark hated psychoanalyzing people. He was bad at it and it only made a mess anyway. There were a thousand clinical explanations for why Reggie George was coming up his driveway again at eight-forty-five on this Tuesday morning, coming for the third time in under twenty hours, but Jan-Mark wanted to ignore them all. He preferred to think Reggie was just being a pain in the ass.

  Reggie had come in his pickup truck, which he almost never did. That pickup truck was a signature, identifiable as Reggie’s from here to Montpelier. He had to be on his way to work. Jan-Mark watched as he stomped through the new snow to the basement door and punched at the bell. He waited a few moments before flipping on the intercom switch next to the kitchen table where he was sitting and calling down to his guest.

  “I’m awake and watching you march through the nice clean precipitation,” he said to Reggie. “Come on up if you have to.”

  “I have to.”

  “I’m out of liquor.”

  “It’s important.”

  Jan-Mark was not out of liquor. He had three untouched bottles of Glenlivet sitting in his trunk upstairs, but he had no intention of bringing them out at this hour of the morning, and no intention of bringing them out for Reggie George at any time. Reggie was impressed when Jan-Mark got him a six-pack of Heineken beer. There was the sound of heavy boots coming up the open, polished cedar staircase. The staircase was spiral and Reggie always slipped on it once or twice when he came up. When he did he swore in the most direct and least imaginative way. He got to the kitchen level and worked his way out of the curving trap, shaking his right foot side to side in the air as if he’d minorly damaged his ankle.

  “Shit,” he said. “I hate those stairs.”

  “I know you hate those stairs,” Jan-Mark said patiently. “What do you like? Can I pour you some coffee?”

  “I’ve got some coffee in the truck. And I’m in a hurry. I’m supposed to be on my way to work.”

  “Maybe you talked to your wife about what we talked about last night. About making things a little more interesting.”

  “No, I haven’t talked to my wife. I haven’t hardly seen my wife. She was asleep when I got back from here last night. It’s what I heard. That’s what I wanted to tell you. What I heard at breakfast this morning.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “That they found the gun, that’s what I heard,” Reggie said. “That foreign guy did it. Or he told Franklin’s people where to look, I guess. Right there in the park where it happened. It’s all over the CB.”

  “You mean on the police band?”

  “I mean people talking about it.” Reggie was impatient. “The news is all over town, JM. The only reason you don’t know about it is that you’re stuck all the way out here. And you don’t talk to anybody.”

  “I talk to lots of people.”

  “You don’t talk to anybody in town.”

  All this time, Reggie had been bouncing around on the balls of his feet, rocking back and forth, taking his hands out of the pockets of his jacket and putting them back in again. He had said he was in a hurry and he was damn well going to look like he was in a hurry. That was how Jan-Mark saw it. Now Reggie seemed to decide that this was stupid, or to change his mind, or something. He pulled out one of the bentwood kitchen chairs and sat down.

  “They found the gun,” he repeated.

  “You said that.” Jan-Mark nodded.

  “It was up in a tree. There aren’t a lot of trees in the park. Just a couple. It was in one of those, near that place where the animals go in and out. Maybe it was in a bush.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Well, I’m trying to remember what the park looks like, JM. I don’t go traipsing around in parks on a regular basis. Only time I’ve been through in years except to take a shortcut from Main Street to Carrow is going to see Candy in this play. And I guess it’s a bush, not really a tree. Big round pine bush, like the kind they use for hedges.”

  “Clipped?”

  “I don’t know,” Reggie said. “How should I know? Why the hell would anybody want to know?”

  “Just asking,” Jan-Mark said.

  “The point isn’t the bush,” Reggie said, “it’s the gun. That’s what I had to tell you. And about the silencer. Did I mention the silencer?”

  “No,” Jan-Mark said.

  “Whoever it was stuck a potato in the barrel for a silencer. Can you beat that? It must have been a woman. I mean it. Who’d do something that stupid? The damned rifle could go off right in your face.”

  “But it didn’t,” Jan-Mark pointed out.

  “No,” Reggie said, “no, it didn’t. But that’s the way it always is with bitches, isn’t it? All the dumb luck in the world.”

  “Right,” Jan-Mark said.

  Reggie George sniffed. “I mean, for Chrissake, JM, I wouldn’t have driven all the way out here in my own goddamn truck just because of a goddamn bush and a goddamn gun and a goddamn potato if it didn’t mean something.”

  “So what does it mean?”

  “It means it was the same gun,” Reggie said. “Stuart Ketchum’s gun. The Browning .22-caliber semiautomatic Grade I rifle. It had his name scratched right there in the base.”

  “That’s the same gun as what?”

  “What do you mean, the same gun as what? The same gun that blew away your goddamn wife, that’s as what. I mean, Christ, JM, where have you been? Don’t you even read the papers?”

  “If you mean the local paper, not exactly. I do read the ads.” Jan-Mark sighed. “How could they possibly know it’s the same gun? Don’t they have to test the bullets? First test the bullets that hit Tisha and then test the ones from the gun and then test the ones that hit Gemma? Don’t they have to do all that before they know it’s the same gun?”

  “They already did that with Tisha,” Reggie said. “They tested the bullets she was hit with, and then when Stuart found the gun missing, he got some spent shells from all that target practice he does and they tested those and the bullets that hit his tin cans and I don’t know what else, so they definitely know that’s the gun that killed your goddamn wife.”

  “Right,” Jan-Mark said. Of course, none of that proved that this gun was the gun that had been shot at Gemma Bury. They’d have to test the bullets in Gemma’s body for that. None of it said that the gun was what it appeared to be, either: They’d have to test for that, too. He could have explained all this to Reggie, but he didn’t want to. It would have been too tiring. Explaining things to R
eggie was about as easy as teaching a chicken to talk.

  Jan-Mark looked into his coffee cup, reached for the Pyrex coffeepot on its warmer and considered lighting his sixteenth cigarette of the day. He even considered getting himself some booze.

  Somehow, with Reggie George and phantom guns that mysteriously appeared in town park bushes, the day seemed to demand it.

  3

  Up the road toward town, on the other side of the stone wall, Kelley Grey sat in the kitchen of the Episcopal rectory, drinking her third cup of black coffee since six o’clock and wondering if she was ever going to get to sleep again. If she stayed at the rectory, she thought the answer would be no—which made it not so bad that the parish council was going to want the rectory back, and her out of it, in no time at all. How long no time at all was, Kelley didn’t know, but it presented problems. She might not be able to sleep in this place, but she didn’t have anyplace else to sleep. It was strange, the things she did even when she knew better. Gemma Bury hadn’t been her lover, but in some ways Gemma Bury might as well have been. They had been on those kinds of terms with each other in every way but the sexual. They had shared the house. They had shared the things they owned. They had shopped for food together and gone to the movies together and treated the car as if it was jointly owned between them. The difficulty was that nothing had been owned between them. Gemma was gone and with her everything that had served as a material foundation for Kelley Grey’s life.