Stillness in Bethlehem

by Jane Haddam

  Tisha Verek was blackmailing Gemma Bury

  and didn’t like it. Gregor had no doubt that Susan Everman had been telling the truth. He had no doubt that Tisha Verek had tried to take advantage of what she knew in just the way Susan had said she had. The more Gregor learned about Tisha, the less he liked her. The problem with blackmail, though, was that it took not only two people, but two distinct prerequisites. It made sense for Tisha Verek to try to blackmail Susan Everman. Susan had had mob connections—otherwise known as a guilty secret—and it was possible that those connections had made her flush with money. That was what was needed. A guilty secret. And the possession of money by the man or woman who harbored the secret. Gemma Bury may very well have been spending her overnight excursions to Boston worshiping Satan in the back room of a homophobic gin mill. Tisha Verek may very well have found out about it. That didn’t give Gemma Bury the kind of money she would need to make it worth Tisha’s while not to tell. As for the rest of the actors in this drama—Gregor was ready to throw up his hands. Nuts they all most definitely were. Impecunious they also all most definitely were. Something might come up to change the situation later—something often did—but from the way it looked at the moment, he thought he could rule the blackmail out. He tried

  Tisha Verek threatened to blackmail people

  and liked that better. The threat of blackmail, especially to someone who could not pay, might have caused Tisha Verek’s murder. The problem with that as a solution, though, was that it did nothing to explain the motive for Gemma Bury’s death, never mind for Dinah Ketchum’s. Gregor was almost beginning to believe in Bennis’s atypical psychopath, the homicidal maniac.

  Out on the other side of town, the church clocks began to chime the noon hour, beginning with the traditional bongs and segueing into carillon carols without a hitch. The production must have been coordinated. There were no clashes between songs and no false notes. Gregor hummed “The First Noel” to himself and packed the legal pad away inside the folds of his newspaper. He didn’t want Bennis to see it and get silly ideas. Bennis was always getting silly ideas. Her silliest and most persistent one was that his life was just like the lives of her favorite fictional detectives—Hercule Poirot, Nero Wolfe—and if she could just catch him living in it she could share the excitement of it. Gregor didn’t think his life was exciting at all. His feet hurt.

  He had put the legal pad away just in time. He had been sitting with his back to the lounge’s door, which had kept him from seeing into the lobby without keeping the people in the lobby from seeing him. Bennis must have seen him on her way out to the sidewalk with Father Tibor and his friend. Now she came striding back in, dodging the trailing stems of holly leaves that hung from the curved frame of the doorway, and tapped him on the shoulder with an air of pure relief.

  “He’s gone,” she told him, with a kind of wonder. “Off with Father Cooney and happy as a clam. I can’t believe it.”

  “Is that Tibor’s friend?” Gregor asked. “Father Cooney?”

  “Father Martin Cooney,” Bennis told him, “and don’t ask me how they met because I don’t know. Maybe they were both buying food. It’s been the most extraordinary morning. Do you know what’s gotten into him?”

  “Mmm,” Gregor said.

  Bennis shook her head. “I was sitting in my room, minding my own business, reading a book and he comes jumping in on me with—this is after the cookies, Gregor, this is impossible—anyway, he comes jumping in on me with Slim Jims. I haven’t eaten Slim Jims since I was ten years old. And he’s got this whole pile of them, dozens and dozens, and he throws them on my lap, and then when I wouldn’t eat them he gave me a lecture about how I seem to have forgotten that my body is the temple of the Holy Ghost. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “What were you reading?”

  “What? Oh. The Chocolate Addict’s Never Say Never Diet. Donna Moradanyan gave it to me. Isn’t that Franklin Morrison?”

  It was indeed Franklin Morrison, unwinding himself from the front seat of a bright yellow Ford Taurus right in front of the Green Mountain Inn’s front doors. Gregor thought about telling Bennis how much easier a time she would have with Tibor if she just stopped reading diet books, but he couldn’t figure out how to put it. He’d probably have to ask a lot of questions he didn’t want to hear the answers to. He’d probably have to have a discussion about emotions, maybe even his own. He couldn’t think about a less-appetizing prospect. He got out of his seat and motioned Bennis toward the doorway, keeping a firm grip on his newspaper-covered legal pad all the while. His grip must have been very firm. Bennis didn’t notice that he had anything inside the paper. She only noticed the paper. She tapped the oversized picture of him right on the nose and said, “Tibor brought me a copy of that with the Slim Jims. Your life’s going to be a living hell around here from now on, if you ask me.”

  Gregor had not asked her. He pointed firmly at the arched doorway with its drooping leaves, and Bennis went.

  2

  Franklin Morrison had fought in the Second World War, and because of that—as he told Gregor and Bennis half a dozen times before he even got the car away from the curb—he didn’t like foreign cars and he didn’t like automatic transmissions. Gregor understood the part about the foreign cars. Franklin didn’t want to hand his money to the same people who had blown up his brother at Pearl Harbor. That was fine. Gregor did not understand the part about the automatic transmission, which he was sure had not been invented by the Japanese. Franklin Morrison could have used an automatic transmission. He didn’t seem to know how to drive a standard one. The car bucked and shook and shuddered. The car made strange noises and seemed to sway from side to side. For reasons of space and size, Bennis was in the back while Gregor was in the front next to Franklin. Gregor could just feel Bennis back there, itching to get her hands on the wheel. Bennis was like that. She preferred to drive and hated being driven. Gregor was usually willing to do almost anything to keep Bennis from getting in control of a car, except drive himself. She was a maniac. In this case, he sympathized. Franklin’s incompetence was making him grind his teeth.

  They finally got out on the road, and past Bethlehem’s three in-town intersections, and out on the Delaford Road. The car was moving more smoothly simply because there was less for Franklin to do. Gregor’s nerves were working more smoothly because the landscape was such a natural tranquilizer. They were still more or less in town—the turnoff to the Ketchum place was technically within the town limits—but it was a part of town without the hyperactive peppiness of the Celebration-soaked center. Gregor watched as they passed small white houses with front doors strung around with Christmas lights and snow-laden evergreens decked out in satin balls and sparkly ribbons. Smoke rose from chimneys. Front walks were shoveled clear and driveways neatly plowed. It was as if they had stepped off the set of some Swedish director’s absurdist movie and into the real Vermont. Gregor came out and said so, as soon as he thought Franklin Morrison could be safely distracted from the death-grip of concentration he was directing at the cleared but winding road.

  He heard what Gregor had to say and shook his head.

  “You can’t do it like that anymore,” Franklin told them. “It’s not the same. Vermont isn’t about Vermont these days.”

  “Which is supposed to mean what?” Bennis asked from the back seat.

  “Which is supposed to mean the flatlanders have moved in.” Franklin sounded grim. “It’s like Colorado up here now, that’s what it’s like. We’ve got all these people from Boston and New York. We’ve got movie stars. We’ve got guys went to jail for financial hanky-panky and came out with a couple of million bucks. And we’ve got what follows them, of course. We’ve got all these people who aren’t anybody yet but they want to be hip.”

  “Sounds wonderful,” Bennis said, in a way that made it impossible for Gregor to decide if she was being sarcastic or not.

  “It’s a pain in the ass,” Franklin told her. He was doing about twenty
miles an hour, but even at twenty miles an hour a car will get where it’s going eventually, and apparently they had. Franklin turned on his right-turn signal and began to buck off the comfortable blacktop of the Delaford Road onto what Gregor thought must have been dirt down there underneath all the packed snow and ice. It was a road whose name might or might not have been “Ketchum.” It was impossible to tell. There was a sign that said KETCHUM at the place where the dirt road met the asphalted one, but that could have been a way to indicate that to get to the Ketchum farm you had to go this way. Gregor looked around and realized that Franklin Morrison had been right. The distances weren’t what you would expect them to be, if you were a man from the city, like Gregor, and thrown off-kilter by the trees and isolation. Just ahead along the Delaford Road, Gregor could see the tall stone spire of what had to be the Episcopal Church. Almost every one of the Episcopal churches in New England had been built from that kind of stone. A little beyond the church there was a house, built high on a hill. Its position made it look even bigger than it was, and it was very big. Gregor decided that must be the rectory. Where was the Verek house? Franklin Morrison had stalled out. Gregor leaned toward him, straining against his seat belt, and asked. “Go over the distances with me again,” he said. “How far is the Verek house from here?”

  “How do you want to get there?”

  “By the road.”

  Franklin Morrison did some quick calculations in his head. “The Episcopal Church has got fifteen hundred feet of frontage on the road, and most of that’s down this end. Then the Vereks have about twelve hundred feet on the road, but that’s mostly down the other end. They built the house right down here near the stone wall, only place they could fit it without having to blast through granite. I don’t know. Lot less than a mile.”

  “Less than a mile,” Gregor repeated.

  “Maybe I could drive,” Bennis suggested. “I’m really very good with standard transmissions.”

  “It’s less than a mile to Stu’s place, too,” Franklin put in. “It’s maybe, I don’t know, four, five thousand feet on this road. Less than that if you go behind on the walls.”

  “I want to get out and walk it,” Gregor said.

  “Whatever the hell for?” Franklin Morrison demanded.

  “You never want to go out and walk anywhere,” Bennis said. “You take to exercise the way dogs take to cats. What’s got into you?”

  “Give the woman your keys,” Gregor said to Franklin. “We’ll walk and you’ll show me the way, and she can take the car down to Stuart Ketchum’s farm.”

  “How are we going to get to Stuart Ketchum’s farm?” Franklin demanded.

  “You’re the one who said it was no big deal to walk on the walls,” Gregor told him. Gregor was already out of the car and onto the hard-packed snow. He had the seat pushed forward to let Bennis out. Bennis climbed out obediently and looked at the sky, which was dark. Franklin climbed out disgruntled and tossed over his keys.

  “I’m an old man,” he said, “and you’re not much better. This is nuts.”

  “Maybe. But I like to see for myself.” Gregor turned to Bennis. “Tell Mr. Ketchum we’re on our way. Try not to flirt too much. And don’t touch any guns.”

  “It’s touching, the sort of faith you have in my common sense.” Bennis stomped around the car, climbed into the driver’s seat under Franklin Morrison’s arm and had the engine roaring in no time at all. Franklin Morrison looked startled.

  They had not gone very far on the dirt road before Franklin stalled. It was only a few steps back to the asphalt. Gregor took them immediately, to keep his city shoes from sinking into snow. If he was going to go tramping around the countryside, he ought to have the proper attire to do it in, but he never believed he was going to go tramping around the countryside. It wasn’t the sort of thing he used to do much of when he was head of the Behavioral Sciences department for the FBI. It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d ever imagined himself doing much of. If he had to pick one of Bennis’s fictional detectives to be, it would definitely come down to Nero Wolfe, who sat in a chair all day and ate.

  Franklin reached the Delaford Road himself. He was wearing thick-soled hob boots, and he stamped them on the asphalt as soon as he was able.

  “You want to walk,” he said. “You’re absolutely sure.”

  “I’m absolutely sure.”

  “Fine.”

  Franklin started walking up the road in the direction of the Episcopal Church spire and the big white house, and Gregor followed behind. It was cold and windy and miserable, with only sporadic bursts of sunlight to alleviate the gloom, but although it was farther than Gregor might otherwise have chosen to walk in this weather, it was not actually far. In no time at all they were in front of the church itself, rising stone-built and majestic from a bed of untrammeled snow. Less than a minute later, they had reached a place from which they could see the front door of the rectory in the distance. Gregor nodded to himself, checking his watch and counting in his head. They were two older men—older was as far as he would go; he wasn’t ready for Franklin Morrison’s “old.” A younger man or woman would have been much quicker, and it wouldn’t have taken him very long at all. Franklin flapped his arms in the air to get warm.

  “We could go up there and pay a call on Ms. Kelley Grey,” he said, gesturing toward the rectory. “I’d like to talk to her again anyway. I’d like to talk to her for a good long time.”

  “I’d like to talk to her, too,” Gregor said, “but not right now. Does she live up there all the time?”

  “Far as I know. She’s in some kind of graduate program or something downstate, I think.”

  “Were she and Gemma Bury close?”

  Franklin Morrison shrugged. “Hard to tell with flatlanders. They go on at each other so much. They spent a lot of time together.”

  “What about Gemma Bury and Tisha Verek?”

  Franklin Morrison snorted. “Aside from the fact that Gemma was getting it on with Tisha’s husband, I don’t know what you could possibly be talking about. I got to tell you, Mr. Demarkian, I do not spend a lot of time worrying how the people out here are behaving themselves, except for Stu and his wife, of course, because they’re friends. As for these other people,” his sweeping arm took in the Vereks and the Episcopal rectory both, “who can tell?”

  “Try to guess,” Gregor suggested. “Tisha Verek and Gemma Bury.”

  “They talked,” Franklin said. “They knew each other better than they knew any of us, and that includes better than Gemma knew her parishioners, who would really appreciate it if she’d go off and worship the goddess in Boston. Except now she can’t. If you see what I mean.”

  “I see what you mean. This is a stone wall.”

  This was most certainly a stone wall. It was nearly covered over by towering evergreen trees, but it was more than broad enough to walk on, assuming the trees did not impede your progress. Gregor hesitated and looked up the road.

  “What’s just beyond here?” he asked. “The Verek place?”

  “That’s right. You can’t see much with all the trees, but you’re only a few hundred steps from the Verek driveway.”

  “How long to walk?”

  “For us?” Franklin grinned. “Forever. For a good healthy young person, less than two minutes. If that.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. He turned back to the stone wall and began to climb slowly onto it, being careful not to slip. Frozen rock is slick. It would be all too easy to fall and break his head. The day Tisha Verek and Dinah Ketchum had been killed, there had been little or no snow on the ground, and the temperature had been warm for the season. Gregor remembered that from the report Franklin had shown him. That was good. If the temperature hadn’t been warm, anybody who’d tried to do this would have killed himself long before he managed to kill anybody else.

  Actually, it wasn’t that bad. Once away from the road and into the trees, the branches were not so encroaching and the surface of the stones did not fe
el so treacherous. Gregor was able to stand up tall and walk normally, with Franklin panting and swearing behind him. Gregor kept his memory of the map Franklin had drawn him as clear as possible in his mind and plunged ahead, looking to the right and to the left, into the trees on each side.

  “All this land used to belong to Stuart’s people,” Franklin said. “The first they sold off was to the Episcopal Church back in the 1800s, and then just a few years ago they sold the lot to the Vereks. Stashing cash. All the farmers are stashing cash these days. There’s not enough money to be made from farming.”

  “What’s that I see through the trees?” Gregor asked. “Looks like glass.”

  “That’s the Verek house,” Franklin said. “Look the other way and you can see the hill the rectory’s built on, but not the rectory, because it’s too high up. The Verek place is bolted into the side of the hill and down in a valley. Don’t ask me why they did it like that. Don’t ask me why they built all that glass. At my house, glass like that would make my heating bills impossible.”

  “Do they have a view? Is there something they can see through the glass?”

  “Nothing but more trees and the sides of more hills,” Franklin said, “which is mostly what flatlanders are looking for, I guess. You want a real good look at some people, you ought to go up to the third floor of the rectory. That’s the highest point anywhere for miles.”

  “Mmm,” Gregor said. He ran it through his mind and came up blank. He couldn’t see a single reason why the rectory’s view of the town of Bethlehem ought to get anyone murdered.

  He went plowing on ahead, stone after stone. After a while, he couldn’t see much of anything. It felt entirely natural. Walking in trees. Not being able to see the sky.