Stillness in Bethlehem

by Jane Haddam

  “Someone,” he told Franklin Morrison cautiously, “told me today that Tisha Verek might have been trying to blackmail some people here in town. What do you think of that?”

  “I think Tisha Verek had more money than most of the people here in town could even imagine,” Franklin Morrison said. “What kind of a damn fool idea is that?”

  “It was just a suggestion.”

  “What would they get blackmailed about? If you’re talking about new people moving in, it could be anything, but people in town? I know the people in town.”

  “What about Peter Callisher? Hasn’t he been away?”

  “Yeah, but he doesn’t have any money. Not real money. He’s got what he makes from the newspaper and what comes in from some rental units he owns over at Green Mountain Condominiums.”

  “Mmm,” Gregor said. “That was how I figured it. Just checking. What’s that up ahead?”

  Franklin looked over Gregor’s shoulder. “That’s the fork,” he said. “At that point you’re at the junction of the Verek place, the Episcopal Church property, and the Ketchum farm.”

  “Fine,” Gregor said. He moved a little more rapidly and came to the “fork,” which was really more like an almost-open place in the trees, allowing another stone wall to branch off and go up to their left. It would have been an exposed place, except that there was nothing here to expose anything to. They were out of the sight of human beings or any human construction. Gregor Demarkian turned slowly at the center of this wide space and looked into the branches of the evergreen trees around him. Nothing. Then he looked at the base of the stone wall. Nothing. Then he looked into the bushes and the brush just into the trees. That was when he saw it, lying there just where he had expected it to be.

  “Just a second,” he told Franklin Morrison, as he climbed off the stone wall. It was a problem for him to wade through all that snow and to fight the roots of God only knew what, but he did it. Then he got down on his knees, not caring what was happening to the trousers of his suit, and pulled it out where Franklin could see it.

  “Here we go,” he said. “Rifle number two.”

  Five

  1

  AMANDA BALLARD WOULD NOT have voluntarily spoken to Gregor Demarkian for anything in the world. Gregor Demarkian made her nervous, and his presence in Bethlehem seemed wrong to her, odd and out of whack, as if the Pope had suddenly decided to put up overnight at the Waco, Texas, Holiday Inn. Amanda Ballard didn’t think of Demarkian as the Pope, of course. She was saner than that. She just found him intimidating. That was not a surprise. Amanda found a lot of people intimidating, and a lot of others downright terrifying. It was a form of shyness she had cured by an effort of will. When she had to talk to people, she made herself talk to them. She kept her chin up and her eyes straight ahead. Very few people noticed how tense she was, although Gregor Demarkian might turn out to be one of the few people who would. It was all very confusing. She was jumpy and nervous and tired. She really had been sick the night before and she was sick still, queasy and dry-mouthed and getting worse. She was turning Gregor Demarkian into the bogeyman and that was dangerous. That was more dangerous than she wanted to contemplate.

  What was most dangerous was the situation with Peter Callisher and Timmy Hall, which wasn’t exactly a situation at all, but an atmosphere. It was twelve-thirty on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 17th, a little more than fourteen hours since Gemma Bury’s body had been discovered sitting on a bleacher in the town park, dead as a nail and in full view of several hundred tourists. The extra edition of the Bethlehem News and Mail Peter had worked all night to put together had arrived from the printer. It was sitting in boxes that had been lined against the wall under the front windows in the newsroom. The boxes seemed to be everywhere and to obscure everything. BODY FOUND IN PARK, the headline read, and then: Third Death Sheds New Light On First Two. Amanda kept seeing the headlines when she should have been seeing the new evergreen wreath Betty Heath had brought in while Amanda had still been asleep upstairs. The wreath was covered with gold-painted plastic everythings, from angels to French horns to partridges that would have looked more suitable in pear trees. It was silly and extravagant and wonderful. So was the gift from Sharon Morrissey, left specifically for Peter, which would have made Amanda angry if she hadn’t known Sharon was gay. It was a hand-sized angel made of accordion-pleated red-and-white ribbons with a face made from painted straw. Sharon had been making them with a group of children from the Congregational Church last Sunday and come by today to drop one off. We should be thinking about Christmas, Amanda told herself, not all these other things. Then she rubbed the palms of her hands against her face and rubbed as hard as she could. Bad, bad, bad, she thought. It was as bad as it had ever been, and it was going to get worse.

  Peter Callisher was certainly going to get worse. Amanda knew that because he had been getting worse, ever since they came downstairs just after noon. Timmy had come in soon afterward, and now he was getting worse, too, picking up the tension, sending back little signals of panic and distress. Amanda saw Timmy as her project, a kind of penance for not really being the kind of caring, socially concerned person she told everybody else they ought to be. She also liked him, because he meant well and had none of the complexities of more intelligent people, and none of the subterfuges, either. Timmy either liked you or hated you, pronounced you good or pronounced you evil. He liked Amanda and had hated both Tisha Verek and Gemma Bury without reservation. Nor did this hatred seem to have engendered in him the kind of telescoped guilt it might have in anybody else. If Timmy thought that by hating these women he had secretly done something that led to their deaths, he must also have thought this was perfectly all right. Nor would he understand the injunction to speak no ill of the dead. You spoke ill of someone because there was ill to be spoken of them. It didn’t matter if they were living or dead.

  Amanda watched him on the other side of the room, stacking boxes to take out to the truck at the back. He was immensely tall and immensely fat, but he was also immensely strong. He could get two of those boxes into his arms and up on the counter without sweating. He could get the front of the truck up off the ground in one hand, too.

  There really wasn’t anything to do in the newsroom today. There never was on the day an issue came out, although Peter always insisted they be there, taking in whatever might come in, listening to the music of town gossip that might someday yield some news. This afternoon there was just this electric-wire snappishness that had begun to spill over to the occasional help. Shelley Dee had been cutting off a phone caller when Amanda first came down. Right this minute, Tara Dessaver was in the middle of a tirade on the environmental disasters caused by the tapping of maple trees. The tourists probably hadn’t noticed it, but the deaths had had an effect. The whole town was strung tight, natives and flatlanders both. Amanda wanted to get into her car and go to Montpelier.

  Instead, she got up off her seat and crossed the room to where Peter was standing, leaning over a drawing board and checking the graphics on the ad for the Penderman Funeral Home as if they really mattered. The Penderman Funeral Home had an ad in every edition of the Bethlehem News and Mail, and no matter how often or how forcefully Peter argued with Penderman pére and Penderman fils, it was always the same ad.

  “Peter,” she said, “you ought to tell everybody to go home.”

  “I’m not going to tell everybody to go home.” His voice was deadly with patience, as if they had had this discussion several times already today, which they hadn’t. “This day is no different from any other day, except that we have the extra to distribute, and that takes more work around here, not less.”

  “Then I’m going to take a walk,” Amanda said. “I’m getting so nervous, I’m getting sick all over again. I want some fresh air.”

  “I’ve been arguing with myself for the last half hour whether we ought to put out another extra tomorrow,” Peter said. “All the things that keep happening. Finding the rifle.”

&nb
sp; “They found the rifle last night.”

  “We didn’t hear about it until this morning.”

  “All that stuff is going to be on the television news.”

  Peter shrugged that off. “Not everybody watches the television news. Not everybody wants to watch it. I’ve got to think, Amanda.”

  Amanda supposed he did, but she didn’t see why he had to think about this stuff. This was nothing. Whether Peter liked to admit it or not, everybody watched the television news. They only read the paper if they had nothing else to do. She opened her mouth to tell him something else and then decided not to. It was like playing pick-up sticks: Pull the wrong one and the whole house comes down. Peter was definitely a house ready to come down.

  Amanda crossed the room to where Timmy was working, tapped him on the shoulder and had to jump back when he leaped up and swung around, his fists up, too loosely balled, too tightly cocked. He saw her and flushed. Then he seemed to deflate, his body going from taut to flab exactly as if the air had been let out of him. Good grief, Amanda thought.

  “It’s just me,” she told him.

  “I see you,” Timmy said. “I didn’t mean anything.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t. You have to relax.”

  “He thinks I did it,” Timmy said. “He thinks I killed those two ladies.”

  “Who does?”

  “The man we talked to last night. The man Mr. Morrison likes.”

  “Gregor Demarkian?”

  “That’s him.”

  “I’m sure he doesn’t think that,” Amanda said firmly. “He’s supposed to be a very famous detective. He works with facts. You haven’t given him any facts to make him think you killed them.”

  “I told him I was glad they were dead,” Timmy said. “I told them it was right they were dead.”

  “I think it’s right they’re dead, too,” Amanda said, “but half the town probably thinks that, and they couldn’t all have killed them. And what about Dinah Ketchum? You aren’t glad that she’s dead. You didn’t even know her.”

  “They think I’m crazy,” Timmy said. “Because I’m not so bright. They think I’m so crazy I’d do things with no reason at all.”

  “Gregor Demarkian does not think you are crazy,” Amanda said, and then sighed inwardly, because she hated telling Timmy things were certain when she wasn’t certain about them at all. Bethlehem had been pretty good to Timmy. It was a town that believed in live and let live, and it had left Timmy alone. A few people had even tried to help. Amanda knew small towns, though. She had been born in one much smaller than this. Small towns could turn on you if things got bad enough.

  Timmy was tossing another pair of boxes onto the counter, going on with his work in spite of the fact that she was there, because that was what she had taught him to do. When she had first taken him under her wing, she had promised to let him know everything he needed to know to survive. “It’s just a few simple rules,” she had said, and that had been the truth, as far as it went. She had hurt for him in the beginning and she hurt for him now. With things getting this crazy, she was even afraid for him. Part of her wanted to stay and protect him, although she couldn’t have said from what, right at the moment. The rest of her wanted to get out where she could breathe, and the rest of her was winning. She patted him on the back.

  “I’m going to go for a drive,” she told him. “Do you want me to bring you something?”

  “You could bring me a Hostess cupcake,” Timmy said. “For later. After I get these boxes out to the truck, I’m supposed to drive them around town. I’ve got to deliver them just like they were the real newspaper.”

  “I’ll get you a Hostess cupcake. You sure you don’t want anything else?”

  “A soda?”

  “All right.”

  “If they try to hurt me, I’ll hit them,” Timmy said. “That’s all right. I can do that. If someone tries to hurt you, it’s all right to make them hurt instead.”

  “I suppose it is,” Amanda told him, “but let them hit first. All right?”

  “If you let them hit first, sometimes you’re already dead before you can get a chance to hit back.”

  And to that, Amanda thought, there was no answer whatsoever. She knew entirely too well just how true it was.

  She stood up, looked across the room at Peter at the drawing board, knew that he had noticed her and was not going to look up, and went to the coatrack for her jacket. Shrugging it on, she went through the vestibule and then to the door to the outside. The sky had clouded up again in the last few hours. It was going to snow again. The town park looked barren and embittered. The bleachers had been taken down, but the ground under them hadn’t been tidied up as it usually was. The earth looked damaged.

  Amanda turned up the street and began walking toward the pharmacy, uptown in the direction of Carrow. There were red and green ribbons on the storefronts and the mailboxes all along her path, but they looked wilted. She passed Stella Marvin and said hello. Stella looked straight through her. She passed Liz Beck and said hello, and Liz stopped, said hello back, and looked her up and down as if she were a piece of rotten meat the butcher had tried to sneak into the good stuff in the supermarket. Amanda took a deep breath and let it out again, feeling the cold in her lungs as pain. She had known things were going to get bad. She hadn’t expected them to get this bad this quickly.

  Her car was parked in front of the pharmacy. She untangled her keys from the gloves in her pocket and opened the driver’s side door. Nobody locked their cars in Bethlehem any more than they locked their houses, but Amanda was not so trusting. She never had been.

  She slipped behind the wheel and got the engine started, forcing herself to sit still while the motor warmed up, so she wouldn’t stall out six times on her way out of town. Frank Vatrie was coming down the street at her, looking straight through her windshield and making no acknowledgment at all. He made no acknowledgment to Betty Heath, either, when Betty came down the street in the other direction. They might have been two strangers passing each other in New York City.

  This is a mess, Amanda told herself. Then she swung the car out onto Main Street and repeated what had become her mantra.

  Things were going to have to get worse before they got better.

  2

  Candy George knew that what she had just done was only a temporary solution, but she didn’t have time for a permanent solution at the moment, and she had to have something. It had been one of the strangest days of the last three weeks, and the last three weeks had been the strangest of her life. It wasn’t that Reggie was getting particularly violent and particularly nasty. Reggie was always violent and nasty. Reggie was terrible, if the truth was to be known, and Candy was beginning to think the truth wasn’t as hidden as she’d originally thought. Of course, she knew that at least some people in town had to know that Reggie had hit her at least once. There was that time Sharon Morrissey had called in Franklin, and Franklin had come to the door and tried to talk to her. Candy wished he’d do that again, now, because now she would understand it better than she had. Back then, it had been like he’d been talking Latin. You can put him in jail. It’s against the law for him to do this to you. If you need help getting on your feet, I know some places you can go in Burlington. The man had looked to her like some kind of Martian. Put him in jail for what? Get on her feet how? And who cared what kind of laws they passed over in Montpelier? Candy really did wish Franklin would show up on her doorstep right this minute. She could use the help.

  One of the reasons it had been such a strange three weeks was that Candy had not been able to sleep, in the usual sense, since it had started. For a while she had put this down to excitement. She was so happy to be in the play she just couldn’t calm down enough to drift off. This was a prime example of mental con job, and she knew it. She was excited to be in the play, all right, but that wasn’t why she couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t sleep because she was afraid to close her eyes. She was afraid to close her eyes because of how b
ad her dreams had gotten, and because she knew there were going to be worse ones to come. This was because her dreams were not dreams the way dreams were supposed to be anymore, meaning scenes her mind made up. There was nothing fictional about what she saw when she closed her eyes these days. There was the bedroom she had in the house she shared with her mother and stepfather. There was the set of curtains with the bluebird border swaying in the summer breeze. There were his hands getting bigger and bigger in the moonlight and the pain that never seemed to stop, never never, and only got worse if she cried or asked him to go away. She was eleven or twelve years old, she couldn’t remember which. He was huge and the black pupils seemed to take up all of his eyes. When he came near her, she found it impossible to breathe. That was when she got dizzy and started to look at the stains on the sheets, to contemplate them, to turn them into artwork. She lay flat on her stomach and made artwork out of the trailing blotches he had left the night before and willed the pain out, out of her body, out of her life, out of her mind, into the air.

  When Reggie came home from lunch this afternoon, she was lying on the couch on her back, looking up at the ceiling and thinking. She was thinking the oddest thing, a thing that had never occurred to her before. She couldn’t figure out why it hadn’t occurred to her before. It seemed so obvious. She couldn’t figure out what she was supposed to do with it now that she knew. All her life, she had secretly harbored the conviction that there was a secret out there, a special secret some people knew and once you knew it you were free, you could do anything you wanted to do, you did not have to be the person you were born to be. Now she had it, and it had stopped her cold. This was it, this was the secret of the universe, this was what she should have known all along.

  What he did to me was wrong.