Stillness in Bethlehem

by Jane Haddam

  A few minutes after she had reached this revelation, she had had another one, coming down on her like a light, and the voice it spoke to her in was Franklin Morrison’s.

  What Reggie is doing to me is wrong.

  That was when Reggie had come in, home from work for lunch the way he never was, glaring and prancing and all wound up. She had known what he was after as soon as she set eyes on him.

  He threw himself down in the big lounge chair and kicked himself back, so that he had his feet up and his head halfway to the floor. He’d glared at the sight of her on the couch as he walked in, but he hadn’t done anything about it. Maybe he was tired. Instead, he’d put his hands behind his head and closed his eyes and said, “Get me a beer, all right? I want a beer.”

  A beer. Candy got up off the couch and looked down at him. Reggie never had a beer for lunch on a day when he was working. In that way he was better than both her father and her stepfather had been. He had that much control of his addictions. Maybe he was losing it now. She looked at his chin and the way the stubble along the underside of it was flaked with the soap he hadn’t rinsed off well enough this morning. She looked at his throat, which was young but damaged, creased already with too much getting high and too many Camels.

  “Do you want a beer beer,” she asked him, “or do you want some of that stuff you brought home? That Molson’s Ale.”

  “Molson’s Ale.”

  “All right,” Candy said.

  She walked past him and out into the kitchen, breathing carefully, telling herself to slow down. If all he’d wanted was one of his ordinary Budweisers, she wouldn’t have been able to bring it off. The Budweisers were in the refrigerator. The six-pack of Molson’s Ale was on the back porch, just off the landing that led to the cellar, two steps down from the kitchen through a narrow door. There was a lightbulb screwed into a socket on the ceiling of that landing, and they had a ritual about it. Since Candy was short and small, she wasn’t supposed to be able to reach the bulb to change it. Since Reggie was tall and big, he was supposed to do it for her. This was one of the many ways in which he brought home his point, which was that men and women were very different, and that men were stronger and taller and better than women, and that all the problems in the world would be solved if women just learned to accept the fact. There had been times when Candy thought the entire Women’s Liberation Movement had been invented to give Reggie something to argue about. Reggie and her stepfather.

  Candy went down the two steps to the landing and pulled the knob on the outside door. It held, meaning the door was really shut, not half-open the way Reggie sometimes left it. She reached up and turned the switch lock to locked, then threw the bolt. Then she got the old-fashioned key that worked the center lock from its place on the ledge and locked that lock, too, putting the key in her pocket. Out in the living room, Reggie was getting restless.

  “What the hell are you doing out there?” he bellowed at her.

  Candy came up the two steps into the kitchen again and called back. “There’s a ton of crap on the landing. I’m just getting out the door.”

  There was not, as a matter of fact, a ton of crap on the landing. There was not much of anything at all. Candy waited, but there were no further sounds from Reggie, and she assumed her explanation had held water for the moment. The moment was all she really needed. She went back down to the landing and reached into the stairwell for the broom. When she got it out, she held its handle in the air and aimed for the bulb. The first time, shockingly enough, she missed. She almost panicked. It was such an easy target, such a close thing to hit. If she couldn’t do that much, what could she do? Then she tried it again and it worked. The glass shattered. The shards fell onto her hands and her blouse and glittered even in this place where there was almost no light.

  Candy took a deep breath and made herself as loud as she could. “Damn,” she said. “Damn, damn, damn.”

  “Candy?”

  Candy dropped the broom and came up into the kitchen again. It was very important that she not be on the landing. It was very important that she not be anywhere near the cellar door. She stepped into the middle of the kitchen and called, “Reggie?”

  “What is it?”

  “I need some help. I was moving some things around on the landing, trying to get to the back porch, where your Molson’s is. I picked up the broom and the handle broke the bulb.”

  “Broke the bulb?”

  “It’s just a lightbulb, Reggie.”

  “Nothing’s just a lightbulb,” Reggie said. “It all costs money. It all costs a lot of money.”

  They kept the spare lightbulbs in the cabinet next to the kitchen sink. Candy got one out—careful to make sure it was a sixty-watt bulb; she didn’t want to set him off with the wrong kind of bulb—and stood back a little farther with the bulb held in her hand, held out, like an offering. Reggie came lumbering in to the kitchen with a scowl on his face, and Candy saw it. Always before, she had thought of their fights as inevitable, as stimulus-response, as her fault. She said something or did something to set him off, and then he was out of control. Now she realized there was nothing she could have done or failed to do, because he looked for excuses to start his fights, he began wanting to hit her and then he found a reason he could pin it on. That was what he was doing now. He didn’t care about the bulb. He didn’t care all that much about the Molson’s Ale, either. He just wanted to punch her into a mass of pulp and blood.

  “Broke the bulb,” he muttered, taking the new one she was offering him. “Stupid bitch. Stupid goddamned bitch.”

  “It was just an accident, Reggie. I picked up the broom and the top of the handle hit the light. I didn’t do it on purpose.”

  “I don’t know what you do on purpose,” Reggie said. “You have so many goddamned accidents.”

  “I didn’t think it would be a good idea to leave it there like that,” she told him. “That’s why I called you.”

  “You called me because you’d be shit without me. Always remember that.”

  Candy promised to always remember something, anyway, and held her breath. Reggie went through the door and down the two steps to the landing. She heard him beginning to unscrew the light and swearing under his breath. She counted to five to keep herself steady and then stepped forward and slammed the door shut.

  “What the hell—”

  There were three bolt locks on this door, one at the top, one in the middle and one at the bottom. They were left over from the previous resident of this house, who had raised Dobermans and kept them in the basement. Candy had always thought those Dobermans must have been mean. She got the middle bolt thrown first and then went to work on the others. She worked patiently and without fumbling, without panic, as if all her emotions had gone underground and frozen solid until she had the job done. Reggie was down there bellowing now, screaming and pounding, and Candy thanked God that the outer door had no window in it. That had been because of the Dobermans, too.

  “Candy!” Reggie screamed at her. “Candy, you open up! You let me out of here! You goddamned stinking bitch—”

  “Right,” Candy said, not so much to Reggie as to the air or the world in general or to herself. Then she walked out of the kitchen and back into the living room. She got her coat out of the hall closet and swung it over her shoulders. She stepped out the front door. It was cold as hell outside, but she didn’t mind.

  “My name is not Candy George,” she said to no one and everyone and most of all to herself. “My name is Candace Elizabeth Spear and I can act rings around that horse-face snot Cara Hutchinson.”

  It was hardly a statement of broad-minded generosity or Christian tolerance or grace under pressure, but Candy didn’t figure she was ready for all that yet, because she was barely ready for what she was doing. She went down the front steps to the driveway and got into Reggie’s green Chevy station wagon. The keys were just where she’d expected them to be—meaning in the ignition, where Reggie kept all his keys for all his car
s—and she was ready to go.

  Driving off, she was happy to realize she couldn’t hear Reggie bellowing back there at all.

  Six

  1

  TO GREGOR DEMARKIAN, NEW England farmhouses were all the same: white clapboard constructions with black roofs and mullioned windows and covered porches, long flat buildings with woodsheds built onto their backs and clotheslines anchored in the wood just outside the kitchen door. Stuart Ketchum’s farmhouse had a woodshed, but beyond that it was unrecognizable. Gregor didn’t think he’d ever seen anything so obviously old. It bothered him that he didn’t know what made him think that. The house was not disintegrating. It had been recently painted a pearl grey with black shutters, and its corners were true enough. The house was not cloyingly precious, either, the way so many houses were when they had been reclaimed and restored by people with money. Stuart Ketchum had had neither the time nor the inclination to indulge himself in replica lintels or decorative wheelbarrows. There were a pair of flowerboxes fixed under the windows on either side of the front door, but Gregor thought those belonged to Stuart Ketchum’s wife, or possibly to his late mother. They were a female touch. This was a no-nonsense working farm, as dedicated to its vocation as a cloistered nun. Stuart Ketchum himself was more on the order of a backwoods philosopher, although Gregor thought the “backwoods” part might be overdone a little for the benefit of visitors. He was tall and thin and straight, in whole and in part. Each one of his individual bones seemed to be elongated, and his hair hung straight and brown and limp from the top of his head to a point midway down the back of his neck. Gregor spent a lot of time watching the back of Stuart Ketchum’s neck, with concentration, as Stuart led them into the house and to the kitchen in the back, dodging ceiling beams with every step. Gregor dodged them, too. It reminded him of the Pilgrimage Green, the boat—supposedly a replica of the Mayflower—he had just spent a couple of weeks chasing a murderer on. That had been a place of low ceilings and imminent danger to the top of his head, too, and he wondered how Stuart Ketchum stood it, day after day, having to duck every time he wanted to come through the front hall and answer the door. Then they came through a door to the kitchen and the ceilings were instantly taller. Stuart Ketchum stood up and Gregor stood up, too. Franklin Morrison heaved the kind of sigh the fat boy does when the running is finally over in gym. At the long, unvarnished, uncovered kitchen table, Bennis Hannaford sat holding a white ceramic coffee mug full of coffee, looking curious and interested and mischievous at once. She looked like she belonged right where she was sitting, just like she always looked like she belonged wherever she was sitting, and she also looked impossibly good. Gregor thought it was a good thing Stuart Ketchum had a wife, because without her he might be subject to one of Bennis’s enthusiasms. Not that he would necessarily mind.

  There was a small glass bowl full of pine needles and tiny silver balls in the middle of the table, but no other decoration—maybe because Stuart’s mother had died so recently—and Stuart took this bowl off and put it out of the way on a wall shelf. Franklin Morrison had given Stuart the gun to carry as soon as he and Gregor arrived at the farm. It made sense, according to Franklin, because even if Stuart was a suspect, he was also the best man in this part of Vermont when it came to the care, feeding and identification of firearms. Besides, as Franklin said, they were chasing a sane person here. Any sane person would have had the sense to wipe the rifle clear of prints.

  This was not a line of reasoning Gregor Demarkian relished, or even approved of, but he was on Franklin Morrison’s territory. He let Stuart Ketchum take the gun and watched the man for signs of strangeness or evasion. He might not have recognized either, because Stuart Ketchum was not a personality type he had had a great deal to do with. Stuart put the rifle down on the kitchen table, lying diagonally across the surface with its nose pointed into an empty corner. Then he stood back and contemplated it, as if it were a problem in mathematics.

  “Mr. Ketchum is very Zen,” Bennis Hannaford said after a while. “Hello, Gregor. Hello, Mr. Morrison. We’ve been having a very nice time here being Zen while you’ve been gone. I see you’ve found something.”

  “You don’t have to be some kind of Buddhist not to want to talk so much your tongue falls off,” Stuart Ketchum said. “Excuse me a minute.” He went back to the shelf where he’d put the glass bowl and came back with a pair of wire-rimmed glasses.

  Bennis drew her legs up under her and hunched over her coffee. “You did find something,” she said. “Where did you find it?”

  “In an evergreen bush,” Gregor said, “or maybe it was a low tree. I don’t know the difference.”

  “It was a low tree,” Franklin Morrison said.

  “It was out near those stone walls,” Gregor went on. “We were walking around on them. There’s a place where three of them come together—”

  “It’s just two,” Stuart Ketchum said. “Three properties but two walls. It looks like three walls because the line of the Episcopal Church wall is crooked. Never did get things very accurate, those Episcopalians.”

  “Now, Stuart,” Franklin Morrison said, mildly.

  “Just tell me one thing,” Stuart asked. “Is this the way you found it? Exactly the way you found it? You didn’t do anything to it?”

  “Like what?” Gregor asked.

  “Like disassemble it,” Stuart Ketchum said.

  Gregor was relieved to see that Franklin Morrison was looking just as bewildered as he was. It was embarrassing, after all the movies and television shows, to be an ex-FBI agent who didn’t know anything about rifles. The FBI agents in Bonnie and Clyde had stood in a field and chewed up the landscape with machine guns. Gregor caught Bennis Hannaford’s eye and blushed a little. She knew exactly what was making him so uncomfortable.

  Stuart Ketchum hadn’t noticed that anyone was uncomfortable in the first place. He leaned toward the rifle, fussed with something Gregor didn’t catch and came up with a limp hand-sized object. “There’s the clip,” he said calmly, “with three bullets gone. That makes it much safer. This is a Marlin Model 70P Papoose, it’s a .22 long-rifle caliber semiautomatic with side ejection, but that’s not the point of it. It’s what’s called a quick takedown.”

  “Meaning what?” Gregor asked.

  “Meaning you can do this.” Stuart Ketchum picked up the gun and seemed to break it in half, except that there weren’t any sounds of breaking and nothing small and vulnerable fell on the floor. Then he jerked his arms and the rifle seemed to snap back together again, as if it were made out of Lego blocks. “The point of something like this,” he said, “is to make storage easier and to make the hunter feel like he’s still in the army, which is how a lot of these guys want to feel. This is not a military rifle. It’s a sports model, not a bad one, I’ve got a couple in the gun room. Introduced in 1986. Sixteen-and-a-quarter-inch barrel. Hundred fifty, hundred seventy-five dollars, in there. No big deal.”

  “No big deal,” Gregor repeated. “But it could kill somebody.”

  “Oh, yes.” Stuart Ketchum nodded. “I wouldn’t shoot it at anything serious, like a bear. Not if I had a choice. But it could kill a person without much trouble. I take it this is what you think killed my mother.”

  “We don’t know,” Franklin Morrison said quickly. “We just found it.”

  “Considering how we found it,” Gregor said, “I’d be extremely surprised if it wasn’t the rifle that killed your mother. I believe in coincidences, Mr. Ketchum, but not in too many of them in the same place.”

  “Amateur,” Stuart Ketchum said.

  “What?” That was Gregor and Franklin both.

  “Amateur,” Stuart Ketchum repeated. “Nobody who knew what he was doing around guns would have stored this rifle without the barrel cocked, not even in a tree. Never mind stored it with the ammunition clip inside it—the only point to that I can see is that whoever had this thing didn’t know how to get the clip out and didn’t want to figure it out. It isn’t hard to know what y
ou have to do if you look carefully enough. And leaving it out there, all ready to fire with the clip still in. You sure you didn’t do anything to it? Take the safety off?”

  “I wouldn’t know where to find a safety on a rifle if my life depended on it,” Gregor Demarkian said.

  “Franklin would,” Stuart said. “It doesn’t matter. Whoever put it out there was stupid beyond belief. Some animal could have come along and set it off. It wouldn’t have been easy, but it’s been known to happen. Then the bullet flies and who knows what it hits? Or who?”

  “Maybe that’s what happened to your mother,” Bennis said cautiously.

  “Once is one thing,” Stuart said, “twice is another. I wish I could tell you I don’t know a single person who would have put that gun out there that way, but it isn’t true. It’s incredible what people don’t know about guns. I’ve got a lot of them. I believe people ought to have the right to have them. But dear sweet Jesus, it ought to be like driving a car. They ought to make sure you can operate one before they let you have a license.”

  “That’s the kind of thing Stuart doesn’t say in town,” Franklin Morrison said drily, “because otherwise people would say he’s gone over to the enemy.”

  “The enemy?” Gregor asked.

  “Flatlanders,” Bennis Hannaford said. “I have heard a fair amount about flatlanders since I got here. The man does talk, just not a lot, and not about any subject I bring up.”

  “I couldn’t talk to you about the punk aesthetic in science fiction,” Stuart said, “because I don’t read science fiction.”

  “He reads histories of the Vietnam War.” Bennis stared at the ceiling. “And he knows who Bernard Hare is.”

  Stuart went back to fussing with the gun. Gregor watched him move the barrel up and down, back and forth, and then pick up the clip and examine it. Every once in a while he shook his head. The lack of emotion was disturbing, but not as disturbing as it might have been. Gregor thought it was Stuart Ketchum’s form of self-control. Either show no emotion or go publicly nuts. A lot of men were like that. Gregor leaned over and touched the rifle’s barrel gently, to get Stuart’s attention.