Stillness in Bethlehem

by Jane Haddam

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s too tall,” Amanda said patiently. “I’m five-four. You’re—what? Not much taller than that.”

  “Five-five,” Sharon said. “Susan’s five-three.”

  “Candy George is five-three, too, and Betty Heath is the same height I am. But Timmy’s nearly six-three. His head would have come right up over the top of this thing. He’d have had to bend over to aim, unless he fired without aiming, and I don’t believe that. I don’t believe Timmy would fire a rifle without looking at what he was aiming at. I don’t think Timmy would have fired a rifle.”

  “Who says he did?”

  Amanda looked back over her shoulder, up Main Street to the News and Mail office. “Lots of people,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe the phone calls we’ve gotten today. They think that just because he’s retarded, he’s crazy.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  “Good,” Amanda said. “He’s sweet as pie, really, and not violent at all. He was the nicest boy at Riverton. Peter checked out all his records when we first decided to hire him. There wasn’t a single thing wrong.”

  “I’m sure there wasn’t.”

  “They just hate him because he’s different,” Amanda said. “Even Peter does. I thought when I heard about this that it would clear him, because it so obviously means he couldn’t have done any of it, but instead they’ve all got their theories. They’ve all got their fantasies about how he bent over to, shoot and nobody saw him. It’s sick.”

  “Yes,” Sharon said carefully. “Amanda? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” Amanda had been standing with her arms wrapped around her body. She’d barely moved from the moment Sharon had first come up to her. Now she shoved her hands in her pockets and turned her back on the stand of evergreen bushes.

  “I’ve got to go back,” she said. “Timmy’s nervous and Peter’s really been crazy all day. I don’t think he’s been completely all right since Tisha Verek died.”

  “What?”

  But Amanda was already moving away, across the park to Main Street, down Main Street to the News and Mail in the direction opposite the one Sharon wanted to take. Sharon stood looking after her, feeling agitated and not knowing why.

  Timmy Hall. Peter Callisher. God only knew there had been enough rumors about Timmy Hall. And Tisha Verek had started every one of them.

  Sharon went back to Main Street herself and began to make her way toward Jim MacAfee’s front lawn. It felt horrible in this place now, sticky and vile, and she just wanted to get out.

  It made her wonder why she and Susan had come here to begin with.

  2

  Kelley Grey was sitting in the rectory kitchen when the doorbell rang, sitting at the table and looking over the manuscript Tisha Verek had left with Gemma Bury. She was also conducting a running argument in her head about what she ought to do about this manuscript. She had already decided to bring it to Gregor Demarkian or Franklin Morrison or the state police or whoever was really investigating Gemma’s death. She may not have liked Gemma much at the end, but she owed the woman at least the courtesy of providing a clue to her murder to the authorities assigned to avenge it. Beyond the mere fact of handing the manuscript over, though, Kelley found it hard to think. Should she discuss Gemma with Gregor Demarkian? Yesterday, Kelley had been sure she ought to tell Demarkian about Gemma’s affair with Jan-Mark Verek, but today it had begun to seem less and less important as the hours went by. Maybe if she had been able to get in touch with Demarkian himself—instead of being forced to leave messages at the desk at the Inn—it would have been easier to make up her mind. It hadn’t been an important affair. Gemma Bury didn’t have important affairs. She didn’t want to get tied down. That, Kelley understood now, was why she herself had been so angry with Gemma at the end. Gemma hadn’t liked to get tied down to anybody, for any reason. Her idea of the ideal friendship was one whose emotional commitment never surpassed that of a lunch date. God only knew what her idea of the ideal sexual relationship had been. Kelley’s idea of the ideal friendship had always had something in common with the ideal of the indissoluble marriage, but maybe thinking like that was out of date.

  When the doorbell rang, Kelley had decided to get up, make herself a cup of tea and do something serious about the part of the rectory she was now occupying. This part was shrinking by the minute—she got more and more afraid of the size and the emptiness of the place by the minute, too—but it could do with a few more Christmas decorations than it had been subjected to so far. Gemma had been fairly contemptuous about people who were “sentimental” about Christmas, the way she got fairly contemptuous of those of her parishioners she described as “wedded to the more ludicrous details of the Christian myth.” Gemma had preached diversity and nonjudgmental acceptance with the best of them, but she had had no tolerance for either in her own life.

  The doorbell was a chime that echoed and gonged for long seconds after the button was pushed. Kelley got up, looked around the kitchen and decided to put the manuscript in the refrigerator. She had a friend in Boston who was an aspiring novelist, and he always put his manuscripts in the refrigerator when he went out. Refrigerators survived fires, that was the point. The house could burn to the ground while he was away, but the manuscript would remain intact, protected along with the leftover scrambled eggs. Kelley put this manuscript next to a half-full bottle of Perrier water—Gemma hadn’t been big on abandoning herself to the pleasures of the flesh no matter what they were—and went out into the foyer to answer the door. With her growing nervousness in the house, Kelley had had a growing need to keep the lights on, even in the daytime. Now half the bulbs in the foyer chandelier were dead and she had no way to change them. She didn’t know where to find a ladder tall enough to reach and she didn’t know who to call for help. She brushed aside the feeling that the foyer was too dark to allow her to admit a stranger safely, stepped up to the right hand door of the front double doors and looked through the viewer. On the doorstep was a small blonde girl in an oversized jacket, looking tired.

  Kelley stepped away from the door, thought for a moment and then opened up. If she’d been living in town instead of all the way out here—or if she’d been more in contact with the people who were living in town—she might have caught the paranoia everybody else had caught like the latest round of flu. She hadn’t. When she had the door open, she stepped aside and let her visitor in. Then she smiled and said, “Yes? Can I help you? Is there something I can do for you?”

  The small blonde girl looked around the foyer, including up at the chandelier. “My name is Candy—Candace. Candace. Never mind. You’d know me as Candy George. If you know me. Do you know me?”

  “I know who you are,” Kelley said, thinking that Candy George was disoriented, like someone in shock.

  “My name isn’t really Candy George, though,” Candy said. “George is my husband’s name. Reggie George. Reginald. You may not know who he is. Not being from town. You, I mean. You not being from town.”

  Kelley closed the door against the wind. “I’ve seen him around,” she said. “Would you like to come into the kitchen? I’ve got the tea kettle on the stove, all ready to go. You look all done in.”

  “My real name is Candace Elizabeth Spear,” Candy said. “That’s the name I had when I was born. I can’t do anything about it now. It says Candy George on all the programs for the play and this is the last week. But after it’s over, I can change. And I can change in every other way right away. So I don’t want you to call me Candy George.”

  “All right.”

  “Call me Candace instead.”

  “All right.”

  “And I will have tea.”

  “Wonderful.”

  Kelley turned around and walked rapidly back in the direction of the kitchen, assuming Candy—or Candace, or whoever she was—would follow. She was right. Candy did follow. Kelley put out a chair for her and she even sat down, automatically, as if she had been computer-pr
ogrammed to respond to certain signals in certain ways. Shock, Kelley decided, was exactly what was going on here. The symptoms were so classic, they could have been a paragraph in the training manual of the women’s center Kelley used to volunteer in down in Burlington. Kelley got out a clean cup and put it on the table. Then she got the sugar bowl out of the cupboard and put that on the table, too. With any luck, she would be able to convince Candy to have her tea with lots of sugar in it, because that was one of the ways you were supposed to be able to treat shock.

  The tea kettle began to whistle. The water had been warm before Kelley had put the kettle on the burner, because she’d been warming it up and pouring herself cup after cup of tea all day. Just in case Candy liked liquor better than she liked sugar, Kelley took Gemma’s only bottle—Johnnie Walker Red—and put it on the table. It didn’t go over well. Candy made a face at it and pushed it aside.

  “I don’t drink liquor,” she said. “I don’t even drink beer. Alcohol makes people crazy.”

  “It certainly makes some people crazy,” Kelley said.

  “Let me show you something,” Candy said. She stood up and pulled her sweater up over her head. She undid her blouse and turned around. For one short second, Kelley thought this was the beginning of some weird sexual come-on, but she’d barely had the thought when she saw the reality, and the reality made it very hard to breathe. Then a wave of nausea washed over her and she had to put her head between her knees to keep from throwing up.

  “Good God. Good Christ in heaven. What happened to you?”

  “What do you think happened to me?” Candy said. “Reggie happened to me.”

  Kelley looked up. Candy had already pulled her shirt back on and got it buttoned up. She was reaching for her sweater. Kelley could tell now that she was finding it hard to move. The miracle was that Candy could move at all. She had heard the rumors, of course—in a town like this, you always heard the rumors if they didn’t have anything to do with you; there’d been whispering for months at least that Reggie George beat his wife—but she’d had no idea of what the reality would be like. Even after all that volunteering at the women’s center, she’d had no idea what the reality would be like. She’d never faced the reality before. She’d always been involved in the talk counseling afterward.

  Candy settled her sweater around her waist and sat down. Kelley asked her, “Did that just happen today? Just now? Did you escape from him and come running here?”

  “That happened yesterday.” Candy took the tea bag out of her cup. She reached for the sugar, and Kelley was relieved to see she used a lot of it. “If it had happened today,” she said matter-of-factly, “it would still be bleeding. I always bleed for hours afterward. Sometimes for days. He doesn’t like me to put bandages on it. He says they make my clothes look funny.”

  “Right,” Kelley said. Matter-of-fact or not, Candy was still disoriented. “Where is your husband?” she asked. “What are you doing here? Is he chasing you?”

  “Reggie can’t chase me because I locked him in the basement. I tried to call Franklin Morrison to come and take him away, but every time I got the police station, they said Franklin was out. Franklin came once when it was bad and tried to do something, but I wouldn’t let him and nothing came of it. He said he’d come back and help any time I wanted him.”

  “Wouldn’t any of them have helped? Couldn’t you have told one of the other policemen and had him come and take Reggie away?”

  “I don’t know,” Candy said. “I didn’t trust it. I wanted Franklin. I still want Franklin. Reggie will be safe enough in the basement. I threw all the bolts.”

  “Right,” Kelley said again. It didn’t seem to be the time to suggest that basements have windows that can be broken, or that the George house was close enough to civilization so that someone might hear Reggie hollering and let him out, or that Reggie was a large and strong man who might break a door or two if he got angry enough. “Well,” Kelley said, “you’re here now. I’ve just got to figure out what we can do for you.”

  Candy looked up from her tea, skeptical. “You’re a feminist, aren’t you?”

  “A feminist? Well, yes. Yes, of course I am.” Kelley didn’t think it sounded like an accusation, although it would have with some people. It sounded more like Candy was making sure she had her facts straight.

  “I’ve got to go be in the play tonight,” Candy said. “And for the rest of this week. You see what I mean?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Well, I can’t do anything about anything now,” Candy said, “except get Franklin Morrison to lock Reggie up, and I can do that as soon as I find Franklin, because he once said—well, he said. And then I have to be in the play for the rest of the week, and I won’t give that up for anything. But then there’s after that.”

  “After that what?”

  “You’re a feminist,” Candy said, “so you’ll know.”

  “Know what?” Kelley was getting desperate.

  “Know where to go,” Candy said. “I saw it on television, on 60 Minutes. I know everybody thinks I’m stupid, but I’m not. I watch 60 Minutes when Reggie’s gone out to a bar or someplace, which he does practically every Sunday night. And there it was. All these women who were feminists and the feminists got women whose husbands beat them up the way Reggie beats me up and the feminists helped these women find new places to stay and how to get a job and what to do about school and they give advice, you see what I mean? They give advice, which is all I need, because I sure as hell don’t need any guts, I must have been born with those or I’d have been dead by now, but I do need some information and you’re always saying you’re a feminist and Gemma Bury was, too. I used to think feminists were just women who didn’t like men, but on 60 Minutes it said feminists were women who did this instead. So are you real? Are you a feminist?”

  Are you a feminist? Kelley Grey asked herself, marveling. She knew the tone in Candy’s voice all too well. She’d heard it from dozens of other people over the course of her life. That tone said: Put up or shut up. And faced with that alternative, Kelley Grey had always failed.

  Well, she decided, she wasn’t going to fail this time. She wasn’t going to have to.

  She got up out of her seat and headed for the phone on the wall next to the refrigerator.

  “I am definitely a feminist,” she said, “and I definitely know what you can do. Let me make a few phone calls. Drink more tea.”

  “I’ve had enough tea, thank you.”

  “Then eat the cookies in the tin on the counter. You need to gain about thirty pounds. When I’m finished here, I’ll drive you in to the Celebration.”

  Candy George—or Candace Elizabeth Spear—went to the counter and got the cookies. Kelley heard the phone being picked up down in Burlington and a familiar voice saying, “Eve’s Apple. Can I help you?”

  Kelley blew a stream of air into her bangs and smiled. “Stacey?” she said. “This is Kelley Grey. Listen, I’ve got a problem I think you could help me with.”

  Three

  1

  BY THE TIME THEY all got back to the center of town—meaning Bennis, Franklin and Gregor himself; Jan-Mark stayed at home and Stuart Ketchum went back to his farm—Gregor was worried, and the closer they got to the Inn, the more worried he got. Even Bennis’s driving did nothing to distract him. She had taken over the wheel from Franklin Morrison only yards from Stuart Ketchum’s front door and put her foot on the floor as soon as she reached the Delaford Road. Her driving had scared Franklin Morrison to death. Gregor had hardly noticed it. He kept going over and over the whole situation in his mind, and every time he did he came to the same conclusion. He knew who. He knew how. He even knew why. He just didn’t know what he could do about it.

  Bennis had had to slow down when she turned onto Main Street proper. It was five-thirty, close enough to the start of the performance for activity in town to be heating up a little. The town’s one stoplight was operating, instead of hanging from its wire and blinking
yellow. Families who had driven up from downstate or over from New Hampshire were strolling along the sidewalk, looking at the Christmas decorations in the shop windows and discussing where to go for dinner. Most of them, Gregor assumed, would end up at The Magick Endive. It was the kind of place the mothers of small children liked to go when they wanted to eat out “nice.”

  Bennis had to stop at the traffic light. When she did, Gregor looked into the town park at the bleachers that were now almost all the way up and the two small clumps of evergreen bushes he could see. If there had been any defections from the population expected to view the performance this evening, the news hadn’t got back to the ground crew. Gregor didn’t know what kind of publicity there had been about the death of Gemma Bury. The only newspaper he had seen was the Bethlehem News and Mail. He hadn’t watched television in days. The story might be a total washout. If it was, he didn’t think it would be one for long, but that was another matter. It always surprised him, how conscientious murderers were, to do things in the most spectacular possible way. Maybe he ought to say unsuccessful murderers. The ones with sense—the ones who did what they wanted to do quickly and without fanfare; who were interested in seeing someone dead and not in showing the world how absolutely brilliant they were—probably never got caught. In Gregor’s experience, the ones who never got caught were all professionals, and sense wasn’t exactly what they had.

  Bennis was tapping impatiently on the steering wheel. The light was staying at red forever. In the back seat, Franklin Morrison was wheezing away on a cigar. Gregor went on staring into the park and then he made up his mind.

  “Pull over,” he said.

  “Again?” Bennis asked him. “You don’t have any stone walls to climb around on here.”

  “That’s the green light,” Franklin Morrison said.

  “Pull over,” Gregor insisted.

  Bennis let out a long-suffering sigh and eased the car forward, reaching for her cigarettes as she went. “I can’t just pull over,” she told him, “I have to go around the corner and then hope I see someplace to park, which I probably won’t because the performance is in less than three hours. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”