Stillness in Bethlehem

by Jane Haddam

  Exactly how all this archaic thinking might have been applied to the situation as it existed on Main Street when he got there that night, he had no way of knowing, because as it turned out he had no time to do anything but observe. He spilled out onto the street with a clutch of people, all eager to see what the fuss was about. He found himself looking at a long dark expanse of asphalt that seemed to have been cleared of everything but one big man. The man was Timmy Hall, and as he stood there at the center of a circle made by a rim of faceless bodies in ski parkas, Gregor found himself being reminded eerily of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” He wouldn’t have been surprised if someone in the crowd had started throwing stones. What they all thought they were doing there in that circle, Gregor didn’t know.

  The woman who was screaming was standing in that circle, at the part of it closest to the Green Mountain Inn and to Gregor himself. She was hopping around and flapping her arms across her body. Gregor couldn’t see at what. Her voice was high and thin and hysterical. Gregor thought it was also faintly familiar. “HE GRABBED ME HE GRABBED ME HE GRABBED MY SHOULDER HE GRABBED ME.” She kept saying it over and over again. Gregor thought she was one of the people they had talked to the night before, and probably someone from town. He hadn’t paid much attention to the tourists while the questioning had been going on.

  “It’s Betty Heath,” Kelley Grey said suddenly in his ear. “I wonder what’s going on. I wonder what she’s so upset about.”

  “He grabbed her shoulder,” someone in the crowd said.

  Timmy Hall was bellowing and scratching like an animal. “LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR,” he roared, and it was an awful sound, a sound that seemed to contain an echo of itself. That was when Gregor noticed the mood of the people around him, the same mood he’d picked up the one or two times he’d stumbled onto cockfights, the will to see blood. He saw Franklin Morrison at the edge of the crowd and started toward him.

  “Good,” Franklin said when Gregor turned up. “I’ve got Lee out there but I could use some help. Go get Stuart Ketchum for me.”

  “Stuart Ketchum? You mean you want me to drive out to the farm?”

  “Over there.” Franklin pointed. Gregor saw Stuart Ketchum, looking as tensely alert as if he’d still been on sentry duty in the Mekong Delta, standing next to a small, furious woman with a look on her face as wild as the ones in drawings from the French Revolution. Madame Guillotine.

  “Dear Jesus Christ,” Gregor said. “What’s going on around here?”

  “Gossip,” Franklin Morrison said grimly. “Gossip all over town for weeks now that Timmy Hall is Tommy Hare and guilty of God knows what, and now they’re scared and they’re not thinking, they’re just looking for a blood sacrifice. I’m going to get Peter Callisher. Between the five of us—you and me and Lee and Stuart and Peter—we ought to be able to get Timmy out of here.”

  “Right,” Gregor said.

  “All they need is torches,” Franklin said.

  A big old man came up between them and grabbed Franklin by the shoulders, hard. “Lock the bastard up!” he screamed into Franklin’s face, and Gregor could smell the beer. “Lock the bastard up. What are you anyway, Morrison, some kind of jellyfish queer? What are you anyway—”

  “That’s enough,” Peter Callisher said, coming up behind the big man and grabbing him even harder than he was grabbing Franklin Morrison. Peter had an advantage, because Peter wasn’t drunk. Peter got the man off-balance and pitched him back into the crowd.

  “You all right?” he asked Franklin.

  Franklin was shaking. “I’m fine,” he said. “I was just going to find you. Mr. Demarkian here is going around the circle to get Stuart.”

  “Good idea.”

  “What happened out here?” Gregor asked them. “How did this get started?”

  Peter Callisher exploded. “It was that damned fool woman, Betty Heath. Timmy came up behind her just wanting to know if she wanted help carrying this bag she had—I don’t know what happened to the bag, she doesn’t have it now—and when she didn’t hear him ask, he tapped her on the shoulder and all hell broke loose. God, people have been crazy all day. You’d better get Stu, Mr. Demarkian. We’re going to have to get them both out of here and it isn’t going to be easy.”

  “Both?” Franklin Morrison asked.

  “Amanda’s over on that side against the wall ready to tear to shreds anybody who tries to lay a finger on him. And she’s small. You know how that will end.”

  “Go get Stuart,” Franklin Morrison said.

  Gregor went to get Stuart. It helped that Stuart hadn’t moved since Gregor had first seen him, even though many of the people in the crowd had. In fact, there was suddenly a lot of movement all around him, and not only of the physical kind. “Riots,” his old instructor at Quantico had told him, all those many years ago, “are a matter of emotion.” He knew what the old man had meant. The emotions here were shifting. They were not shifting in the right direction. The crowd had been in an ugly humor when Gregor first came out of the Inn. It was now turning vicious.

  He came up to Stuart Ketchum and tapped him on the shoulder, very gently, not wanting to set one more person off. Stuart was in far too rigid a state of control to be set off.

  “Mr. Demarkian,” he said.

  “I’ve come as an emissary from Franklin Morrison,” Gregor told him. “Mr. Morrison wants your help.”

  “I’ll bet he does.”

  “You mean you won’t give it?”

  Stuart Ketchum brushed this off, as if it were a stupid suggestion, which Gregor admitted it probably was. Then Stuart began to ease out toward the center of the circle, very carefully, trying not to be too obvious. Gregor thought he knew what Stuart was going to do. He was going to enter the circle’s almost empty center, and he didn’t want to do it in such a way as to start a surge. It would be far too easy to start a surge. Gregor caught sight of Franklin Morrison and Peter Callisher and Lee Greenwood. They had maneuvered their way around the edges of the circle until they were standing nearly opposite the Green Mountain Inn, in that place where they had the least room to move and the least chance of escape. The problem was, if they were going to get Timmy out, that was the only way they were going to do it. To pull him in any other direction would require bringing him past too many irrational people, with no place to stash him once he was through. Where Franklin and the rest were now standing there was a building, and a building meant rooms with doors that could be locked and windows that could be shortcutted through.

  Stuart looked back over his shoulder. “Tell Franklin when I start talking, he should start bringing Timmy out of there. To the back. Where it isn’t conspicuous.”

  “I think he already intends to bring Timmy out through the back.”

  “Yeah,” Stuart said. “I do, too. Be careful. Don’t give them an excuse.”

  In the crowd around him, people had started swaying, rhythmically and hypnotically. “Lock him up lock him up lock him up,” people were saying, but it was like a murmur, half indistinct, the mantra of hostility and the secret password of fear. Gregor edged through the thinning ranks of people inch by inch, second by second, barely breathing. Not many in the crowd had been willing to stand so close to the buildings that might catch them in an outbreak. That was fortunate. Stuart had gotten about a tenth of the way into the empty center of the circle without anybody following him.

  Gregor got to Franklin Morrison and the others and told them what Stuart had in mind. Franklin Morrison said “damn fool idiot,” but didn’t go any farther, because Stuart was now at least two-tenths of the way into the center and there was no way any of them could stop him. Peter Callisher was sweating, in spite of the fact that it was below freezing. He had a hand around Amanda Ballard’s upper arm. Amanda Ballard was crying.

  “Go,” Peter Callisher told her, nudging her in the direction of the building behind them. Gregor saw that there was an open window very close, probably opened by Lee or Peter or Franklin precisely
for the purposes of escape. Amanda didn’t care.

  “I’m not going to leave him out there,” she kept saying, over and over again. “I’m not just going to walk away and let them beat him up. He didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “We’re not going to let anyone beat him up,” Franklin Morrison said.

  “Lock him up lock him up lock him up,” the crowd chanted, and then someone in the back screamed, “Stupid retard stupid retard stupid RE-TARD.”

  Gregor broke away from the others and moved into the middle of the circle, much more quickly than Stuart was doing, because he was at the back and there weren’t many people who could follow him. He didn’t think there were many people who could see him. He got halfway to Timmy before Franklin even noticed he was gone. When Franklin called out for him to come back, Gregor ignored him.

  Stuart had begun to move more quickly. He was now nearly half the way to the center of the circle, and Timmy had noticed him. Stuart motioned with his head for Timmy to look behind him and Timmy did, but his reaction wasn’t all that Gregor might have hoped. “Lock him up lock him up lock him up,” the crowd was saying. Timmy set his jaw and shouted back. “I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING SHE’S A LIAR.”

  Gregor reached him, grabbed him by the coat and said, “I know you didn’t do anything, Timmy. You have to come with me. You have to get out of here.”

  “You’re going to lock me up,” Timmy said stubbornly. “I’m not going to let you lock me up. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Lock him up lock him up lock him up,” the crowd said, and then that other voice, vile and high-pitched and not really human, cawing, “Stupid RETARD RETARD RETARD RETARD RETARD.”

  Gregor got both hands around Timmy’s arms and tugged. “Come on,” he said. “Your friend Amanda is over there waiting, and she won’t leave without you. We’ve got to move.”

  Timmy was now out of the center of the circle, not very far out but out. Gregor had managed to move him a little. Stuart Ketchum was occupying the center of the circle himself. Gregor saw him unzipping his jacket. He pulled on Timmy one more time. Then he saw Stuart’s hand rise in the air and said, “Oh, Jesus Christ.”

  Rifles, apparently, weren’t the only kind of guns Stuart Ketchum had an interest in. What he had in his hand now was a small pistol. He was pointing it straight up into the air. Enough of the people in the crowd had seen it to cause another sea change in the mood. A lot of people were suddenly very, very uneasy. A lot of people were suddenly even more angry. “Don’t let him go,” they started to shout. “Don’t let him go. Don’t let him get away!”

  Stuart Ketchum pulled the trigger. The sound that followed was quick and sharp and unmistakable. Gregor got a good grip on Timmy’s arm and pulled him the rest of the way to Amanda Ballard.

  “Through the window,” Peter Callisher said, grabbing on to Timmy’s other arm and taking over. “Through the window right now. Let’s get out of here.”

  In the center of the circle, Stuart Ketchum was still standing stock still with his pistol in the air, waiting. At the edges, everybody was quiet. Gregor held his breath. The trouble with firing a shot in the air is that it sometimes provided the occasion for someone to fire a shot at you.

  This time, it seemed to be doing what it was supposed to do. Everybody was quiet. Everybody was breathless. Everybody was waiting for something definitive to happen, nobody knew what.

  Franklin Morrison seemed to think it was up to him to provide it. He strode into the center to stand beside Stuart and then called out, in a voice that needed no help from electronics:

  “All right, everybody, let’s go on home, because if you’re anywhere near this place five minutes from now, I’m gonna throw you in jail and I’m not gonna give a shit who you think you are.”

  Five

  1

  SHARON MORRISSEY AND SUSAN Everman were sitting in the Village Restaurant when it started, and they were still sitting there twenty minutes later, when it finished, as abruptly and nonsensically as it had begun. Susan was drinking a cup of coffee. Sharon was trying to finish a hamburger that just wouldn’t go down. The shouting was far enough away so that the words were indecipherable, but clear enough in intent, to make Sharon think of blood. After a while, everything began to make her think of blood, even the bright plastic poinsettias on the middle of the table and the fuzzy red suit of the Santa Claus doll that had been placed in the window so that it faced the street. It shocked her a little, to think that Susan could sit there so calmly, drinking her coffee, watching the progress of the riot, watching the death of it—and not twitch at all. Sharon Morrissey definitely felt like twitching. She even felt like screaming. Ever since the circle had formed and it had become obvious what was going on, she had wanted to jump in her car and head for Boston.

  “What are we going to do?” she asked, when the crowd started to disperse and the thick film of tension in the air began to disperse with it. “What are we going to do?”

  Susan reached into her handbag and came up with a pack of the cigarettes she so rarely smoked. Susan Everman was the only person Sharon Morrissey had ever known who was able to smoke cigarettes only for mental-health purposes, and then only once or twice a year. Susan lit up with a gold Dunhill lighter and said, “Tomorrow morning we’re going to go apartment hunting in Boston.”

  “But that means we’ll have to sell the house.”

  “We’ll buy another house someday,” Susan said. She blew a stream of smoke into the air and thought about it. “Maybe we should travel a little,” she suggested. “I’ve never done any serious traveling in my life. And we have the money for it. We could go to Paris and Rome and to Holland. If we have the time.”

  “If we did something like that, we wouldn’t have to sell the house,” Sharon said. “We could leave everything where it is and just take off.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Why do you want to leave this place? Is it just over that or is it something about us?”

  “What went on over there isn’t ‘just’ anything,” Susan said grimly. “Small towns can turn, Sharon, and I think this one just did. There are already three people dead, and for all we know it’s some crazy who doesn’t like deviance of one sort or another. I think it’s time we got out of here.”

  And, Sharon thought, Susan was right, just as Susan was always right and Susan was always beautiful, but it felt wrong, that was the problem. It felt like running. And what was worse, it felt like running from no danger at all. Sharon considered telling Susan what she really thought—which was that no matter who was dead already, the two of them were safe—but decided against it. If she said something like that, Susan would want her to explain it, and Sharon wasn’t sure she could.

  At this point, Sharon Morrissey wasn’t sure she could explain anything.

  2

  “I think it’s time I got out of here,” Amanda Ballard was saying to Peter Callisher ten minutes later, pacing back and forth across his living-room floor, rubbing every once in a while against the raw patch of skin at the side of her face. The raw patch of skin was a scrape from a brick she’d run into getting out the back way after the—Peter didn’t want to call it a riot—and it seemed to nag at her. Timmy was out in the kitchen, drinking coffee full of sugar and cream and looking cold. He would fall asleep where he was sitting and they would have to move him. Amanda kept picking things up and putting them down again. Peter wanted to make her sit still.

  “I don’t think you’re being fair,” he told her, wishing his voice didn’t sound so tight, wishing he didn’t really care. “They’re not like that. Not most of the time. You know they’re not like that.”

  “I don’t know what they’re like.”

  “This has been a good place for you. I’ve been a good man for you. I don’t see how you can talk about walking out on it all after everything we’ve been to each other.”

  “We haven’t been anything to each other, Peter. We’ve just been sleepin
g together. And sex is only important to men.”

  “Sex used to be important to you.”

  “No, it didn’t. Not really.”

  Peter started to argue the point and stopped himself. It was a ludicrous point to argue. It was an argument no man could win. All the woman had to do was say she’d been faking it, and how would the man ever know? Peter got up and went to the window. He could see Main Street and the town park. He could see streets filled with tourists and the bleacher tents like giant blobs blocking his view. It had all gone back to normal in no time at all.

  “It’s as if it never happened,” he said, watching a cluster of bright silver balls tied to a fire hydrant bounce in the wind. “It’s all back to normal. And it’s going to stay back to normal. It was some kind of catharsis.”

  “It was the next best thing to a lynching.”

  “They would never have lynched anybody.”

  “You would never have lynched anybody,” Amanda said. “You’re you. They’re them. I’m sorry, Peter. It’s my fault, really. I didn’t realize what I was doing. I didn’t understand it could work out this way.”

  “I don’t see why it’s your fault.”

  “I have to get Timmy out of here.”

  “He didn’t come with you to begin with. I wish I understood you, Amanda. I wish I knew what you wanted out of life.”

  “I want what everybody wants,” Amanda said. “I want to be left alone.”

  Peter didn’t think that was what everybody wanted, but Amanda was on her way to the bedroom and he was following her. She went to the big oak wardrobe he’d bought in Burlington and began to take her sweaters down from its high shelf. He stood in the doorway with his arms folded over his chest and felt the sweat come pouring down his forehead into his eyes.