Stillness in Bethlehem

by Jane Haddam

Six

  1

  GREGOR DEMARKIAN KNEW THAT there were people in town who were afraid the killings would have the wrong effect on the Celebration. They worried that people would get nervous and leave in droves, destroying any hopes Bethlehem had of having a happy new year. He wasn’t worried. He’d spent over twenty years of his life officially involved with murder. He knew what people were like. The bleachers around the seats he shared with Bennis and Father Tibor were sparsely populated for that night’s performance, but all the other bleachers were crammed full, even fuller than they’d been the night before. The vast American public was irresistibly drawn to other people’s danger. That was why network television was full of series about violent detectives.

  The second night of the Bethlehem Nativity play was full of donkeys and camels, although why that was so, Gregor was not able to explain. This was a night of imagination, where a lot of events had been added that appeared in none of the ordinary accounts of Christ’s birth. At one point, the audience was treated to at least part of a Jewish wedding. Gregor thought that whatever the writers and producers had done might be of some scholarly interest, since Tibor was intent throughout, but since Gregor had no scholarly interests of his own, he couldn’t have said. He contented himself with waiting, and being happy that Bennis seemed to have given in and decided to munch her way through one of Tibor’s brown paper bakery bags, and thinking about what he was going to have to do. He was sorry Kelley Grey was not in the seat beside him, although he’d have been surprised if she’d come, even if he hadn’t known she had something else to do for the evening. Bennis noticed her being gone, too, and remarked on it, both at the intermission and when the play was over.

  “If I was that woman, I’d never sit in bleachers again,” she said. “Gregor, what are you up to? You’ve been halfway to Mars all night.”

  “I’m not up to anything. Is Tibor falling asleep?”

  Bennis leaned over, to find Tibor peering suspiciously at his program and not asleep at all. All the other bleachers were emptying out. Their own, already mostly empty, was the scene of a few last-minute scrambles. Tibor was ignoring it all.

  “He’s trying to find out what source they used,” Bennis sighed, “and he keeps expecting to come up with someone like Raymond Brown—”

  “Not Raymond Brown, Bennis, please, he’s always looking for natural explanations for miracles—”

  “Whichever,” Bennis said. “Some hot biblical scholar, at any rate. And I keep telling him he’s not going to find it. Whoever wrote this play just made all that stuff up.”

  “You do not make up events in the life of Christ and His Mother,” Tibor said.

  “Sure you do. Think about Nikos Kazantzakis. Think about Martin Scorsese. Think about—”

  “I have enough to think about, Bennis. Have you finished your muffins?”

  Bennis fished around inside the bag and came up with a muffin. “Pumpkin bread,” she said solemnly. “Tibor got them for me special. I’ve already had six.”

  “What was the alternative?” Gregor asked her.

  “Death by hanging.” She put the muffin back in the bag. “Gregor, are you sure you’re all right? Are you sure you’re not up to something dangerous?”

  “If you mean something you can help me with, no. I have to go talk to Franklin Morrison for a moment. I’d have talked to him before this but he had to take a young man to jail. Franklin’ll be free by now. Then I’m going to come right home.”

  “And you don’t want to tell me what this is about?”

  “He doesn’t need to tell you what this is about,” Tibor said, “he needs only to let you eat. Eat all the muffins, Bennis, you are looking much too thin. It could be bad for you.”

  “Right,” Bennis said. “Gregor.”

  The loudspeakers that had been used to amplify the voices of the actors in and around the gazebo were now being used to broadcast Christmas carols. The first one of the night was, as Gregor suspected it always was, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Gregor put his coat on and got his gloves out of the pockets.

  “Maybe you should start making him eat,” Bennis said to Tibor. “I think he’s become addled from malnutrition.”

  Tibor clucked. Gregor backed away from both of them. “I have to go talk to Franklin Morrison. You two go back to the Inn and relax.”

  “We two ought to follow him,” Bennis said. “He’s up to something.”

  And that, Gregor thought, as he turned his back on the both of them and hurried out of the park, was true enough. On the other hand, he was always up to something, and he had told Bennis and Tibor the literal truth. He did have to talk to Franklin Morrison.

  He stopped to look back at the park and sighed. It had all been so much easier in the FBI. You got a warrant. You made an arrest. You let some Federal prosecutor figure out how to prove your case in court in a day and age when it was impossible to prove much of anything in court. You certainly didn’t wander around small towns in Vermont, wishing you could get your act together well enough to know what you were supposed to do next.

  Or if what you’d decided to do next would work.

  2

  She had had to wait until the end of the Nativity play, because until then Kelley Grey was otherwise engaged. “Otherwise engaged” was a phrase she liked very much, because it reminded her of one of the doctors in that place they’d sent her to, the one who was so afraid of her he wouldn’t sit down when she was in the room. They were all afraid of her in that place, really. It surprised her. After a while, she thought it might be because they knew she wasn’t crazy. That was the thing it was so hard to get people to understand. They said, “You murdered someone.” They said, “You were only a child.” They said, “You must have been crazy.” It was like those syllogisms she had found in the book about logic she had taken out of the library, thinking that if she could prove that she was logical she could make them see she didn’t belong in an institution. All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Socrates is mortal. It was like that. But it wasn’t true. Murder was sometimes the sanest possible solution. It was sane even when resorted to by a child. It was what everybody would do if they had the chance and the weapon, if they understood what life was all about.

  The phone call had come at the very last minute, just before she was getting ready to go out, and then she’d had to stop and think about it all again, about the logistics. She couldn’t go back out to the Ketchum farm. Someone might be home. Someone might spot her driving along in the dark like that, when nobody and nothing else was on the road. She couldn’t go back to Eddie Folier’s place, either, because the police had been there earlier today and Eddie had been called back from Hanover. The place was at least locked up. She wouldn’t put it past them to have it guarded. She’d had to think long and hard about it after that. She knew half the guns in town—it was the kind of information she was always careful to put together, whenever she arrived in a new place—but stealing one wasn’t so easy in the middle of the night. In the end she opted for the gun club at the American Legion because the back-door lock was easy to break. The guns on the walls were .22s, and they weren’t locked into their racks, either. Maybe she should have used one of those and not Eddie Folier’s when she killed Dinah Ketchum. It was a tough one to call.

  The gun club kept its ammunition in big metal drawers built into one wall of the meeting room. She rifled through the boxes until she found one full of clips for the Remington Model 552 Speedmaster she had chosen. She wished she had something else to choose. This weighed over five pounds. It wasn’t the heaviest gun she had ever held, but it was heavier than she liked. She thought about standing in the trees at the side of the Delaford Road and firing at Dinah Ketchum, thought about the gun jerking to the right as it always did, thought about the fact that that gun had been heavy, too. If women ever got real equal rights, they would start making guns for themselves that didn’t pull and didn’t kick so much. She supposed that in the long run it didn’t matter. They were both dead,
the really evil one and the one who was just like a sick animal, dangerous but without guilt. That was how she thought about Dinah Ketchum. Tisha Verek was like a picture of the devil in an illustrated Fundamentalist Bible. She threatened and laughed. Dinah Ketchum just sat in the car saying, “Oh, I’m so sorry dear, I just noticed and I was just trying to tell you that if you don’t want people to know you should—”

  You should what?

  She loaded the rifle and wrapped it into her coat. She’d worn her long coat instead of her parka for just this purpose. She could carry it pressed to her left side without looking too strange on the street. It was very cold and people who saw her passing would think she was simply stiff with cold. Besides, nobody was really looking at anybody right now, not after what they had done to Timmy Hall. They had all gone back home to be ashamed of themselves.

  She got the rifle early and went over to the park. It would have been a three-block walk if she had been in the city, maybe a third of a mile. She went into the tent they used as a dressing room and looked around, being careful not to be seen. It wasn’t hard. It was the last fifteen minutes of the play, with everybody in the cast for the night either out at the gazebo or waiting in the passage to take a bow. She thought Kelley must have gone out there, too, since Kelley was nowhere around. It was too bad. She believed in her luck—or at least, she believed in her luck with rifles—but she also knew you could push luck only so far. She’d been pushing hers straight off the cliff these last few weeks.

  “Listen,” Kelley Grey had said on the telephone. “I think we have to talk.”

  “Who is it?” a voice said from the other room, and she had held her breath and crossed her fingers.

  “It’s for me.”

  “Listen,” Kelley Grey said again. “Gemma had this manuscript. That Tisha Verek wrote, you know. And last night I read it.”

  “So?”

  “So there’s something in it you have to see.”

  “What?”

  “A picture.”

  “I don’t want to see any pictures.”

  “Yes, you do,” Kelley Grey insisted. “You have to see this one. You should come up to the rectory tonight after the play and let me show it to you.”

  Once there had been a voice on the phone that said: I saw you walking on the stone walls Monday morning. What were you doing on the stone walls?

  That voice had belonged to Gemma Bury, and the next time she had heard it Gemma had been on her way to do what she had threatened to do, on her way to talk to Peter Callisher about the story and to get it all put in the newspaper and make it… make it what?

  There were people who said it was safer to kill in emptiness, but she knew it wasn’t true. She could go out to the rectory. She could shoot Kelley Grey there. She could rid herself of all the restrictions imposed by being in this tent and having so many other people to take into account. She could do all that, but if she did she would have a whole new set of problems and one she liked less. To be seen, even by one person, would be death. To make a mistake, no matter how minor, would be disaster. Besides, Kelley would be ready for her up there, waiting for her, taking precautions. She couldn’t have that.

  There was a place at the end of the tent farthest from the passage to the park “stage” where the flaps came together and made a kind of curtain. She checked it out, decided it would do, and folded herself into it. Her feet were exposed, but she didn’t think anyone would notice. They would be coming back in after taking their bows and concentrating on going home. She backed up against the tent’s corner and tried to look out. She could see the flap of the two dressing rooms diagonally across from where she was. She would have to hope that Kelley came in on her own or stayed later than the others, or most of the others. If Kelley didn’t do that, she would have to go on up to the rectory after all. She got the rifle out from under her coat and felt its weight in her arms.

  In the place where she had been they had long wide rooms full of tables to eat at, but if you had been good you got to sit in the smaller room where the tables were round. It was not a prize she had ever valued much—if there had been waiters and waitresses in the round-tabled room she might have felt differently—but she had always been so conscientious about working for prizes and playing to win games and being good, that she had worked at that, too. Then she would get there and it would all begin to seem so awful and terrible, so much a part of the lie that that place was, she wouldn’t be able to stand it anymore. She would stand up and start throwing things, forks and spoons, there were never any knives, furniture. She would shout and scream and tell them all to go to hell, she didn’t belong in a crazy place, and then they would sit her down in some doctor’s room and tell her: If you could behave for three months straight, we’d be more than willing to let you out of here.

  But it wasn’t true.

  It wasn’t true.

  The whole world was a cage.

  That was true.

  The whole world was a cage and there was only one way to keep yourself out of it.

  That first time she had stood behind the door with the sweat pouring down her face and her heart hammering and she had seen him coming up the walk, coming up as if there was nothing wrong at all, nothing he had done, nothing he ought to be ashamed of. There were people on the street behind him, walking down the sidewalk, walking dogs, carrying packages. She saw an old lady with a hat with a flower on it and a mother with two small children who looked frazzled in the heat. It had been very hot for days and it was going to get hotter. It was ten o’clock in the morning and already so thick with humidity the air felt wet. She watched him coming up toward her and decided it didn’t matter. As long as she killed him it didn’t matter what else happened because nothing else would. Nothing else ever would. She was alone on top of a high place and very calm. She could aim her father’s rifle out the front door and down the front walk and right out into the street and the bullet would be magic. It wouldn’t go to the right or to the left. It would hit him in the heart just as surely as if it had been drawn there with a magnet.

  Safe, she thought now. Safe, safe, safe. She was always safe.

  The flap at the far end of the tent opened and she could hear someone moving down the center aisle, humming and shuffling along. She tensed against the long stock of the rifle and waited. The voice sounded right but she couldn’t be sure. If it turned out to be right she would be luckier than she had ever imagined. She held her breath and waited. She brought the rifle up a little higher and waited. She listened to the humming get louder and realized it was “The First Noel.”

  “Bugger,” Kelley Grey said, interrupting her music, banging her leg into a metal folding chair that had been left out to no good purpose. Kelley moved the chair and then pulled back the flap on the dressing room at the very end of the row on the far side. She made the flap secure, went into the cubicle, and sat down on a bench with her back to the corridor. She was dressed in a bright red sweater that seemed to sparkle and pulse in the dim light.

  Behind the curtain flaps in the corner, she waited, barely able to breathe.

  3

  “Bugger, bugger, bugger,” Kelley Grey said, to the air, to nothing at all. It was cold and she was colder. It had been a long night and she wanted it to end. Reggie George was in jail but she still had Candy to take care of. The play was almost over for the night, but she had Candy’s things to pack up before the tent could be taken down. Her head ached and she began to wonder what she really wanted to do with her life. Last week, she would have answered that with: Grow up. Now she wasn’t so sure. Growing up was all about responsibility. She’d had enough responsibility tonight to last her forever.

  Candy had left her few pieces of jewelry in a small box on one of the tables. She didn’t think it was right for Mary to wear jewelry even if it couldn’t be seen. Kelley checked through the box to make sure it contained a pair of gold earrings, an ivory ring in the shape of a daisy and a tiny locket on a chain. Then she put the box into her pocket an
d went looking for a change purse. The change purse was supposed to be red plastic and not to have anything in it but a New York City subway token Candy said she kept for luck.

  Kelley found the change purse and the subway token on the floor, next to one of the spike-heeled shoes. She didn’t know if it was the shoe Candy had used to kick Reggie or not. Even if it wasn’t, it looked lethal. She picked it up and turned it over in her hand.

  “I wonder if she wants these,” she said, to nobody at all.

  Then she got off the bench and dropped to the floor, to see if she could find the other one.

  4

  When Kelley Grey dropped to the floor, she had just brought the rifle up to her shoulder. She was in the process of adjusting it against the padding of her coat. Then all of a sudden, Kelley was out of sight. She was talking to herself and moving around on the ground. If it went on very much longer, the actors would be in from the play, and then what would she do? There was nothing to say Kelley would stick around until most of the rest of them were gone. She would have to go out to the rectory, and she really didn’t want that.

  “Shoes,” Kelley Grey said. “Stupid shoes.”

  She was moving around much too much.

  If you stay calm it will work no matter what, she told herself, watching Kelley move, hearing Kelley swear.

  Just remember.

  Her body is a magnet.

  Her body is a magnet for the bullets from this gun.

  Your hands are steady.

  All you have to do is fire.

  5

  “Damned stupid shoes,” Kelley Grey said to herself again, and then it went past her, hard air moving fast, and the next thing she heard was wood splintering and metal whining in complaint.

  “What the hell,” she said.

  6

  The first one missed but it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because she was absolutely calm. She was always absolutely calm at times like this. She steadied the rifle against her shoulder and fired again, felt the pull again, saw the bullet miss again. She didn’t panic because there was nothing to panic about. There was nobody and nothing in the universe but herself and this rifle and Kelley Grey. All she had to do was go on firing.