Stillness in Bethlehem (27 page)

Franklin reached the Delaford Road himself. He was wearing thick-soled hob boots, and he stamped them on the asphalt as soon as he was able.

“You want to walk,” he said. “You’re absolutely sure.”

“I’m absolutely sure.”

“Fine.”

Franklin started walking up the road in the direction of the Episcopal Church spire and the big white house, and Gregor followed behind. It was cold and windy and miserable, with only sporadic bursts of sunlight to alleviate the gloom, but although it was farther than Gregor might otherwise have chosen to walk in this weather, it was not actually far. In no time at all they were in front of the church itself, rising stone-built and majestic from a bed of untrammeled snow. Less than a minute later, they had reached a place from which they could see the front door of the rectory in the distance. Gregor nodded to himself, checking his watch and counting in his head. They were two older men—older was as far as he would go; he wasn’t ready for Franklin Morrison’s “old.” A younger man or woman would have been much quicker, and it wouldn’t have taken him very long at all. Franklin flapped his arms in the air to get warm.

“We could go up there and pay a call on Ms. Kelley Grey,” he said, gesturing toward the rectory. “I’d like to talk to her again anyway. I’d like to talk to her for a good long time.”

“I’d like to talk to her, too,” Gregor said, “but not right now. Does she live up there all the time?”

“Far as I know. She’s in some kind of graduate program or something downstate, I think.”

“Were she and Gemma Bury close?”

Franklin Morrison shrugged. “Hard to tell with flatlanders. They go on at each other so much. They spent a lot of time together.”

“What about Gemma Bury and Tisha Verek?”

Franklin Morrison snorted. “Aside from the fact that Gemma was getting it on with Tisha’s husband, I don’t know what you could possibly be talking about. I got to tell you, Mr. Demarkian, I do not spend a lot of time worrying how the people out here are behaving themselves, except for Stu and his wife, of course, because they’re friends. As for these other people,” his sweeping arm took in the Vereks and the Episcopal rectory both, “who can tell?”

“Try to guess,” Gregor suggested. “Tisha Verek and Gemma Bury.”

“They talked,” Franklin said. “They knew each other better than they knew any of us, and that includes better than Gemma knew her parishioners, who would really appreciate it if she’d go off and worship the goddess in Boston. Except now she can’t. If you see what I mean.”

“I see what you mean. This is a stone wall.”

This was most certainly a stone wall. It was nearly covered over by towering evergreen trees, but it was more than broad enough to walk on, assuming the trees did not impede your progress. Gregor hesitated and looked up the road.

“What’s just beyond here?” he asked. “The Verek place?”

“That’s right. You can’t see much with all the trees, but you’re only a few hundred steps from the Verek driveway.”

“How long to walk?”

“For us?” Franklin grinned. “Forever. For a good healthy young person, less than two minutes. If that.”

“All right,” Gregor said. He turned back to the stone wall and began to climb slowly onto it, being careful not to slip. Frozen rock is slick. It would be all too easy to fall and break his head. The day Tisha Verek and Dinah Ketchum had been killed, there had been little or no snow on the ground, and the temperature had been warm for the season. Gregor remembered that from the report Franklin had shown him. That was good. If the temperature hadn’t been warm, anybody who’d tried to do this would have killed himself long before he managed to kill anybody else.

Actually, it wasn’t that bad. Once away from the road and into the trees, the branches were not so encroaching and the surface of the stones did not feel so treacherous. Gregor was able to stand up tall and walk normally, with Franklin panting and swearing behind him. Gregor kept his memory of the map Franklin had drawn him as clear as possible in his mind and plunged ahead, looking to the right and to the left, into the trees on each side.

“All this land used to belong to Stuart’s people,” Franklin said. “The first they sold off was to the Episcopal Church back in the 1800s, and then just a few years ago they sold the lot to the Vereks. Stashing cash. All the farmers are stashing cash these days. There’s not enough money to be made from farming.”

“What’s that I see through the trees?” Gregor asked. “Looks like glass.”

“That’s the Verek house,” Franklin said. “Look the other way and you can see the hill the rectory’s built on, but not the rectory, because it’s too high up. The Verek place is bolted into the side of the hill and down in a valley. Don’t ask me why they did it like that. Don’t ask me why they built all that glass. At my house, glass like that would make my heating bills impossible.”

“Do they have a view? Is there something they can see through the glass?”

“Nothing but more trees and the sides of more hills,” Franklin said, “which is mostly what flatlanders are looking for, I guess. You want a real good look at some people, you ought to go up to the third floor of the rectory. That’s the highest point anywhere for miles.”

“Mmm,” Gregor said. He ran it through his mind and came up blank. He couldn’t see a single reason why the rectory’s view of the town of Bethlehem ought to get anyone murdered.

He went plowing on ahead, stone after stone. After a while, he couldn’t see much of anything. It felt entirely natural. Walking in trees. Not being able to see the sky.

“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.”

A
MANDA 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.”

“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.