Stillness in Bethlehem (37 page)

“See what?”

“Into the Vereks’ driveway from the third floor of the rectory,” Kelley said. “It’s the highest place in at least a six-mile radius. You can see all kinds of things. Especially from the offices on that floor.”

“Is Gemma Bury’s office on that floor?”

“No, it’s downstairs. My office is on that floor.”

“Did you see anything on the day Tisha Verek was killed?”

“I didn’t, no,” Kelley said, “but Gemma saw Tisha Verek die. I went to the bathroom for a minute, and when I came back she was leaning against the office windows, looking positively green.”

“You went to the bathroom for a minute,” Gregor said slowly.

Kelley looked at him curiously. “It was the middle of the morning,” she said. “There wasn’t any reason not to go. You make it sound as if I did a terrible thing.”

“No,” Gregor said. “I don’t think you did a terrible thing.”

The fire in the fireplace was burning down, retreating from flames into embers. He stared at it a minute, thinking, and then pushed his chair back. He was still holding the manila envelope Kelley had given him, with its thick weight of manuscript inside. He stuck it absentmindedly under his arm.

“Well,” he said. “I have to thank you. For the package and the information.”

“And I have to go across to the park.” Kelley stood up. “Do you think any of this will be of any use to you?”

“I think it will be of a great deal of use.”

“I’m glad. I didn’t like Gemma very much. Gemma was a hard woman to like. But I didn’t want her dead.”

Gregor was going to make all the right soothing noises, to tell Kelley that she was brave and fine and wonderful, to cluck and mutter the way Tibor did when he got worried about one of the refugee children who had come to live on Cavanaugh Street. He never got a chance.

He had just opened his mouth to say the first words when a clatter and crash came from the street outside, and a woman started screaming.

Gregor Demarkian did not like cases with a lot of alarms in them. He didn’t like having to jump and twist and chase. He didn’t like having to march into the middle of dangerous and unstable situations. He had done all those things in his first years with the Bureau, but the timing in that fact was important. There were Bureau agents who spent their entire careers playing cops and robbers. In the old days, they had chased bank robbers and kidnappers. In the more recent ones, they had chased drug lords. On the day after tomorrow, they would probably be chasing aliens from outer space. Gregor didn’t care. He had found his niche behind a desk. He had loved the sheer mental work required to run an investigation on a series of related murders—the sheer mental work that did not require following serial killers down dark alleys with a gun in his hand. Since taking up the investigation of murder as a hobby rather than as a profession, Gregor seemed to have lost his protection from violence. It was infuriating. In all those books Bennis was forever giving him, the police did the chasing and the fighting and the getting shot at, and the Great Detective got to sit home in a chair and cogitate. Definitely cogitate. Not think. That was the way things were.

If Gregor had been a different man from a different generation, he might have insisted on this prerogative. He might have refused to go chasing screams when he heard them or murderers when he found them and there didn’t seem to be any other way to bring them down. He was of a generation that had been brought up to take responsibility—any responsibility, all responsibility, even when taking that responsibility made no sense of any kind whatsoever. In fact, that was what he had been given to understand was the real difference between men and women, back there in the days when people thought there were real differences between men and women. Women, Gregor Demarkian had been brought up to believe, could take responsibility or give it to their men as they chose, with no loss in status or respect. Men never could.

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!”