Stillness in Bethlehem (15 page)

He passed the offices of the
Bethlehem News and Mail
and looked through the big plate-glass window on the ground floor to see a dozen people scurrying around, apparently being directed by a young blonde woman with Alice-in-Wonderland hair. A tiny evergreen tree had been set up on a desk near the middle of the room and decorated with twinkly lights and too much tinsel. Gregor had always been partial to too much tinsel. He passed the pharmacy and looked in its window at a display of spray-snow and Santa Claus. He passed the town’s only three parking meters—all in front of the Town Hall—and saw that red ribbons had been tied just at the top of the poles holding up each one. The small town park was almost exactly at the intersection of Main and Carrow, so he passed that, too, but he didn’t stop to look at it. Nothing was going on there that hadn’t been going on yesterday. The first of the week’s performances would start tonight at eight. Anything he might be interested in that might be going on in the park would keep till then.

Gregor got to Carrow, turned the only way he could, and went on walking. The townscape changed from blocks of stores to blocks of houses with shingles on their lawns, advertising treasures within. Gregor passed a small Victorian that called itself Ethan Allen’s Used Books, a smaller colonial that promised Hand-Sewn Quilts, and a positively minuscule Cape Cod whose sign read “Yankee Fashions—Original Needlework and Crochet.” All the houses had wreaths on their doors and some sort of bright abeyance to Christmas in their front windows. The Cape Cod had a hanging row of knitted reindeer with bits of glitter in their fur. Gregor thought Christmas stockings would have been more to the point, but admitted he didn’t really know. Who patronized shops like these on out-of-the-way streets? Who turned in at the sign in front of the decaying farmhouse that said “Fish Taxidermy Done Here”? Who bought birdhouses from the stack in the yard of the small brick ranch? The houses were all so small and so close to the road and so close to each other—old for real, then, and not just built recently to look old. Just how old, Gregor couldn’t tell. The Cape Cod might go back as far as the Revolutionary War. The small brick ranch probably dated from the end of the Second World War. The people who lived in these houses could be anybody at all, but Gregor was willing to bet they were people who had moved here from other places. In his experience, people who grew up with antique houses didn’t appreciate them half as much as people who’d spent their childhoods in splendid suburban comfort, complaining all the time that perfect plumbing and instantaneous heat made their lives “plastic.”

Fish taxidermy. Quilts. Used Books. Birdhouses. Gregor couldn’t use any of those, but Bennis liked hand-knit cotton sweaters and he hadn’t bought her anything for Christmas yet. What he ought to buy her was a critical review of the fantasy genre that rated Stephen Donaldson’s books several notches above her own, just to drive her as crazy as she had driven him with Curty Gentry’s take on the FBI, but he was better than that. He backed up until he was standing in front of the Cape Cod and looked at its window. The knitted reindeer were lumpy and creased. They didn’t give him a great deal of confidence. Still, you could never tell. And if everything was awful, it might not matter. What could something cost, being sold in a place like this?

Less than two minutes later, Gregor was standing in the Cape Cod’s front hall, knocking snow off his shoes onto a mat and answering his own question. There was an absolutely beautiful knitted sweater draped over the top of a dressmaker’s dummy in the corner of what seemed to be the only room on this floor. The sweater was a bright red with black-and-white reindeer leaping across it in rows. It was exquisitely done, and it had a sign under it that said $360. Next to that sign was another sign that said
VISA AND MASTERCARD ACCEPTED
. Gregor was relieved.

At the back of the room, a young woman with long brown hair was sitting at a long table, talking to another young woman whose hair was just as brown but very short, and enlivened by a broad streak of white that was startling because it was natural. The short-haired young woman had to be thirty-five at least, but she reminded Gregor so strongly of girls he had known in high school, he had to keep reminding himself of the fact. What the girl who was standing looked like was the captain of a field hockey team, all raw bones and awkwardness and tomboyish delicacy. It was a look Gregor had always found peculiarly attractive. The long-haired young woman was more traditionally feminine, but she seemed to Gregor the clone of hundreds of others, all relentlessly addicted to Indian prints.

The two young women had stopped talking when he came in. Now they stared at him politely, waiting for him to make a move. Gregor looked back at the red sweater, checked his pockets for his wallet and said, “I’d like to buy this.”

The short-haired young woman laughed. “My God, Maria. The man must be in love.”

Maria stood up and came around the table. “It’s not possible,” she said. “Gregor Demarkian is a great detective. Great detectives don’t fall in love.”

“I don’t believe it,” the short-haired woman said. “It didn’t say that in the article.”

“It didn’t have to.”

“I think if it were true, Peter would at least have mentioned it.”

“Peter mentioned him having a ‘constant companion,’ ” Maria said, “but I figured that was just his overworked girl Friday. You know what men are like. She probably makes him coffee, carries his books, runs his theories through the computer and gets a reputation as a bubblehead for her trouble.”

Gregor Demarkian smiled as best he could. “If you’re talking about Bennis Hannaford,” he said, “she’s never been anyone’s girl Friday in her life, she doesn’t carry anything and she blows up her own computer at least twice a month. She does make coffee, but I think that’s in self-defense.”

“You probably think you need some self-defense,” Maria said. “Have we been very bad? Have we thoroughly embarrassed you?”

“No, not really,” Gregor admitted. “When I saw that newspaper story, I resigned myself to the inevitable. I take it your name is Maria.”

“That’s right,” Maria said. “And this is Sharon. Sharon Morrissey.”

“How do you do,” Sharon Morrissey said.

“Do the two of you run this shop together?”

Maria was getting the sweater down from the dressmaker’s dummy, being careful to remove the pins one by one and straight out, so they wouldn’t snag on the cotton yarn.

“I run the store,” Maria said. “Sharon lives out on the Delaford Road and writes children’s books her housemate illustrates.”

“My housemate is named Susan Everman.”

“They came out here from New York together and went native.”

Maria stopped in her removal of the pins and looked back over her shoulder at Gregor. Sharon crossed her arms over her stomach and looked at Gregor, too. Gregor didn’t know whether to feel amused or exasperated. Obviously, this was the test they put people to—these broad hints that Sharon and her housemate were gay, these long seconds waiting for a reaction. What did they expect him to do? He made it a point never to have opinions about the consensual sexual behavior of other people—even Bennis—but even if he had been stuffed full of hostility to homosexuals, what could he possibly have done? Tibor would have sailed blissfully past the question, as if it hadn’t existed, and asked Sharon to see one of the books she wrote for children.

Whatever he did do passed muster. Sharon looked at Maria and Maria looked back, and there was a recognizable easing of tension in the room. Maria went back to getting the sweater down from the dummy, and Sharon took the seat behind the table.

“The problem is,” Maria said, “everybody already knows you’re here, and it’s such a surprise. I mean, it would have been less of a big deal if you’d registered at the Inn under your own name.”

“I didn’t register at the Inn at all,” Gregor said. “Bennis registered. Do you want some help getting that over the top?”

“I’m fine.” Maria had kicked a stepstool into place and was climbing on it. “It’s just that Peter Callisher made such a big deal about that Thanksgiving thing, with your picture all over the paper three weeks running and all these gory details he kept picking up from his friends in Boston and New York.”

“And then there were the shootings,” Sharon said.

“So when you showed up, it looked like a conspiracy.” Maria draped the sweater over her arm and headed back for the table. Gregor got out his wallet and began searching for his Visa card. Maria put the sweater down and got out a sales-slip book. “It really does look like a conspiracy,” she continued, “especially since everybody in town knows that Franklin Morrison has always been a big fan of yours—Franklin Morrison is the chief of police.”

“I know,” Gregor said. “That’s what I’m doing here. I’m going down to the police station to visit. Invited.”

Sharon cocked her head. “Are you here to investigate the shootings?”

“No.” Gregor handed over his credit card. “I’m here to give a friend of mine a vacation, and myself a vacation, and Bennis Hannaford a chance to nag. From what I’ve heard of your shootings, I tend to think the state police were right.”

“You mean that they were hunting accidents.” Sharon frowned.

Maria spread tissue paper across the top of the table. “The sweater you’re buying was made by one of the women who died,” she said. “Dinah Ketchum. She was eighty-something. Best handwork artist in all this part of Vermont. She did quilts, too.”

“She has some still on sale over at the Celebration,” Sharon said. “Last year she sold an eight-by-seven wedding quilt for fifteen hundred dollars.”

“All the people who make this sort of thing and do it right are old ladies,” Maria said. “Part of that’s the experience—the more of it you do, the better you get at it. Nobody’s going to be able to make a sweater like this one at twenty. But part of it’s the patience. Women now don’t seem to have the patience. I don’t have the patience.”

“It paid off for Dinah,” Sharon pointed out. She looked up at Gregor. “Jan-Mark Verek was absolutely obsessed with her stuff. Usually you only get really big prices during the tourist invasions—Christmas for the Celebration, July and August with people on vacations, sometimes winter if the snow’s been good and we have some overflow from the ski places. Dinah could get what she wanted any time at all. If she made it, Jan-Mark would buy it.”

“He said he painted them, but you couldn’t tell from what came out,” Maria said. “I mean, he’s very abstract and very postmodernist.”

“In fact, he’s probably crazy.” Sharon nodded. “That’s the big theory in town, you know. That Jan-Mark shot Tisha and got rid of the gun.”

“Just Tisha?” Gregor asked. “Not Dinah Ketchum?”

“People think the police were right about Dinah Ketchum,” Maria said. “She was way far out in the middle of nowhere, and Jan-Mark couldn’t have gotten to her. Besides, she wasn’t shot with the same gun.”

“She wasn’t that far out,” Sharon insisted. “Everybody here is always talking about how far away things are, but they aren’t. This isn’t Wyoming.”

“Well, Jan-Mark was standing in the living room of his own house not ten minutes after Tisha was shot, looking at her bleeding to death in the driveway and not doing a damned thing when Stu and Peter showed up. I don’t care how close Dinah was, Jan-Mark couldn’t have gotten to her and back in time.”

“You’re acting like this is
Mystery Theater
,” Sharon said. “Timetables and who could have been where when. Life isn’t like that. In life, things just happen. Isn’t that right, Mr. Demarkian?”

“Mmm,” Gregor Demarkian said.

The sweater was wrapped in tissue paper and deposited in a bag. The bag was blue and gold and had twined gold handles to carry it with. Gregor put his credit card back in his wallet.

“Could I come pick this up on my way back?” he asked. “I can’t see myself walking into a police station with it in hand.”

“I’ll take it over to the Inn and drop it off for you, if you want,” Sharon told him. “It’s on my way. I’m supposed to read for the kindergarten at the library today.”

“I think it’s too bad you didn’t come to town to investigate the shootings,” Maria said. “I don’t care what anybody thinks. They were creepy.”

Gregor didn’t know if they were creepy or not. He did know there was something very odd about that fact that no one at all—not Chief Morrison, not the newspaper article—had mentioned that there was any connection between Dinah Ketchum and Tisha Verek.

In fact, everybody seemed to have been going out of their way to imply that there wasn’t one.

If Gregor Demarkian had been a speculating man, he would have guessed that the Bethlehem Police Department would be a hole-in-the-wall operation—and when he first got there, that was what he thought it was. The hand-lettered sign that marked the turn from Carrow to Williams Street said
TO POLICE AND NEW TOWN HALL
. Just as Gregor had suspected from that oracle, the police department was in the basement of the New Town Hall. Just why Bethlehem, Vermont, needed a new town hall when the old one was apparently still in operation on Main Street, Gregor couldn’t begin to imagine, so he didn’t try. Instead, he made his way up the carefully shovelled steps to the New Town Hall’s wreath-adorned doors, let himself inside, and followed the meager directions on another hand-lettered sign to the basement. New Town Hall was better than he had expected, because it was very new, very clean and very well built. Most of what you got in very small towns was decaying infrastructure and secondhand accoutrements. There were more hand-lettered signs in the basement, and Gregor followed these, too, looking with interest at one that said “jail cells” and pointed to the back of the building. The jail cells in Bethlehem, Vermont, must have all the cheerfulness of the dungeon rooms at Glencannon Castle. Another sign said MCU and had been appended to:
ANYONE TAKING OUT THE MCU MUST SIGN FOR THE KEYS IN THE OFFICE
. For Gregor, “MCU” would always mean “mobile crime unit,” but here he didn’t believe it. Mobile crime units were enormously expensive. Towns the size of this one didn’t have them.