Stillness in Bethlehem (16 page)

Gregor finally reached a door that said
BETHLEHEM POLICE DEPARTMENT PLEASE COME IN
with a sign that wasn’t hand-lettered at all. He gave a perfunctory knock and walked in, expecting to find himself in a small room with a few desks scattered around it and an ancient metal filing cabinet full to overflowing. What he got was a very large room and no metal filing cabinet. The desks were new, and each one of them held a computer work station that seemed to be hooked into some larger system. There were a fair number of desks and a fair number of work stations, but not very many people. In fact, there were only two. A young man was sitting at a desk at the front, tapping things into his computer and swearing under his breath. Franklin Morrison was standing at a desk in the back, talking on the phone.

Franklin saw him, nodded and waved. Then the younger man looked up, flushed and stood.

“Oh,” he said. “You must be Gregor Demarkian.”

“That’s right,” Gregor told him. “Who are you?”

“Lee Greenwood.” Lee Greenwood looked down at his computer terminal, swore again and retook his seat. He tapped a few more things into the machine and sighed. “Excuse me,” he said, “but someone stole one of the camels again last night, and we’ve got to track it down. I mean, it can’t have gotten very far.”

“Kids,” Franklin Morrison said from the back of the room. He had hung up the phone and begun coming forward. “The kids always steal the livestock, meaning our kids, and don’t you know it was a mess the year we had the elephants. I don’t remember whose idea that was. Anyway, their kids, meaning the tourist kids, steal cars.”

“We’ve got a couple of those, too,” Lee Greenwood said. “The staties will find them.”

“Yeah, they will.” Franklin nodded. “They drive ’em out to the roadhouses on 91, and then when they can’t get served they have a fit. I still say it makes more sense than stealing a camel and sneaking it into Betty Heath’s barn. No, it was the elephant that ended up in Betty Heath’s barn. Woman damn near had a heart attack. Hello, Mr. Demarkian.”

“Hello,” Gregor said.

Franklin Morrison shook his head. “I suppose we sound like a pack of hicks to you. I guess we might as well. We are a pack of hicks.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t exactly say that,” Lee Greenwood protested.

“The only reason you wouldn’t is because you don’t have the sense God gave the rear end of a mule.” There was a small gate between the desks and the narrow front of the room. Franklin pushed it open and motioned Gregor inside. “Come take a look at the world’s most expensively outfitted hick cop shop. We got computers. We got labs. We got nationwide information hookups. We got anything you care to name, and the day those two women died I was sitting here feeling sorry for myself because we never got to use any of it. I’m seventy-two years old and I still don’t know a damn thing about a damn thing.”

Gregor looked around at the interior of the office, at the desks and the computer terminals, at the paper scattered around. What this police department needed was people. A dispatcher. A clerk. Somebody to take care of the paperwork housekeeping. He drew out a desk chair and sat down in it.

“Do you have a mobile crime unit?” he asked Franklin Morrison.

Franklin Morrison laughed. “I’ve got an MCU any station in New York City would die for. I’ve got a lab—”

“A lab?”

“Set up for fiber analysis, earth analysis, I don’t know what. Got this kid, Mary Dempsey’s oldest, goes to MIT on scholarship now. When I need something done, I pay him and he comes down and does it.”

“Do you need the lab often?” Gregor couldn’t imagine Bethlehem as a hotbed of crime. He couldn’t imagine Bethlehem as a hotbed of anything, except the terminally colonial.

But Franklin Morrison was nodding. “Traffic accidents,” he was saying. “And at least one outbreak of cabin fever every February, some asshole gets snowed in up in the hills and gets tanked up and decides life isn’t worth living. We could ask the staties to run the tests for us, but what for?”

“Rather not ask the staties for anything,” Lee Greenwood put in.

Franklin Morrison scratched his head. “Of course, sometimes the staties are useful. Like with these shootings here. I think we’d have had no end of trouble with those if we hadn’t had the staties standing by, ready to step in. They took the heat, if you get what I mean.”

“They did the tests and they made the pronouncements and whatever they said, it wasn’t your fault.” Gregor nodded. “But I’m surprised. I’d have thought you’d want to use that lab of yours when you had the chance.”

“We did,” Lee Greenwood said.

Gregor raised an eyebrow at Franklin Morrison and watched the chief blush.

“We didn’t tell anybody about it,” Franklin Morrison said, “but we ran the same tests here the staties ran down-state. Just to be sure, if you get what I mean.”

“Just to be sure of what?” Gregor demanded.

Lee Greenwood jumped in. “Franklin thought the state police were leaping to conclusions before they had any real evidence,” he said, “and I know what he meant, because I sort of felt that way, too. They hardly looked at anything at all before they decided we had hunting accidents.”

Gregor looked from Lee Greenwood to Franklin Morrison and paused. “Did you find anything different from what they found? Did you find any reason to doubt their conclusions?”

“No,” Lee Greenwood said.

Franklin Morrison had been standing near the gate he’d let Gregor in through. Now he pulled out a chair and sat down, moving his bulk carefully, and propped his feet up on an open desk drawer. In some men, that would have constituted attitude. In Franklin Morrison, Gregor thought, it was fatigue. Franklin Morrison was an old man. His feet hurt.

“Tisha Verek,” Franklin said, “was shot at nine-forty-one on the morning of Monday, December second, with a Browning .22-caliber semiautomatic Grade I rifle we now know belonged to Stuart Ketchum, son of Dinah Ketchum, who was also shot that morning but with a Marlin Model 70P Papoose—which also happens to be a semiautomatic and also happens to be a twenty-two, but a twenty-two long. Meaning the ammunition would not have been interchangeable. Anyway, both women were hit twice, once in the shoulder and once in the neck. We have a time for Tisha Verek because her husband says he saw her fall. We don’t have one for Dinah Ketchum because she wasn’t found until hours later, but we do have her schedule for the day, and the possibility is that she was shot close to the same time Tisha Verek was.”

“Are twenty-twos what people use to shoot deer?” Gregor asked.

“They’re a little light, but women use them sometimes. And flatlanders will use anything. We had the kid run the tests and the staties ran the tests, but I knew that Browning bullet just by looking at it. Stuart has a whole collection of guns out there. He puts in a lot of target practice and he likes to have company.”

“Meaning you’ve shot the gun yourself,” Gregor said.

Franklin nodded. “When we first saw this mess, I thought Stuart had gone round the bend, had some kind of delayed Vietnam syndrome and shot them both, but it couldn’t have been Stuart. He was with Peter Callisher all morning and the two of them went up to Tisha’s together. If you believe Jan-Mark Verek—and I only sort of half do—they got there within minutes of Tisha’s going down. Most people in town think Jan-Mark killed Tisha himself, stole Stu’s gun and just did it, but most people in town would do anything they could to get rid of Jan-Mark Verek. As a matter of principle.”

“Was he opposed to the Nativity Celebration, too?”

Franklin shook his head. “He’s just a general pain in the butt, that’s all. Speaks with a phony accent you can hear the Brooklyn under with no trouble at all. Goes berserk if anybody crosses his property, which means he goes berserk on a regular basis, because when it’s minus six with the wind chill and hip deep in snow, people take shortcuts. Then there’s the money. Jan-Mark isn’t so good about money. Remembering to pay people what he owes them, I mean. Most of the people up here who run small businesses or do personal work—chopping cordwood or raking leaves or painting houses—don’t have much of a cushion. If they put in the time, they expect to get paid.”

“He sounds altogether charming,” Gregor said. “Is there anything else wrong with him?”

“Probably. We just don’t know about it yet. So, Mr. Demarkian, you want to look at this stuff I’ve got for you.”

Gregor stood up. “I will if you want me to. You still have to understand that this isn’t the kind of evidence I’m used to dealing with. I mean, I’ve dealt with it, of course, but I’ve always relied on other people’s reports.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Franklin Morrison said. “So have I. But it isn’t the physical stuff I want you to see right this minute. I’ve got the Dempsey kid coming in; when he gets here he can walk you through that. It’s something else. I want your opinion about a probability.”

“A probability?”

Franklin Morrison took his feet off the open desk drawer, got up and went to the wall at the back of the room. The wall was blank, and along the top of it was a shade roll of the kind Gregor remembered from elementary school, the kind that pulled down to reveal a map of the United States. This one pulled down to reveal a map, too, but it was an extremely detailed map of the village and township of Bethlehem, Vermont, complete with roads, hills, woods and houses, with property lines clearly marked. It was in color, too. Franklin Morrison was very proud of it.

“Come here,” he told Gregor Demarkian. “I want to show you something very odd.”

G
EMMA BURY BELIEVED UNRESERVEDLY
in the primacy of experience—believed, to be precise, that the emotional response of a person experiencing something was infinitely more important than any matter of fact related to that something in life. Putting it into words was damn near impossible, but acting on it was not. Acting on it made Gemma Bury’s life a hundred times easier than it might have been. It saved her a lot of work, too. She believed the conspiracy theories in Oliver Stone’s
JFK
—in spite of the distortions everybody else seemed to find in it—because Oliver Stone’s
JFK
expressed the way the Kennedy assassination
felt
to her better than the Warren Report. She believed in astrology, too, at least in the sense of thinking that her destiny was at least partially controlled by the stars (and her menstrual cycle by the moon). It didn’t matter to her that the stars were not actually in the places that astrologers said they were. Gemma didn’t know where astrologers said they were. She didn’t know where astronomy said they were, either. It just
felt
right, this connection to the universe, this vast undifferentiated primal muck of space and time. Fortunately, Gemma never seemed to feel anything flagrantly opposed to common sense, such as that gravity wasn’t operating one day. She never went tripping out a tenth-story window, trusting the emotions that told her she could float. What she did do was write a lot of theology, both in the seminary and after she came to take up her position as pastor of the Episcopal Church in Bethlehem, Vermont. This theology had a great deal to do with Love, in the twentieth-century use of the term. It also had a great deal to do with sex, but Gemma never put it that way. Gemma thought of herself as a very natural personality. She enjoyed sex the way the ancient Greeks had—as an activity, not an identity—and liked to believe she had a lot in common with the Wife of Bath. What bothered her was that, since the deaths of Tisha Verek and Dinah Ketchum, she was becoming more and more convinced that her parishioners saw her the same way, and that wouldn’t do at all. What was really frightening was that they seemed to have known about her affair with Jan-Mark Verek all along. The phone in the rectory had started ringing only minutes after the news of Tisha Verek’s death had reached the village, and gone on ringing almost every hour of every day of the two weeks since. It was now two o’clock on the afternoon of Monday, December 16th, and Gemma’s head was aching. The little old ladies were driving her crazy, that was the truth. They were also having the time of their lives. Nothing this exciting had happened in Bethlehem since the Great Depression had given the Celebration its start.

There was a big evergreen wreath in the window of Abigail’s Fine Cheeses, and Gemma sat behind the wheel of her little Volvo, staring at it and wondering how long she could go on sitting in her car on Main Street before somebody stopped to ask her what was wrong. She’d left the rectory half an hour ago because she hadn’t been able to stand the idea of staying in it one more minute. Every time the phone rang, she wanted to scream. Every time Kelley asked her a question, she wanted to scream, too. She hated being around Kelley these days. She had hated it since the conversation they had had just before Tisha’s death, but she had begun to hate it more and more afterward. It was all mixed up. What did a philosophy of experience mean if you didn’t know what you were experiencing? She didn’t want to be near her phone. She didn’t want to be near Kelley Grey. She didn’t want to be near Jan-Mark, never mind in bed with him, where all she could remember was a hairy, boozed-out torso with sagging skin and too much flesh around the middle. She had driven out there today, before she’d come into town, and ended up parked by the side of the road, nauseated.

Abigail’s Fine Cheeses was right across the street from the
Bethlehem News and Mail
. The
Bethlehem News and Mail
was lit up more brightly than the town park and on fire with activity. The
Bethlehem News and Mail
was always like that, even on the day after they put out an issue. Peter Callisher was some kind of throwback to the nineteenth century, a capitalist baron with a stable of wage slaves. Either that, or they were having orgies in there. Gemma Bury thought of Tisha hinting and hinting about the points of resemblance between Tommy Hare and Timmy Hall, and found herself getting nauseated all over again.

If I go on like this I’ll never get anything done, Gemma told herself. Then she popped the door to her car and swung her legs out into the road. Main Street had been closed off to traffic at one, as it was on every day when an actual performance of the Nativity play was scheduled. Gemma didn’t have to look out for cars or worry about being crushed by a farm vehicle on its way to the Grange. She stretched a little in the cold air and shut the car door behind her. She didn’t bother to lock it because nobody but tourists ever locked anything in Bethlehem, Vermont. There were people on the street, but nobody around she knew, which was a blessing.