Stillness in Bethlehem (2 page)

“I don’t know,” Peter said. “It’s been much too quiet. Don’t you think it’s been much too quiet?”

“I think I’ve got much too much work to do to worry about whether it’s been much too quiet.”

“I don’t know.” Peter sighed. “It’s opening day. Every year before opening day, we have a crisis. Where’s the crisis?”

“Maybe Dinah Ketchum will finally shoot that daughter-in-law of hers dead, and we can all get ready to listen to another lecture from Montpelier about how we have to bring Vermont into the twentieth century. Are you going to let me get back to work?”

“Sure.”

“You ought to do something yourself,” Amanda said. “At least look like you’re doing something. If you don’t, Timmy Hall is going to come up and give you five awful ideas for the paper.”

Timmy Hall was nowhere to be seen, which was par for the course for Timmy. Their copy boy always seemed to be either underfoot or invisible. He always left Peter wondering how old he really was.

Peter shook that out of his head, watched Amanda go back to her desk and turned to look back out at Main Street again. He was being an old Nelly, of course, but he couldn’t really help himself. Small towns like this were full of people whose deepest wish was to have a television camera aimed at them. There would be a lot of television cameras on hand for the opening of the Celebration, and the nuts should have come out of the trees by now. So where were they?

Peter considered the possibility that this year there would be no nuts at all, and no trouble, either, and dismissed it out of hand. He had been around the world and back. He had been born and brought up in this very town. He knew better.

He decided to take his mind off it by looking at the mock-up for the front page, which was always news from Away and always amusing. It was a front page he was particularly proud of, because it had everything—as far as Bethlehem, Vermont, was concerned. In the first place, it was about violence in the flatlands, which allowed the citizens of Bethlehem to congratulate themselves on how intelligent they had been to stick around
here
. In the second place, it was violence with style and a kind of Agatha Christie twist, which made it fun to read. There was even a picture, a great big smudged-looking thing of a thick tall man with a Middle Eastern solemnity to his face. The headline read:

HIGH SEAS MYSTERY: DEMARKIAN NABS

MURDERER ON BILLIONAIRE’S BOAT

Then there was a subhead, one he’d written himself:

THE ARMENIAN-AMERICAN HERCULE POIROT

SOLVES ANOTHER ONE

It was too good to be true.

It was so good, in fact, that Peter Callisher used it as one more proof positive that a disaster was about to befall them.

Tisha Verek had been the wife of a notorious man long enough to know how to behave, and on this morning of December second—with a thin mist of snow falling on the barren ground of her summer garden and the half-light of a cloud-occluded dawn making all the world look gray—she was behaving herself with a vengeance. It was eight o’clock in the morning, much too early to get anything done in New York—but this was not New York. This was Bethlehem, Vermont, where Tisha and her husband Jan-Mark had moved five years before, during one of Jan-Mark’s counterphobic fits. Tisha often had trouble believing that Jan-Mark was really
here
, in Vermont, in the country, and that he hadn’t vanished into smoke as soon as the carbon dioxide began to thin in the air. Jan-Mark was that quintessential urban invention, the contemporary artist. He smoked too much, drank too much, swore too much and snorted too much cocaine. He hand-stretched custom canvases to forty feet in length and pasted them over with twice-washed trash. He painted red-and-black acrylic swirls on conventional four-by-eights and called the results “Cunnilingus.” Most of all, he met other men like himself, and women, too, in heavy-metal bars where the air was thick with marijuana smoke. Back in the city, all but one of his friends had AIDS. The one had made a vow to Buddha in 1972 and lived in an apartment filled with joss sticks and chimes.

Tisha had never made a vow to anyone, anywhere. She hadn’t even made a vow to Jan-Mark at their wedding. She’d written the ceremony herself, and she’d been very careful about all that. Tisha had been very careful about almost everything in her life. She was forty years old and looked thirty, the result of decades of patiently taking care. Her thick red hair was the color of flame and only barely touched up. It floated out from her skull in the tight crimps of a natural wiriness. Her skin had the hard smoothness of good porcelain. In the winter it grew faintly pink with cold, but in the summer it wasn’t allowed to tan at all. She weighed ten pounds less and wore jeans two sizes smaller than she had at seventeen. The refrigerator was full of crudités and the basement was full of dumbbells to take care of that. Once upon a time, she had been a lumpy girl named Patty Feld, growing up unpopular in Dunbar, Illinois. She had made a promise to herself then about what she would become. She had made meticulous plans for taking elaborate revenge. In the years since, she had made herself into exactly what she had promised herself to make herself into, and every once in a while, she had indulged herself in a little revenge. Patricia Feld Verek had never been the sort of person it made sense to cross, not even as a child. At the age of five, she had put a snake in the lunchbox of the only mentally retarded girl in her class. At the age of twelve, she had told twenty-six people that Mary Jean Carmody was going all the way with Steven Marsh, which wasn’t true. The fact that it wasn’t true hadn’t helped Mary Jean Carmody any, because Steven was hardly going to deny it. Tisha had wanted Mary Jean off the junior cheerleading squad, and Mary Jean had been thrown off. Now what Tisha wanted was something definitive, a token of power, from the people of Bethlehem, Vermont. This was the morning on which she intended to get it. After all, it only made sense. This was a terrible place, a prison, a cesspool. This was the pit of hell dressed up to look like Santa’s Workshop. Tisha had been around long enough to know.

The house where Tisha and Jan-Mark lived was not an old farmhouse but a new log one, four levels high, stuck halfway up a mountain and surrounded by trees. The second level was a loft that served as their bedroom, screened from nature and the living room only by a thick built-in bookcase that acted as a headboard for the bed. Standing on this level, just past the bookcase on either side, Tisha could see down into the living room with its massive fieldstone fireplace and chimney. She could also see back into the bedroom, where Jan-Mark was lying fetuslike in the bed, smothering himself under four Hudson Bay point blankets and a down quilt. He was dead to the world, and Tisha didn’t blame him. He’d been up until two o’clock in the morning, drinking blended Scotch whiskey and singing along to ancient Beach Boys records.

There were a pair of cedar chests at the foot of their oversized, custom-made bed. Tisha opened one of them, pawed through the sweaters until she found one dyed a bright lime green, and pulled the sweater over her head. Tisha liked colors like lime green. They clashed with her hair and made people nervous. She liked Jan-Mark being asleep, too. Jan-Mark liked to
épater la bourgeoisie
, but only for Art and only when he started it. He hated it when she went off on her own, doing all kinds of things he didn’t understand, making people upset for no good reason he could see. Tisha didn’t care about that—in her opinion, Jan-Mark didn’t see much—but she didn’t like to argue, and if it was all over and done with by the time he found out about it, he wouldn’t bother to make a fuss. Back in New York, Jan-Mark had been legendary for his rages, but that was theater.

At the bottom of the cedar chest there was a stack of leg warmers. Tisha took out the ones that matched the sweater she was wearing, considered exchanging them for a pair in tangerine orange and decided against it. That sort of thing violated her sense of order. She pulled the leg warmers up over her knee socks, anchored her jeans to her ankles with them, and stood up.

“Son of a
bitch
,” Jan-Mark said from his nest of wool and feathers.

“Daughter of one, too,” Tisha said equably. Then she turned her back on him and walked away, around the bookcase, across the balcony, to the spiral stairs that led to the balcony above. She could hear him snoring after her as she went.

The balcony above was where their “offices” were—her office, really, and Jan-Mark’s studio. They were both simply large open spaces divided by a four-inch construction of good drywall. Tisha had to pass Jan-Mark’s studio to get where she wanted to go. She looked in on paints and canvases and easels and palettes and a life-sized poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger from
Terminator II
. Her office was much more organized, much more efficient. The Macintosh had its own hard-plastic work station in one corner. The corkboards that lined the walls were themselves lined with pictures, portraits of the people in her latest project. Tisha Verek was a “writer,” particulars undefined, but she was a “writer” with good connections. She had had four true-crime books published already and was now working on a fifth. This time, instead of writing about a single crime, putting the details together the way she’d put together a novel, she was working on a concept, on a theory. The photographic portraits on her corkboards were all of children between the ages of five and twelve years old. Each and every one of those children had committed at least one murder, and three had committed more than five.

Tisha sat down in the big armchair she kept next to her phone and looked up at her favorite corkboard of all, what she thought of as her gallery of grotesques. On this corkboard she had Mikey Pellman, who had cut the throats of three of his kindergarten classmates during a school picnic in Andorman, Massachusetts, in 1958. When he was asked why he’d done it, Mikey’d said he wanted to know if everyone had the same color of blood. She also had Tommy Hare, who had waited until he was twelve but shown a good deal more imagination. He had killed his ex-girlfriend and the boy she’d dumped him for by electrocuting them in a swimming pool. That wouldn’t have gotten Tommy onto this corkboard in and of itself, except for the fact that there had been twenty-two other people in that swimming pool at the time, and Tommy had had to stand at the edge of it with a cattle prod in his hand to get the job done. All in all, this was by far the best of the corkboards, much better than the one she kept near her computer, to give herself inspiration. That one had the pictures of people who fit her theory without stretching, like Stevie Holtzer, who at the age of seven pushed the father who beat him down the cellar stairs and broke his neck, or Amy Jo Bickerel, who put a bullet through the head of the uncle who forced her into finger-probing trysts in the front seat of his car when she was eleven. There was something about those people that Tisha didn’t like at all—as if it were less attractive to kill for a reason rather than for the sheer ecstasy of doing it.

She got the phone untangled from its cord, checked the number on her phone pad although she knew it by heart and began to punch buttons. The beeps and whirs that sounded in her ear made her think of R2D2 and those silly
Star Wars
movies. Then the phone started to ring, and she sat back to wait. Tisha could be as patient and as understanding as the next woman if she wanted to be, and today she wanted to be. She had been thinking long and hard about what she was going to do and how she was going to do it. She had even consulted a lawyer in New York and paid him eight hundred dollars for his opinion. She was as sure as anyone could be that nothing on earth could stop her.

All she had to do now was set her little time bombs and wait.

Franklin Morrison had been the chief lawman for Bethlehem, Vermont, for far longer than he wanted to remember, and during most of that time he had been desperately dreaming of escape. Exactly what he wanted to escape from, he wasn’t sure. Sometimes he thought it was just the job. He kept telling himself he could quit any time he wanted to. He didn’t even have to think of anything else to do. He had his Social Security and a little pension the town had helped him set up twenty years ago. He owned his house free and clear, and the taxes on it weren’t heavy. He could retreat to his living room and his vast collection of the novels of Mickey Spillane and never have to hear another word about the Bethlehem Nativity Celebration as long as he lived. Sometimes he thought it was all much more complicated than that. What he really wanted to escape from was Vermont, and snow, and winter. His best friend, Charlie Deaver, had gone down to live in Florida a year ago, and in the letters Charlie’s wife sent, Florida sounded like a cross between Walt Disney heaven and the Promised Land. Then Franklin would get to thinking about it, and even Florida would not be enough. He’d begin to wonder what was out there. He’d begin to dream about spaceships to Jupiter. He’d find himself standing in the checkout line in the supermarket at the shopping center over in Kitchihee, New Hampshire, staring long and hard at the front page of
The Weekly World News
. “Woman Murdered By Fur Coat.” “Psychic Reveals: ELVIS CAPTURED BY ALIENS FOR EXPERIMENTS ON ALPHA CENTAURI.” “A Diet That Eats Your Fat Away While You Sleep.” He’d begin to think he was going nuts.

On this second day of December, Franklin Morrison didn’t have to think he was going nuts. He knew he was going nuts. It was the opening day of the Celebration. Peter Callisher might look out on the town and think that all was quiet, but Franklin knew better. Oh, there was nothing major going on, not yet. Jackie Dunn hadn’t had enough liquor to want to bed down in the crêche. Stu Ketchum hadn’t staggered in from the hills with an illegal deer over his shoulders and too much ammunition left for that damned automatic rifle he’d bought. Even Sarah Dubay had been reasonably quiet. Now there was a lady who believed in life on Jupiter—and in Elvis being captured by aliens, for all that Franklin knew. The only reason that Sarah wasn’t a bag lady was that places like Bethlehem, Vermont, didn’t allow old women to wander around the streets with nowhere to go.