Stillness in Bethlehem (23 page)

Lately, Jan-Mark had begun to wonder if Reggie might be dangerous in a way more subtle than the obvious one, if what he had to fear from this yokel was less an outburst of rage—although that was coming; that was surely coming—than an indiscretion. Bisexuality might be par for the course in SoHo, but Jan-Mark was not stupid enough to believe it would be accepted with equanimity in Bethlehem, Vermont. It would be a wonderful excuse for an orgy of released repressed hostility, if that was the way to put it. Everybody up here hated him anyway. They’d just love to find a way to make his life a living hell. They’d made it hard enough over his affair with Gemma, which he had always known was an open secret, even if she had not. They probably hated art. Jan-Mark thought it might be about time to go back to the city, where homosexuals were of the out-of-the-closet, unconflicted, normal variety and bisexuals were as common as fast-food joints on an urban strip. He wished Tisha were still alive, so that he could tell her all about all of it and be comforted by the familiarity of one of her patented tantrums.

Last night, Jan-Mark had seen Reggie for an hour starting at seven-thirty, a quick roll and knock around while Reggie’s wife was off being in that idiotic play. Much later, he had seen Reggie again, unexpectedly, well after midnight, when Reggie came to tell him about Gemma Bury being dead. Reggie should have called, but he hadn’t wanted to, maybe because it was a kind of victory. Jan-Mark had three lovers and now two of them were dead, leaving Reggie to rule the roost alone. Or something. Jan-Mark hated psychoanalyzing people. He was bad at it and it only made a mess anyway. There were a thousand clinical explanations for why Reggie George was coming up his driveway again at eight-forty-five on this Tuesday morning, coming for the third time in under twenty hours, but Jan-Mark wanted to ignore them all. He preferred to think Reggie was just being a pain in the ass.

Reggie had come in his pickup truck, which he almost never did. That pickup truck was a signature, identifiable as Reggie’s from here to Montpelier. He had to be on his way to work. Jan-Mark watched as he stomped through the new snow to the basement door and punched at the bell. He waited a few moments before flipping on the intercom switch next to the kitchen table where he was sitting and calling down to his guest.

“I’m awake and watching you march through the nice clean precipitation,” he said to Reggie. “Come on up if you have to.”

“I have to.”

“I’m out of liquor.”

“It’s important.”

Jan-Mark was not out of liquor. He had three untouched bottles of Glenlivet sitting in his trunk upstairs, but he had no intention of bringing them out at this hour of the morning, and no intention of bringing them out for Reggie George at any time. Reggie was impressed when Jan-Mark got him a six-pack of Heineken beer. There was the sound of heavy boots coming up the open, polished cedar staircase. The staircase was spiral and Reggie always slipped on it once or twice when he came up. When he did he swore in the most direct and least imaginative way. He got to the kitchen level and worked his way out of the curving trap, shaking his right foot side to side in the air as if he’d minorly damaged his ankle.

“Shit,” he said. “I hate those stairs.”

“I know you hate those stairs,” Jan-Mark said patiently. “What
do
you like? Can I pour you some coffee?”

“I’ve got some coffee in the truck. And I’m in a hurry. I’m supposed to be on my way to work.”

“Maybe you talked to your wife about what we talked about last night. About making things a little more interesting.”

“No, I haven’t talked to my wife. I haven’t hardly seen my wife. She was asleep when I got back from here last night. It’s what I heard. That’s what I wanted to tell you. What I heard at breakfast this morning.”

“What did you hear?”

“That they found the gun, that’s what I heard,” Reggie said. “That foreign guy did it. Or he told Franklin’s people where to look, I guess. Right there in the park where it happened. It’s all over the CB.”

“You mean on the police band?”

“I mean people talking about it.” Reggie was impatient. “The news is all over town, JM. The only reason you don’t know about it is that you’re stuck all the way out here. And you don’t talk to anybody.”

“I talk to lots of people.”

“You don’t talk to anybody in town.”

All this time, Reggie had been bouncing around on the balls of his feet, rocking back and forth, taking his hands out of the pockets of his jacket and putting them back in again. He had said he was in a hurry and he was damn well going to look like he was in a hurry. That was how Jan-Mark saw it. Now Reggie seemed to decide that this was stupid, or to change his mind, or something. He pulled out one of the bentwood kitchen chairs and sat down.

“They found the gun,” he repeated.

“You said that.” Jan-Mark nodded.

“It was up in a tree. There aren’t a lot of trees in the park. Just a couple. It was in one of those, near that place where the animals go in and out. Maybe it was in a bush.”

“Maybe?”

“Well, I’m trying to remember what the park looks like, JM. I don’t go traipsing around in parks on a regular basis. Only time I’ve been through in years except to take a shortcut from Main Street to Carrow is going to see Candy in this play. And I guess it’s a bush, not really a tree. Big round pine bush, like the kind they use for hedges.”

“Clipped?”

“I don’t know,” Reggie said. “How should I know? Why the hell would anybody want to know?”

“Just asking,” Jan-Mark said.

“The point isn’t the bush,” Reggie said, “it’s the gun. That’s what I had to tell you. And about the silencer. Did I mention the silencer?”

“No,” Jan-Mark said.

“Whoever it was stuck a potato in the barrel for a silencer. Can you beat that? It must have been a woman. I mean it. Who’d do something that stupid? The damned rifle could go off right in your face.”

“But it didn’t,” Jan-Mark pointed out.

“No,” Reggie said, “no, it didn’t. But that’s the way it always is with bitches, isn’t it? All the dumb luck in the world.”

“Right,” Jan-Mark said.

Reggie George sniffed. “I mean, for Chrissake, JM, I wouldn’t have driven all the way out here in my own goddamn truck just because of a goddamn bush and a goddamn gun and a goddamn potato if it didn’t mean something.”

“So what does it mean?”

“It means it was the same gun,” Reggie said. “Stuart Ketchum’s gun. The Browning .22-caliber semiautomatic Grade I rifle. It had his name scratched right there in the base.”

“That’s the same gun as what?”

“What do you mean, the same gun as what? The same gun that blew away your goddamn wife, that’s as what. I mean, Christ, JM, where have you been? Don’t you even read the papers?”

“If you mean the local paper, not exactly. I do read the ads.” Jan-Mark sighed. “How could they possibly know it’s the same gun? Don’t they have to test the bullets? First test the bullets that hit Tisha and then test the ones from the gun and then test the ones that hit Gemma? Don’t they have to do all that before they know it’s the same gun?”

“They already did that with Tisha,” Reggie said. “They tested the bullets she was hit with, and then when Stuart found the gun missing, he got some spent shells from all that target practice he does and they tested those and the bullets that hit his tin cans and I don’t know what else, so they definitely know that’s the gun that killed your goddamn wife.”

“Right,” Jan-Mark said. Of course, none of that proved that this gun was the gun that had been shot at Gemma Bury. They’d have to test the bullets in Gemma’s body for that. None of it said that the gun was what it appeared to be, either: They’d have to test for that, too. He could have explained all this to Reggie, but he didn’t want to. It would have been too tiring. Explaining things to Reggie was about as easy as teaching a chicken to talk.

Jan-Mark looked into his coffee cup, reached for the Pyrex coffeepot on its warmer and considered lighting his sixteenth cigarette of the day. He even considered getting himself some booze.

Somehow, with Reggie George and phantom guns that mysteriously appeared in town park bushes, the day seemed to demand it.

Up the road toward town, on the other side of the stone wall, Kelley Grey sat in the kitchen of the Episcopal rectory, drinking her third cup of black coffee since six o’clock and wondering if she was ever going to get to sleep again. If she stayed at the rectory, she thought the answer would be no—which made it not so bad that the parish council was going to want the rectory back, and her out of it, in no time at all. How long no time at all was, Kelley didn’t know, but it presented problems. She might not be able to sleep in this place, but she didn’t have anyplace else to sleep. It was strange, the things she did even when she knew better. Gemma Bury hadn’t been her lover, but in some ways Gemma Bury might as well have been. They had been on those kinds of terms with each other in every way but the sexual. They had shared the house. They had shared the things they owned. They had shopped for food together and gone to the movies together and treated the car as if it was jointly owned between them. The difficulty was that nothing had been owned between them. Gemma was gone and with her everything that had served as a material foundation for Kelley Grey’s life.

As for the emotional foundation of Kelley Grey’s life, that was something else again, something that didn’t concern her for the moment. For the moment, she had no emotional life. It had been driven out of her like those small pieces of blood and skin and bone had been driven out of Gemma’s throat, through the back of Gemma’s neck, when the bullet had passed from her windpipe to her neck muscles to the empty air beneath the bleachers. Kelley wondered if that Gregor Demarkian person would call Gemma’s death an easy one, quick and painless, over before she knew it. It must have happened so fast and it seemed to Kelley to have been so terrible. Ugly, that was the word for it. Ugly. Kelley had been called ugly most of her life, behind her back, in whispers in the corners of girls’ rooms in high schools and colleges and scout camps and Sunday schools. She knew what the word meant. To her, Gemma’s death was about as ugly as it got. She just couldn’t feel it.

She just couldn’t feel anything—and that, she thought, was an advantage. At some point her armor of ice was going to melt, and from then on in she was going to be of no use to anyone. She was going to really believe that Gemma had been killed stone dead by a bullet aimed at her while Kelley herself was sitting right next to her and then it was all going to come apart. In the meantime, she had this small space in which to decide what to do and how to do it.

She got up, walked away from the kitchen table, walked down the hall to the foyer and the stairs. She looked up the stairs but didn’t climb them. That numb she was not. She couldn’t bear the idea of going up to her room or out of easy access to the door. The rectory was too big and it echoed. In the dark, in the halls of the second and third floor, out of sight of any human person, it whispered. Kelley had spent the night curled up on the couch in Gemma’s office, and she was going to spend every night curled up there until she found an apartment and could move out to be on her own. Now she moved around behind the staircase and let herself in to Gemma’s office. It was nine o’clock and the bells in the church were ringing. They were heavy cast-iron things and they tolled heavily, the way the bells had in a movie Kelley had once seen, about Marie Antoinette and the guillotine.

Kelley walked over to Gemma’s desk, pulled out the long center drawer and felt beneath it. The key to Gemma’s wall safe was there, fastened with tape. Kelley unhooked it without being careful. She had been careful all the times before, but there was no point to it now. She walked over to the large portrait of some fat dead divine that took up most of the north wall and pulled it aside. It swung on hinges like the safe-hiding portraits in English detective movies. It was odd to think that there had been an era when people really indulged in things like this.

The safe was high on the wall. It had been built by men and for men. Gemma had been tall. Kelley ignored the swivel chair behind the desk and got one of the wingbacks from near the couch instead. In the days when she used to be careful, she’d brought a straightback from the kitchen so she wouldn’t leave shoe prints in the wingback’s yellow upholstery. The wingback was a soft chair with a springy seat and hard to stand on. Kelley had to concentrate on her balance to keep herself from falling over. She pulled the chair as close to the wall as she could and got to work.

The safe was a simple one and there wasn’t much in it. Gemma’s birth certificate. Gemma’s bank books for the four investment accounts in Boston. Gemma’s packet of sentimental photographs, showing her arm in arm with all the wrong people in Boston. Gemma had never trusted the safe to hold anything anyone might want to steal. She’d kept her mother’s jewelry in the drawer of her night table next to her bed. The safe was for documents, and it was documents she kept in it, including the thick one in the stiff brown envelope in the back.

Kelley got that out, shut the safe and got back down off the chair. She pushed the portrait back against the wall and congratulated herself on not breaking her neck. Then she looked down at the envelope and frowned. It was a perfectly blank envelope except for a notation in the corner, in Gemma’s handwriting, in pencil, that said: “
TV/MS/SKC
.” Just to be sure, Kelley opened it up and pulled out the inch-thick sheaf of papers inside. The top one said: “
BORN IN BLOOD
. A Book About Children Who Kill.
By Patricia Feld Verek.” Kelley could see Gemma sitting in this room, playing with the manuscript pages and saying, “When this thing is published, it’s going to tear this town into tiny little shreds and throw them down over the Connecticut River like confetti. Always remember something, Kelley. It’s not how many people you offend that matters. It’s who.”

Well, Gemma had certainly offended somebody, and maybe so had Tisha Verek. Kelley just wished she understood who.