Stillness in Bethlehem (26 page)

Tibor would have said that there was so much sexual corruption going on everywhere, that that was one of the things Christianity had been trying for two thousand years to mitigate and explain. Then he would have gone on to show why explanations would be thick on the ground but mitigation nearly nonexistent, and then he would have started down a path that would have led him inevitably to the Greek Schism, which was where all philosophical discussion led Tibor sooner or later. For Tibor, the split between the Eastern and Western churches in the twelfth century—or whenever; Tibor would know, Gregor didn’t—was the determinative factor in every disastrous thing that had happened since, from the decline of Latin as a universal language to the Holocaust, from the corruptions of Baroque architecture to Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols. Tibor had a surprisingly wide range of general knowledge.

Gregor pulled his legal pad close to him and wrote

What Tisha Verek and Gemma Bury had in common

at the top of a page. Underneath it he wrote

Jan-Mark Verek

and then blew a raspberry. Certainly they had other things in common. He tried

not from town

contemplated First Amendment suit against Celebration

lived next-door to each other on the Delaford Road

and considered it. That third one had possibilities. In all the fuss about Tisha Verek and Gemma Bury and who Jan-Mark Verek was sleeping with now, Dinah Ketchum got lost. Dinah Ketchum was part of the equation, even if only as a curiosity. She had either to be incorporated in any theory that attempted to unravel the intricacies involved in the other two deaths, or explained away. Dinah Ketchum had also lived next door to Gemma Bury, although not on the Delaford Road. From what Gregor remembered of the map he had made with Franklin Morrison yesterday, the Ketchum property also bordered the Vereks’, back to back. He tried

Tisha Verek was blackmailing Gemma Bury

and didn’t like it. Gregor had no doubt that Susan Everman had been telling the truth. He had no doubt that Tisha Verek had tried to take advantage of what she knew in just the way Susan had said she had. The more Gregor learned about Tisha, the less he liked her. The problem with blackmail, though, was that it took not only two people, but two distinct prerequisites. It made sense for Tisha Verek to try to blackmail Susan Everman. Susan had had mob connections—otherwise known as a guilty secret—and it was possible that those connections had made her flush with money. That was what was needed. A guilty secret. And the possession of money by the man or woman who harbored the secret. Gemma Bury may very well have been spending her overnight excursions to Boston worshiping Satan in the back room of a homophobic gin mill. Tisha Verek may very well have found out about it. That didn’t give Gemma Bury the kind of money she would need to make it worth Tisha’s while not to tell. As for the rest of the actors in this drama—Gregor was ready to throw up his hands. Nuts they all most definitely were. Impecunious they also all most definitely were. Something might come up to change the situation later—something often did—but from the way it looked at the moment, he thought he could rule the blackmail out. He tried

Tisha Verek
threatened
to blackmail people

and liked that better. The threat of blackmail, especially to someone who could not pay, might have caused Tisha Verek’s murder. The problem with that as a solution, though, was that it did nothing to explain the motive for Gemma Bury’s death, never mind for Dinah Ketchum’s. Gregor was almost beginning to believe in Bennis’s atypical psychopath, the homicidal maniac.

Out on the other side of town, the church clocks began to chime the noon hour, beginning with the traditional bongs and segueing into carillon carols without a hitch. The production must have been coordinated. There were no clashes between songs and no false notes. Gregor hummed “The First Noel” to himself and packed the legal pad away inside the folds of his newspaper. He didn’t want Bennis to see it and get silly ideas. Bennis was always getting silly ideas. Her silliest and most persistent one was that his life was just like the lives of her favorite fictional detectives—Hercule Poirot, Nero Wolfe—and if she could just catch him living in it she could share the excitement of it. Gregor didn’t think his life was exciting at all. His feet hurt.

He had put the legal pad away just in time. He had been sitting with his back to the lounge’s door, which had kept him from seeing into the lobby without keeping the people in the lobby from seeing him. Bennis must have seen him on her way out to the sidewalk with Father Tibor and his friend. Now she came striding back in, dodging the trailing stems of holly leaves that hung from the curved frame of the doorway, and tapped him on the shoulder with an air of pure relief.

“He’s gone,” she told him, with a kind of wonder. “Off with Father Cooney and happy as a clam. I can’t believe it.”

“Is that Tibor’s friend?” Gregor asked. “Father Cooney?”

“Father Martin Cooney,” Bennis told him, “and don’t ask me how they met because I don’t know. Maybe they were both buying food. It’s been the most extraordinary morning. Do you know what’s gotten into him?”

“Mmm,” Gregor said.

Bennis shook her head. “I was sitting in my room, minding my own business, reading a book and he comes jumping in on me with—this is after the cookies, Gregor, this is impossible—anyway, he comes jumping in on me with Slim Jims. I haven’t eaten Slim Jims since I was ten years old. And he’s got this whole pile of them, dozens and dozens, and he throws them on my lap, and then when I wouldn’t eat them he gave me a lecture about how I seem to have forgotten that my body is the temple of the Holy Ghost. I didn’t know what to do.”

“What were you reading?”

“What? Oh.
The Chocolate Addict’s Never Say Never Diet
. Donna Moradanyan gave it to me. Isn’t that Franklin Morrison?”

It was indeed Franklin Morrison, unwinding himself from the front seat of a bright yellow Ford Taurus right in front of the Green Mountain Inn’s front doors. Gregor thought about telling Bennis how much easier a time she would have with Tibor if she just stopped reading diet books, but he couldn’t figure out how to put it. He’d probably have to ask a lot of questions he didn’t want to hear the answers to. He’d probably have to have a discussion about emotions, maybe even his own. He couldn’t think about a less-appetizing prospect. He got out of his seat and motioned Bennis toward the doorway, keeping a firm grip on his newspaper-covered legal pad all the while. His grip must have been very firm. Bennis didn’t notice that he had anything inside the paper. She only noticed the paper. She tapped the oversized picture of him right on the nose and said, “Tibor brought me a copy of that with the Slim Jims. Your life’s going to be a living hell around here from now on, if you ask me.”

Gregor had not asked her. He pointed firmly at the arched doorway with its drooping leaves, and Bennis went.

Franklin Morrison had fought in the Second World War, and because of that—as he told Gregor and Bennis half a dozen times before he even got the car away from the curb—he didn’t like foreign cars and he didn’t like automatic transmissions. Gregor understood the part about the foreign cars. Franklin didn’t want to hand his money to the same people who had blown up his brother at Pearl Harbor. That was fine. Gregor did not understand the part about the automatic transmission, which he was sure had not been invented by the Japanese. Franklin Morrison could have used an automatic transmission. He didn’t seem to know how to drive a standard one. The car bucked and shook and shuddered. The car made strange noises and seemed to sway from side to side. For reasons of space and size, Bennis was in the back while Gregor was in the front next to Franklin. Gregor could just feel Bennis back there, itching to get her hands on the wheel. Bennis was like that. She preferred to drive and hated being driven. Gregor was usually willing to do almost anything to keep Bennis from getting in control of a car, except drive himself. She was a maniac. In this case, he sympathized. Franklin’s incompetence was making him grind his teeth.

They finally got out on the road, and past Bethlehem’s three in-town intersections, and out on the Delaford Road. The car was moving more smoothly simply because there was less for Franklin to do. Gregor’s nerves were working more smoothly because the landscape was such a natural tranquilizer. They were still more or less in town—the turnoff to the Ketchum place was technically within the town limits—but it was a part of town without the hyperactive peppiness of the Celebration-soaked center. Gregor watched as they passed small white houses with front doors strung around with Christmas lights and snow-laden evergreens decked out in satin balls and sparkly ribbons. Smoke rose from chimneys. Front walks were shoveled clear and driveways neatly plowed. It was as if they had stepped off the set of some Swedish director’s absurdist movie and into the real Vermont. Gregor came out and said so, as soon as he thought Franklin Morrison could be safely distracted from the death-grip of concentration he was directing at the cleared but winding road.

He heard what Gregor had to say and shook his head.

“You can’t do it like that anymore,” Franklin told them. “It’s not the same. Vermont isn’t about Vermont these days.”

“Which is supposed to mean what?” Bennis asked from the back seat.

“Which is supposed to mean the flatlanders have moved in.” Franklin sounded grim. “It’s like Colorado up here now, that’s what it’s like. We’ve got all these people from Boston and New York. We’ve got movie stars. We’ve got guys went to jail for financial hanky-panky and came out with a couple of million bucks. And we’ve got what follows them, of course. We’ve got all these people who aren’t anybody yet but they want to be hip.”

“Sounds wonderful,” Bennis said, in a way that made it impossible for Gregor to decide if she was being sarcastic or not.

“It’s a pain in the ass,” Franklin told her. He was doing about twenty miles an hour, but even at twenty miles an hour a car will get where it’s going eventually, and apparently they had. Franklin turned on his right-turn signal and began to buck off the comfortable blacktop of the Delaford Road onto what Gregor thought must have been dirt down there underneath all the packed snow and ice. It was a road whose name might or might not have been “Ketchum.” It was impossible to tell. There was a sign that said
KETCHUM
at the place where the dirt road met the asphalted one, but that could have been a way to indicate that to get to the Ketchum farm you had to go this way. Gregor looked around and realized that Franklin Morrison had been right. The distances weren’t what you would expect them to be, if you were a man from the city, like Gregor, and thrown off-kilter by the trees and isolation. Just ahead along the Delaford Road, Gregor could see the tall stone spire of what had to be the Episcopal Church. Almost every one of the Episcopal churches in New England had been built from that kind of stone. A little beyond the church there was a house, built high on a hill. Its position made it look even bigger than it was, and it was very big. Gregor decided that must be the rectory. Where was the Verek house? Franklin Morrison had stalled out. Gregor leaned toward him, straining against his seat belt, and asked. “Go over the distances with me again,” he said. “How far is the Verek house from here?”

“How do you want to get there?”

“By the road.”

Franklin Morrison did some quick calculations in his head. “The Episcopal Church has got fifteen hundred feet of frontage on the road, and most of that’s down this end. Then the Vereks have about twelve hundred feet on the road, but that’s mostly down the other end. They built the house right down here near the stone wall, only place they could fit it without having to blast through granite. I don’t know. Lot less than a mile.”

“Less than a mile,” Gregor repeated.

“Maybe I could drive,” Bennis suggested. “I’m really very good with standard transmissions.”

“It’s less than a mile to Stu’s place, too,” Franklin put in. “It’s maybe, I don’t know, four, five thousand feet on this road. Less than that if you go behind on the walls.”

“I want to get out and walk it,” Gregor said.

“Whatever the hell for?” Franklin Morrison demanded.

“You never want to go out and walk anywhere,” Bennis said. “You take to exercise the way dogs take to cats. What’s got into you?”

“Give the woman your keys,” Gregor said to Franklin. “We’ll walk and you’ll show me the way, and she can take the car down to Stuart Ketchum’s farm.”

“How are we going to get to Stuart Ketchum’s farm?” Franklin demanded.

“You’re the one who said it was no big deal to walk on the walls,” Gregor told him. Gregor was already out of the car and onto the hard-packed snow. He had the seat pushed forward to let Bennis out. Bennis climbed out obediently and looked at the sky, which was dark. Franklin climbed out disgruntled and tossed over his keys.

“I’m an old man,” he said, “and you’re not much better. This is nuts.”

“Maybe. But I like to see for myself.” Gregor turned to Bennis. “Tell Mr. Ketchum we’re on our way. Try not to flirt too much. And don’t touch any guns.”

“It’s touching, the sort of faith you have in my common sense.” Bennis stomped around the car, climbed into the driver’s seat under Franklin Morrison’s arm and had the engine roaring in no time at all. Franklin Morrison looked startled.

They had not gone very far on the dirt road before Franklin stalled. It was only a few steps back to the asphalt. Gregor took them immediately, to keep his city shoes from sinking into snow. If he was going to go tramping around the countryside, he ought to have the proper attire to do it in, but he never believed he was going to go tramping around the countryside. It wasn’t the sort of thing he used to do much of when he was head of the Behavioral Sciences department for the FBI. It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d ever imagined himself doing much of. If he had to pick one of Bennis’s fictional detectives to be, it would definitely come down to Nero Wolfe, who sat in a chair all day and ate.