Stillness in Bethlehem (28 page)

Amanda crossed the room to where Timmy was working, tapped him on the shoulder and had to jump back when he leaped up and swung around, his fists up, too loosely balled, too tightly cocked. He saw her and flushed. Then he seemed to deflate, his body going from taut to flab exactly as if the air had been let out of him. Good grief, Amanda thought.

“It’s just me,” she told him.

“I see you,” Timmy said. “I didn’t mean anything.”

“I’m sure you didn’t. You have to relax.”

“He thinks I did it,” Timmy said. “He thinks I killed those two ladies.”

“Who does?”

“The man we talked to last night. The man Mr. Morrison likes.”

“Gregor Demarkian?”

“That’s him.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t think that,” Amanda said firmly. “He’s supposed to be a very famous detective. He works with facts. You haven’t given him any facts to make him think you killed them.”

“I told him I was glad they were dead,” Timmy said. “I told them it was right they were dead.”

“I think it’s right they’re dead, too,” Amanda said, “but half the town probably thinks that, and they couldn’t all have killed them. And what about Dinah Ketchum? You aren’t glad that she’s dead. You didn’t even know her.”

“They think I’m crazy,” Timmy said. “Because I’m not so bright. They think I’m so crazy I’d do things with no reason at all.”

“Gregor Demarkian does not think you are crazy,” Amanda said, and then sighed inwardly, because she hated telling Timmy things were certain when she wasn’t certain about them at all. Bethlehem had been pretty good to Timmy. It was a town that believed in live and let live, and it had left Timmy alone. A few people had even tried to help. Amanda knew small towns, though. She had been born in one much smaller than this. Small towns could turn on you if things got bad enough.

Timmy was tossing another pair of boxes onto the counter, going on with his work in spite of the fact that she was there, because that was what she had taught him to do. When she had first taken him under her wing, she had promised to let him know everything he needed to know to survive. “It’s just a few simple rules,” she had said, and that had been the truth, as far as it went. She had hurt for him in the beginning and she hurt for him now. With things getting this crazy, she was even afraid for him. Part of her wanted to stay and protect him, although she couldn’t have said from what, right at the moment. The rest of her wanted to get out where she could breathe, and the rest of her was winning. She patted him on the back.

“I’m going to go for a drive,” she told him. “Do you want me to bring you something?”

“You could bring me a Hostess cupcake,” Timmy said. “For later. After I get these boxes out to the truck, I’m supposed to drive them around town. I’ve got to deliver them just like they were the real newspaper.”

“I’ll get you a Hostess cupcake. You sure you don’t want anything else?”

“A soda?”

“All right.”

“If they try to hurt me, I’ll hit them,” Timmy said. “That’s all right. I can do that. If someone tries to hurt you, it’s all right to make them hurt instead.”

“I suppose it is,” Amanda told him, “but let them hit first. All right?”

“If you let them hit first, sometimes you’re already dead before you can get a chance to hit back.”

And to that, Amanda thought, there was no answer whatsoever. She knew entirely too well just how true it was.

She stood up, looked across the room at Peter at the drawing board, knew that he had noticed her and was not going to look up, and went to the coatrack for her jacket. Shrugging it on, she went through the vestibule and then to the door to the outside. The sky had clouded up again in the last few hours. It was going to snow again. The town park looked barren and embittered. The bleachers had been taken down, but the ground under them hadn’t been tidied up as it usually was. The earth looked damaged.

Amanda turned up the street and began walking toward the pharmacy, uptown in the direction of Carrow. There were red and green ribbons on the storefronts and the mailboxes all along her path, but they looked wilted. She passed Stella Marvin and said hello. Stella looked straight through her. She passed Liz Beck and said hello, and Liz stopped, said hello back, and looked her up and down as if she were a piece of rotten meat the butcher had tried to sneak into the good stuff in the supermarket. Amanda took a deep breath and let it out again, feeling the cold in her lungs as pain. She had known things were going to get bad. She hadn’t expected them to get this bad this quickly.

Her car was parked in front of the pharmacy. She untangled her keys from the gloves in her pocket and opened the driver’s side door. Nobody locked their cars in Bethlehem any more than they locked their houses, but Amanda was not so trusting. She never had been.

She slipped behind the wheel and got the engine started, forcing herself to sit still while the motor warmed up, so she wouldn’t stall out six times on her way out of town. Frank Vatrie was coming down the street at her, looking straight through her windshield and making no acknowledgment at all. He made no acknowledgment to Betty Heath, either, when Betty came down the street in the other direction. They might have been two strangers passing each other in New York City.

This is a mess, Amanda told herself. Then she swung the car out onto Main Street and repeated what had become her mantra.

Things were going to have to get worse before they got better.

Candy George knew that what she had just done was only a temporary solution, but she didn’t have time for a permanent solution at the moment, and she had to have something. It had been one of the strangest days of the last three weeks, and the last three weeks had been the strangest of her life. It wasn’t that Reggie was getting particularly violent and particularly nasty. Reggie was always violent and nasty. Reggie was terrible, if the truth was to be known, and Candy was beginning to think the truth wasn’t as hidden as she’d originally thought. Of course, she knew that at least some people in town had to know that Reggie had hit her at least once. There was that time Sharon Morrissey had called in Franklin, and Franklin had come to the door and tried to talk to her. Candy wished he’d do that again, now, because now she would understand it better than she had. Back then, it had been like he’d been talking Latin.
You can put him in jail. It’s against the law for him to do this to you. If you need help getting on your feet, I know some places you can go in Burlington.
The man had looked to her like some kind of Martian. Put him in jail for what? Get on her feet how? And who cared what kind of laws they passed over in Montpelier? Candy really did wish Franklin would show up on her doorstep right this minute. She could use the help.

One of the reasons it had been such a strange three weeks was that Candy had not been able to sleep, in the usual sense, since it had started. For a while she had put this down to excitement. She was so happy to be in the play she just couldn’t calm down enough to drift off. This was a prime example of mental con job, and she knew it. She was excited to be in the play, all right, but that wasn’t why she couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t sleep because she was afraid to close her eyes. She was afraid to close her eyes because of how bad her dreams had gotten, and because she knew there were going to be worse ones to come. This was because her dreams were not dreams the way dreams were supposed to be anymore, meaning scenes her mind made up. There was nothing fictional about what she saw when she closed her eyes these days. There was the bedroom she had in the house she shared with her mother and stepfather. There was the set of curtains with the bluebird border swaying in the summer breeze. There were his hands getting bigger and bigger in the moonlight and the pain that never seemed to stop, never never, and only got worse if she cried or asked him to go away. She was eleven or twelve years old, she couldn’t remember which. He was huge and the black pupils seemed to take up all of his eyes. When he came near her, she found it impossible to breathe. That was when she got dizzy and started to look at the stains on the sheets, to contemplate them, to turn them into artwork. She lay flat on her stomach and made artwork out of the trailing blotches he had left the night before and willed the pain out, out of her body, out of her life, out of her mind, into the air.

When Reggie came home from lunch this afternoon, she was lying on the couch on her back, looking up at the ceiling and thinking. She was thinking the oddest thing, a thing that had never occurred to her before. She couldn’t figure out why it hadn’t occurred to her before. It seemed so obvious. She couldn’t figure out what she was supposed to do with it now that she knew. All her life, she had secretly harbored the conviction that there was a secret out there, a special secret some people knew and once you knew it you were free, you could do anything you wanted to do, you did not have to be the person you were born to be. Now she had it, and it had stopped her cold. This was it, this was the secret of the universe, this was what she should have known all along.

What he did to me was wrong.

A few minutes after she had reached this revelation, she had had another one, coming down on her like a light, and the voice it spoke to her in was Franklin Morrison’s.

What Reggie is doing to me is wrong.

That was when Reggie had come in, home from work for lunch the way he never was, glaring and prancing and all wound up. She had known what he was after as soon as she set eyes on him.

He threw himself down in the big lounge chair and kicked himself back, so that he had his feet up and his head halfway to the floor. He’d glared at the sight of her on the couch as he walked in, but he hadn’t done anything about it. Maybe he was tired. Instead, he’d put his hands behind his head and closed his eyes and said, “Get me a beer, all right? I want a beer.”

A beer. Candy got up off the couch and looked down at him. Reggie never had a beer for lunch on a day when he was working. In that way he was better than both her father and her stepfather had been. He had that much control of his addictions. Maybe he was losing it now. She looked at his chin and the way the stubble along the underside of it was flaked with the soap he hadn’t rinsed off well enough this morning. She looked at his throat, which was young but damaged, creased already with too much getting high and too many Camels.

“Do you want a beer beer,” she asked him, “or do you want some of that stuff you brought home? That Molson’s Ale.”

“Molson’s Ale.”

“All right,” Candy said.

She walked past him and out into the kitchen, breathing carefully, telling herself to slow down. If all he’d wanted was one of his ordinary Budweisers, she wouldn’t have been able to bring it off. The Budweisers were in the refrigerator. The six-pack of Molson’s Ale was on the back porch, just off the landing that led to the cellar, two steps down from the kitchen through a narrow door. There was a lightbulb screwed into a socket on the ceiling of that landing, and they had a ritual about it. Since Candy was short and small, she wasn’t supposed to be able to reach the bulb to change it. Since Reggie was tall and big, he was supposed to do it for her. This was one of the many ways in which he brought home his point, which was that men and women were very different, and that men were stronger and taller and better than women, and that all the problems in the world would be solved if women just learned to accept the fact. There had been times when Candy thought the entire Women’s Liberation Movement had been invented to give Reggie something to argue about. Reggie and her stepfather.

Candy went down the two steps to the landing and pulled the knob on the outside door. It held, meaning the door was really shut, not half-open the way Reggie sometimes left it. She reached up and turned the switch lock to locked, then threw the bolt. Then she got the old-fashioned key that worked the center lock from its place on the ledge and locked that lock, too, putting the key in her pocket. Out in the living room, Reggie was getting restless.

“What the hell are you doing out there?” he bellowed at her.

Candy came up the two steps into the kitchen again and called back. “There’s a ton of crap on the landing. I’m just getting out the door.”

There was not, as a matter of fact, a ton of crap on the landing. There was not much of anything at all. Candy waited, but there were no further sounds from Reggie, and she assumed her explanation had held water for the moment. The moment was all she really needed. She went back down to the landing and reached into the stairwell for the broom. When she got it out, she held its handle in the air and aimed for the bulb. The first time, shockingly enough, she missed. She almost panicked. It was such an easy target, such a close thing to hit. If she couldn’t do that much, what could she do? Then she tried it again and it worked. The glass shattered. The shards fell onto her hands and her blouse and glittered even in this place where there was almost no light.

Candy took a deep breath and made herself as loud as she could. “Damn,” she said. “Damn, damn, damn.”

“Candy?”

Candy dropped the broom and came up into the kitchen again. It was very important that she not be on the landing. It was very important that she not be anywhere near the cellar door. She stepped into the middle of the kitchen and called, “Reggie?”

“What is it?”

“I need some help. I was moving some things around on the landing, trying to get to the back porch, where your Molson’s is. I picked up the broom and the handle broke the bulb.”

“
Broke
the bulb?”

“It’s just a lightbulb, Reggie.”

“Nothing’s just a lightbulb,” Reggie said. “It all costs money. It all costs a lot of money.”

They kept the spare lightbulbs in the cabinet next to the kitchen sink. Candy got one out—careful to make sure it was a sixty-watt bulb; she didn’t want to set him off with the wrong kind of bulb—and stood back a little farther with the bulb held in her hand, held out, like an offering. Reggie came lumbering in to the kitchen with a scowl on his face, and Candy saw it. Always before, she had thought of their fights as inevitable, as stimulus-response, as her fault. She said something or did something to set him off, and then he was out of control. Now she realized there was nothing she could have done or failed to do, because he looked for excuses to start his fights, he began wanting to hit her and then he found a reason he could pin it on. That was what he was doing now. He didn’t care about the bulb. He didn’t care all that much about the Molson’s Ale, either. He just wanted to punch her into a mass of pulp and blood.