Stillness in Bethlehem (29 page)

“Broke the bulb,” he muttered, taking the new one she was offering him. “Stupid bitch. Stupid goddamned bitch.”

“It was just an accident, Reggie. I picked up the broom and the top of the handle hit the light. I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“I don’t know what you do on purpose,” Reggie said. “You have so many goddamned accidents.”

“I didn’t think it would be a good idea to leave it there like that,” she told him. “That’s why I called you.”

“You called me because you’d be shit without me. Always remember that.”

Candy promised to always remember something, anyway, and held her breath. Reggie went through the door and down the two steps to the landing. She heard him beginning to unscrew the light and swearing under his breath. She counted to five to keep herself steady and then stepped forward and slammed the door shut.

“What the
hell
—”

There were three bolt locks on this door, one at the top, one in the middle and one at the bottom. They were left over from the previous resident of this house, who had raised Dobermans and kept them in the basement. Candy had always thought those Dobermans must have been mean. She got the middle bolt thrown first and then went to work on the others. She worked patiently and without fumbling, without panic, as if all her emotions had gone underground and frozen solid until she had the job done. Reggie was down there bellowing now, screaming and pounding, and Candy thanked God that the outer door had no window in it. That had been because of the Dobermans, too.

“Candy!” Reggie screamed at her. “Candy, you open up! You let me out of here! You goddamned stinking bitch—”

“Right,” Candy said, not so much to Reggie as to the air or the world in general or to herself. Then she walked out of the kitchen and back into the living room. She got her coat out of the hall closet and swung it over her shoulders. She stepped out the front door. It was cold as hell outside, but she didn’t mind.

“My name is not Candy George,” she said to no one and everyone and most of all to herself. “My name is Candace Elizabeth Spear and I can act rings around that horse-face snot Cara Hutchinson.”

It was hardly a statement of broad-minded generosity or Christian tolerance or grace under pressure, but Candy didn’t figure she was ready for all that yet, because she was barely ready for what she was doing. She went down the front steps to the driveway and got into Reggie’s green Chevy station wagon. The keys were just where she’d expected them to be—meaning in the ignition, where Reggie kept all his keys for all his cars—and she was ready to go.

Driving off, she was happy to realize she couldn’t hear Reggie bellowing back there at all.

T
O GREGOR DEMARKIAN, NEW
England farmhouses were all the same: white clapboard constructions with black roofs and mullioned windows and covered porches, long flat buildings with woodsheds built onto their backs and clotheslines anchored in the wood just outside the kitchen door. Stuart Ketchum’s farmhouse had a woodshed, but beyond that it was unrecognizable. Gregor didn’t think he’d ever seen anything so obviously old. It bothered him that he didn’t know what made him think that. The house was not disintegrating. It had been recently painted a pearl grey with black shutters, and its corners were true enough. The house was not cloyingly precious, either, the way so many houses were when they had been reclaimed and restored by people with money. Stuart Ketchum had had neither the time nor the inclination to indulge himself in replica lintels or decorative wheelbarrows. There were a pair of flowerboxes fixed under the windows on either side of the front door, but Gregor thought those belonged to Stuart Ketchum’s wife, or possibly to his late mother. They were a female touch. This was a no-nonsense working farm, as dedicated to its vocation as a cloistered nun. Stuart Ketchum himself was more on the order of a backwoods philosopher, although Gregor thought the “backwoods” part might be overdone a little for the benefit of visitors. He was tall and thin and straight, in whole and in part. Each one of his individual bones seemed to be elongated, and his hair hung straight and brown and limp from the top of his head to a point midway down the back of his neck. Gregor spent a lot of time watching the back of Stuart Ketchum’s neck, with concentration, as Stuart led them into the house and to the kitchen in the back, dodging ceiling beams with every step. Gregor dodged them, too. It reminded him of the
Pilgrimage Green
, the boat—supposedly a replica of the
Mayflower
—he had just spent a couple of weeks chasing a murderer on. That had been a place of low ceilings and imminent danger to the top of his head, too, and he wondered how Stuart Ketchum stood it, day after day, having to duck every time he wanted to come through the front hall and answer the door. Then they came through a door to the kitchen and the ceilings were instantly taller. Stuart Ketchum stood up and Gregor stood up, too. Franklin Morrison heaved the kind of sigh the fat boy does when the running is finally over in gym. At the long, unvarnished, uncovered kitchen table, Bennis Hannaford sat holding a white ceramic coffee mug full of coffee, looking curious and interested and mischievous at once. She looked like she belonged right where she was sitting, just like she always looked like she belonged wherever she was sitting, and she also looked impossibly good. Gregor thought it was a good thing Stuart Ketchum had a wife, because without her he might be subject to one of Bennis’s enthusiasms. Not that he would necessarily mind.

There was a small glass bowl full of pine needles and tiny silver balls in the middle of the table, but no other decoration—maybe because Stuart’s mother had died so recently—and Stuart took this bowl off and put it out of the way on a wall shelf. Franklin Morrison had given Stuart the gun to carry as soon as he and Gregor arrived at the farm. It made sense, according to Franklin, because even if Stuart was a suspect, he was also the best man in this part of Vermont when it came to the care, feeding and identification of firearms. Besides, as Franklin said, they were chasing a sane person here. Any sane person would have had the sense to wipe the rifle clear of prints.

This was not a line of reasoning Gregor Demarkian relished, or even approved of, but he was on Franklin Morrison’s territory. He let Stuart Ketchum take the gun and watched the man for signs of strangeness or evasion. He might not have recognized either, because Stuart Ketchum was not a personality type he had had a great deal to do with. Stuart put the rifle down on the kitchen table, lying diagonally across the surface with its nose pointed into an empty corner. Then he stood back and contemplated it, as if it were a problem in mathematics.

“Mr. Ketchum is very Zen,” Bennis Hannaford said after a while. “Hello, Gregor. Hello, Mr. Morrison. We’ve been having a very nice time here being Zen while you’ve been gone. I see you’ve found something.”

“You don’t have to be some kind of Buddhist not to want to talk so much your tongue falls off,” Stuart Ketchum said. “Excuse me a minute.” He went back to the shelf where he’d put the glass bowl and came back with a pair of wire-rimmed glasses.

Bennis drew her legs up under her and hunched over her coffee. “You did find something,” she said. “Where did you find it?”

“In an evergreen bush,” Gregor said, “or maybe it was a low tree. I don’t know the difference.”

“It was a low tree,” Franklin Morrison said.

“It was out near those stone walls,” Gregor went on. “We were walking around on them. There’s a place where three of them come together—”

“It’s just two,” Stuart Ketchum said. “Three properties but two walls. It looks like three walls because the line of the Episcopal Church wall is crooked. Never did get things very accurate, those Episcopalians.”

“Now, Stuart,” Franklin Morrison said, mildly.

“Just tell me one thing,” Stuart asked. “Is this the way you found it? Exactly the way you found it? You didn’t do anything to it?”

“Like what?” Gregor asked.

“Like disassemble it,” Stuart Ketchum said.

Gregor was relieved to see that Franklin Morrison was looking just as bewildered as he was. It was embarrassing, after all the movies and television shows, to be an ex-FBI agent who didn’t know anything about rifles. The FBI agents in
Bonnie and Clyde
had stood in a field and chewed up the landscape with machine guns. Gregor caught Bennis Hannaford’s eye and blushed a little. She knew exactly what was making him so uncomfortable.

Stuart Ketchum hadn’t noticed that anyone was uncomfortable in the first place. He leaned toward the rifle, fussed with something Gregor didn’t catch and came up with a limp hand-sized object. “There’s the clip,” he said calmly, “with three bullets gone. That makes it much safer. This is a Marlin Model 70P Papoose, it’s a .22 long-rifle caliber semiautomatic with side ejection, but that’s not the point of it. It’s what’s called a quick takedown.”

“Meaning what?” Gregor asked.

“Meaning you can do this.” Stuart Ketchum picked up the gun and seemed to break it in half, except that there weren’t any sounds of breaking and nothing small and vulnerable fell on the floor. Then he jerked his arms and the rifle seemed to snap back together again, as if it were made out of Lego blocks. “The point of something like this,” he said, “is to make storage easier and to make the hunter feel like he’s still in the army, which is how a lot of these guys want to feel. This is not a military rifle. It’s a sports model, not a bad one, I’ve got a couple in the gun room. Introduced in 1986. Sixteen-and-a-quarter-inch barrel. Hundred fifty, hundred seventy-five dollars, in there. No big deal.”

“No big deal,” Gregor repeated. “But it could kill somebody.”

“Oh, yes.” Stuart Ketchum nodded. “I wouldn’t shoot it at anything serious, like a bear. Not if I had a choice. But it could kill a person without much trouble. I take it this is what you think killed my mother.”

“We don’t know,” Franklin Morrison said quickly. “We just found it.”

“Considering how we found it,” Gregor said, “I’d be extremely surprised if it wasn’t the rifle that killed your mother. I believe in coincidences, Mr. Ketchum, but not in too many of them in the same place.”

“Amateur,” Stuart Ketchum said.

“What?” That was Gregor and Franklin both.

“Amateur,” Stuart Ketchum repeated. “Nobody who knew what he was doing around guns would have stored this rifle without the barrel cocked, not even in a tree. Never mind stored it with the ammunition clip inside it—the only point to that I can see is that whoever had this thing didn’t know how to get the clip out and didn’t want to figure it out. It isn’t hard to know what you have to do if you look carefully enough. And leaving it out there, all ready to fire with the clip still in. You sure you didn’t do anything to it? Take the safety off?”

“I wouldn’t know where to find a safety on a rifle if my life depended on it,” Gregor Demarkian said.

“Franklin would,” Stuart said. “It doesn’t matter. Whoever put it out there was stupid beyond belief. Some animal could have come along and set it off. It wouldn’t have been easy, but it’s been known to happen. Then the bullet flies and who knows what it hits? Or who?”

“Maybe that’s what happened to your mother,” Bennis said cautiously.

“Once is one thing,” Stuart said, “twice is another. I wish I could tell you I don’t know a single person who would have put that gun out there that way, but it isn’t true. It’s incredible what people don’t know about guns. I’ve got a lot of them. I believe people ought to have the right to have them. But dear sweet Jesus, it ought to be like driving a car. They ought to make sure you can operate one before they let you have a license.”

“That’s the kind of thing Stuart doesn’t say in town,” Franklin Morrison said drily, “because otherwise people would say he’s gone over to the enemy.”

“The enemy?” Gregor asked.

“Flatlanders,” Bennis Hannaford said. “I have heard a fair amount about flatlanders since I got here. The man does talk, just not a lot, and not about any subject I bring up.”

“I couldn’t talk to you about the punk aesthetic in science fiction,” Stuart said, “because I don’t read science fiction.”

“He reads histories of the Vietnam War.” Bennis stared at the ceiling. “And he knows who Bernard Hare is.”

Stuart went back to fussing with the gun. Gregor watched him move the barrel up and down, back and forth, and then pick up the clip and examine it. Every once in a while he shook his head. The lack of emotion was disturbing, but not as disturbing as it might have been. Gregor thought it was Stuart Ketchum’s form of self-control. Either show no emotion or go publicly nuts. A lot of men were like that. Gregor leaned over and touched the rifle’s barrel gently, to get Stuart’s attention.

“Let me ask you a few questions,” he said. “Is this a rare gun or a popular one? Would you know who else besides you in town would have one? Are you sure you’ve got all the ones you own here?”

“I was in the gun room when she drove up,” Stuart said, jerking his head in Bennis’s direction. “My guns are all in racks. I could tell in a second if any of them were missing. None of them were missing, except the one you and Franklin have already got.”

“All right,” Gregor said.

“As for anybody else in town who might have one—” Stuart Ketchum shrugged. “It’s a decent rifle for target practice and it’s relatively cheap. And it’s glamorous, if you know what I mean. It makes you look good when you hold it. I know half a dozen people in town who’ve got them. Maybe more.”

“Like who?” Franklin Morrison asked.

“Reggie George,” Stuart said promptly, “although why any society in its right mind would let Reggie George have a firearm is beyond me. Someday he’s going to push that little girl he’s married to just far enough, and she’s going to use it to take off his head. At least, I hope she will.”

“Yeah,” Franklin said. “I hope she will, too. I offered to do it for her once, but she wasn’t interested.”

“Umn.” Stuart ran his hands through his hair. “Let’s see. Carl Herman’s got one. Keeps it behind the counter of the store—he runs a feed-and-grain store, Mr. Demarkian, out on the Montpelier Road—anyway, he keeps it back there just in case somebody wants to steal a sack of chicken meal. And Henry Dearmott’s got one he keeps on his back porch out on the other end of Carrow from Main Street. And there’s Eddie Folier, of course, but I don’t think it could belong to him.”