Stillness in Bethlehem (32 page)

“All of these spaces were filled?” Gregor asked Jan-Mark. “Every last one of them?”

“Every last one of them,” Jan-Mark said. “Of course, I can’t tell you with what, exactly. She used to change them fairly frequently. Especially on that board. But they were filled and they were up there in alphabetical order.”

“They’re not in alphabetical order now,” Bennis said. “Look, Gregor. There’s Monica Hammond and then John Ziebert and then Billy Welsh and then Elsie Hastings. Two of the HAs were removed.”

“Tommy Hare,” Jan-Mark said. “That’s one of the ones that were removed.”

“Who’s Tommy Hare?” Bennis asked.

Stuart Ketchum and Franklin Morrison looked uncomfortable. Gregor said, “Tommy Hare was a teen-aged boy in Devon, Massachusetts, about twenty-five years ago. Not teen-aged. Twelve, I think he was. Anyway, he got a girlfriend and eventually the girlfriend got another boy. He waited until she was giving a party and sneaked into her patio that night and used a cattle prod to electrocute everybody who happened to be in her pool. A lot of people, from what I remember. He ended up at a place called Checkered Tree. It’s a facility for what we used to call the criminally insane.”

“Oh, yuck,” Bennis said.

“Tisha always said she thought Tommy Hare and Timmy Hall were one and the same person,” Jan-Mark said.

Bennis thought this over. “That won’t work,” she said finally. “Timmy Hall is that man we met with Peter Callisher yesterday, isn’t he, Gregor?”

“That’s right,” Gregor said.

“Well, he couldn’t have been twelve twenty-five years ago. He’s not that old.”

“You just think he’s not that old because he’s retarded,” Jan-Mark Verek said. “There’s no telling how old he is. There’s no way to know.”

“I could know if I wanted to,” Franklin Morrison said, “except there’s no point to it, because I already know he wasn’t in anyplace called Checkered Tree. He was at the Riverton Training Facility right here in Vermont. Teacher of his called me up to tell me about him when he first came down here. Woman I went to high school with.”

Stuart Ketchum turned politely to Gregor and Bennis. “Riverton is a big complex of mental-health facilities in the Green Mountains. They’ve got everything up there. This training school for the mentally retarded. A psychiatric hospital. A sort of summer camp, out-patient, group-therapy arrangement for people with chronic conditions. Oh, and an addiction-treatment specialty facility that does everything from cocaine to overeating.”

“Sounds wonderful,” Bennis said, unenthusiastically. She had wandered across the room and stood now next to Tisha’s computer station, looking at the corkboard there. “There’s been a bunch of pictures removed from here, too,” she said. “I wonder why anyone would take them. There must be a manuscript around somewhere if she was writing a book.”

“There are a couple,” Jan-Mark said. “She made copies of her proposal and gave them to people.”

“A lot of people?” Gregor asked.

Jan-Mark shrugged. “She gave one to Gemma Bury, if you’re looking to construct a conspiracy theory. I think she gave one to one of the ladies at the library, too.”

“You mean it was general knowledge,” Gregor persisted. “It wasn’t a case of someone thinking there would only be one copy and trying to get a hold of it.”

“They might have thought that if they were mentally retarded,” Jan-Mark said. “That’s the point of being mentally retarded. You’re not too bright.”

“Someone as stupid as you’re making Timmy Hall out to be wouldn’t have removed all these pictures so neatly,” Gregor said. “He’d have trashed the place and destroyed the computer and had done with it.”

“Let’s look at what’s missing from here,” Bennis said.

Bennis had sat down at the computer station. She ran her finger across the corkboard and said, “Bateman, Beddish, Yale, Carter—there’s something. Who belongs there?”

“How should I know?” Jan-Mark demanded.

“There’s another one further down,” Bennis said. “Holby, Warren, Hurt. Who would that be?”

“Maybe you have some way of calling up the information on the computer,” Gregor suggested. “Or maybe your wife left notes. Or a manuscript.”

“No notes,” Jan-Mark said. “And as for the computer—”

He looked dubiously at the blank screen and then sighed, almost resignedly, as if necessity were forcing him into the worst of all possible positions, the need to act like an ordinary man. He tapped Bennis on the shoulder, waited until she stood up and then sat down himself. He reached into a side drawer, looked through the diskettes there, and chose one. Then he loaded up.

“This was her index,” he said. “If you want to know the truth, it was the only part of the book I liked. You wouldn’t believe how many innocent-seeming little children have been positively homicidal.”

Bennis Hannaford frowned. “Isn’t that usually because they’ve been abused?” she asked him. “It’s not as if they were born evil or something like
The Bad Seed
.”

Jan-Mark was rolling information across the screen. “A lot of them have been abused, I’ll grant you that,” he said. “Tisha had more stories about child rape than I’ve got canvases. She used to read them to me at night. It made for no end of wonderfulness in our times of marital companionship. However, some of these kids are absolutely out of it. Just plain bad.”

“I don’t believe in just plain bad,” Bennis said.

“You wouldn’t.” Jan-Mark tapped a key and the information stopped rolling. “Here’s the first one. Actually, the first two. Bickerel, Amy Jo. And Kathleen Butterworth.”

Franklin Morrison stirred. “I remember Amy Jo Bickerel,” he said. “Oh, God, but that was a mess. About—what? Twenty, twenty-five years ago—”

“Twenty-three,” Jan-Mark said, peering at the computer screen.

“Yeah. Well. Happened right here in Vermont. Girl was eleven, twelve years old. Had an uncle who would take her out for rides and every time he got her alone, wham. One day she got her father’s rifle and whammed right back. Waited for him to come up the walk and fired—”

“Wait,” Gregor said. “I remember that one. It was ten o’clock on a Monday morning or something like that and the street was full of people—”

“Right,” Franklin Morrison said. “It was. And the bullet that hit the uncle first passed right through him and got a car, but it just missed this woman coming home with her groceries, and the second bullet broke the window of a store across the street that was thankfully shut for repairs. It was nuts. Caused a fuss in this state, you wouldn’t believe it, especially since it turned out she could prove all that stuff he’d done to her. He’d taken pictures and she knew where they were. He really was a first-class asshole.”

“He sounds like it,” Bennis said. She was leaning over Jan-Mark’s shoulder. “It says here she was—no, it says she is at Riverton. Does Riverton have a place for the criminally insane? Did they really send her away for life?”

“Oh, no,” Franklin Morrison said. “She wasn’t convicted of anything. Even though by the laws of the time she was guilty, and the judge tried to instruct the jury and get them to do what they were legally supposed to do, the jury just wouldn’t do it. I didn’t blame them. I don’t blame them now. I wouldn’t have done it, either. Uncle of hers was a first-class son of a bitch and a first-class loser on top of it. Anyway, it was her parents who had her committed, if I remember correctly. She was pretty messed up by the time it was all over.”

“Who was Kathleen Butterworth?” Stuart asked.

“Kathleen Butterworth is one of the ones I like,” Jan-Mark said. “She offed her baby sister in her sister’s crib, and then she got a taste for it and offed a couple of other babies in the neighborhood. She had about ten scalps under her belt before they caught on to her.”

“Arizona,” Bennis Hannaford said. “Who’s the third?”

Jan-Mark tapped a few keys and the information began rolling again. He stopped and said, “Hudder. Cynthia Hudder. This one’s recent. She wouldn’t be more than maybe twenty-eight, thirty years old.”

“Like Kelley Grey,” Bennis said immediately.

“Or Sharon Morrissey,” Franklin Morrison put in. “Kelley’s too young. You can’t do that, Ms. Hannaford. There have to be half a dozen young women of about the right age in town right now, all of them from Away and so nobody knows who they are or where they’ve been.”

“What did Cynthia Hudder do?” Bennis asked.

Jan-Mark shrugged. “No big deal. Killed her stepmother. Stepmother was to all intents and purposes a first-class pain and fond of using a belt. Kid was about ten. Happened out in Shaker Heights.”

“Did she go to jail?” Stuart Ketchum asked.

“She wouldn’t have gone to jail,” Gregor said. “A child that young would have been put into a psychiatric hospital and then possibly into a juvenile detention center. If they couldn’t place her in a foster home.”

“If you were a foster parent, would you take a kid who’d killed her own stepmother?” Bennis asked.

“I think a psychiatric hospital I didn’t want to be in and a juvenile detention center would feel like jail to me,” Stuart said. “When would she have gotten out?”

“It says right here when she got out,” Jan-Mark told them. “It was—twelve years ago. When she was eighteen.”

“Most states require the system to release juvenile offenders at age eighteen, no matter what they’ve done,” Gregor pointed out. “Juvenile law is not the same as adult law.”

“What about the rest of them?” Bennis asked.

Jan-Mark tapped his computer keys again, rolling the information back. “Amy Jo Bickerel, released from care about three years ago. Going on four. Kathleen Butterworth, released from care about twenty years ago, when she was eighteen. I don’t think I’d want Kathleen Butterworth wandering around my neighborhood.”

“I don’t think I’d want any of these people wandering around my neighborhood,” Gregor Demarkian said. He had been standing a little behind the others, not looking at the computer screen, but thinking. Now he was all thought out. He had never taken off his coat. He reached into his pockets, got the gloves he had borrowed from Tibor and began to pull them on.

“I don’t think we have anything more to do here,” he said. “We’ve done as much as we’re going to do.”

“What about my safety?” Jan-Mark demanded.

“Your safety is secure,” Gregor told him. “This was a very careful, very gentle theft, if it can technically be called a theft at all. The picture or pictures in question were removed, and the thief went away. That is all.”

“If the thief also happens to be the murderer of my wife, he might come back,” Jan-Mark said.

“True,” Gregor Demarkian told him, and then brightened, as if that was the cheeriest news he had had in ages. Maybe it was. Gregor found that Jan-Mark Verek did not improve with acquaintance.

That made it all the more necessary, to Gregor’s mind, that he get out of this redwood-and-glass monstrosity and back to normal life.

S
OMETIMES, SHARON MORRISSEY THOUGHT
that people who lived in Bethlehem had less Christmasy Christmases than people who didn’t, because the middle of Bethlehem was so chock full of Christmas spirit they couldn’t bear to bring any of it home. That was slightly incoherent, but she knew what she meant. After a day sitting in the Congregational Church, looking out the basement windows at the ribbons and the bows and the ornaments and the statuettes that had been springing up all over town, day after day, since the Celebration began, all Sharon wanted to do was go home and pretend to be Scrooge. Since she and Susan had already decorated their house, she couldn’t. As soon as she walked through her front door, she would be confronted with a “stained glass” mobile made from colored plastic wrapping paper, and as soon as she walked into her living room, she would be confronted by a crêche. The Congregational Church had a crêche, too, in the lobby on the first floor just outside the room Sharon thought of as “the room with the pews in it.” She didn’t know what else to call it. She couldn’t called it the church proper, or refer to an altar or a sanctuary. Congregational churches didn’t have those. Sharon found it all very frustrating. She had been born and brought up Catholic. Everything had been much simpler there.

Sharon had been in the basement of the church holding story hours for the children of tourists—and, of course, for any local children who had the time and inclination to attend. Sharon was considered to be far and away the best reader in Bethlehem. She was in demand at the library not only for children’s readings, but for readings to the elderly and public presentations as well. The library always held a read-aloud in the spring to raise extra money for its bookmobile program. Today, Sharon had read six different stories at six different sessions. Now it was five o’clock in the afternoon and her throat hurt. The last of the children had gone. She had been a tiny girl in pink tights and a bright fuschia snow parka, too shy to smile, and she had left clutching a gingerbread cookie iced to look like a snow-covered candy house. Wasn’t it the witch whose house had been made of gingerbread and candy? Sharon had wondered at the time. Then she had pushed the thought away from her. It was just one more example of the way her mind had been working lately. Susan kept saying it was silly to go on this way. Susan ought to know. Still, Sharon couldn’t stop from being depressed, and she couldn’t stop from being worried, either. When she had first heard Tisha Verek had been found dead, she had been relieved. Tisha Verek was the danger. Tisha Verek was gone. There was no more danger. It turned out to have been far more complicated than that. Even Susan thought so. Sharon wondered what she had said when she had gone to Gregor Demarkian this morning.

Sharon had left her parka in the cloak room at the back of the basement. She got it off its hanger and put it on, starting up the steps to the first floor as she pulled her arms into the sleeves. Coming out into the foyer, she looked at the crêche—with the baby Jesus conspicuously in His manger, to show that this was a Protestant, not a Catholic, production—and then went for the side stairs, as if she were going to climb to the second floor. The second floor was new, part of a wing that had been added to the church in the 1950s. The church itself had been built in 1721. Sharon went a quarter of the way up the steps, saw that the door to Toby Brookfield’s office was open and the light inside was on and called up. Toby Brookfield was the minister.