Stillness in Bethlehem (33 page)

“Toby?” Sharon said. “I’m going home.”

There was the sound of a chair scraping against hardwood and Toby’s face appeared in his office door. “Be careful driving,” he told her. “It’s supposed to be icing up. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’ve been depressed all day.”

Sharon shrugged. “It’s Gemma Bury and all the rest of it, I guess,” she said. “It doesn’t exactly put me in the holiday spirit.”

“Oh, I know what you mean.” Toby Brookfield sounded eager and solicitous at once. “It’s been terrible. It’s been terrible everywhere. I don’t know what’s gotten into people.”

Sharon knew what had gotten into people. She used to live in New York City. “Something terrible is going to happen if something good doesn’t happen soon,” she said, and then, because she really didn’t want to discuss this—and especially not with Toby Brookfield, who was very nice and meant exceedingly well but wasn’t very bright—she began to back down the stairs. “Well,” she said. “I guess I’d better go. I just wanted to tell you I was leaving.”

“Be careful,” Toby Brookfield said again.

Sharon muttered something incomprehensible, even to herself, and backed down into the foyer again. She gave the crêche one last glance and then let herself out onto the church’s front steps. Five o’clock was late this time of year in Vermont. The sky was already dark. The street lamps were already beginning to look ineffective against the night. Sharon zipped her parka to her chin, wrapped her scarf around the high collar that jutted up around her neck and started down the steps to the street.

On most days, when Sharon came into town to work at the Congregational Church, she parked her car in the church parking lot, just as, when she was working at the library, she parked her car there. During the Celebration, she always used Jim MacAfee’s front lawn instead. It cost a quarter, but it guaranteed she was never stuck, because Jim made a point of keeping the cars of people from town in the barn, where they could be easily and quickly moved, in spite of a sea of tourists’ vehicles blocking every available patch of grass around them. Sharon had been stuck once too often behind the church or the library or even the
News and Mail
, rendered immobile by escapees from Boston who’d decided that their cars could sit any old place they chose.

To get to Jim MacAfee’s front lawn, Sharon had to go up Main Street in the direction of Carrow and turn down Carrow for a few hundred feet until she came to a dirt extension. If it hadn’t been for a sign at the start of it that said
PARKING 25¢ THIS WAY
, only the natives would have known the extension wasn’t a dead-end rut. Sharon started up Main Street in the right direction, passing no one from town and glad she was passing no one from town. Usually, the number of people she knew and the extent of her friendly relations with them were a large part of what Sharon liked about Bethlehem. It was like she’d told Toby Brookfield, though. The death of Gemma Bury had broken something, some thread, that Sharon had once thought to be strong but now saw to be fragile. The atmosphere in town was slipping past tension into a kind of hysteria. Sharon had seen it all day in the people who had come to the church to hear her read. The tourists had been fine. The people from town had all been stiff as boards and twice as rough. It was as if they’d all gotten up this morning and taken a pill that made them think:
Shut down. Lock up. Close ranks.

Up the street and across it in the park, the crews were beginning to put up the bleachers. They were working slowly and it looked like they were starting late. Sharon walked up Main until she was across from them and stopped. The park looked so ordinary. It didn’t look like the kind of place a murder would happen at all. At least there was that much. There was no room for mistake. Tisha Verek’s death might have been an accident. Dinah Ketchum’s death might have been an accident. Gemma Bury’s death was the result of deliberate malice, no two ways about it.

Sharon wrapped her arms around her waist, rocked back and forth on her feet and stopped. In there among the carpenters and the teen-aged boys who were their helpers was another figure, small and still and seeming to flaunt her Alice-in-Wonderland hair. She was standing right next to that clump of bushes some people were saying had hidden the gun that killed Gemma Bury, and the gun that had killed Dinah Ketchum, too. Sharon didn’t know if she believed this. They had to run tests on guns before they knew for certain that the guns had killed anybody. She didn’t think there had been time to run tests like that. On the other hand, town gossip was remarkably accurate. It always startled her. She’d been brought up to believe that gossip was always lies. Sharon stared across the street a little longer and then made up her mind. It was different during the Celebration than it was at other times. You did have to look both ways when you wanted to cross Main Street. Beyond that, it wasn’t too bad, because the tourists tended to park their cars as soon as they crossed the town line and go from one place to another on foot. It was a little worse right before the performances started, but that was several hours away. Sharon waited for an Isuzu Trooper that belonged to the commune out in Lebanon to pass and then crossed to the park, half running as she went, to keep herself warm.

On the other side of Main Street, Sharon had to dodge two high-school boys carrying a long ladder between them and a cluster of blue and silver Christmas balls that had suddenly appeared in a bouquet tied to a bench at the street’s edge. Christmas decorations often appeared suddenly in the middle of town during the Celebration. It was a measure of how tense things had been under the surface, even before Gemma Bury was dead, that there had been so many fewer of them in the last two weeks than there had been in other years.

Sharon slipped through the line of carpenters and went to the small stand of bushes. Amanda Ballard was standing behind them, toward the middle of the park. Sharon had almost missed seeing her from Main Street. After Sharon had seen her, there had been a moment or two when Amanda seemed to disappear. Now Amanda was back, standing a little away from the bushes stiff needles, frowning as if the evergreens had been schoolchildren refusing to obey their mother.

“Amanda?” Sharon asked.

Amanda turned her head slowly, not startled, not surprised. Then her eyes swept the broad streak of white on the left side of Sharon’s head and she blinked. “Sharon,” she said. “I saw you across the street.”

“I was across the street,” Sharon said, feeling like an idiot. Amanda always made her feel like an idiot. Amanda always made her feel conspicuous, too, as if that streak of white was made of neon and glowing and pulsing in the dark. Sharon Morrissey couldn’t begin to count the times that that streak had made her feel like a marked woman. She turned away from Amanda and said, “What are you doing here?”

“Trying to check it out,” Amanda said simply. Then, seeming to think she might have been unclear, she elaborated. “It’s something I heard Peter talking about on the phone. To Stuart Ketchum. That Gregor Demarkian person has a theory about how Gemma Bury was killed.”

“Really? How?”

“He says the killer put the rifle right here in these bushes—put it here early, aimed ahead of time at the two seats Gemma and Kelley were going to be sitting in—”

“You mean the killer knew where Gemma and Kelley were going to be sitting?”

“Well, it’s assigned seating,” Amanda said, “and Peter gave Gemma the tickets right there in the
News and Mail
office, right in front of I don’t know how many people. I don’t think it was any surprise to anyone, where she was sitting.”

“Oh,” Sharon said.

“Anyway,” Amanda said, “the killer is supposed to have stood right up to these bushes when the time came and squeezed the trigger, with the gun in here at shoulder height so all he had to do was lean forward and aim. But I don’t see how that can be true, can you? And if it is true, I don’t see that Timmy could have done it.”

Sharon stepped forward and examined the bushes. “I could have done it that way,” she said finally. “I could have put the rifle right there,” she pointed to a cleft in the branches, “and then when I wanted to shoot, it probably wouldn’t have been much of a problem.”

“Well, you, yes,” Amanda agreed. “And me, too. And Susan Everman and Candy George and Betty Heath and I can think of a dozen people. But Timmy couldn’t have done it.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s too tall,” Amanda said patiently. “I’m five-four. You’re—what? Not much taller than that.”

“Five-five,” Sharon said. “Susan’s five-three.”

“Candy George is five-three, too, and Betty Heath is the same height I am. But Timmy’s nearly six-three. His head would have come right up over the top of this thing. He’d have had to bend over to aim, unless he fired without aiming, and I don’t believe that. I don’t believe Timmy would fire a rifle without looking at what he was aiming at. I don’t think Timmy would have fired a rifle.”

“Who says he did?”

Amanda looked back over her shoulder, up Main Street to the
News and Mail
office. “Lots of people,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe the phone calls we’ve gotten today. They think that just because he’s retarded, he’s crazy.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“Good,” Amanda said. “He’s sweet as pie, really, and not violent at all. He was the nicest boy at Riverton. Peter checked out all his records when we first decided to hire him. There wasn’t a single thing wrong.”

“I’m sure there wasn’t.”

“They just hate him because he’s different,” Amanda said. “Even Peter does. I thought when I heard about this that it would clear him, because it so obviously means he couldn’t have done any of it, but instead they’ve all got their theories. They’ve all got their fantasies about how he bent over to, shoot and nobody saw him. It’s sick.”

“Yes,” Sharon said carefully. “Amanda? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” Amanda had been standing with her arms wrapped around her body. She’d barely moved from the moment Sharon had first come up to her. Now she shoved her hands in her pockets and turned her back on the stand of evergreen bushes.

“I’ve got to go back,” she said. “Timmy’s nervous and Peter’s really been crazy all day. I don’t think he’s been completely all right since Tisha Verek died.”

“What?”

But Amanda was already moving away, across the park to Main Street, down Main Street to the
News and Mail
in the direction opposite the one Sharon wanted to take. Sharon stood looking after her, feeling agitated and not knowing why.

Timmy Hall. Peter Callisher. God only knew there had been enough rumors about Timmy Hall. And Tisha Verek had started every one of them.

Sharon went back to Main Street herself and began to make her way toward Jim MacAfee’s front lawn. It felt horrible in this place now, sticky and vile, and she just wanted to get out.

It made her wonder why she and Susan had come here to begin with.

Kelley Grey was sitting in the rectory kitchen when the doorbell rang, sitting at the table and looking over the manuscript Tisha Verek had left with Gemma Bury. She was also conducting a running argument in her head about what she ought to do about this manuscript. She had already decided to bring it to Gregor Demarkian or Franklin Morrison or the state police or whoever was really investigating Gemma’s death. She may not have liked Gemma much at the end, but she owed the woman at least the courtesy of providing a clue to her murder to the authorities assigned to avenge it. Beyond the mere fact of handing the manuscript over, though, Kelley found it hard to think. Should she discuss Gemma with Gregor Demarkian? Yesterday, Kelley had been sure she ought to tell Demarkian about Gemma’s affair with Jan-Mark Verek, but today it had begun to seem less and less important as the hours went by. Maybe if she had been able to get in touch with Demarkian himself—instead of being forced to leave messages at the desk at the Inn—it would have been easier to make up her mind. It hadn’t been an important affair. Gemma Bury didn’t have important affairs. She didn’t want to get tied down. That, Kelley understood now, was why she herself had been so angry with Gemma at the end. Gemma hadn’t liked to get tied down to anybody, for any reason. Her idea of the ideal friendship was one whose emotional commitment never surpassed that of a lunch date. God only knew what her idea of the ideal sexual relationship had been. Kelley’s idea of the ideal friendship had always had something in common with the ideal of the indissoluble marriage, but maybe thinking like that was out of date.

When the doorbell rang, Kelley had decided to get up, make herself a cup of tea and do something serious about the part of the rectory she was now occupying. This part was shrinking by the minute—she got more and more afraid of the size and the emptiness of the place by the minute, too—but it could do with a few more Christmas decorations than it had been subjected to so far. Gemma had been fairly contemptuous about people who were “sentimental” about Christmas, the way she got fairly contemptuous of those of her parishioners she described as “wedded to the more ludicrous details of the Christian myth.” Gemma had preached diversity and nonjudgmental acceptance with the best of them, but she had had no tolerance for either in her own life.

The doorbell was a chime that echoed and gonged for long seconds after the button was pushed. Kelley got up, looked around the kitchen and decided to put the manuscript in the refrigerator. She had a friend in Boston who was an aspiring novelist, and he always put his manuscripts in the refrigerator when he went out. Refrigerators survived fires, that was the point. The house could burn to the ground while he was away, but the manuscript would remain intact, protected along with the leftover scrambled eggs. Kelley put this manuscript next to a half-full bottle of Perrier water—Gemma hadn’t been big on abandoning herself to the pleasures of the flesh no matter what they were—and went out into the foyer to answer the door. With her growing nervousness in the house, Kelley had had a growing need to keep the lights on, even in the daytime. Now half the bulbs in the foyer chandelier were dead and she had no way to change them. She didn’t know where to find a ladder tall enough to reach and she didn’t know who to call for help. She brushed aside the feeling that the foyer was too dark to allow her to admit a stranger safely, stepped up to the right hand door of the front double doors and looked through the viewer. On the doorstep was a small blonde girl in an oversized jacket, looking tired.