Stillness in Bethlehem (12 page)

“I know it won’t,” Amanda said. “I just can’t help wondering. I mean, the timing was perfect, wasn’t it? Now Tisha can’t file for an injunction and the Celebration is safe.”

“For the moment.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that in all probability the Celebration is unconstitutional as all hell and not long for this world. Is that the downstairs bell? I think somebody’s trying to get in to the office.”

Somebody was definitely trying to get in to the office. Amanda could hear not only the bell, but the sound of feet pounding against the mat on the porch, trying to stay warm. She got up, took Peter’s terrycloth bathrobe off the chair next to the bed and wrapped herself up. Then she went to the window and looked out. The porch out there had a roof, but only a partial one. If you got the right angle, you could see who was out there calling on you.

“It’s Cara Hutchinson,” Amanda said. “Should I go down there and see what she wants? We’re supposed to be taking ads today. And announcements.”

“I’ve got to start hiring somebody to sit at the desk,” Peter said. “This is getting ridiculous.”

“Should I go?”

“I’ll go if you want. Just call down and tell her I’ll be a minute.”

“That’s all right. It’ll take me less time to get dressed than you. I’ll do it.”

One of the reasons it would take Amanda less time to dress than Peter was that Amanda already had more on than Peter. Peter liked to sit up in bed all day naked, but it made Amanda self-conscious. She got into her underwear as soon as it seemed feasible. She opened the window and stuck her head out into the cold.

“Cara? It’s me, Amanda. Give me a second. I’ll be right down.”

Cara backed up and came down the first of the porch steps to the street. “Amanda? Did I wake you up?”

“No, no. I’m fine. I’ll be right there.”

“Hurry up. I’m freezing out here.”

Amanda knew how freezing it was. The wind was blowing in on her and her bones were chilled. This was what they called a “mild” winter in Vermont, and “warm” weather for December. It made Amanda crazy. She searched around in the wardrobe until she found one of her jersey dresses, dropped Peter’s robe to the floor and pulled the dress over her head. It had short sleeves and a wide neckline and was totally inappropriate for the season, but it would have to do. She shoved her bare feet into moccasins and said, “I’ll only be a minute. Why don’t you think about what you want to do about dinner.”

“Mmm,” Peter said.

“At least think about thinking about it.”

“Mmm.”

Amanda bit her lip. It was impossible, really. It was always impossible with men. They didn’t listen. It had seemed new and unusual with Peter for a while only because he didn’t listen to different things. Amanda let herself out of the bedroom, made her way across the living room and came out on the landing to the stairs. When she got to the next landing, she chose the door into the newspaper offices and made her way around the equipment to let Cara in the front door. She didn’t see any reason to get any colder than she absolutely had to.

She reached the front door, pulled it open and practically pulled Cara inside. It was getting dark out there, and Amanda always thought it was colder in Vermont in the dark.

Cara didn’t seem to have spent much time noticing the dark. She came stomping into the newspaper office, her cheeks rosy, her eyes bright. She was a plain girl and not one Amanda cared for much—she was too ambitious, for one thing, and too likely to cut corners to get what she wanted—but this time her excitement was attractive. She was waving a piece of paper in one of her gloved hands, so Amanda assumed she wanted to place an announcement or an ad. Amanda went behind the ad counter and waited.

“Oh, Amanda,” Cara said, twirling around on the heels of her snow boots. “You just won’t believe what happened. You just won’t believe what happened to me.”

Sharon Morrissey spent her late Sunday afternoons in the basement of the First Congregational Church, teaching reading to a small collection of old people who came in from the hills and back roads to expose themselves to this humiliation one day of every week. Most of her old people were women, all but two of them were white, and every last one of them was embarrassed. Sharon got past that by pulling the shades tightly down on the half-windows that looked out on the street and keeping the door shut. She got her old people moving by promising them they would be able to read the Bible in church on Christmas Day. There was now exactly one weekly session left before she’d have to make good on her promise, and she thought it was going to work out. Her group wasn’t ready to plunge into the more unfamiliar recesses of the King James Version, but they ought to do fine with the familiar Nativity narrative of St. Luke. It made Sharon feel as high as liquor ever had, and without the worry about waking up with a hangover. Everything about her involvement with the First Congregational Church made Sharon high. Sharon didn’t know what Congregational churches were like in general, but this one had been wonderful to her without being condescending, and she was grateful. Nobody had made a big fuss about what she was, one way or the other. Nobody had made a point of not making a big fuss about what she was. She and Susan had been accepted without comment or unease. The fact that the literacy project she was working in was sponsored by the First Congregational Church was another reason Sharon liked teaching her old people to read.

The one thing Sharon didn’t like about it was the walk home. Sharon walked home because Susan used the car on Sundays to go up and visit her mother in New Hampshire. Sharon and Susan didn’t visit together because Susan’s mother wouldn’t let them. Sharon could have asked Susan to pick her up at the church—Susan never stayed that long in New Hampshire—but it seemed like an unnecessary bother when it was perfectly safe to walk. The problem was, in order to get home, Sharon had to go down Main Street to Carrow and down Carrow to the Delaford Road, and when she did that she passed Candy and Reggie George’s house. The problem with passing Candy and Reggie George’s house was that the same thing was always going on inside it: Reggie was beating Candy into a pulp. The first time Sharon had heard this, she had done what she knew was the right thing to do. She’d marched straight home and called the cops. She even had to give Franklin Morrison credit. He’d come out. He’d thrown Reggie in jail. He’d taken Candy to the hospital. He’d done everything he could do without some cooperation from Candy herself, and Candy refused to give it. Sharon didn’t know if Vermont had a mandatory-charge law for battering or not—she had never been entirely sure what happened after Reggie and Candy had been carted off to their separate public institutions—but she had come to realize this: Without Candy’s cooperation, mandatory-charge law or not, it was going to be impossible to convict Reggie. The second time she had called, Franklin Morrison had asked her if she
really
wanted him to come out, and Sharon hadn’t blamed him. The time Franklin had come out, Reggie had put a load of buckshot in his knee that had messed him up for weeks, and what had he got to show for it? It was so frustrating, it made Sharon want to scream.
Candy
made Sharon want to scream. How could you go through life with so little self-respect? How could you get out of bed in the morning weighed down by so much fear?

Tonight, things were quieter than usual, but not quiet. Sharon wondered if they had gotten an early start. Candy seemed to be moaning. Reggie seemed to be slapping something, but not human flesh. Sharon thought what she was hearing was the sound of a belt being slapped against a wooden table. She stopped under cover of the Georges’ evergreen hedge and listened for a while, but that was all she could hear. She was glad she could hear Candy moaning. If she hadn’t been able to hear Candy doing anything, she would have been worried she was dead.

She knocked snow off her boots and got moving again, through the dark, down the road, toward home. It wasn’t far. The house she shared with Sharon was on the northeast corner lot at the intersection of Carrow and Delaford, if you could call that an intersection. Sharon supposed that it was, but using that term for it bothered her. Intersections had sidewalks and streetlamps and stoplights.

Half a mile past Candy and Reggie’s house, Sharon started to jog, and she jogged the whole last three-quarters of a mile, right down her driveway to her back door. The lights were on all over the house, meaning Susan was home. Sharon hopped up the back porch steps and let herself into the mudroom, humming a little under her breath. The humming was not a good sign. It was “The Wearing of the Green,” and the only times Sharon had ever heard “The Wearing of the Green” was at funerals.

She stuck her head into the kitchen and said, “Susan?”

Susan came into the kitchen from the dining room on the other side. She must have been in the living room and heard Sharon coming up. “Get on in,” she said. “It’s cold out there. How was your class?”

“Class was fine.” Sharon had kicked off her snow boots and left them to lie on the drip-dry grate. Now she shoved her parka onto a hanger and came sock-footed into the kitchen. Susan was putting on a kettle of hot water for tea. There was fresh bread in the middle of the kitchen table, on a board with a knife and a tiny crock of butter at its side. It was this sort of thing that made Sharon’s commitment to Susan so absolute. This sort of thoughtfulness. This sort of care.

“Class was fine,” Sharon said again, sitting down. “It’s coming home I don’t like.”

“I know.”

“It wasn’t half as bad as usual, believe it or not. Or maybe it was worse. She was moaning in there. I kept standing there in the snow, trying to make sure I could hear her breathing. Which I couldn’t do, of course. Just moaning. I suppose that’s good enough.”

“You did what you could, Sharon. If you want, we can call Franklin Morrison again.”

“No, that’s all right. What good would it do?”

“Maybe it would do some good for you.”

Sharon shook her head. “I’ll be fine. What about you? How was New Hampshire?”

“The way New Hampshire always is,” Susan said, light and tight. “I had my problem with my mother long before I had you. Or anybody like you. If you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean.” Sharon sighed. “Do you ever wonder about it? The way people are, I mean. Candy and Reggie. Your mother.”

Susan smiled. “The men I knew in New York before I met you? I don’t wonder how jerks get to be jerks, Sharon. They just are.”

“Do you think Candy is a jerk?”

“I think anybody who can’t take care of herself is a fool. Especially any woman. Come on now. There must be something we can talk about that isn’t depressing. What went on in town today?”

Sharon pulled the bread to her and cut a slice. The kettle began to boil and Susan turned to take it off the stove. Susan had a perfect jawline, tight and well-defined, flawless. Susan was flawless all over, in spite of the fact that she was getting on to forty. Sharon ate bread and butter and watched Susan pour them both some tea.

“Well,” she said, “Jan-Mark Verek is apparently finished grieving, or he likes to work when he grieves. You remember how he was painting a portrait of Dinah Ketchum?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, now he’s painting one of Cara Hutchinson. At least, according to Cara Hutchinson he is. She was all over town with it this morning. She’s supposed to go up there tomorrow for a sitting, and she can hardly contain herself.”

Susan looked amused. “He’ll make her look like a lot of puke-green blobs on a piece of recycled paper. Do you think she’ll mind?”

“I don’t even think she’ll notice. She’s already gotten him to give her the grand tour. She was all over town about that, too. How wonderful the house was. How he keeps Tisha’s office practically as a shrine.”

“Horse manure,” Susan said.

“I’m with you.” Sharon put too much sugar in her tea, because she always put too much sugar in her tea. “Still, it had me worried, for a bit. About what Tisha might have left lying around her office that Jan-Mark hasn’t bothered to clean up yet.”

“I don’t think Tisha left things just lying around her office. She was much more organized than that.”

“I know,” Sharon said. “Maybe there isn’t anything we can talk about without getting depressed. Do you want to get thoroughly down?”

“No.”

“Well, I’m going to get you thoroughly down anyway. I ran into Franklin on my way to class today. In the pharmacy. I was buying Blistex and wishing we were in Florida.”

“Franklin can’t get me thoroughly down,” Susan said. “For a cop, he’s almost a nice man.”

“Well, nice or not, he was just beside himself today. And I’ll bet you can’t guess why.”

“You’re right. I can’t guess why.”

Sharon cut another piece of bread and buttered it. “Well,” she said, “it seems that his hero is in town. The man he most wants to meet. The absolute paragon of law enforcement. The wet dream of every small-town lawman from here to Arizona—”

“What are you
talking
about?”

“Gregor Demarkian,” Sharon said. Then she put her bread down on the bare wood of the table and said, “I don’t know if he’s here because Franklin asked him here or if it’s just a coincidence or what, but we’ve got those two deaths that were very nicely put down to hunting accidents—especially the one of them—and now we have
People
magazine’s favorite expert on murder as well. I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon, Susan, and I just don’t like the way it stacks up.”

What Stu Ketchum didn’t like was the way his rifles looked, stacked up on the floor of the gun room the way they were now. Ever since his mother had been found in the snow at the side of the road and Franklin Marshall had come back here to find Stu’s Browning .22-caliber semiautomatic Grade I rifle gone from its place on the wall, Stu had been taking his rifles down and putting them back up again, over and over, as if, if he did it enough times he could make the count finally come out right. Finding out that Dinah had not been killed with one of his guns had not helped. It had made him feel just a little less sick, but it had not really
helped
. Stu didn’t know what would help. Sometimes he thought he had invented a new kind of therapy, shot therapy, weapons therapy, whatever you wanted to call it. Sometimes he would take all the rifles down from the wall and go out into the yard and shoot holes in the side of his barn. Fortunately, there wasn’t much of anything in his barn.