Stillness in Bethlehem (38 page)

Stuart Ketchum pulled the trigger. The sound that followed was quick and sharp and unmistakable. Gregor got a good grip on Timmy’s arm and pulled him the rest of the way to Amanda Ballard.

“Through the window,” Peter Callisher said, grabbing on to Timmy’s other arm and taking over. “Through the window right now. Let’s get out of here.”

In the center of the circle, Stuart Ketchum was still standing stock still with his pistol in the air, waiting. At the edges, everybody was quiet. Gregor held his breath. The trouble with firing a shot in the air is that it sometimes provided the occasion for someone to fire a shot at you.

This time, it seemed to be doing what it was supposed to do. Everybody was quiet. Everybody was breathless. Everybody was waiting for something definitive to happen, nobody knew what.

Franklin Morrison seemed to think it was up to him to provide it. He strode into the center to stand beside Stuart and then called out, in a voice that needed no help from electronics:

“All right, everybody, let’s go on home, because if you’re anywhere near this place five minutes from now, I’m gonna throw you in jail and I’m not gonna give a shit who you think you are.”

S
HARON MORRISSEY AND SUSAN
Everman were sitting in the Village Restaurant when it started, and they were still sitting there twenty minutes later, when it finished, as abruptly and nonsensically as it had begun. Susan was drinking a cup of coffee. Sharon was trying to finish a hamburger that just wouldn’t go down. The shouting was far enough away so that the words were indecipherable, but clear enough in intent, to make Sharon think of blood. After a while, everything began to make her think of blood, even the bright plastic poinsettias on the middle of the table and the fuzzy red suit of the Santa Claus doll that had been placed in the window so that it faced the street. It shocked her a little, to think that Susan could sit there so calmly, drinking her coffee, watching the progress of the riot, watching the death of it—and not twitch at all. Sharon Morrissey definitely felt like twitching. She even felt like screaming. Ever since the circle had formed and it had become obvious what was going on, she had wanted to jump in her car and head for Boston.

“What are we going to do?” she asked, when the crowd started to disperse and the thick film of tension in the air began to disperse with it. “What are we going to do?”

Susan reached into her handbag and came up with a pack of the cigarettes she so rarely smoked. Susan Everman was the only person Sharon Morrissey had ever known who was able to smoke cigarettes only for mental-health purposes, and then only once or twice a year. Susan lit up with a gold Dunhill lighter and said, “Tomorrow morning we’re going to go apartment hunting in Boston.”

“But that means we’ll have to sell the house.”

“We’ll buy another house someday,” Susan said. She blew a stream of smoke into the air and thought about it. “Maybe we should travel a little,” she suggested. “I’ve never done any serious traveling in my life. And we have the money for it. We could go to Paris and Rome and to Holland. If we have the time.”

“If we did something like that, we wouldn’t have to sell the house,” Sharon said. “We could leave everything where it is and just take off.”

“That’s true.”

“Why do you want to leave this place? Is it just over that or is it something about us?”

“What went on over there isn’t ‘just’ anything,” Susan said grimly. “Small towns can turn, Sharon, and I think this one just did. There are already three people dead, and for all we know it’s some crazy who doesn’t like deviance of one sort or another. I think it’s time we got out of here.”

And, Sharon thought, Susan was right, just as Susan was always right and Susan was always beautiful, but it
felt
wrong, that was the problem. It felt like running. And what was worse, it felt like running from no danger at all. Sharon considered telling Susan what she really thought—which was that no matter who was dead already, the two of them were safe—but decided against it. If she said something like that, Susan would want her to explain it, and Sharon wasn’t sure she could.

At this point, Sharon Morrissey wasn’t sure she could explain anything.

“I think it’s time I got out of here,” Amanda Ballard was saying to Peter Callisher ten minutes later, pacing back and forth across his living-room floor, rubbing every once in a while against the raw patch of skin at the side of her face. The raw patch of skin was a scrape from a brick she’d run into getting out the back way after the—Peter didn’t want to call it a riot—and it seemed to nag at her. Timmy was out in the kitchen, drinking coffee full of sugar and cream and looking cold. He would fall asleep where he was sitting and they would have to move him. Amanda kept picking things up and putting them down again. Peter wanted to make her sit still.

“I don’t think you’re being fair,” he told her, wishing his voice didn’t sound so tight, wishing he didn’t really care. “They’re not like that. Not most of the time. You know they’re not like that.”

“I don’t know what they’re like.”

“This has been a good place for you. I’ve been a good man for you. I don’t see how you can talk about walking out on it all after everything we’ve been to each other.”

“We haven’t been anything to each other, Peter. We’ve just been sleeping together. And sex is only important to men.”

“Sex used to be important to you.”

“No, it didn’t. Not really.”

Peter started to argue the point and stopped himself. It was a ludicrous point to argue. It was an argument no man could win. All the woman had to do was say she’d been faking it, and how would the man ever know? Peter got up and went to the window. He could see Main Street and the town park. He could see streets filled with tourists and the bleacher tents like giant blobs blocking his view. It had all gone back to normal in no time at all.

“It’s as if it never happened,” he said, watching a cluster of bright silver balls tied to a fire hydrant bounce in the wind. “It’s all back to normal. And it’s going to stay back to normal. It was some kind of catharsis.”

“It was the next best thing to a lynching.”

“They would never have lynched anybody.”

“You would never have lynched anybody,” Amanda said. “You’re you. They’re them. I’m sorry, Peter. It’s my fault, really. I didn’t realize what I was doing. I didn’t understand it could work out this way.”

“I don’t see why it’s your fault.”

“I have to get Timmy out of here.”

“He didn’t come with you to begin with. I wish I understood you, Amanda. I wish I knew what you wanted out of life.”

“I want what everybody wants,” Amanda said. “I want to be left alone.”

Peter didn’t think that was what everybody wanted, but Amanda was on her way to the bedroom and he was following her. She went to the big oak wardrobe he’d bought in Burlington and began to take her sweaters down from its high shelf. He stood in the doorway with his arms folded over his chest and felt the sweat come pouring down his forehead into his eyes.

“Amanda,” he said.

Amanda unhooked an empty felt Christmas stocking with her name on it from the wardrobe’s upper molding and tossed it on the bed.

“Don’t tell me how much I mean to you, because we’ll both know it won’t be true. I was never anything more to you than a convenience.”

“A convenience,” Peter repeated.

“That’s why I like Timmy,” Amanda told him. “He gets angry and sad and happy and horny, but he never tries to cover it up by saying it’s something else.”

Peter didn’t have an answer to that. He didn’t know where to begin to look for an answer to that. He hadn’t even figured out what to think about tonight. He did tell himself that the right thing to do right this second would be to get her to stop, to prove through force and ardor that he hadn’t felt about her as she assumed he had felt about her, that nothing was the way she thought it to be, but for some reason he felt paralyzed, and the paralysis translated into visions of Gregor Demarkian, going off to talk to Kelley Grey while the crowd melted away into the night.

Maybe Amanda was right. Maybe she had been only a convenience.

Maybe putting up with Timmy had been the coin of the realm.

When it was over, the first thing Stuart Ketchum wanted to do was to drive out to Rose Hill Cemetery and visit his mother’s grave. He hadn’t been there since the funeral and didn’t intend to go again. He went once to any grave that concerned him and then left it alone. That was what he’d done with the boys he’d known in Nam who hadn’t come home. If he found out where they were buried he went to see their markers, once, and then he walked away. It made sense. It made the only sense Stuart could think of, when it came to death. It had never ceased to surprise him just how final dying was.

He never made it to the cemetery. He stood in the middle of Main Street, watching it empty out, thinking of these people he had known all his life. He thought of himself holding that pistol in the air, that pistol he’d only had with him because he was going to go down to Burlington tonight and talk to his dealer about selling it off. He had started collecting guns of every type and only settled on rifles after a time. What would have happened if he hadn’t had it with him? What would have happened if he’d had one of the rifles instead, so that he was out there in the middle of that circle looking like an ad for the United States Marines? What would his friends and neighbors have done then? Minute by minute, he had a harder and harder time thinking of these people as “his friends and neighbors.” They were like the pod people from the remake of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, the ones that opened their mouths and made a horrible noise.

He looked around in the empty street and saw Gregor Demarkian standing by himself, his hands in the pockets of his long city coat, his head bare. Stuart’s head was bare, too, and he could guess how Demarkian felt. Stuart thought his own ears were frozen solid and about to drop off. He went down the pavement and stopped just close enough to make conversation possible. Demarkian was staring into the gutter with a frown on his face. It was one of the things Stuart had noticed. Demarkian was the kind of man who looked intelligently at inanimate objects, as if they could tell him something.

The dwarf evergreen bushes that lined the walk to the front door of the Green Mountain Inn on the other side of the street had been decked out with gold Christmas balls. Stuart hadn’t seen them there the last time he’d been in. He moved a little closer to Demarkian and said, “Where did Franklin go? Did he disappear with the riot?”

“Chief Morrison was called away on an errand. By Kelley Grey.”

“What about you?” Stuart said.

“I am waiting here for no good reason, and in a moment I’ll go back to the Inn and get changed for the performance. I suppose it’s getting late.”

“Getting.”

Demarkian rocked back and forth on his heels. “Would you mind telling me something? If I asked you a question?”

“You can ask me anything.”

“Meaning you don’t have to answer.”

“Exactly.”

“This is a very little question,” Demarkian said. “I have heard, from a number of people, that your mother was having her portrait painted by Jan-Mark Verek.”

“That’s right.”

“And that she was very excited about this, and that she talked about it and about the times she spent at the Verek house. That she talked to quite a few people.”

“Definitely. She was tickled pink, to put it the way she would have herself.”

“That’s what I thought. Did she mention anything at all in particular about that house? Did she go only in Jan-Mark’s studio or did she go into the other rooms? Did she ever say she’d seen anything—”

“You mean in Tisha’s office?” Stuart laughed. “Of course she’d seen Tisha’s office. Jan-Mark shows people Tisha’s office. Haven’t you had a chance to talk to Cara Hutchinson?”

“Who’s Cara Hutchinson?”

“High-school girl, plays Elizabeth in the Nativity play this year. She’s the new portrait subject, the one Jan-Mark picked on after my mother died. I don’t know why he needs subjects, though, it’s all found objects and collages. Anyway, first day she was there, he gave her a tour.”

“He gave your mother a tour also, when she was alive?”

“No,” Stuart said, “it was Tisha who gave my mother the tour, at least as I understood it. Does this have something to do with why she died?”

“Why she was killed?” Gregor asked. “Yes. Yes, it does. It also confirms something for me.”

“Which is what?”

“Which is that that entire alarm nonsense we went through today was staged for the purpose of letting Mr. Jan-Mark Verek get a look at me, and incidentally to find out what we were doing, which wasn’t much.”

“You mean you don’t think he was robbed?”

“Of the photographs?” Demarkian smiled. “Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t. He certainly wasn’t robbed of them today.”

“Why not?”

“Because this Cara Hutchinson person of yours is not dead. I take it nothing you’ve heard of has happened so that she’s just narrowly escaped death? No one has shot at her? She wasn’t the person originally intended for Gemma Bury’s seat?”

“She’s in the play, like I told you. And you know what this town is like. If something really odd had happened, you’d have heard yourself by now. You’ve been in the paper so much, you’re practically a resident.”

“Fine,” Gregor said. “Then the photos weren’t stolen today, if they were stolen at all. They would have had to have been removed before this Cara Hutchinson first saw Tisha Verek’s office. Is there a place in the Verek house where it might be possible to see into your yard?”

“Not into my yard,” Stuart said, “because the Verek place is in a hollow. But you know what he can see? The road and the notches in the woods where the stone walls come out.”

“Meaning he probably saw Franklin and me wandering in and out when we were using the stone walls. All right. That will do.”

“Why did the pictures have to be taken before Cara Hutchinson saw Tisha Verek’s office?”

Gregor Demarkian got a surprised look on his face that Stuart remembered from grade school. It was the look of a teacher whose prize pupil has just asked a monumentally stupid question.