Stillness in Bethlehem (7 page)

Now she just jogged through, not bothering to imagine queens, and went down the steps to the door to the tunnel that went under the lawn to the rectory. The rectory was only 100 years old, but it was just as magnificent a building as the church was. The ceilings were fourteen feet high. The staircase at the front entrance was a curving sweep worthy of hoop skirts and Scarlett O’Hara. The cubed patterns that surrounded the interior doors had been cut from three-inch pieces of teakwood. It was a house built at a time when Episcopal priests were assumed to be Episcopal gentlemen, with all that that entailed in a nineteenth-century world. Gemma would never have believed it, but she looked perfectly natural in this place. Her genetics were in favor of it. She was, after all, the descendant of the very same aristocratic WASPs who had wanted their rectories to look like this one. Her temperament was in favor of it, too. No one who had known Gemma Bury for ten minutes would have been the least surprised that she imagined herself as Queen Elizabeth the First. They would have suspected her of imagining herself as Catherine the Great. Given the time and place of her birth, she had turned out to be an Episcopal priest—but she had been born to be an empress.

She made her way to the rectory’s second floor, down a short corridor and then through a door to a longer and narrower one. In the old days, these had been the servants’ quarters. Gemma now used the rooms as offices for the church groups she especially favored. The Women’s Awareness Project had an office up here. So did the Social Justice Committee. So did the Ecumenical Society. Gemma had considered turning one of the rooms over to a Sikh who had been expelled from El Salvador, but the Sikh had found other Sikhs and Gemma was never able to figure out what he had been doing in El Salvador anyway.

Gemma stopped at the third door on the right, listened for a moment to the sound of an IBM electronic typewriter rattling away and knocked. Knowing Kelley, she didn’t wait for her knock to be answered. She just opened the door and stuck in her head. Kelley was sitting with her back to the door, hunched over the typewriter, copying something out of a notebook she had to scrunch over to read. Kelley was working on her dissertation for a doctorate in sociology at the University of New Hampshire, and she was always scrunching over something trying to read.

Gemma flicked a glance at Kelley’s one sentimental concession to the season—a glass snow ball with a Vermont-like town scene in it—and cleared her throat. Kelley sat up straight and took her glasses off, but didn’t turn around. Gemma went over to the side of the desk instead and sat down on the metal folding chair that had been left there, as if Kelley were trying to signal that guests were welcome, but not very. Ordinarily, Gemma would not have put up with this sort of behavior. It was inappropriate, and Gemma hated all things inappropriate. Kelley, however, was Kelley. She was short and squat and very, very neurotic.

Gemma stretched out her legs, looked up at the ceiling and said, “Well. I’ve interrupted you. You know I had to.”

“Did you?”

“Oh, yes,” Gemma said. “I’ve been taking phone calls all morning. From all the old ladies. I’m afraid I was beginning to lose it.”

“About Tisha Verek?” Kelley was finally interested. Kelley was always interested in Tisha Verek. Gemma didn’t know why.

“The thing is,” Gemma said, “on the subject of the lawsuit, we can hardly blame her, can we? Tisha, I mean. You know, I’ve thought about bringing a lawsuit like that myself.”

“It would have caused a terrible mess,” Kelley said wryly. “The old ladies would probably have given up writing to the bishop and gone down and picketed instead. Or they would have picketed you.”

“I know. I still think I should have done it. It would have been a wonderful opportunity to show the community what real Christianity is all about. It would have been a splendid object lesson in true tolerance.”

“It would have been professional suicide.” Kelley laughed. She had been threading a pencil through the fingers of her left hand, a nervous habit she fell back on at the start of every conversation. Now she put the pencil down and stretched. “Just be glad Tisha came along and decided to do it herself. I don’t care how you feel about tolerance or Christianity or any of the rest of it. This is a small town. I grew up in a town like this.”

“And you hated it,” Gemma said solemnly. “It stifled you.”

“Not really.” Kelley shrugged. “I felt a lot more stifled at Swarthmore, if you want to know the truth. Stifling isn’t my point. My point is that towns like this tend to get involved in very us and them-oriented wrangles. It’s not true they care so much about your not having been around for twenty years. What they really care about is whose side you’re on.”

“I’m sure I’m on everybody’s side,” Gemma said disapprovingly. “We’re all on the same side, after all. We’d realize that if we only took the time to determine our true interests.”

“Right,” Kelley said. “You tell that to the Bethlehem school board when it wants to put in a language lab and it doesn’t have the money because the Celebration’s been shut down.”

“I don’t want to talk about the Bethlehem school board,” Gemma said. “I want to talk about Tisha. She’s supposed to be leaving for Montpelier in just about fifteen minutes, and once she does, we’re going to have to have a policy. In advance. If we don’t have a policy, the old ladies are going to end up running right over us.”

“The old ladies are going to run right over us anyway,” Kelley said. “They always do.”

Gemma wanted to protest that they did nothing of the sort—Gemma wasn’t the sort of person who let other people run over her—but Kelley had gotten out of her chair and wandered off to the room’s single window, and there was something about the way she was standing at it that made Gemma pause. Head cocked, hands in the back pockets of her jeans, one foot rubbing the calf of the other leg—what could she possibly be looking at? Gemma came up behind her and stared over her shoulder at what seemed to be undifferentiated white. There was nothing to look at out there, not even a bird. Then the scene shifted into sharp focus, and she understood. The rectory property bordered the Verek property on one side. Because the rectory was on a much higher hill than the Verek property was, and because of the way Jan-Mark had had his trees cleared, they could look right down into the Vereks’ drive.

Gemma backed away a little, put her own hands in her own pockets, and said, “Oh.”

“Oh?” Kelley asked her.

“Well,” Gemma said, uncomfortable. “It’s not nice, is it? Spying on people, I mean.”

“Well, you can’t see anything important,” Kelley reasoned, “just people getting in and out of cars and driving away or coming home. I was looking out here earlier, while you were on the phone. I was thinking what a perfect spot it would be.”

“Perfect spot for what?”

“For a sniper,” Kelley said lightly. “There have to be dozens of people in town this morning who would love to see Tisha dead before she got a chance to go to Montpelier. This would be a perfect place to kill her from. You could just stand right here at the window and aim something really accurate, one of those fancy rifles Stu Ketchum is always carrying around. You’d be so far away, the hick cops around here would never be able to figure out where you’d done it from. Or who you were, either.”

“The hick cops around here would probably have the sense to call in the state police,” Gemma said sharply. “What’s all this talk about guns? You know how I feel about violence.”

“I know how you feel about everything, practically. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Feel? You’ve made a profession of it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“No,” Kelley said wearily. “You probably don’t.”

Gemma watched her walk back to her chair and drop down in it, looking tired. “This isn’t like you,” she said to the back of Kelley’s head, when Kelley had turned around again and begun to pretend to be working on her essay. “I don’t know what’s got into you this morning. You were just the way you usually are at breakfast.”

“I’m just the way I usually am now. You aren’t used to paying attention. I wish you’d go take the phones off the hook or something and leave me alone. I really do have a lot of work to do.”

“I don’t believe that’s true,” Gemma said tightly. “I think you’re playing games with my mind. I think you’re trying to punish me.”

“For what?”

“How should I know? In spite of the way you’re behaving, I can’t believe it’s over Tisha Verek and her silly lawsuit.”

“Of course you can’t.”

“Tisha Verek isn’t important. She’s just—God’s chosen instrument, that’s all. She’s just a vessel.”

“You should know,” Kelley said. “You’re the one who’s sleeping with her husband.”

And with that, Kelley Grey picked up her much-battered Sony Walkman, jammed the earphones in her ears, shoved the switch to “on” and closed her eyes. She had the music up so loud, Gemma could hear faint strains of “Silent Night.” Gemma stared at the back of Kelley’s head and then at the window and then at the back of Kelley’s head again. She wanted to break some furniture or smash the Walkman into fragments. She did neither.

She sat right back down in Kelley’s metal folding chair and gave due consideration to just how many people had known for just how long that she was having an affair with Jan-Mark Verek.

Exactly twenty-one minutes later, at nine forty-one, Jan-Mark Verek himself rose from the tangled torture of his bed, walked around his bookcase headboard, and went to stand at the rail that looked out over the living room of his house. His mouth was full of cotton and his head was full of cotton candy. He had aches in places he was sure aches ought to be fatal and that sour taste in his mouth that meant he had drunk just enough to be hung over without ever having had the pleasure of being first-class drunk. He was wearing a pair of Jockey shorts and nothing else. If he had been entirely sober the night before, he wouldn’t have been wearing the Jockey shorts. The balcony looked out not only on the living room but on a wall of windows. Through those windows he could see his driveway with its detached garage and circular sweep of gravel. It was definitely the case that he was sick of that circular sweep of gravel, as he was sick of his house and his trees and the deer that came down out of the hills when the mornings were especially cold. He’d started talking to anybody who would listen about how much he appreciated forest fires. Down in the driveway, a rust-red Cadillac Seville was pulling in, maneuvering gingerly along the curve, trying not to scratch itself on the rocks and trees that jutted out of everywhere in a random hash the landscape designer had assured them was “ecologically aesthetic.” Jan-Mark identified the car as the one belonging to Camber Hartnell just seconds before he saw Tish come out on the gravel, dressed in her most constipated New York lunch clothes and actually holding a handbag. Tish never carried handbags unless she was meeting with an editor from
The New York Times
. She came hurrying across the gravel, seemed to trip, and stopped to bend over and fuss with her shoes. She was just standing up straight again when it happened.

At first, Jan-Mark wasn’t entirely sure what had happened. It was all so fast and so neat. It was all so simple. First there was that odd popping sound, nothing too loud, nothing ominous. Then Tish seemed to rise a little in the air. Then she jerked backward at the neck and spun around. Then she fell. Jan-Mark stood at the balcony railing with his mouth open, staring. Tish was lying on the ground, seeping the smallest threads of blood onto the stones. The blood had to be coming from holes, but they were holes too small for Jan-Mark to see.

They were not holes too small for Camber Hartnell to see. He slammed his Cadillac into gear, revved his engine so abruptly it made the car squeal and took off in a spray of flying gravel.

Fifteen minutes later and six miles farther down the road, in a hollow on the side of the road that had once been the edge of a farm owned by a family that had ceased to exist, old Dinah Ketchum lay in a nest of twigs and snow, listening to her murderer get into a car parked on the shoulder not ten feet away. Her murderer was the murderer of Tisha Verek, too, and Dinah Ketchum knew that. She knew everything there was to know about everything that had happened in the last half hour, and the only thing that really bothered her was knowing she would never get a chance to tell anyone about it.

Old Dinah Ketchum was eighty-two years old, old enough, and as she closed her eyes, she told herself she should have known better. She should have seen. She should have understood. She should have wondered what the gun was doing there in the back of that car instead of up on Stuart’s rack at home where it belonged. Dinah Ketchum had never liked Stuart’s guns, and she didn’t like them now. The blood that was oozing out of her shoulder into the ground was so hot it was making the snow melt.

Go to sleep, she told herself. Go to sleep.

The only thing that matters now is to go to sleep.

Above thy deep and dreamless sleep

The silent stars go by

I
T WAS CALLED
J
.
Edgar Hoover: The Man and His Secrets
, and what Gregor Demarkian told people who asked him what he was doing with it was: Bennis Hannaford gave it to me for an early Christmas present. This, of course, was true.
J. Edgar Hoover
was a book, and Bennis Hannaford had indeed given it to Gregor Demarkian for an early Christmas present. She had even wrapped it up in shiny silver paper. Back on Cavanaugh Street in Philadelphia, where they both lived, Gregor thought Bennis had thought there might actually be sense in the idea. Gregor had spent twenty years of his life in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the last ten of them either establishing or heading the Department of Behavioral Sciences. He had chased serial killers from Florida to Oregon to Massachusetts and back around again. He had sat kidnapping stake-outs from Palm Beach to Palm Springs. He had known three presidents and more senators, congressmen and departmental functionaries than he cared to remember. He’d been spoken of as a possible candidate for Director of the Bureau itself, although that sort of talk had mercifully died an early death. To Bennis Hannaford, one thing and one thing only would have been important, and that was that Gregor had known J. Edgar Hoover himself.