by Jane Haddam
From where he was standing, Peter Callisher could see most of the town park and the south end of Main Street. As usual on the first day, before the serious tourists had begun their serious tramping about, people were milling around, trying themselves out, wondering how they’d gotten themselves into this fix. The three wise men had new robes this year, brightly colored and sewn over with paste gemstones. They even had camels sent up from a theatrical-animal supply service in Boston. The child Jesus had swaddling clothes shot through with gold thread. The angel of the Annunciation had wings wired to glow with incandescent bulbs. According to The Boston Globe, Bethlehem was likely to realize over three hundred and fifty thousand dollars from this Celebration, spread out across viewing tickets, room rents, restaurant checks, parking fees and souvenirs—of which there would be plenty, on sale twenty-four hours a day from the old horse barn in back of the Town Hall. According to New York magazine, Bethlehem’s take was going to be closer to half a million, due at least in part to the fact that New York had been hyping the Celebration vigorously for every one of the past five seasons. Whatever the final count, the money would more than come in handy. Like too many of the towns on the edges of the rural backwaters of northern New England, Bethlehem didn’t seem to have any money of its own.
Peter had left a cigarette burning in his only ashtray. He put it out—unsmoked; he had started smoking in India, out of polite necessity, and never really developed a taste for it, only a habit—and headed for the door that led to the stairs to the first floor. Those stairs ended in a landing fronted by two doors, one to the outside and one to the newsroom. Theoretically, this ensured his privacy. If he didn’t want his employees to know what he was doing, he could use the outside door and not have to pass through the newsroom at all. In practice, privacy was an illusion he didn’t waste his time worrying about. Everyone in town knew precisely everything he’d done since he’d first come back from God Only Knew Where.
He reached the landing, opened the door to the newsroom and stuck in his head. He had one or two truly local people working for him, but most of his employees were from Away. They were smart kids with rich parents, who’d been sent proudly through Groton and Harvard—only to decide that what they really wanted to do was to Go Back to the Land. They worked hard, demanded little money, and grew alfalfa sprouts in big white plastic tubs in the ladies’ room. Not a single one of them had the least idea of what it really meant to belong to a place like this.
Peter squinted across the piles of paper that never seemed to change position and found Amanda Ballard, his best, checking type sizes on a font chart. Amanda Ballard was not only his best: She was his prettiest. Thin, blond, even-featured, straight-haired and blue-eyed, Amanda was a vision of cultural perfection, circa 1968. She was a lot of other things circa 1968, too. She seemed to think and speak in staccato bursts of discarded clichés, apparently unconcerned that even the politics of her beloved New Left had passed her by. If it hadn’t been for the odd deformation of her right ear, with no earlobe at all and a stunted little nub at the bottom that looked like a pierced earring in the wrong place, she would have been indistinguishable from a doll. She was thirty-six years old and looked sixteen—and would look sixteen, Peter thought, when she was eighty. In that way, she was very different from Peter himself, who had weathered in body as well as in mind. His skin was creased into folds at the corners of his eyes and along the line of his jaw. Sand and wind and worry had marked him. His mind had tied itself into knots in its attempt to hold on to a belief in the essential goodness of human beings, and been defeated.
Amanda put down the font chart, picked up what seemed to be an Associated Press tear-off and frowned. Frowning, she looked very much the way she did in bed, after intercourse, when she tried to explain to him why his attitude was all wrong. Peter watched while Timmy Hall, their great overgrown copy boy, came up to ask Amanda a question. Seeing Timmy around Amanda always made Peter nervous, as if that great tub of lard might suddenly turn lean and mean and lunge with sharpened teeth. It was a ridiculous image. Timmy was strange, but not that kind of strange. His peculiarities ran to eating Marshmallow Fluff with his scrambled eggs. Amanda was fragile, but not that kind of fragile. Peter could never put a finger on what kind of fragile she was, but he was attracted to it. Besides, Amanda had known Timmy forever, as far as Peter could tell. She’d even gotten Timmy this job. Timmy was mentally retarded and had been brought up in the mental-health complex in Riverton. Amanda had met him there while she was doing something Peter had never been able to pin down, but that he secretly suspected was getting straight from drugs. That was the kind of trouble Amanda would have, heat prostration from an attempt to resurrect the Summer of Love.
Peter shifted on his feet, nodded to the two or three people who had noticed him standing in the doorway, and said, “Amanda?”
Amanda put the Associated Press tear-off down, shook her head at something Timmy was saying and came toward the door. “We can’t play tricks like that on our readers,” she said over her shoulder—to Timmy, Peter supposed. Then she came up to him and sighed. “If we’re going to deliver to the printers by three o’clock, we’re going to have to get a lot more done than we’ve been getting done. How are you?”
“I’m all right. I came to find out how you were. Everything quiet?”
“Absolutely,” Amanda said.
“Not a squawk out of our usual troublemakers? No hunters shooting game wardens? No Sarah Dubay marching up and down Main Street saying the end of the world is at hand?”
“Sarah doesn’t say the end of the world is at hand,” Amanda said, “she says Christ was really an alien.”
“Whatever.”
“You shouldn’t be so worried.” Amanda stretched her arms. “I’ve just been looking at the numbers. We’re going to print them on page five because everybody in town wants to know how well we’re doing, but you know how the tourists feel when they think we’re being mercenary. Anyway, the inns are booked solid for all three weeks, and the tickets are sold out for every performance, and there’s even some special arrangement with a school in New Hampshire where they’re going to bus the kids in every night. It’s going to be fine. The town’s going to make a pile of money.”
“I hope,” Peter said. “No word from the mountain? Nothing from Jan-Mark? Nothing from Tish?”
“Not a peep.”
Peter came all the way into the newsroom and shut the door behind him. The windows that fronted the street on this level were mullioned, but the mullions were new and modern and large. Peter could see the short paved stretch of Main Street that ended at the gazebo and the town park. The windows of the stores were full of evergreen branches with twinkly little lights implanted in them. People came to see a six-day-long Nativity play, but when they weren’t watching it they wanted their Christmas American Traditional. Over on Mott Street, Jean and Robert Mulvaney had turned their little dry-goods store into Santa’s Workshop and ordered a stack of toys to sell to outlanders with too much money and not a lot of sense.
“I don’t know,” Peter said. “It’s been much too quiet. Don’t you think it’s been much too quiet?”
“I think I’ve got much too much work to do to worry about whether it’s been much too quiet.”
“I don’t know.” Peter sighed. “It’s opening day. Every year before opening day, we have a crisis. Where’s the crisis?”
“Maybe Dinah Ketchum will finally shoot that daughter-in-law of hers dead, and we can all get ready to listen to another lecture from Montpelier about how we have to bring Vermont into the twentieth century. Are you going to let me get back to work?”
“Sure.”
“You ought to do something yourself,” Amanda said. “At least look like you’re doing something. If you don’t, Timmy Hall is going to come up and give you five awful ideas for the paper.”
Timmy Hall was nowhere to be seen, which was par for the course for Timmy. Their copy boy always seemed to be either underfoot or invisible
. He always left Peter wondering how old he really was.
Peter shook that out of his head, watched Amanda go back to her desk and turned to look back out at Main Street again. He was being an old Nelly, of course, but he couldn’t really help himself. Small towns like this were full of people whose deepest wish was to have a television camera aimed at them. There would be a lot of television cameras on hand for the opening of the Celebration, and the nuts should have come out of the trees by now. So where were they?
Peter considered the possibility that this year there would be no nuts at all, and no trouble, either, and dismissed it out of hand. He had been around the world and back. He had been born and brought up in this very town. He knew better.
He decided to take his mind off it by looking at the mock-up for the front page, which was always news from Away and always amusing. It was a front page he was particularly proud of, because it had everything—as far as Bethlehem, Vermont, was concerned. In the first place, it was about violence in the flatlands, which allowed the citizens of Bethlehem to congratulate themselves on how intelligent they had been to stick around here. In the second place, it was violence with style and a kind of Agatha Christie twist, which made it fun to read. There was even a picture, a great big smudged-looking thing of a thick tall man with a Middle Eastern solemnity to his face. The headline read:
HIGH SEAS MYSTERY: DEMARKIAN NABS
MURDERER ON BILLIONAIRE’S BOAT
Then there was a subhead, one he’d written himself:
THE ARMENIAN-AMERICAN HERCULE POIROT
SOLVES ANOTHER ONE
It was too good to be true.
It was so good, in fact, that Peter Callisher used it as one more proof positive that a disaster was about to befall them.
2
Tisha Verek had been the wife of a notorious man long enough to know how to behave, and on this morning of December second—with a thin mist of snow falling on the barren ground of her summer garden and the half-light of a cloud-occluded dawn making all the world look gray—she was behaving herself with a vengeance. It was eight o’clock in the morning, much too early to get anything done in New York—but this was not New York. This was Bethlehem, Vermont, where Tisha and her husband Jan-Mark had moved five years before, during one of Jan-Mark’s counterphobic fits. Tisha often had trouble believing that Jan-Mark was really here, in Vermont, in the country, and that he hadn’t vanished into smoke as soon as the carbon dioxide began to thin in the air. Jan-Mark was that quintessential urban invention, the contemporary artist. He smoked too much, drank too much, swore too much and snorted too much cocaine. He hand-stretched custom canvases to forty feet in length and pasted them over with twice-washed trash. He painted red-and-black acrylic swirls on conventional four-by-eights and called the results “Cunnilingus.” Most of all, he met other men like himself, and women, too, in heavy-metal bars where the air was thick with marijuana smoke. Back in the city, all but one of his friends had AIDS. The one had made a vow to Buddha in 1972 and lived in an apartment filled with joss sticks and chimes.
Tisha had never made a vow to anyone, anywhere. She hadn’t even made a vow to Jan-Mark at their wedding. She’d written the ceremony herself, and she’d been very careful about all that. Tisha had been very careful about almost everything in her life. She was forty years old and looked thirty, the result of decades of patiently taking care. Her thick red hair was the color of flame and only barely touched up. It floated out from her skull in the tight crimps of a natural wiriness. Her skin had the hard smoothness of good porcelain. In the winter it grew faintly pink with cold, but in the summer it wasn’t allowed to tan at all. She weighed ten pounds less and wore jeans two sizes smaller than she had at seventeen. The refrigerator was full of crudités and the basement was full of dumbbells to take care of that. Once upon a time, she had been a lumpy girl named Patty Feld, growing up unpopular in Dunbar, Illinois. She had made a promise to herself then about what she would become. She had made meticulous plans for taking elaborate revenge. In the years since, she had made herself into exactly what she had promised herself to make herself into, and every once in a while, she had indulged herself in a little revenge. Patricia Feld Verek had never been the sort of person it made sense to cross, not even as a child. At the age of five, she had put a snake in the lunchbox of the only mentally retarded girl in her class. At the age of twelve, she had told twenty-six people that Mary Jean Carmody was going all the way with Steven Marsh, which wasn’t true. The fact that it wasn’t true hadn’t helped Mary Jean Carmody any, because Steven was hardly going to deny it. Tisha had wanted Mary Jean off the junior cheerleading squad, and Mary Jean had been thrown off. Now what Tisha wanted was something definitive, a token of power, from the people of Bethlehem, Vermont. This was the morning on which she intended to get it. After all, it only made sense. This was a terrible place, a prison, a cesspool. This was the pit of hell dressed up to look like Santa’s Workshop. Tisha had been around long enough to know.
The house where Tisha and Jan-Mark lived was not an old farmhouse but a new log one, four levels high, stuck halfway up a mountain and surrounded by trees. The second level was a loft that served as their bedroom, screened from nature and the living room only by a thick built-in bookcase that acted as a headboard for the bed. Standing on this level, just past the bookcase on either side, Tisha could see down into the living room with its massive fieldstone fireplace and chimney. She could also see back into the bedroom, where Jan-Mark was lying fetuslike in the bed, smothering himself under four Hudson Bay point blankets and a down quilt. He was dead to the world, and Tisha didn’t blame him. He’d been up until two o’clock in the morning, drinking blended Scotch whiskey and singing along to ancient Beach Boys records.
There were a pair of cedar chests at the foot of their oversized, custom-made bed. Tisha opened one of them, pawed through the sweaters until she found one dyed a bright lime green, and pulled the sweater over her head. Tisha liked colors like lime green. They clashed with her hair and made people nervous. She liked Jan-Mark being asleep, too. Jan-Mark liked to épater la bourgeoisie, but only for Art and only when he started it. He hated it when she went off on her own, doing all kinds of things he didn’t understand, making people upset for no good reason he could see. Tisha didn’t care about that—in her opinion, Jan-Mark didn’t see much—but she didn’t like to argue, and if it was all over and done with by the time he found out about it, he wouldn’t bother to make a fuss. Back in New York, Jan-Mark had been legendary for his rages, but that was theater.
At the bottom of the cedar chest there was a stack of leg warmers. Tisha took out the ones that matched the sweater she was wearing, considered exchanging them for a pair in tangerine orange and decided against it. That sort of thing violated her sense of order. She pulled the leg warmers up over her knee socks, anchored her jeans to her ankles with them, and stood up.
“Son of a bitch,” Jan-Mark said from his nest of wool and feathers.
“Daughter of one, too,” Tisha said equably. Then she turned her back on him and walked away, around the bookcase, across the balcony, to the spiral stairs that led to the balcony above. She could hear him snoring after her as she went.
