Stillness in Bethlehem

by Jane Haddam

  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.

  The balcony above was where their “offices” were—her office, really, and Jan-Mark’s studio. They were both simply large open spaces divided by a four-inch construction of good drywall. Tisha had to pass Jan-Mark’s studio to get where she wanted to go. She looked in on paints and canvases and easels and palettes and a life-sized poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger from Terminator II. Her office was much more organized, much more efficient. The Macintosh had its own hard-plastic work station in one corner. The corkboards that lined the walls were themselves lined with pictures, portraits of the people in her latest project. Tisha Verek was a “writer,” particulars undefined, but she was a “writer” with good connections. She had had four true-crime books published already and was now working on a fifth. This time, instead of writing about a single crime, putting the details together the way she’d put together a novel, she was working on a concept, on a theory. The photographic portraits on her corkboards were all of children between the ages of five and twelve years old. Each and every one of those children had committed at least one murder, and three had committed more than five.

  Tisha sat down in the big armchair she kept next to her phone and looked up at her favorite corkboard of all, what she thought of as her gallery of grotesques. On this corkboard she had Mikey Pellman, who had cut the throats of three of his kindergarten classmates during a school picnic in Andorman, Massachusetts, in 1958. When he was asked why he’d done it, Mikey’d said he wanted to know if everyone had the same color of blood. She also had Tommy Hare, who had waited until he was twelve but shown a good deal more imagination. He had killed his ex-girlfriend and the boy she’d dumped him for by electrocuting them in a swimming pool. That wouldn’t have gotten Tommy onto this corkboard in and of itself, except for the fact that there had been twenty-two other people in that swimming pool at the time, and Tommy had had to stand at the edge of it with a cattle prod in his hand to get the job done. All in all, this was by far the best of the corkboards, much better than the one she kept near her computer, to give herself inspiration. That one had the pictures of people who fit her theory without stretching, like Stevie Holtzer, who at the age of seven pushed the father who beat him down the cellar stairs and broke his neck, or Amy Jo Bickerel, who put a bullet through the head of the uncle who forced her into finger-probing trysts in the front seat of his car when she was eleven. There was something about those people that Tisha didn’t like at all—as if it were less attractive to kill for a reason rather than for the sheer ecstasy of doing it.

  She got the phone untangled from its cord, checked the number on her phone pad although she knew it by heart and began to punch buttons. The beeps and whirs that sounded in her ear made her think of R2D2 and those silly Star Wars movies. Then the phone started to ring, and she sat back to wait. Tisha could be as patient and as understanding as the next woman if she wanted to be, and today she wanted to be. She had been thinking long and hard about what she was going to do and how she was going to do it. She had even consulted a lawyer in New York and paid him eight hundred dollars for his opinion. She was as sure as anyone could be that nothing on earth could stop her.

  All she had to do now was set her little time bombs and wait.

  3

  Franklin Morrison had been the chief lawman for Bethlehem, Vermont, for far longer than he wanted to remember, and during most of that time he had been desperately dreaming of escape. Exactly what he wanted to escape from, he wasn’t sure. Sometimes he thought it was just the job. He kept telling himself he could quit any time he wanted to. He didn’t even have to think of anything else to do. He had his Social Security and a little pension the town had helped him set up twenty years ago. He owned his house free and clear, and the taxes on it weren’t heavy. He could retreat to his living room and his vast collection of the novels of Mickey Spillane and never have to hear another word about the Bethlehem Nativity Celebration as long as he lived. Sometimes he thought it was all much more complicated than that. What he really wanted to escape from was Vermont, and snow, and winter. His best friend, Charlie Deaver, had gone down to live in Florida a year ago, and in the letters Charlie’s wife sent, Florida sounded like a cross between Walt Disney heaven and the Promised Land. Then Franklin would get to thinking about it, and even Florida would not be enough. He’d begin to wonder what was out there. He’d begin to dream about spaceships to Jupiter. He’d find himself standing in the checkout line in the supermarket at the shopping center over in Kitchihee, New Hampshire, staring long and hard at the front page of The Weekly World News. “Woman Murdered By Fur Coat.” “Psychic Reveals: ELVIS CAPTURED BY ALIENS FOR EXPERIMENTS ON ALPHA CENTAURI.” “A Diet That Eats Your Fat Away While You Sleep.” He’d begin to think he was going nuts.

  On this second day of December, Franklin Morrison didn’t have to think he was going nuts. He knew he was going nuts. It was the opening day of the Celebration. Peter Callisher might look out on the town and think that all was quiet, but Franklin knew better. Oh, there was nothing major going on, not yet. Jackie Dunn hadn’t had enough liquor to want to bed down in the crêche. Stu Ketchum hadn’t staggered in from the hills with an illegal deer over his shoulders and too much ammunition left for that damned automatic rifle he’d bought. Even Sarah Dubay had been reasonably quiet. Now there was a lady who believed in life on Jupiter—and in Elvis being captured by aliens, for all that Franklin knew. The only reason that Sarah wasn’t a bag lady was that places like Bethlehem, Vermont, didn’t allow old women to wander around the streets with nowhere to go.

  So far, Franklin’s problems on this cold morning had been mostly procedural. Henry Furnald wanted two dollars for every car parked on his lawn instead of the one the town allowed him to charge while calling himself an official parking area. Henry was therefore threat
ening to take his lawn out of the car-parking business and had to be cooled down. God only knew what would happen if people started streaming in from Burlington and Keene and there was no place for them to put their cars. Then there were the camels, which had broken free of their tethers and come to rest in the middle of the intersection of Main and Carrow. They had to be moved to allow the truck bringing sausages from Montpelier to get to the food arcade. Then there was the food arcade itself, which seemed to be falling down. The damned thing was put together with plywood and penny nails, and the wind had been strong all week. Franklin kept getting calls from people who had passed by and been convinced it was about to collapse on their heads.

  All in all, the Bethlehem Nativity Celebration was just as much of a pain this year as it had ever been. Franklin would have been for abolishing it, except for two things. In the first place, it paid his salary. In the second, it kept him from thinking. Of these two, the keeping-him-from-thinking part was the more important. As long as camels were poking their noses into Beder’s Dry Goods Store, Franklin would not be visited by any middle-of-the-day paralyses. As long as the local juvenile delinquents kept trying to paint the Star of Bethlehem green, Franklin would not find himself coming to in the middle of empty rooms while his brain tried furiously to figure out What It All Meant—or if it meant anything at all. Franklin didn’t know what It was—maybe, at seventy-two, he was finally getting old—but he was sick and tired of It. It would have made more sense to him if he’d developed a sudden passion for pissing up.

  Now he came back to the squad room from the john and looked around, sighing a little. The squad room wasn’t really a squad room—the Bethlehem, Vermont, Police Department didn’t have a squad—but it was closer to it than anything anywhere in Vermont outside Montpelier. In fact, in spite of the fact that it was just a room in the basement of the town hall with two cells down the corridor next to the boiler room, it was better equipped than any squad room north of Boston. Back in the thirties, the town’s proceeds from the Bethlehem Nativity Celebration had gone to pay for necessities, like cleaning the streets and keeping the elementary school in business. Now, after decades of post-War prosperity only intermittently disrupted by recessions—and the steadily rising popularity of the Celebration itself—those proceeds went to pay for the spectacular. The elementary school had a computer room with fifty-four top-of-the-line IBM PCs, a gymnasium with two swimming pools and enough exercise equipment to qualify for a Jack LaLanne franchise and a music program that provided any child who wanted to learn to play an instrument with an instrument to use to learn on, for free. The volunteer fire department had a fully mechanized hook-and-ladder truck with a ladder that could stretch to 120 feet. Since the tallest building in Bethlehem was Jan-Mark Verek’s four-story log contemporary, the 120 feet weren’t likely to be needed anytime soon. The police department had what police departments get, when money is no object. Franklin had computer hookups, patrol cars, a mobile crime unit out of a Columbo fantasy, a full fingerprint classification and retrieval system with access linkage to the FBI, even a crime lab capable of microscopic blood, earth and fiber analysis. What he didn’t have was any crime worth speaking of, which he often thought was too bad.

  He let himself through the swinging gate in the low wooden rail and walked up behind his one deputy, Lee Greenwood, who was sitting with his feet on his desk and The Boston Globe opened in front of his nose, doing what he was always doing: reading the paper with enough fierce concentration to memorize the punctuation. At the moment, he was reading the latest in the Globe’s series of articles on what everybody had been calling The Thanksgiving Murder for a week or so now, in spite of the fact that it hadn’t taken place on Thanksgiving at all. Franklin saw fuzzy pictures of “billionaire Jonathan Edgewick Baird” and “mysterious arbitrageur Donald McAdam.” He passed over these to the even fuzzier picture of Gregor Demarkian, looking tall and broad and Middle Eastern and nothing at all like an “Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.” Going to a law-enforcement convention last year, Franklin had not been surprised to find that every smalltown cop in America seemed to know all there was to know about Mr. Gregor Demarkian. In places like this, where nothing much ever happened, it was intriguing to think that you might one day land in the middle of a mess interesting enough to call on the services of “the most skilled expert on the investigation of murder in America.”

  It was also intriguing to think that you might one day abscond with the town treasury and go to live in Borneo, but it wasn’t likely to happen. Franklin brushed it all out of his mind and tugged at the top of the paper to get Lee’s attention. Lee was as young and hairy as Franklin was old and bald. When Lee put his paper down, his hair seemed to bristle and crackle with static electricity, and maybe to throw off sparks.

  “Listen,” Franklin said, when he could finally see Lee’s face. “Don’t you think you should be out there doing something? Don’t you think you should at least be seeing to those camels?”

  Lee smoothed the paper out against his desk. “I don’t like this one as much as I liked the last one,” he said, tapping his finger right on Gregor Demarkian’s oversized nose. “This one has too many rich people. The last one, that happened in a town just like this.”

  “A town full of nuns and Catholics isn’t a town just like this,” Franklin said irritably. “And what about the camels? We can’t just leave them sitting in the middle of Main Street, causing a traffic hazard.”

  “They’re not causing a traffic hazard,” Lee said reasonably. “Betty Heath called in and said they’d moved on to that open lot at the end of Carrow Street, and the only thing that’s causing a hazard now is what they left behind, and I don’t do that kind of work. I called Don Francis over to Clean-up and he said he’d send somebody out. You got a call from Benjy Warren.”

  “Benjy Warren,” Franklin repeated. “Benjy” Warren preferred to be known as “Ben” Warren, now that he’d been all the way to Harvard Law School and back again, but he was fighting a losing battle and he knew it. He’d been Benjy in grammar school and Benjy in high school and Benjy when he’d come home for vacations from Bowdoin College, and he would go on being Benjy as long as he stayed in town. It didn’t help that he worked for a friend of his father’s, who had been calling him Benjy all his life and didn’t intend to stop. Franklin sometimes wondered about that. This friend of Benjy’s father’s was Camber Hartnell, until Benjy’s return the town’s only attorney and still the town’s most prominent son of a bitch. He wouldn’t have been Franklin’s first choice for a boss if Franklin had been the one with the degree from Harvard Law School.

  Franklin leaned over Lee’s paper again. There was a second picture of Demarkian there, a smaller one, walking next to a small woman with a face as close to perfect as Elizabeth Taylor’s at twenty-five. Franklin knew that face—it popped up in stories about Demarkian all the time, and sometimes even in accounts of Demarkian’s cases—but he couldn’t remember the name. He wondered if Demarkian was sleeping with her. He supposed Demarkian had to be. All those people from Away hopped in and out of bed with each other all the time.

  Franklin backed up a little and cleared his throat. “The thing is,” he said, “even if there isn’t anything to do, we ought to look like we’ve got something to do. For the papers.”

  “Papers?”

  “The Away papers,” Franklin said patiently. “I told you about this last year. The Away papers always send reporters, so do the television stations in Boston; they get people up here the first day and talk about the gala opening that isn’t so gala if you ask me. I was a tourist, I’d come in the second or third week when I could count on people knowing their lines. Never mind. The papers are going to be here, and we ought to look like we’ve got something to do.”

  “Like what?”

  “How the hell should I know like what? Like anything. Like fighting crime. That’s what we’re paid for. Fighting crime.”

  “There isn’t any crime to fight,” Lee pointed ou
t. “We’ll get some pickpockets later tonight when the crowds get thick. We catch a couple every year.”

  “I know.”

  “We’ll get some fifteen-year-old jerk trying to steal some Boston lady’s Ferrari,” Lee said, “and then he won’t be able to figure out how to get it out of the lots, and we’ll haul him in and yell at him for twenty minutes and send him home. If I’m guessing right that ought to be Hal Bonnard this year.”

  “Hal Bonnard.” Franklin nodded. “Him or Joey Fay.”

  “We’ll get six anonymous calls saying people are going at it in the bushes in the park, and the calls will all come from Dodie Fenner, and there won’t be a pair of squirrels necking by the time we get there. We’ll get Bill Varley calling in to say he’s seen a spaceship. We’ll get a lot of petty vandalism. This is Vermont, for Christ’s sake. You’ve been here long enough. You ought to know.”

  And, of course, Franklin did know. He knew better than Lee Greenwood. Lee was only thirty-two and had been on the job only thirty months. Franklin looked down at the newspaper one more time. There was Mr. Gregor Demarkian, looking a little like a diplomat and a little like a czar, looking important and busy and oversupplied with interesting things to think about, walking along beside a beautiful woman who looked like she did aerobics and who had hold of his arm. There was Franklin’s own desk, not six steps away on the other side of the room against the wall, piled high with message slips demanding immediate attention to falling Christmas lights, muddied angels’ costumes and straying animals that would only stray again as soon as they were brought back to where they were supposed to be. Franklin didn’t even have a wife at home to keep him warm or make his life miserable. It hardly seemed fair.