Stillness in Bethlehem

by Jane Haddam

  Bennis Hannaford frowned. “Isn’t that usually because they’ve been abused?” she asked him. “It’s not as if they were born evil or something like The Bad Seed.”

  Jan-Mark was rolling information across the screen. “A lot of them have been abused, I’ll grant you that,” he said. “Tisha had more stories about child rape than I’ve got canvases. She used to read them to me at night. It made for no end of wonderfulness in our times of marital companionship. However, some of these kids are absolutely out of it. Just plain bad.”

  “I don’t believe in just plain bad,” Bennis said.

  “You wouldn’t.” Jan-Mark tapped a key and the information stopped rolling. “Here’s the first one. Actually, the first two. Bickerel, Amy Jo. And Kathleen Butterworth.”

  Franklin Morrison stirred. “I remember Amy Jo Bickerel,” he said. “Oh, God, but that was a mess. About—what? Twenty, twenty-five years ago—”

  “Twenty-three,” Jan-Mark said, peering at the computer screen.

  “Yeah. Well. Happened right here in Vermont. Girl was eleven, twelve years old. Had an uncle who would take her out for rides and every time he got her alone, wham. One day she got her father’s rifle and whammed right back. Waited for him to come up the walk and fired—”

  “Wait,” Gregor said. “I remember that one. It was ten o’clock on a Monday morning or something like that and the street was full of people—”

  “Right,” Franklin Morrison said. “It was. And the bullet that hit the uncle first passed right through him and got a car, but it just missed this woman coming home with her groceries, and the second bullet broke the window of a store across the street that was thankfully shut for repairs. It was nuts. Caused a fuss in this state, you wouldn’t believe it, especially since it turned out she could prove all that stuff he’d done to her. He’d taken pictures and she knew where they were. He really was a first-class asshole.”

  “He sounds like it,” Bennis said. She was leaning over Jan-Mark’s shoulder. “It says here she was—no, it says she is at Riverton. Does Riverton have a place for the criminally insane? Did they really send her away for life?”

  “Oh, no,” Franklin Morrison said. “She wasn’t convicted of anything. Even though by the laws of the time she was guilty, and the judge tried to instruct the jury and get them to do what they were legally supposed to do, the jury just wouldn’t do it. I didn’t blame them. I don’t blame them now. I wouldn’t have done it, either. Uncle of hers was a first-class son of a bitch and a first-class loser on top of it. Anyway, it was her parents who had her committed, if I remember correctly. She was pretty messed up by the time it was all over.”

  “Who was Kathleen Butterworth?” Stuart asked.

  “Kathleen Butterworth is one of the ones I like,” Jan-Mark said. “She offed her baby sister in her sister’s crib, and then she got a taste for it and offed a couple of other babies in the neighborhood. She had about ten scalps under her belt before they caught on to her.”

  “Arizona,” Bennis Hannaford said. “Who’s the third?”

  Jan-Mark tapped a few keys and the information began rolling again. He stopped and said, “Hudder. Cynthia Hudder. This one’s recent. She wouldn’t be more than maybe twenty-eight, thirty years old.”

  “Like Kelley Grey,” Bennis said immediately.

  “Or Sharon Morrissey,” Franklin Morrison put in. “Kelley’s too young. You can’t do that, Ms. Hannaford. There have to be half a dozen young women of about the right age in town right now, all of them from Away and so nobody knows who they are or where they’ve been.”

  “What did Cynthia Hudder do?” Bennis asked.

  Jan-Mark shrugged. “No big deal. Killed her stepmother. Stepmother was to all intents and purposes a first-class pain and fond of using a belt. Kid was about ten. Happened out in Shaker Heights.”

  “Did she go to jail?” Stuart Ketchum asked.

  “She wouldn’t have gone to jail,” Gregor said. “A child that young would have been put into a psychiatric hospital and then possibly into a juvenile detention center. If they couldn’t place her in a foster home.”

  “If you were a foster parent, would you take a kid who’d killed her own stepmother?” Bennis asked.

  “I think a psychiatric hospital I didn’t want to be in and a juvenile detention center would feel like jail to me,” Stuart said. “When would she have gotten out?”

  “It says right here when she got out,” Jan-Mark told them. “It was—twelve years ago. When she was eighteen.”

  “Most states require the system to release juvenile offenders at age eighteen, no matter what they’ve done,” Gregor pointed out. “Juvenile law is not the same as adult law.”

  “What about the rest of them?” Bennis asked.

  Jan-Mark tapped his computer keys again, rolling the information back. “Amy Jo Bickerel, released from care about three years ago. Going on four. Kathleen Butterworth, released from care about twenty years ago, when she was eighteen. I don’t think I’d want Kathleen Butterworth wandering around my neighborhood.”

  “I don’t think I’d want any of these people wandering around my neighborhood,” Gregor Demarkian said. He had been standing a little behind the others, not looking at the computer screen, but thinking. Now he was all thought out. He had never taken off his coat. He reached into his pockets, got the gloves he had borrowed from Tibor and began to pull them on.

  “I don’t think we have anything more to do here,” he said. “We’ve done as much as we’re going to do.”

  “What about my safety?” Jan-Mark demanded.

  “Your safety is secure,” Gregor told him. “This was a very careful, very gentle theft, if it can technically be called a theft at all. The picture or pictures in question were removed, and the thief went away. That is all.”

  “If the thief also happens to be the murderer of my wife, he might come back,” Jan-Mark said.

  “True,” Gregor Demarkian told him, and then brightened, as if that was the cheeriest news he had had in ages. Maybe it was. Gregor found that Jan-Mark Verek did not improve with acquaintance.

  That made it all the more necessary, to Gregor’s mind, that he get out of this redwood-and-glass monstrosity and back to normal life.

  Two

  1

  SOMETIMES, SHARON MORRISSEY THOUGHT that people who lived in Bethlehem had less Christmasy Christmases than people who didn’t, because the middle of Bethlehem was so chock full of Christmas spirit they couldn’t bear to bring any of it home. That was slightly incoherent, but she knew what she meant. After a day sitting in the Congregational Church, looking out the basement windows at the ribbons and the bows and the ornaments and the statuettes that had been springing up all over town, day after day, since the Celebration began, all Sharon wanted to do was go home and pretend to be Scrooge. Since she and Susan had already decorated their house, she couldn’t. As soon as she walked through her front door, she would be confronted with a “stained glass” mobile made from colored plastic wrapping paper, and as soon as she walked into her living room, she would be confronted by a crêche. The Congregational Church had a crêche, too, in the lobby on the first floor just outside the room Sharon thought of as “the room with the pews in it.” She didn’t know what else to call it. She couldn’t called it the church proper, or refer to an altar or a sanctuary. Congregational churches didn’t have those. Sharon found it all very frustrating. She had been born and brought up Catholic. Everything had been much simpler there.

  Sharon had been in the basement of the church holding story hours for the children of tourists—and, of course, for any local children who had the time and inclination to attend. Sharon was considered to be far and away the best reader in Bethlehem. She was in demand at the library not only for children’s readings, but for readings to the elderly and public presentations as well. The library always held a read-aloud in the spring to raise extra money for its bookmobile program. Today, Sharon had read six different stories at six different se
ssions. Now it was five o’clock in the afternoon and her throat hurt. The last of the children had gone. She had been a tiny girl in pink tights and a bright fuschia snow parka, too shy to smile, and she had left clutching a gingerbread cookie iced to look like a snow-covered candy house. Wasn’t it the witch whose house had been made of gingerbread and candy? Sharon had wondered at the time. Then she had pushed the thought away from her. It was just one more example of the way her mind had been working lately. Susan kept saying it was silly to go on this way. Susan ought to know. Still, Sharon couldn’t stop from being depressed, and she couldn’t stop from being worried, either. When she had first heard Tisha Verek had been found dead, she had been relieved. Tisha Verek was the danger. Tisha Verek was gone. There was no more danger. It turned out to have been far more complicated than that. Even Susan thought so. Sharon wondered what she had said when she had gone to Gregor Demarkian this morning.

  Sharon had left her parka in the cloak room at the back of the basement. She got it off its hanger and put it on, starting up the steps to the first floor as she pulled her arms into the sleeves. Coming out into the foyer, she looked at the crêche—with the baby Jesus conspicuously in His manger, to show that this was a Protestant, not a Catholic, production—and then went for the side stairs, as if she were going to climb to the second floor. The second floor was new, part of a wing that had been added to the church in the 1950s. The church itself had been built in 1721. Sharon went a quarter of the way up the steps, saw that the door to Toby Brookfield’s office was open and the light inside was on and called up. Toby Brookfield was the minister.

  “Toby?” Sharon said. “I’m going home.”

  There was the sound of a chair scraping against hardwood and Toby’s face appeared in his office door. “Be careful driving,” he told her. “It’s supposed to be icing up. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’ve been depressed all day.”

  Sharon shrugged. “It’s Gemma Bury and all the rest of it, I guess,” she said. “It doesn’t exactly put me in the holiday spirit.”

  “Oh, I know what you mean.” Toby Brookfield sounded eager and solicitous at once. “It’s been terrible. It’s been terrible everywhere. I don’t know what’s gotten into people.”

  Sharon knew what had gotten into people. She used to live in New York City. “Something terrible is going to happen if something good doesn’t happen soon,” she said, and then, because she really didn’t want to discuss this—and especially not with Toby Brookfield, who was very nice and meant exceedingly well but wasn’t very bright—she began to back down the stairs. “Well,” she said. “I guess I’d better go. I just wanted to tell you I was leaving.”

  “Be careful,” Toby Brookfield said again.

  Sharon muttered something incomprehensible, even to herself, and backed down into the foyer again. She gave the crêche one last glance and then let herself out onto the church’s front steps. Five o’clock was late this time of year in Vermont. The sky was already dark. The street lamps were already beginning to look ineffective against the night. Sharon zipped her parka to her chin, wrapped her scarf around the high collar that jutted up around her neck and started down the steps to the street.

  On most days, when Sharon came into town to work at the Congregational Church, she parked her car in the church parking lot, just as, when she was working at the library, she parked her car there. During the Celebration, she always used Jim MacAfee’s front lawn instead. It cost a quarter, but it guaranteed she was never stuck, because Jim made a point of keeping the cars of people from town in the barn, where they could be easily and quickly moved, in spite of a sea of tourists’ vehicles blocking every available patch of grass around them. Sharon had been stuck once too often behind the church or the library or even the News and Mail, rendered immobile by escapees from Boston who’d decided that their cars could sit any old place they chose.

  To get to Jim MacAfee’s front lawn, Sharon had to go up Main Street in the direction of Carrow and turn down Carrow for a few hundred feet until she came to a dirt extension. If it hadn’t been for a sign at the start of it that said PARKING 25¢ THIS WAY, only the natives would have known the extension wasn’t a dead-end rut. Sharon started up Main Street in the right direction, passing no one from town and glad she was passing no one from town. Usually, the number of people she knew and the extent of her friendly relations with them were a large part of what Sharon liked about Bethlehem. It was like she’d told Toby Brookfield, though. The death of Gemma Bury had broken something, some thread, that Sharon had once thought to be strong but now saw to be fragile. The atmosphere in town was slipping past tension into a kind of hysteria. Sharon had seen it all day in the people who had come to the church to hear her read. The tourists had been fine. The people from town had all been stiff as boards and twice as rough. It was as if they’d all gotten up this morning and taken a pill that made them think: Shut down. Lock up. Close ranks.

  Up the street and across it in the park, the crews were beginning to put up the bleachers. They were working slowly and it looked like they were starting late. Sharon walked up Main until she was across from them and stopped. The park looked so ordinary. It didn’t look like the kind of place a murder would happen at all. At least there was that much. There was no room for mistake. Tisha Verek’s death might have been an accident. Dinah Ketchum’s death might have been an accident. Gemma Bury’s death was the result of deliberate malice, no two ways about it.

  Sharon wrapped her arms around her waist, rocked back and forth on her feet and stopped. In there among the carpenters and the teen-aged boys who were their helpers was another figure, small and still and seeming to flaunt her Alice-in-Wonderland hair. She was standing right next to that clump of bushes some people were saying had hidden the gun that killed Gemma Bury, and the gun that had killed Dinah Ketchum, too. Sharon didn’t know if she believed this. They had to run tests on guns before they knew for certain that the guns had killed anybody. She didn’t think there had been time to run tests like that. On the other hand, town gossip was remarkably accurate. It always startled her. She’d been brought up to believe that gossip was always lies. Sharon stared across the street a little longer and then made up her mind. It was different during the Celebration than it was at other times. You did have to look both ways when you wanted to cross Main Street. Beyond that, it wasn’t too bad, because the tourists tended to park their cars as soon as they crossed the town line and go from one place to another on foot. It was a little worse right before the performances started, but that was several hours away. Sharon waited for an Isuzu Trooper that belonged to the commune out in Lebanon to pass and then crossed to the park, half running as she went, to keep herself warm.

  On the other side of Main Street, Sharon had to dodge two high-school boys carrying a long ladder between them and a cluster of blue and silver Christmas balls that had suddenly appeared in a bouquet tied to a bench at the street’s edge. Christmas decorations often appeared suddenly in the middle of town during the Celebration. It was a measure of how tense things had been under the surface, even before Gemma Bury was dead, that there had been so many fewer of them in the last two weeks than there had been in other years.

  Sharon slipped through the line of carpenters and went to the small stand of bushes. Amanda Ballard was standing behind them, toward the middle of the park. Sharon had almost missed seeing her from Main Street. After Sharon had seen her, there had been a moment or two when Amanda seemed to disappear. Now Amanda was back, standing a little away from the bushes stiff needles, frowning as if the evergreens had been schoolchildren refusing to obey their mother.

  “Amanda?” Sharon asked.

  Amanda turned her head slowly, not startled, not surprised. Then her eyes swept the broad streak of white on the left side of Sharon’s head and she blinked. “Sharon,” she said. “I saw you across the street.”

  “I was across the street,” Sharon said, feeling like an id
iot. Amanda always made her feel like an idiot. Amanda always made her feel conspicuous, too, as if that streak of white was made of neon and glowing and pulsing in the dark. Sharon Morrissey couldn’t begin to count the times that that streak had made her feel like a marked woman. She turned away from Amanda and said, “What are you doing here?”

  “Trying to check it out,” Amanda said simply. Then, seeming to think she might have been unclear, she elaborated. “It’s something I heard Peter talking about on the phone. To Stuart Ketchum. That Gregor Demarkian person has a theory about how Gemma Bury was killed.”

  “Really? How?”

  “He says the killer put the rifle right here in these bushes—put it here early, aimed ahead of time at the two seats Gemma and Kelley were going to be sitting in—”

  “You mean the killer knew where Gemma and Kelley were going to be sitting?”

  “Well, it’s assigned seating,” Amanda said, “and Peter gave Gemma the tickets right there in the News and Mail office, right in front of I don’t know how many people. I don’t think it was any surprise to anyone, where she was sitting.”

  “Oh,” Sharon said.

  “Anyway,” Amanda said, “the killer is supposed to have stood right up to these bushes when the time came and squeezed the trigger, with the gun in here at shoulder height so all he had to do was lean forward and aim. But I don’t see how that can be true, can you? And if it is true, I don’t see that Timmy could have done it.”

  Sharon stepped forward and examined the bushes. “I could have done it that way,” she said finally. “I could have put the rifle right there,” she pointed to a cleft in the branches, “and then when I wanted to shoot, it probably wouldn’t have been much of a problem.”

  “Well, you, yes,” Amanda agreed. “And me, too. And Susan Everman and Candy George and Betty Heath and I can think of a dozen people. But Timmy couldn’t have done it.”