Stillness in Bethlehem

by Jane Haddam

  7

  The second one hit the back of the bench she had been sitting on when she came in, and with that Kelley knew what was happening. She was being shot at. There was somebody else in the tent with her and she was being shot at. She was supposed to be shot at, but not yet, not here, and where was Gregor Demarkian when you needed him? That was the question. That and what the hell it was she was supposed to do.

  There sure as hell wasn’t anyplace she was going to be able to hide.

  She whipped around and looked in the direction she thought the bullet must have come from. She could see nothing or nobody and it made her afraid. That was what she had to do. She had to bring it all out into the open.

  She grabbed the metal folding chair, collapsed it into a shield and held it out in front of her, or at least what she hoped was in front of her, between herself and where she was sure the bullet must have come from.

  “Come out of there,” she said, as loud as she could. “Come out of there right this minute. Amanda, for God’s sake.”

  8

  My name is not Amanda, Amanda Ballard thought. My name has never been Amanda. It was only supposed to be.

  Kelley Grey had the metal folding chair up over her head.

  Amanda knew no one could hold onto metal when the metal had been hit by a bullet.

  The bullet made the metal vibrate and the metal stung.

  She raised the rifle to firing height again and positioned it ever more carefully against her shoulder. She had never been able to take the kick very well and now her shoulder ached.

  She fired at the metal folding chair and hit it.

  She heard Kelley cry out and then the clatter of the chair falling to the ground.

  She took aim and fired again.

  9

  “For god’s sake,” Gregor Demarkian said. “Franklin, I told you, you were supposed to leave somebody here.”

  10

  Gregor Demarkian was coming in from the back end of the tent. As soon as she saw him, she knew it had finally gone wrong. Getting caught didn’t make it go wrong. Only missing made it go wrong. Getting caught didn’t do anything to her at all.

  She gave it one more try. She had the rifle in position. She sighted as best she could with this big man bearing down on her and pulled the trigger.

  11

  Gregor got his hands on the barrel of the gun just in time. He felt the barrel rock as he held it, the heat searing his hands, the bullet racing through, the redirected rifle sending sparks into the tent ceiling as the bullet crashed through and into the air. He sent up a little prayer that nobody was out there, in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then heard the splintering of wood that meant the bullet had hit a tree. He let himself relax.

  “Get up,” he said to Kelley Grey. “It’s over now.”

  “It’s over and I’m going to sue you,” Kelley said. “What did you think you were doing? Weren’t you at least having her watched?”

  “I didn’t know where she was to start having her watched from,” Franklin Morrison said, struggling into the tent himself.

  A lot of other people were struggling into the tent, too, actors in costume, animal handlers looking for a nip from the bottle that floated around the dressing room most nights. Gregor saw Candy George, who played Mary, looking from Kelley to Amanda and back again in mild, but not very curious, confusion.

  In the end, he turned his attention to Amanda Ballard, who was really Amy Jo Bickerel, and who now looked like nobody in particular at all. Her hair was back and he could see the ear without the earlobe clearly. It made her look not quite finished.

  Other than that, she simply looked tired.

  Epilogue

  Hurray for the fun

  Is the pudding done?

  Hurray for the pumpkin pie…

  1

  IT WAS CHRISTMAS DAY, and to Donna Moradanyan’s son Tommy, who was eighteen months old, the purpose of such a day was strikingly and unquestionably clear. It wasn’t presents. Tommy had gotten about seven million presents at his grandmother’s out in Ardmore last night, and a couple of dozen more in his own apartment this morning, but although he liked to rip paper off packages, what was inside the packages didn’t make much sense to him yet. It wasn’t going to church, either, although he liked that. The sound of the cantor’s voice always put him to sleep, and he climbed into his mother’s arms—or Gregor Demarkian’s—and closed his eyes. Tommy Moradanyan liked Gregor Demarkian about as much as he liked anyone, except he liked his mother better. But Gregor Demarkian was good. Gregor Demarkian wore ties that always seemed to be fraying and unraveling along the edges, and if Tommy was very quiet and very serious, he could take them apart into threads in no time at all.

  What Tommy Moradanyan really liked about Christmas Day was the food. His grandmother at Ardmore was good at food. His mother was good at food. His mother’s best friend Bennis Hannaford was good at buying cotton candy from the back of Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store and sneaking it to him when his mother wasn’t looking. Nobody was as good at food as Mrs. Arkmanian. Of course, he didn’t call Mrs. Arkmanian Mrs. Arkmanian, even though his mother wanted him to. He called her Nana Lida, and every time he did, she smiled at him and let him take bulgar-covered meatballs from the big bowl she kept in the refrigerator or stuffed grape leaves from the plastic-wrapped bundle in the vegetable crisper. Tommy Moradanyan’s mother was very stern about Eating Vegetables and Having Regular Meals, but Nana Lida was not. Nana Lida just liked to see him eat.

  Nana Lida’s living room took up the entire second floor of her townhouse. It was a big room to begin with, and it had been made bigger by the removal of almost all the furniture from its center and the repositioning of its chairs along the outer walls. Under the tall narrow windows that looked out on Cavanaugh Street, tables had been set with just about everything Tommy Moradanyan could think of to call wonderful.

  Old George Tekemanian had been given the only armchair allowed onto the scene and the job of keeping Tommy out of trouble while Tommy’s mother finished helping with the silverware. Tommy sat patiently in old George’s lap for a good twenty-five seconds, and then saw something that interested him across the room. Alex Oumoudian, who had come from Armenia just a few months ago and who was only two years older than Tommy himself, had made his way to the grilled shrimp and begun to eat. If he went on eating like that, all the grilled shrimp would be gone. Never mind the grilled peppers that went with it. All across America, small boys were refusing to eat anything that didn’t come in a McDonald’s wrapper. Tommy Moradanyan would have considered them all nuts. He ate grilled peppers. He ate big thick anchovies imported from Italy. He ate escargot. He ate anything you put in front of him and ninety-nine times out of a hundred he liked it. The world was full of wonderful food. His mother was always saying she hoped he’d gotten his father’s metabolism, because if he had he could eat like that forever and still be thin. Tommy didn’t know what a metabolism was, and he had only vague ideas about fathers, except for his Father in Heaven, whom he thought of as a priest like Father Tibor. The father his mother was always talking about was someone he’d never met.

  Alex Oumoudian had gone from the shrimp to the stuffed grape leaves, and that was really too much. Stuffed grape leaves were Tommy Moradanyan’s favorite thing. Old George Tekemanian was humming to himself, not paying attention. Tommy’s mother was in the middle of the room, holding a plate of something and talking to Gregor Demarkian and Bennis Hannaford. There was nothing to stop him. Tommy slid to the floor and took off, head down.

  When he put his mind to it, he could run faster than a grown man.

  2

  “WHOOSH,” DONNA MORADANYAN SAID, when Tommy came barreling into her legs, not watching where he was going, legs pumping like pistons to get him where he was going. “You’re supposed to be with George.”

  “Eat,” Tommy said emphatically.

  “You’ve been eating for a week,” Donna said.

  “Eat,” Tommy sai
d again.

  Then he wriggled out of her arms and jumped away. She watched him go to the food tables and shook her head. “Well, at least he’s healthy. And he’s not fat. The doctor keeps telling me that. How can he not be fat?”

  “He’s building bones,” Bennis said. “What I want to know is why I’m not fat. I’ve had Mrs. Alvoudian in my apartment all week and all she does is cook. And clean. She threw out my cleaning lady.”

  “It will only be a couple of weeks,” Donna soothed. “Hannah Krekorian has a place for Mrs. Alvoudian opening up next month, and while the three of you were away the committee got up the rest of the price, so we’re going to be able to buy that building on Debberfield Street after all. That’ll take a couple of months to fix up properly—”

  “By which time seventeen more Armenian refugee families will have landed in Philadelphia,” Bennis said.

  “—but it will help. It really is better than it was even at Thanksgiving, Bennis, you know that.”

  “At Thanksgiving,” Gregor Demarkian said, “I was sleeping in my bathtub.”

  Donna Moradanyan and Bennis Hannaford both looked him up and down, as if he’d just landed from Mars, and Gregor thought that was all right. He felt as if he’d just landed from Mars. There were more people in this room speaking Armenian than speaking English.

  “I’d better go and get Tommy under control,” Donna said. “Or maybe it’s Father Tibor I should get under control. He’s feeding Tommy something and he knows how I feel about it.”

  “Give it up,” Bennis said. “It’s like refighting Waterloo on Napoleon’s side.”

  “Maybe it is, but I’ve got to do something. He’s become Cavanaugh Street’s official neighborhood grandchild. He’s going to be spoiled rotten before he ever gets to school.”

  “Right,” Bennis said.

  Donna Moradanyan hurried off in the direction of the food tables, and Bennis looked after her, sighing.

  “Sometimes I think they’re all right,” she told Gregor. “About getting married and having a child, I mean. Donna’s, what, fifteen years younger than I am? More? I’m thirty-six years old.”

  “You date drummers in rock bands who wear Stars of David in their pierced noses. These are not exactly prime husband material, Bennis.”

  “There was only one of those and he was prime husband material, at least in some senses. He would have been a good provider. That band you’re so superior to makes a couple of million dollars a year.”

  “Big time Mafiosi make a couple of million dollars a year.”

  “Tell me about Bethlehem,” Bennis sighed. “It’s got to be better than listening to another lecture.”

  3

  GREGOR DIDN’T KNOW IF it would be better than listening to another lecture or not, but he did know that he’d been dying to explain this to somebody, especially since the Philadelphia Inquirer had come out with a mangled story that made it sound as if Amanda Ballard had been picked up during an incident that resembled the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral. This was not the Inquirer’s fault. The original mess of a story had appeared in the Bethlehem News and Mail, written by a reporter manqué who had suddenly found himself in charge of a pencil while Peter Callisher was indisposed. Peter Callisher had spent a great deal of time indisposed after Amanda Ballard was arrested. Gregor hadn’t been able to blame him. It had to come as a shock that the woman you had been living with had just killed three people and tried to kill a fourth. It had to come as even more of a shock that she had killed one more before she ever met you. That was the sort of shock that came from that most universal of human failings, the delusion each and every one of us has that we are good judges of character.

  “It was very simple,” he said, and Bennis shot him a look.

  “If you start telling me it was elementary, my dear Watson, I’m going to kick you in the shin. It wasn’t simple to me.”

  “Well, the physical procedure was just a matter of logistics,” Gregor pointed out. “I explained all that back in Bethlehem.”

  “Did you ever find out whose gun it was?” Bennis asked him. “That she stole, I mean. To kill Dinah Ketchum.”

  “It was Mr. Folier’s. I’d suspected as much after I found out that Folier’s house was so close to the offices of the News and Mail. But Dinah Ketchum was the key all along. She was what had to be explained. There had to be two dozen people who would have been more than happy to kill Tisha Verek, and the situation with Gemma Bury was almost as bad. So that left us with Dinah Ketchum, and Tisha Verek’s office, and the only thing it could have been, which is that Dinah saw something there.”

  “And the something had to be those pictures?” Bennis asked. “I don’t see why, Gregor, I really don’t. I mean, okay, Jan-Mark Verek gave tours of the house and pointed out all the things in his wife’s office, but why would Dinah Ketchum have paid particular attention?”

  “Probably because Tisha Verek pointed it out to her,” Gregor said. “My point here, however, is that it had to be something like that, and something like that was ready to hand in Tisha’s research and in the pictures, one of which probably showed Amy Jo Bickerel with her deformed ear clearly in view.”

  “How did you know it was Amy Jo Bickerel? You never saw the pictures.”

  “I didn’t have to,” Gregor said patiently. “Amy Jo Bickerel had two things speaking for her in this case. In the first place, she had done it before—done murder, that is, in exactly the way we were seeing it done in Bethlehem. When Amy Jo Bickerel killed her uncle, she stood behind the front door of her house and aimed a rifle at him as he came up the walk, at ten o’clock on a weekday morning, on a busy street. When Amanda Ballard killed Tisha Verek, she aimed a rifle at her while Tisha was standing in her own driveway and a car was pulling in—almost anybody else would have backed off and waited for another chance. And then there was Gemma Bury—”

  “Like she gets so intent on what she’s after, she doesn’t see what’s around her,” Bennis said. “All right. But then Dinah Ketchum—”

  “Was killed in the only way Amanda could manage it, and right away because she was afraid that Tisha Verek’s death might start Dinah talking. Remember, the Bickerel case wasn’t some remote report of true crime. It happened right in that area of Vermont, and it was an enormous sensation while it was going on. Dinah might not have remembered the deformed ear before she saw the picture, she might not even have known about it, but she would have remembered it as soon as she heard how Tisha Verek died. So Amanda did what she thought she had to do. That’s what Amy Jo Bickerel has always done. What she thought she had to do.”

  “What was the second reason?” Bennis asked.

  “The second reason was motive,” Gregor said. “The rest of the people on that list of missing pictures had been released from the institutions they’d been remanded to, but Amy Jo Bickerel had not. I checked that out afterward, by the way. It turns out she hadn’t been released, because every time they got close she seemed to go wild, violent and hallucinatory. She’s been doing it for years. But if she hadn’t been released, she must have escaped. And if she had escaped—”

  “If she’d escaped, wouldn’t that have been big news in that part of Vermont?”

  “Not in that part of Vermont, no,” Gregor said. “Up around Riverton, there it would have been big news. The Bickerel case was old, you have to remember that. The people who remembered it most clearly were old, too. It wasn’t Stuart Ketchum or Peter Callisher who talked to us about Amy Jo Bickerel, even though Stuart was with us when we discussed the missing Bickerel picture in Tisha Verek’s office. It was Franklin Morrison who remembered—and he’s over seventy.”

  “All right,” Bennis said patiently. “So that’s why you figured it had to be Amy Jo Bickerel. And you figured Amy Jo Bickerel had to be Amanda Ballard because Amanda was the only one with something physically odd about her that would have been picked up in a picture and made instantly recognizable—”

  “Well,” Gregor said, “there was this other you
ng woman, just about the right age, named Sharon Morrissey. She had a white streak in her hair she told me she’d had from birth. I dismissed her because I figured all she had to do to disguise that was to dye her hair.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “And then there was all that about Riverton and Timmy Hall,” Gregor said. “Amanda Ballard had known Timmy Hall when he was at Riverton. She made no secret of that. Everybody assumed that she’d been up there working with retarded children or in the library or the cafeteria or something, but she never actually said that. In the end, all anybody really knew was that Amanda Ballard and Timmy Hall had both spent a fair amount of time at Riverton, background details unknown.”

  “I suppose we ought to be grateful she didn’t kill Timmy.”

  “She wouldn’t have killed Timmy,” Gregor said. “She had nothing to fear from Timmy. He was devoted to her—he still is. He wasn’t going to give her secret away. And then, of course, there was the obvious. Since Amanda was the one who worked in the News and Mail office, she was the one most likely to have heard Peter Callisher giving Gemma Bury tickets to the Nativity play and to know where those tickets were. Since Amanda lived with Peter Callisher and Peter Callisher was Stuart Ketchum’s best friend, the chances were she had been at the Ketchum farm often enough to know the layout and be able to steal a gun with the smallest possible fuss. Since Kelley Grey had seen her within inches of that stand of bushes just minutes before Gemma Bury must have been killed, she was in the right place at the right time—”