A Stillness in Bethlehem(101)

Well, she decided, she wasn’t going to fail this time. She wasn’t going to have to.

She got up out of her seat and headed for the phone on the wall next to the refrigerator.

“I am definitely a feminist,” she said, “and I definitely know what you can do. Let me make a few phone calls. Drink more tea.”

“I’ve had enough tea, thank you.”

“Then eat the cookies in the tin on the counter. You need to gain about thirty pounds. When I’m finished here, I’ll drive you in to the Celebration.”

Candy George—or Candace Elizabeth Spear—went to the counter and got the cookies. Kelley heard the phone being picked up down in Burlington and a familiar voice saying, “Eve’s Apple. Can I help you?”

Kelley blew a stream of air into her bangs and smiled. “Stacey?” she said. “This is Kelley Grey. Listen, I’ve got a problem I think you could help me with.”





Three


1


BY THE TIME THEY all got back to the center of town—meaning Bennis, Franklin and Gregor himself; Jan-Mark stayed at home and Stuart Ketchum went back to his farm—Gregor was worried, and the closer they got to the Inn, the more worried he got. Even Bennis’s driving did nothing to distract him. She had taken over the wheel from Franklin Morrison only yards from Stuart Ketchum’s front door and put her foot on the floor as soon as she reached the Delaford Road. Her driving had scared Franklin Morrison to death. Gregor had hardly noticed it. He kept going over and over the whole situation in his mind, and every time he did he came to the same conclusion. He knew who. He knew how. He even knew why. He just didn’t know what he could do about it.

Bennis had had to slow down when she turned onto Main Street proper. It was five-thirty, close enough to the start of the performance for activity in town to be heating up a little. The town’s one stoplight was operating, instead of hanging from its wire and blinking yellow. Families who had driven up from downstate or over from New Hampshire were strolling along the sidewalk, looking at the Christmas decorations in the shop windows and discussing where to go for dinner. Most of them, Gregor assumed, would end up at The Magick Endive. It was the kind of place the mothers of small children liked to go when they wanted to eat out “nice.”

Bennis had to stop at the traffic light. When she did, Gregor looked into the town park at the bleachers that were now almost all the way up and the two small clumps of evergreen bushes he could see. If there had been any defections from the population expected to view the performance this evening, the news hadn’t got back to the ground crew. Gregor didn’t know what kind of publicity there had been about the death of Gemma Bury. The only newspaper he had seen was the Bethlehem News and Mail. He hadn’t watched television in days. The story might be a total washout. If it was, he didn’t think it would be one for long, but that was another matter. It always surprised him, how conscientious murderers were, to do things in the most spectacular possible way. Maybe he ought to say unsuccessful murderers. The ones with sense—the ones who did what they wanted to do quickly and without fanfare; who were interested in seeing someone dead and not in showing the world how absolutely brilliant they were—probably never got caught. In Gregor’s experience, the ones who never got caught were all professionals, and sense wasn’t exactly what they had.

Bennis was tapping impatiently on the steering wheel. The light was staying at red forever. In the back seat, Franklin Morrison was wheezing away on a cigar. Gregor went on staring into the park and then he made up his mind.

“Pull over,” he said.

“Again?” Bennis asked him. “You don’t have any stone walls to climb around on here.”

“That’s the green light,” Franklin Morrison said.

“Pull over,” Gregor insisted.

Bennis let out a long-suffering sigh and eased the car forward, reaching for her cigarettes as she went. “I can’t just pull over,” she told him, “I have to go around the corner and then hope I see someplace to park, which I probably won’t because the performance is in less than three hours. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Bennis—”

“Never mind.”

It turned out not to be impossible after all. The corner wasn’t a corner, but a bend in the park. On the far side of it there was a little indentation in the underbrush at the edge of a wooded area that looked like it had been hollowed out for a police car to sit in. Gregor couldn’t imagine why a police car would want to sit in it. There wouldn’t be anything for a policeman to see. Bennis pulled into this space and put the car in park. Franklin Morrison leaned into the front seat and blew hot thick smoke in Gregor’s face.