A Stillness in Bethlehem(108)

“Is Peter Callisher important?”

“Yes,” Kelley said slowly. “But if something happened to Timmy, he’d be sorry to see Amanda hurt but he wouldn’t be sorry for Timmy. I don’t think he likes Timmy.”

“Not much of anybody seems to like Timmy,” Gregor said.

Kelley Grey sighed. “We can’t all be saints like Amanda. I mean, not that I know her that well, but she must have something I don’t, to be able to deal with retarded people the way she does. She used to work with them, you know.”

“Did she?”

“That’s what I’ve heard. Before she came here and got involved with Peter Callisher. She used to know Timmy before.”

“Then I take it you wouldn’t consider Amanda herself a candidate for being one of Tisha Verek’s child murderers?”

“Oh, no.” Kelley was shocked. “She’s so gentle and—and calm. If I had to pick someone in town to have been a killer as a child, it would definitely be someone like Sharon Morrissey. She’s gentle and calm on the outside, but she has a temper on her, I’ve seen it.”

“Often?”

“No, no. Not often.”

“Do you really think Sharon Morrissey is—who? Kathleen Butterworth?”

“The baby killer?” Kelley made a face. “I’m being ridiculous, aren’t I? It was just talk. Gemma and Tisha, making themselves important.”

“Mmm,” Gregor said, caught himself and then cursed himself for it. If he kept this up, he was going to sound like one of Bennis’s favorite fictional detectives. “Let me ask you a few more questions,” he said. “I would like to untangle a few relationships that seem very strange to me. Like the relationship between Gemma Bury and Tisha Verek.”

“Well, that one’s tangled enough, all right.”

“They were friends?”

“Not really friends. In fact, I think they mutually despised each other. But they spent a certain amount of time together.”

“Why? If they mutually despised each other?”

“Because neither one of them had anybody else to talk to. I mean, they couldn’t talk to the locals, could they? Not sophisticated enough for them. And most of the other flatlanders in town are like me, college or graduate school age. We all go back to the land until someone offers us a decent position, then we heave a sigh of relief and go off to Boston or New York and tell all the people we leave behind that we just have to, in this economic climate there’s nothing to do but sell out.”

“So there was Gemma Bury and Tisha Verek, thrown together out of necessity when they would have preferred to have been apart.”

“Right,” Kelly said. “Sharon Morrissey and Susan Everman were more or less of the same generation, but they kept to themselves and for all Gemma’s talk about goddesses and feminism and I don’t know what else, she was very uncomfortable around lesbians. Which was maybe just as well, if you know what I mean, because Sharon and Susan are very nice and I don’t think they had much use for Gemma. Anyway, then there’s Amanda, who’s thirty-six, but she’s like a nun or something. I don’t mean physically. I mean she’s sort of ethereal. And who else was there? Nobody, I think.”

“I can see that,” Gregor said. “Now, I have heard a rumor, a rumor you might possibly find embarrassing—”

“You mean that Gemma and Jan-Mark Verek were having an affair.”

“I’m beginning to think that people of your age find nothing at all embarrassing,” Gregor said.

Kelley gave him a wry look. “I find it funny, if you want to know the truth. Not funny that Gemma and Jan-Mark were having the affair, that was pathetic. I mean funny that it was a rumor. I thought I was the only one who knew.”

“You’re just not on the town grapevine,” Gregor said.

“Obviously not. Well, they were definitely having one, and if you ask me, Gemma wasn’t the only extracurricular project in Jan-Mark’s life. Don’t ask me who the other one was, because I’m not sure. But you can see, you know.”

“See what?”

“Into the Vereks’ driveway from the third floor of the rectory,” Kelley said. “It’s the highest place in at least a six-mile radius. You can see all kinds of things. Especially from the offices on that floor.”

“Is Gemma Bury’s office on that floor?”

“No, it’s downstairs. My office is on that floor.”

“Did you see anything on the day Tisha Verek was killed?”

“I didn’t, no,” Kelley said, “but Gemma saw Tisha Verek die. I went to the bathroom for a minute, and when I came back she was leaning against the office windows, looking positively green.”