A Stillness in Bethlehem(109)

“You went to the bathroom for a minute,” Gregor said slowly.

Kelley looked at him curiously. “It was the middle of the morning,” she said. “There wasn’t any reason not to go. You make it sound as if I did a terrible thing.”

“No,” Gregor said. “I don’t think you did a terrible thing.”

The fire in the fireplace was burning down, retreating from flames into embers. He stared at it a minute, thinking, and then pushed his chair back. He was still holding the manila envelope Kelley had given him, with its thick weight of manuscript inside. He stuck it absentmindedly under his arm.

“Well,” he said. “I have to thank you. For the package and the information.”

“And I have to go across to the park.” Kelley stood up. “Do you think any of this will be of any use to you?”

“I think it will be of a great deal of use.”

“I’m glad. I didn’t like Gemma very much. Gemma was a hard woman to like. But I didn’t want her dead.”

Gregor was going to make all the right soothing noises, to tell Kelley that she was brave and fine and wonderful, to cluck and mutter the way Tibor did when he got worried about one of the refugee children who had come to live on Cavanaugh Street. He never got a chance.

He had just opened his mouth to say the first words when a clatter and crash came from the street outside, and a woman started screaming.





2


Gregor Demarkian did not like cases with a lot of alarms in them. He didn’t like having to jump and twist and chase. He didn’t like having to march into the middle of dangerous and unstable situations. He had done all those things in his first years with the Bureau, but the timing in that fact was important. There were Bureau agents who spent their entire careers playing cops and robbers. In the old days, they had chased bank robbers and kidnappers. In the more recent ones, they had chased drug lords. On the day after tomorrow, they would probably be chasing aliens from outer space. Gregor didn’t care. He had found his niche behind a desk. He had loved the sheer mental work required to run an investigation on a series of related murders—the sheer mental work that did not require following serial killers down dark alleys with a gun in his hand. Since taking up the investigation of murder as a hobby rather than as a profession, Gregor seemed to have lost his protection from violence. It was infuriating. In all those books Bennis was forever giving him, the police did the chasing and the fighting and the getting shot at, and the Great Detective got to sit home in a chair and cogitate. Definitely cogitate. Not think. That was the way things were.

If Gregor had been a different man from a different generation, he might have insisted on this prerogative. He might have refused to go chasing screams when he heard them or murderers when he found them and there didn’t seem to be any other way to bring them down. He was of a generation that had been brought up to take responsibility—any responsibility, all responsibility, even when taking that responsibility made no sense of any kind whatsoever. In fact, that was what he had been given to understand was the real difference between men and women, back there in the days when people thought there were real differences between men and women. Women, Gregor Demarkian had been brought up to believe, could take responsibility or give it to their men as they chose, with no loss in status or respect. Men never could.

Exactly how all this archaic thinking might have been applied to the situation as it existed on Main Street when he got there that night, he had no way of knowing, because as it turned out he had no time to do anything but observe. He spilled out onto the street with a clutch of people, all eager to see what the fuss was about. He found himself looking at a long dark expanse of asphalt that seemed to have been cleared of everything but one big man. The man was Timmy Hall, and as he stood there at the center of a circle made by a rim of faceless bodies in ski parkas, Gregor found himself being reminded eerily of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” He wouldn’t have been surprised if someone in the crowd had started throwing stones. What they all thought they were doing there in that circle, Gregor didn’t know.

The woman who was screaming was standing in that circle, at the part of it closest to the Green Mountain Inn and to Gregor himself. She was hopping around and flapping her arms across her body. Gregor couldn’t see at what. Her voice was high and thin and hysterical. Gregor thought it was also faintly familiar. “HE GRABBED ME HE GRABBED ME HE GRABBED MY SHOULDER HE GRABBED ME.” She kept saying it over and over again. Gregor thought she was one of the people they had talked to the night before, and probably someone from town. He hadn’t paid much attention to the tourists while the questioning had been going on.