A Stillness in Bethlehem(112)

In the center of the circle, Stuart Ketchum was still standing stock still with his pistol in the air, waiting. At the edges, everybody was quiet. Gregor held his breath. The trouble with firing a shot in the air is that it sometimes provided the occasion for someone to fire a shot at you.

This time, it seemed to be doing what it was supposed to do. Everybody was quiet. Everybody was breathless. Everybody was waiting for something definitive to happen, nobody knew what.

Franklin Morrison seemed to think it was up to him to provide it. He strode into the center to stand beside Stuart and then called out, in a voice that needed no help from electronics:

“All right, everybody, let’s go on home, because if you’re anywhere near this place five minutes from now, I’m gonna throw you in jail and I’m not gonna give a shit who you think you are.”





Five


1


SHARON MORRISSEY AND SUSAN Everman were sitting in the Village Restaurant when it started, and they were still sitting there twenty minutes later, when it finished, as abruptly and nonsensically as it had begun. Susan was drinking a cup of coffee. Sharon was trying to finish a hamburger that just wouldn’t go down. The shouting was far enough away so that the words were indecipherable, but clear enough in intent, to make Sharon think of blood. After a while, everything began to make her think of blood, even the bright plastic poinsettias on the middle of the table and the fuzzy red suit of the Santa Claus doll that had been placed in the window so that it faced the street. It shocked her a little, to think that Susan could sit there so calmly, drinking her coffee, watching the progress of the riot, watching the death of it—and not twitch at all. Sharon Morrissey definitely felt like twitching. She even felt like screaming. Ever since the circle had formed and it had become obvious what was going on, she had wanted to jump in her car and head for Boston.

“What are we going to do?” she asked, when the crowd started to disperse and the thick film of tension in the air began to disperse with it. “What are we going to do?”

Susan reached into her handbag and came up with a pack of the cigarettes she so rarely smoked. Susan Everman was the only person Sharon Morrissey had ever known who was able to smoke cigarettes only for mental-health purposes, and then only once or twice a year. Susan lit up with a gold Dunhill lighter and said, “Tomorrow morning we’re going to go apartment hunting in Boston.”

“But that means we’ll have to sell the house.”

“We’ll buy another house someday,” Susan said. She blew a stream of smoke into the air and thought about it. “Maybe we should travel a little,” she suggested. “I’ve never done any serious traveling in my life. And we have the money for it. We could go to Paris and Rome and to Holland. If we have the time.”

“If we did something like that, we wouldn’t have to sell the house,” Sharon said. “We could leave everything where it is and just take off.”

“That’s true.”

“Why do you want to leave this place? Is it just over that or is it something about us?”

“What went on over there isn’t ‘just’ anything,” Susan said grimly. “Small towns can turn, Sharon, and I think this one just did. There are already three people dead, and for all we know it’s some crazy who doesn’t like deviance of one sort or another. I think it’s time we got out of here.”

And, Sharon thought, Susan was right, just as Susan was always right and Susan was always beautiful, but it felt wrong, that was the problem. It felt like running. And what was worse, it felt like running from no danger at all. Sharon considered telling Susan what she really thought—which was that no matter who was dead already, the two of them were safe—but decided against it. If she said something like that, Susan would want her to explain it, and Sharon wasn’t sure she could.

At this point, Sharon Morrissey wasn’t sure she could explain anything.





2


“I think it’s time I got out of here,” Amanda Ballard was saying to Peter Callisher ten minutes later, pacing back and forth across his living-room floor, rubbing every once in a while against the raw patch of skin at the side of her face. The raw patch of skin was a scrape from a brick she’d run into getting out the back way after the—Peter didn’t want to call it a riot—and it seemed to nag at her. Timmy was out in the kitchen, drinking coffee full of sugar and cream and looking cold. He would fall asleep where he was sitting and they would have to move him. Amanda kept picking things up and putting them down again. Peter wanted to make her sit still.