A Stillness in Bethlehem(118)

“Right,” Bennis said. “Gregor.”

The loudspeakers that had been used to amplify the voices of the actors in and around the gazebo were now being used to broadcast Christmas carols. The first one of the night was, as Gregor suspected it always was, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Gregor put his coat on and got his gloves out of the pockets.

“Maybe you should start making him eat,” Bennis said to Tibor. “I think he’s become addled from malnutrition.”

Tibor clucked. Gregor backed away from both of them. “I have to go talk to Franklin Morrison. You two go back to the Inn and relax.”

“We two ought to follow him,” Bennis said. “He’s up to something.”

And that, Gregor thought, as he turned his back on the both of them and hurried out of the park, was true enough. On the other hand, he was always up to something, and he had told Bennis and Tibor the literal truth. He did have to talk to Franklin Morrison.

He stopped to look back at the park and sighed. It had all been so much easier in the FBI. You got a warrant. You made an arrest. You let some Federal prosecutor figure out how to prove your case in court in a day and age when it was impossible to prove much of anything in court. You certainly didn’t wander around small towns in Vermont, wishing you could get your act together well enough to know what you were supposed to do next.

Or if what you’d decided to do next would work.





2


She had had to wait until the end of the Nativity play, because until then Kelley Grey was otherwise engaged. “Otherwise engaged” was a phrase she liked very much, because it reminded her of one of the doctors in that place they’d sent her to, the one who was so afraid of her he wouldn’t sit down when she was in the room. They were all afraid of her in that place, really. It surprised her. After a while, she thought it might be because they knew she wasn’t crazy. That was the thing it was so hard to get people to understand. They said, “You murdered someone.” They said, “You were only a child.” They said, “You must have been crazy.” It was like those syllogisms she had found in the book about logic she had taken out of the library, thinking that if she could prove that she was logical she could make them see she didn’t belong in an institution. All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Socrates is mortal. It was like that. But it wasn’t true. Murder was sometimes the sanest possible solution. It was sane even when resorted to by a child. It was what everybody would do if they had the chance and the weapon, if they understood what life was all about.

The phone call had come at the very last minute, just before she was getting ready to go out, and then she’d had to stop and think about it all again, about the logistics. She couldn’t go back out to the Ketchum farm. Someone might be home. Someone might spot her driving along in the dark like that, when nobody and nothing else was on the road. She couldn’t go back to Eddie Folier’s place, either, because the police had been there earlier today and Eddie had been called back from Hanover. The place was at least locked up. She wouldn’t put it past them to have it guarded. She’d had to think long and hard about it after that. She knew half the guns in town—it was the kind of information she was always careful to put together, whenever she arrived in a new place—but stealing one wasn’t so easy in the middle of the night. In the end she opted for the gun club at the American Legion because the back-door lock was easy to break. The guns on the walls were .22s, and they weren’t locked into their racks, either. Maybe she should have used one of those and not Eddie Folier’s when she killed Dinah Ketchum. It was a tough one to call.

The gun club kept its ammunition in big metal drawers built into one wall of the meeting room. She rifled through the boxes until she found one full of clips for the Remington Model 552 Speedmaster she had chosen. She wished she had something else to choose. This weighed over five pounds. It wasn’t the heaviest gun she had ever held, but it was heavier than she liked. She thought about standing in the trees at the side of the Delaford Road and firing at Dinah Ketchum, thought about the gun jerking to the right as it always did, thought about the fact that that gun had been heavy, too. If women ever got real equal rights, they would start making guns for themselves that didn’t pull and didn’t kick so much. She supposed that in the long run it didn’t matter. They were both dead, the really evil one and the one who was just like a sick animal, dangerous but without guilt. That was how she thought about Dinah Ketchum. Tisha Verek was like a picture of the devil in an illustrated Fundamentalist Bible. She threatened and laughed. Dinah Ketchum just sat in the car saying, “Oh, I’m so sorry dear, I just noticed and I was just trying to tell you that if you don’t want people to know you should—”