A Stillness in Bethlehem(13)

“Awful,” Susan agreed.

“Horrific,” Sharon echoed. “That’s why you shouldn’t put off anything important. There’s nothing to say you won’t be even more swamped later than you are now.”

“Well,” Betty Heath said, “there is that.”

Susan took her firmly by the arm and began to guide her to the steps leading up to the foyer and the door to the outside. “Of course there’s that,” she said. “What do you take us for?”

“Take you for?” Betty looked bewildered.

“Mrs. Ketchum just went into Heckert’s Pharmacy. If you hurry you can catch her before she comes out.” Susan flung open the door to the stairs, pushed Betty through it and stood back. Betty got up four or five risers and then looked down again, undecided.

“Well,” she said.

“Go,” Susan said.

“All right,” she said. And with that, Betty Heath brightened, turned and began to hurry up the stairs—or came as close to hurrying as legs with veins like that could manage. Susan Everman watched her until she reached the landing and then shut the basement door.

“Well,” she said. “That got her out of the way. What do we do now?”

It was exactly what Sharon Morrissey had been wondering herself, all the time that Betty Heath had been hesitating about running out to meet old Dinah Ketchum—and all the time before that, too, ever since Peter Callisher had come bombing in with the news. She watched Susan flit back and forth in front of the narrow table, her fine-boned body moving like a dancer’s or a model’s, her perfectly chiseled face a vision out of some expensive photographic artist’s portfolio of seminal work. Sharon Morrissey was not like that and never would be. She was too thick and athletic and awkward, too much like what a lesbian was supposed to be. Susan was the kind of lesbian men were always offering to fix.

“Susan,” Sharon said, “I’ve been thinking about it. About Tish.”

“So have I.”

“Well,” Sharon said. “What do you think? How dangerous do you really suppose she is?”

“More dangerous than she knows she is,” Susan said decisively. “Very dangerous to us, if that’s what you meant.”

“That’s what I meant.”

“It’s not as if everybody in town doesn’t know,” Susan said slowly. “It’s not that we’ve been keeping it a secret. We were smarter than that this time.”

“We were bowing to the inevitable,” Sharon told her.

“There’s nothing wrong with bowing to the inevitable if it gets you where you want to go. And as for the other thing—”

“Right,” Sharon said. “The other thing.”

Susan came to a halt and put her hands down on the narrow table right next to the nylon ribbons. “As for the other thing,” she repeated, “I’m sure Tish couldn’t know—well, anything. She really couldn’t. But I worry.”

“So do I.”

“So I think that this might be the perfect time. Don’t you agree? We could go up there and—and look around. See what she’s got in plain sight. Of course, if the information’s on a computer, we couldn’t do anything about that, but you know Tish. All those pictures she carries around. And those corkboards it talked about in the paper. There might be something.”

“Yes,” Sharon said solemnly. “There might be something.”

“And if there was something, we’d finally know what we had to do.” Susan sounded decisive at last. She bent at the waist to get a better look out the window onto Main Street. “Betty Heath’ll be gone for a while,” she said, “and we wouldn’t be conspicuous. If anybody saw us leaving town, we could just say we were going out to the house. It’s on the same road. And with Peter Callisher and Stu all worked up and half the town worked up with them, I’ll bet there’s going to be a convention up there this morning anyway. Lots of people out to stop Tish. Lots of people milling around that house. Lots of—cover. No one would ever guess.”

“Mmm,” Sharon said.

“Never mind,” Susan said. “Get your coat. If we don’t get out of here before Betty gets back, we will have a problem.”

To Sharon Morrissey’s mind, they already had a problem—a problem that might or might not have been discovered by Tisha Verek—but that was almost beside the point. One of the things that had made Sharon Morrissey happy when she first realized she was a lesbian was the possibility that she would never fall in love again in that dizzying, sickening, soul-abandoning way she had when she had fallen in love with men. Then Susan had come along, and Sharon had realized not only that love hadn’t changed, but that it had gotten worse. The addition of passion to the rest of the symptoms was enough to make her choke.