A Stillness in Bethlehem(25)

Gregor went all the way in, walked to the window and looked out. The Palestinian village looked empty, and so did the rest of the town. Gregor noticed a hardware store, a pharmacy, a real estate agent and a doctor. There was no grocery, and Gregor supposed the people here drove out to a shopping mall to buy their food. He turned slightly and found a two-story wooden building with the words “Bethlehem News and Mail” carved into a wooden sign that had been placed on the facade between the two floors. The sign was painted blue and the letters were painted gold. The blue and gold were almost the only extraneous colors Gregor could see. Bethlehem, Vermont, took Christmas seriously. The park where the Palestinian village was had been left more or less bare, home only to what would be needed in the production, but the rest of the town had been conscientiously decorated. Storefronts sported wreaths and bells. Houses had turned their porch rails into candy canes. The public library had a carved-wood crêche on its front lawn. Gregor thought Donna Moradanyan would be pleased. Donna Moradanyan was his upstairs neighbor on Cavanaugh Street and Bennis Hannaford’s closest friend in Philadelphia. Donna Moradanyan believed in decorating everything to within an inch of its life, just on principle.

There was a knock on the door and Bennis came in, her down vest open over her sweater and her hair in even more of a mess than usual. Bennis always wore her hair loose on her first visit to a place, until it got so tangled she couldn’t deal with it anymore. Then she pinned it up and started a battle with falling hair barrettes.

“Where’s Tibor?” she asked Gregor as she came inside. “I thought for sure he’d be running back and forth in front of the window taking in the panorama of the Nativity play. You don’t know what Robert had to go through to get us this suite. You don’t know what I had to pay for it, either.”

“I don’t think I want to know what you had to pay for it,” Gregor said. “And I don’t know where Tibor is. I saw him come in here—”

“I went to use the private room, Krekor, please. You will embarrass me.”

“Oh,” Gregor said.

Tibor emerged from one of the north-side doors—the one that led to the bathroom, Gregor assumed—still carrying his paper with him. He gave Bennis a shy smile and went to sit down in one of the heavy club chairs by the window.

“I have gone past the article on Krekor and read the rest of the paper,” he said, “and do you know what? I think Krekor is famous in this place. He had a part in an entirely different article.”

“You mean there were two articles on Gregor?” Bennis asked.

Tibor shook his head. “It was an article on hunting accidents. Two weeks ago—it is Monday the second, it says here—there were two hunting accidents and two people died. I would have thought this was an occupational hazard in a place where there is hunting, but apparently not. According to the paper, the deaths have the town very, very upset. And the town is more upset because no one knows who’s responsible.”

“Don’t they really?” Bennis took the paper from Tibor and turned it over in her hands. “How strange.”

“There’s nothing strange about it,” Gregor said sharply. “It’s just the ordnance equivalent of hit-and-run.”

“Well, Gregor, I know what it is. I just think it’s odd. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a case where a hunter gunned someone down and then didn’t tell anybody about it. Never mind gunning down two people.”

“I don’t think it was the same hunter,” Tibor said. “Look in the paper there, Bennis. It was two different women in two different places. Miles apart.”

“Was it?” Bennis unfolded the paper and searched until she found the front page story. “It doesn’t say anything about the bullets. They must have found them. They always do. Maybe the hunter was someone from out of the area.”

“They say there they could use Krekor to solve the crime,” Tibor said. “I find it very flattering, Bennis. I find it fascinating. This is our Krekor, and they could use him to solve the crime.”

“You make me sound like I’m two years old,” Gregor said. “And they couldn’t use me to solve the crime, because I’d be no good at this kind of thing. It’s a kind of hit-and-run, just like I said. They need firearms experts and tech men, the kind of people who can take footprint impressions and identify the treads of tires. That’s how you solve something like this. Not with a poisons expert with a sideline in motivational psychology.”

“Is that what you are?” Bennis asked him.