“Meaning you’ve shot the gun yourself,” Gregor said.
Franklin nodded. “When we first saw this mess, I thought Stuart had gone round the bend, had some kind of delayed Vietnam syndrome and shot them both, but it couldn’t have been Stuart. He was with Peter Callisher all morning and the two of them went up to Tisha’s together. If you believe Jan-Mark Verek—and I only sort of half do—they got there within minutes of Tisha’s going down. Most people in town think Jan-Mark killed Tisha himself, stole Stu’s gun and just did it, but most people in town would do anything they could to get rid of Jan-Mark Verek. As a matter of principle.”
“Was he opposed to the Nativity Celebration, too?”
Franklin shook his head. “He’s just a general pain in the butt, that’s all. Speaks with a phony accent you can hear the Brooklyn under with no trouble at all. Goes berserk if anybody crosses his property, which means he goes berserk on a regular basis, because when it’s minus six with the wind chill and hip deep in snow, people take shortcuts. Then there’s the money. Jan-Mark isn’t so good about money. Remembering to pay people what he owes them, I mean. Most of the people up here who run small businesses or do personal work—chopping cordwood or raking leaves or painting houses—don’t have much of a cushion. If they put in the time, they expect to get paid.”
“He sounds altogether charming,” Gregor said. “Is there anything else wrong with him?”
“Probably. We just don’t know about it yet. So, Mr. Demarkian, you want to look at this stuff I’ve got for you.”
Gregor stood up. “I will if you want me to. You still have to understand that this isn’t the kind of evidence I’m used to dealing with. I mean, I’ve dealt with it, of course, but I’ve always relied on other people’s reports.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Franklin Morrison said. “So have I. But it isn’t the physical stuff I want you to see right this minute. I’ve got the Dempsey kid coming in; when he gets here he can walk you through that. It’s something else. I want your opinion about a probability.”
“A probability?”
Franklin Morrison took his feet off the open desk drawer, got up and went to the wall at the back of the room. The wall was blank, and along the top of it was a shade roll of the kind Gregor remembered from elementary school, the kind that pulled down to reveal a map of the United States. This one pulled down to reveal a map, too, but it was an extremely detailed map of the village and township of Bethlehem, Vermont, complete with roads, hills, woods and houses, with property lines clearly marked. It was in color, too. Franklin Morrison was very proud of it.
“Come here,” he told Gregor Demarkian. “I want to show you something very odd.”
Six
1
GEMMA BURY BELIEVED UNRESERVEDLY in the primacy of experience—believed, to be precise, that the emotional response of a person experiencing something was infinitely more important than any matter of fact related to that something in life. Putting it into words was damn near impossible, but acting on it was not. Acting on it made Gemma Bury’s life a hundred times easier than it might have been. It saved her a lot of work, too. She believed the conspiracy theories in Oliver Stone’s JFK—in spite of the distortions everybody else seemed to find in it—because Oliver Stone’s JFK expressed the way the Kennedy assassination felt to her better than the Warren Report. She believed in astrology, too, at least in the sense of thinking that her destiny was at least partially controlled by the stars (and her menstrual cycle by the moon). It didn’t matter to her that the stars were not actually in the places that astrologers said they were. Gemma didn’t know where astrologers said they were. She didn’t know where astronomy said they were, either. It just felt right, this connection to the universe, this vast undifferentiated primal muck of space and time. Fortunately, Gemma never seemed to feel anything flagrantly opposed to common sense, such as that gravity wasn’t operating one day. She never went tripping out a tenth-story window, trusting the emotions that told her she could float. What she did do was write a lot of theology, both in the seminary and after she came to take up her position as pastor of the Episcopal Church in Bethlehem, Vermont. This theology had a great deal to do with Love, in the twentieth-century use of the term. It also had a great deal to do with sex, but Gemma never put it that way. Gemma thought of herself as a very natural personality. She enjoyed sex the way the ancient Greeks had—as an activity, not an identity—and liked to believe she had a lot in common with the Wife of Bath. What bothered her was that, since the deaths of Tisha Verek and Dinah Ketchum, she was becoming more and more convinced that her parishioners saw her the same way, and that wouldn’t do at all. What was really frightening was that they seemed to have known about her affair with Jan-Mark Verek all along. The phone in the rectory had started ringing only minutes after the news of Tisha Verek’s death had reached the village, and gone on ringing almost every hour of every day of the two weeks since. It was now two o’clock on the afternoon of Monday, December 16th, and Gemma’s head was aching. The little old ladies were driving her crazy, that was the truth. They were also having the time of their lives. Nothing this exciting had happened in Bethlehem since the Great Depression had given the Celebration its start.