A Stillness in Bethlehem(49)

“Mmm,” Amanda Ballard said.

“Well,” Cara took a deep breath, prepared to go on.

Amanda looked up, saw Gemma at the door and put down her pen. Gemma smiled. She did not say what she wanted to say, which was that if “practically everybody” had been staring at Cara Hutchinson in the library the other day, it wasn’t because Cara had been reading The New York Review of Books. It might have been because Cara was muttering to herself, which Gemma had seen her do when she read, but that was something else again. Amanda was rubbing the side of her neck with the flat of her hand and looking quizzical.

“Gemma,” she said. “Cara is Jan-Mark’s latest local model.”

“So I’ve gathered,” Gemma said.

“It’s really been the most wonderful experience,” Cara repeated, with a trace of a smirk in her voice that could have been detected by a deaf woman. “He showed me his wife’s office. His late wife’s office. He keeps it like a shrine.”

“She was a bad woman,” Timmy Hall said suddenly. “She was Evil.”

Amanda picked up her pen again. “All right,” she said. “I think we all have that established. I’m sorry, Gemma. All anybody ever talks about around here is Tisha and the shootings. And now that Gregor Demarkian is in town—”

“My old ladies keep talking about Gregor Demarkian,” Gemma said. “You’d think Peter Falk had arrived to shoot an episode of Columbo. Did Franklin Morrison really hire him to look into Tisha Verek’s death?”

“You can’t hire him,” Cara Hutchinson said. “He doesn’t take money, except sometimes he asks for donations to some Armenian refugee relief society or this homeless shelter in Philadelphia. The Archdiocese of Colchester gave twenty-five thousand dollars to the homeless shelter last year after all that mess with the nuns being killed around St. Patrick’s Day. Or maybe it was one nun. I don’t remember. But I’ll tell you—”

“He’s here to attend the Celebration, just like everybody else,” Amanda said, cutting Cara off. “You can read all about it in the paper tomorrow, Gemma. When Peter found out he was here, he put a story right on page one. About his being here, I mean, and with a picture. We tried to get an interview, but it didn’t work out.”

“He doesn’t give interviews,” Cara Hutchinson said.

“Did you want to see Peter?” Amanda asked. “He went upstairs to lie down, but he wouldn’t mind coming back again. He only lies down when he’s bored, anyway. I could call upstairs and get him.”

“I wish he’d let me write something for the paper,” Cara said. “It wouldn’t have to be about Art exactly. I mean, I know that won’t sell papers in Bethlehem, Vermont. It could be about Tisha’s office and be all hooked in with the shootings. She has the most interesting office, really, with all these pictures in it of children who killed people when they were children and then some pictures of the children grown up. It’s very interesting, really.”

“Gemma?”

Gemma had been staring at a little collection of Santa’s elves on the counter near Amanda’s elbow. Cara Hutchinson had always made her eyes glaze over, and this new obsession with Art, Artists and the Artist’s Wife just made the situation worse. Gemma straightened up. Since Cara obviously knew that Gemma and Jan-Mark had been having a relationship—since the whole town obviously knew—it ought to have occurred to her that Gemma had been in Jan-Mark’s house, and seen Tisha’s office, more times than Cara herself ever would, unless Jan-Mark decided to go all French and take up with his own underaged model. Cara was horse-faced and grating and less than half Jan-Mark’s age, but Gemma wouldn’t put anything at all past the stupid rutting fool. Whether that negated all the hours of deeply spiritual communion   she and Jan-Mark had shared together, Gemma didn’t know.

“Gemma?” Amanda said again.

“Yes,” Gemma answered. “Yes. I’m sorry. I’m very tired. I do want to see Peter. I have something I need to talk over with him.”

“I’ll call him right down.”

“Thank you.”

Over on the other side of the office, Timmy Hall was leaning against a broom, contemplating the women set out before him. Gemma watched his gaze move from Amanda to herself to Cara and then pause, frowning furiously, as if what he saw angered him. Gemma sometimes argued in favor of women’s intuition—which she translated as “a natural biological affinity for extrasensory perception”—but she didn’t need women’s intuition or ESP or anything else to tell her what she was seeing now. The way Timmy Hall was looking at Cara Hutchinson made Gemma Bury’s blood run cold.