Tisha sat down in the big armchair she kept next to her phone and looked up at her favorite corkboard of all, what she thought of as her gallery of grotesques. On this corkboard she had Mikey Pellman, who had cut the throats of three of his kindergarten classmates during a school picnic in Andorman, Massachusetts, in 1958. When he was asked why he’d done it, Mikey’d said he wanted to know if everyone had the same color of blood. She also had Tommy Hare, who had waited until he was twelve but shown a good deal more imagination. He had killed his ex-girlfriend and the boy she’d dumped him for by electrocuting them in a swimming pool. That wouldn’t have gotten Tommy onto this corkboard in and of itself, except for the fact that there had been twenty-two other people in that swimming pool at the time, and Tommy had had to stand at the edge of it with a cattle prod in his hand to get the job done. All in all, this was by far the best of the corkboards, much better than the one she kept near her computer, to give herself inspiration. That one had the pictures of people who fit her theory without stretching, like Stevie Holtzer, who at the age of seven pushed the father who beat him down the cellar stairs and broke his neck, or Amy Jo Bickerel, who put a bullet through the head of the uncle who forced her into finger-probing trysts in the front seat of his car when she was eleven. There was something about those people that Tisha didn’t like at all—as if it were less attractive to kill for a reason rather than for the sheer ecstasy of doing it.
She got the phone untangled from its cord, checked the number on her phone pad although she knew it by heart and began to punch buttons. The beeps and whirs that sounded in her ear made her think of R2D2 and those silly Star Wars movies. Then the phone started to ring, and she sat back to wait. Tisha could be as patient and as understanding as the next woman if she wanted to be, and today she wanted to be. She had been thinking long and hard about what she was going to do and how she was going to do it. She had even consulted a lawyer in New York and paid him eight hundred dollars for his opinion. She was as sure as anyone could be that nothing on earth could stop her.
All she had to do now was set her little time bombs and wait.
3
Franklin Morrison had been the chief lawman for Bethlehem, Vermont, for far longer than he wanted to remember, and during most of that time he had been desperately dreaming of escape. Exactly what he wanted to escape from, he wasn’t sure. Sometimes he thought it was just the job. He kept telling himself he could quit any time he wanted to. He didn’t even have to think of anything else to do. He had his Social Security and a little pension the town had helped him set up twenty years ago. He owned his house free and clear, and the taxes on it weren’t heavy. He could retreat to his living room and his vast collection of the novels of Mickey Spillane and never have to hear another word about the Bethlehem Nativity Celebration as long as he lived. Sometimes he thought it was all much more complicated than that. What he really wanted to escape from was Vermont, and snow, and winter. His best friend, Charlie Deaver, had gone down to live in Florida a year ago, and in the letters Charlie’s wife sent, Florida sounded like a cross between Walt Disney heaven and the Promised Land. Then Franklin would get to thinking about it, and even Florida would not be enough. He’d begin to wonder what was out there. He’d begin to dream about spaceships to Jupiter. He’d find himself standing in the checkout line in the supermarket at the shopping center over in Kitchihee, New Hampshire, staring long and hard at the front page of The Weekly World News. “Woman Murdered By Fur Coat.” “Psychic Reveals: ELVIS CAPTURED BY ALIENS FOR EXPERIMENTS ON ALPHA CENTAURI.” “A Diet That Eats Your Fat Away While You Sleep.” He’d begin to think he was going nuts.
On this second day of December, Franklin Morrison didn’t have to think he was going nuts. He knew he was going nuts. It was the opening day of the Celebration. Peter Callisher might look out on the town and think that all was quiet, but Franklin knew better. Oh, there was nothing major going on, not yet. Jackie Dunn hadn’t had enough liquor to want to bed down in the crêche. Stu Ketchum hadn’t staggered in from the hills with an illegal deer over his shoulders and too much ammunition left for that damned automatic rifle he’d bought. Even Sarah Dubay had been reasonably quiet. Now there was a lady who believed in life on Jupiter—and in Elvis being captured by aliens, for all that Franklin knew. The only reason that Sarah wasn’t a bag lady was that places like Bethlehem, Vermont, didn’t allow old women to wander around the streets with nowhere to go.