Kelley Grey grimaced. It was an ugly expression and it made her plain face plainer. “What do you think the odds are, that it’s not?” she asked him. “I read the papers. Shoulder and throat, shoulder and throat, shoulder and throat.”
“There is that, yes.”
“So what do you want to know?”
Gregor settled his hands on his knees. Kelley had a tiny pair of smiling Santa faces in her pierced ears that he had just noticed. They looked ludicrous.
“When we sat down this evening,” he said, “Gemma told me that she had never seen this play before, even though she had been here a while. Do you know how long a while?”
“It was three or four years, I think. I’ve only been here eighteen months, myself.”
“Do you know why she hadn’t seen the play?”
“I know she didn’t approve of it,” Kelley said. Then she shook her head, dissatisfied. “It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t an emotional thing. Gemma had a set of principles, you see, and she didn’t approve of whatever was opposed to those principles, but there was nothing—worked up about it. It wasn’t like Jesse Helms or anything. She didn’t get all passionate about things like that.”
“What did she get all passionate about?”
“Nothing, really,” Kelley said. “Gemma was strange that way, Mr. Demarkian, if you ask me. Emotions were something she talked about all the time, but she didn’t really have any, not the way other people do. She was always in control. She’d say, ‘I’m very angry with you, Kelley.’ But she wouldn’t sound angry. She’d sound… reasonable.”
“Did you like that?”
“I hated it.”
“Was she often angry at you?”
“I was more often angry at her.” Kelley smiled slightly. “I’ve got my principles, too, but I’m not like Gemma was about them. I yell and scream and pound tables.”
Gregor smiled back. “I think I prefer it that way,” he said. He stretched his legs and considered what she’d told him. “I would have thought, that as a priest, Gemma Bury would have been overjoyed with a production like the Bethlehem Nativity play. I would have thought she would at least have been interested in seeing how it was done.”
“Gemma wasn’t that kind of priest,” Kelley said. “She wasn’t that kind of Episcopalian. I don’t think she believed that there was any truth to the story. And then there was the constitutional thing. She was very firm about the constitutional thing.”
“Firm how?”
“In thinking that having the play and making money for the town was illegal because of the separation of church and state and the town shouldn’t do it. She was really happy when we heard Tisha Verek was going to file that lawsuit. She said she’d been thinking about doing it since she got here but then she hadn’t because she was worried about the effect it would have. Her parishioners would probably have killed her—Oh.”
“Do you think one of her parishioners would have killed her just for believing what she believed?” Gregor asked gently.
Kelley was shaky. “I don’t know.”
“Do you think Tisha Verek was shot because she was going to file a lawsuit against the Celebration?”
Kelley just shrugged. “I don’t know why Tisha Verek was shot, or Dinah Ketchum either. I barely knew either of them. Tisha used to come to the rectory sometimes to visit Gemma, but she didn’t have time for me. And as for Dinah Ketchum, she might as well have been on another planet. We had virtually no contact at all. Except for the inevitable, of course. Everybody runs into everybody else in a town this size at least once in a while.”
“Mmm,” Gregor said. He decided that was likely to be true. It was difficult for him to work in small towns because he had never lived in one. He had been born in Philadelphia and stationed in New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Like the Armenian traders who were his ancestors, he was a man of the cities. It was hard for him to believe that there were places anywhere where everybody ran into everybody else at least once in a while.
That, however, was not his problem. The shooting death of Gemma Bury was, in no matter how unofficial a capacity. Franklin Morrison had every intention of sticking him with it. Gregor knew himself too well to believe he had any intention to refuse.
“Let’s talk about tonight,” he told Kelley Grey. “Why did the two of you decide to come tonight?”
“It was because of Peter Callisher,” Kelley said. “Gemma went to talk to Peter Callisher this afternoon, and he had a pair of tickets he didn’t need, and he gave them to Gemma.”