A Stillness in Bethlehem(67)

“Just asking,” Jan-Mark said.

“The point isn’t the bush,” Reggie said, “it’s the gun. That’s what I had to tell you. And about the silencer. Did I mention the silencer?”

“No,” Jan-Mark said.

“Whoever it was stuck a potato in the barrel for a silencer. Can you beat that? It must have been a woman. I mean it. Who’d do something that stupid? The damned rifle could go off right in your face.”

“But it didn’t,” Jan-Mark pointed out.

“No,” Reggie said, “no, it didn’t. But that’s the way it always is with bitches, isn’t it? All the dumb luck in the world.”

“Right,” Jan-Mark said.

Reggie George sniffed. “I mean, for Chrissake, JM, I wouldn’t have driven all the way out here in my own goddamn truck just because of a goddamn bush and a goddamn gun and a goddamn potato if it didn’t mean something.”

“So what does it mean?”

“It means it was the same gun,” Reggie said. “Stuart Ketchum’s gun. The Browning .22-caliber semiautomatic Grade I rifle. It had his name scratched right there in the base.”

“That’s the same gun as what?”

“What do you mean, the same gun as what? The same gun that blew away your goddamn wife, that’s as what. I mean, Christ, JM, where have you been? Don’t you even read the papers?”

“If you mean the local paper, not exactly. I do read the ads.” Jan-Mark sighed. “How could they possibly know it’s the same gun? Don’t they have to test the bullets? First test the bullets that hit Tisha and then test the ones from the gun and then test the ones that hit Gemma? Don’t they have to do all that before they know it’s the same gun?”

“They already did that with Tisha,” Reggie said. “They tested the bullets she was hit with, and then when Stuart found the gun missing, he got some spent shells from all that target practice he does and they tested those and the bullets that hit his tin cans and I don’t know what else, so they definitely know that’s the gun that killed your goddamn wife.”

“Right,” Jan-Mark said. Of course, none of that proved that this gun was the gun that had been shot at Gemma Bury. They’d have to test the bullets in Gemma’s body for that. None of it said that the gun was what it appeared to be, either: They’d have to test for that, too. He could have explained all this to Reggie, but he didn’t want to. It would have been too tiring. Explaining things to Reggie was about as easy as teaching a chicken to talk.

Jan-Mark looked into his coffee cup, reached for the Pyrex coffeepot on its warmer and considered lighting his sixteenth cigarette of the day. He even considered getting himself some booze.

Somehow, with Reggie George and phantom guns that mysteriously appeared in town park bushes, the day seemed to demand it.





3


Up the road toward town, on the other side of the stone wall, Kelley Grey sat in the kitchen of the Episcopal rectory, drinking her third cup of black coffee since six o’clock and wondering if she was ever going to get to sleep again. If she stayed at the rectory, she thought the answer would be no—which made it not so bad that the parish council was going to want the rectory back, and her out of it, in no time at all. How long no time at all was, Kelley didn’t know, but it presented problems. She might not be able to sleep in this place, but she didn’t have anyplace else to sleep. It was strange, the things she did even when she knew better. Gemma Bury hadn’t been her lover, but in some ways Gemma Bury might as well have been. They had been on those kinds of terms with each other in every way but the sexual. They had shared the house. They had shared the things they owned. They had shopped for food together and gone to the movies together and treated the car as if it was jointly owned between them. The difficulty was that nothing had been owned between them. Gemma was gone and with her everything that had served as a material foundation for Kelley Grey’s life.

As for the emotional foundation of Kelley Grey’s life, that was something else again, something that didn’t concern her for the moment. For the moment, she had no emotional life. It had been driven out of her like those small pieces of blood and skin and bone had been driven out of Gemma’s throat, through the back of Gemma’s neck, when the bullet had passed from her windpipe to her neck muscles to the empty air beneath the bleachers. Kelley wondered if that Gregor Demarkian person would call Gemma’s death an easy one, quick and painless, over before she knew it. It must have happened so fast and it seemed to Kelley to have been so terrible. Ugly, that was the word for it. Ugly. Kelley had been called ugly most of her life, behind her back, in whispers in the corners of girls’ rooms in high schools and colleges and scout camps and Sunday schools. She knew what the word meant. To her, Gemma’s death was about as ugly as it got. She just couldn’t feel it.