A Stillness in Bethlehem(68)
She just couldn’t feel anything—and that, she thought, was an advantage. At some point her armor of ice was going to melt, and from then on in she was going to be of no use to anyone. She was going to really believe that Gemma had been killed stone dead by a bullet aimed at her while Kelley herself was sitting right next to her and then it was all going to come apart. In the meantime, she had this small space in which to decide what to do and how to do it.
She got up, walked away from the kitchen table, walked down the hall to the foyer and the stairs. She looked up the stairs but didn’t climb them. That numb she was not. She couldn’t bear the idea of going up to her room or out of easy access to the door. The rectory was too big and it echoed. In the dark, in the halls of the second and third floor, out of sight of any human person, it whispered. Kelley had spent the night curled up on the couch in Gemma’s office, and she was going to spend every night curled up there until she found an apartment and could move out to be on her own. Now she moved around behind the staircase and let herself in to Gemma’s office. It was nine o’clock and the bells in the church were ringing. They were heavy cast-iron things and they tolled heavily, the way the bells had in a movie Kelley had once seen, about Marie Antoinette and the guillotine.
Kelley walked over to Gemma’s desk, pulled out the long center drawer and felt beneath it. The key to Gemma’s wall safe was there, fastened with tape. Kelley unhooked it without being careful. She had been careful all the times before, but there was no point to it now. She walked over to the large portrait of some fat dead divine that took up most of the north wall and pulled it aside. It swung on hinges like the safe-hiding portraits in English detective movies. It was odd to think that there had been an era when people really indulged in things like this.
The safe was high on the wall. It had been built by men and for men. Gemma had been tall. Kelley ignored the swivel chair behind the desk and got one of the wingbacks from near the couch instead. In the days when she used to be careful, she’d brought a straightback from the kitchen so she wouldn’t leave shoe prints in the wingback’s yellow upholstery. The wingback was a soft chair with a springy seat and hard to stand on. Kelley had to concentrate on her balance to keep herself from falling over. She pulled the chair as close to the wall as she could and got to work.
The safe was a simple one and there wasn’t much in it. Gemma’s birth certificate. Gemma’s bank books for the four investment accounts in Boston. Gemma’s packet of sentimental photographs, showing her arm in arm with all the wrong people in Boston. Gemma had never trusted the safe to hold anything anyone might want to steal. She’d kept her mother’s jewelry in the drawer of her night table next to her bed. The safe was for documents, and it was documents she kept in it, including the thick one in the stiff brown envelope in the back.
Kelley got that out, shut the safe and got back down off the chair. She pushed the portrait back against the wall and congratulated herself on not breaking her neck. Then she looked down at the envelope and frowned. It was a perfectly blank envelope except for a notation in the corner, in Gemma’s handwriting, in pencil, that said: “TV/MS/SKC.” Just to be sure, Kelley opened it up and pulled out the inch-thick sheaf of papers inside. The top one said: “BORN IN BLOOD. A Book About Children Who Kill. By Patricia Feld Verek.” Kelley could see Gemma sitting in this room, playing with the manuscript pages and saying, “When this thing is published, it’s going to tear this town into tiny little shreds and throw them down over the Connecticut River like confetti. Always remember something, Kelley. It’s not how many people you offend that matters. It’s who.”
Well, Gemma had certainly offended somebody, and maybe so had Tisha Verek. Kelley just wished she understood who.
She hadn’t told Gregor Demarkian about the affair Gemma was having with Jan-Mark Verek, but maybe she ought to tell him now. And while she was at it, maybe she ought to give him this manuscript.
At least it would get it out of the house.
Three
1
GREGOR DEMARKIAN WAS FIFTY-SIX years old, the product of a generation that believed in reason, frugality and hard work, not magic and intuition. He had had a good career and a celebrated one, entirely—he believed—because of the time and effort he had put in. If he had had brilliant moments of insight, they had arisen from his years of patient, plodding study. If he had appeared to be possessed of mythic wisdom in his field, it was because he had applied himself so thoroughly to understanding his field. That was why this business with the rifle made him so nervous. Gregor Demarkian didn’t know anything about rifles. He had never bothered to learn. He didn’t like guns, although he could shoot as well as anybody else who had been a field agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation a dozen years ago. All Bureau agents had to learn how to shoot, of course, and administrators were supposed to go out to the range and keep up their skills, but Gregor had learned quickly that that was a rule easily avoided and happily unenforced. He hated firing ranges at least as much as he hated guns. Heat and noise, anger and hostility: At the Bureau, there had always been somebody around who did like guns, and who studied them, and who could tell Gregor what Gregor needed to know. Gregor didn’t understand the first thing about impacts and trajectories.