A Stillness in Bethlehem(74)
“If you don’t mind my saying so,” he told her, “I’m surprised at how completely you’ve changed.”
“You mean because people aren’t supposed to be able to?” Susan sighed. “Well, I’m out of temptation’s way up here, of course. I really couldn’t get very far out of line without getting clobbered. And I suppose you can buy drugs up here the same as you can anywhere, but the logistics would be more complicated. I was in therapy for a good long time in New York, individual and group, at the same time. Screaming at people. Driving Sharon out of her mind. Maybe I haven’t changed much at all.”
“But you don’t sell yourself.”
“No.”
“And you don’t do dope.”
“Definitely not.”
“What do you do?”
“I illustrate children’s books,” Susan said. “It’s not very lucrative, but it’s all right for what we need to live on up here. And I have some money in the bank. From before.”
“From Charlie?”
“Of course.”
Gregor cut his sausage patty into quarters and speared a piece. “So what’s the problem?” he asked her. “It sounds to me like the perfect bedtime story. You have Sharon. You have work you like to do. You have a life that has to be better than what you had before. You’re even on good terms with Charlie. What could you possibly want with me?”
Susan Everman cocked her head. “Is it true Gemma Bury and Tisha Verek were shot with the same gun?”
“I’m never going to get over the way news travels in small towns,” Gregor said. “The answer is yes, as far as we know. The lab tests may turn up something different.”
“Did you know that Tisha Verek and Gemma Bury were friends? That Gemma was the closest friend—really the only friend of any kind—Tisha had in this town?”
“No,” Gregor said, “but it’s useful information. I take it you don’t believe the theory that Tisha Verek was killed because she wanted to file a lawsuit against the Celebration.”
“No,” Susan Everman said, “and I don’t believe Jan-Mark killed her, either, although Jan-Mark was having an affair with Gemma, if you didn’t know that already. God, this sounds awful. What a mess they were running up there. Anyway, Mr. Demarkian, I don’t buy either of those theories because I’ve got a better one. Tisha Verek was trying to blackmail me. And I’ll bet if she was trying to blackmail me, she was trying to blackmail someone else.”
Four
1
LATER, WAITING FOR IT to be time for Franklin Morrison to take him out to Stuart Ketchum’s farm, Gregor Demarkian sat in the lounge at the Green Mountain Inn with a yellow legal pad on his lap, making notes about how strange it all was. It was worse than strange. It was absurd. The yellow legal pad came from the stationery store down the block. It was narrow-ruled, which made that stationery store one of only two places Gregor knew of in the Northeast where he could get narrow-ruled legal pads. For some reason, the distinction seemed to make sense. Everything else about Bethlehem, Vermont, was patently bizarre. Why shouldn’t it be a material depot for rare, unpopular and nonstandard office supplies? Why shouldn’t it be anything? The pen he was using was a standard Bic, which should have ruined his theory, but didn’t, because it was the kind of theory nothing ruined. Gregor had no trouble recognizing in himself what he’d often criticized in his subordinates. He had had one surprise too many. Now he was starting to run with them. The list on his legal pad was instructive. Were these things really that odd? Was their convergence here, in a small Vermont town, any odder? Susan Everman had been first a street whore and then the call-girl centerpiece of a small-time hoodlum’s stable. She had given it up and decided she was lesbian and moved to Vermont with her woman friend. Gregor had known a lot of whores and ex-whores and junkies and reformed junkies and small-time hoodlums with the bad luck to land in Attica, too. Jan-Mark Verek was a man who had brought all his lack of discipline from New York City. The man would apparently go to bed with anything that moved, including his wife’s best friend, assuming Gemma Bury had been Tisha Verek’s best friend. Since he had only Susan’s word for it, Gregor drew a circle around that line and a star next to it. What looked like “best friends” to outsiders may have been mutual emotional distaste overcome for reasons of emotional isolation. Neither Tisha Verek nor Gemma Bury could have found many other women like themselves in this place. Or could they have? That was what was so maddening. Gregor was not an unsophisticated man. He had spent a good part of his adult life processing the debris left behind by some of the worst people on earth. He had looked into shallow graves in the countryside as often as he had walked through the rooms where bodies had been left in the cities. He knew there was no such thing anymore as a Norman Rockwell town in a Norman Rockwell America, if there had ever been either one. It bothered him that he seemed to have internalized a Norman Rockwell vision of New England nonetheless. It bothered him that it bothered him that there was so much sexual corruption going on in Bethlehem, Vermont.