“That’s the Verek house,” Franklin said. “Look the other way and you can see the hill the rectory’s built on, but not the rectory, because it’s too high up. The Verek place is bolted into the side of the hill and down in a valley. Don’t ask me why they did it like that. Don’t ask me why they built all that glass. At my house, glass like that would make my heating bills impossible.”
“Do they have a view? Is there something they can see through the glass?”
“Nothing but more trees and the sides of more hills,” Franklin said, “which is mostly what flatlanders are looking for, I guess. You want a real good look at some people, you ought to go up to the third floor of the rectory. That’s the highest point anywhere for miles.”
“Mmm,” Gregor said. He ran it through his mind and came up blank. He couldn’t see a single reason why the rectory’s view of the town of Bethlehem ought to get anyone murdered.
He went plowing on ahead, stone after stone. After a while, he couldn’t see much of anything. It felt entirely natural. Walking in trees. Not being able to see the sky.
“Someone,” he told Franklin Morrison cautiously, “told me today that Tisha Verek might have been trying to blackmail some people here in town. What do you think of that?”
“I think Tisha Verek had more money than most of the people here in town could even imagine,” Franklin Morrison said. “What kind of a damn fool idea is that?”
“It was just a suggestion.”
“What would they get blackmailed about? If you’re talking about new people moving in, it could be anything, but people in town? I know the people in town.”
“What about Peter Callisher? Hasn’t he been away?”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t have any money. Not real money. He’s got what he makes from the newspaper and what comes in from some rental units he owns over at Green Mountain Condominiums.”
“Mmm,” Gregor said. “That was how I figured it. Just checking. What’s that up ahead?”
Franklin looked over Gregor’s shoulder. “That’s the fork,” he said. “At that point you’re at the junction of the Verek place, the Episcopal Church property, and the Ketchum farm.”
“Fine,” Gregor said. He moved a little more rapidly and came to the “fork,” which was really more like an almost-open place in the trees, allowing another stone wall to branch off and go up to their left. It would have been an exposed place, except that there was nothing here to expose anything to. They were out of the sight of human beings or any human construction. Gregor Demarkian turned slowly at the center of this wide space and looked into the branches of the evergreen trees around him. Nothing. Then he looked at the base of the stone wall. Nothing. Then he looked into the bushes and the brush just into the trees. That was when he saw it, lying there just where he had expected it to be.
“Just a second,” he told Franklin Morrison, as he climbed off the stone wall. It was a problem for him to wade through all that snow and to fight the roots of God only knew what, but he did it. Then he got down on his knees, not caring what was happening to the trousers of his suit, and pulled it out where Franklin could see it.
“Here we go,” he said. “Rifle number two.”
Five
1
AMANDA BALLARD WOULD NOT have voluntarily spoken to Gregor Demarkian for anything in the world. Gregor Demarkian made her nervous, and his presence in Bethlehem seemed wrong to her, odd and out of whack, as if the Pope had suddenly decided to put up overnight at the Waco, Texas, Holiday Inn. Amanda Ballard didn’t think of Demarkian as the Pope, of course. She was saner than that. She just found him intimidating. That was not a surprise. Amanda found a lot of people intimidating, and a lot of others downright terrifying. It was a form of shyness she had cured by an effort of will. When she had to talk to people, she made herself talk to them. She kept her chin up and her eyes straight ahead. Very few people noticed how tense she was, although Gregor Demarkian might turn out to be one of the few people who would. It was all very confusing. She was jumpy and nervous and tired. She really had been sick the night before and she was sick still, queasy and dry-mouthed and getting worse. She was turning Gregor Demarkian into the bogeyman and that was dangerous. That was more dangerous than she wanted to contemplate.
What was most dangerous was the situation with Peter Callisher and Timmy Hall, which wasn’t exactly a situation at all, but an atmosphere. It was twelve-thirty on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 17th, a little more than fourteen hours since Gemma Bury’s body had been discovered sitting on a bleacher in the town park, dead as a nail and in full view of several hundred tourists. The extra edition of the Bethlehem News and Mail Peter had worked all night to put together had arrived from the printer. It was sitting in boxes that had been lined against the wall under the front windows in the newsroom. The boxes seemed to be everywhere and to obscure everything. BODY FOUND IN PARK, the headline read, and then: Third Death Sheds New Light On First Two. Amanda kept seeing the headlines when she should have been seeing the new evergreen wreath Betty Heath had brought in while Amanda had still been asleep upstairs. The wreath was covered with gold-painted plastic everythings, from angels to French horns to partridges that would have looked more suitable in pear trees. It was silly and extravagant and wonderful. So was the gift from Sharon Morrissey, left specifically for Peter, which would have made Amanda angry if she hadn’t known Sharon was gay. It was a hand-sized angel made of accordion-pleated red-and-white ribbons with a face made from painted straw. Sharon had been making them with a group of children from the Congregational Church last Sunday and come by today to drop one off. We should be thinking about Christmas, Amanda told herself, not all these other things. Then she rubbed the palms of her hands against her face and rubbed as hard as she could. Bad, bad, bad, she thought. It was as bad as it had ever been, and it was going to get worse.