A Stillness in Bethlehem(8)

And, of course, Franklin did know. He knew better than Lee Greenwood. Lee was only thirty-two and had been on the job only thirty months. Franklin looked down at the newspaper one more time. There was Mr. Gregor Demarkian, looking a little like a diplomat and a little like a czar, looking important and busy and oversupplied with interesting things to think about, walking along beside a beautiful woman who looked like she did aerobics and who had hold of his arm. There was Franklin’s own desk, not six steps away on the other side of the room against the wall, piled high with message slips demanding immediate attention to falling Christmas lights, muddied angels’ costumes and straying animals that would only stray again as soon as they were brought back to where they were supposed to be. Franklin didn’t even have a wife at home to keep him warm or make his life miserable. It hardly seemed fair.

Franklin looked up at the clock, saw it said only 8:15, and frowned.

“Lee,” he asked, “when Benjy called, was he calling from the office?”

“He was home,” Lee mumbled, deep in his forty-second perusal of this installment of the Adventures of Gregor Demarkian. “It wasn’t even eight o’clock, for Christ’s sake. He said you should call him right back.”

“At home,” Franklin insisted.

“That’s right, at home.”

“Fine,” Franklin said.

He walked over to his desk, sat down in his swivel chair and picked up his receiver. Then he punched himself into the first of his six lines and tapped out Benjy’s home number on the pad. Benjy’s father had been one of Franklin’s less-astute drinking buddies before he died, but Franklin would have known the number without looking it up in any case. He knew the numbers of everyone in town who had anything to do with the government, officially or unofficially. In small towns like this, anyone with a law degree automatically becomes part of the unofficial government, and a man whose number it’s good to know.

“Going to be nothing,” Franklin said to himself, as the phone rang once and started to ring again.

Then the ringing was cut off in mid-squeal, and Benjy Warren’s breathless voice said, “Yes? Who is it?”

“It’s me,” Franklin said, surprised. “Are you all right, Benjy? What’s your hurry?”

“Hurry,” Benjy Warren said. Then he laughed, long and hard enough to start himself coughing. “Oh, God,” he said. “You’re the one who better hurry. Guess who I just talked to. Tish.”

“Tisha Verek? So what?”

“So you got to know why she called. She wasn’t looking for me. She was looking for Cam.”

“That makes sense.”

“Cam’s in New Hampshire, skiing for the day. Left at six this morning. She wanted to get in touch with him.”

“You could do that for her,” Franklin said.

“I could, but I haven’t yet. I wanted to give everybody a little time.”

“A little time for what?”

“A little time to head her off at the pass,” Benjy said. “God, Franklin, I’m sorry. If I’d known this was brewing, I’d have warned you all long ago. I’ve been trying to figure out the paperwork ever since I heard.”

“Figure out the paperwork for what?” Franklin demanded, exasperated. “What could Tisha Verek possibly do that would—”

“I’ll tell you what she could possibly do,” Benjy said. “She could take the ACLU up on their standing offer and file an injunction.”





4


The core rooms of Stuart Ketchum’s house had been built in 1687 by the very first Ketchum to come to Vermont—far enough back, in fact, that the flatlanders who ran the Historical Society thought it might be the oldest house in town. Whether it was or not, Stuart Ketchum didn’t know and didn’t care. The core wasn’t much to speak of anyway—just a big room with a fireplace that now served as the kitchen and two smaller rooms upstairs Stu used as spares—and it wasn’t really in town anyway. Until 1947, it hadn’t even been in the town limits, which had caused a few interesting situations with the land-tax people. It had also caused a few interesting situations with the state government in Montpelier. Montpelier always wanted to know what was going on and why it was going on and what they were supposed to do about it. Like governments everywhere—at least in Stu’s opinion—Montpelier took to busybodiness as a holy cause. Stu Ketchum didn’t have much use for governments, in Montpelier or anywhere else. It was the principal bone of contention he had with his best friend, Peter Callisher, since forever, when they managed to get together to drink a few beers in peace. It was getting harder and harder to drink a few beers in peace, because there were the drunk-driving people and the save-your-heart people and the if-you-really-need-that-one-beer-after-dinner-you-must-be-an-alcoholic people. Stu never listened to the alcoholic people, because his father had been an alcoholic and Stu knew one when he saw one. Stu’s father had frozen to death one night in 1956, after falling down dead drunk in the back pasture after a six-hour visit with Johnny Walker Black. Stu had been ten years old at the time.