A Stillness in Bethlehem(81)

“Who does?”

“The man we talked to last night. The man Mr. Morrison likes.”

“Gregor Demarkian?”

“That’s him.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t think that,” Amanda said firmly. “He’s supposed to be a very famous detective. He works with facts. You haven’t given him any facts to make him think you killed them.”

“I told him I was glad they were dead,” Timmy said. “I told them it was right they were dead.”

“I think it’s right they’re dead, too,” Amanda said, “but half the town probably thinks that, and they couldn’t all have killed them. And what about Dinah Ketchum? You aren’t glad that she’s dead. You didn’t even know her.”

“They think I’m crazy,” Timmy said. “Because I’m not so bright. They think I’m so crazy I’d do things with no reason at all.”

“Gregor Demarkian does not think you are crazy,” Amanda said, and then sighed inwardly, because she hated telling Timmy things were certain when she wasn’t certain about them at all. Bethlehem had been pretty good to Timmy. It was a town that believed in live and let live, and it had left Timmy alone. A few people had even tried to help. Amanda knew small towns, though. She had been born in one much smaller than this. Small towns could turn on you if things got bad enough.

Timmy was tossing another pair of boxes onto the counter, going on with his work in spite of the fact that she was there, because that was what she had taught him to do. When she had first taken him under her wing, she had promised to let him know everything he needed to know to survive. “It’s just a few simple rules,” she had said, and that had been the truth, as far as it went. She had hurt for him in the beginning and she hurt for him now. With things getting this crazy, she was even afraid for him. Part of her wanted to stay and protect him, although she couldn’t have said from what, right at the moment. The rest of her wanted to get out where she could breathe, and the rest of her was winning. She patted him on the back.

“I’m going to go for a drive,” she told him. “Do you want me to bring you something?”

“You could bring me a Hostess cupcake,” Timmy said. “For later. After I get these boxes out to the truck, I’m supposed to drive them around town. I’ve got to deliver them just like they were the real newspaper.”

“I’ll get you a Hostess cupcake. You sure you don’t want anything else?”

“A soda?”

“All right.”

“If they try to hurt me, I’ll hit them,” Timmy said. “That’s all right. I can do that. If someone tries to hurt you, it’s all right to make them hurt instead.”

“I suppose it is,” Amanda told him, “but let them hit first. All right?”

“If you let them hit first, sometimes you’re already dead before you can get a chance to hit back.”

And to that, Amanda thought, there was no answer whatsoever. She knew entirely too well just how true it was.

She stood up, looked across the room at Peter at the drawing board, knew that he had noticed her and was not going to look up, and went to the coatrack for her jacket. Shrugging it on, she went through the vestibule and then to the door to the outside. The sky had clouded up again in the last few hours. It was going to snow again. The town park looked barren and embittered. The bleachers had been taken down, but the ground under them hadn’t been tidied up as it usually was. The earth looked damaged.

Amanda turned up the street and began walking toward the pharmacy, uptown in the direction of Carrow. There were red and green ribbons on the storefronts and the mailboxes all along her path, but they looked wilted. She passed Stella Marvin and said hello. Stella looked straight through her. She passed Liz Beck and said hello, and Liz stopped, said hello back, and looked her up and down as if she were a piece of rotten meat the butcher had tried to sneak into the good stuff in the supermarket. Amanda took a deep breath and let it out again, feeling the cold in her lungs as pain. She had known things were going to get bad. She hadn’t expected them to get this bad this quickly.

Her car was parked in front of the pharmacy. She untangled her keys from the gloves in her pocket and opened the driver’s side door. Nobody locked their cars in Bethlehem any more than they locked their houses, but Amanda was not so trusting. She never had been.

She slipped behind the wheel and got the engine started, forcing herself to sit still while the motor warmed up, so she wouldn’t stall out six times on her way out of town. Frank Vatrie was coming down the street at her, looking straight through her windshield and making no acknowledgment at all. He made no acknowledgment to Betty Heath, either, when Betty came down the street in the other direction. They might have been two strangers passing each other in New York City.