A Stillness in Bethlehem(84)

“I didn’t think it would be a good idea to leave it there like that,” she told him. “That’s why I called you.”

“You called me because you’d be shit without me. Always remember that.”

Candy promised to always remember something, anyway, and held her breath. Reggie went through the door and down the two steps to the landing. She heard him beginning to unscrew the light and swearing under his breath. She counted to five to keep herself steady and then stepped forward and slammed the door shut.

“What the hell—”

There were three bolt locks on this door, one at the top, one in the middle and one at the bottom. They were left over from the previous resident of this house, who had raised Dobermans and kept them in the basement. Candy had always thought those Dobermans must have been mean. She got the middle bolt thrown first and then went to work on the others. She worked patiently and without fumbling, without panic, as if all her emotions had gone underground and frozen solid until she had the job done. Reggie was down there bellowing now, screaming and pounding, and Candy thanked God that the outer door had no window in it. That had been because of the Dobermans, too.

“Candy!” Reggie screamed at her. “Candy, you open up! You let me out of here! You goddamned stinking bitch—”

“Right,” Candy said, not so much to Reggie as to the air or the world in general or to herself. Then she walked out of the kitchen and back into the living room. She got her coat out of the hall closet and swung it over her shoulders. She stepped out the front door. It was cold as hell outside, but she didn’t mind.

“My name is not Candy George,” she said to no one and everyone and most of all to herself. “My name is Candace Elizabeth Spear and I can act rings around that horse-face snot Cara Hutchinson.”

It was hardly a statement of broad-minded generosity or Christian tolerance or grace under pressure, but Candy didn’t figure she was ready for all that yet, because she was barely ready for what she was doing. She went down the front steps to the driveway and got into Reggie’s green Chevy station wagon. The keys were just where she’d expected them to be—meaning in the ignition, where Reggie kept all his keys for all his cars—and she was ready to go.

Driving off, she was happy to realize she couldn’t hear Reggie bellowing back there at all.





Six


1


TO GREGOR DEMARKIAN, NEW England farmhouses were all the same: white clapboard constructions with black roofs and mullioned windows and covered porches, long flat buildings with woodsheds built onto their backs and clotheslines anchored in the wood just outside the kitchen door. Stuart Ketchum’s farmhouse had a woodshed, but beyond that it was unrecognizable. Gregor didn’t think he’d ever seen anything so obviously old. It bothered him that he didn’t know what made him think that. The house was not disintegrating. It had been recently painted a pearl grey with black shutters, and its corners were true enough. The house was not cloyingly precious, either, the way so many houses were when they had been reclaimed and restored by people with money. Stuart Ketchum had had neither the time nor the inclination to indulge himself in replica lintels or decorative wheelbarrows. There were a pair of flowerboxes fixed under the windows on either side of the front door, but Gregor thought those belonged to Stuart Ketchum’s wife, or possibly to his late mother. They were a female touch. This was a no-nonsense working farm, as dedicated to its vocation as a cloistered nun. Stuart Ketchum himself was more on the order of a backwoods philosopher, although Gregor thought the “backwoods” part might be overdone a little for the benefit of visitors. He was tall and thin and straight, in whole and in part. Each one of his individual bones seemed to be elongated, and his hair hung straight and brown and limp from the top of his head to a point midway down the back of his neck. Gregor spent a lot of time watching the back of Stuart Ketchum’s neck, with concentration, as Stuart led them into the house and to the kitchen in the back, dodging ceiling beams with every step. Gregor dodged them, too. It reminded him of the Pilgrimage Green, the boat—supposedly a replica of the Mayflower—he had just spent a couple of weeks chasing a murderer on. That had been a place of low ceilings and imminent danger to the top of his head, too, and he wondered how Stuart Ketchum stood it, day after day, having to duck every time he wanted to come through the front hall and answer the door. Then they came through a door to the kitchen and the ceilings were instantly taller. Stuart Ketchum stood up and Gregor stood up, too. Franklin Morrison heaved the kind of sigh the fat boy does when the running is finally over in gym. At the long, unvarnished, uncovered kitchen table, Bennis Hannaford sat holding a white ceramic coffee mug full of coffee, looking curious and interested and mischievous at once. She looked like she belonged right where she was sitting, just like she always looked like she belonged wherever she was sitting, and she also looked impossibly good. Gregor thought it was a good thing Stuart Ketchum had a wife, because without her he might be subject to one of Bennis’s enthusiasms. Not that he would necessarily mind.