A Stillness in Bethlehem(85)

There was a small glass bowl full of pine needles and tiny silver balls in the middle of the table, but no other decoration—maybe because Stuart’s mother had died so recently—and Stuart took this bowl off and put it out of the way on a wall shelf. Franklin Morrison had given Stuart the gun to carry as soon as he and Gregor arrived at the farm. It made sense, according to Franklin, because even if Stuart was a suspect, he was also the best man in this part of Vermont when it came to the care, feeding and identification of firearms. Besides, as Franklin said, they were chasing a sane person here. Any sane person would have had the sense to wipe the rifle clear of prints.

This was not a line of reasoning Gregor Demarkian relished, or even approved of, but he was on Franklin Morrison’s territory. He let Stuart Ketchum take the gun and watched the man for signs of strangeness or evasion. He might not have recognized either, because Stuart Ketchum was not a personality type he had had a great deal to do with. Stuart put the rifle down on the kitchen table, lying diagonally across the surface with its nose pointed into an empty corner. Then he stood back and contemplated it, as if it were a problem in mathematics.

“Mr. Ketchum is very Zen,” Bennis Hannaford said after a while. “Hello, Gregor. Hello, Mr. Morrison. We’ve been having a very nice time here being Zen while you’ve been gone. I see you’ve found something.”

“You don’t have to be some kind of Buddhist not to want to talk so much your tongue falls off,” Stuart Ketchum said. “Excuse me a minute.” He went back to the shelf where he’d put the glass bowl and came back with a pair of wire-rimmed glasses.

Bennis drew her legs up under her and hunched over her coffee. “You did find something,” she said. “Where did you find it?”

“In an evergreen bush,” Gregor said, “or maybe it was a low tree. I don’t know the difference.”

“It was a low tree,” Franklin Morrison said.

“It was out near those stone walls,” Gregor went on. “We were walking around on them. There’s a place where three of them come together—”

“It’s just two,” Stuart Ketchum said. “Three properties but two walls. It looks like three walls because the line of the Episcopal Church wall is crooked. Never did get things very accurate, those Episcopalians.”

“Now, Stuart,” Franklin Morrison said, mildly.

“Just tell me one thing,” Stuart asked. “Is this the way you found it? Exactly the way you found it? You didn’t do anything to it?”

“Like what?” Gregor asked.

“Like disassemble it,” Stuart Ketchum said.

Gregor was relieved to see that Franklin Morrison was looking just as bewildered as he was. It was embarrassing, after all the movies and television shows, to be an ex-FBI agent who didn’t know anything about rifles. The FBI agents in Bonnie and Clyde had stood in a field and chewed up the landscape with machine guns. Gregor caught Bennis Hannaford’s eye and blushed a little. She knew exactly what was making him so uncomfortable.

Stuart Ketchum hadn’t noticed that anyone was uncomfortable in the first place. He leaned toward the rifle, fussed with something Gregor didn’t catch and came up with a limp hand-sized object. “There’s the clip,” he said calmly, “with three bullets gone. That makes it much safer. This is a Marlin Model 70P Papoose, it’s a .22 long-rifle caliber semiautomatic with side ejection, but that’s not the point of it. It’s what’s called a quick takedown.”

“Meaning what?” Gregor asked.

“Meaning you can do this.” Stuart Ketchum picked up the gun and seemed to break it in half, except that there weren’t any sounds of breaking and nothing small and vulnerable fell on the floor. Then he jerked his arms and the rifle seemed to snap back together again, as if it were made out of Lego blocks. “The point of something like this,” he said, “is to make storage easier and to make the hunter feel like he’s still in the army, which is how a lot of these guys want to feel. This is not a military rifle. It’s a sports model, not a bad one, I’ve got a couple in the gun room. Introduced in 1986. Sixteen-and-a-quarter-inch barrel. Hundred fifty, hundred seventy-five dollars, in there. No big deal.”

“No big deal,” Gregor repeated. “But it could kill somebody.”

“Oh, yes.” Stuart Ketchum nodded. “I wouldn’t shoot it at anything serious, like a bear. Not if I had a choice. But it could kill a person without much trouble. I take it this is what you think killed my mother.”