A Stillness in Bethlehem(93)

Constipated or not, nasty or not, those weren’t his problems. He looked around the office one more time and said, “How do you know anything was stolen? Are you trying to tell me the room was usually neater than this?”

Jan-Mark Verek made a face. “Awful, isn’t it? She was the most anal woman. It’s neat enough, even now, I’ll give it to you, but you’ve got to see things are missing.”

“He’s right,” Bennis Hannaford said.

She was standing at the back, near one of the cork-boards, looking up at it and squinting. Gregor walked to where she was and tried to see what she saw. He saw row after row of small, blurry, black-and-white pictures, each one labeled with a name. In the bottom row, there were two missing—or at least two empty spaces.

“All of these spaces were filled?” Gregor asked Jan-Mark. “Every last one of them?”

“Every last one of them,” Jan-Mark said. “Of course, I can’t tell you with what, exactly. She used to change them fairly frequently. Especially on that board. But they were filled and they were up there in alphabetical order.”

“They’re not in alphabetical order now,” Bennis said. “Look, Gregor. There’s Monica Hammond and then John Ziebert and then Billy Welsh and then Elsie Hastings. Two of the HAs were removed.”

“Tommy Hare,” Jan-Mark said. “That’s one of the ones that were removed.”

“Who’s Tommy Hare?” Bennis asked.

Stuart Ketchum and Franklin Morrison looked uncomfortable. Gregor said, “Tommy Hare was a teen-aged boy in Devon, Massachusetts, about twenty-five years ago. Not teen-aged. Twelve, I think he was. Anyway, he got a girlfriend and eventually the girlfriend got another boy. He waited until she was giving a party and sneaked into her patio that night and used a cattle prod to electrocute everybody who happened to be in her pool. A lot of people, from what I remember. He ended up at a place called Checkered Tree. It’s a facility for what we used to call the criminally insane.”

“Oh, yuck,” Bennis said.

“Tisha always said she thought Tommy Hare and Timmy Hall were one and the same person,” Jan-Mark said.

Bennis thought this over. “That won’t work,” she said finally. “Timmy Hall is that man we met with Peter Callisher yesterday, isn’t he, Gregor?”

“That’s right,” Gregor said.

“Well, he couldn’t have been twelve twenty-five years ago. He’s not that old.”

“You just think he’s not that old because he’s retarded,” Jan-Mark Verek said. “There’s no telling how old he is. There’s no way to know.”

“I could know if I wanted to,” Franklin Morrison said, “except there’s no point to it, because I already know he wasn’t in anyplace called Checkered Tree. He was at the Riverton Training Facility right here in Vermont. Teacher of his called me up to tell me about him when he first came down here. Woman I went to high school with.”

Stuart Ketchum turned politely to Gregor and Bennis. “Riverton is a big complex of mental-health facilities in the Green Mountains. They’ve got everything up there. This training school for the mentally retarded. A psychiatric hospital. A sort of summer camp, out-patient, group-therapy arrangement for people with chronic conditions. Oh, and an addiction-treatment specialty facility that does everything from cocaine to overeating.”

“Sounds wonderful,” Bennis said, unenthusiastically. She had wandered across the room and stood now next to Tisha’s computer station, looking at the corkboard there. “There’s been a bunch of pictures removed from here, too,” she said. “I wonder why anyone would take them. There must be a manuscript around somewhere if she was writing a book.”

“There are a couple,” Jan-Mark said. “She made copies of her proposal and gave them to people.”

“A lot of people?” Gregor asked.

Jan-Mark shrugged. “She gave one to Gemma Bury, if you’re looking to construct a conspiracy theory. I think she gave one to one of the ladies at the library, too.”

“You mean it was general knowledge,” Gregor persisted. “It wasn’t a case of someone thinking there would only be one copy and trying to get a hold of it.”

“They might have thought that if they were mentally retarded,” Jan-Mark said. “That’s the point of being mentally retarded. You’re not too bright.”

“Someone as stupid as you’re making Timmy Hall out to be wouldn’t have removed all these pictures so neatly,” Gregor said. “He’d have trashed the place and destroyed the computer and had done with it.”