A Stillness in Bethlehem(94)

“Let’s look at what’s missing from here,” Bennis said.

Bennis had sat down at the computer station. She ran her finger across the corkboard and said, “Bateman, Beddish, Yale, Carter—there’s something. Who belongs there?”

“How should I know?” Jan-Mark demanded.

“There’s another one further down,” Bennis said. “Holby, Warren, Hurt. Who would that be?”

“Maybe you have some way of calling up the information on the computer,” Gregor suggested. “Or maybe your wife left notes. Or a manuscript.”

“No notes,” Jan-Mark said. “And as for the computer—”

He looked dubiously at the blank screen and then sighed, almost resignedly, as if necessity were forcing him into the worst of all possible positions, the need to act like an ordinary man. He tapped Bennis on the shoulder, waited until she stood up and then sat down himself. He reached into a side drawer, looked through the diskettes there, and chose one. Then he loaded up.

“This was her index,” he said. “If you want to know the truth, it was the only part of the book I liked. You wouldn’t believe how many innocent-seeming little children have been positively homicidal.”

Bennis Hannaford frowned. “Isn’t that usually because they’ve been abused?” she asked him. “It’s not as if they were born evil or something like The Bad Seed.”

Jan-Mark was rolling information across the screen. “A lot of them have been abused, I’ll grant you that,” he said. “Tisha had more stories about child rape than I’ve got canvases. She used to read them to me at night. It made for no end of wonderfulness in our times of marital companionship. However, some of these kids are absolutely out of it. Just plain bad.”

“I don’t believe in just plain bad,” Bennis said.

“You wouldn’t.” Jan-Mark tapped a key and the information stopped rolling. “Here’s the first one. Actually, the first two. Bickerel, Amy Jo. And Kathleen Butterworth.”

Franklin Morrison stirred. “I remember Amy Jo Bickerel,” he said. “Oh, God, but that was a mess. About—what? Twenty, twenty-five years ago—”

“Twenty-three,” Jan-Mark said, peering at the computer screen.

“Yeah. Well. Happened right here in Vermont. Girl was eleven, twelve years old. Had an uncle who would take her out for rides and every time he got her alone, wham. One day she got her father’s rifle and whammed right back. Waited for him to come up the walk and fired—”

“Wait,” Gregor said. “I remember that one. It was ten o’clock on a Monday morning or something like that and the street was full of people—”

“Right,” Franklin Morrison said. “It was. And the bullet that hit the uncle first passed right through him and got a car, but it just missed this woman coming home with her groceries, and the second bullet broke the window of a store across the street that was thankfully shut for repairs. It was nuts. Caused a fuss in this state, you wouldn’t believe it, especially since it turned out she could prove all that stuff he’d done to her. He’d taken pictures and she knew where they were. He really was a first-class asshole.”

“He sounds like it,” Bennis said. She was leaning over Jan-Mark’s shoulder. “It says here she was—no, it says she is at Riverton. Does Riverton have a place for the criminally insane? Did they really send her away for life?”

“Oh, no,” Franklin Morrison said. “She wasn’t convicted of anything. Even though by the laws of the time she was guilty, and the judge tried to instruct the jury and get them to do what they were legally supposed to do, the jury just wouldn’t do it. I didn’t blame them. I don’t blame them now. I wouldn’t have done it, either. Uncle of hers was a first-class son of a bitch and a first-class loser on top of it. Anyway, it was her parents who had her committed, if I remember correctly. She was pretty messed up by the time it was all over.”

“Who was Kathleen Butterworth?” Stuart asked.

“Kathleen Butterworth is one of the ones I like,” Jan-Mark said. “She offed her baby sister in her sister’s crib, and then she got a taste for it and offed a couple of other babies in the neighborhood. She had about ten scalps under her belt before they caught on to her.”

“Arizona,” Bennis Hannaford said. “Who’s the third?”

Jan-Mark tapped a few keys and the information began rolling again. He stopped and said, “Hudder. Cynthia Hudder. This one’s recent. She wouldn’t be more than maybe twenty-eight, thirty years old.”