A Stillness in Bethlehem(95)

“Like Kelley Grey,” Bennis said immediately.

“Or Sharon Morrissey,” Franklin Morrison put in. “Kelley’s too young. You can’t do that, Ms. Hannaford. There have to be half a dozen young women of about the right age in town right now, all of them from Away and so nobody knows who they are or where they’ve been.”

“What did Cynthia Hudder do?” Bennis asked.

Jan-Mark shrugged. “No big deal. Killed her stepmother. Stepmother was to all intents and purposes a first-class pain and fond of using a belt. Kid was about ten. Happened out in Shaker Heights.”

“Did she go to jail?” Stuart Ketchum asked.

“She wouldn’t have gone to jail,” Gregor said. “A child that young would have been put into a psychiatric hospital and then possibly into a juvenile detention center. If they couldn’t place her in a foster home.”

“If you were a foster parent, would you take a kid who’d killed her own stepmother?” Bennis asked.

“I think a psychiatric hospital I didn’t want to be in and a juvenile detention center would feel like jail to me,” Stuart said. “When would she have gotten out?”

“It says right here when she got out,” Jan-Mark told them. “It was—twelve years ago. When she was eighteen.”

“Most states require the system to release juvenile offenders at age eighteen, no matter what they’ve done,” Gregor pointed out. “Juvenile law is not the same as adult law.”

“What about the rest of them?” Bennis asked.

Jan-Mark tapped his computer keys again, rolling the information back. “Amy Jo Bickerel, released from care about three years ago. Going on four. Kathleen Butterworth, released from care about twenty years ago, when she was eighteen. I don’t think I’d want Kathleen Butterworth wandering around my neighborhood.”

“I don’t think I’d want any of these people wandering around my neighborhood,” Gregor Demarkian said. He had been standing a little behind the others, not looking at the computer screen, but thinking. Now he was all thought out. He had never taken off his coat. He reached into his pockets, got the gloves he had borrowed from Tibor and began to pull them on.

“I don’t think we have anything more to do here,” he said. “We’ve done as much as we’re going to do.”

“What about my safety?” Jan-Mark demanded.

“Your safety is secure,” Gregor told him. “This was a very careful, very gentle theft, if it can technically be called a theft at all. The picture or pictures in question were removed, and the thief went away. That is all.”

“If the thief also happens to be the murderer of my wife, he might come back,” Jan-Mark said.

“True,” Gregor Demarkian told him, and then brightened, as if that was the cheeriest news he had had in ages. Maybe it was. Gregor found that Jan-Mark Verek did not improve with acquaintance.

That made it all the more necessary, to Gregor’s mind, that he get out of this redwood-and-glass monstrosity and back to normal life.





Two


1


SOMETIMES, SHARON MORRISSEY THOUGHT that people who lived in Bethlehem had less Christmasy Christmases than people who didn’t, because the middle of Bethlehem was so chock full of Christmas spirit they couldn’t bear to bring any of it home. That was slightly incoherent, but she knew what she meant. After a day sitting in the Congregational Church, looking out the basement windows at the ribbons and the bows and the ornaments and the statuettes that had been springing up all over town, day after day, since the Celebration began, all Sharon wanted to do was go home and pretend to be Scrooge. Since she and Susan had already decorated their house, she couldn’t. As soon as she walked through her front door, she would be confronted with a “stained glass” mobile made from colored plastic wrapping paper, and as soon as she walked into her living room, she would be confronted by a crêche. The Congregational Church had a crêche, too, in the lobby on the first floor just outside the room Sharon thought of as “the room with the pews in it.” She didn’t know what else to call it. She couldn’t called it the church proper, or refer to an altar or a sanctuary. Congregational churches didn’t have those. Sharon found it all very frustrating. She had been born and brought up Catholic. Everything had been much simpler there.

Sharon had been in the basement of the church holding story hours for the children of tourists—and, of course, for any local children who had the time and inclination to attend. Sharon was considered to be far and away the best reader in Bethlehem. She was in demand at the library not only for children’s readings, but for readings to the elderly and public presentations as well. The library always held a read-aloud in the spring to raise extra money for its bookmobile program. Today, Sharon had read six different stories at six different sessions. Now it was five o’clock in the afternoon and her throat hurt. The last of the children had gone. She had been a tiny girl in pink tights and a bright fuschia snow parka, too shy to smile, and she had left clutching a gingerbread cookie iced to look like a snow-covered candy house. Wasn’t it the witch whose house had been made of gingerbread and candy? Sharon had wondered at the time. Then she had pushed the thought away from her. It was just one more example of the way her mind had been working lately. Susan kept saying it was silly to go on this way. Susan ought to know. Still, Sharon couldn’t stop from being depressed, and she couldn’t stop from being worried, either. When she had first heard Tisha Verek had been found dead, she had been relieved. Tisha Verek was the danger. Tisha Verek was gone. There was no more danger. It turned out to have been far more complicated than that. Even Susan thought so. Sharon wondered what she had said when she had gone to Gregor Demarkian this morning.