Sharon had left her parka in the cloak room at the back of the basement. She got it off its hanger and put it on, starting up the steps to the first floor as she pulled her arms into the sleeves. Coming out into the foyer, she looked at the crêche—with the baby Jesus conspicuously in His manger, to show that this was a Protestant, not a Catholic, production—and then went for the side stairs, as if she were going to climb to the second floor. The second floor was new, part of a wing that had been added to the church in the 1950s. The church itself had been built in 1721. Sharon went a quarter of the way up the steps, saw that the door to Toby Brookfield’s office was open and the light inside was on and called up. Toby Brookfield was the minister.
“Toby?” Sharon said. “I’m going home.”
There was the sound of a chair scraping against hardwood and Toby’s face appeared in his office door. “Be careful driving,” he told her. “It’s supposed to be icing up. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve been depressed all day.”
Sharon shrugged. “It’s Gemma Bury and all the rest of it, I guess,” she said. “It doesn’t exactly put me in the holiday spirit.”
“Oh, I know what you mean.” Toby Brookfield sounded eager and solicitous at once. “It’s been terrible. It’s been terrible everywhere. I don’t know what’s gotten into people.”
Sharon knew what had gotten into people. She used to live in New York City. “Something terrible is going to happen if something good doesn’t happen soon,” she said, and then, because she really didn’t want to discuss this—and especially not with Toby Brookfield, who was very nice and meant exceedingly well but wasn’t very bright—she began to back down the stairs. “Well,” she said. “I guess I’d better go. I just wanted to tell you I was leaving.”
“Be careful,” Toby Brookfield said again.
Sharon muttered something incomprehensible, even to herself, and backed down into the foyer again. She gave the crêche one last glance and then let herself out onto the church’s front steps. Five o’clock was late this time of year in Vermont. The sky was already dark. The street lamps were already beginning to look ineffective against the night. Sharon zipped her parka to her chin, wrapped her scarf around the high collar that jutted up around her neck and started down the steps to the street.
On most days, when Sharon came into town to work at the Congregational Church, she parked her car in the church parking lot, just as, when she was working at the library, she parked her car there. During the Celebration, she always used Jim MacAfee’s front lawn instead. It cost a quarter, but it guaranteed she was never stuck, because Jim made a point of keeping the cars of people from town in the barn, where they could be easily and quickly moved, in spite of a sea of tourists’ vehicles blocking every available patch of grass around them. Sharon had been stuck once too often behind the church or the library or even the News and Mail, rendered immobile by escapees from Boston who’d decided that their cars could sit any old place they chose.
To get to Jim MacAfee’s front lawn, Sharon had to go up Main Street in the direction of Carrow and turn down Carrow for a few hundred feet until she came to a dirt extension. If it hadn’t been for a sign at the start of it that said PARKING 25¢ THIS WAY, only the natives would have known the extension wasn’t a dead-end rut. Sharon started up Main Street in the right direction, passing no one from town and glad she was passing no one from town. Usually, the number of people she knew and the extent of her friendly relations with them were a large part of what Sharon liked about Bethlehem. It was like she’d told Toby Brookfield, though. The death of Gemma Bury had broken something, some thread, that Sharon had once thought to be strong but now saw to be fragile. The atmosphere in town was slipping past tension into a kind of hysteria. Sharon had seen it all day in the people who had come to the church to hear her read. The tourists had been fine. The people from town had all been stiff as boards and twice as rough. It was as if they’d all gotten up this morning and taken a pill that made them think: Shut down. Lock up. Close ranks.
Up the street and across it in the park, the crews were beginning to put up the bleachers. They were working slowly and it looked like they were starting late. Sharon walked up Main until she was across from them and stopped. The park looked so ordinary. It didn’t look like the kind of place a murder would happen at all. At least there was that much. There was no room for mistake. Tisha Verek’s death might have been an accident. Dinah Ketchum’s death might have been an accident. Gemma Bury’s death was the result of deliberate malice, no two ways about it.