A Stillness in Bethlehem(97)

Sharon wrapped her arms around her waist, rocked back and forth on her feet and stopped. In there among the carpenters and the teen-aged boys who were their helpers was another figure, small and still and seeming to flaunt her Alice-in-Wonderland hair. She was standing right next to that clump of bushes some people were saying had hidden the gun that killed Gemma Bury, and the gun that had killed Dinah Ketchum, too. Sharon didn’t know if she believed this. They had to run tests on guns before they knew for certain that the guns had killed anybody. She didn’t think there had been time to run tests like that. On the other hand, town gossip was remarkably accurate. It always startled her. She’d been brought up to believe that gossip was always lies. Sharon stared across the street a little longer and then made up her mind. It was different during the Celebration than it was at other times. You did have to look both ways when you wanted to cross Main Street. Beyond that, it wasn’t too bad, because the tourists tended to park their cars as soon as they crossed the town line and go from one place to another on foot. It was a little worse right before the performances started, but that was several hours away. Sharon waited for an Isuzu Trooper that belonged to the commune out in Lebanon to pass and then crossed to the park, half running as she went, to keep herself warm.

On the other side of Main Street, Sharon had to dodge two high-school boys carrying a long ladder between them and a cluster of blue and silver Christmas balls that had suddenly appeared in a bouquet tied to a bench at the street’s edge. Christmas decorations often appeared suddenly in the middle of town during the Celebration. It was a measure of how tense things had been under the surface, even before Gemma Bury was dead, that there had been so many fewer of them in the last two weeks than there had been in other years.

Sharon slipped through the line of carpenters and went to the small stand of bushes. Amanda Ballard was standing behind them, toward the middle of the park. Sharon had almost missed seeing her from Main Street. After Sharon had seen her, there had been a moment or two when Amanda seemed to disappear. Now Amanda was back, standing a little away from the bushes stiff needles, frowning as if the evergreens had been schoolchildren refusing to obey their mother.

“Amanda?” Sharon asked.

Amanda turned her head slowly, not startled, not surprised. Then her eyes swept the broad streak of white on the left side of Sharon’s head and she blinked. “Sharon,” she said. “I saw you across the street.”

“I was across the street,” Sharon said, feeling like an idiot. Amanda always made her feel like an idiot. Amanda always made her feel conspicuous, too, as if that streak of white was made of neon and glowing and pulsing in the dark. Sharon Morrissey couldn’t begin to count the times that that streak had made her feel like a marked woman. She turned away from Amanda and said, “What are you doing here?”

“Trying to check it out,” Amanda said simply. Then, seeming to think she might have been unclear, she elaborated. “It’s something I heard Peter talking about on the phone. To Stuart Ketchum. That Gregor Demarkian person has a theory about how Gemma Bury was killed.”

“Really? How?”

“He says the killer put the rifle right here in these bushes—put it here early, aimed ahead of time at the two seats Gemma and Kelley were going to be sitting in—”

“You mean the killer knew where Gemma and Kelley were going to be sitting?”

“Well, it’s assigned seating,” Amanda said, “and Peter gave Gemma the tickets right there in the News and Mail office, right in front of I don’t know how many people. I don’t think it was any surprise to anyone, where she was sitting.”

“Oh,” Sharon said.

“Anyway,” Amanda said, “the killer is supposed to have stood right up to these bushes when the time came and squeezed the trigger, with the gun in here at shoulder height so all he had to do was lean forward and aim. But I don’t see how that can be true, can you? And if it is true, I don’t see that Timmy could have done it.”

Sharon stepped forward and examined the bushes. “I could have done it that way,” she said finally. “I could have put the rifle right there,” she pointed to a cleft in the branches, “and then when I wanted to shoot, it probably wouldn’t have been much of a problem.”

“Well, you, yes,” Amanda agreed. “And me, too. And Susan Everman and Candy George and Betty Heath and I can think of a dozen people. But Timmy couldn’t have done it.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s too tall,” Amanda said patiently. “I’m five-four. You’re—what? Not much taller than that.”