Great Day for the Deadly (36 page)

Bennis whirled around. “Now, Gregor,” she said, “don’t get upset. I mean, you know George, he’s eighty-something, he couldn’t really have been smoking marijuana, he says he was just trying to talk this boy he met out of smoking it and I believe him and as to the pinching women, well you know how he gets and he doesn’t mean any harm by it—”

“Whom did he pinch?” Gregor demanded.

“Well, it was the governor’s wife or the somebody’s wife at any rate and you know he didn’t mean—”

Out on Delaney Street, a new band had struck up “Danny Boy” in a distinctly marchlike, unsentimental way. Gregor took a deep breath and did his best to keep his face as stern as it ought to be. After all, he was the designated purveyor of Right Thinking and Common Sense on Cavanaugh Street. He couldn’t have them thinking he liked all the nutsy things they did.

Stern or not, though, he was going to be glad to eat his way through this celebration and get himself home.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries

L
IKE DOZENS OF OTHER
small towns scattered across the White Mountains and the Green Mountains and the Berkshires, Bethlehem often got its first dusting of snow just after Halloween and found itself hip-deep in white by the first of December. This first of December had not been that bad. It had been a mild season from the beginning, causing squeals of panic and indignation to rise from the flatlanders who had bought up the ski resorts to the north. The squeals and panic were noted with a certain amount of satisfaction by the natives, who didn’t much like the flatlanders in spite of the money they spent. Then, in the middle of everything, there had been a quick-mud thaw. The temperature had dropped far enough to freeze that over only on the first of December itself. It was now December second, the official opening day of the Bethlehem Nativity Celebration, and everything looked a little skewed. Peter Callisher thought that what it really looked like was haphazard. The people of Bethlehem, Vermont, had been putting on their Nativity Celebration since 1934. The Celebration had grown from a small collection of rough sheds propped up with two-by-fours around the gazebo in the town park to a kind of psychic delusion that possessed the whole town three weeks out of every year. Each cycle of the Nativity play now took a full week, starting on Monday and ending on Saturday, bringing new and bewildered bevies of tourists into the inns around Main Street every Sunday afternoon. The Holy Family had taken up residence in the gazebo itself, and the cow and the donkey and the sheep that surrounded them were all real enough to cause difficulties in managing their manure. It all looked eerily authentic, in spite of the fact that Palestine rarely got this much snow—or any snow at all. For Peter Callisher, standing at the window of the living room in the apartment he kept over the offices of the
Bethlehem News and Mail
, it all looked depressing, as if they were trying to hold on to something they should have let go of long ago. Peter wasn’t a flatlander, but he looked like one. He was tall and angular and bookish, complete with wire-rimmed glasses and a parka from L. L. Bean, and there was something about the way he moved his hands that spoke very strongly of Away. It should have. Peter Callisher was forty-four years old. He had been born and raised in Bethlehem, in the small brick house on Dencher Street his father had built around the time he took over the
News and Mail
. Peter had sold that house exactly six years ago, when his father died and he had taken over the
News and Mail
himself. In the time between, he had been about as Away as anyone could get. At first, there had been the usual things. He had gone south to Yale for college and then to New York to take a master’s degree at the Columbia School of Journalism. After that, he had gone to work for
The New York Times
. It was what happened after that that got to people, because they found it inexplicable. Running away to Boston or New York or the Ivy League: That was all right. That was about sex. Running away to Pakistan, even if
The New York Times
was paying you to do it and calling you a foreign correspondent: That was something else again. As for coming back to town with a bullet in your hip when you hadn’t even been in a war, and trailing rumors about Afghanistan and the mujahadeen—that was enough to put an end to conversations all over town, even down in the basement of the Congregational Church, where the old ladies made holiday baskets for the poor in Burlington and talked about the children of friends of theirs who’d died.

From where he was standing, Peter Callisher could see most of the town park and the south end of Main Street. As usual on the first day, before the serious tourists had begun their serious tramping about, people were milling around, trying themselves out, wondering how they’d gotten themselves into this fix. The three wise men had new robes this year, brightly colored and sewn over with paste gemstones. They even had camels sent up from a theatrical-animal supply service in Boston. The child Jesus had swaddling clothes shot through with gold thread. The angel of the Annunciation had wings wired to glow with incandescent bulbs. According to
The Boston Globe
, Bethlehem was likely to realize over three hundred and fifty thousand dollars from this Celebration, spread out across viewing tickets, room rents, restaurant checks, parking fees and souvenirs—of which there would be plenty, on sale twenty-four hours a day from the old horse barn in back of the Town Hall. According to
New York
magazine, Bethlehem’s take was going to be closer to half a million, due at least in part to the fact that
New York
had been hyping the Celebration vigorously for every one of the past five seasons. Whatever the final count, the money would more than come in handy. Like too many of the towns on the edges of the rural backwaters of northern New England, Bethlehem didn’t seem to have any money of its own.

Peter had left a cigarette burning in his only ashtray. He put it out—unsmoked; he had started smoking in India, out of polite necessity, and never really developed a taste for it, only a habit—and headed for the door that led to the stairs to the first floor. Those stairs ended in a landing fronted by two doors, one to the outside and one to the newsroom. Theoretically, this ensured his privacy. If he didn’t want his employees to know what he was doing, he could use the outside door and not have to pass through the newsroom at all. In practice, privacy was an illusion he didn’t waste his time worrying about. Everyone in town knew precisely everything he’d done since he’d first come back from God Only Knew Where.

He reached the landing, opened the door to the newsroom and stuck in his head. He had one or two truly local people working for him, but most of his employees were from Away. They were smart kids with rich parents, who’d been sent proudly through Groton and Harvard—only to decide that what they really wanted to do was to Go Back to the Land. They worked hard, demanded little money, and grew alfalfa sprouts in big white plastic tubs in the ladies’ room. Not a single one of them had the least idea of what it really meant to belong to a place like this.

Peter squinted across the piles of paper that never seemed to change position and found Amanda Ballard, his best, checking type sizes on a font chart. Amanda Ballard was not only his best: She was his prettiest. Thin, blond, even-featured, straight-haired and blue-eyed, Amanda was a vision of cultural perfection, circa 1968. She was a lot of other things circa 1968, too. She seemed to think and speak in staccato bursts of discarded clichés, apparently unconcerned that even the politics of her beloved New Left had passed her by. If it hadn’t been for the odd deformation of her right ear, with no earlobe at all and a stunted little nub at the bottom that looked like a pierced earring in the wrong place, she would have been indistinguishable from a doll. She was thirty-six years old and looked sixteen—and would look sixteen, Peter thought, when she was eighty. In that way, she was very different from Peter himself, who had weathered in body as well as in mind. His skin was creased into folds at the corners of his eyes and along the line of his jaw. Sand and wind and worry had marked him. His mind had tied itself into knots in its attempt to hold on to a belief in the essential goodness of human beings, and been defeated.

Amanda put down the font chart, picked up what seemed to be an Associated Press tear-off and frowned. Frowning, she looked very much the way she did in bed, after intercourse, when she tried to explain to him why his attitude was all wrong. Peter watched while Timmy Hall, their great overgrown copy boy, came up to ask Amanda a question. Seeing Timmy around Amanda always made Peter nervous, as if that great tub of lard might suddenly turn lean and mean and lunge with sharpened teeth. It was a ridiculous image. Timmy was strange, but not that kind of strange. His peculiarities ran to eating Marshmallow Fluff with his scrambled eggs. Amanda was fragile, but not that kind of fragile. Peter could never put a finger on what kind of fragile she was, but he was attracted to it. Besides, Amanda had known Timmy forever, as far as Peter could tell. She’d even gotten Timmy this job. Timmy was mentally retarded and had been brought up in the mental-health complex in Riverton. Amanda had met him there while she was doing something Peter had never been able to pin down, but that he secretly suspected was getting straight from drugs. That was the kind of trouble Amanda would have, heat prostration from an attempt to resurrect the Summer of Love.

Peter shifted on his feet, nodded to the two or three people who had noticed him standing in the doorway, and said, “Amanda?”

Amanda put the Associated Press tear-off down, shook her head at something Timmy was saying and came toward the door. “We can’t play tricks like that on our readers,” she said over her shoulder—to Timmy, Peter supposed. Then she came up to him and sighed. “If we’re going to deliver to the printers by three o’clock, we’re going to have to get a lot more done than we’ve been getting done. How are you?”

“I’m all right. I came to find out how you were. Everything quiet?”

“Absolutely,” Amanda said.

“Not a squawk out of our usual troublemakers? No hunters shooting game wardens? No Sarah Dubay marching up and down Main Street saying the end of the world is at hand?”

“Sarah doesn’t say the end of the world is at hand,” Amanda said, “she says Christ was really an alien.”

“Whatever.”

“You shouldn’t be so worried.” Amanda stretched her arms. “I’ve just been looking at the numbers. We’re going to print them on page five because everybody in town wants to know how well we’re doing, but you know how the tourists feel when they think we’re being mercenary. Anyway, the inns are booked solid for all three weeks, and the tickets are sold out for every performance, and there’s even some special arrangement with a school in New Hampshire where they’re going to bus the kids in every night. It’s going to be fine. The town’s going to make a pile of money.”

“I hope,” Peter said. “No word from the mountain? Nothing from Jan-Mark? Nothing from Tish?”

“Not a peep.”

Peter came all the way into the newsroom and shut the door behind him. The windows that fronted the street on this level were mullioned, but the mullions were new and modern and large. Peter could see the short paved stretch of Main Street that ended at the gazebo and the town park. The windows of the stores were full of evergreen branches with twinkly little lights implanted in them. People came to see a six-day-long Nativity play, but when they weren’t watching it they wanted their Christmas American Traditional. Over on Mott Street, Jean and Robert Mulvaney had turned their little dry-goods store into Santa’s Workshop and ordered a stack of toys to sell to outlanders with too much money and not a lot of sense.

“I don’t know,” Peter said. “It’s been much too quiet. Don’t you think it’s been much too quiet?”

“I think I’ve got much too much work to do to worry about whether it’s been much too quiet.”

“I don’t know.” Peter sighed. “It’s opening day. Every year before opening day, we have a crisis. Where’s the crisis?”

“Maybe Dinah Ketchum will finally shoot that daughter-in-law of hers dead, and we can all get ready to listen to another lecture from Montpelier about how we have to bring Vermont into the twentieth century. Are you going to let me get back to work?”

“Sure.”

“You ought to do something yourself,” Amanda said. “At least look like you’re doing something. If you don’t, Timmy Hall is going to come up and give you five awful ideas for the paper.”

Timmy Hall was nowhere to be seen, which was par for the course for Timmy. Their copy boy always seemed to be either underfoot or invisible. He always left Peter wondering how old he really was.

Peter shook that out of his head, watched Amanda go back to her desk and turned to look back out at Main Street again. He was being an old Nelly, of course, but he couldn’t really help himself. Small towns like this were full of people whose deepest wish was to have a television camera aimed at them. There would be a lot of television cameras on hand for the opening of the Celebration, and the nuts should have come out of the trees by now. So where were they?