Stillness in Bethlehem (34 page)

Kelley stepped away from the door, thought for a moment and then opened up. If she’d been living in town instead of all the way out here—or if she’d been more in contact with the people who were living in town—she might have caught the paranoia everybody else had caught like the latest round of flu. She hadn’t. When she had the door open, she stepped aside and let her visitor in. Then she smiled and said, “Yes? Can I help you? Is there something I can do for you?”

The small blonde girl looked around the foyer, including up at the chandelier. “My name is Candy—Candace. Candace. Never mind. You’d know me as Candy George. If you know me. Do you know me?”

“I know who you are,” Kelley said, thinking that Candy George was disoriented, like someone in shock.

“My name isn’t really Candy George, though,” Candy said. “George is my husband’s name. Reggie George. Reginald. You may not know who he is. Not being from town. You, I mean. You not being from town.”

Kelley closed the door against the wind. “I’ve seen him around,” she said. “Would you like to come into the kitchen? I’ve got the tea kettle on the stove, all ready to go. You look all done in.”

“My real name is Candace Elizabeth Spear,” Candy said. “That’s the name I had when I was born. I can’t do anything about it now. It says Candy George on all the programs for the play and this is the last week. But after it’s over, I can change. And I can change in every other way right away. So I don’t want you to call me Candy George.”

“All right.”

“Call me Candace instead.”

“All right.”

“And I will have tea.”

“Wonderful.”

Kelley turned around and walked rapidly back in the direction of the kitchen, assuming Candy—or Candace, or whoever she was—would follow. She was right. Candy did follow. Kelley put out a chair for her and she even sat down, automatically, as if she had been computer-programmed to respond to certain signals in certain ways. Shock, Kelley decided, was exactly what was going on here. The symptoms were so classic, they could have been a paragraph in the training manual of the women’s center Kelley used to volunteer in down in Burlington. Kelley got out a clean cup and put it on the table. Then she got the sugar bowl out of the cupboard and put that on the table, too. With any luck, she would be able to convince Candy to have her tea with lots of sugar in it, because that was one of the ways you were supposed to be able to treat shock.

The tea kettle began to whistle. The water had been warm before Kelley had put the kettle on the burner, because she’d been warming it up and pouring herself cup after cup of tea all day. Just in case Candy liked liquor better than she liked sugar, Kelley took Gemma’s only bottle—Johnnie Walker Red—and put it on the table. It didn’t go over well. Candy made a face at it and pushed it aside.

“I don’t drink liquor,” she said. “I don’t even drink beer. Alcohol makes people crazy.”

“It certainly makes some people crazy,” Kelley said.

“Let me show you something,” Candy said. She stood up and pulled her sweater up over her head. She undid her blouse and turned around. For one short second, Kelley thought this was the beginning of some weird sexual come-on, but she’d barely had the thought when she saw the reality, and the reality made it very hard to breathe. Then a wave of nausea washed over her and she had to put her head between her knees to keep from throwing up.

“Good God. Good Christ in heaven. What happened to you?”

“What do you think happened to me?” Candy said. “Reggie happened to me.”

Kelley looked up. Candy had already pulled her shirt back on and got it buttoned up. She was reaching for her sweater. Kelley could tell now that she was finding it hard to move. The miracle was that Candy could move at all. She had heard the rumors, of course—in a town like this, you always heard the rumors if they didn’t have anything to do with you; there’d been whispering for months at least that Reggie George beat his wife—but she’d had no idea of what the reality would be like. Even after all that volunteering at the women’s center, she’d had no idea what the reality would be like. She’d never faced the reality before. She’d always been involved in the talk counseling afterward.

Candy settled her sweater around her waist and sat down. Kelley asked her, “Did that just happen today? Just now? Did you escape from him and come running here?”

“That happened yesterday.” Candy took the tea bag out of her cup. She reached for the sugar, and Kelley was relieved to see she used a lot of it. “If it had happened today,” she said matter-of-factly, “it would still be bleeding. I always bleed for hours afterward. Sometimes for days. He doesn’t like me to put bandages on it. He says they make my clothes look funny.”

“Right,” Kelley said. Matter-of-fact or not, Candy was still disoriented. “Where is your husband?” she asked. “What are you doing here? Is he chasing you?”

“Reggie can’t chase me because I locked him in the basement. I tried to call Franklin Morrison to come and take him away, but every time I got the police station, they said Franklin was out. Franklin came once when it was bad and tried to do something, but I wouldn’t let him and nothing came of it. He said he’d come back and help any time I wanted him.”

“Wouldn’t any of them have helped? Couldn’t you have told one of the other policemen and had him come and take Reggie away?”

“I don’t know,” Candy said. “I didn’t trust it. I wanted Franklin. I still want Franklin. Reggie will be safe enough in the basement. I threw all the bolts.”

“Right,” Kelley said again. It didn’t seem to be the time to suggest that basements have windows that can be broken, or that the George house was close enough to civilization so that someone might hear Reggie hollering and let him out, or that Reggie was a large and strong man who might break a door or two if he got angry enough. “Well,” Kelley said, “you’re here now. I’ve just got to figure out what we can do for you.”

Candy looked up from her tea, skeptical. “You’re a feminist, aren’t you?”

“A feminist? Well, yes. Yes, of course I am.” Kelley didn’t think it sounded like an accusation, although it would have with some people. It sounded more like Candy was making sure she had her facts straight.

“I’ve got to go be in the play tonight,” Candy said. “And for the rest of this week. You see what I mean?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, I can’t do anything about anything now,” Candy said, “except get Franklin Morrison to lock Reggie up, and I can do that as soon as I find Franklin, because he once said—well, he said. And then I have to be in the play for the rest of the week, and I won’t give that up for anything. But then there’s after that.”

“After that what?”

“You’re a feminist,” Candy said, “so you’ll know.”

“Know
what
?” Kelley was getting desperate.

“Know where to go,” Candy said. “I saw it on television, on
60 Minutes
. I know everybody thinks I’m stupid, but I’m not. I watch
60 Minutes
when Reggie’s gone out to a bar or someplace, which he does practically every Sunday night. And there it was. All these women who were feminists and the feminists got women whose husbands beat them up the way Reggie beats me up and the feminists helped these women find new places to stay and how to get a job and what to do about school and they give advice, you see what I mean? They give advice, which is all I need, because I sure as hell don’t need any guts, I must have been born with those or I’d have been dead by now, but I do need some information and you’re always saying you’re a feminist and Gemma Bury was, too. I used to think feminists were just women who didn’t like men, but on
60 Minutes
it said feminists were women who did this instead. So are you real? Are you a feminist?”

Are you a feminist? Kelley Grey asked herself, marveling. She knew the tone in Candy’s voice all too well. She’d heard it from dozens of other people over the course of her life. That tone said: Put up or shut up. And faced with that alternative, Kelley Grey had always failed.

Well, she decided, she wasn’t going to fail this time. She wasn’t going to have to.

She got up out of her seat and headed for the phone on the wall next to the refrigerator.

“I am definitely a feminist,” she said, “and I definitely know what you can do. Let me make a few phone calls. Drink more tea.”

“I’ve had enough tea, thank you.”

“Then eat the cookies in the tin on the counter. You need to gain about thirty pounds. When I’m finished here, I’ll drive you in to the Celebration.”

Candy George—or Candace Elizabeth Spear—went to the counter and got the cookies. Kelley heard the phone being picked up down in Burlington and a familiar voice saying, “Eve’s Apple. Can I help you?”

Kelley blew a stream of air into her bangs and smiled. “Stacey?” she said. “This is Kelley Grey. Listen, I’ve got a problem I think you could help me with.”

B
Y THE TIME THEY
all got back to the center of town—meaning Bennis, Franklin and Gregor himself; Jan-Mark stayed at home and Stuart Ketchum went back to his farm—Gregor was worried, and the closer they got to the Inn, the more worried he got. Even Bennis’s driving did nothing to distract him. She had taken over the wheel from Franklin Morrison only yards from Stuart Ketchum’s front door and put her foot on the floor as soon as she reached the Delaford Road. Her driving had scared Franklin Morrison to death. Gregor had hardly noticed it. He kept going over and over the whole situation in his mind, and every time he did he came to the same conclusion. He knew who. He knew how. He even knew why. He just didn’t know what he could do about it.

Bennis had had to slow down when she turned onto Main Street proper. It was five-thirty, close enough to the start of the performance for activity in town to be heating up a little. The town’s one stoplight was operating, instead of hanging from its wire and blinking yellow. Families who had driven up from downstate or over from New Hampshire were strolling along the sidewalk, looking at the Christmas decorations in the shop windows and discussing where to go for dinner. Most of them, Gregor assumed, would end up at The Magick Endive. It was the kind of place the mothers of small children liked to go when they wanted to eat out “nice.”

Bennis had to stop at the traffic light. When she did, Gregor looked into the town park at the bleachers that were now almost all the way up and the two small clumps of evergreen bushes he could see. If there had been any defections from the population expected to view the performance this evening, the news hadn’t got back to the ground crew. Gregor didn’t know what kind of publicity there had been about the death of Gemma Bury. The only newspaper he had seen was the
Bethlehem News and Mail
. He hadn’t watched television in days. The story might be a total washout. If it was, he didn’t think it would be one for long, but that was another matter. It always surprised him, how conscientious murderers were, to do things in the most spectacular possible way. Maybe he ought to say unsuccessful murderers. The ones with sense—the ones who did what they wanted to do quickly and without fanfare; who were interested in seeing someone dead and not in showing the world how absolutely brilliant they were—probably never got caught. In Gregor’s experience, the ones who never got caught were all professionals, and sense wasn’t exactly what they had.

Bennis was tapping impatiently on the steering wheel. The light was staying at red forever. In the back seat, Franklin Morrison was wheezing away on a cigar. Gregor went on staring into the park and then he made up his mind.

“Pull over,” he said.

“Again?” Bennis asked him. “You don’t have any stone walls to climb around on here.”

“That’s the green light,” Franklin Morrison said.

“Pull over,” Gregor insisted.

Bennis let out a long-suffering sigh and eased the car forward, reaching for her cigarettes as she went. “I can’t just pull over,” she told him, “I have to go around the corner and then hope I see someplace to park, which I probably won’t because the performance is in less than three hours. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Bennis—”

“Never mind.”

It turned out not to be impossible after all. The corner wasn’t a corner, but a bend in the park. On the far side of it there was a little indentation in the underbrush at the edge of a wooded area that looked like it had been hollowed out for a police car to sit in. Gregor couldn’t imagine why a police car would want to sit in it. There wouldn’t be anything for a policeman to see. Bennis pulled into this space and put the car in park. Franklin Morrison leaned into the front seat and blew hot thick smoke in Gregor’s face.

“What are we stopping here for?” he asked.

“I want to get out and check something one more time.”

Bennis shut off the ignition. “We might as well go,” she said. “As you should know by now, Mr. Morrison, when the man’s decided he wants to haul ass all over the landscape, there isn’t any stopping him.”

Gregor almost told her to watch her language. Then he remembered that he was trying not to put her under any kind of stress, just in case it was stress that had caused the reading of all those diet books, and maybe even the diet. Gregor certainly hadn’t seen her eating anything today. He climbed out of the car and across to the park proper, between two sections of bleachers that would have to be the ones almost directly across from where he, Bennis, Tibor, Gemma and Kelley had been sitting the night before. He got to the center of the park and decided he was just about right. He was directly across, but a little to the west. He started across the park to the bushes, confident that Bennis and Franklin would follow him.

They did follow him, but when they got to the bushes, neither one of them was in a good mood.

“You’ve been all over this thing a dozen times already,” Bennis complained. “That’s how you found the gun last night, don’t you remember? And that boy from MIT was all over it, too. He took samples. He’s running tests.”

“I know he’s running tests,” Gregor said.

“Well, the lady has a point,” Franklin said. “I don’t think you’re going to find anything here. Not anything that we missed. It was real instructive, watching you and Demp working last night. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a scene gone over in quite that way.”