Stillness in Bethlehem by Jane Haddam Page A

realized that couldn’t be true. The park was what out-of-staters would have called a “common.” It was a flat, empty stretch of land with nothing but the gazebo in it and a few benches. The animals were there, and the small man who was walking them. Nobody else was. The voice they had heard was high-pitched, hysterical and definitely a woman’s. It had cut through the cold-thickened air as if it had edges made of razor blades.
    “There they are,” Bennis said. “Up by the Bethlehem News and Mail .”
    Bennis was right. They were up by the Bethlehem News and Mail —all the way up. You couldn’t really talk about “blocks” in Bethlehem, Vermont, although everybody, including the brochure on the Bethlehem Nativity Celebration, did. Main Street was sort of broken up into them, since it was paved and crossed by smaller streets here and there. The intersection pattern was random, though, and not neatly or precisely laid out. It was as if cows had wandered over this area many years ago, and the paths they made had been paved and christened roads. What Gregor meant when he thought of the offices of the Bethlehem News and Mail being “at least two-and-a-half blocks” away from where he was standing was two-and-a-half Philadelphia city blocks. A long way away, in fact. Far enough to make it surprising that they had heard this woman’s voice at all.
    There were three of them, two women and a man. Gregor knew immediately that the voice he had heard had come from the small blonde woman and not the other one. The other one was blonde, too, but a studied kind of blonde, as if she had her hair dyed strand by strand to produce the proper effect. In spite of that, she was not particularly attractive. There was something leaden about her face, something uninspired about the way she held her body. That could have been the distance from which he was looking at her, but Gregor didn’t think so. The smaller woman looked to him like a Botticelli angel, and the way she held herself was—he couldn’t pin that down. There seemed to be a dozen things going on in her at once, but there was fire and passion in all of them.
    The other woman was talking now. Gregor could see her lips move, but hear nothing of what she said. Beside her, the man was rocking back and forth on his heels, his hands in the back pockets of his jeans, his denim jacket open to the wind. Gregor had a hard time deciding whose side he was on, or which woman he was with. The smaller blonde one, he finally decided, because the other one looked too expensive. The other one looked as if she’d only be interested in men in suits.
    “I’m fine,” the smaller blonde woman said now, her voice still hysterical, still carrying, still sharp. “I’m just plain fine. I don’t need any help from you. I don’t need any help from anybody.”
    The man leaned over, said something, leaned back. The small blonde woman recoiled instinctively and then seemed to force herself to stand perfectly still. Then she turned her back on both of them and crossed her arms in front of her chest.
    “Look,” Tibor hissed in Gregor’s ear. “Right in the brochure. She’s the girl who is Mary.”
    “What?” Gregor said.
    Bennis had her brochure out, too. “Tibor’s right. The small blonde one who was getting hysterical is playing Mary. There are pictures of all the people playing the major roles right here in the back. It says she’s seventeen.”
    “That can’t be the same person,” Gregor said. “She has to be twenty.”
    Bennis looked amused. “I thought she was fifteen. Look. The other one is the one who’s playing Elizabeth. She’s seventeen, too. Quite a difference, isn’t there?”
    “I wonder what the fight was about,” Gregor said.
    Bennis shrugged. “I’d say Elizabeth thinks she’d be a better Mary than Mary. The Elizabeths of this world always do. I met a million and a half of them in boarding school. Mary looks like she’s all right. I don’t think she’s