Baptism in Blood (27 page)

Gregor came all the way into the room, found a tall yellow wing chair, and sat down in it. “I would like to talk to Dinah and Stelle, if I could. Right this minute. After I talk to them, I’ll be more than willing to go back to town on my own two feet, without having to be propelled in that direction by you.”

“What if I don’t want you to talk to Dinah and Stelle?”

“I don’t think that circumstance is likely to come up, Ms. Meyer. In spite of your tone of anger and exasperation, it’s my very good guess that you’re scared to death. I prom­ise you I won’t grill either of your guests. I just want to ask them a few questions.”

“If you were Clayton Hall, I’d throw you out on your ear.”

“But I’m not Clayton Hall.”

Zhondra Meyer seemed to consider this seriously, watching Gregor’s face all the time. Then she reached out and grabbed the phone that had been pushed to the side of the desk by the computer equipment.

“Alice?” she said, after she had punched a few but­tons and waited a while. “Is that you? Are Stelle and Dinah there?” She listened. Then she nodded. “All right. Send her to me in the study, will you? I’ll talk to Dinah when she gets back. And Alice—pay attention to me. I don’t want parsnips again tonight, do you understand? I don’t care how wonderfully healthy they’re supposed to be.”

Zhondra hung up the phone and looked at Gregor. “Well,” she said, “there you are. Stelle is on her way. Dinah went into town about half an hour ago and isn’t expected back until evening. If you think I’m going to leave you alone in here with Stelle, you’re out of your mind.”

“You don’t have to leave me alone in here, Ms. Meyer. I’m not going to say anything I don’t want you to hear.”

“It’s not what you’re going to say that worries me, Mr. Demarkian. It’s what you’re going to do. You’d better behave yourself.”

Gregor was going to tell her that he always behaved himself—but he didn’t. The room was oppressive. The air was thick with humidity. He was tired. He was staying fo­cused by an act of will. Whenever he began to relax, his mind started to drift. It drifted right out of the room and back up to the clearing, where it made light conversation with the wind.

T
HE APPEARANCE OF STELLE
Cary should not have been a shock, but it was—and in that shock Gregor Demarkian realized just how odd this whole trip had been. Stelle Cary was a black woman, tall and middle-aged and bony, with a little potbelly that strained against the fabric of the smock she wore over her jeans. Her face was free of makeup, but her ears were hung with beaded strands in bright colors and silver disks that seemed too heavy. If it hadn’t been for the earrings, Stelle would have provided the perfect picture of a woman you wouldn’t look at twice on the street. Her clothes were worn and nondescript. Her face was worn and nondescript. Her carriage was halfway between youth and defeat.

What had shocked Gregor when Stelle first walked into the room was her color. He had become so used to seeing white people, and only white people, in Bellerton, that race had become a nonissue, unimportant because the conditions for it did not exist. He had, he realized, espe­cially not expected to find a black woman at the camp, at least not as a guest. In his experience, institutions like the one Zhondra Meyer was trying to set up appealed almost universally   to   middle   and   upper-middle-class white women with axes to grind. Other women, poor or black or whatever else they might be, didn’t have time for retreats into the North Carolina pines. Here Stelle was, however, and she didn’t look ready to go away. She stood at the side of Zhondra Meyer’s desk like a sentinel with bad posture.

Gregor got out of his chair and held out his hand. “Excuse me,” he said. “At my age, I have a hard time leaping to my feet. I’m Gregor Demarkian.”

Stelle Cary took Gregor’s hand and shook it, looking amused. “You don’t have to leap to your feet. It doesn’t look like you could leap much of anywhere.”

Gregor let this pass. “At the moment, I can hardly stand up. Do you mind if I sit while we talk?”

“Not unless you mind if I sit.”

“Go right ahead.”

Stelle perched on a corner of the big polished desk. Zhondra Meyer frowned at her back and then said, “Mr. Demarkian is a private detective of sorts—”

“I’m not a private detective at all,” Gregor inter­rupted.

“I know who Gregor Demarkian is,” Stelle Cary said. “He’s all over
People
all the time. I heard they were going to make a TV movie out of his life, but I didn’t see any­thing come of it.”

“They couldn’t get my permission,” Gregor said grimly, “and they never will. You look—calmer than I ex­pected you to look. After what happened this morning, I mean.”

“You mean Carol,” Stelle Cary said. She hopped off the corner of the desk and went to the open the French doors. “I don’t see any reason not to be calm,” she said after a while. “A couple of the women are getting hysteri­cal, but it doesn’t make sense to me. Carol and that poor little baby. Do you think there’s some psychopathic killer stalking the camp, intent on wiping out any lesbian he can get his hands on?”

“No,” Gregor said.

“I don’t either,” Stelle told him. “So you see, there’s no reason not to be calm. That doesn’t mean that I’m not sorry that what happened to Carol happened to Carol.”

“So Carol Littleton was a friend of yours.”

“Of mine and Dinah’s, yeah. That is, as far as people make friendships here. This is an odd sort of place, Mr. Demarkian. In some ways, it isn’t a real place at all. Zhon­dra is the only one who is committed to it. The rest of us are all on our way from someplace to someplace else.”

“I know. Would you mind telling me what you’re on your way away from?”

Stelle smiled faintly. “Well, for one thing, Mr. Demarkian, I’m on my way from jail. I just did three years in Illinois for possession with intent to sell. Not, by the way, that they ever actually caught me selling anything. There are these federal sentencing guidelines set up by how much is found in your possession, and I had quite a bit in my possession. It was one of the few times in my life I ever felt like I had enough.”

“I take it there weren’t any complications to this charge? No weapons violations? No violence?”

“I’ve had a man or two who was interested in having guns around, but I could never see the point. You have a gun around, you’re likely to get mad and use it and then wish you hadn’t.”

“There are other weapons besides guns.”

“I don’t deal in weapons, Mr. Demarkian. I just deal in dope, and I don’t sell it to other people. I take it when I can get it”

“I thought we’d decided that was all over,” Zhondra Meyer said.

Stelle shot Zhondra a cynical little smile. “Zhondra thinks it’s like giving up chocolate,” she told Gregor. “She thinks you do it and that’s it. I keep trying to tell her, it’s all a matter of time.”

“I don’t see how you can want to do that to yourself anymore,” Zhondra said. “You were destroying your body. You were destroying your mind. You were in jail. You were as helpless as the patriarchy wants us to be. What good was that doing you?”

“Zhondra doesn’t understand how good it feels to be high. I love to be high.”

“But you’re not high now. You’re not using drugs now.”

“I’m not using drugs in the ordinary sense now, no,” Stelle told him, “but I don’t have to be. I’ve got religion at the moment.”

“What?”

Stelle came back from the French doors and sat down on the corner of the desk again, grinning. “I’ve got reli­gion,” she repeated. “I’ve had religion before, other times and other places and other ways. You know anything about drug rehab?”

“No,” Gregor said.

“Well, the dirty little secret about drug rehab is that the religious-based programs are about twice as effective as the psychologically based ones. Not that either of them are very effective, you understand. The figure I heard was a ninety-eight-percent failure rate. But the religions do better than the shrinks, and you know why?”

“Why?”

“Because religion is another kind of drug,” Stelle said, “especially those Holy Roller religions, where you dance around and speak in tongues and get baptized in the spirit. You can get higher doing that than I’ve ever been able to get on crack. I can remember one time getting so out of it at a meeting that I walked on the top of a space heater in my bare feet and didn’t feel a thing. The next morning I woke up and found out I couldn’t walk. The soles of my feet were blistered raw. I had to go to the hospital and get fixed up. But I never felt a thing at the time, and when I think back on it, the only thing that comes to mind is that it was all great, I was the happiest I’ve ever been. I’d do it again in a second.”

“And have you done it again?” Gregor asked. “Are you still part of a—what did you call it?—Holy Roller reli­gion?”

“Nope.” Stelle shook her head. “I liked the way it felt, you understand, but when I was down I’d start think­ing, and the more I thought the more ridiculous it all got. People rising from the dead. Pie in the sky when you die. Do you believe any of that stuff?”

“I don’t think about it, most of the time,” Gregor said. “What about you? If you’re not taking drugs, and you’re not involved in Holy Roller religion, what are you involved in?”

“Oh, these days I worship the Goddess.” Stelle sounded more cynical than ever. “The Goddess of wisdom and nature, the Great Mother of us all. It’s the hip thing, especially here. Religion without patriarchy.”

“It’s much better than all those things you were doing before,” Zhondra said. “It gives you an arena to express your spirituality and it gives you a political analysis of your condition at the same time. That way you don’t start turn­ing it all on yourself, telling yourself it was your fault. That’s what the patriarchy is hoping you will do.”

“Actually,” Stelle said drily, “I was partial to the idea of original sin myself. We’re all born wanting things we can’t have and craving things that aren’t good for us. Too many white people want to feel superior to somebody, and black people are handy. I’d really rather get high than do anything about my life, and the stuff I need to get high with is handy, too:”

“I hope you don’t think we go around here looking for somebody to be superior to,” Zhondra Meyer said. “We understand that racism is systemic. Every woman in this house struggles with her own racism every day.”

“Right,” Stelle said. “Is this what you wanted to talk to me about, Mr. Demarkian? I thought you were looking into the death of that baby.”

“I am,” Gregor said. “Would you mind my asking you a few things about the day of the hurricane?”

“Ask away.”

“Let’s start with the ceremony the three of you were going to do,” Gregor said. “Carol Littleton was late.”

“That’s right.” Stelle nodded. “She’d gone into town to buy a christening present for her granddaughter. She bought it in that silly store that sells all the religious things, angel statues, stuff like that. The one in the Victorian house. Although, to tell you the truth, I couldn’t understand why she was doing it. It wasn’t like she was going to be invited to the christening. She hadn’t even seen the baby.”

“Carol Littleton didn’t get along with her children?”

“She got along with her son all right,” Stelle said. “It was her daughter that was the problem. Shelley, I think her name was, but I’m not really sure. Anyway, Shelley really hated the idea of Carol being up here. She
really
hated it. And then, of course, there was Carol’s ex-husband.”

“What about him?”

“He took this whole business of Carol’s becoming a lesbian as a personal insult. Men take it that way some­times. Sometimes I think men are all born a little cracked.”

Gregor considered Carol Littleton’s daughter and her ex-husband. Then he said, “So, when Carol finally showed up it was—what? In the middle of the storm? Close to the start of it?”

Stelle hooted. “If any one of us had known anything about hurricanes, we would have gotten ourselves inside and stayed there. Instead of that, we were standing around in that clearing, Dinah and me, and it was drizzling on our heads. And then Carol came running out from the house.”

“You couldn’t see her from the clearing, could you? The trees would have prevented that.”

“I’d gone down to the end of the path to see if I could find out where she was. She came running out of the house just as I got there. She was all worked up, nearly crying.”

“About what? Did you ask?”

“I asked. She said something about Shelley, and about how you could never trust anyone, not really, you could never really know them, people were entirely unpredictable. It was quite a hash. Carol got that way when she talked about her daughter.”

“Was she coming out of this room here?”

Stelle shook her head. “I don’t think so. I wasn’t really paying much attention, but it’s my impression that she was coming out of one of the center sets of doors, the ones that open on to the living room.”

“Does that make sense to you, now that you think about it? Was that a likely way for her to come?”

“It depends on where she was coming from,” Stelle said reasonably. “I guess I just assumed that she’d come down from upstairs and was taking the shortest way out. The big front staircase is just outside the living room door.”

Gregor hauled himself to the edge of his chair and put his elbows on his knees. “So,” he said, “Carol came out of the house, and the two of you got together, and then you went to the clearing. Am I right so far?”

“Right.”

“And this woman Dinah was there when you got there.”

“She was sitting on a rock. Dinah’s the one who is really into all this stuff. Carol and I just did it because—well, I like to get high, and Carol needed something to take her mind off the new baby and how she wasn’t getting to see it. But Dinah’s a believer. She won’t even stand inside the circle of stones. She says it’s blasphemy.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “So then you were all to­gether. What came next?”

“Well.” Stelle shot Zhondra a look. Zhondra gave an elaborate shrug.

“It’s all right, Stelle,” Zhondra said. “He knows all about it.”

Stelle sighed. “I suppose by now the entire state of North Carolina knows about it. Maybe the entire world. What came next, Mr. Demarkian, is that we got out of our clothes.”