Baptism in Blood (33 page)

Naomi Brent had been holding a pencil in one hand when the door opened. Now she dropped it on the desk and said, “There you are. What kept you? You were just across the street.”

Gregor didn’t think anything had kept them. Clayton said, “Naomi, I’d like you to meet—”

“Mr. Demarkian and I have met,” Naomi cut in. “I’m sorry about my—demeanor yesterday morning, Mr. Demarkian. I wasn’t at my best.”

“You seemed fine to me.”

Naomi turned to Clayton. “I yelled at him,” she ex­plained. “I accused him of trying to make everybody who believed in God look like a rube and a dimwit. And he didn’t deserve it, of course. He wasn’t doing anything like that.”

Clayton grabbed one of Naomi’s visitor’s chairs and sat down at it. It was made of some kind of shiny metal and a vinyl meant to look like black leather, with no arms. Gregor got the impression that Clayton wished he could straddle it.

“I’m surprised to hear you were defending religion,” the police chief said. “That isn’t what we usually get from you. Remember all that nonsense about
The Catcher in the Rye
?”

“Henry Holborn wanted
The Catcher in the Rye
taken out of the library, or at least put behind the desk and only loaned to adults or something. I never did get it completely straightened out. And of course, there was a whole slew of things he just wanted out of here completely. All the novels by Stephen King.”

“I’ve read Stephen King novels,” Gregor said, feeling confused. “What’s wrong with Stephen King novels? There wasn’t any sex to speak of in any of the ones I read.”

Naomi Brent burst out laughing. “Oh, dear, Mr. Demarkian. You’re terribly out-of-date. Nobody worries about sex in books anymore.”

“They don’t?”

“Oh, well, they do, a little, of course,” Naomi said. “Especially if it’s unconventional sex, and to Henry Hol­born conventional means sex with the person you’re mar­ried to, no one else, period.”

“Also sex in the missionary position,” Gregor said, “and—”

But Naomi Brent was shaking her head vigorously. “No, no, Mr. Demarkian. You really are behind the times. Tim and Beverly LaHaye, these enormously big evange­lists, wrote a guide to lovemaking a few years back, and trust me, it wasn’t restricted to the missionary position. You’d be amazed what a husband and wife can do together in bed these days and still be holy in the sight of the Lord.”

“I think I’ll decide not to think about it,” Gregor said.

“Anyway,” Naomi said, “the big thing these days is occultism. They see occultism everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. If you ask me, Stephen King is one of the most traditionally Christian writers I’ve ever read. His whole philosophy of life comes straight out of St. Augus­tine—although I don’t know if he knows it. All they see is that people in these books talk to ghosts and sometimes the hero or the heroine has magical powers, like the little girl in
Firestarter
who could start fires just by thinking about it. And you know what magical powers mean to them. Some­body must be worshipping the devil.”

“The other day,” Gregor said, “you were warning me about having just this attitude you’re displaying now.”

“I go back and forth, Mr. Demarkian. I don’t think I meant to say that you shouldn’t—dislike—this end-times philosophy Henry Holborn and his people have. Did you know that Henry Holborn thinks we’re about to see the end of the world?”

“At the start of the new millennium, I suppose.”

“That’s right, Mr. Demarkian. Millennial fever. But down here, where so many people believe in very simple, very direct forms of Christianity, it gets into the air. It becomes part of things. If you see what I mean.”

“Not exactly.”

Naomi Brent looked down at her hands. “Sometimes, when Henry Holborn gets to talking, you can almost see the Devil right there at your shoulder, grinning like hell, ready to snatch your soul. I had a girl who used to come in here,” both her parents were practical agnostics, she was never taken to church, and two months after she started her freshman year at Brown, she nearly had a nervous break­down. She was totally isolated up there. It was crazy.”

“So what was it about Henry Holborn and his people you were defending to me the other day behind the Town Hall?” Gregor asked.

“Oh,” Naomi said, “it was just, I didn’t want you to be like other people and think they were stupid. Or naive. Or ignorant. Brain-dead backwoods hicks, that’s what most of those reporters think of them. But they aren’t stupid and they aren’t hicks and they surely don’t live in the back­woods anymore. I just wish they’d get past all this stuff about the Devil. It’s making me nervous. Even the Catho­lics are doing it and they used to have more sense.”

“The millennium will come and go,” Gregor said gently, “this time just as it did last time. And when the world hasn’t ended and Christ hasn’t come again in glory, people will calm down.”

“That’s longer than I want to wait, Mr. Demarkian.”

“That’s longer than I want to wait, too,” Gregor said, “but that’s the time we’ve got, and I don’t think anything will really change until it’s over. Do you mind very much if I ask you a few questions about the night that Ginny Marsh’s baby died? I realize that it was a while ago, and that with the new murder you’ve probably been distracted, but—”

“It was the night of the hurricane, Mr. Demarkian. I’ll remember it all my life.”

“Good. I take it you ended up in the study at Bonaventura during the storm. You were there when David Sandler came in with Ginny Marsh and said that the baby was dead.”

“He didn’t say that the baby was dead,” Naomi cor­rected. “He hadn’t seen the baby yet. He said we had to find the baby.”

“All right. So he said you had to find the baby, and he had Ginny with him, and she was—”

“All wet and covered with red. Her clothes were soaked through with red. Some of it was dye that had run from her shirt, but some of it was blood, and there was blood all over her hands and her arms. The paper came out and said it, later.”

“Who else was in the study at the time that David Sandler got there?”

“Oh, lots of people. Zhondra Meyer herself, of course. She spent the whole storm sitting behind that big desk of hers, behaving like a queen bee. It was something to see. And Maggie Kelleher was there, sitting on the rug in front of the fire. And Rose MacNeill. Oh, and that woman Alice, you know, Zhondra Meyer’s assistant.”

“And that was all?”

“Oh, no, Mr. Demarkian. There were dozens of peo­ple there. All of the women from the camp. The women were mostly in the living room next door, where we couldn’t see them, but they were there. I meant, those were the people from town that I was talking to. You know, the people I know.”

“You didn’t see Carol Littleton?”

“No, Mr. Demarkian, I didn’t.”

“Would you have known who she was?”

“Sure. She came into town all the time. Some of them up there almost never come in, but Carol did. She came into the library every Tuesday and Thursday, right at eleven o’clock. And she was in the library on the morning of the storm, too. That’s how I knew that Zhondra Meyer was taking people in up at the camp. Carol told me. And I thought, you know, that Bonaventura was a hell of a lot more interesting than the Bellerton Public High School, so why not?”

“Is that how most of the people from town who went up to the camp found out it was okay to go there? Because Carol Littleton told them?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Demarkian. But she surely was telling lots of people. It was one of the only two topics of conversation she had that morning.”

“What was the other one?”

“Her granddaughter. Her daughter’s daughter. The one that was going to have the christening she wasn’t going to be allowed to go to. Not that that matters much any­more.”

“Mmm,” Gregor said.

The phone on Naomi Brent’s desk rang and she picked it up. She said hello and then listened in silence, frowning more deeply every second the tinny little voice came at her over the line. Finally she said, “All right, just a minute, let me put him on,” and handed the phone across the desk to Clayton.

“It’s Jackson,” she told him. “I think he’s saying that something else has gone wrong up at that house.”

Clayton Hall and Gregor Demarkian looked at each other. Then Clayton put the receiver to his ear and said, “Jackson? What the hell is up?”

There was more tinny noise coming over the line, and then a small click: Jackson hanging up. Clayton handed the phone back across the desk to Naomi and turned to Gregor Demarkian.

“We better go,” he said. “If Jackson has his ass on straight, Zhondra Meyer just committed suicide.”

T
HEY WERE ALL UP
there on the terrace when Clayton and Gregor arrived, all the women who lived at the camp. Later, Gregor knew, the rest would arrive: the reporters, the people from town. That only went to prove that it wasn’t a question of being a hick or not being one. The reporters would tell each other that they were only up here because they were doing their jobs. The truth was that they craved even more blood lust excitement than the rest of the world. Gregor was surprised to see how many women there were. Every time he thought he had the group all together, there seemed to be more of them than before. He recognized the woman called Alice, and Stelle Cary, standing in two sepa­rate knots of women on opposite sides of the terrace. He recognized one or two others he didn’t have names for. There was a wind high in the trees, bending the tops of the pines back and forth above his head. The air was warm and thick with water. Bonaventura, Gregor thought, didn’t belong here. It was a cold weather house, built by a cold weather man. It ought to be somewhere that snow could fall on it, and the fires lit in its fireplaces.

Gregor and Clayton had expected all the women to be staring toward the stand of trees and the circle of stones. In fact, they had expected them to be in the stand of trees and trampling through the circle of stones. Instead, they were all standing on the terrace, looking at each other, watching Clayton and Gregor come around the side of the house on the narrow gravel path.

Clayton went up to the woman named Alice and took off his hat. Alice looked ready to explode. It was obvious that she had already been crying. Some women could pro­duce tears with no wear and tear on their faces, no bloating, no redness, no streaks of strain. Alice was not one of them.

“Now, Alice,” Clayton said. “What have you done with her? Is she still in the clearing?”

“Of course she isn’t in the clearing,” Alice said. “She’s never been in the clearing. She’s upstairs in her own room.”

“Did you move her, Alice? I know it’s natural, with a suicide—”

“She didn’t die in the clearing,” a woman said, a small woman with a black braid down her back and a flow­ered dress. “She died upstairs in her room. We didn’t move her.”

“We didn’t want anybody to be able to say we’d messed everything up,” Alice said. “We didn’t want to read in the papers that the reason you were never able to catch Zhondra’s murderer was that we destroyed all the evidence.”

“She’s up there hanging,” the small woman with the black braid said. “She has the rope swung over the chande­lier hook. We would have taken her down if we could. None of us could figure out how.”

“It’s just as well that you didn’t,” Clayton said. “Al­ice was right. It would destroy evidence.”

The woman with the braid blushed deep scarlet. “There’s one other thing,” she said, looking from Gregor to Clayton and back again. “She left a note.”

“She left it upstairs?” Gregor asked. “Near where you found the body?”

The small woman nodded.

“Is it still there?” Gregor said.

The small woman looked at Alice and blushed again.

“Well, it made sense to read it, didn’t it?” Alice demanded defiantly. “It was right there out in the open where anybody could see.”

“It had ‘to the police’ written on the envelope,” one of the other women said, a middle-aged one with lines of disapproval on either side of her mouth. “I thought it was like opening somebody else’s mail.”

“It wasn’t mail,” Alice said. “It was a note. It was probably a forged note. We had to see what it said.”

“I think we should have left it where it was,” the small woman with the braid said stubbornly. “I know how you feel about it, Alice, but it just makes sense. There was no hurry for us to read if. We could have let the police handle it and read it later when it was released.”

“If it ever was released,” Alice said. “And how would we have known that the same letter was released as the one they got? Once they had it and none of us had read it, they could have said anything. They could have made up whatever they wanted.”

“Do you have the letter?” Clayton asked, holding out his hand. “Come on now, Alice. No matter what’s hap­pened to Zhondra and what hasn’t happened to her, there have already been two murders on or near this property. Let’s go at this with a little common sense.”

Alice hesitated, looking more mulish by the second. Then she plunged her hand into the pocket of her jeans and came up with a crumpled envelope. Even in the battered state it was in, Gregor could see that it was made of very good, very expensive paper, the kind people ordered from jewelry stores with their initials engraved on it. It was al­most as thick as cardboard and made of cream linen, but Zhondra Meyer’s initials were nowhere to be seen.

Clayton took four small sheets of paper out of the envelope and began to read them over. Gregor could see that the words on them had been typed, and that there were no initials on these pages, either. He tried to remember if he had ever seen notepaper with Zhondra’s initials on it anywhere at Bonaventura, but it wasn’t the kind of thing he noticed if he had no reason to, and up until now he had no reason to. Still, Gregor thought it was odd, the first solid piece of evidence he had seen that Alice and his own instincts might be right, that it made no sense at all for Zhondra Meyer to have committed suicide. Zhondra Meyer was the kind of person who
should
have had good notepaper with her initials engraved on it. Clayton handed the little typewritten note to him, and Gregor took it.