Baptism in Blood (37 page)

“You don’t have any inadequacies.”

“Oh, yes, I do, David, yes, I do. I’m much too gullible, for one thing. I believe too much of what people want me to believe.”

“If you did, you would never have gotten to New York in the first place. From what I hear on Main Street, for most people in this town, New York is a cross between Sodom and Gomorrah and hell itself.”

“Maybe I was just interested in getting myself to Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“I think that’s usually a boy thing.”

“Have you ever really been fooled by somebody?” Maggie asked. “Have you ever really—believed in some­body—and had it not be true?”

“Of course,” David said. “It happens all the time. Did you have a bad experience with a boyfriend? Is that it?”

“What? Oh, no. No. It doesn’t have anything to do with boyfriends. It was just that—”

“What?”

Maggie got out of her chair and went to the deck rail­ing, to look out over the ocean.

“I wish I could find out things for real,” she said. “I wish I could know what was true about people and just know, the way you know that gravity is real, or that evolu­tion happened.”

“I don’t think life works that way, Maggie. There are people right here in this town who don’t even think evolu­tion happened.”

“I know. I was thinking about that, too.”

“I wish you would think about coming with me to New York.”

“Sometimes,” Maggie said, “I think the world is full of secrets, and none of them is mine to give away.”

There was a breeze coming in off the water now, warm and mild. David wished they had something else to talk about, that they were somewhere else, away from Ginny Marsh and Carol Littleton and Zhondra Meyer, in New York where if Maggie felt sad he could take her to the opera or out for Tibetan food. He had spent half his life telling himself that he would come down here one day to live permanently, and now he knew that it wasn’t true. He wouldn’t be able to stand it here on the water for months at a time, with no access to the lights and the noise and the music and the people. It made him feel claustrophobic just to think of staying here for the rest of the year.

“Come back and sit down again,” he said to Maggie. “I’m getting lonely without your company.”

“Is that what you would be like in New York?” she asked, laughing. “Demanding and possessive?”

“In New York,” David said solemnly, “I would be like myself.”

G
REGOR DEMARKIAN HAD SPENT
his life dealing with re­calcitrant bureaucracies. He had not expected to find one in Bellerton, which was a small town and which, by defini­tion, should have been easier to handle. Instead, in the crunch, he found that he was dealing not with a town, but with a county. It was the county prosecutor he would have to convince of his “brilliant theory,” the term “brilliant theory” having been coined by Clayton Hall when they were all still up at Bonaventura and then held on to the way a leech holds on to fresh skin. They had been in Zhondra Meyer’s room at the time, with the investigation swirling around them, and Gregor had sat down on the floor to show Clayton Hall how it would work. He had been aware at once that he had put himself in a very undignified position. His pants were being stretched in odd angles. His shirt was coming out from under his belt. Clayton’s big beer belly hung in the air above him like a hot air balloon. Gregor wondered if he had one himself and what it looked like to other people. Then he turned his attention back to the pages of the suicide note/confession, spread out across the Per­sian carpet. The picture was there, too, the one of Stephen tangled naked with a woman nobody could identify, except that everybody knew it could be neither Lisa, Stephen’s wife, nor Zhondra Meyer. The hair in the photograph was just too light.

Do it later, Gregor had thought at the time, pushing reflexively at the pages of the suicide note in order to make them straight.

“Look,” he’d said to Clayton Hall. “There are a cou­ple of things in this note that mitigate against the possibil­ity that it could have been written by Zhondra Meyer. Let’s start with that.”

“Because Zhondra Meyer was a Jew.”

“Because she was Jewish, yes, that’s one thing. Look, the writer refers at one point to giving the baby a ‘baptism in blood,’ and that—”

“But Jewish people know about baptisms,” Clayton interrupted. “My daughter Jenny’s roommate from Sweet Briar was Jewish. When Jenny’s baby had her christening, Rachel was right there with a silver spoon for a present.”

“I’m not saying that Jewish people don’t know about baptisms,” Gregor said. “I’m saying that the phrase in this note is almost tossed off. The writer isn’t making some complicated theological argument. The letter just says, ‘It was my idea to dedicate her to the Goddess, to baptize her in blood.’ Just like that. As if it were the most natural thing in the world.”

“And you think that means the letter couldn’t have been written by a Jew.”

“No,” Gregor said. “I think that means the letter couldn’t have been written by Zhondra Meyer. It’s not just that Zhondra was brought up Jewish, it’s that she was something worse than an agnostic. She was impatient talk­ing about religion no matter what religion it was, and that included the goddess worship that several of her guests were engaged in at the time of Tiffany’s murder. You would have expected her to pay some attention to that after all the mess it seems to have caused.”

“That could have been a ruse,” Clayton said. “That could have been a deliberate attempt to put us off.”

“I agree,” Gregor said. “But it’s more than just that Zhondra Meyer didn’t seem to be much interested in religion—it’s that she didn’t think in terms of religion, if you see what I mean.”

“Vaguely.”

“It’s also a question of the way the goddess religion was practiced up here. Have you ever heard anybody up here talking about a baptism in blood in any context what­soever?”

“No, I haven’t,” Clayton said, “but if they really have gotten into human sacrifice up here, they aren’t likely to just go telling us about it. They’re going to do their best to keep it secret.”

“Of course they’re going to do their best, Clayton, but make sense for a minute. These aren’t professionals you’re dealing with. They’re not psychopaths, either. I know. I’ve met them. Do you really believe that if there had been something going on up here that was commonly described as a baptism in blood—that nobody up here would have made any mention of it in any way, even obliquely?”

Clayton opened his mouth and shut it again. He looked depressed. “No,” he said finally.

“Good,” Gregor told him. “But there’s something else you’ve got to take into consideration here. ‘Baptism in blood’ isn’t just a cute little catchphrase that somebody thought up to throw into the letter. It is something.”

“What do you mean, it is something?”

“I mean it’s a real phrase in real theology—Roman Catholic theology, to be exact, not some pseudoreligion like goddess worship that was made up from whole cloth the day before yesterday.”

“I sometimes wonder how anybody distinguishes be­tween pseudoreligions and the real thing,” Clayton said drily. “It all seems like a lot of religious hocus-pocus to me.”

“Point taken,” Gregor said, thinking that he now knew for certain why there was no religious paraphernalia flung around the police department’s big basement room. “But now back to business. Do you know what a baptism in blood is?”

“No.”

“It’s what’s said to happen to unbaptized people who die in defense of the faith. It’s the baptism of the early Christian martyrs, to be exact. It’s also an attempt to get around the Bible and the tradition, both of which are very sticky on one particular point.”

“What point is that?”

“The point that no one can enter the kingdom of heaven without having been baptized in water and the spirit. There wasn’t any New Testament as we know it at the time of the great Roman persecutions. The Catholic Bible didn’t get put together until after the Emperor Constantine made Christianity a state religion in 300-something. When it did get put together, there was that inescapable little problem of baptism, and the equally ines­capable little problem of the fact that, historically, so many of the early Catholic saints hadn’t been baptized at the time they were martyred. And we’re talking about horrible martyrdoms here, people who suffered gross atrocities and re­fused to recant from the faith.”

“Fanatics,” Clayton said.

“Fanatics,” Gregor agreed, “but you can see what the problem is here. The Church didn’t want to say that these people must be damned. How could God possibly be just if he would condemn a man to hell who had just let his eyes be burned out of their sockets rather than declare that Christ had not risen and that the Christian religion was not true?”

“I sometimes wonder about the justice of God on a day-to-day basis. Did people really do things like that? Good Christ.”

“The historical record is difficult to verify,” Gregor said. “Remember, the winners write history, and Christians wrote what we now know about the early Church and the way the Roman Empire responded to it. By the time we get around to the age of the Church fathers, however, it doesn’t matter, because everybody believed it had happened that way, and that left the theological problem to be solved. That’s how we got the baptism of blood. Dying in defense of the faith confers baptism on the martyr whether he thought he wanted baptism or not. It doesn’t matter if he’s a believer or an unbeliever. It doesn’t matter if—”

“—if she’s a child,” Clayton said.

“Actually,” Gregor sighed, “it does matter. In cases of children below the age of reason, it’s really very compli­cated. We’re getting past what little I know about the sub­ject.”

“I’m amazed at how much you know about the sub­ject.”

“Yes, well, I have a friend who’s a priest. An Arme­nian priest, not a Catholic priest, although I know a few Catholic priests, too. Anyway, my friend the Armenian priest—lectures me sometimes. On the things he’s working on. He writes theology quite often.”

“And he’s lectured you on the baptism in blood.”

“It was years ago,” Gregor said, “but it stuck in my mind. Anyway, we’re talking about a fairly sophisticated concept here, and it occurs to me, just in passing, that when you go by the board in front of the Methodist Church, un­der the hours for services there’s a line that reads ‘Stephen Harrow, A.B., A.M., Th.D.’”

“You’re right,” Clayton Hall said. “It does.”

“I think it’s fairly common these days in a number of the mainline denominations. Getting a doctorate in theol­ogy, I mean.”

“But you can’t say that it had to be Stephen Harrow who wrote this letter,” Clayton said, “not just because he’s had a lot of schooling in theology. Henry Holborn has had a lot of schooling in theology. I may not like him, but he did go off and go to Bible college.”

“It’s not the same thing. As far as I know, baptism in blood is not a concept accepted in fundamentalist Protes­tantism. From what I’ve been able to see, Bible colleges of the type you’re talking about mostly teach biblical interpre­tation.”

“Yes, yes, they do.”

“And from what I hear,” Gregor said, “listening to the radio and the television programs, the fundamentalist churches aren’t much interested in finding excuses for why people can be saved without being baptized.”

“I think they make an exception for infants these days,” Clayton said, “but not all of them do.”

“Whatever. So far, Stephen Harrow is the only person in town connected to Bonaventura who would have known of the concept and who would have been able or likely to use it casually. And there’s one other thing to take Henry Holborn out of the picture.”

“What?”

“He was sitting in his own church at the time that Tiffany Marsh died. He was there all day. Dozens of people saw him. Unless you’re going to tell me that Henry Hol­born has learned to fly through the air like Peter Pan, I think we’re both going to have to concede that he was sit­ting in that church on the Hartford Road the whole time the first murder was going on.”

Clayton picked up the photograph of Stephen Harrow and turned it around and around in his hands. “Christ pre­serve me from ever showing up in a picture like this,” he said. “Everybody on earth looks ridiculous in pictures like this.”

“Look at the background,” Gregor told him. “It’s fuzzy, but you can make it out if you try. Trees and leaves and pine needles.”

“The trees behind Bonaventura House?”

“I think so, yes.”

“They did their screwing up by the circle of stones?”

“Probably a little way off. They look like they’re actu­ally lying under some branches, instead of directly in a clearing. I hate pictures taken with telephoto lenses, unless the lenses are the really expensive kind, and nobody goes in for those except a couple of private eyes I know and the government. Zhondra must have bought this one at her lo­cal camera shop and decided it would do.”

“It did do,” Clayton said. “It did very well. If you’re right, it managed to get her killed.”

“Oh, I don’t think it was this photograph that got her killed. I don’t think Stephen Harrow knows we have it. I don’t think he knows it even exists. No, my guess is that Zhondra got fed up with everything that was happening to her plan, and decided to try to put two and two together.”

“Right,” Clayton Hall said.

Gregor picked up the pages of the letter. They should have been more careful with it. It was sometimes possible to get fingerprints off letters. It used to be possible to match typefaces, too, but that was getting harder and harder. Everybody had daisy wheels these days. Daisy wheels were easy to destroy.

“Gregor?” Clayton Hall said.

Gregor stuffed the letter back in the envelope, and that was the end of the crime scene for him. He hung around for at least two more hours, but his mind was elsewhere, and he didn’t even listen to the questions Clayton asked the women waiting on the terrace.

N
OW IT WAS WELL
past dinnertime, and they were still stuck, sitting in the police department’s basement office, waiting for the county prosecutor to show up and let them get on with it. Jackson had gone out to get them some food. Gregor had been hoping for a timely delivery from Bet­sey’s diner, but Jackson had driven all the way out to the Interstate instead, and come back with bags and bags of McDonald’s. Big Macs. Supersize fries. Quarter Pounders with cheese. Vanilla milkshakes. Gregor thought of Cavanaugh Street, where the Ararat restaurant could be counted on to have big bowls of meatballs in a bulgur crust and stuffed cabbage and big flatbreads and things to dip the flatbreads into, made of chick-peas and eggplant and cod­fish roe. Sometimes he came home to find a bowl of
yaprak sarma
in his refrigerator, courtesy of Lida Arkmanian or Hannah Krekorian or one of the other women in the street who thought he was entirely incapable of taking care of himself. Somehow, he thought Jackson would not be in­trigued by any of this. Still, Tibor was intrigued by all of it, and he loved McDonald’s. At least once a week, Tibor got Bennis to drive him down to the biggest McDonald’s in Philadelphia, and they sat together in a booth, with Bennis nursing a coffee and trying not to mind that she couldn’t smoke, while Tibor ate his way through several examples of the burger of the month and three Super Size boxes of fries.