Baptism in Blood (42 page)

He went in the police department entrance on Town Hall’s side, and waved to Jackson as he came down the hall. The police department was otherwise empty. They must all be out at the hospital or the morgue or someplace, or maybe State Police headquarters. Bobby didn’t know where they were, and he didn’t care. Stephen Harrow was dead. Stephen Harrow had confessed. The world was all right again. Jackson came out into the hall with a big ring of keys in his hand.

“I told her you were coming as soon as you called,” Jackson said. “She already knows what’s been going on. She’s been listening to the radio.”

“Is she happy?”

“I wouldn’t say she was happy, Bobby. Ginny hasn’t been happy since the baby died.”

“I know,” Bobby said. “I know.”

“You can’t expect her to be happy, Bobby. Not with Tiffany dead. It wouldn’t be right for her to be happy.”

“No,” Bobby said. “Of course it wouldn’t.”

They were already halfway across to the little double jail cell. It wasn’t much of a jail, at least, this place where Ginny had been. It wasn’t like being on the work farm or in the state penitentiary. Bobby reminded himself that that probably didn’t make much difference to Ginny. He re­minded himself of a lot of other things, too, like Ginny’s favorite color (cornflower blue) and the fact that she loved to have him send her flowers. He would have to do that on the day he brought her home. He would have to have the house full of cornflower blue flowers.

Ginny was sitting on the chair in her cell with the reading light on, reading her Bible. She looked up at them and put the Bible down on the bed. Bobby expected her to smile at him, but she didn’t. Jackson used the key to open the cell and drew back the barred door.

“You two could talk in the conference room,” Jack­son said. “You’d have more privacy there.”

“That’s a good idea,” Bobby told him.

Jackson turned away and walked back down the hall, pushing open the conference room door as he went. Bobby felt elated. Jackson wouldn’t be behaving like this if there was any chance at all that Ginny wouldn’t be released. He would stick around and make sure she didn’t get away in­stead. Ginny was standing in the middle of the cell with her arms wrapped around her body, not looking at him. Bobby was amazed that her hair looked so good, so shiny and curly and long. It had to have been hell trying to take care of it in a dinky little small-town jail cell.

“Ginny,” Bobby said.

“Yes,” Ginny said. “I hear you.”

“Let’s go down to that conference room Jackson was talking about,” Bobby said. “It’s got to be more cheerful there. Anything’s got to be more cheerful than here.”

Ginny looked around. “I suppose it does.”

“Come on, then,” Bobby said.

Ginny looked around. “I don’t think so,” she told him. “I think I’ll just stay right here.”

“Jackson told me that you’d been listening to the ra­dio,” Bobby said. “He told me you knew all about it. About Harrow.”

“Oh, I know about Harrow, Bobby. Stephen Harrow is dead.”

“Stephen Harrow confessed to the murders,” Bobby said. “Didn’t you know that?”

“I knew that, Bobby.”

“But you’re free to go, don’t you see that? I mean, not tonight. They’ve got their paperwork to do and all that crap. But you’re off the hook now. Stephen Harrow con­fessed. Everybody will know you didn’t kill Tiffany.”

Ginny cocked her head. “Really, Bobby? Will every­body know?”

“Of course,” Bobby said.

“Even you?”

Bobby felt a chill go up his spine, a vise of ice close around his testicles. “I knew you didn’t kill Tiffany. I al­ways knew that.”

“No,” Ginny told him. “I don’t think you did.”

“I was just—confused, that’s all,” Bobby said. “I couldn’t get around the things you were saying. The god­dess worship and all that. It didn’t make any sense. But I didn’t think you killed Tiffany.”

“You thought I killed her just like everybody else thought I killed her,” Ginny said. “All those people who were supposed to be my friends, and my family, and my husband.”

“I am your husband,” Bobby said. “We were married in the sight of the Lord.”

“I don’t seem to have much time for the Lord these days, Bobby. I’m too busy figuring out what I’m going to do with myself next.”

“You’re going to come home to me.”

“I don’t think so.”

“It will get better.” Bobby willed himself not to feel the panic that was rushing up into his head like a geyser of bile. “You’ll see. We’ll feel better after a while, both of us will, and then, I know you hate to hear it now, then we’ll have another child.”

“I don’t want another child.”

“You don’t want one now, but you will. You will. Reverend Holborn told me. And once we have another child, the wound will heal, it will heal, it won’t be gone but it won’t hurt so very much and then we can—”

“I think you’d better get out of here,” Ginny said.

“Ginny, please, all right? Please don’t do this to me. I’m trying as hard as I can.”

“You always try as hard as you can,” Ginny said, and suddenly Bobby could see it, deep in her eyes, everything she thought of him, and it was not good. Loser, whiner, weakling, mouse. Loser, loser, loser. Loser most of all. You never got away from the place you started at. You were always the person you were born to be.

“I think you’d better get out of here,” Ginny said again.

This time Bobby left, half running, not looking in through the open conference room door. He should have called for Jackson. He should have told someone that he was leaving. But he just ran and ran, ran and ran, until he was out in the air and couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there. There was a cool breeze in the tops of the trees and a chill on the ground. Or maybe it was hot. He couldn’t de­cide. He couldn’t tell. He didn’t know what he was going to do.

Ginny had always been his anchor, and now his anchor was setting him loose.

I
T WAS TWO DAYS
later before Gregor was able to get out of Bellerton. The paperwork and odds and ends took much longer than he had expected them to. The waiting took forever. There wasn’t much to do except buy books at Maggie Kelleher’s bookshop and sit on David’s deck, read­ing them, while David tapped away on his computer in the study, working on his definitive history of American athe­ism—or whatever it was. When he was very, very restless, Gregor went into town and shopped for presents for people at home. Donna Moradanyan got a four-foot-tall ceramic statue of a guardian angel from Rose MacNeill’s shop. Her little son Tommy got a cap gun and caps, which were ille­gal in Pennsylvania but very legal here, where Gregor had seen dozens of little boys smashing cap strips with their shoe heels in the street. Walking around Bellerton wasn’t very comfortable. Now that the reporters were mostly gone, Gregor was the most visible stranger in town. David Sand­ler didn’t count, because he wasn’t a stranger here any­more. Gregor wasn’t sure he liked having people watch him the way they did here. It was so intense, he sometimes wondered if he were imagining it. Curtains seemed to flick in windows as he passed. Eyes seemed to move as he walked in front of them, doing nothing more important than buying an apple from the bin in front of Charlie Hare’s store. He wanted to buy a present for Bennis, but he wasn’t sure what. He wanted to call Bennis, too, but that seemed like the wrong idea. She hadn’t called him. In the end, he bought Tibor a T-shirt with University of North Carolina symbols on the front and back. He bought Lida Arkmanian a beautiful polished conch shell mounted on a frame. It was too hard to buy things for Bennis, he decided. She was too rich. She had too much already. She had ec­centric tastes. Besides, when he thought about Bennis he got restless, and the restlessness was almost unbearable. He didn’t know what he was going to do if he had to stay in North Carolina much longer.

When the day came, he laid his suitcase out on the bed in David’s guest room and did his best to pack it “right,” although he knew that neither Bennis (who would notice) nor Lida Arkmanian (if she were home) would think he had made anything else but a mess of it. He packed shirts and shoes on top of each other, neatly folded. He packed socks rolled into balls in the corners. He packed ties that he tried not to look at, because they were almost always a mess. He had no idea why he did what he did to ties, but they always ended up ruined. Maybe, this was some trauma left over from his childhood—some unexamined grief work, as the therapists liked to say—some resistance to leaving the im­migrant ghetto of Cavanaugh Street as it had been to be­come part of the great American middle class. Examined or not, though, he was just going to have to get over it. The Cavanaugh Street that existed now was nothing like the Cavanaugh Street that had existed then. He was going back to town houses, not tenements, and women who bought their clothes at Lord & Taylor.

The morning he was due to leave was as bright and warm as summer. Sun streamed in through the tall win­dows and skylights of David’s house, brighter than klieg lights. Gregor folded cotton sweaters and thought about David’s sleeping loft, which was the only room in the house that could be completely closed off from the sun. David’s guests, obviously, were expected to get up early. David sat in a corner of the room on a chair he had brought out from the kitchen. He had his legs stretched out and a cup of coffee in his hands. Gregor and David were the same age, but Gregor knew that David looked much younger. He was thinner, for one thing. He’d had less sadness and much, much less worry. Gregor didn’t know if he would have wanted that kind of life for himself or not. In one way, it was good. There was nothing noble about suffering, no matter how apocalyptic, or how trivial. In another way it wasn’t, because it left you cut off from reality. Gregor Demarkian had always liked reality.

“So,” David was saying, “I think you ought to come, because you ought to meet her, at least once. I mean, that’s why I got you down here. Because I was worried it was going to be a witch hunt. Because I was worried they were going to send Ginny all the way to the gas chamber without knowing whether or not she did it.”

“I don’t think they have the gas chamber in this state,” Gregor said. “I think they execute by legal injec­tion.”

“Whatever. You don’t have to stay forever. Just come and watch her blow out the candles or whatever she’s going to do—”

“Like a birthday party?”

“Well, it is like a birthday, isn’t it? Her new birth out of jail. It was Rose who set it up, and Naomi from the library. It’s going to be a nice little party. And besides, like I said, you should see her at least once before you go.”

“You don’t give Clayton Hall enough credit. He may sound like a rube to you, but he knows what he’s doing.”

“I never said he didn’t know what he was doing. Come.”

“I have a train to catch. I’m tired and I want some serious Armenian food. I want to go home.”

“You can do it before you go to catch your train. Come.”

“There’s somebody at your front door, David. You ought to go answer it.”

There was somebody at the front door, too. The doorbell was ringing. Gregor could see the tall man on the front step from the guest room window—Henry Holborn, he thought, the reverend who had made all that fuss up at the camp. Gregor had talked to Holborn once or twice during his stay in Bellerton. The talks had not been long and they had not been very deep. Gregor’s impressions had been favorable, but not for any particular reason: Henry Holborn had seemed to him like a decent man, in spite of all the fire and brimstone and ingrained fear of the devil. David opened the front door and stood back to let Henry Holborn in. Gregor folded a cotton knit polo shirt he hadn’t worn once and put it next to his favorite gray wool sweater. He had worn his gray wool sweater so many times, it was un­raveling from the hem and the sleeves and coming apart everyplace else.

“He’s over in the guest room, packing,” he heard David Sandler say. “You come along this way and I’ll get you a cup of coffee.”

“I don’t need a cup of coffee, David,” Henry Holborn said. “I just want to talk to Mr. Demarkian.”

Gregor put a little snow globe with a model of the state capitol in it into the suitcase. He had nothing more to pack. David Sandler and Henry Holborn were coming across the hardwood floor of the living room together, clat­tering. Gregor took his best tweed sport jacket from where it was lying across the desk and put it on.

“There he is,” David said, coming through the guest room door. “All finished packing and everything. I’ve been trying to talk him into coming to Ginny’s coming-out party.”

“Everybody in town is going to be at that party, al­most,” Henry Holborn said politely. “So are those report­ers that are still in town, even if there aren’t too many of them anymore. You might have a good time, Mr. Demar­kian. You’d certainly be welcome.”

“Besides,” David said. “He saved Ginny’s life, and he’s never even met her.”

Henry Holborn came into the guest room and looked around. “Well,” he said. “I can see you’re busy. I’m very sorry to bother you. And I know this is just silly as any­thing—”

“That’s all right,” Gregor said. “If there’s something I can do for you?”

Henry Holborn was looking at the big abstract paint­ing on the wall. “It’s just that it doesn’t matter anymore. Now that what’s happened with Stephen has happened, I mean. It’s just—”

“What?”

“Well, when I first heard about Zhondra Meyer com­mitting suicide, I knew she hadn’t, you see. I
knew
she hadn’t. But then, everything happened with Stephen, you see, and…” Henry Holborn shrugged.

Gregor was intrigued. “How did you
know
Zhondra Meyer didn’t commit suicide? Were you there?”

“No, no,” Henry Holborn said. “She was with me. The night before she died, I mean. She came to see me.”

“About what?”

“About buying me out.”

“Buying you out?” David Sandler said. “Jesus Christ, Henry.”

There was a flicker of annoyance about the profanity in Henry Holborn’s face, but just a flicker, nothing more. Henry Holborn believed the things he believed, but he also lived in the world he lived in, and he was used to it.