Baptism in Blood (16 page)

What had reminded Gregor of Alabama—and all the rest of it—in David Sandler’s house was the smell just un­der the smell of the ocean, the flat damp badness of vegeta­tion gone to rot. In Alabama, that smell had been everywhere. In spite of the fact that he had spent only two weeks at that camp, Gregor had carried the smell with him ever since, and it was still part of what he thought of when he heard the words “the South.” One thing about being an overeducated ethnic had been very good, even at the time. None of the officers in that Alabama camp had been able to stand him, and none of them wanted to deal with him, and so at the first possible moment, faster than he would have dreamed was possible in the U.S. Army, he had been shipped off to a training facility in Massachusetts, and put on the list for the Officer Training Corps, and that was that. Gregor had all he had ever wanted to have of being a grunt in one of the army’s classic proving grounds in the Bible Belt. Just why the army always seemed to want to build their forts on swampland and great plains, Gregor never did learn to understand.

The clock on the night table next to the bed said 5:45. Gregor untangled himself from his light coverlet and got to his feet. Then he went to the door and looked into the big central main room of the house. Everything was quiet. David Sandler’s sleeping loft was quiet. Gregor went into the living room and looked around. The sunlight coming in through the windows was very strong. It didn’t seem to matter down here that it was late in the month of October. Gregor looked at the paintings on the walls that he hadn’t paid much attention to yesterday, and the books in the bookcases, too. The paintings were all prints from the Re­naissance. People expected militant atheists to be modern, but David had always had more than a little of the classical scholar in him. The books were all books for work—books on the history of religion; tracts on various denominations and sects; the really classic literature of atheism, like Bertrand Russell’s
Why I Am Not a Christian
and Thomas Paine’s
Common Sense.
Gregor made a face. Reading ought to be for pleasure as much as for work, he thought. His apartment back in Philadelphia had almost nothing in it but crime manuals or forensic textbooks, and the entire set of Bantam’s paperback editions of the Nero Wolfe novels. Gregor took another look at David Sandler’s door—David was unlikely to wake up soon; he had stayed up late the night before; David was a night person—and went back to the guest room. He shut the door and shucked off his pajamas, navy blue with red piping, a gift last Christmas from old George Tekemanian. Really hip men didn’t wear pajamas, according to Bennis. Really hip men wore nothing to bed at all. Gregor reminded himself that he neither was, nor aspired to be, a really hip man, and went in to the guest bath to take a shower.

When he came out of the shower, it was only 6:06 and the house was still quiet. He went to his suitcase, found a pair of good but reasonably relaxed gray flannel slacks and a shirt still in its packaging from the cleaners. He found new underwear and three ties, all shredded, that he decided not to wear. It was going to be too hot to wear a sweater, so he took out a sports jacket instead. Then he laid it all out on the bed and tried to decide if the pieces matched each other. Bennis and Lida and his late wife Elizabeth all seemed to be able to tell just by looking, but Gregor had no idea what they were looking at. Between the time Elizabeth had died and the time he had moved up from Washington to live on Cavanaugh Street, he had played it safe by wearing suits that had been matched by the store he bought them at. Now that he didn’t feel comfortable doing that anymore, he found himself spending too many mornings agonizing about whether he was going to look put together. That, he knew, was Bennis Hannaford’s fault. Before Bennis Hannaford, he had never cared whether he looked put together or not, although that might have been because Elizabeth had been there to make it unnecessary for him to care.

Gregor was doing it again. He put on his clothes as quickly as possible. Then he put on his shoes and went back out into the living room. It was still quiet—why wouldn’t it be?—and he went out the big sliding glass doors on David’s deck to look at the ocean. It seemed im­possible that the ocean had gone crazy less than three weeks ago and laid waste to most of the coastline of this state. Right now it looked majestic but calm, like a grand old lioness well past the days when she was able to hunt.

Gregor walked all the way around the deck to the side of the house, where the deck faced the beach instead of the ocean. From there, he could see not only the beach road but the start of town beyond it. Yesterday, that town had been nothing but a blur of crowded images, mostly of television equipment and junior reporters wielding microphones. Now it looked as quiet as David’s house was. And why wouldn’t it be? The media people were probably as night-oriented as David. The official organs of the town and state wouldn’t open until nine. The rest of Bellerton would be, though. If there was one thing Gregor knew about small towns, it was that they woke up early and got down to business with the dawn.

Gregor went back into the house and into the kitchen. It wasn’t much of a kitchen, by Gregor’s standards. It was open on two sides to the dining area and the living room, and there were hardly enough cabinets to hold a decent set of baking pans. Still, there was a paper and a pencil and a refrigerator nearly coated with little magnets. Gregor wrote David a note—
Gone for a walk; be back soon
—and stuck it on the freezer door. The magnet he used to stick it with was a bunch of letters jumbled together that spelled out: THE TIME TO BE HAPPY IS NOW. If Gregor remem­bered correctly, that was a quote from a famous nineteenth-century freethinker named Robert Ingersoll. Freethinker was the nineteenth-century euphemism for atheist.

Gregor went out the front door this time, and then up the slatted wood walk that led over the sand to the side­walk. Out here he could smell nothing but clean wild ocean. He could hear nothing but birds, cawing frantically above his head as they circled. The house next to David’s looked as if it had been badly damaged in the hurricane. Parts of its roof were missing and one of the pilings that held it up was cracked and out of true. Its windows were still boarded up, meaning that its owners, other vacation people like David, didn’t intend to occupy it anytime soon.

At the sidewalk, Gregor did the proper city thing and looked both ways to check the traffic on the beach road, saw that there wasn’t a car in sight, and crossed. He found himself on a sidewalk corner between two small white houses, both battered-looking but full.

Maybe just because he was finally doing something in particular, Gregor suddenly felt a lot better.

I
N VERY SMALL TOWNS
in the United States, all the real action happens in one of two places: on Main Street, or in the main room of the nearest McDonald’s. Gregor thought the nearest McDonald’s must be some ways away. Main Street was already humming. The grain-and-feed store was actually open, with big wooden bins placed outside its front door and filled with Gregor couldn’t determine what. The other stores he saw—a religious gift shop; a bookstore—weren’t open, but they were lit up inside, testimony to the fact that the people who owned them really meant business. Gregor walked down the street. Bellerton gave a very good impression. The sidewalks were well kept. The street was clean and swept. The brick Town Hall had been recently washed. Maybe all that was the result of the cleanup they had all had to do after the hurricane, but in Gregor’s expe­rience, keeping a town looking spruce and cheerful took active commitment. When that commitment was lacking, things fell apart in a hurry. Just look at New York.

It took Gregor a couple of blocks before he found what he was looking for, and then it not only met his ex­pectations, it exceeded his hopes. It was called Betsey’s House of Hominy, and it was so full of people, they looked as if they were going to start spilling out the windows at any moment. It wasn’t a real diner—meaning a restaurant in a retired railroad dining car—but it had been made up to look like one, and there was a sign across two of the front windows in neon script that said:
Get Your Grits.
This be­ing North Carolina, Gregor supposed you really could get grits. The few times he had tried grits, though, he hadn’t much liked them. All the men Gregor could see were wear­ing short-sleeved camp shirts made of various colors in polyester. All the women had big hair. Gregor didn’t really believe, in a town that catered to this many tourists, that all the men in it had the kinds of jobs that required going to work in your shirtsleeves—but he did believe that this might be the kind of town where men had to pretend to have that kind of work. In cases like this one, the character of the town or the neighborhood where the crime had hap­pened was vitally important, and it was so hard to work it all out.

Gregor worked up his courage and went in through Betsey’s front door. The place was crowded, but not as crowded as it had seemed from outside. Most of the cus­tomers seemed to like to sit in the booths that were pressed up against the windows. The booths in the back were all full, too. The counter around the cash register was mostly empty. Gregor sat down on one of the stools and waited for the girl behind the counter to notice him.

Gregor had had Bennis Hannaford working on him for years. He knew better than to call women “girls,” but in this case he thought he was justified—and as soon as the girl behind the counter turned around, he knew he was. Gregor didn’t think she could be more than fifteen. In spite of the hair and the thick coat of makeup, she looked like she still needed a baby-sitter. She looked not so much inno­cent as bone ignorant, and not bright enough to do anything about that. Gregor sat patiently on his stool with his hands folded in front of him. The girl contemplated him as if he were a toad who had suddenly decided to order breakfast.

An older woman came through a swinging door from the back, saw Gregor sitting with his hands folded, and bustled up behind the counter. It was only then that Gregor noticed that she was wearing a white uniform just like the girl’s. On the older woman it looked natural, instead of like a costume. The older woman brushed the girl away in the direction of the cash register and said, “Sheri Lynn, for Heaven’s sake. What can you be thinking of? Have you taken this gentleman’s order?”

“Uh,” Sheri Lynn said. “Um. No.”

The look on the older woman’s face spoke volumes. Gregor wondered just how long she had had to put up with Sheri Lynn. The older woman gave him a great big smile and said, “Good morning, sir. I’m Betsey. What can I get for you this morning?”

Back on Cavanaugh Street, Bennis Hannaford was al­ways worrying about Gregor’s cholesterol. Bennis Hanna­ford was not here to worry about it now.

“I’ll have two scrambled eggs,” Gregor said firmly, “and a side order of sausage and a side order of hash browns. And toast with butter. And some coffee. Oh, yes. And some orange juice.”

Betsey wasn’t writing this down on anything. “You just give me a minute,” she told him. “I’ll be right back with your coffee. Sheri Lynn, for Heaven’s sake. Donnie Mac wants to pay up.”

Donnie Mac must be the young man waiting at the cash register, the one wearing the pin that said: MY BOSS IS A JEWISH CARPENTER. Gregor thought he ought to dispense with Christian charity in this instance and count his change when he got it. A second later, Gregor noticed that he did. Sheri Lynn seemed to be swimming through molasses, physically as well as mentally. She was far too thin, and Gregor thought that might be because she couldn’t keep her mind on anything long enough to remem­ber to eat.

There was a man on a stool four places away from Gregor toward the back of the room, sipping coffee and playing with the pens that lined the pocket of his lime green short-sleeved shirt. He swiveled in Gregor’s direction and said, “You a tourist down here? Isn’t very usual, hav­ing tourists down here in October.”

“Shh,” somebody in the back of the room said. “He’s from the city; can’t you see that? He must be an­other one of those reporters.”

“He’s too old to be a reporter,” somebody else said.

Betsey came out of the back room again, picked up a Pyrex pot of coffee from a hot plate behind the counter, picked up a cup and saucer from behind the counter, too, and advanced toward Gregor.

“All of you stop this now,” she said. “He isn’t a reporter. His name is Gregor Demarkian and he’s staying with David Sandler. I know. Minna Lorimer told me.”

Gregor had no idea who Minna Lorimer was, but he was instantly grateful to her. It hadn’t occurred to him that anyone might mistake him for a reporter. The woman who had called him too old had been absolutely right. Still, this whole town had to be sick to death of reporters.

Gregor held out his hand to Betsey. “Gregor Demar­kian.”

“Betsey Henner.” She shook.

The man four stools down from Gregor said, “You’re staying with David Sandler? Does that mean you’re one of those atheist people, too?”

“I don’t understand how anybody can be an atheist,” a young woman in one of the booths declared. “It doesn’t make any sense. I mean, where do you people think this big old world out there came from?”

“Gregor took a long sip of his coffee. It was too hot, but he didn’t care. This was not going the way he had expected it to.

“To tell you the truth,” he said, “I’ve never thought about it. Atheism, I mean.”

“Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?” a young man in yet another of the booths asked.

Betsey Henner blew a raspberry. “Ricky Drake, you just quit that. The man hasn’t had a chance to drink his morning coffee.”

“We’re living in the last days,” Ricky Drake said. “You never know when the Lord is going to come. You never know what the Lord is going to do. You have to be prepared.”

“Well, he can’t be prepared unless he’s had a cup of coffee,” Betsey said. “For Heaven’s sake.”

“I believe in Jesus Christ,” Sheri Lynn said suddenly. The room hushed, as if it were a major occasion when Sheri Lynn decided to say anything. “I go to the Episcopal Church. My sister’s daughter’s getting baptized there on Sunday.”