Baptism in Blood (18 page)

“Sometimes,” Gregor replied. “I don’t think I under­stand what you’re getting at—”

“They
think it’s all some kind of mental illness.” The woman tossed her head in the direction of Main Street.
They
might not be out there yet, but Gregor knew who
they
were supposed to be. “They think it’s all voodoo and fanat­icism. You can hear it when they talk. You have to give Dr. Sandler that much. He doesn’t talk to people like that.”

“Oh,” Gregor said.

The woman got a set of keys out of the pocket of her dress. “I’m not a religious person, you know. I don’t go to church and I’m not even one hundred percent sure I believe in God and whenever Rose starts in with all that angels I business, I go right up the wall. But people have a right to have their beliefs respected. They have a right not to be laughed at by people who don’t for one minute intend to even try to understand what’s going on. That’s part of be­ing an American.”

“Right,” Gregor said.

“You go find Clayton Hall,” the woman said. “I hope you do a little good around here instead of what all the rest of them are doing. I hope you have
some
consideration.”

“Right,” Gregor said again.

“And just remember this.” The woman now had a single one of her keys in her hand, as if she were about to open a door, “Ginny Marsh didn’t kill her daughter. Ginny Marsh didn’t collude in the killing of her daughter. Ginny Marsh never hurt anybody in her life and won’t hurt any­body as long as she lives. But she scares easily.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’ve got to get moving,” the woman said. “I’m sup­posed to open the library at nine, and I have to get all the way out to my house and back again before then. I have a very busy day.”

“I’m sure you do, Miss—”

“Ms. Brent. Ms. Naomi Brent. I run the library. I don’t have any more time for this kind of talk, Mr. Demarkian. I have to go now.”

She turned away from him then and half ran across the parking lot. Gregor watched her skirt billow out around her. She got to the small green Ford Escort and opened it up and got in. Gregor suddenly remembered that Donna Moradanyan had just bought a Ford Escort. That one was a station wagon, though. And it was blue.

What am I doing? Gregor demanded of himself.

Naomi Brent had started her engine and begun to back her car out of its space. Gregor started around the last side of Town Hall, still in search of the Bellerton Police Depart­ment.

A
CTUALLY, THE BELLERTON POLICE
Department was not hard to find, once you knew where to look. The steps were exactly where Naomi Brent had said they were going to be, carved into the flat ground on the side of the building. Gregor had the impression that it was not very usual to have basements in this part of North Carolina. In fact, from what he remembered, all the South tended to prefer slab and crawl space foundations. This foundation had been raised a good five feet above grade, however, and the ad­ministration of the town at the time it had been built had gone to what must have been a great deal of expense to do it all right. Gregor went down the concrete steps and opened the wooden door at the bottom of them. There was no musty smell of mildew and damp rushing out at him. In spite of the fact that there had been a major hurricane here only a couple of weeks ago, the basement was entirely dry and very fresh-smelling. It was also heavily air-conditioned. Gregor felt the cold hit him like a wall. He was almost sorry he hadn’t worn his sweater. He closed the outside door behind him and looked up at the wall next to it, where there was one of those plastic plug-in letter boards with departments written on it.

Tax Department, Gregor read. Water Department. Sewage Department. Police Department.

He had been hoping for directions, but he wasn’t go­ing to get any. This was not a town that expected strangers to be wandering around in the basement of its Town Hall. Anybody who lived in Bellerton would know where he was going without having to be told.

From the place where Gregor was standing, the hall went in two directions, right and left, Gregor tried to orient himself, and decided that the front of the building was probably to his left. He went that way, past the Water De­partment, and got to a corner. He turned the corner and found the office of the tax collector. Obviously, the base­ment was laid out like a gigantic doughnut, with a concrete block instead of a hole in the middle. Gregor passed a ladies’ room and kept on going.

Finally, when he turned the next corner, Gregor heard signs of life. Somebody slammed a door. Somebody called out to somebody else. There was a fire door set up in the middle of the hall—because of worries about fires? because of worries about security?—and Gregor went through it. On the other side of it he found a big sign with the words BELLERTON POLICE DEPARTMENT written on it. He also found an open door with light spilling out of it.

Gregor went to the open door and looked in. The big man he had seen first was now standing at a coffee ma­chine, fiddling with coffee grounds and water. The smaller man was now sitting at a desk and reading. There was a radio in one corner of the room, tuned to the state police band. It was giving out information on traffic conditions on Interstate 95.

Gregor knocked as loudly as he could on the frame of the door and waited. The big man didn’t hear him. The small man heard him, and looked up, and jumped to his feet.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Who are you? Where did you come from?”

The big man turned around now, and looked Gregor over. Then he looked at the small man and said, “You shouldn’t swear like that, Jackson. You don’t know who you might be talking to.”

“Well, I’m not talking to a preacher now, am I?” Jackson demanded. “Look at him. He’s one of those re­porters.”

“I’m Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said.

The big man came across the room and held out his hand. “I know you are,” he said. “I read an article about you in
People
magazine. I’m Clayton Hall.”

“How do you do.” Gregor shook the man’s hand. He never shook hands anymore, except in small towns. People in cities seemed to have given the practice up.

Jackson was looking back and forth between Clayton Hall and Gregor Demarkian. He dropped back down in his chair and said, “My, my. Gregor Demarkian. You finally
got
here.”

“Now, now,” Clayton Hall said.

“Tell me something,” Jackson said. “Are you a reli­gious man, Mr. Demarkian?”

Gregor was beginning to think he ought to become a Buddhist, at least for as long as he was going to stay in Bellerton. He was also wondering if Jackson was this man’s first or last name.

“You don’t want to get started on all that religious stuff,” Clayton Hall said. “Mr. Demarkian just got here. I hope you don’t mind too much, Mr. Demarkian. The reli­gion thing has become a sore point down here over the past few weeks. People are beginning to feel—harassed.”

“Harassed isn’t the half of it,” Jackson said. “Perse­cuted is more like it.
Persecuted.
”

“Certain members of the media from up North,” Clayton Hall said, “seem to think that belief in a literal interpretation of the Bible is irrefutable proof of mental retardation.”

“They think it turns you into an ax murderer,” Jack­son snarled. “They think it makes you crazy.”

“Mr. Demarkian didn’t come here to talk about reli­gion,” Clayton Hall said. “Or I don’t think he did. Why don’t you come in and have a seat, Mr. Demarkian. Drink a cup of coffee. David Sandler says you’re a very intelligent man.”

“David Sandler says
you’re
a very intelligent man.”

There was a full coffeepot sitting next to the coffee maker, which was just beginning to pour dark brown liquid into an empty one. Clayton Hall picked up the full pot and poured some coffee into a small white Styrofoam cup.

“Have a seat,” Clayton Hall said again.

Gregor made his way into the room and found a chair to sit in. All the chairs were wooden and cheap and uni­form, the kind of chairs they used to have in schoolrooms when he was a child. The air-conditioning, he realized, was even stronger in here than it had been in the hall. Neither Clayton Hall nor his associate Jackson seemed to notice the cold. Because of it, Gregor took the coffee gratefully when Clayton finally handed it to him, in spite of the fact that he knew what it would taste like. Police department coffee tastes the same everywhere, all over the world. Police de­partments in Bolivia serve up the same awful brew that sits ready and waiting in police departments in New York. Gregor took a long sip and was instantly warmer. He also felt instantly a little sick.

“I’ve been walking around town,” he said. “Looking at things. I had breakfast in a place called Betsey’s House of Hominy. It was interesting.”

“I’ll bet everybody thought you were a reporter,” Jackson said.

“They did at first. There was a woman there named Maggie Kelleher—”

“Oh, Maggie,” Clayton Hall said. “Now, Maggie is an interesting woman. Good-looking, too.”

“She’s got to be
forty
,” Jackson said scornfully.

“She knew who I was,” Gregor said. “Some other people might have, too, but she was the one who said so. There was also somebody there named Ricky Drake.”

Jackson dropped his head into his hands. “Oh, dear sweet Jesus.”

Gregor let this pass. “Then when I came over here, I met a woman coming out, who said her name was Naomi Brent. From the library.”

“That’s right,” Clayton said. “She does run the li­brary. Has for years now. She’s not exactly your old maid librarian, though.”

“She didn’t seem so to me, no,” Gregor agreed. “But what I’m trying to get to here, what struck me, is that what everybody wanted to tell me was that there was no way they thought Virginia Marsh could have killed her baby. In fact, it seemed to be a general consensus.”

Clayton Hall and Jackson looked at each other. “It is a consensus,” Clayton said slowly. “In town, at any rate.”

“I’d been given the impression by David Sandler that the consensus ran exactly the other way. That one of the reasons he wanted me down here was that he was afraid it was being taken as a foregone conclusion, that Virginia Marsh was guilty, and that he wanted someone here who would look at things differently for a while.”

The second coffeepot was now full of coffee. Clayton Hall adjusted it on its metal plate, fussing with it, giving his hands something to do. “Mr. Demarkian, given everything you’ve ever heard about this case, what is it that you think it’s going to turn out to be?”

“I think it’s going to turn out to be Virginia Marsh, or Virginia Marsh’s husband, or Virginia Marsh’s boyfriend, if she has one. That’s what it always turns out to be.”

“Exactly,” Clayton Hall said. “That’s the point. And she was there, Ginny was. Up at the camp. And she lied to us and everybody else about why she was up there.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ginny told David Sandler, among other people, that she was going up to the camp in the middle of the storm because Zhondra Meyer had refused to let her off the hook for work that day. But it wasn’t true. Ginny never called Zhondra Meyer and asked to be excused from work that day. Zhondra would have been more than happy to give her the afternoon off. Not much work was going to get done up there anyway, what with the storm.”

“Couldn’t that be what Zhondra Meyer is saying now? Maybe Ginny is telling the truth and it’s Zhondra Meyer who’s lying.”

“We’ve got the phone records, Mr. Demarkian. There were no incoming calls to the camp that morning. None. Zero. Zilch.”

“Ah,” Gregor said.

“And it isn’t just the phone call.” Clayton Hall was getting worked up now. “There’s the blood to account for. When David Sandler found her, Ginny was covered with blood. Some of it was her own blood. Some of it was Tif­fany’s blood. She was soaked in it.”

“All right.”

“Yeah,” Clayton said. “All right. The point here is wider, though. Because that was all the blood we found.
All
of it. There wasn’t a drop of Tiffany Marsh’s blood any­where on the premises of the camp. Not in that grove where Ginny keeps saying she saw the Satan worship. Not any­where. And we searched that place—Christ, it took days.”

“The blood could have been washed away. We are talking about the middle of a hurricane here. A major hur­ricane.”

“The blood couldn’t have been washed away from ev­erything,” Clayton insisted. “We should have found flecks of it. We should have found something. And then there were these women Ginny says she saw worshipping the Devil. Carol Littleton was the only one she said she recog­nized. Well, Mr. Demarkian, Ginny Marsh had been work­ing up at the camp for months. And I know Ginny Marsh. I don’t believe there were three women up there she wouldn’t have been able to recognize, stark naked or not.”

Gregor considered this. He had read about the stark naked business. That was one detail the papers never omit­ted.

“What about this Carol Littleton?” he asked. “What did she say?”

“She says that she and two other women decided to have a celebration of the goddess in a grove at the back of the camp’s formal gardens just before the storm really started—”

“The goddess?”

Clayton Hall sighed: “Yeah, the goddess. The Great Goddess, to be specific. It’s the big thing these days with the academic types up in the Research Triangle. Theoretically, millions and millions of years ago, or however long it was, when the human race just got started, everybody wor­shipped the Great Goddess, instead of a male god, and that meant there was equality between the sexes and everything was better for everybody and women were affirmed and I don’t know what all. But I ask you this. If it was all so wonderful, why did anybody ever want to change it?”

“The preachers all think the Great Goddess is Satan,” Jackson put in. “Or at least, some of the preachers do. They’re always talking about it.”

“Let’s get back to Carol Littleton,” Gregor said gently. “You said she and these two other women decided to go out and worship the Great Goddess. Did they?”

“Yes,” Clayton said.

“Have you talked to the other two women?”