Baptism in Blood (19 page)

“Of course I have. They say the same thing.”

“How was this worship carried out?”

Jackson whooped. “Well,” he said, in a strongly ex­aggerated drawl, “for one thing, that business about being stark naked was absolutely right. They did get stark na­ked.”

Clayton Hall was actually blushing. “To tell you the truth, Mr. Demarkian, this embarrasses the hell out of me. It would embarrass the hell out of anybody. They all got naked, you see, and then they knelt in a circle around a pile of rocks, and then they sang this song they say they always sing. It’s a special song. One of them wrote it, not Carol Littleton. I don’t remember which one it was.”

“It’s a song to their twats,” Jackson said, absolutely deadpan. “That’s what they do out there. They get all na­ked and kneel in a circle and sing to their—”

“Jackson, stop it, for Pete’s sake. Now you’ve got Mr. Demarkian blushing.”

“Call me Gregor,” Gregor said, trying to will the blush away. It was impossible. He could feel the heat in his face. It was strong enough to scorch.

“It’s called ‘affirming the goodness of the body,’” Jackson said. “Did you ever hear of such a thing? And those asses from New York think the Holy Rollers are crazy.”

Gregor took a deep breath. “Look,” he said. “Don’t you realize? This means that Ginny Marsh was telling the truth about something.”

“Maybe it just means she got lucky,” Clayton Hall said. “There’s been rumors about the goddess worship for months. Henry Holborn has been going on and on about it for months. And Ginny is a member of Henry Holborn’s church.”

“They were talking about Henry Holborn in Betsey’s this morning,” Gregor said.

“Henry’s got the biggest church anywhere around here,” Jackson said. “Big complex out on Hartford Road. Huge congregation. He must fill three thousand seats every Sunday.”

“Three
thousand?
”

“That’s not much,” Clayton Hall said. “Some of the really big evangelists, Oral Roberts, Robert Schuller, they’ll do ten thousand without sweating. But Henry’s big for around here. And getting bigger.”

“And he thinks they’re worshipping the devil up at this camp,” Gregor said.

“That’s right,” Clayton Hall said.

The tiny window placed high in the wall looked out on a window well full of dying leaves and pine needles. Other than that, all Gregor could see was the sun, and the grating that protected the well from the lawn. There was a small bird on the grating, pecking away at the air.

“I think,” Gregor said finally, “that what I would like to do, if you could arrange it, is to go out to this camp and look around. Would that be possible?”

“More than possible,” Clayton Hall said. “Zhondra Meyer will probably be happy enough to marry you. She’s a very rich society lady from New York, and she isn’t used to this kind of publicity.”

“Serves her right,” Jackson said.

“What about Ginny Marsh?” Gregor asked. “Where is she? Out on bail?”

Clayton looked uncomfortable. “She’s in a jail cell about three yards from here. I know that that’s crazy, under the circumstances, but there isn’t anybody to go her bail. Bobby won’t do it.”

“Her husband.”

“That’s right,” Clayton said. “He doesn’t have the money. And he isn’t so inclined, either.”

“Do you mean he’s one of the few people in town who thinks she’s actually guilty?” Gregor asked.

Clayton threw his arms in the air. “We don’t know what to think. He and Ginny were always close. Now he won’t talk to us and he won’t talk to her and we don’t know what’s going on. Do you want to talk to Ginny before you go up to Zhondra Meyer’s place? She’s available. Her law­yer is a personal friend of mine. All it would take is a phone call.”

Outside the window, the bird had flown off. There was nothing more to see.

“No,” Gregor said. “I don’t think I’m ready to talk to Ginny Marsh just yet. Let’s go up and see what we can find out about goddess worship.”

“Goddess worship,” Jackson said, starting to crack up. “Maybe they’ll put on a demonstration. Can’t you pic­ture it? All those sagging old ladies. All those drooping old—”

“Jackson,” Clayton Hall said. Then he looked at Gregor and shrugged. “Sometimes I wish Jackson here would get religion. It would surely improve the tone of this place.”

W
HEN THE CALL CAME
in from Clayton Hall, Zhondra Meyer was sitting at her desk in the big study on the main floor of the west wing, reading the papers. She had already read her way through the Bellerton
Times
and the Raleigh
News and Observer.
She had started in on the
New York Times,
too, but had ended up bored in the middle of an editorial about the Middle East. Zhondra’s mother was al­ways telling her that she didn’t take the State of Israel seri­ously enough. Zhondra’s friends were always telling her that, too, although for reasons her mother would undoubt­edly deplore. It didn’t matter. Zhondra couldn’t think about the Middle East for more than three seconds without feel­ing her head start to ache. Nothing made any sense over there, and she had the sneaking suspicion that nobody wanted it to. Besides, she had
USA Today
to read, and what was there was a disaster. Being in
USA Today
was like being in
People.
Lots of pictures. Lots of scrupulously re­ported innuendo. At least, Zhondra thought, they weren’t on the front page this time. The crime had occurred far enough back to spare them from that. The story about the camp was on pages two and three of the first section—
all
of pages two and three. There were pictures of the big front gate with its curving crown, like the gate to an old movie studio. There were pictures of Alice and Dinah and Carol in town, all looking dumpy and tired. There were even a few pictures of Zhondra herself, none of them recent. The one that made Zhondra cringe was her coming-out photo­graph, taken with fifteen other young women, all dressed in white gowns, just before the Christmas Cotillion and New Year’s Ball in Manhattan. It seemed impossible to Zhondra that she had ever been that woman: so thin, so stupid, so unaware.

Clayton Hall had wanted to know if he could bring this Demarkian person up to talk to her and the rest of the women about what had happened on the day of the storm. That was how Zhondra thought of it: what had happened on the day of the storm. Thinking about it any other way made her feel sick. She had heard that David Sandler was bring­ing this Demarkian to North Carolina. She even knew who he was. There had been a profile of him in
Vanity Fair,
which she still read, mostly secretly, in the bathroom. It was one of the few times
Vanity Fair
had ever done a pro­file without the subject’s cooperation, and Zhondra had found it an interesting piece. Zhondra had no idea what kind of mental attitude it took to want to look into crimes and solve them. Even simple acts of stealing bewildered her beyond belief. Trying to think about what had hap­pened on the day of the hurricane blanked her out com­pletely. Zhondra was not a sentimental woman. She wasn’t particularly fond of children, and she sometimes loathed infants, who seemed to have been designed to make their mothers’ lives impossible. Children were a trap. She had said it often, in the days when she was still speaking and teaching, before she opened the camp. Children are patri­archy’s most lethal weapon. She only allowed them at the camp because their mothers insisted on bringing them, and lately it had begun to be considered antifeminist not to allow them. Even so, Zhondra had never wanted a child, and surely not one as small and helpless and pliant as Tiffany had been.

Clayton wanted to bring Gregor Demarkian up here. Zhondra was glad to have them both, and anybody else directly connected to a law enforcement agency, instead of those reporters who had camped out in town. Clayton and Demarkian wanted to question the women who had been taking part in the goddess ritual—well, Zhondra was per­fectly happy about that, too. Zhondra knew all the theories behind goddess worship: reclaiming the sacredness of the body; repairing our relationship with nature and the earth; reempowering the spirituality of women. Zhondra thought it was all bunk. If you wanted to give up religion, you should give it up. You should walk right out on it, just like Zhondra had walked out on Judaism. Inventing religions that had never existed and pretending that they came from the beginning of time made no sense to her at all.

Zhondra looked down at the spread-open pages of
USA Today
one more time, decided she had looked hideous in miniskirts, and got up from her chair. She walked to the tall French doors that opened onto the back terrace and pulled back the curtains that covered them. Alice was out there, just where she said she’d be, cleaning out the big stone birdbath. Around her, the shrubs were carved into hearts and spades and diamonds and clubs, just as they had been in Zhondra’s grandfather’s time. Zhondra had no idea why she had never changed it.

Zhondra went out onto the terrace and waved to Alice, who was hanging almost upside down from the birdbath’s center tier. Alice saw her and waved back. Then she circled herself up into a sitting position and began the slow process of getting herself to the ground. The birdbath was still full of water. Alice’s jeans were soaked through and her thin cotton peasant blouse was dotted with damp. She had to leap like a gymnast to get clear of the birdbath’s bottom tier, and when she landed it looked as if it hurt.

“Hey,” Alice said, standing up straight and brushing water and bits of grass off her thighs. “What is it? I practi­cally had that thing straightened out.”

“Did you start from the top or from the bottom?” Zhondra asked, honestly curious.

“From the top,” Alice replied. “You always lose some muck to the next tier down. Is there something in particular you wanted? This birdbath really needed clean­ing out. Our lawn service is worthless.”

The lawn service wasn’t useless. It just didn’t do bird-baths. “Clayton Hall just called,” Zhondra said. “He wants to bring Gregor Demarkian up here to see us.”

“He does? When?”

“Now.”

Alice look nonplussed. “For Christ’s sake, Zhondra,” she said. “My hair’s a mess. My clothes are a mess. I smell like a stagnant pond. Do you mean right
now
now?”

“As soon as they can get up here from town, Alice, yes. Clayton said something about wanting to go over some paperwork with Demarkian and we shouldn’t expect them for about forty-five minutes, but that’s the upshot of it. I don’t think they’re going to care about what you look like.”

“I care about what I look like. Are you glad he’s coming? Gregor Demarkian? When I saw the piece in the Bellerton
Times,
I didn’t know what to think.”

“I think it would be a good idea if we got all this cleared up. Fast.”

“I agree.”

Zhondra shook her head. “I don’t think you realize. I’ve been coming here since I was two years old, and I know this place. Half the people in town probably think that Ginny Marsh is telling the God’s honest truth, and we’re holding Black Masses up here and worshipping the Devil.”

“I know that.”

“Yes, Alice, you know that, but you don’t know what it means. Down there there’s somebody—Henry Holborn or somebody else—planning something right this minute. I don’t know what, and I don’t know when, but it’s coming. And when it does, there’s going to be real trouble.”

“I don’t mean to get you pissed off or anything,” Alice said, “but I think you underestimate the people in Bellerton. In spite of the newspaper snipes and a few peo­ple like Henry Holborn, they’ve mostly been very nice, at least to me. They don’t seem like the kind of people who would, I don’t know, dress up in hoods or whatever you’re suggesting.”

“Not in hoods.”

“What is it, then? There really isn’t anything they can do to us, Zhondra. You own this place. They can’t revoke the lease or anything. And they can’t run us out of town, either. Your lawyers are better than their lawyers.”

“There are a lot of things people can do.” Zhondra sounded enigmatic when she didn’t want to. “Where are they all, Dinah and Stelle and Carol?”

“Stelle’s sleeping. Dinah and Carol were in the dining room, last I heard.”

“Get them all together and bring them down here to my study. I want to talk to them before Clayton gets here with Demarkian.”

“You mean you want to prime them?”

“No,” Zhondra said, “I don’t want to prime them. I just want to talk to them. Will you please go and bring them here?”

“Sure.”

Zhondra turned away. It was a warm day, but there was the beginning of cold in it, like an undercurrent. Her grandmother probably walked across this terrace the way she was walking across it now, tall and imperious and just a little angry. Lately, Zhondra had been finding all kinds of connections between that ancient matriarch and herself. Sometimes she thought of the jewelry that had been left to her, passed down from one generation of Meyer women to the next, and wondered what it would be like to walk with it covering her, the heavy round dinner rings and diamond tiaras, the diamond chokers and diamond and ruby breast­plates. When nineteenth-century women dressed up to go out, they knew how to dress
up.

Zhondra left the French doors open and sat down at the desk in the study. The ceiling was so far above her head, the light from the chandelier didn’t quite reach into the corners of it. The chandelier was a spreading beehive of crystal and glass. The desk was a polished mahogany tour de force, full of secret doors and spring locks, carved on the sides into curlicues and cherubs.

“You think you’re going to just pack up your things and get away from it all,” Zhondra’s mother had said, when Zhondra had been getting ready to leave home for the last time. “You think you’re going to buy your clothes in Kmart and call yourself by a nickname and nobody is go­ing to know who and what you are. But it doesn’t work like that, Zhondra. It has never worked like that and it never will.”

It was true, of course. The money was on her as tightly and as thoroughly as her skin. What was different was that now, in her forties, she was beginning to like it that way. She had no trouble imagining her own portrait going up beside the others in the gallery on the second floor. Zhondra’s mother had made a terrible matriarch. She lacked self-confidence and emotional control. Zhondra knew that she herself lacked neither.