Baptism in Blood (20 page)

Zhondra picked all the newspapers up and dumped them into the wastebasket. The computer screen was show­ing a test pattern, meant to keep the machine ready for its next serious use. Zhondra looked at the pictures on the desk instead, all of them in silver Tiffany frames. They were all from long ago. Only one was of her parents, and it had been taken when they were young, before they had had Zhondra in their life. Zhondra found that she liked the way they looked, in their white lawn-party clothes. She liked the big sweep of grass behind them and the rose-garden trel­lises that made the lawn look decorated.

Christ,
Zhondra thought, throwing back her head.
I’d better find a lover soon. I’m reverting to type.

H
ENRY HOLBORN BLAMED HIMSELF
for everything that had happened. He blamed himself for the death of Tiffany Marsh. He blamed himself for the way Ginny and Bobby were becoming increasingly estranged. Ginny hated Bobby for thinking she might have killed Tiffany. Bobby hated Ginny for not making him absolutely sure she had not. Henry Holborn was absolutely sure. He had known Ginny and Bobby Marsh all their lives. He had known Ginny when she was first in high school and still had so much ambition, before she found out she wasn’t really good enough to get any of the things she wanted. That was the way it was with almost all the people who came to his church. The last shall be first, the Lord had said, and Henry had seen it be true. The people who lived in the big Greek revival houses in town, the doctors and the lawyers and the dentists and the accountants, didn’t come out to the Full Gospel Christian Church. Neither did the engineers and sci­entists who had bought the new construction in the housing developments that seemed to be springing up everywhere across the state. The people Henry ministered to were not necessarily down, right this minute, but they had been down. Some of them were well-paid people now, but they had grown up in the shacks and on the dirt farms on the back roads of the state. They had gone to state colleges on loans and scholarships. They had learned the hard way how to get past the handicaps of fathers who drank and mothers who didn’t seem to be able to get up the energy to cook a full dinner more than one night a week. The New York newspeople had it all wrong. Henry’s parishioners weren’t the drunks and the slatterns out looking for some entertain­ment in the form of holy rolling. They were the children of drunks and slatterns who had worked themselves to distrac­tion and finally made it out.

Henry blamed himself for everything that had hap­pened because he knew he should have seen it coming. God talked to him as much as God talked to anyone. God had privileged him in more ways than Henry was willing to count. Henry had had a vision of the Devil, as clear and strong and real as the presence of a big old tree in the front yard, and he knew the Devil was ready and waiting, moving cautiously but inexorably, coming to get them all. History had been written in advance. This life was a war between the forces of good and the forces of evil. The job of every man, woman, and child alive was to choose up sides. Henry had chosen his side. He had chosen the Lord and all His works. He had chosen to carry the cross with Christ, to suffer mockery and persecution, to preach the Good News to people God really wanted to hear it, all them that were weary and heavy laden. The problem was that Henry had gotten lazy, and complacent, and smug. He had seen the signs and ignored them. He had heard the Devil knocking on the door and pretended he wasn’t there. Now the Devil was right in the middle of the house, sucking up all the air, and Henry was having a hard time figuring out what to do about it.

It was just about eight o’clock in the morning, and the Full Gospel Christian Church was already humming. The hurricane had done a lot of damage, more than Henry had admitted to the public. Volunteers were clearing debris out of the fountain in the courtyard and putting new shingles on the steeply sloped roof. The cross on the steeple had survived intact. It was made of tempered steel and inde­structible. The cross in the church’s front yard hadn’t been so fortunate. It was made of wood, to be as authentic as possible, and it had fallen over and split in two. It was as if God was giving them mixed signals: the church was going to survive or it wasn’t. The only thing Henry was abso­lutely sure of was that God would win out in the end, and the Devil and his forces would be vanquished.

Henry’s wife Janet came in from the back of the church and waved to him. Henry waved back and came down off the podium. He had to be careful, because his arthritis was bothering him this morning. He ached more and more these days. He was getting old. All around him, volunteers were working hard in the church, cleaning up after what the people who had camped here had done dur­ing the hurricane. When Henry had invited people to come to the church to get in out of the rain, he hadn’t realized what it would do to the carpets. He made his way down the central aisle, leaning against the backs of the seats as he went. His chest hurt.

“Are you all right?” Janet asked him when he reached her. “You’re white as a ghost.”

“I’m fine,” Henry said, and oddly enough, it was true. The pain in his chest was gone. The odd feeling that he had suddenly forgotten how to breathe was gone, too. He felt better than he had in weeks. He straightened up, all at once aware of the fact that he had been bending over. “I’m fine,” he said again. “How are you? You look agitated.”

“I’ve spent all morning trying to find out about all those things you wanted to know,” Janet told him. “It hasn’t been easy.”

“Has it been fruitful?”

“Yes. It has definitely been fruitful. Or most of it has. Some things don’t seem to have any answers, which I think is very, very odd.”

Henry looked around the church. There were really far too many people here for them to talk privately, although he didn’t think they were going to say anything his congre­gation shouldn’t hear. Still, it was always better to be safe. He opened the door at the back of the church and pushed Janet through it into the hall. The hall was mostly empty. There were long slatted wooden benches against the walls. Henry sat Janet down on one of those and then sat down, too. The walls looked too empty out here, too blank. He was going to have to buy some religious pictures to deco­rate them with.

“Now, then,” he said, “tell me what you found out. About Mr. Demarkian or Zhondra Meyer.”

“Mr. Demarkian is the boring one,” Janet told him. You want to hear about him first?”

“Fine.”

“Mostly, what I found out about Mr. Demarkian is what I’ve read in the papers,” Janet said. “He used to be with the FBI. He was head of a department there and considered very important. He retired just after his wife died of cancer. Now he acts as a consultant when he’s called in on murder cases. He doesn’t have a private investigator’s li­cense, by the way. I checked.”

“That’s odd,” Henry murmured. “I thought you had to have one. To do the things he does, I mean.”

“Maybe it’s different if you call yourself a consul­tant,” Janet said. “I’ve always hated that word. I’ve never understood for a minute what it was supposed to mean.”

“What about Mr. Demarkian’s religious affiliations? Does he belong to a church? Has he been born again?”

“I sincerely doubt he’s ever been born again, Henry. Don’t be silly. To tell you the truth, his religious connec­tions are very fuzzy. He does technically belong to a church, Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church, in Phila­delphia—”

“Well, Janet, if it calls itself a Christian church—”

“It’s some kind of Eastern European ethnic thing, Henry. They don’t mean by it what we do. They just mean they aren’t Roman Catholics.”

“Does Mr. Demarkian actually go to this church?”

“I can’t tell,” Janet admitted. “I found out that his closest friend is a priest, though. The priest of this Holy Trinity—”

“But I thought priests are Catholic.”

“Some priests are Episcopal, Henry. And they’ve got priests in this ethnic church. But the really interesting thing is just how much of a connection Mr. Demarkian does have to the Catholics. You know John Cardinal O’Bannion, the one from Colchester, New York?”

“I know who he is, of course I do. He’s in the papers all the time.”

“Yes, well. It seems that Mr. Demarkian has accom­modated him more than once, in murder cases that the car­dinal had an interest in—”

“What kind of an interest?”

“Oh, don’t get apocalyptic on me, Henry. It’s nothing like that. It’s just cases priests or nuns have been involved in, or they’ve taken place on the grounds of a church some­where. They’ve mostly been routine things, except for one or two, and you’re not going to get Cardinal O’Bannion on any of them. Anyway, the cardinal seems to pay Mr. Demarkian by contributing to all these Armenian charities, you know, for refugees and things like that. It’s a very interesting arrangement.”

Henry thought it over. You had to be very careful. The Devil was very clever. Even so, he couldn’t see anything really wrong with any of this. There didn’t seem to be anything about Mr. Demarkian that was actively evil.

“Tell me about Zhondra Meyer,” he said. “Is that the person you said you couldn’t get decent answers about?”

“It’s very, very hard to get answers about somebody that rich,” Janet said. “You wouldn’t believe the things you can do to preserve your privacy if you’ve only got enough money. There are some things, though, that are a matter of public record.”

“And?”

“Well,” Janet said, “in the first place, Zhondra Meyer has been estranged from both her parents for years.”

“Because of the lesbianism?”

“Because of the Communism, in the beginning. She joined the Communist Party of the United States when she was in her junior year at Smith. Then she transferred to the University of California at Berkeley and joined a Commu­nist cell there. Her parents were livid.”

“Why did they let her transfer? Why didn’t they pull her out of school?”

“They couldn’t. Zhondra’s got her own money, mil­lions and millions of dollars of it. She came into it when she was eighteen.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice,” Henry said. “Can you imag­ine having a situation like that?”

“No.” Janet was blunt. And uninterested in speculat­ing. Janet liked to think of herself as a strictly pragmatic woman. “The thing is, they have tried to do something about her more than once. To rein her in, so to speak, which means to get control of the money away from her. They haven’t been successful. But what’s interesting to me, Henry, was what they decided to try.”

“And what was it?”

“They tried to have her declared insane.”

Henry sat up even straighter on the bench. “Do you mean her parents tried to have her declared incompetent,” he demanded, “or insane?”

“I mean
insane,
Henry. I supposed they would have had her declared incompetent, too, when it was all over, but first they tried to have her declared insane. They had her apartment in San Francisco raided and got her locked up in an insane asylum.”

“Good Lord.”

“You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to find this infor­mation, Henry. I mean, it’s all a matter of public record, but they’re very good at making sure they don’t get any publicity they don’t want to have. There were stories in the newspapers, but they were just little squibs. Even after it all went wrong and Zhondra got released and threatened to sue them.”

“It should have been the movie of the week,” Henry said. “Are you sure all this happened?”

“Oh, yes, Henry. I’m sure. I checked and double-checked, and I had Deacon Hatcher check, too. He’s better than I am at the computer. You can get all this stuff off the Internet, if you know where to look.”

“So what did they use to have her committed? They couldn’t have had her locked up just because she joined the Communist Party.”

“I don’t know what they used to have her committed. Maybe it was enough that they had all that money.”

“What did she use to get herself out?”

“I don’t know that, either,” Janet said. “I told you the information was sketchy. But I was thinking, you know… I was thinking there might be things we might be able to do with it.”

“Like what?”

“Threaten to make it public, maybe. Just something, you know, something that might make them get out of there. We can’t have them up there for years and years, poisoning the air we breathe.”

“I know that.”

Janet stood up and brushed out her skirt. “I’ve got to get back over to the house. We’re cooking lunch for two dozen people today. All these volunteers. You want me to send the printouts and all that stuff back to you?”

“Yes, Janet. Thank you. Thank you very much.”

“There’s nothing to thank me for,” his wife replied. “I wanted to do it. I want them out of here even more than you do. After all, I’m another woman. They don’t make people think odd things about you just because they’re there. You’re a man.”

It took Henry a while to unravel this sentence, and by then Janet was gone. The church’s front doors were still hissing closed behind her. The air from outside was still spilling over him like a warm bath. Henry stood up and went back to the door of the big main room of the church. Catholics would call it the church proper, but Henry had no name for it that he felt comfortable using. “Chapel,” which was what he had used when he first started preach­ing, seemed positively ridiculous in the sight of all these seats.

Crazy, Henry thought. Maybe that was the answer he was looking for. Maybe he could blame it all on the insani­ties of everyone involved.

In the meantime, he had to think it through very thor­oughly, and make sure it wasn’t the Devil talking to him in his head.

There had been times in his life when Henry had found it very difficult to distinguish between the Devil’s voice and God’s.

I
N THE THICK PATCH
of trees at the bottom of the hill on which Zhondra Meyer’s huge house stood, Bobby Marsh was sitting in a nest of pine needles, murdering a mouse. He had found the mouse, half asleep and scared to death, nibbling disinterestedly at the bottom of his brown paper lunch bag. He had picked it up without having to chase it at all, and it was so small he had no trouble holding it caught in his hand, squeezing at its neck until he felt the bones break under his fingers. The sensation was unreal, like li­quor or marijuana or something worse. When the first bone snapped, Bobby felt something leap with joy inside him. That was what he wanted to happen to all of them, all those women up at the camp and all those other people, too, Hall, Sandler, it didn’t matter. They were a roadblock made of flesh standing in his way. They were the worst news he had ever heard. They were taking Ginny away from him. Bobby knew he ought to be thinking about Tiffany. He had been trying and trying to think about Tiffany for days. He just hadn’t been able to do it. It was Ginny he thought about, and what a perfect gift she had been to him, what a miracle, turned now to dust.