Baptism in Blood (25 page)

“Oh,” Naomi said, the memory pushing a little puff of laughter out of her throat. “Oh, yes. I haven’t thought of them in years. Miss Bates had hats, and Miss Thornton bought army surplus boots and smoked a cigar.”

“There was Mr. Catervay, too,” Rose said, “who used to disappear for weeks at a time on buying trips to New York City, but we all knew what was going on. It isn’t a new thing to have homosexuals here. We’ve always had them. We just never paid them any mind.”

“They never pushed our noses in it, either,” Naomi said.

Rose sniffed. “Well, maybe. But maybe they’re push­ing it in our faces because Henry Holborn is always push­ing his stuff in theirs. That’s something new these days, too. Tent preachers didn’t used to get rich like that when I was growing up. And they didn’t—attack people directly. They attacked sin, but they didn’t attack people.”

“Yes,” Naomi said slowly. “I do know what you mean. With Henry it’s sometimes like he targets individu­als, like he has personal vendettas against real-life people.”

Rose went to a display of Jesus statues. The statues were tall and carefully painted (“hand painted,” the sign at the base of the display said) and sitting on a revolving pyramid. Naomi had never understood what people did with statues like these.

“There’s another thing,” Rose said. “I’ve been think­ing and thinking about it, and I don’t care what the Bible says. The Bible isn’t always one-hundred-percent right about its scientific facts. Look at all that business about creation and evolution, and about the Earth being flat.”

“I thought you were a creationist,” Naomi said. “I thought you wrote a letter to the Bellerton
Times
in favor of teaching creationism in the public schools.”

“I’ve changed my mind since then. I’ve been
thinking
about it, Naomi. I don’t think homosexuality is an abomi­nation and an offense against God. I think it just is.”

“What?”

“I think it just is,” Rose insisted. “I think people are just born that way. And if you’re born that way there’s nothing you can do about it and nothing you ought to do about it. Just like being born black or white. Do you see what I mean?”

“No,” Naomi said desperately, “I don’t know what you mean. Do you mean you’re in favor of gay rights laws now? Or what?”

Rose went behind the counter and stood next to the cash register, a mulish look on her face. “I mean I think the way Henry Holborn has been talking around here is just wrong. That’s what I mean. I mean I think he caused these things somehow, Tiffany and that Carol Littleton, too—”

“You think Henry Holborn murdered both Tiffany Marsh and Carol Littleton?”

“I didn’t say I thought he murdered them. I said I thought he caused what happened to them. It’s not the same thing. It’s not—it’s not an action, it’s an—an atmo­sphere—” Rose was floundering.

“Well,” Naomi said. “I think I see what you mean. I’ve never been a big fan of Henry Holborn’s myself.”

“I know you haven’t. But a lot of people are. Big fans of his, I mean. It makes me sick.”

“I think I’d better get back to the library,” Naomi said. “I’ve been away all day, practically. Are you sure you’re going to be all right now, all alone here the way you are?”

“I’m not alone,” Rose said. “I’ve got Kathi opening boxes in the back room. There are a lot of boxes. It’s going to take hours.”

“All right,” Naomi said. “Well. I’ll see you later.”

“You think about the things I said to you. You’ll see I’m making sense. Something ought to be done about Henry Holborn.”

In Naomi’s opinion, something ought to be done about Rose MacNeill—what in God’s name had gotten into her? The most conservatively Christian woman on the North Carolina coast, and now she was turning into—what? A liberal?

Naomi propelled herself back out onto Main Street and looked around. The town still looked deserted. It made her almost misty-eyed for the days before Tiffany Marsh had been murdered, the days when the town was almost always deserted during the seasons when tourists were not in residence in force.

Naomi started walking down Main Street, limping badly in her high, uncertain heels. She was thinking so hard about Rose, the obvious didn’t occur to her until she was almost at the library door. But the obvious was obvious, and it was going to occur to everybody sooner or later, if she wanted to let them know.

Rose was more right than she realized. Henry Holborn could have killed both Tiffany Marsh and Carol Littleton. And Naomi was the only person in town who knew how it could have been done, because she had seen him.

W
HEN STEPHEN HARROW WALKED
through the front door of the bookstore, Maggie Kelleher was sitting in the loft, looking through a hardbound leather copy of the complete works of Aristotle. Maggie had no idea why she had this particular edition of this particular book in the store. Its retail price was something over fifty dollars. God only knew, nobody was going to buy it. The tourists who came in here only wanted trash—or, at best, very very very good genre work, like P. D. James. The few people in town who did like to read classics bought their books at the Barnes & Noble superstore up in Cary, and didn’t buy leather-bound editions, either. Maggie thought of the Aristotle, and the few similar volumes she kept up there—
Les Miserables
in French in hand-tooled red Moroccan leather;
The Brothers Karamazov
in deep brown calf—as talismanic. Other peo­ple had Henry Holborn or the Episcopal Church or old Father Kennedy at St. Mary’s. Maggie had these tokens of another life in another place, a life that had once been all she thought she would ever want. A life with a man in it, she put it to herself now—and almost giggled, out loud, in spite of how awful she felt about Carol Littleton and every­thing that was going on up at the camp. It was something worse than a shame, what was happening to Zhondra Meyer’s dream project. Zhondra claimed that she was be­ing persecuted, and there were times when Maggie could almost believe it.
Something
seemed to be directing itself against the establishment up there. Maggie didn’t believe in the devil, but in this case he would suit, and in this case she would use him. He might be the devil in the disguise of Henry Holborn or some other fundamentalist nut from one of the neon churches on the roads outside town, but until she could put a face to him, she would go on thinking of him as the devil. She just wished it would all come to a stop, right now, before it got any worse. The whole town was winding itself up tight.

When the bell on the door tinkled, Maggie thought it must be David Sandler. He had been her only steady cus­tomer since the tourist season ended. Reporters came in, off and on, now that so many of them were stuck here covering the murder. They made a lot of noise and bought maga­zines. Maggie looked over the loft rail and saw Stephen Harrow standing in the middle of the big main room, look­ing at Linda Lael Miller’s latest. He looked both strained and confused, a man lost in an alien landscape. Maggie wondered where he had bought all those theology books that lined the shelves next to the fireplace in his living room.

Stephen put Linda Lael Miller’s book back on its shelf. Maggie got to her feet and went to the loft rail to lean over.

“Stephen?” she called down. “Just a minute. I’ll be right with you.”

Stephen stepped back and squinted. “Oh, Maggie,” he said, “it’s you. I thought I was going to find what’s-his-name.”

“Joshua has the day off,” Maggie said. “Did you need him for something? I’ve got his home number on my desk someplace.”

“No, no,” Stephen said. “It’s all right, really. I just didn’t expect to find you here. I saw you up at the camp.”

“Everybody was up at the camp. Was that pitiful, or what? We’re all turning into a bunch of small-town ambu­lance chasers.”

“I am a small-town ambulance chaser, Maggie. I’ve been small-town one way or another all my life.”

“Well, I haven’t been. It embarrasses me sometimes, the way I behave lately. Give me a minute and I’ll be right down.”

Maggie put the Aristotle back in its slipcase and back on its shelf. She didn’t want to leave a volume like that lying around. She had even taken the three leather volumes with her on the day of the hurricane, so that no matter how hard the store got hit, they wouldn’t get damaged. Of course, she could have fallen and dropped them and landed them all in the mud, but she hadn’t thought of that at the time. It was like mothers taking babies with them into a storm. You took them because you wanted to be sure. You took them because you didn’t trust anyone to protect them as well as you.

Maggie went back to the loft stairs and then down. Stephen was sitting in the big armchair next to the front window, one of four Maggie had scattered around for the convenience of her customers. This was the kind of thing they were always recommending at seminars at the Inde­pendent Booksellers’ Association convention. The idea was that small bookstores had to make up in service for what they couldn’t provide in the way of discounts. Maggie didn’t know if it actually worked. She could remember her­self when she first got to New York, dirt poor and always scrambling for money. If there hadn’t been discounts she wouldn’t have been able to buy books.

“Here I am,” Maggie said when she got to the ground floor. “Do you actually want a book today, Stephen? Sometimes it seems like nobody in the world wants books between October and March, except David Sandler, and I don’t think he counts. He isn’t usually here this time of year.”

“Does David Sandler come in here a lot?” Stephen sounded politely interested. “I don’t think of him as really being here, if you know what I mean. As being part of town.”

“Well, usually he isn’t.”

“That’s true. He isn’t.” Stephen shifted in his chair. He was much too thin, almost skeletal. The hard surfaces of the chair seemed to hurt him.

“I wonder what it’s like sometimes,” he said, “being an atheist. I can’t really imagine it. I had a professor once who said you could never make yourself not think some­thing, and it’s true. I can’t make myself not think of God as real.”

“I can’t make myself not think of God as fake,” Mag­gie said. “It all depends on where you’re starting, Stephen. I don’t think it’s that big an issue.”

Stephen shifted in his chair again. “No, no, I don’t suppose you do. I don’t suppose anybody does unless they’re in my position. Lisa thinks I might as well be an atheist. Did you know about that?”

“No.”

“She says that I don’t believe in any of the things that were supposed to be Christian when she was growing up, and she’s right, in a way, or she would have been. I went to a very rationalist seminary.”

“What’s a rationalist seminary?”

“Oh, it’s a kind of theological orientation. I can’t be­lieve I’m talking to you about this. You must find it so boring. The men who taught me—and it was all men at the time; that wouldn’t be true now—the men who taught me believed that Christ was a man like any other man, that he wasn’t divine, that he didn’t rise from the dead. In fact, they believed that nobody would ever rise from the dead, at least not bodily. All that sort of thing in the Bible—the story of the resurrection, the parts in Revelation that tell of the Second Coming and the return of souls to their bod­ies—all that is just symbol, metaphor. A way of explaining what religion does for us psychologically if we use it rightly and without fanaticism.”

“Good God,” Maggie said. “Is that what Methodists believe these days?”

“Some Methodists do. Some Presbyterians do, too. The most famous American theologian of that kind is an Episcopalian bishop named Spong. I have all of his books.”

“I suppose I don’t understand why you would have gone into the seminary at all if that was what you thought was going on,” Maggie said. “Why bother to be a minis­ter? What did you think you were going to be ministering to?”

“But I didn’t believe in all that when I entered the seminary.” Stephen’s voice was suddenly intense. “I be­lieved in—well, all the things you believed in. What Henry Holborn believes in, mostly, except that I had an exegesis that let me accept Genesis and Darwin at the same time, which was a good thing because as far as I could tell, the evidence for evolution was conclusive.”

“I think it’s conclusive,” Maggie said. “Most sane people think it’s conclusive.”

“Henry Holborn says that evolution is the thin edge of the wedge. Once they get you believing that the Bible is wrong about how the world was created, then they can go after everything else the Bible says, too. I used to think Henry was nuts. I’m beginning to think he was right.”

Maggie backed away a little. This was not good. This was not good at all. It wasn’t only Stephen’s voice that was too intense. His whole face looked flushed and feverish. His eyes looked twice their normal size. It made Maggie suddenly afraid to be alone in this shut-off room with him.

“Let me get you a cup of coffee,” she said hastily. “I have some on the hot plate in the back.”

“I was up at the camp this morning,” Stephen said. “Did you know that? I saw you there.”

“I saw you, too. You weren’t close enough for me to say hello to.”

“I was thinking the whole time I was up there that the Devil is very real,” Stephen said. “I used to think the Devil was all red and fiery and frightening. But he isn’t, you know. He isn’t frightening at all, not when you’re talk­ing to him. He’s just a voice inside your head.”

“You’ve been hearing the Devil as a voice inside your head?”

“What? Oh. No. That wasn’t what I meant, exactly. I’m sorry, Maggie. I’m making you nervous.”

“A little,” Maggie said.

“It’s just been on my mind so much lately,” Stephen said. “Tiffany. The camp. Holborn. The things I was taught in seminary. It all comes together somehow. Do you see what I mean?”

“No.”

“No, no, of course not. I’m sorry, Maggie. It’s just that I’m very tired. And wrung out, of course, from every­thing that’s been happening. It’s going to be a real circus now, don’t you think? That poor woman dying like that, and the reporters all around, right there when it happened.”

“Do you want that coffee? You really don’t look very well, Stephen. I could put a lot of sugar and milk in the coffee. Maybe it would perk you up.”