Baptism in Blood (28 page)

“All of them?”

“All of them.”

“What did you do with them?”

“We put them in a pile under one of the trees. It didn’t matter what happened to them as long as they were out of the way while the ceremony was going on.”

“Fine,” Gregor said. “What did you do next?”

“We took up positions around the circle of stones and knelt down.”

“And?”

“And we started praying. We were singing this chant thing, this song that Dinah wrote. About how wonderful women are and how beautiful all their parts are. It was weird, really. I mean, there was all this thunder and light­ning, and it worked somehow. I mean, it all seemed part of the ceremony. Crash. Bang. Boom. Chant. When the rain really started coming down, I was surprised as hell.”

“Did you run for the house when that happened?”

Stelle Cary burst out laughing. “Mr. Demarkian, we couldn’t run anywhere. We were stuck. The trees were whipping around like jump ropes. The rain was coming down in buckets. There was hail. All we could do was take cover under one of those trees, hold our clothes over our heads, and hope we didn’t get hit by something serious. We were there all night.”

“All night?”

“Well, all day and most of the evening, anyway. We didn’t get out until the storm was all over and Zhondra came looking for us and told us the baby was dead. And told us that Ginny was saying we killed it. I thought I was going to bust a blood vessel, and Carol started to cry and couldn’t stop.”

“Ginny Marsh was never in the clearing that day?”

“Not that any of us saw.”

“The baby wasn’t either?”

“Again,” Stelle insisted, “not that any of us saw. I suppose they could have been hiding in the trees. Espe­cially if the baby was, well, you know, already dead. So that it wouldn’t cry.”

“Is that what you think happened? That somebody killed it and then hid in the trees near the clearing?”

“I don’t think anything, Mr. Demarkian. Except I think Ginny probably killed the child. I never did like Ginny much. She’s too—intense.”

“That’s interesting,” Gregor said. “Everybody else I’ve talked to seems to like her a great deal. They keep trying to convince me that she couldn’t possibly have killed her own baby.”

“Mothers kill their children every day,” Stelle said. “And I think if that girl didn’t kill the baby, she’s fronting for the man who did. And it would have to be a man, wouldn’t you think?”

“It usually is,” Gregor admitted.

Stelle Cary leaned back and stretched her arms and back, arching. “Do you know what I think?” she asked Gregor. “I think it’s all very simple, and the only reason Carol was killed was to make it look like it wasn’t. I think Ginny and that husband of hers are in it together, and I think the good Reverend Henry Holborn is masterminding the whole thing. I think I’m sick and tired of the South and I’m sick and tired of religion and I’m sick and tired of being a lesbian feminist, too. I think I’m going back to my old neighborhood in Chicago and see who’s still around that I know.”

“I think,” Gregor said carefully, “that that would be both unfortunate and unwise.”

Stelle hopped off the desk, grinning brilliantly. “I think you can take that advice and stuff it where the sun don’t shine,” she told him. “And now, if you two will excuse me, I think I’m going off to get something to eat.”

Stelle Cary headed for the study door and disappeared into the hall. Zhondra Meyer watched her go, then blew a raspberry and collapsed into the chair behind the desk.

“Honestly,” she said. “Some people.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING, GREGOR
Demarkian woke to find that David Sandler had written dozens of notes to him on sticky paper and stuck them all over the house. The one on the refrigerator said:

Where have you been? Make some time to talk.

This, Gregor thought, was not entirely fair. He’d had plenty of time to talk the night before, which he had spent sitting by himself on David’s deck, looking out over the ocean. Last night had been David Sandler’s night to go up to Chapel Hill, where he taught a once-a-week seminar in the philosophy of free thought at the University of North Carolina. Gregor remembered wondering whether anybody ever used the words “free thought” anymore, or even knew what they meant. At any rate, Gregor had been alone, with the first glass of wine he’d had in months. The waves had pounded against the thick wooden pilings that held up David’s house. The full moon had floated in the blackness above the water, looking fat and smug. In the long run, Gregor didn’t think it had been such a good idea, being on his own like that. He had spent too much time on his own in the first six months after Elizabeth died. He had sold the apartment they had lived in together for so many years, and rented a smaller one, and spent night after night sitting on its little balcony, watching the traffic on the Beltway. After a while the cars had begun to look like gigantic beetles, chasing each other and snapping their jaws. Like most other men of his generation, Gregor had never learned to take care of himself emotionally. He had had Elizabeth for that, and before Elizabeth his mother. Every once in a while, there had been gaps, like during the time he had spent in the army, but he had taken care of those by bulling through them, and making sure they didn’t last too long. After Elizabeth died, the gap seemed to last forever. He wondered sometimes if he had gone back to Cavanaugh Street in the hope of finding a place to rest, like a shark looking for a place to die. God only knew, he hadn’t been able to think of anything to do with himself, or any reason to go on getting up in the morning, when he had been left to himself. Even the work that he had done for twenty years had failed to move him. He thought of the country filling up with rapists and murderers and drug dealers and kidnap­pers, and he just didn’t care.

He didn’t know what it was—the moon, maybe, or the uncustomary wine—but after a while he couldn’t sit in the silence and not hear another human voice. He went back into the house and turned on the television in the study. He found three religious stations and the networks. Two of the networks were showing sitcoms. The third, CBS, had one of those tabloid news shows, with a story about a man in Tennessee who had first been suspected of being a serial murderer because of the way he treated his cats. He locked his cats up in his garage for days at a time; without food or water, and made it impossible for them to get out. The religious stations all seemed to be showing preachers of one kind or another, appalled at the state of the country and the state of the world. Gregor stopped and listened to the nun for a few minutes, because she was the only one of the three who didn’t sound hysterical. She was talking about a movie called
Priest,
which she didn’t like. All the priests in it were either terrible people, or untrue to their vows of celibacy. Then the program went to a break, and the station logo came on. Gregor found that he was watching some­thing called the Eternal Word Television Network. He wasn’t ready for eternal words. He turned the television off and got up and went into the living room.

It was, by then, exactly ten o’clock. Gregor didn’t know if David Sandler was going to walk through the door at any moment, or if he customarily went out for dinner or drinks after his class and wouldn’t be in for hours. There was a black, old-fashioned-looking telephone on the end table next to the couch. It took a while for Gregor to realize that what bothered him about it was that it had a rotary dial instead of a touch-tone pad. Gregor sat down next to it and put it into his lap. He wasn’t sure how to go about this with a rotary phone. He wasn’t even sure if he could. It was incredible how dependent people got on technology, even people like him, who didn’t like technology. He had grown up with rotary telephones. He picked up the receiver and did what he would have done then. He dialed the operator.

It took a little while—the operator was young; she wasn’t used to dealing with rotary phones, either—but he finally got the call charged to his credit card and the phone ringing in Bennis’s apartment. It rang and rang. Gregor almost decided that Bennis must have gone out: up to Donna Moradanyan’s apartment, or across the street to Tibor’s. He tried to imagine what it was like, now, on Cavanaugh Street. Had Donna Moradanyan decorated for some holiday? She liked to decorate in style, wrapping whole town houses up in ribbons and bows. They were christening somebody’s baby at Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church this Sunday. Maybe Donna had decorated for that. Maybe he ought to put down the phone and give it up. The operator was going to break in at any moment, to tell him this wasn’t working.

Far away in Philadelphia, the phone was picked up, and a muffled voice said muffled words that Gregor couldn’t make sense of.

“Bennis?” he tried, wondering if he had a bad con­nection or just a wrong number.

There was more muffled noise again and then, “Gregor? Where are you? I just got out of the shower.”

Bennis had been smoking again. Gregor could hear it in her voice. Bennis’s voice always got raspy and raw when she had been smoking, especially now, when she spent most of her time trying to quit.

“I’m in North Carolina,” Gregor said. “I’m at David Sandler’s house. He’s out giving a seminar.”

“On atheism? In North Carolina?”

“On free thought, in Chapel Hill. In case you didn’t know, free thought was a movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—”

“Deism and the French Revolution,” Bennis broke in. “Yes, Gregor, I know. I had a very expensive education. Are you all right? I haven’t been seeing you in the news.”

“I think that you’d take that as a good sign. I do.”

“Has anything been going on down there?”

“Well,” Gregor said, “there was another murder to­day.”

“Oh, God.” Bennis exhaled a stream of smoke. The sound was so distinctive, Gregor could almost see her do it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t watch the news today. I’ve got a copyedited manuscript to go over. I’ve been frantic. Was it another child?”

“It was a middle-aged woman with a grown daughter and a new grandchild. She lived up at this camp that Zhondra Meyer runs, the one for lesbians. Did I ever ask you if you knew Zhondra Meyer?”

“Yes, you did, Gregor. I don’t know Zhondra Meyer. I know
of
her. Even I couldn’t have met every debutante in the industrial northeast. Not that Zhondra and I would have run into each other on the deb circuit in our day, anyway.”

“Why not? Because you came out in Philadelphia and she came out in New York?”

“No, idiot. Because she’s Jewish and I’m not.” Ben­nis laughed. “I mean, for God’s sake, Gregor, what do you think debutante parties are for?”

“I’ve never had the faintest idea.”

“Well, I don’t have the faintest idea what they’re for now, but in my day the idea was to get the girl married before she had to graduate from college. All the girls I knew had dropped out of Smith by their senior year and had big weddings.”

“You didn’t drop out to get married.”

“No, I didn’t, and from what I remember Zhondra Meyer didn’t, either. I don’t think she’s ever been married. Which makes two of us. Nobody gets married anymore, Gregor.”

“Of course they do. Donna Moradanyan got mar­ried.”

“That’s not what I meant. So what about this middle-aged woman who died? Was her death connected to the death of the baby?”

“I think so.”

“Why?”

“Because the methods appear to be similar. Because some effort was made in each case to make it appear that the murders had taken place in a stand of trees behind Zhondra Meyer’s house. Listen to me call it a house. Do you know what that place is like? Bonaventura?”

“I’ve seen pictures of it. It’s infamous in a way, Gregor. The old man went down there and built this enor­mous thing, and in those days nobody he’d ever heard of lived anywhere around. People couldn’t figure out what he was doing.”

“I’ll bet they still don’t know. Do you know anything about Zhondra Meyer? Does she have a reputation?”

“What kind of reputation?” Bennis asked. “I mean, for God’s sake, Gregor, the woman’s sex life has been in every tabloid and magazine for decades. It’s not as if she were making herself out to be a virgin.”

“That wasn’t the kind of reputation I mean. I don’t know if I can explain it. She seems very imperious. In spite of all the rhetoric about patriarchy and revolution, if I had to describe her to somebody, I’d say she was very much like one of those robber baron matriarchs. A will of iron. The unshakeable conviction that any way she does anything is the right way to do it.”

“I don’t think the robber baron matriarchs had that much self-confidence,” Bennis said. “I seem to remember they were always social climbing, until it finally occurred to them that they had more money than anybody else and they could do what they wanted to do. But I know what you mean. I’ve met women like that.”

“But not Zhondra Meyer. You haven’t heard anything like that about her on the grapevine?”

“Gregor, for God’s sake. I’ve been off that particular grapevine for years. I don’t hang around with debutantes anymore. I live on Cavanaugh Street and write fantasy novels.”

“I wish I had someone on some grapevine some­where,” Gregor said. “I hate these things where I’m trying to figure out people I don’t know and can’t get a handle on. It’s like bouncing around in the dark, playing ghost.”

There was a pause on the line while Bennis lit another cigarette. Gregor heard the flare of the match.

“I thought you had this all sewn up before you left,” she said. “I thought you said the mother had killed the baby, or her husband or her boyfriend had, and it was just a matter of waiting until somebody confessed to it.”

“I still think that sometimes.”

“So what’s the matter? Did you meet her and decide that she was just too wonderful to be guilty?”

“I haven’t met her.”

“What?” Bennis was astonished. “How can you not have met her? Won’t her lawyer let you talk to her?”

“I haven’t asked to talk to her.”

“But why not? For God’s sake, Gregor, under the cir­cumstances, I’d think that was the first thing you would do. I mean, she’s the one they’ve arrested.”