Baptism in Blood (36 page)

“Naomi? Did I hear that right? Zhondra Meyer com­mitted suicide?”

“That’s what everybody’s been saying,” Naomi said. “Weren’t you around this afternoon? They had the ambu­lance up there and everything.”

Betsey came down from the other end of the counter, her apron out of true, her expression harried. “Good eve­ning, Henry. Can I get you something?”

“You could get me a cup of coffee and a tuna fish sandwich,” Henry told her. “Betsey, am I hearing this right? Zhondra Meyer committed suicide? And confessed to what? Killing Ginny Marsh’s baby?”

Betsey brushed hair out of her face with the flat of her hand. “That’s what everybody’s saying, and that’s the offi­cial word, too, but I’ve heard other things. You just sit here for a while and you’ll hear other things, too.”

“One of
them
says that Zhondra Meyer was mur­dered,” Naomi Brent said, tossing her head backward, meaning to take in all the reporters in the room. “But no­body’s buying it. It’s just what
they
want to think. They don’t want to imagine for a minute that one of their pre­cious New Yorkers could come down here and cause a lot of mayhem and blame it on us.”

Betsey had gone away to get some coffee. Now she came back again, cup in hand. “It’s true, what Naomi says. They want to make us look like a bunch of murdering cre­tins. They think we go to church on Wednesday nights and have fits.”

“I, for one, think it makes perfect sense that Zhondra Meyer killed them,” Naomi Brent said. “Not that I think that she was worshipping the Devil or anything like that. I don’t believe that people really worship the Devil. No of­fense meant, Reverend.”

“No offense taken,” Henry Holborn said automati­cally.

“They think we’re all violent and dangerous down here,” Betsey said, “and ignorant, too. You should hear the way they talk to me sometimes. It makes me sick.”

“And they lie, too,” Naomi said. “They lie to make their stories come out better. They only interview people the rest of us would consider a little odd. They only listen to what they want to hear. But it’s true, you know. It makes much more sense that Zhondra Meyer killed them.”

The man on the stool on Henry’s other side stirred. He was a young man, with hair that hung a little too far over his ears, and eyes that looked ready to fall out of his head. He had a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich in front of him and a big plate of fries, but he didn’t seem to have touched either.

“Wait a minute now,” he said. “What about Susan Smith? She was a southerner from a small town. She was religious. She killed her children.”

“Susan Smith was a mentally disturbed girl with a history of depression,” Naomi Brent said, “and she wasn’t religious. She didn’t belong to any church that I ever heard of.”

“She talked about God all the time,” the reporter said. “She talked about her faith. What do you call reli­gious?”

Betsey had disappeared again. Now she was back, with Henry’s tuna fish sandwich on a plate.

“I call religious giving your life to Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior,” she said. “I call it making a com­mitment to the Lord, not just mouthing off about how God is up there somewhere and you’re sure He loves you be­cause you can just feel it.”

“Oh, Lord,” Naomi Brent groaned.

“It wasn’t Zhondra Meyer who started all that talk about worshipping the devil,” the reporter said. “It was some preacher. And you’ve got to admit. Religious people aren’t very tolerant.”

“Oh, tolerant,” Naomi said. “We’re tolerant enough if people just behave themselves.”

“But that’s the point,” somebody else said now, an­other reporter from another part of the room, a woman. “People have a right to live their lives as they see fit. They shouldn’t have to deal with people who are trying to im­pose their religion on everybody else.”

Naomi raised her eyes to heaven. “Why is it,” she demanded, “that when religious people try to tell other people what they feel is right and wrong, that’s imposing their religion, but when secular people do it, it’s free speech?”

“And what about the high school?” Betsey said. “According to the Supreme Court, it’s just A-okay for the high school to have an Atheists’ Club, but it can’t have any religious club, because that’s establishing religion.”

“But it would be establishing religion,” the first re­porter said. “The religious clubs wouldn’t be just clubs. They’d be recruiting organizations. The point would be to coerce more people into believing in Christianity.”

“The Atheists’ Club is a recruiting organization,” Naomi said. “They’re always putting up signs announcing how they’re going to have a presentation that might change your mind about God if you only heard it. And besides, this isn’t about God at all, I don’t think. This is about homosex­uals.”

“I don’t think homophobia is a very attractive trait,” the young reporter said stiffly.

“I don’t think anyone here is homophobic,” Henry put in. “I don’t think anybody here is
afraid
of homosexu­ality. I think a good many of us abominate it, but that’s a different thing.”

You could feel it in the room then, the sea change, the shift. Up until the time that Henry had said his little piece about homophobia, everything had still been basically all right. People were listening to Naomi and Betsey talk, but not taking them very seriously. People were nibbling away at sandwiches and sipping at coffee and thinking about home. Henry’s voice seemed to boom out over all of them. It sounded too loud even to him. The words seemed to hang in the air after they had been said, drops of water threaten­ing to become rain.

“Shit,” the reporter sitting at Henry’s side said. “I can’t stand this anymore. This is total crap.”

Henry had no idea what the young man was talking about: Bellerton? the murders? this diner? God? It wasn’t logic but emotion that swung Henry around on his stool. He had spent the day without feeling much of anything at all. Now it was all coming up in him, like bile rising in his throat, and he was furious.

“I do not understand,” he said, feeling the blood pounding under his skull, “what it is about being the resi­dent of some big city that makes it impossible to respect other people and their beliefs instead of—”

“I know who that is,” somebody else in the room said. “That’s the preacher. The one who had the cross up at the camp when that woman’s body was found. The one who’s always talking about the devil.”

“How can you talk about respecting people?” the woman who had spoken before said. “You don’t respect women. You’d rather see them dead than let them be inde­pendent of men.”

“I’ve never wanted to see a woman dead in my life,” Henry Holborn said, confused.

“Wait a minute,” Betsey said, suddenly visibly scared. “Wait a minute, now. We should all calm down.”

“Oh, I’m sick of calming down.” The woman was sitting in the big semicircular booth in the far back corner with three other people. The three other people sat there while she stood up and strode across the diner to where Henry Holborn was sitting. She was an attractive-looking woman, in her thirties, in a suit. In any other situation, Henry Holborn would barely have noticed her.

She got to Henry Holborn’s stool, grabbed him by the shoulders, and spun him around. “Listen to me,” she de­manded. “You think you’re all sick of us? Well, I’m sick of all of you. I’m sick of having my radio alarm go off every morning and some loudmouthed jerk come on telling me to accept Christ as my personal savior. I’m sick of sitting at traffic lights behind cars with bumper stickers that say ‘Abortion Stops a Beating Heart.’ I’m sick of listening to you all go on endlessly about how wonderful you all are. You’re a bunch of tenth-rate backwoods hicks, and if you don’t know it yet, you’d better learn.”

Betsey drew herself up to her full height and puffed out her chest. “Get out of here,” she demanded. “Get out of here right this minute. And don’t come back.”

“Oh, I’ll get out all right,” the woman said. “I’ll be happy to. But before I get out of town, I think I’m going to leave all of you something to remember me by. Maybe I’ll give a lot of money to that camp up there so that they can open an abortion clinic. This is the twentieth century. It’s practically the twenty-first. Get
real.
”

“Get
out
,” Betsey said.

Henry Holborn still had a cup two-thirds full of coffee sitting in front of him. The woman leaned past him and picked it up. For an instant, there was some doubt about what was going to happen next. The young man sitting next to Henry looked faintly alarmed. Naomi was struggling to her feet, getting ready to defend Henry if she could. Even so, the room was incredibly hostile. Henry had preached to rooms like this when he was first starting out, and calling them nests of vipers was not indulging in exaggeration. Blood lust was as old as the human race. Look at Adam and Eve. Look at Cain and Abel. The urge to kill came out of hiding whenever it got a chance.

The woman had Henry’s coffee cup in her hand. Henry knew what she was going to do, but he couldn’t make himself move out of the way of it. It was like waiting for the Apocalypse.

“Wait a minute,” the young man on the other side of Henry said, but it was too late.

The coffee cup was high in the air over Henry Holborn’s head. The woman turned it upside down and let a cascade of brown liquid fall into his hair. Then she waved the cup even higher, and the saucer too, and sent them both crashing to the floor.

“To hell with all of you,” she said.

Then she put her arm flat against the counter and swept it as far as it would go, sending plates and cups crashing to the floor, Naomi’s coffee, Henry’s tuna fish sandwich, the young reporter’s BLT. There was suddenly glass everywhere, bouncing up from the linoleum, skitter­ing along the floor.

“I’ll call the police,” Betsey screeched. “I’ll call the police right this minute.”

“Call anyone you want to,” the woman said. “I’m over at the Super Eight Motel on the Hartford Road. Room 233. I’ll be there for the rest of the night.”

Then she strode to the diner’s front door, yanked it open, and walked out.

Henry felt the tension in the room like a thin film of mayonnaise. He thought somebody else was going to blow, more damage was going to be done. Instead, way behind his back where he couldn’t hope to see, a faint giggling started. It got louder and louder and stronger and stronger and suddenly they were all doing it, all the reporters. Henry and Naomi and Betsey were struck dumb. Some of the reporters were laughing so hard, they were choking. The young man sitting next to Henry had his head down on the counter and his eyes were streaming with tears.

To Henry, of course, it was his worst nightmare be­come real, it was everything he had ever been afraid of happening at once.

He was in a public place, and everybody was laughing at him.

O
UT AT THE BEACH
, David Sandler sat in a canvas chair on his deck, nursing a glass of wine and watching Maggie Kelleher watch the moon. It had just come up, and now its pale light was a stream across the water, like a streak in a woman’s dark hair. David had called Maggie up as soon as he realized that Gregor would not be back for dinner, again. He had had no idea, when he asked Gregor down here, that investigating a murder would mean he never saw his houseguest at all. Or hardly ever. The wine was a good Vin Santo David had brought down from New York. He had a pile of almond biscotti on a plate on the deck floor, in case Maggie should want to dunk cookies while she drank. It would have been a good evening, except that Maggie was depressed, and that made David depressed, too. He had known Maggie on and off now for at least five years, but only recently had he begun to know her well.

“So,” he said, “do you think it’s all true? Do you think Zhondra Meyer killed Tiffany and Carol and then killed herself out of remorse?”

“No,” Maggie said.

“I don’t either,” David admitted. “It’s too easy, isn’t it? I can’t imagine Zhondra Meyer actually committing sui­cide.”

“I’ve been hearing things ever since it happened that it might be a murder after all,” Maggie said. “Did your friend say anything? I heard somebody say that the police wanted to talk to Stephen Harrow.”

“Stephen Harrow? Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they think he did it. Maybe he was Zhondra Meyer’s lover.”

“Zhondra Meyer was a lesbian.”

“Well, David, that doesn’t always do it, does it? Peo­ple do all kinds of crazy things, especially with sex. And Zhondra always appeared to me to be the kind of person who did what she wanted to do when she wanted to do it, and the hell with everybody else.”

David shifted slightly in his chair. “Gregor doesn’t tell me anything. It’s no better than reading the morning papers, having him here. Except that Gregor is Gregor, and I like having him here. I like having you here, too, Mag­gie.”

“I know you do. I like being here.”

“You ought to give a little more consideration to my proposition,” David said. “I know it sounds radical at the moment, moving back to New York, but believe me, we could work it out.”

“I never said we couldn’t.”

“You just don’t want to. Maybe it’s just that you don’t want to with me.”

Maggie swung her foot around and nudged him in the knee. “It’s not you that’s the problem, David. It’s New York. I’ve already lived in New York.”

“And you didn’t like it.”

“I liked it fine. It didn’t like me. There are people who are natural New Yorkers, David, and I’m not one of them.”

“It would be different this time, Maggie. I have a per­fectly good apartment on Riverside Drive. You wouldn’t have to shack up in some godforsaken hole you’re paying fifteen hundred dollars a month for.”

“I know that.”

“And you wouldn’t be—trying all the time, if you know what I mean. It wouldn’t be a test. I think that’s what goes wrong with New York for too many people. They only go there to make their fortunes. They don’t go there to live.”

“I didn’t make my fortune, David.”

“Most people don’t.”

“I felt more like a hick after I’d been there for five years than I had when I came. Maybe it was just that I knew so much more, it was so much easier to see my inade­quacies.”