Baptism in Blood Read online

  They were out of the parking lot now and bumping along an in-town potholed back road. The road was lined with billboards, almost all of them about cigarettes. The Marlboro Man had taken up residence right next door to Joe Camel. In the distance, Gregor could see crosses lit up with neon, glowing red even in the clear light of day.

  “I don’t know,” he told David Sandler. “Somehow, this wasn’t the way I’d imagined you’d want to retire.”

  3

  ACTUALLY, IT GOT MORE and more like a place Gregor could imagine David retiring to the farther and farther they got from the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle. Com­mercial buildings and tightly packed housing developments gave way to open country. Closely crowded billboards gave way to well-spaced ones that appeared like surprises in a birthday cracker along the sides of the road. There was something comforting about the gentle flatness of it all, and the temperature that was neither too hot nor too cold, and the breeze that blew in through the windows of the truck, never too sharp or grating or strong. What was really sur­prising was the utter emptiness of it all. Sometimes the billboards were the only signs of life for miles. What houses there were were few and far between and very small. Gregor never saw any people in them. There were very few other cars on the road, too, and those there were all had out-of-state license plates. This was one of the main routes to Orlando and Disney World. People came through with their car packed solid and their children crying in the backseat.

  After about twenty minutes, David turned off the main road onto a two-lane blacktop. Gregor looked right and left and saw, finally, the South he remembered from so many years ago. There were a few of those solid-looking new brick ranch houses he had seen from the train, but there were also the wooden shacks with their swaybacked roofs and their sagging porches, the washes hung out on lines, the cars missing tires in the side yards. Every once in a while, he saw children, but not many of them. It was the middle of a fall day. The children would be in school. Ev­ery once in a while, he saw an old person, sitting on a porch step. These old people were almost always male. David leaned forward and turned the truck’s radio on to a country station. A singer Gregor didn’t know was singing something apparently called “Pickup Man.”.

  “I was beginning to think all that about the New South was true,” Gregor said. “This certainly looks like the old South to me.”

  “All that stuff about the New South is true,” David said. “It’s just that it applies where it applies and it doesn’t apply where it doesn’t apply. I doubt if half the people who work in the Research Triangle even know all this stuff is here.”

  “Don’t they have to drive through it every once in a while?”

  David shrugged. “Maybe. They probably just don’t pay attention. Why should they? Take a good look at it, Gregor. This is the real dung heap of history. All that high-tech stuff in Raleigh is the future.”

  “If that’s really true, I’m not going to qualify for the future,” Gregor said. “Is Bellerton like this?”

  “This poor, you mean? No. It never was. It was turned into a kind of resort by old Meyer the Robber Baron, if you know who I mean. It’s always been a kind of upscale stop­ping point for weary society people. That’s how we ended up with Zhondra Meyer and her women’s retreat. Which is what started all this, as far as I can tell.”

  “Zhondra Meyer is the woman who runs a camp for lesbians,” Gregor said, trying to make certain he had it all sorted out in his head.

  David made an exasperated gesture in the air. “She’s playing radical hostess to a bunch of women who are more sinned against than sinning, if you know what I mean. I mean, some of them may actually be lesbians in the classic sense, by which I mean they were born with a sexual orien­tation in that direction, but most of them are just worn out. Their husbands beat them or threw them out. Their children have no respect for them. They don’t have much education and they haven’t got much in the way of employment records. Stray cats.”

  “And Zhondra Meyer collects stray cats?”

  “Something like that. I think it makes her feel good about herself, which is what everybody’s after in life these days.”

  “Do these stray cats actually practice Satanic ritu­als?”

  David Sandler blew a raspberry. “Gregor, the stray cats are a bunch of weary-looking middle-aged women who wouldn’t know a Satanic ritual from a coconut custard pie. They’re perfectly harmless. If Zhondra Meyer hadn’t gone around telling anybody that she was making a ‘safe place for gay women’—which is what she said on the radio when she first opened up the place—there wouldn’t be all this nonsense going on now. The problem with Zhondra Meyer is that she not only wants to do good, she wants to let everybody know she’s doing good, and get them all upset about it. Don’t let all the hype and hoopla take you in, Gregor.”

  “No,” Gregor said. “Of course. I wouldn’t.”

  Still, he thought, a woman who not only wanted to do good but wanted to get other people upset about it was not what he would call harmless.

  Three

  1

  WHEN ROSE MACNEILL FIRST heard that Gregor Demarkian was coming to Bellerton, she did absolutely nothing about it. That was right after the hurricane, when there was so much to do and all that trouble with Ginny Marsh on top of it—not that that trouble with Ginny Marsh had ever ended, not to this very day, because it hadn’t. Rose Mac­Neill hadn’t known the baby, Tiffany, and for that reason she had a hard time thinking of it as real. When she tried to focus on Tiffany, what she saw was a package in a har­ness on Ginny, with no eyes or nose or mouth to distin­guish it. She got a much better picture in her mind of Zhondra Meyer, and what Zhondra must have looked like when the baby was discovered dead. She could have seen Zhondra’s face at the time, since she was up at the camp getting out of the storm herself, but she had been otherwise occupied. It was the storm Rose really fixated on, no matter how hard she tried to think of other things. Rose had been in hurricanes before, but never anything like Elsa. She had come roaring in on them all at once, all wind and water and battering debris. Rose remembered standing in the doorway of her shop and watching the wind slice the roof right off of Lisa Cameron’s house on Ellerver Street, and that was be­fore the real trouble started. That was at the very beginning, when Rose had decided that going to the high school wouldn’t be enough. She would have to get to even higher ground. The wind was battering against the windows of the shop, making them rattle. The rose petal stained glass win­dow in the pantry hall shook itself to pieces. All along Main Street, the power lines were down. Telephone poles were snapped and twisted and hanging sideways. The thin black cables for the cable TV were ripped off the sides of houses and twisted into snakelike coiling heaps on the ground. All the people had disappeared—and that, Rose had found to her surprise, was a wonderful thing. There was something truly magical about Bellerton with no peo­ple in it.

  The second time Rose MacNeill heard that Gregor Demarkian was coming to Bellerton, she was standing in Charlie Hare’s feed store, buying a packet of seed for the basil she liked to grow in pots on the ledge over her kitchen sink—and then it struck her. By then it was all over, theo­retically. The plywood had come off the windows of the stores on Main Street. Maggie Kelleher had even put out a little display stand full of paperback books, horror novels with cutout covers and silver foil letters and pictures of the Devil glaring through fiery eye sockets that had nothing in them but flames. Still, there was no way to ignore the fact that Something Had Happened, the Something at the time being represented not by the debris still scattered over Main Street itself or the number of houses without roofs that could be seen by standing on the front steps of the library, but by the CBS News truck parked in front of Town Hall. Something had happened, all right, and that something was Ginny Marsh and her dead baby and what might or might not have gone on up at the camp while the storm was going on everywhere else.

  “It was David Sandler’s idea,” Charlie Hare told her, as he put her seed packet
into a small brown paper bag. Rose’s mother used to put her school lunches in paper bags just like that one, when Rose was in elementary school. “Sandler knew him from somewhere. Clayton Hall says it’s okay for him to be here, too, because with a case like this, it’s good to look like you’re doing everything you can.”

  “Oh, yes,” Rose said. “I suppose it would be. Why is the name so familiar to me?”

  “It’s familiar because it’s in People magazine all the time,” Charlie said. “The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. That one.”

  Something went click in the inner recesses of Rose MacNeill’s brain. She looked down at the paper bag with the seed packet in it and caught her hands instead, long-fingered and beginning to go rough.

  “The thing is,” Charlie continued, “what’s got a lot of people worried, is that if Sandler is an atheist, maybe this Demarkian is an atheist, too. And it’s like Henry Holborn is always saying. You don’t want an atheist mixed up in a case like this.”

  “What?” Rose said.

  Charlie’s face went round and bloated with self-satis­faction. The little gold cross he wore on a chain around his neck gleamed in the light from the fluorescent patch above his head. “Atheists don’t believe in God, do they?” he asked her. “And because atheists don’t believe in God, they’ve got no resources against the Devil. And you have to admit it, Rose, no matter what you think about religion. The Devil is what we’ve got here, one way or another. The Devil pure and simple.”

  Rose snatched the paper bag out of Charlie’s hand. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she snapped. “And don’t you go around talking like that, either, Charlie Hare. It could cause a lot of trouble.”

  “We’ve already got a lot of trouble. We’ve got a baby dead. We’ve got a baby with its throat slit and its skin carved up. That’s what the paper said that came down from Raleigh.”

  “You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the pa­per,” Rose snapped. “And you shouldn’t believe every­thing Henry Holborn tells you, either, that old snake oil salesman. He’s just like one of those preachers my grandma used to go to hear, and your grandma, too, if you’re honest about it, and you know it.”

  “There’s nothing to be said against the way my grandma practiced her religion,” Charlie said stiffly. “She was a good woman. She was a holy woman by the time she died. They knew how to give their lives to the Lord in those days.”

  “All Henry Holborn knows how to give to is himself. He’s been stirring up trouble against that camp since the day it opened, and you know why? Because it scares the pants off the local yokels, that’s why. Half of them don’t know what a lesbian is and the other half would just as soon try it. And as soon as Henry has them all worked up, they just dump their paychecks in his lap.”

  “Henry Holborn is a man of God,” Charlie said, even more stiffly. “You ought to watch yourself, Rose MacNeill. You ought to get yourself born again. The way you’re going these days, you’re going to end up in the arms of the Devil yourself.”

  “You’re going to end up in the asylum,” Rose said furiously. “What’s gotten into everybody these days? Peo­ple used to know better.”

  “People used to worship God and obey His command­ments,” Charlie said, “and now they don’t anymore. You ought to do some listening instead of talking someday, Rose. We’re living in the End Times. Henry Holborn’s been saying so for years. We’re living in the End Times and God is calling us all to choose up sides.”

  Rose’s head had started to throb. “If we’re living in the End Times, I won’t need a packet of basil seeds,” she said, throwing the paper bag down on the counter in front of Charlie. “The Rapture’s likely to start and lift me up into Heaven when I’m in the middle of planting.”

  “The Rapture’s not likely to lift you up anywhere,” Charlie said.

  “The Rapture’s more likely to lift me up than the Devil is to appear up at Zhondra Meyer’s camp,” Rose spat out—and then she couldn’t take it anymore, she just couldn’t. She left her seeds on Charlie’s counter, turned on her high stiletto heels, and marched back onto Main Street. The air was muggy and thick with water. The street was full of strangers—not just CBS News, but all the rest of them. NBC. ABC. CNN. Writers for papers as far away as San Francisco and Portland. All of this, because of Ginny Marsh and her silly story, her evil story, her—

  Rose marched back down Main Street to the big Vic­torian house and let herself in the side door. She could hear Kathi Nelson in the front room, waiting on a customer. The customer had a funny voice, like a tourist’s. Since there weren’t any tourists in Bellerton this time of year, Rose presumed the voice belonged to one of the media people. Rose went into the kitchen and sat down at the little table in the corner where she had her computer set up. There were people who seemed to be resisting the information age with every cell in their bodies, but Rose wasn’t one of them. She’d gotten herself on the Internet within a week of the first time she ever heard of it, and by now she didn’t know how she had ever lived without it.

  “That will be twelve ninety-five,” she heard Kathi Nelson say to somebody.

  Rose poked her perfectly manicured, perfectly scarlet fingernails into her high pile of dark hair. Today she had stood in Charlie Hare’s store and defended those lesbians up at that camp. That was what she had done. She had no idea why she had done it. Even right before the storm, she would have said she hated those people up there as thor­oughly as she had ever hated anybody in her life. She still thought she did.

  “Have a good day,” she heard Kathi Nelson call out. Rose made a face, and the little strip of cowbells on the front door tinkled.

  It was better when everybody said, “Y’all come back now, hear?”—except they didn’t anymore, because ever since it had been on that commercial, everybody thought it was hick.

  Rose tapped a series of input numbers on the key­board, waited for the system to get into form, and wrote:

  GREGOR DEMARKIAN

  GLOBAL REQUEST

  Then she sat back and waited to see what would happen. Usually, nothing did happen, not at once. It took at least half an hour, or sometimes more. This time she must have caught the system just as somebody useful was logging on to it. In no time at all, a blizzard of words appeared on her screen and her printer began to whirr.

  Rose had expected that the information she got would be more or less along the lines of the information she’d heard—the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot; the darling of People—but instead what came up on the screen was all about the Federal Bureau of Investigation and serial killers. Rose MacNeill bit her lip.

  Really, she thought. This might be more interesting than she’d thought it would be. This might be something she could get involved in, even if she couldn’t make the baby be real to her, as real to her as Zhondra Meyer and the camp.

  Lately, nothing seemed very real to her anyway, and her head always seemed to ache. She had always been a very religious woman. The store was full of religious things. She still wore her pin that said Let Go and Let God. She still believed that the Bible was the inerrant word of God and that evolution had never happened and that the problem with the children in the schools today was that they didn’t pray enough. It was just that, since the storm, everything seemed to be mixed up.

  The computer was whirring and pulsing. Rose’s head was whirring and pulsing, too. She rubbed her eyes with her hands and reached for the printout that was beginning to pile up next to her printer. Before this was over, she would have pages and pages of words about Gregor Demarkian—and it would be much easier for her to think about that than to think again about all these other things.

  2

  FOR THE FIRST FEW days, Stephen Harrow had felt very, very important. He had been up there at the time, up at the camp, and he was known to be nothing more than an intel­ligent bystander. Newspeople wanted to interview him. He looked good standing in front of a camera, tweedy and academic, like a college professor. His long, thin face and narrow,
elegant hands showed well on videotape. His eyes actually looked bluer on television than they were in real life. Stephen found it hard to convince himself that it was him up there, flickering and ghostly in the dark of the bed­room at eleven o’clock. He found himself wondering if this was what actors felt like when they saw themselves for the first time in the movies. Maybe everybody this happened to felt unreal and a little uneasy. Maybe everybody found it hard to distinguish between themselves and the picture on the screen.

  Stephen wasn’t sure when things had started to change, but he knew why they had changed, and that was enough: He was not a real celebrity, and David Sandler was. Worse than that, of course, was the fact that it was David Sandler who had come stumbling across a blood-spattered Ginny Marsh and gone off with her to find the baby. Stephen had been sitting at the table in the kitchen at the camp at the time, trying not to notice that the women around him wore much fewer clothes than the women he was used to. It wasn’t that he was aroused by the show. He couldn’t have been. They were ugly women up there at the camp, with the exception of Zhondra Meyer herself. Most of them didn’t shave their legs, and none of them wore makeup. Their clothes were funny, too—boxy and made of synthetic fabrics; cheaply made and badly cut. Where Ste­phen came from, women paid attention to their appearance. Even the women who called themselves feminists had a great deal of interest in matters of style. These women had skin that hung limply away from their bones, that puckered and darkened in unexpected places. Stephen found it painful to look at them. Part of him kept insisting that it must hurt, physically, for women to be so unattractive. They had to have pain like arthritis in all of their joints. It pained him to look at them, and it embarrassed him, too.