Baptism in Blood Read online

  “There’s something else,” she said. “Something I haven’t even told Bobby about. It worries me.”

  “What’s that, Ginny?”

  Ginny shuddered slightly. “They’re doing things out there, Dr. Sandler. I wasn’t supposed to see them, but I saw them. They’re doing things in the woods with candles.”

  “Candles?”

  “Stark naked, too,” Ginny went on. “Sitting in cir­cles in the leaves. I thought they were, you know, doing something private, but then I heard them chanting. To the goddess. I don’t know which goddess. It sounded like hun­dreds of goddesses. There were so many names. They were calling up the spirits of the earth. I heard them say it. And they had knives.”

  “Knives?”

  “Big long ones. I didn’t see what they did with them. I got out of there as fast as I could. I didn’t want them to know I’d been there. But I’ve been thinking about it. Calling up the spirits of the earth. I figure that has to be the same as the Prince of This World. Don’t you?”

  David cleared his throat. He didn’t know where to start with this. “I don’t think so,” he told Ginny carefully. “I think the idea is, they believe that God is in everything and everything is God, even rocks and trees, so the whole earth is holy, even the leaves and the ground—”

  “But the earth isn’t holy,” Ginny argued. “The earth has been corrupted. That’s what happened at Adam’s fall.”

  Tiffany was twisting and turning on the couch. Her clean new Pampers looked shiny along the waist. Her eyes were bright and round and curious, taking the world in. David wanted to pick her up and take her somewhere where she wouldn’t be taught this kind of nonsense before she could even read.

  Instead, he went to the window of the study and looked out. The sky looked even worse than it had when he was on the deck. The wind was doing hard, erratic things to the weather vane that sat on the roof of the next house down the beach. The world looked cold and dirty and wet.

  “It really is getting bad out there, Ginny,” he said. “I’m going to go into town now. You ought to go, too. Once this storm hits, there’s going to be a mess.”

  “I’ll be praying for your house, Dr. Sandler. I’ll be praying that the Lord preserves this house intact. You re­member that when the storm is over and it’s still standing.”

  “I will remember it.”

  “Maybe that will be the miracle that brings you to the Lord.” Ginny had been kneeling on the floor beside the couch. Now she stood up and brought Tiffany with her. “You were destined to be saved,” Ginny said fervently. “I knew that the minute I saw you. You were destined to be saved, and no matter what you do, the Lord is going to get you in the end. So you might as well give up and come over right now.”

  “I’ll think about it, Ginny.”

  “You do that,” Ginny said.

  Then she stomped away across the study, to get her pocketbook, to pack up her cross and her pencils and her picture. David watched her move, with that funny bouncy lightness so many of the young women down here had. Her ponytail shivered and jumped. Her eyes seemed to be looking at nothing at all. If she had been born in the North instead of the South, David thought, she would have be­lieved in cheerleading and therapy instead of God and Christ Jesus.

  Ginny put Tiffany into her Snugli carrier and slipped the carrier on her back.

  “You take care now,” she told him. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  It was morning, but David didn’t bring that up. It was barely eleven o’clock. He watched Ginny leave the study and all the while he was wondering what fool nonsense Zhondra Meyer and her band of merry ladies were getting up to up at the camp.

  2

  THE TEMPERATURE DROPPED SHARPLY at just about eleven o’clock, but Rose MacNeill didn’t notice it. Rose MacNeill was having a hot flash, the worst she’d had yet, and to make sure nobody caught her at it she had locked herself in the little storage room that had once been the kitchen pan­try of her big Victorian house. It was the only Victorian house in all of Bellerton, North Carolina. All the other big houses in town were pre-Civil War Greek revival. There was a little square window in the pantry that Rose could look out of, down Main Street to the old Episcopal Church. She could see the trees being bent by the wind. She could see Maggie Kelleher nailing boards across the plate glass windows of her bookshop and Charlie Hare folding up the plywood display tables he usually kept feed and fertilizer on. Rose had known both of these people all their lives, and most of the rest of the people in town as well, and it sud­denly struck her that she hated them all with a passion.

  There was a plaque hanging on the wall next to the little square window that said: Jesus Loves You. Out on the street, Jim Bonham stopped to help Maggie Kelleher with her boards. Bobby Marsh went by without talking to any­body. Rose closed her eyes and pressed her forehead against the wall. Her head hurt. Her whole body was hot. She could feel rivers of sweat running down the sides of her spine. She had spent her entire life in Bellerton, North Carolina, and all she had ever really wanted to do was get out. Even back in high school, when she was president of the best school sorority and the steady date of the nicest boy in town, all she had been able to think about was other places, other people, going north to live in New York City or out over the ocean to stay in Paris. Instead, she had stayed here to be safe. She had learned to wear very high heels with very tight skirts and to pin her blond hair into a French twist. She wore enameled tin pins on her dresses that said things like Let Go and Let God.

  She was supposed to be safe.

  Once she stopped feeling hot, she was suddenly cold. She stepped away from the window and squinted through the glass. Maggie Kelleher was mostly done with her win­dow. Bobby Marsh was gone. Jim Bonham was talking to Charlie Hare. Rose wondered where all the rest of them were. Had they all taken care of their places early, and ridden out to stay with relatives inland? And what about those women up at the camp? They didn’t have any rela­tives. That was why they were up at the camp. That was what the paper said. Rose thought for a moment of the women up there. Then she tried to think of what they did with each other, and her mind went blank. Lesbians. The word was a hard crystal rock in Rose’s head. There didn’t used to be lesbians in places like Bellerton, North Carolina. Rose had been nearly forty before she even knew what the word meant. There were lesbians here now, though, and an atheist, too, and with all the publicity they got, Bellerton was getting to be famous. For all the wrong things.

  There was a sharp rap on the pantry door.

  “Rose?” Kathi Nelson asked. “Are you in there? I need to talk to you.”

  Kathi Nelson was Rose’s assistant in the shop. She was seventeen years old and not very bright—and not very popular, either. Rose would have preferred to hire the kind of girls she had been herself at seventeen, but those girls didn’t come asking for jobs in a Christian gift shop. Those girls took cram courses for the Scholastic Aptitude Test and went away to Chapel Hill for college. Things had changed a lot since Rose’s day, when a girl who wanted to go away to college was assumed not to want to get married at all, ever, no matter what.

  “Rose?” Kathi asked again.

  Rose pulled herself away from the little square win­dow. She was surrounded by shipping boxes: one thousand blue enamel angel pins; thirty-four engraved brass desk plaques reading Christ Is the Only Answer You Need; forty-two copies of a book called Help, Lord! The Devil Wants Me Fat! Rose shook her head, hoping to clear her eyes. She didn’t want to rub them, because she had makeup on them and she didn’t want to smear it.

  “I’m here,” she called out to Kathi. “I’ll be right out.”

  “Are you feeling okay, Miss MacNeill? Is there any­thing I can get for you?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Lisa Cameron came in here just a little while ago and bought that great big angel statue to take to her niece’s christening—can you imagine? In this weather. In my church, we don’t believe in people getting baptized until they’re a
ll grown up and know what they’re doing. I mean, what does a little baby know about resisting the snares of the Devil?”

  Rose’s eyes went to the Methodist Church on the other end of Main Street. They baptized little babies there, and teddy bears, too, if someone wanted them to. Women wore good dresses and little hats. The organist knew how to play Bach. It was the most liberal church in town, and Stephen Harrow was the most liberal minister.

  Rose smoothed her hair again, opened the pantry door, and went out into the hall. Kathi was standing in the dim light, wearing a denim overall jumper and a T-shirt. She was plump and overeager, like a badly trained dog. Rose could hear the roof creaking above her head and the whistle of the wind. If it was like this now, before the storm had really started, it was going to be a very bad day.

  “We should lock up and head over to the high school,” Rose told her. “This is going to be awful”

  “Oh, I know,” Kathi said breathlessly. “I know. I’ve been packing things away in cupboards all morning.”

  “Good.”

  “It seems like everybody in town has been working and working,” Kathi said. “Boarding up windows. Do you think we ought to board up some windows?”

  “I wouldn’t know how to start.”

  “These windows are small compared to the ones at the bookstore. And the feed store, too. That has—what do you call it—plate glass.”

  “That’s what you call it.”

  “I wish we could board up the stained glass windows, though. It would be a shame to lose those. They’re so pretty.”

  There was the sound of bells in the air—inside bells, tinkling like fairy queens, the bells that rang every time anybody opened the shop’s front door. Rose and Kathi looked up at once.

  “I wonder who that could be at a time like this,” Kathi said. “It couldn’t be anybody wanting to buy some­thing.”

  “Put the books in there up on higher shelves,” Rose said. “I’ll go see who it is myself.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to do that, Miss MacNeill. I’ll just run on out—”

  “I’ll go see for myself,” Rose repeated. Then she turned her back on Kathi and walked swiftly away, down the hall, toward the sound of someone walking around the front rooms, picking things up and putting them down again. The walking made her feel a little better—a little lighter, a little less old. The movement of air across her face made her feel dizzy.

  When she got to the door to the front rooms, Rose stopped and looked through the spy hole. Then she closed her eyes and counted to ten. The woman wandering around the framed pictures of Christ on the cross and guardian angels standing watch over the beds of children was no one Rose knew, but she was certainly someone Rose recognized. She was one of those women from up at the camp. Unless they’d just arrived that morning, Rose knew every one of the camp’s residents by sight.

  A heavyset woman with hair cropped short and. freckles on her nose. A sloppy woman dressed in a frayed blue cotton shirt and tight synthetic-fabric shorts in very bright red. Rose wrinkled her nose in distaste. It only went to show you. Men were necessary for women. Without men around, women let themselves go all to hell. You could see it in those women from the camp. You could see it in those lesbians.

  A sudden vision of Zhondra Meyer came into Rose’s mind: the tall thinness, the high cheekbones, the big dark eyes. Rose pushed the vision away and opened the door to the front rooms. The woman in there was wandering around among the displays, looking dazed. She stopped in front of a pile of pastel kitchen tiles with the Mother’s Prayer printed on them and blinked.

  “Excuse me,” Rose said. The woman jumped. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  The woman looked down at the Mother’s Prayer again. Then she turned away. She really was a homely woman, Rose thought. Her skin was terrible. Her hair was like straw. Now she was blushing, sort of, mottling up and look­ing strained. Rose had a sudden urge to shake her by the shoulders and put her on a diet.

  “Oh,” the woman said. “Yes. I was looking—for a baptism, you know—for a—”

  Most of the women who came into Rose’s shop were looking for something to buy for a baptism. Either that or they wanted Christian books and didn’t think they were going to get to Raleigh-Durham anytime soon to shop in a real Christian bookstore. There were stories all over town about the kind of baptisms that went on up at the camp, though. Rose didn’t know whether to believe the stories or not. She went behind the checkout counter and picked up a little stack of bookmarks with the face of Jesus printed on them, preserved under laminate that could be cleaned with a wet sponge.

  “You can’t want to buy something for a christening now,” Rose said. “Don’t you realize there’s a storm com­ing?”

  “Storm,” the woman said stupidly. “Oh, yes. Yes. I was in the library, you see—”

  “The library is open today?”

  “It was. For a little while this morning. And I’d heard about the storm, of course, but I didn’t think, you know—”

  “Hurricane Hugo knocked out a third of the South Carolina coast,” Rose said. “We had a storm down here a couple of years ago that took down half the houses on the beach.”

  The woman’s skin mottled again. “That was the kind of thing they were saying at the library. The woman there, the one with the lace collars and the green glasses, she told me—”

  “Naomi Brent.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Naomi Brent,” Rose repeated. “That’s the name of the woman at the library who wears the lace collars and the green glasses. Naomi Brent. She tried out for Miss North Carolina the year she was eighteen, but she didn’t make it.”

  “I wanted to buy a gift,” the woman said. “For a baptism. I wanted to buy one of those pictures, you know, with the mother and child—”

  “A Madonna.”

  “—and I thought you’d have one. A big picture in a frame. That you can hang on a wall.”

  “Are you a Catholic?” Rose asked.

  The woman looked startled. “Catholic? No. No, of course not. Why would you think that?”

  “That’s who mostly wants Madonnas,” Rose said. “Catholics. It’s a kind of Catholic specialty.”

  “Oh.”

  “Regular Christians want pictures of Jesus. Either that or they’re grandmothers, and then they like angels, espe­cially for granddaughters. You shouldn’t buy a Madonna for a regular Christian.”

  The woman’s face seemed to close off. “I want one of those pictures of a mother and child,” she said. “One that can hang on a wall. With a frame.”

  Rose moved around from behind the counter. She didn’t have many Madonnas. There were more Catholics in North Carolina now than there had been when she was growing up, but there still weren’t a lot. She went over to a shelf along the west wall and took down what she had: four different pictures in four different frames, ranging in size from a three-by-five card to a cabinet door. The woman reached immediately for the one the size of the cabinet door. It was the most sentimental one Rose had, with a baby Jesus that looked like he had just eaten all the icing off a cake.

  “How much is this one?” the woman asked.

  “Fifty-four fifty.”

  “Oh.” The woman stepped back. “Well.”

  Rose put her hand on the next size down. “This one is thirty-four fifty,” she said. “The next smallest is twenty- nine ninety-five. The little one is fifteen dollars.”

  The woman looked at the little one. It was a murky picture, hard to see anything in. She picked up the next size larger, the one that would cost twenty-nine ninety-five, and turned it over in her hands.

  “I’ll take this one,” she said.

  “There’ll be sales tax on it,” Rose said. “It’ll come to—”

  “I know.” The woman was turning out the pockets of her shorts. The shorts seemed to be full of money, dollar bills, loose change. The woman went to the counter next to the cash register and laid the money out next to the book­marks a
nd enameled pins. Rose went to the counter, too.

  “Thirty sixty-eight,” she said.

  The woman counted her money out again, and pushed it across the counter with the flat of her hand.

  Five minutes later, Rose was standing at the shop’s front window, watching the heavyset woman walk back up Main Street. Kathi had come out from the back and was watching, too, her hands full of prayer books with thick gold crosses etched into their fake white leather covers.

  “What do you think she really wants it for?” Kathi asked. “Those people don’t get their children baptized, do they?”

  “I don’t think she has any children,” Rose said. “I don’t think any of them do, up at the camp.”

  “Ginny Marsh says they worship a goddess up there. They sit around naked in a circle and call out to spirits. Ginny saw them.”

  “Ginny is a stupid little fool and so are you if you believe them. Let’s get moving here. Can’t you hear the wind?”

  Kathi pressed her face against the small pane of glass. “I wonder what she really wants with that picture, Rose. I wonder what she’s going to do with it. Doesn’t it make you feel creepy, just thinking of what she might have had to get it for?”

  Rose pushed Kathi away from the window and started to close the interior shutters. There were exterior shutters, too. She would have to go around front and get those when she was done inside. She tried to think of the plain, heavy woman doing something evil with a picture of the baby Jesus. Instead she got a picture of Zhondra Meyer again, a picture so clear she could almost touch the curling tendrils of that thick dark hair.

  There’s a storm coming, Rose told herself sternly. Then she started to hurry, to hurry and hurry, because if she didn’t hurry she would think, and if she thought she would go crazy.

  She was already going crazy, and she thought it might be killing her.

  3

  STEPHEN HARROW SAW CAROL Littleton come out of Rose MacNeill’s big Victorian house, carrying a flat brown pa­per bag, but the vision didn’t register. Stephen was stand­ing on the sidewalk in front of the Methodist Church, looking up at the bell tower and worrying. The wind was whistling and rattling in the trees. The few thin strands of sandy hair that were still left on his head were jerking vio­lently across his scalp. In spite of the fact that he was only thirty-two, Stephen felt very old and very stupid. This wasn’t the first time he had wished that he belonged to a denomination whose ministers wore backwards collars. Sometimes it didn’t make any sense to him, being any kind of minister at all. When it got very dark at night, he would try to remember how he had made his decision. He would see himself, all alone in the attic bedroom of his parents’ house in Greenville, Massachusetts. If there was a God, Stephen Harrow had never met Him. If Christ had really risen from the dead, Stephen didn’t think there would be so many different Christian denominations now or so many people who didn’t believe in Him. This was the kind of thing that was understood implicitly in Massachusetts. At the seminary where Stephen had trained, there wasn’t a single professor who would have argued for the literal di­vinity of Jesus. It was different down here. All of his parishioners in Bellerton believed that Jesus Christ was really and truly God incarnate. All of them believed that there would be a last day of judgment with the righteous taken bodily into Heaven along with their immortal souls. Half of them believed in a literal interpretation of Genesis. When Stephen preached a sermon that mentioned evolution, or used it as a metaphor for the spiritual life, he always got a dozen phone calls, complaining about his lack of commit­ment to the inerrant Word of God. God, these people seemed to think, was a ghostly CEO, dictating letters to His tireless secretaries, wearing out the girls in the typing pool, insisting on His words being accepted without correction. Stephen couldn’t remember when he had started to hate it here, but it was soon after he came. If it hadn’t been for his wife, he would have left months ago. By now he even hated the accents these people had, and the way they walked down the street. He wanted to go home.