Baptism in Blood

by Jane Haddam

  “Look at this place,” Clayton said. “Man who built it—not the grandfather, I think; the great-grandfather—his wife was dead and his children were grown. He put this place up and came down here to vacation for six weeks every year, mostly by himself. With a dozen servants, but they slept out over the garage. If you see what I mean.”

  “Did he have guests?”

  “He must have had guests,” Clayton said. “I remem­ber in the brochures they used to give out, it talked about the parties he gave. People down from New York. Caviar brought in from I don’t know where—and there weren’t planes to fly it in, not readily available. I don’t think people build places like this anymore even if they can afford it.”

  “In Hollywood, maybe,” Gregor said. “Or one of those new billionaires, like Donald Trump or Bill Gates.”

  “There was this guy Michael Milken once. I thought he’d have a place like this. I don’t know how many hundreds of millions of dollars he made every year. Turned out, all he had was an ordinary house, not even very big. I could have owned it myself; if it was built out here instead of in California.”

  Clayton climbed the steps to the front door and rang the bell. There was a rope to pull instead of a button to push. The rope was made of something shiny and gold, and it was very well kept.

  “Zhondra Meyer can’t be letting down the side en­tirely,” Gregor said. “Somebody’s keeping this place up. Somebody’s keeping it up very well. I think you have to rake gravel drives to make them look like that.”

  “You surely do. Half the town seems to work up here in one capacity or another. I didn’t say Ms. Meyer didn’t keep the place up.”

  “So what is it that you disapprove of so much?” Gregor asked. “It’s obvious that you disapprove. I can see it in your face.”

  “Well,” Clayton Hall said, “it’s like this—”

  But he didn’t have time to finish. The bellpull wasn’t only pretty. It worked. One of the big double doors was drawing open. Gregor stepped back politely to wait. A mo­ment later, he saw the figure of a small, dumpy woman in ragged jeans that bagged out at the knees and thighs. She was peering out at them, worry written all over her face.

  “Excuse me?” she said in a high, tight little voice. “Can I help you?”

  “It’s Clayton Hall, Alice,” Clayton said patiently. “I called Zhondra a few minutes ago. She knows we’re com­ing. This is Gregor Demarkian.”

  Alice turned her head in Gregor’s direction and squinted. She was wearing contact lenses. They were tinted ones, a little off center, so that Gregor could tell. She still seemed to be having trouble seeing him. She looked him up and down and paused for a long moment to stare at his shoes. Then she stepped back even farther and motioned them both in.

  “We have to be very careful,” she said primly, mostly (Gregor assumed) for Gregor’s benefit. “We’re always in danger here. We never know what we’re going to find when the doorbell rings.”

  “Now, Alice,” Clayton Hall said. “You know that isn’t true. You haven’t had a single spot of trouble since Ms. Meyer opened this camp.”

  “We’ve had rhetoric,” Alice retorted self-righteously. “And rhetoric matters. Rhetoric can turn to action at any moment.” She shut the door firmly behind them and turned to Gregor. “We send people into the churches, you know, undercover. People they don’t think belong to us. We tape them.”

  “Tape them doing what?” Gregor was startled.

  “We tape the sermons,” Alice said. “You should hear some of the things we get. Especially down at Henry Holborn’s place. They’re all crazy, down there. In any truly just society, free from patriarchy, they’d all be locked up.”

  “Henry Holborn talks the same way about beer as he does about you,” Clayton Hall said, “and he isn’t rampag­ing around the countryside, shutting down liquor stores.”

  “People did,” Alice said. “There was a woman named Carrie Nation who went around smashing up bars with an ax. Ideas have consequences. You wait and see.”

  “If Henry Holborn starts running around with an ax,” Clayton Hall said, “I’ll know it long before he gets here. We did come to talk to Zhondra, Alice. We even called in advance.”

  “Zhondra is in her study.”

  “Yes, well. Would you please go call her for us?”

  “I’ll go see if she can be disturbed. Sometimes she does her spiritual exercises in her study. If she’s doing her spiritual exercises, I won’t be able to get her for you.”

  “If she’s doing her spiritual exercises, Alice, we’ll sit down right here in the foyer and wait until she’s ready.”

  Alice’s face seemed to twist into a corkscrew. “This is private property you’re standing on, you know. You don’t have a search warrant now. You have no right to be here if we don’t say you can be here.”

  “Zhondra did say we could be here. Alice, for God’s sake—”

  “It’s the hallmark of the patriarchy,” Alice told Gregor. “Men under patriarchy always proceed with vio­lence and intimidation. Life under patriarchy is always a brutal competition for position in the hierarchy. It would be different in a gender-reimaged society. That’s what we do up here. We reimagine ourselves and the world we live in. We strike a blow for equality.”

  “By reimagining?” Gregor asked.

  Alice turned her back on both of them. “I’ll go see if Zhondra can be disturbed,” she said. “But don’t fool your­selves. We’ve not stupid up here. We know what happened with that baby. We know Henry Holborn or one of those people murdered it and planted it up here just to make it look like it happened in the middle of worshipping the Goddess. Nothing like that could happen in the middle of worshipping the Goddess. The Goddess is a goddess of life.”

  “Oh,” Gregor said.

  Alice seemed to think about turning around to face them again and then decided against it.

  “I’ll go talk to Zhondra,” she told them. Then she started off down the hall to the left, walking with that odd rolling gait some almost-fat people have, the back of her churning like the back of a cement truck.

  Gregor turned to Clayton Hall and raised his eye­brows. “What was that all about?” he asked.

  Clayton sighed. “I don’t know. I’ve been listening to it for the past three years, and I just don’t know. It’s like they’ve got a language of their own, and nobody else can understand it.”

  “Do you think they really are sending undercover peo­ple into these churches they’re talking about? Fundamen­talist churches?”

  “I don’t see why not. Anybody can go to church, Mr. Demarkian. All you have to do is show up.”

  “I don’t think that’s a situation I’d like very much, if I were in your position. That’s a situation that’s likely to get dangerous on very short notice.”

  “I’d be a lot more worried if Henry Holborn was sending people up here,” Clayton said. “Alice is one of the calmer people in this place, if you can believe it. The women who come up here are really wound up, and they seem to get more wound up the longer they stay. If you want to know the truth, I wasn’t all that surprised when I first heard there had been a murder up here.”

  “You mean you think there really was some kind of devil worship? That Tiffany Marsh really was killed as a blood sacrifice?”

  “Oh, hell, no, Mr. Demarkian. It’s not that. It’s just that for months now, I’ve been thinking that—”

  There were footsteps in the hall again. Alice chugged back in their direction, looking sourer and angrier than ever. She had her arms folded across her very heavy breasts, making her look out of proportion and unsteady on her feet.

  She stopped a few feet from them and dropped her arms. “Zhondra says she’s ready to talk to you,” she said. “You should come along this way.”

  “Thank you very much,” Clayton Hall said. “I appre­ciate your help.”

  “Oh, don’t give me that,” Alice said furiously. “I’ll bet you just love this. Getting some woman you hardly ev
en know to show you around a house like a servant. I’ll bet you just live for moments like this.”

  Alice whirled away from them again and marched off down the hall she had just come to them from, not bother­ing to look back to see if they were following her. On the other hand, the hall seemed to be a straight shot without curves. Gregor didn’t see what they needed a guide for.

  “Well?” he asked Clayton Hall.

  Clayton was shaking his head. “I know where the study is,” he said. “I don’t know about you, Mr. Demarkian, but I find these women completely bewildering. I mean, why would anybody want to live like this?”

  Gregor didn’t have an answer for that, either, so he let it go.

  2

  AFTER ALICE, ZHONDRA MEYER came as something of a surprise. Without realizing it, Gregor had simply assumed that everybody who lived at the camp would stay true to type, and that that type must have been set by Zhondra Meyer herself. Instead, in no time at all, he found himself face-to-face with a tall, willowy woman with abundant dark hair that fell to just above her shoulders, enormous gray eyes, and the kind of cheekbones fashion models have sur­gery to get. She was dressed in a long, batik-printed skirt and a silk T-shirt that flowed and clung in all the right places. The outfit had been put together at inexpensive places—Gregor had learned enough from Bennis Hannaford by now to be able to work that out—but in an odd way it suited both the woman and the room. The room was as spectacular as Zhondra Meyer herself, or maybe more so. The ceilings seemed to go halfway into space. The marble fireplace was big enough to roast a calf in. The ormolu clock on the mantel was old enough and fine enough to fetch five figures at auction at Sotheby’s, and probably had come down to Zhondra from some relative or other. Almost nobody went out and bought things like that.

  Zhondra Meyer was barefoot. There was a pair of sim­ple thong sandals lying on the fireplace hearth, so simple that Gregor knew they must have cost a great deal of money. Gregor found it interesting to contemplate the things Zhondra Meyer did and did not choose to spend her cash on.

  She came forward and held out her hand to Gregor. “Hello, Clayton. How do you do, Mr. Demarkian, I’m glad you’re here.”

  Alice still hovered in the doorway. Zhondra nodded gently. “It’s all right, Alice. I can take it from here. Why don’t you go find yourself something to eat?”

  “No woman should ever be alone with two male po­lice officers.” Alice’s face was stony. “You remember we talked about that in meeting last week.”

  “Yes,” Zhondra said. “I know we did. But this is different, Alice. There isn’t any need for that kind of pre­caution here.”

  “How can you possibly know that? You’ve never seen that Demarkian person before in your life.”

  “Alice.”

  Alice suddenly looked close to tears. “All right,” she said. “All right. But you be careful. Keep your whistle on you just in case.”

  “I’ve got my whistle on me,” Zhondra said.

  Alice went out the door, but she didn’t shut it. Gregor imagined her lurking in the hallway, listening for the first sounds of violence.

  “Is she always like that?” he asked Zhondra Meyer.

  Zhondra moved to sit down behind her desk. “Yes,” she said, sounding exasperated. “Alice is always like that. You see, she kept trying to divorce her husband. Every time she filed papers, he would show up and break enough of her bones to put her in the hospital, and when she got out he would stalk her until she didn’t dare try to go on with the proceedings. It took her six years to get a decree, and then do you know what happened?”

  “No,” Gregor said.

  “He showed up again, broke both her arms and both her legs, gave her a broken jaw, ruptured her spleen so badly she very nearly died, knocked out most of her teeth, and ripped off all of her clothes in the process. I think the police department in Memphis did then deign to arrest this asshole, but you see what I’m getting at here. Alice is al­ways like that because Alice has good reason to be always like that. So do most of the women who come to stay here. That’s what this place is for.”

  “I didn’t say she didn’t have good reason,” Gregor said.

  “Of course you didn’t.” Zhondra Meyer put her head in her hands and rubbed her eyes. When she looked up again, she seemed faintly blurred. “All right, now,” she said. “Clayton, Mr. Demarkian. Here we are. What do we do now? I don’t want to start sounding like Alice, but things are getting very bad around here. I spend half my time wondering if I’m about to be lynched.”

  “Could I clear some things up first?” Gregor asked. “I’m just a little confused about what exactly is going on here.”

  “Of course,” Zhondra Meyer said. “Ask anything you like. Have a brochure.”

  Gregor took the four-color glossy foldout from Zhondra’s hand. It had a picture, of the front gate on the cover and the words: Bonaventura. A Camp for Gay Women.

  “Well, that answers one thing,” Gregor said. “This is a camp for gay women. If you want to call it a camp.”

  Zhondra grinned. “My grandfather called it his hunt­ing cabin, if you can believe it.”

  “I live very close to the Philadelphia Main Line, Ms. Meyer. I can believe it. Is Alice a lesbian as well as a battered wife? Or did you make a concession in her case?”

  “Actually, sort of both at once. When I opened this place, I thought I was going to have the sort of thing they’ve got in that town in Mississippi, you know, a place where women could come to come out or to talk about what it was like living in a very antigay culture. And I do have that, sort of. But the more I spoke and the more I listened, the more I ran into battered wives who wanted to give up heterosexuality. I don’t know, Mr. Demarkian. I’ve never been particularly attracted by heterosexuality. I sup­pose these days I’m just trying to… help out.”

  “Well, that’s not a bad idea,” Gregor said. “What about all this talk of goddess worship? Were there women up here worshipping a goddess on the day of the hurricane? Which goddess?”

  “The Goddess Sophia, Mr. Demarkian. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of her. She was constructed, really, by the women’s movement. Or specifically, the movement to reclaim women’s spirituality. A lot of women seem to need religion very much, even if religion hasn’t been very good to them.”

  “I take it you don’t need religion very much,” Gregor said.

  “Actually, I’m a rank atheist. The very word ‘spiritu­ality’ makes my eyes glaze over.”

  “But you don’t disapprove of it?”

  “I don’t really think about it. If a bunch of women want to go out to the pine grove and sing songs to the Great Mother of Us All, I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t.”

  “And that was what they were doing the day of the hurricane? Singing songs to the Great Mother?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Naked?”

  Zhondra fluttered her hands in the air. “I know it sounds ridiculous,” she said, “but it’s part of the ritual. Learning to honor your body. Your body is an avatar. The Great Mother lives in every woman. Every woman is there­fore beautiful.”

  “And this requires running around naked in the out­doors during a hurricane?”

  “Well, Mr. Demarkian, the hurricane hadn’t started when they went out to do it. They should have been done long before they had anything to worry about. It isn’t even that long a ceremony.”

  “But they weren’t done.”

  “No, they weren’t,” Zhondra agreed. “That’s be­cause Carol Littleton was late. She’d gone into town to buy a christening present for her granddaughter, I remember, and she didn’t get back until more than half an hour after she was expected. And they didn’t want to start without her, so they waited.”

  “Had the storm started by the time they did?”

  “I don’t know,” Zhondra said. “I wasn’t with them then. I’d come inside. We had a lot of people up here, getting out of the weather. A lot of people from town. I
invited them. I thought it would be good public relations.”

  “Was it?”

  “God only knows. We were all sitting in here around the fire, with the power off and the candles on, playing out a scene from some ancient movie, I suppose, when David Sandler came in with Ginny Marsh and she had blood all over her. I don’t suppose that was good for public rela­tions.”

  “I don’t suppose it was. The women who were sup­posed to be worshipping the goddess weren’t here at the time David Sandler brought back Ginny Marsh?”

  “No, they weren’t.”

  “Who was?”

  “I really couldn’t tell you, Mr. Demarkian. We had a couple of dozen people here. I don’t remember noticing anything in particular. Or anyone.”

  “Would you know just who these couple of dozen people were, if you had to know? Could you write down their names?”

  “All of them? No, I couldn’t. Some were people I’d never even heard of before. They were here out of curiosity, I guess, or because they lived close. I could give you the names of about half of them, though. There were quite a few people I did know. Like Maggie Kelleher and Rose MacNeill and Naomi Brent. Rose was wearing so much religious jewelry, I thought she was going to rename her­self Trinity Christian Church and open up for services.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “We’ll get to that later. For now, let’s think about this goddess service the women were holding. How many women were there?”

  “Three.”

  “Were they regular guests at the camp?”

  ”All three of them have been here longer than a year.”

  “So you knew them well.”

  “I knew them.”

  “Who were they?”

  “Well,” Zhondra said, “Carol Littleton was one. Di­nah Truebrand was one of the other two. She wrote the litany they sang. And then there was Stelle Cary. Stelle is boring. She knew she was a lesbian from the time she was twelve. She’s only here because she wanted to spend some time in a place where that wasn’t a weird thing to be.”

  “What kind of litany was this?” Gregor asked, think­ing about Jackson and his reference to various parts of the female anatomy.