by Jane Haddam
“Yes, I am. But I’m not nearly passing out on Main Street.”
“I’m not, either, David, not anymore. I really will be all right. You ought to go on with whatever it was you were doing.”
“I was going to go into Maggie’s and buy a book.”
“Well, good. You go do that. Maggie could use the company. The store is absolutely dead.”
“I’m sure it is.” David hesitated. Part of him did not want to leave Stephen on his own. Stephen had been reeling. Stephen had been close to passing out. Another part of him didn’t want to hang on to Stephen when Stephen didn’t want to be hung on to. One of the cardinal principles of David Sandler’s life was that people ought to be left alone when they wanted to be left alone. People had the right to make stupid decisions as well as wise and good ones.
“Are you sure now?” David said. “You can make it back to the church on your own?”
“I won’t have any problems at all.”
“I’d go see a doctor pretty soon if I were you, though. It never hurts to check.”
“I’ll take your advice under consideration. Really, David. I’m all right. You don’t have to worry about what’s going to happen to me.”
Stephen shook his arm free and moved on. David stood on the sidewalk watching him go. The farther away Stephen got, the faster he seemed to go and the straighter he seemed to get. It really was all right, David told himself—but it still didn’t feel right, and he wished he could think of something to do about it.
Instead, he turned back the way he had come. It was an oddly beautiful day, bright and clear—but empty, much too empty, and much too quiet, too. Maybe it was just that he still had the sound of Henry Holborn and his people singing “That Old Time Religion” in his head, but he kept thinking that he ought to hear something besides tree leaves rustling and sand scraping along in the gutters.
On the way back down the sidewalk, he passed in front of the Town Hall on the side where the jail window was, but on the other side of the street. He thought for a moment that he saw Ginny Marsh in there, looking out, counting his footsteps on the pavement.
Three
1
AFTER A WHILE IT got to the point where there was nothing left to do. The crowd was dispersed, as Clayton Hall insisted on describing it. He meant that after he had fired a few shots in the air, most of the people who had been watching from the sidelines decided they had things they would rather do. That was the case even with some of the reporters, who had all begun to look nervous and jumpy. After all, none of them had volunteered for combat duty. This was not supposed to be a dangerous assignment in the same sense as spending a few weeks in Sarajevo or Beirut. What Gregor noticed was that the people from town were faintly irritated and the strangers were more than a little alarmed. The people from town knew Clayton too well not to know what he was doing with a weapon. The strangers didn’t want to take anything for granted. After all, you never knew what people would do, especially these people, especially down here. These were the people who joined the National Rifle Association and claimed to keep at least two guns in their houses at all times. In the end, however, it was Henry Holborn who set the tone for everybody else. When the shot was fired, it seemed to change something in him, something deep. Gregor saw the metamorphosis in the older man’s face, working itself out like the plot of a bad soap opera. As soon as it was done, Henry Holborn’s face collapsed. His shoulders slumped. His body seemed to half melt into putty. He turned around to the people behind him and waved his arms.
“Wait, wait,” he called out. His voice had none of the boom to it that it had had when he was praying. Gregor could barely hear him. Few of his followers could hear him, either. The crowd on the edges of the clearing had begun to thin. Gregor saw Maggie Kelleher slip away, and Naomi Brent, and David Sandler. He recognized a few other people, too, like Betsey from the diner. Ricky Drake was in among Henry Holborn’s people, looking both belligerent and scared. Gregor started to fade back, toward the trees.
“Wait,” Henry Holborn called out again—and then a vast murmuring went up, a thousand tinny voices talking at once. Up until then, Henry Holborn’s people had been absolutely quiet. Now they were all talking at once, and it was like listening to bees humming along the telephone wires. In the sudden normality of this scene, they had become normal, too—not zealots and monsters, but ordinary men and women, old and middle-aged and young, small-town people who had come to witness another death they didn’t believe they had anything to do with.
It took a while to get the clearing free of civilians, and a while more for the tech men to do what they needed to do and pack up their equipment. Gregor spent all that time sitting on a rock just into the trees, thinking. This was not an easy operation. There was no wide path up here that an ambulance could take. The ambulance was parked down in Bonaventura’s back drive, along with the police cars and the mobile crime unit that belonged to the state police. Gregor watched Clayton Hall writing down things in a small steno pad, but he didn’t ask what those things were. He knew a look of bewilderment when he saw it, and he was bewildered enough himself. He was also enormously tired. He hadn’t paid much attention to the time he had gotten out of bed this morning, but it had been early, and he had been moving ever since. He wanted to lie down and take a nap, but there was no place to do it among the trees. He wouldn’t have lain down in the clearing even if it hadn’t been full of people. Over the course of the afternoon, the clearing had taken on a personality for him. Ghosts floated above it, and bodiless voices whispered in the trees. He stared and stared at the stones, but there was nothing in them that could tell him what it was about this place that was so important to somebody, so central, that it had become the stage of choice whenever a body was supposed to be found. There was just something about this place.
Now it was hours later—almost three, Gregor thought, wishing he could be sure of the reading on his watch in all these shadows—and the whole of Bonaventura seemed to be deserted. There were birds in the trees and rustlings in the pine needles under his feet. Gregor didn’t even want to think of what kind of little animals might live in a stand of trees like this one. Rats. Chipmunks. Snakes. He strained to hear what was to be heard and decided nothing could be. He had heard the last of the official cars drive away a good five minutes ago. He thought that even Clayton Hall must have gone back to town. The first forty-eight hours after the commission of a crime were supposed to be the important ones, but in Gregor’s experience they were also times of relative paralysis. Maybe it was different for big-city police officers who dealt with homicides every day, but for small-town cops like Clayton Hall, and detached federal professionals like Gregor himself, there was always a period when the most important thing was to assimilate everything that had happened and everything that they had had to see. Human beings had been murdering each other for millions of years. It had to be perfectly natural. It didn’t look natural when you came face-to-face with it, though, and the feeling of strangeness and wrongness and alienation persisted. It might be perfectly natural for human beings to murder each other, but it went against something deeper than nature. It was this something-deeper-than-nature that made up Gregor Demarkian’s religion, as far as he had ever had one. He wondered what Father Tibor would think if he came out and told him that.
When there was absolute quiet all around him, when even the birds had stopped calling to each other in the air, Gregor began making his way down the hill toward the house. The trees were such thickly needled pines that they made it impossible for him to see much of anything until he came to the very edge of them. Then he saw the narrow path leading to the terrace and the back of the house. The terrace was empty, although at least three of the French doors were standing open. Gregor’s slick leather shoes kept slipping against the pine needles. Bennis was right. One of these days, he was going to have to give in and buy the kind of thing most people wore on their feet, like sneakers or moccasins. If he kept on exploring forest clear
ings in wing tips, he was going to end up breaking his neck.
Gregor got to the terrace and began to look through each of the open French doors in turn. The first two, although fairly far apart, opened onto the same room, a big tall-ceilinged reception room, full of Louis XVI furniture, the walls painted with Italian Madonnas, fat-cheeked, vacant-eyed women holding fat-cheeked, squirming infants. Gregor tried to imagine doing, in this room, the things people ordinarily did in living rooms: playing cards, watching television, reading books, gossiping about the neighbors. It was impossible. This was a room for a king and queen to receive their court in. At the very least, it should have a butler stationed at its main door, ready to announce the name of anyone who wanted to come in. Gregor drifted down the terrace to the last of the open French doors. It was the terrace door to Zhondra Meyer’s big study, and Zhondra was there, sitting at the desk, tapping away at a computer. Some people might have found something incongruous in this, but Gregor didn’t. The computer seemed to him to be the only thing about the study that made the room even faintly livable. Obviously, he was not cut out to be a very rich man.
Zhondra Meyer looked up from what she was doing, saw Gregor standing at the terrace door, and blinked.
“For God’s sake,” she said. “What are you doing here? I thought you’d all gone.”
“Everybody else has.” Gregor stepped through the door into the study. “I’ve been sitting on a rock up there, thinking. I just came to, so to speak.”
“Well, you can just go, too, right this minute,” Zhondra Meyer said tartly. “I told you up there, hours ago. I’ve had it with all this. I’m not answering any more questions, and I’m not cooperating with any more police officers.”
“I’m not a police officer. I’m not even a private detective. Did Clayton ever get to talk to those two women we came up here to talk to this morning? Dinah and—”
“Stelle,” Zhondra Meyer said. “He talked to them, sort of. He grilled them or whatever you call it. You know what I mean. He asked them a lot of questions about whether or not they killed Carol, and he reduced poor Dinah to tears.”
“I take it he decided that they hadn’t killed Carol Littleton.”
Zhondra waved this all away. “I don’t know what he decided. He went away, that’s all, and I was glad to see him go. Everybody around here is in a state of panic. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“Did you call your lawyers?”
“Oh, yes.”
“And?”
“They’re going to send somebody down here in the morning. It’s wonderful what having a couple of hundred million dollars can do. People just fall all over you to be nice to you.”
“I’m sure they do.”
Zhondra Meyer tapped the desk at the side of her keyboard. “I really do think you ought to go now, Mr. Demarkian. There’s nothing you can do here at the moment. There’s nothing I’m really willing to let you do. Rack it up and call it the end of a bad day.”
“Do you really want to find out who murdered Tiffany Marsh?”
“Of course I do,” Zhondra said.
“Do you really want to know why somebody is using your place as a dumping ground for dead bodies?”
“I think these are ridiculous questions, Mr. Demarkian. I don’t understand what it is they have to do with you.”
Gregor came all the way into the room, found a tall yellow wing chair, and sat down in it. “I would like to talk to Dinah and Stelle, if I could. Right this minute. After I talk to them, I’ll be more than willing to go back to town on my own two feet, without having to be propelled in that direction by you.”
“What if I don’t want you to talk to Dinah and Stelle?”
“I don’t think that circumstance is likely to come up, Ms. Meyer. In spite of your tone of anger and exasperation, it’s my very good guess that you’re scared to death. I promise you I won’t grill either of your guests. I just want to ask them a few questions.”
“If you were Clayton Hall, I’d throw you out on your ear.”
“But I’m not Clayton Hall.”
Zhondra Meyer seemed to consider this seriously, watching Gregor’s face all the time. Then she reached out and grabbed the phone that had been pushed to the side of the desk by the computer equipment.
“Alice?” she said, after she had punched a few buttons and waited a while. “Is that you? Are Stelle and Dinah there?” She listened. Then she nodded. “All right. Send her to me in the study, will you? I’ll talk to Dinah when she gets back. And Alice—pay attention to me. I don’t want parsnips again tonight, do you understand? I don’t care how wonderfully healthy they’re supposed to be.”
Zhondra hung up the phone and looked at Gregor. “Well,” she said, “there you are. Stelle is on her way. Dinah went into town about half an hour ago and isn’t expected back until evening. If you think I’m going to leave you alone in here with Stelle, you’re out of your mind.”
“You don’t have to leave me alone in here, Ms. Meyer. I’m not going to say anything I don’t want you to hear.”
“It’s not what you’re going to say that worries me, Mr. Demarkian. It’s what you’re going to do. You’d better behave yourself.”
Gregor was going to tell her that he always behaved himself—but he didn’t. The room was oppressive. The air was thick with humidity. He was tired. He was staying focused by an act of will. Whenever he began to relax, his mind started to drift. It drifted right out of the room and back up to the clearing, where it made light conversation with the wind.
2
THE APPEARANCE OF STELLE Cary should not have been a shock, but it was—and in that shock Gregor Demarkian realized just how odd this whole trip had been. Stelle Cary was a black woman, tall and middle-aged and bony, with a little potbelly that strained against the fabric of the smock she wore over her jeans. Her face was free of makeup, but her ears were hung with beaded strands in bright colors and silver disks that seemed too heavy. If it hadn’t been for the earrings, Stelle would have provided the perfect picture of a woman you wouldn’t look at twice on the street. Her clothes were worn and nondescript. Her face was worn and nondescript. Her carriage was halfway between youth and defeat.
What had shocked Gregor when Stelle first walked into the room was her color. He had become so used to seeing white people, and only white people, in Bellerton, that race had become a nonissue, unimportant because the conditions for it did not exist. He had, he realized, especially not expected to find a black woman at the camp, at least not as a guest. In his experience, institutions like the one Zhondra Meyer was trying to set up appealed almost universally to middle and upper-middle-class white women with axes to grind. Other women, poor or black or whatever else they might be, didn’t have time for retreats into the North Carolina pines. Here Stelle was, however, and she didn’t look ready to go away. She stood at the side of Zhondra Meyer’s desk like a sentinel with bad posture.
Gregor got out of his chair and held out his hand. “Excuse me,” he said. “At my age, I have a hard time leaping to my feet. I’m Gregor Demarkian.”
Stelle Cary took Gregor’s hand and shook it, looking amused. “You don’t have to leap to your feet. It doesn’t look like you could leap much of anywhere.”
Gregor let this pass. “At the moment, I can hardly stand up. Do you mind if I sit while we talk?”
“Not unless you mind if I sit.”
“Go right ahead.”
Stelle perched on a corner of the big polished desk. Zhondra Meyer frowned at her back and then said, “Mr. Demarkian is a private detective of sorts—”
“I’m not a private detective at all,” Gregor interrupted.
“I know who Gregor Demarkian is,” Stelle Cary said. “He’s all over People all the time. I heard they were going to make a TV movie out of his life, but I didn’t see anything come of it.”
“They couldn’t get my permission,” Gregor said grimly, “and they never will. You look—calmer than I expe
cted you to look. After what happened this morning, I mean.”
“You mean Carol,” Stelle Cary said. She hopped off the corner of the desk and went to the open the French doors. “I don’t see any reason not to be calm,” she said after a while. “A couple of the women are getting hysterical, but it doesn’t make sense to me. Carol and that poor little baby. Do you think there’s some psychopathic killer stalking the camp, intent on wiping out any lesbian he can get his hands on?”
“No,” Gregor said.
“I don’t either,” Stelle told him. “So you see, there’s no reason not to be calm. That doesn’t mean that I’m not sorry that what happened to Carol happened to Carol.”
“So Carol Littleton was a friend of yours.”
“Of mine and Dinah’s, yeah. That is, as far as people make friendships here. This is an odd sort of place, Mr. Demarkian. In some ways, it isn’t a real place at all. Zhondra is the only one who is committed to it. The rest of us are all on our way from someplace to someplace else.”
“I know. Would you mind telling me what you’re on your way away from?”
Stelle smiled faintly. “Well, for one thing, Mr. Demarkian, I’m on my way from jail. I just did three years in Illinois for possession with intent to sell. Not, by the way, that they ever actually caught me selling anything. There are these federal sentencing guidelines set up by how much is found in your possession, and I had quite a bit in my possession. It was one of the few times in my life I ever felt like I had enough.”
“I take it there weren’t any complications to this charge? No weapons violations? No violence?”
“I’ve had a man or two who was interested in having guns around, but I could never see the point. You have a gun around, you’re likely to get mad and use it and then wish you hadn’t.”
“There are other weapons besides guns.”