Baptism in Blood

by Jane Haddam

  “I don’t deal in weapons, Mr. Demarkian. I just deal in dope, and I don’t sell it to other people. I take it when I can get it”

  “I thought we’d decided that was all over,” Zhondra Meyer said.

  Stelle shot Zhondra a cynical little smile. “Zhondra thinks it’s like giving up chocolate,” she told Gregor. “She thinks you do it and that’s it. I keep trying to tell her, it’s all a matter of time.”

  “I don’t see how you can want to do that to yourself anymore,” Zhondra said. “You were destroying your body. You were destroying your mind. You were in jail. You were as helpless as the patriarchy wants us to be. What good was that doing you?”

  “Zhondra doesn’t understand how good it feels to be high. I love to be high.”

  “But you’re not high now. You’re not using drugs now.”

  “I’m not using drugs in the ordinary sense now, no,” Stelle told him, “but I don’t have to be. I’ve got religion at the moment.”

  “What?”

  Stelle came back from the French doors and sat down on the corner of the desk again, grinning. “I’ve got reli­gion,” she repeated. “I’ve had religion before, other times and other places and other ways. You know anything about drug rehab?”

  “No,” Gregor said.

  “Well, the dirty little secret about drug rehab is that the religious-based programs are about twice as effective as the psychologically based ones. Not that either of them are very effective, you understand. The figure I heard was a ninety-eight-percent failure rate. But the religions do better than the shrinks, and you know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because religion is another kind of drug,” Stelle said, “especially those Holy Roller religions, where you dance around and speak in tongues and get baptized in the spirit. You can get higher doing that than I’ve ever been able to get on crack. I can remember one time getting so out of it at a meeting that I walked on the top of a space heater in my bare feet and didn’t feel a thing. The next morning I woke up and found out I couldn’t walk. The soles of my feet were blistered raw. I had to go to the hospital and get fixed up. But I never felt a thing at the time, and when I think back on it, the only thing that comes to mind is that it was all great, I was the happiest I’ve ever been. I’d do it again in a second.”

  “And have you done it again?” Gregor asked. “Are you still part of a—what did you call it?—Holy Roller reli­gion?”

  “Nope.” Stelle shook her head. “I liked the way it felt, you understand, but when I was down I’d start think­ing, and the more I thought the more ridiculous it all got. People rising from the dead. Pie in the sky when you die. Do you believe any of that stuff?”

  “I don’t think about it, most of the time,” Gregor said. “What about you? If you’re not taking drugs, and you’re not involved in Holy Roller religion, what are you involved in?”

  “Oh, these days I worship the Goddess.” Stelle sounded more cynical than ever. “The Goddess of wisdom and nature, the Great Mother of us all. It’s the hip thing, especially here. Religion without patriarchy.”

  “It’s much better than all those things you were doing before,” Zhondra said. “It gives you an arena to express your spirituality and it gives you a political analysis of your condition at the same time. That way you don’t start turn­ing it all on yourself, telling yourself it was your fault. That’s what the patriarchy is hoping you will do.”

  “Actually,” Stelle said drily, “I was partial to the idea of original sin myself. We’re all born wanting things we can’t have and craving things that aren’t good for us. Too many white people want to feel superior to somebody, and black people are handy. I’d really rather get high than do anything about my life, and the stuff I need to get high with is handy, too:”

  “I hope you don’t think we go around here looking for somebody to be superior to,” Zhondra Meyer said. “We understand that racism is systemic. Every woman in this house struggles with her own racism every day.”

  “Right,” Stelle said. “Is this what you wanted to talk to me about, Mr. Demarkian? I thought you were looking into the death of that baby.”

  “I am,” Gregor said. “Would you mind my asking you a few things about the day of the hurricane?”

  “Ask away.”

  “Let’s start with the ceremony the three of you were going to do,” Gregor said. “Carol Littleton was late.”

  “That’s right.” Stelle nodded. “She’d gone into town to buy a christening present for her granddaughter. She bought it in that silly store that sells all the religious things, angel statues, stuff like that. The one in the Victorian house. Although, to tell you the truth, I couldn’t understand why she was doing it. It wasn’t like she was going to be invited to the christening. She hadn’t even seen the baby.”

  “Carol Littleton didn’t get along with her children?”

  “She got along with her son all right,” Stelle said. “It was her daughter that was the problem. Shelley, I think her name was, but I’m not really sure. Anyway, Shelley really hated the idea of Carol being up here. She really hated it. And then, of course, there was Carol’s ex-husband.”

  “What about him?”

  “He took this whole business of Carol’s becoming a lesbian as a personal insult. Men take it that way some­times. Sometimes I think men are all born a little cracked.”

  Gregor considered Carol Littleton’s daughter and her ex-husband. Then he said, “So, when Carol finally showed up it was—what? In the middle of the storm? Close to the start of it?”

  Stelle hooted. “If any one of us had known anything about hurricanes, we would have gotten ourselves inside and stayed there. Instead of that, we were standing around in that clearing, Dinah and me, and it was drizzling on our heads. And then Carol came running out from the house.”

  “You couldn’t see her from the clearing, could you? The trees would have prevented that.”

  “I’d gone down to the end of the path to see if I could find out where she was. She came running out of the house just as I got there. She was all worked up, nearly crying.”

  “About what? Did you ask?”

  “I asked. She said something about Shelley, and about how you could never trust anyone, not really, you could never really know them, people were entirely unpredictable. It was quite a hash. Carol got that way when she talked about her daughter.”

  “Was she coming out of this room here?”

  Stelle shook her head. “I don’t think so. I wasn’t really paying much attention, but it’s my impression that she was coming out of one of the center sets of doors, the ones that open on to the living room.”

  “Does that make sense to you, now that you think about it? Was that a likely way for her to come?”

  “It depends on where she was coming from,” Stelle said reasonably. “I guess I just assumed that she’d come down from upstairs and was taking the shortest way out. The big front staircase is just outside the living room door.”

  Gregor hauled himself to the edge of his chair and put his elbows on his knees. “So,” he said, “Carol came out of the house, and the two of you got together, and then you went to the clearing. Am I right so far?”

  “Right.”

  “And this woman Dinah was there when you got there.”

  “She was sitting on a rock. Dinah’s the one who is really into all this stuff. Carol and I just did it because—well, I like to get high, and Carol needed something to take her mind off the new baby and how she wasn’t getting to see it. But Dinah’s a believer. She won’t even stand inside the circle of stones. She says it’s blasphemy.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “So then you were all to­gether. What came next?”

  “Well.” Stelle shot Zhondra a look. Zhondra gave an elaborate shrug.

  “It’s all right, Stelle,” Zhondra said. “He knows all about it.”

  Stelle sighed. “I suppose by now the entire state of North Carolina knows about it. Maybe the entir
e world. What came next, Mr. Demarkian, is that we got out of our clothes.”

  “All of them?”

  “All of them.”

  “What did you do with them?”

  “We put them in a pile under one of the trees. It didn’t matter what happened to them as long as they were out of the way while the ceremony was going on.”

  “Fine,” Gregor said. “What did you do next?”

  “We took up positions around the circle of stones and knelt down.”

  “And?”

  “And we started praying. We were singing this chant thing, this song that Dinah wrote. About how wonderful women are and how beautiful all their parts are. It was weird, really. I mean, there was all this thunder and light­ning, and it worked somehow. I mean, it all seemed part of the ceremony. Crash. Bang. Boom. Chant. When the rain really started coming down, I was surprised as hell.”

  “Did you run for the house when that happened?”

  Stelle Cary burst out laughing. “Mr. Demarkian, we couldn’t run anywhere. We were stuck. The trees were whipping around like jump ropes. The rain was coming down in buckets. There was hail. All we could do was take cover under one of those trees, hold our clothes over our heads, and hope we didn’t get hit by something serious. We were there all night.”

  “All night?”

  “Well, all day and most of the evening, anyway. We didn’t get out until the storm was all over and Zhondra came looking for us and told us the baby was dead. And told us that Ginny was saying we killed it. I thought I was going to bust a blood vessel, and Carol started to cry and couldn’t stop.”

  “Ginny Marsh was never in the clearing that day?”

  “Not that any of us saw.”

  “The baby wasn’t either?”

  “Again,” Stelle insisted, “not that any of us saw. I suppose they could have been hiding in the trees. Espe­cially if the baby was, well, you know, already dead. So that it wouldn’t cry.”

  “Is that what you think happened? That somebody killed it and then hid in the trees near the clearing?”

  “I don’t think anything, Mr. Demarkian. Except I think Ginny probably killed the child. I never did like Ginny much. She’s too—intense.”

  “That’s interesting,” Gregor said. “Everybody else I’ve talked to seems to like her a great deal. They keep trying to convince me that she couldn’t possibly have killed her own baby.”

  “Mothers kill their children every day,” Stelle said. “And I think if that girl didn’t kill the baby, she’s fronting for the man who did. And it would have to be a man, wouldn’t you think?”

  “It usually is,” Gregor admitted.

  Stelle Cary leaned back and stretched her arms and back, arching. “Do you know what I think?” she asked Gregor. “I think it’s all very simple, and the only reason Carol was killed was to make it look like it wasn’t. I think Ginny and that husband of hers are in it together, and I think the good Reverend Henry Holborn is masterminding the whole thing. I think I’m sick and tired of the South and I’m sick and tired of religion and I’m sick and tired of being a lesbian feminist, too. I think I’m going back to my old neighborhood in Chicago and see who’s still around that I know.”

  “I think,” Gregor said carefully, “that that would be both unfortunate and unwise.”

  Stelle hopped off the desk, grinning brilliantly. “I think you can take that advice and stuff it where the sun don’t shine,” she told him. “And now, if you two will excuse me, I think I’m going off to get something to eat.”

  Stelle Cary headed for the study door and disappeared into the hall. Zhondra Meyer watched her go, then blew a raspberry and collapsed into the chair behind the desk.

  “Honestly,” she said. “Some people.”

  Four

  1

  THE NEXT MORNING, GREGOR Demarkian woke to find that David Sandler had written dozens of notes to him on sticky paper and stuck them all over the house. The one on the refrigerator said:

  Where have you been? Make some time to talk.

  This, Gregor thought, was not entirely fair. He’d had plenty of time to talk the night before, which he had spent sitting by himself on David’s deck, looking out over the ocean. Last night had been David Sandler’s night to go up to Chapel Hill, where he taught a once-a-week seminar in the philosophy of free thought at the University of North Carolina. Gregor remembered wondering whether anybody ever used the words “free thought” anymore, or even knew what they meant. At any rate, Gregor had been alone, with the first glass of wine he’d had in months. The waves had pounded against the thick wooden pilings that held up David’s house. The full moon had floated in the blackness above the water, looking fat and smug. In the long run, Gregor didn’t think it had been such a good idea, being on his own like that. He had spent too much time on his own in the first six months after Elizabeth died. He had sold the apartment they had lived in together for so many years, and rented a smaller one, and spent night after night sitting on its little balcony, watching the traffic on the Beltway. After a while the cars had begun to look like gigantic beetles, chasing each other and snapping their jaws. Like most other men of his generation, Gregor had never learned to take care of himself emotionally. He had had Elizabeth for that, and before Elizabeth his mother. Every once in a while, there had been gaps, like during the time he had spent in the army, but he had taken care of those by bulling through them, and making sure they didn’t last too long. After Elizabeth died, the gap seemed to last forever. He wondered sometimes if he had gone back to Cavanaugh Street in the hope of finding a place to rest, like a shark looking for a place to die. God only knew, he hadn’t been able to think of anything to do with himself, or any reason to go on getting up in the morning, when he had been left to himself. Even the work that he had done for twenty years had failed to move him. He thought of the country filling up with rapists and murderers and drug dealers and kidnap­pers, and he just didn’t care.

  He didn’t know what it was—the moon, maybe, or the uncustomary wine—but after a while he couldn’t sit in the silence and not hear another human voice. He went back into the house and turned on the television in the study. He found three religious stations and the networks. Two of the networks were showing sitcoms. The third, CBS, had one of those tabloid news shows, with a story about a man in Tennessee who had first been suspected of being a serial murderer because of the way he treated his cats. He locked his cats up in his garage for days at a time; without food or water, and made it impossible for them to get out. The religious stations all seemed to be showing preachers of one kind or another, appalled at the state of the country and the state of the world. Gregor stopped and listened to the nun for a few minutes, because she was the only one of the three who didn’t sound hysterical. She was talking about a movie called Priest, which she didn’t like. All the priests in it were either terrible people, or untrue to their vows of celibacy. Then the program went to a break, and the station logo came on. Gregor found that he was watching some­thing called the Eternal Word Television Network. He wasn’t ready for eternal words. He turned the television off and got up and went into the living room.

  It was, by then, exactly ten o’clock. Gregor didn’t know if David Sandler was going to walk through the door at any moment, or if he customarily went out for dinner or drinks after his class and wouldn’t be in for hours. There was a black, old-fashioned-looking telephone on the end table next to the couch. It took a while for Gregor to realize that what bothered him about it was that it had a rotary dial instead of a touch-tone pad. Gregor sat down next to it and put it into his lap. He wasn’t sure how to go about this with a rotary phone. He wasn’t even sure if he could. It was incredible how dependent people got on technology, even people like him, who didn’t like technology. He had grown up with rotary telephones. He picked up the receiver and did what he would have done then. He dialed the operator.

  It took a little while—the operator was young; she wasn’t used to dealing with rotary
phones, either—but he finally got the call charged to his credit card and the phone ringing in Bennis’s apartment. It rang and rang. Gregor almost decided that Bennis must have gone out: up to Donna Moradanyan’s apartment, or across the street to Tibor’s. He tried to imagine what it was like, now, on Cavanaugh Street. Had Donna Moradanyan decorated for some holiday? She liked to decorate in style, wrapping whole town houses up in ribbons and bows. They were christening somebody’s baby at Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church this Sunday. Maybe Donna had decorated for that. Maybe he ought to put down the phone and give it up. The operator was going to break in at any moment, to tell him this wasn’t working.

  Far away in Philadelphia, the phone was picked up, and a muffled voice said muffled words that Gregor couldn’t make sense of.

  “Bennis?” he tried, wondering if he had a bad con­nection or just a wrong number.

  There was more muffled noise again and then, “Gregor? Where are you? I just got out of the shower.”

  Bennis had been smoking again. Gregor could hear it in her voice. Bennis’s voice always got raspy and raw when she had been smoking, especially now, when she spent most of her time trying to quit.

  “I’m in North Carolina,” Gregor said. “I’m at David Sandler’s house. He’s out giving a seminar.”

  “On atheism? In North Carolina?”

  “On free thought, in Chapel Hill. In case you didn’t know, free thought was a movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—”

  “Deism and the French Revolution,” Bennis broke in. “Yes, Gregor, I know. I had a very expensive education. Are you all right? I haven’t been seeing you in the news.”

  “I think that you’d take that as a good sign. I do.”

  “Has anything been going on down there?”

  “Well,” Gregor said, “there was another murder to­day.”

  “Oh, God.” Bennis exhaled a stream of smoke. The sound was so distinctive, Gregor could almost see her do it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t watch the news today. I’ve got a copyedited manuscript to go over. I’ve been frantic. Was it another child?”