by Jane Haddam
“She wasn’t out of my sight at all,” David answered. “I was hanging on to her with both hands. I didn’t know what was going on. I was scared to death.”
“I don’t blame you,” Gregor said. “But you see my point here. There’s a little glitch in the evidence. Looked at this way, it seems much more likely that Stelle and Dinah and Carol did just what Ginny Marsh says they did, at least insofar as they are supposed to have killed the baby. I think we can rule the devil worship nonsense out. Just a nice Baptist girl misinterpreting the bizarre.”
“I don’t think Dinah and Stelle and Carol killed that baby,” David said. “Especially not Carol. You have no idea how besotted she was by babies.”
“A lot of child murderers are besotted by babies, but I’ll give you a plausible scenario. Dinah and Stelle and Carol decided to worship the goddess with a good old human sacrifice, the way she’s been worshipped through most of history. So they got hold of the baby, and they killed it, and then Carol Littleton couldn’t handle the guilt. And now Carol Littleton is dead.”
“Do you really believe that, Gregor? That they’re practicing blood sacrifice up at the camp?”
“No. I just said the scenario was plausible, more plausible right now than anything else.”
“You ought to tell the whole thing to Ginny’s defense lawyer. Maybe it would get her out of—protective custody.”
Gregor stood up and drained the last of his coffee.
“I’ve got to go into town,” he said. “I’m not very interested in talking to Ginny Marsh’s defense lawyer, but I am interested in talking to Clayton Hall. Are you going to be around later this afternoon?”
“I’m going to be right in my office, typing away.”
“Good. Maybe I’ll come back for lunch and tell you what I’ve found. You ought to get up earlier in the morning. It’s better for your health.”
“You’re the one with the paunch, Gregor. Don’t forget to lock the door on your way out.”
Gregor made his way down the spiral staircase again, moving slowly to make sure he wouldn’t fall. It had always seemed shameful to him that he had so little sense of balance. Someone who had been in the positions he had been in ought to be more sure on his feet.
Five
1
IT TOOK ROSE MACNEILL almost all day to get herself to go up the hill to the camp—on her own this time, not in a crowd, not because of an emergency. Actually, Rose used to go up there all the time when she was a little girl. That was in the days when the camp was not a camp but Bonaventura House, and open to the public like a museum. In high school, Rose and her girlfriends liked to go look at the furniture and the wallpaper. It was much better there than in the pictures in the decorating magazines, richer and more magnificent. Rose could just imagine herself sweeping down the big central staircase in a floor-length ball gown with a tiara of diamonds on her head. Waiting at the bottom would be hundreds of people, in ball gowns, too, walking carefully under heavy loads of jewelry, and the men in tuxedos. Rose knew girls who dreamed only of growing up to be the kind of housewife who was married to a doctor. They imagined themselves giving barbecue parties on broad back patios on lawns that brushed the territory of the eighteenth hole. They pictured themselves in smart little suits from Neiman-Marcus and Lord & Taylor. Rose was more ambitious than that. She wanted to sweep through galleries of mirrors in Balenciaga and Cartier pearls.
Of course, Rose thought now, looking up from the box of pen and pencil gift sets she was unpacking, she had only wanted those things in her dream life. In her real life, she had been eminently practical, and more than happy to live in Bellerton and be part of what Bellerton was all about. She could, she told herself, have gone on like that forever, if everybody else hadn’t kept changing all the time. It was other people changing that made her so mixed up. She looked down at the pen and pencil sets and grimaced. They were nice little sets, in gold and silver tone, with inscriptions on each piece. DO THE WORK OF GOD AND YOU WILL PROSPER, one said. It didn’t cite chapter and verse, so Rose assumed it wasn’t from the Bible. That was strange. Why would anyone want a pen and pencil set with something inscribed on it that wasn’t from the Bible? Why would anyone want a pen and pencil set with anything inscribed on it at all? Rose could feel the irritation rising in her. She had been nuts all day—all day—and it was getting worse. She could hardly sit still for a minute before she wanted to leap to her feet and run around the room, smashing things. One of the reasons she was in the back room doing the unpacking was that she didn’t want to be in the store where the unpacking had already been done, looking at things. The false cheerfulness of it all appalled her. She had never thought of it before, but what she was selling was an almost pathological desire to be cheerful at any price. She had little plastic wand doohickeys with haloed angel heads bouncing around on small springs off the tops of them. They cost $5.95 and had CHRIST IS LORD written up the side of them. She had bookmarks with pictures of Christ coming in glory through the clouds and the words JESUS CHRIST IS LORD written under His feet. They cost $4.69 and were encased in sharp-edged plastic shields. Rose had walked around amid it all, first thing she got in, before she even opened up. She kept wanting to ball her hands into fists and hit at it, punch at it, until she had it strewn all over the carpet, in shards. As soon as Kathi came in for the day, Rose went into the back and the unpacking. She usually arranged it so that it was the other way around, but she couldn’t stand the idea of talking to the little old ladies who came in to buy thank-you notes with pictures of the cross on them in gold and white. If she had to discuss white leather gift Bibles or the latest book by Beverley LaHaye about why it was better to be a stay-at-home wife, she was going to murder someone.
Now she stood and looked around. It had to be almost noon. The sun was that way in the sky. Rose had once been very good at judging the position of the sun. That had been in high school, when she hadn’t been able to stand the thought of sitting through one more minute of English or math. Now she couldn’t stand the thought of being surrounded by—these things—one more minute, either. She kept imagining herself standing on the terrace of Bonaventura, holding a wineglass in her hand, listening to the sound her high heels made on the flagstones. She hadn’t had a glass of wine in years. It wasn’t Christian, at least not in the way Christianity was practiced around here. She wished she was imagining herself at Bonaventura in a ball gown instead of in her ordinary clothes. She wished she was imagining herself with someone, instead of all alone. It all went around and around. It made her dizzy, but she couldn’t make it stop. Everything seemed to be out of control. She knew she ought to be thinking about baby Tiffany, or that poor stumpy woman Carol Littleton, but they didn’t exist for her. She watched Maggie Kelleher on the six o’clock news, saying how awful it all was, and the sentiment seemed inconceivably overwrought. It had all happened to other people. It had nothing to do with her.
The door to the storeroom popped open and Kathi looked in, curious and just faintly annoyed.
“What are you doing back here?” she demanded. “You have a headache or something? You’ve been back here all morning.”
“I’ve been back here because there’s been work to do,” Rose snapped. The pen and pencils sets were strewn all over the floor, not stacked neatly on a shelf the way they were supposed to be. If Kathi had ever done something like this, Rose knew perfectly well that she would have brained the girl. Kathi knew it, too. She kept looking from the mess on the floor to Rose and then back again.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Kathi said.
“I’m fine. I’m better than fine. If you’re back here, you’re not out there watching the store.”
“There’s nobody in the store,” Kathi said reasonably. “And if somebody comes in, we’ll hear the bell.”
“Somebody could come in and keep the bell from ringing. Somebody could show up just wanting to steal something.”
“How could somebody keep the bell f
rom ringing? It rings if you just lean against that door.”
“I think you’re very naive, Kathi, I really do. You don’t realize the kind of people there are out there. Clever people. And we’ve got all these strangers down from New York.”
“I think you must be sick,” Kathi said. “You’re not making any sense at all today. Do you want to go upstairs and lie down and leave it all to me for the rest of the day?”
“I want to go for a walk,” Rose said, wondering where that had come from. Did she want to go for a walk? Where would she walk to? “I want to get out in the air.”
Kathi was as solid and boring and unfazed as always. “Fine,” she said. “You go take a walk.”
“I could be the whole afternoon.”
“I’ve been here for the whole afternoon by myself before.”
“The painters might come,” Rose said, thinking that she knew exactly where she wanted to walk to. “The ones who are going to fix the front room and the kitchen because of the storm damage. You’d have to give them directions.”
“You wrote out the directions. Don’t you remember? You put them on lined paper next to the cash register so you could hang them on the door in case you had to be out and the painters were coming. I’ve been looking at them all day.”
“Oh,” Rose said.
Kathi blew her bangs out of her eyes with a long stream of air. The gesture made her almost repulsively unattractive, and Rose winced.
“I’m going to go back out front in case somebody comes in,” Kathi told her. “If you want to go for a walk you should go for a walk. You aren’t doing any good around here. And I can lock up by myself, Rose, I’ve done it before and you know it.”
It would be a terrible thing, Rose thought, if Kathi knew how stupid Rose thought she was. Everything about Kathi was graceless and disjointed, almost as if she were an embryonic form of what those women up at the camp had come to maturity at, whatever that was.
“Go for a walk,” Kathi said again, stopping in the storeroom’s door. Then she disappeared into the hall, and Rose held her breath, waiting for her to be truly gone.
After that, it didn’t take very long. Rose had been wearing a frilly little apron to unpack the pen and pencil sets. She took it off and dumped it into one of the open cardboard boxes on the floor. Her feet hurt, but she didn’t want to exchange her elegant high-heeled shoes for serviceable flats. All in all, she thought she looked pretty good. Her hair had been colored only a few days ago. Her skirt was wide and full of flowers. Her blouse was made of silk so fine, you could almost see through it.
Rose went out in the hall, looked up and down it to make sure that Kathi wasn’t lurking anywhere, and then headed for the back and the door to the driveway. She let herself out into a day that seemed hotter than it should have been. Usually by this time of year the worst of the heat was gone. She went around the little paved walk to the front of the house and Main Street. She saw Charlie Hare on a chair outside his store, reading the newspaper. Ever since she had had that blowup with Charlie about religion the other day, he’d been telling people that she was possessed by the Devil.
Well, Rose thought, maybe I am.
She kept carefully to the side of the street away from Maggie Kelleher’s and Charlie Hare’s. On this side of the street, there were mainly souvenir stores that catered to the tourists. She was finding it very hard not to run. She was also finding it very hard to breathe. The headline on the Bellerton Times was all about this new murder. There was a black-and-white picture of Carol Littleton on the front page, looking even more blurry and out of focus than Carol had in real life.
At the end of the long center block of Main Street—the block with Charlie Hare’s and Maggie Kelleher’s stores on it—Rose made herself stop and draw in air. Then she walked another whole block, crossed the road, and turned down Barton Street. Town Hall was on her right, a mass of blank-faced brick. She started breathing a little more easily as soon as she knew she was past the point where anybody could see her. Most of the houses on Barton Street belonged to summer people and were shut up for the winter.
Barton Street, like all the streets on this side of Main, petered out after less than three blocks. There were still roads out here, but they weren’t town roads. The houses were slutty-looking, too, shacky and listless. They reminded Rose of what happened to people who didn’t take care of themselves.
She made her way left along the last sidewalked stretch, making a little loop so that she came out right in front of the short road that led up to the camp. She had been afraid that she would find somebody walking on it, one of those women coming in to town to shop or have lunch, but there wasn’t anybody there. She looked right and left to see if anybody was watching her and then felt foolish doing it. In places like Bellerton, if somebody wanted to see you, they saw you. There could be dozens of old women sitting behind the drawn living room curtains of all the houses she could see. There was just no way that she would ever be able to tell.
She started up the camp’s road, limping a little on her heels, propelled forward half by determination and half by fear. Almost as soon as she started to make the climb, she felt that everything was different. The air was charged out here. It even smelled unusual. The flowers on the bushes at the roadside looked heavier and brighter than the same kind of thing Rose had seen in town. Maybe something happened to people when they came up here on their own. Maybe they got drunk on the air, and did things they didn’t know they were doing.
Rose must have been drunk on the air herself. She was already at the gate to Bonaventura and she didn’t remember getting there. She had expected it to be closed, locked tight to keep out the media and the curious, but it wasn’t. Rose stepped through it onto the gravel drive and felt her ankle twist. It was impossible to walk on gravel in very high heels. It was impossible to do anything when you couldn’t get any air. Rose pulled her foot up and her heel out of the soft ground under the stones and leaned over to examine the damage. She was still half gasping for breath when she saw a shadow fall across hers and heard Zhondra Meyer say, “Well, what is it? Are you hurt? Do you need something? You’re not here to stay. You’re the woman who runs that religious gift store in the Victorian house in town.”
Rose straightened up, very carefully. She had always found looking at Zhondra Meyer painful. Zhondra was so beautiful, and so strong a presence. Being very close to her was like being enveloped in light. Rose felt that Zhondra was sending out rays, like heat, but stronger than heat.
“I—” she began, and then, “My name is Rose MacNeill. We’ve been introduced before.”
Zhondra cocked her head. “But you are the woman who owns the religious gift shop. I’ve seen you a million times.”
“Yes,” Rose said. “Yes, I am. Christening presents. Gift Bibles. Note card sets with pictures of Christ Our Lord and Savior on every sheet. That kind of thing.”
“I know the kind of thing,” Zhondra said. “I’ve been in your store. But what do you want up here?”
Rose’s lips felt suddenly dry. Every part of her felt suddenly dry. And hot. And afraid. She wanted to step back a little, out of Zhondra Meyer’s orbit, but she was afraid she would stumble again.
“She came into the store, you know, on the day of the hurricane,” Rose said. “Carol Littleton, I mean. She wanted to buy a christening present for her granddaughter.”
“I know she did. Is that what you came up here about?”
“No, no. I was just thinking about it. About how strange it was. I wasn’t very nice to her.”
“Most people weren’t.”
“I’ve known people like that,” Rose said. “People who seem to—to almost attract abuse.”
“You mean people who cause their own abuse? You mean the abuse is their fault?”
“No, not exactly,” Rose said. “It’s just that it seems as if there are some people, if you froze them solid and put them in a room with twenty-five other people, and then you got some real psychopath to
go in and pick the one he wanted most, they’d be the ones who got picked. Bad luck, maybe, or—what did we use to say a few years ago? Bad karma.”
“I didn’t think Christians believed in karma.”
“They don’t. Goodness, you should hear Pat Robertson talk about Eastern religions. I don’t know if you know who Pat Robertson is. He’s on this thing called the Christian Broadcasting Network. He—”
“I know who Pat Robertson is.”
Rose turned to look at the house, the massive blocks of it, the peaks and towers. It was just like the worst kind of fairy tale castle, the one the wicked stepmother always lived in. Rose rubbed her arms with the palms of her hands. She felt hot. She felt cold. She felt as if she were about to faint.
Rose looked back to Zhondra Meyer and saw that her eyes were deep and still and perfect.
“I think,” Rose said carefully. “I think that I have come to stay. As a guest. If you know what I mean.”
“You want to stay here,” Zhondra Meyer said, just as carefully.
“Yes,” Rose said. “I do. I want to stay here.”
“Do you know what we’re all about, what this place is set up to be?”
“Of course I do. Everybody knows. Henry Holborn preaches about you every Sunday.”
“It might not be what Henry Holborn thinks it is.”
“It’s what I think it is. I know it.”
“It wouldn’t do you much good with that store of yours.”
“Maybe I’ll change the store.”
“You couldn’t stay in your church, either. Not if you go to Henry Holborn’s.”
“I don’t go to Henry Holborn’s church,” Rose said. “But I wouldn’t want to stay in my church, either. I don’t even know if I want to stay in town. I get so—so crazy sometimes. Do you know what I mean?”
“I know that I don’t trust you,” Zhondra Meyer said. “You want to give up much too much of your life for sex.”
It was an awful moment, one of the worst Rose could remember in her life. She was sure that Zhondra Meyer was going to make her go away. She could already see what it would be like, stumbling her way back down that hill, open and exposed to any old lady who might happen to be watching, turned down. Why had she always been so sure that rejection was something that showed in her face?