by Jane Haddam
“What about Carol Littleton?” Gregor asked. “Who do you think killed her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think she was killed by the same person who killed Ginny Marsh’s baby?”
“I don’t know. Not if Ginny Marsh killed her own baby, though. Ginny is still safely in jail.”
“Do you think Carol Littleton was killed because of religion?”
Clayton hopped down off the desk he had been sitting on. “If you mean do I think that Henry Holborn or one of his people decided to go off half-cocked and start exorcising devils for himself, the answer is no. Henry can be pretty damned irritating at times, but he’s not violent.”
“There are people around him who could be violent,” Gregor said.
“Oh, I agree with you.” Clayton Hall nodded vigorously. “I was telling Henry the same thing myself just a couple of hours ago. And it worries me a little, probably more than you realize. But the fact is that we haven’t had any violence from any of them at any time for any reason. We haven’t even had any pro-life violence, and there’s an operating clinic not three miles from Henry Holborn’s church, one of the few first-rate clinics in North Carolina. You can’t lump people together, you know. You can’t say that just because there are crazy fundamentalists in Halford, Mississippi, that everybody who believes in the fundamentals is crazy.”
Actually, Gregor thought, that wasn’t the point. He wished he could get it clear in his own mind. He wasn’t one of those people who automatically thought all religions and all religious believers were dangerous, or insane, or worse. He even showed up at Father Tibor’s church every once in a while, out of politeness, and enjoyed himself there. It wasn’t that there was something wrong about religion. It was that there was something wrong about religion in this case.
“You got something on your mind?” Clayton Hall demanded. “You want to tell the rest of us about it?”
“You’re the only ‘rest of us’ there is at the moment, Clayton. And there’s nothing to tell, not in the way you mean it. I was thinking there was somebody I would like to talk to.”
“Well, if it isn’t somebody in jail or under suspicion of murder or living up in Massachusetts, I might be able to arrange that for you.”
“I’ve talked to her before, but I didn’t know her. The lady from the library. Ruth something.”
“Naomi,” Clayton said drily. “Naomi Brent. Now I can tell Henry Holborn that at least once upon a time, you read the Bible.”
“I heard Bible stories in my Sunday school classes,” Gregor said. “In Armenian. Can we go talk to this Naomi Brent?”
“Sure, if she’s in. Why don’t you let me call over to the library and find out? Then it’s just across the street.”
“I know where the library is, Clayton.”
Clayton picked up the phone. “That’s the trouble with small towns like this,” he said. “They’re too easy to get to know.”
2
THE WALK BETWEEN THE police department and the library felt endless, because for the first time in Gregor’s experience, Main Street wasn’t mostly deserted. There were the reporters on the front steps on Town Hall, but they didn’t count. There weren’t as many of them there as when Gregor had first seen them, either. Maybe the story was going stale, and some of them were being recalled to San Francisco and Tulsa. Maybe, and much more likely, all the waiting was boring beyond belief, and they took off as often as they dared to drink coffee in Betsey’s or buy magazines at Maggie Kelleher’s bookstore. What made this short walk really awful was that the people of Bellerton were out in force. Gregor saw Maggie Kelleher standing in front of her store’s plate glass window, talking to a man in a wooden rocker who seemed to own the store next to hers. He saw Ricky Drake on the steps of Betsey’s diner, stopped dead in his tracks to stare at them. A short, sharp movement caught his eye, and Gregor looked up to catch sight of an old woman retreating hastily behind a second-story curtain. He had a thick sheen of sweat across the back of his neck.
“Jesus,” he said to Clayton Hall.
The library’s big front doors were right in front of them. The doors were shut, so they wouldn’t let out any of the air-conditioning. Clayton opened one and ushered Gregor inside. Gregor landed in the lobby right in front of the plaque he had been thinking about, the one with the words WISDOM IS THE JEWEL OF GOD AND THE CROWN OF THE JUST MAN written on it. Gregor didn’t know much about the Bible, but he did know this was a quotation from Ecclesiastics, one of the books of the Bible that Catholics accepted and Protestants did not. The Bellerton Public Library seemed to be more ecumenical than many of the church groups Gregor had heard of.
There were inner doors as well as outer ones. Everyone believed in air locks these days. The inner doors were made of glass. Through them, Gregor could see the few people who were in the library. They were mostly old people, reading newspapers at long wooden tables. There was a young woman at a little computer desk that served as the card catalogue these days, tapping things onto the keyboard with one hand and wrestling with a baby with the other. The baby was bright and cheerful and determined and strong. He kept getting away and having to be chased after.
Clayton pushed open one of the inner doors and said, “You coming? Or are you asleep on your feet?”
“Both,” Gregor told him. “It’s a good-sized library for a small town.”
“Have you been in here before?”
“Just as far as this vestibule. I poked my head in one of those mornings when I was wandering around, exploring.”
“It is a good library for a small town,” Clayton said. “The town council did a good job. They raised some money from taxes and some from fund-raisers and then they got a chunk from the state, and they used it wisely, if you ask me, No paying somebody’s second cousin to make a mess of the foundations.”
The young woman behind the checkout desk was not the one Gregor was looking for. For one thing, she was too young. For another, her hair was a bizarre shade of yellow that he had never seen before on anyone, anywhere. She was wearing a big silver cross around her neck on a delicate gold chain. So were at least three of the old ladies who were reading newspapers at the long table in the middle of the room. Clayton passed by them all, waving at the young woman behind the desk, whose name appeared to be Tisha. Then he headed for the staircase at the back and started climbing.
“Naomi’s office is on the second floor,” he explained. “That’s because she’s a really big noise with a doctorate in library science and everything. She’s also local, by the way. Doctorate or no doctorate, I don’t think the council would have hired her if she wasn’t local.”
“I knew she was local,” Gregor said.
Clayton looked as if he wanted to ask Gregor how he knew, but they were at the top of the steps now. There were more stacks up here, and more wooden tables and wooden chairs—but small ones this time, just big enough for one or two people. Gregor followed Clayton to the back of the big room and found himself facing three brown metal doors. One of them was marked MEN. One of them was marked WOMEN. The third was blank.
“Here we are,” Clayton said, knocking on the blank door. He didn’t wait to hear an answering summons. He just opened the door and stuck his head in. “Naomi?”
Naomi was sitting at her desk near the windows. She had her back to the door when Clayton opened it, as if she had been watching the birds in the trees as she waited for their arrival. As soon as she heard the door swing open, she turned. Gregor thought she looked paler and more strained than the first time he had seen her.
Naomi Brent had been holding a pencil in one hand when the door opened. Now she dropped it on the desk and said, “There you are. What kept you? You were just across the street.”
Gregor didn’t think anything had kept them. Clayton said, “Naomi, I’d like you to meet—”
“Mr. Demarkian and I have met,” Naomi cut in. “I’m sorry about my—demeanor yesterday morning, Mr. Demarkian. I was
n’t at my best.”
“You seemed fine to me.”
Naomi turned to Clayton. “I yelled at him,” she explained. “I accused him of trying to make everybody who believed in God look like a rube and a dimwit. And he didn’t deserve it, of course. He wasn’t doing anything like that.”
Clayton grabbed one of Naomi’s visitor’s chairs and sat down at it. It was made of some kind of shiny metal and a vinyl meant to look like black leather, with no arms. Gregor got the impression that Clayton wished he could straddle it.
“I’m surprised to hear you were defending religion,” the police chief said. “That isn’t what we usually get from you. Remember all that nonsense about The Catcher in the Rye?”
“Henry Holborn wanted The Catcher in the Rye taken out of the library, or at least put behind the desk and only loaned to adults or something. I never did get it completely straightened out. And of course, there was a whole slew of things he just wanted out of here completely. All the novels by Stephen King.”
“I’ve read Stephen King novels,” Gregor said, feeling confused. “What’s wrong with Stephen King novels? There wasn’t any sex to speak of in any of the ones I read.”
Naomi Brent burst out laughing. “Oh, dear, Mr. Demarkian. You’re terribly out-of-date. Nobody worries about sex in books anymore.”
“They don’t?”
“Oh, well, they do, a little, of course,” Naomi said. “Especially if it’s unconventional sex, and to Henry Holborn conventional means sex with the person you’re married to, no one else, period.”
“Also sex in the missionary position,” Gregor said, “and—”
But Naomi Brent was shaking her head vigorously. “No, no, Mr. Demarkian. You really are behind the times. Tim and Beverly LaHaye, these enormously big evangelists, wrote a guide to lovemaking a few years back, and trust me, it wasn’t restricted to the missionary position. You’d be amazed what a husband and wife can do together in bed these days and still be holy in the sight of the Lord.”
“I think I’ll decide not to think about it,” Gregor said.
“Anyway,” Naomi said, “the big thing these days is occultism. They see occultism everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. If you ask me, Stephen King is one of the most traditionally Christian writers I’ve ever read. His whole philosophy of life comes straight out of St. Augustine—although I don’t know if he knows it. All they see is that people in these books talk to ghosts and sometimes the hero or the heroine has magical powers, like the little girl in Firestarter who could start fires just by thinking about it. And you know what magical powers mean to them. Somebody must be worshipping the devil.”
“The other day,” Gregor said, “you were warning me about having just this attitude you’re displaying now.”
“I go back and forth, Mr. Demarkian. I don’t think I meant to say that you shouldn’t—dislike—this end-times philosophy Henry Holborn and his people have. Did you know that Henry Holborn thinks we’re about to see the end of the world?”
“At the start of the new millennium, I suppose.”
“That’s right, Mr. Demarkian. Millennial fever. But down here, where so many people believe in very simple, very direct forms of Christianity, it gets into the air. It becomes part of things. If you see what I mean.”
“Not exactly.”
Naomi Brent looked down at her hands. “Sometimes, when Henry Holborn gets to talking, you can almost see the Devil right there at your shoulder, grinning like hell, ready to snatch your soul. I had a girl who used to come in here,” both her parents were practical agnostics, she was never taken to church, and two months after she started her freshman year at Brown, she nearly had a nervous breakdown. She was totally isolated up there. It was crazy.”
“So what was it about Henry Holborn and his people you were defending to me the other day behind the Town Hall?” Gregor asked.
“Oh,” Naomi said, “it was just, I didn’t want you to be like other people and think they were stupid. Or naive. Or ignorant. Brain-dead backwoods hicks, that’s what most of those reporters think of them. But they aren’t stupid and they aren’t hicks and they surely don’t live in the backwoods anymore. I just wish they’d get past all this stuff about the Devil. It’s making me nervous. Even the Catholics are doing it and they used to have more sense.”
“The millennium will come and go,” Gregor said gently, “this time just as it did last time. And when the world hasn’t ended and Christ hasn’t come again in glory, people will calm down.”
“That’s longer than I want to wait, Mr. Demarkian.”
“That’s longer than I want to wait, too,” Gregor said, “but that’s the time we’ve got, and I don’t think anything will really change until it’s over. Do you mind very much if I ask you a few questions about the night that Ginny Marsh’s baby died? I realize that it was a while ago, and that with the new murder you’ve probably been distracted, but—”
“It was the night of the hurricane, Mr. Demarkian. I’ll remember it all my life.”
“Good. I take it you ended up in the study at Bonaventura during the storm. You were there when David Sandler came in with Ginny Marsh and said that the baby was dead.”
“He didn’t say that the baby was dead,” Naomi corrected. “He hadn’t seen the baby yet. He said we had to find the baby.”
“All right. So he said you had to find the baby, and he had Ginny with him, and she was—”
“All wet and covered with red. Her clothes were soaked through with red. Some of it was dye that had run from her shirt, but some of it was blood, and there was blood all over her hands and her arms. The paper came out and said it, later.”
“Who else was in the study at the time that David Sandler got there?”
“Oh, lots of people. Zhondra Meyer herself, of course. She spent the whole storm sitting behind that big desk of hers, behaving like a queen bee. It was something to see. And Maggie Kelleher was there, sitting on the rug in front of the fire. And Rose MacNeill. Oh, and that woman Alice, you know, Zhondra Meyer’s assistant.”
“And that was all?”
“Oh, no, Mr. Demarkian. There were dozens of people there. All of the women from the camp. The women were mostly in the living room next door, where we couldn’t see them, but they were there. I meant, those were the people from town that I was talking to. You know, the people I know.”
“You didn’t see Carol Littleton?”
“No, Mr. Demarkian, I didn’t.”
“Would you have known who she was?”
“Sure. She came into town all the time. Some of them up there almost never come in, but Carol did. She came into the library every Tuesday and Thursday, right at eleven o’clock. And she was in the library on the morning of the storm, too. That’s how I knew that Zhondra Meyer was taking people in up at the camp. Carol told me. And I thought, you know, that Bonaventura was a hell of a lot more interesting than the Bellerton Public High School, so why not?”
“Is that how most of the people from town who went up to the camp found out it was okay to go there? Because Carol Littleton told them?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Demarkian. But she surely was telling lots of people. It was one of the only two topics of conversation she had that morning.”
“What was the other one?”
“Her granddaughter. Her daughter’s daughter. The one that was going to have the christening she wasn’t going to be allowed to go to. Not that that matters much anymore.”
“Mmm,” Gregor said.
The phone on Naomi Brent’s desk rang and she picked it up. She said hello and then listened in silence, frowning more deeply every second the tinny little voice came at her over the line. Finally she said, “All right, just a minute, let me put him on,” and handed the phone across the desk to Clayton.
“It’s Jackson,” she told him. “I think he’s saying that something else has gone wrong up at that house.”
Clayton Hall and Gregor Demarkian looked at ea
ch other. Then Clayton put the receiver to his ear and said, “Jackson? What the hell is up?”
There was more tinny noise coming over the line, and then a small click: Jackson hanging up. Clayton handed the phone back across the desk to Naomi and turned to Gregor Demarkian.
“We better go,” he said. “If Jackson has his ass on straight, Zhondra Meyer just committed suicide.”
PART THREE
One
1
THEY WERE ALL UP there on the terrace when Clayton and Gregor arrived, all the women who lived at the camp. Later, Gregor knew, the rest would arrive: the reporters, the people from town. That only went to prove that it wasn’t a question of being a hick or not being one. The reporters would tell each other that they were only up here because they were doing their jobs. The truth was that they craved even more blood lust excitement than the rest of the world. Gregor was surprised to see how many women there were. Every time he thought he had the group all together, there seemed to be more of them than before. He recognized the woman called Alice, and Stelle Cary, standing in two separate knots of women on opposite sides of the terrace. He recognized one or two others he didn’t have names for. There was a wind high in the trees, bending the tops of the pines back and forth above his head. The air was warm and thick with water. Bonaventura, Gregor thought, didn’t belong here. It was a cold weather house, built by a cold weather man. It ought to be somewhere that snow could fall on it, and the fires lit in its fireplaces.
Gregor and Clayton had expected all the women to be staring toward the stand of trees and the circle of stones. In fact, they had expected them to be in the stand of trees and trampling through the circle of stones. Instead, they were all standing on the terrace, looking at each other, watching Clayton and Gregor come around the side of the house on the narrow gravel path.
Clayton went up to the woman named Alice and took off his hat. Alice looked ready to explode. It was obvious that she had already been crying. Some women could produce tears with no wear and tear on their faces, no bloating, no redness, no streaks of strain. Alice was not one of them.