by Jane Haddam
Naomi raised her eyes to heaven. “Why is it,” she demanded, “that when religious people try to tell other people what they feel is right and wrong, that’s imposing their religion, but when secular people do it, it’s free speech?”
“And what about the high school?” Betsey said. “According to the Supreme Court, it’s just A-okay for the high school to have an Atheists’ Club, but it can’t have any religious club, because that’s establishing religion.”
“But it would be establishing religion,” the first reporter said. “The religious clubs wouldn’t be just clubs. They’d be recruiting organizations. The point would be to coerce more people into believing in Christianity.”
“The Atheists’ Club is a recruiting organization,” Naomi said. “They’re always putting up signs announcing how they’re going to have a presentation that might change your mind about God if you only heard it. And besides, this isn’t about God at all, I don’t think. This is about homosexuals.”
“I don’t think homophobia is a very attractive trait,” the young reporter said stiffly.
“I don’t think anyone here is homophobic,” Henry put in. “I don’t think anybody here is afraid of homosexuality. I think a good many of us abominate it, but that’s a different thing.”
You could feel it in the room then, the sea change, the shift. Up until the time that Henry had said his little piece about homophobia, everything had still been basically all right. People were listening to Naomi and Betsey talk, but not taking them very seriously. People were nibbling away at sandwiches and sipping at coffee and thinking about home. Henry’s voice seemed to boom out over all of them. It sounded too loud even to him. The words seemed to hang in the air after they had been said, drops of water threatening to become rain.
“Shit,” the reporter sitting at Henry’s side said. “I can’t stand this anymore. This is total crap.”
Henry had no idea what the young man was talking about: Bellerton? the murders? this diner? God? It wasn’t logic but emotion that swung Henry around on his stool. He had spent the day without feeling much of anything at all. Now it was all coming up in him, like bile rising in his throat, and he was furious.
“I do not understand,” he said, feeling the blood pounding under his skull, “what it is about being the resident of some big city that makes it impossible to respect other people and their beliefs instead of—”
“I know who that is,” somebody else in the room said. “That’s the preacher. The one who had the cross up at the camp when that woman’s body was found. The one who’s always talking about the devil.”
“How can you talk about respecting people?” the woman who had spoken before said. “You don’t respect women. You’d rather see them dead than let them be independent of men.”
“I’ve never wanted to see a woman dead in my life,” Henry Holborn said, confused.
“Wait a minute,” Betsey said, suddenly visibly scared. “Wait a minute, now. We should all calm down.”
“Oh, I’m sick of calming down.” The woman was sitting in the big semicircular booth in the far back corner with three other people. The three other people sat there while she stood up and strode across the diner to where Henry Holborn was sitting. She was an attractive-looking woman, in her thirties, in a suit. In any other situation, Henry Holborn would barely have noticed her.
She got to Henry Holborn’s stool, grabbed him by the shoulders, and spun him around. “Listen to me,” she demanded. “You think you’re all sick of us? Well, I’m sick of all of you. I’m sick of having my radio alarm go off every morning and some loudmouthed jerk come on telling me to accept Christ as my personal savior. I’m sick of sitting at traffic lights behind cars with bumper stickers that say ‘Abortion Stops a Beating Heart.’ I’m sick of listening to you all go on endlessly about how wonderful you all are. You’re a bunch of tenth-rate backwoods hicks, and if you don’t know it yet, you’d better learn.”
Betsey drew herself up to her full height and puffed out her chest. “Get out of here,” she demanded. “Get out of here right this minute. And don’t come back.”
“Oh, I’ll get out all right,” the woman said. “I’ll be happy to. But before I get out of town, I think I’m going to leave all of you something to remember me by. Maybe I’ll give a lot of money to that camp up there so that they can open an abortion clinic. This is the twentieth century. It’s practically the twenty-first. Get real.”
“Get out,” Betsey said.
Henry Holborn still had a cup two-thirds full of coffee sitting in front of him. The woman leaned past him and picked it up. For an instant, there was some doubt about what was going to happen next. The young man sitting next to Henry looked faintly alarmed. Naomi was struggling to her feet, getting ready to defend Henry if she could. Even so, the room was incredibly hostile. Henry had preached to rooms like this when he was first starting out, and calling them nests of vipers was not indulging in exaggeration. Blood lust was as old as the human race. Look at Adam and Eve. Look at Cain and Abel. The urge to kill came out of hiding whenever it got a chance.
The woman had Henry’s coffee cup in her hand. Henry knew what she was going to do, but he couldn’t make himself move out of the way of it. It was like waiting for the Apocalypse.
“Wait a minute,” the young man on the other side of Henry said, but it was too late.
The coffee cup was high in the air over Henry Holborn’s head. The woman turned it upside down and let a cascade of brown liquid fall into his hair. Then she waved the cup even higher, and the saucer too, and sent them both crashing to the floor.
“To hell with all of you,” she said.
Then she put her arm flat against the counter and swept it as far as it would go, sending plates and cups crashing to the floor, Naomi’s coffee, Henry’s tuna fish sandwich, the young reporter’s BLT. There was suddenly glass everywhere, bouncing up from the linoleum, skittering along the floor.
“I’ll call the police,” Betsey screeched. “I’ll call the police right this minute.”
“Call anyone you want to,” the woman said. “I’m over at the Super Eight Motel on the Hartford Road. Room 233. I’ll be there for the rest of the night.”
Then she strode to the diner’s front door, yanked it open, and walked out.
Henry felt the tension in the room like a thin film of mayonnaise. He thought somebody else was going to blow, more damage was going to be done. Instead, way behind his back where he couldn’t hope to see, a faint giggling started. It got louder and louder and stronger and stronger and suddenly they were all doing it, all the reporters. Henry and Naomi and Betsey were struck dumb. Some of the reporters were laughing so hard, they were choking. The young man sitting next to Henry had his head down on the counter and his eyes were streaming with tears.
To Henry, of course, it was his worst nightmare become real, it was everything he had ever been afraid of happening at once.
He was in a public place, and everybody was laughing at him.
2
OUT AT THE BEACH, David Sandler sat in a canvas chair on his deck, nursing a glass of wine and watching Maggie Kelleher watch the moon. It had just come up, and now its pale light was a stream across the water, like a streak in a woman’s dark hair. David had called Maggie up as soon as he realized that Gregor would not be back for dinner, again. He had had no idea, when he asked Gregor down here, that investigating a murder would mean he never saw his houseguest at all. Or hardly ever. The wine was a good Vin Santo David had brought down from New York. He had a pile of almond biscotti on a plate on the deck floor, in case Maggie should want to dunk cookies while she drank. It would have been a good evening, except that Maggie was depressed, and that made David depressed, too. He had known Maggie on and off now for at least five years, but only recently had he begun to know her well.
“So,” he said, “do you think it’s all true? Do you think Zhondra Meyer killed Tiffany and Carol and then killed herself out of remorse?”
“No,” Maggie said.
“I don’t either,” David admitted. “It’s too easy, isn’t it? I can’t imagine Zhondra Meyer actually committing suicide.”
“I’ve been hearing things ever since it happened that it might be a murder after all,” Maggie said. “Did your friend say anything? I heard somebody say that the police wanted to talk to Stephen Harrow.”
“Stephen Harrow? Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they think he did it. Maybe he was Zhondra Meyer’s lover.”
“Zhondra Meyer was a lesbian.”
“Well, David, that doesn’t always do it, does it? People do all kinds of crazy things, especially with sex. And Zhondra always appeared to me to be the kind of person who did what she wanted to do when she wanted to do it, and the hell with everybody else.”
David shifted slightly in his chair. “Gregor doesn’t tell me anything. It’s no better than reading the morning papers, having him here. Except that Gregor is Gregor, and I like having him here. I like having you here, too, Maggie.”
“I know you do. I like being here.”
“You ought to give a little more consideration to my proposition,” David said. “I know it sounds radical at the moment, moving back to New York, but believe me, we could work it out.”
“I never said we couldn’t.”
“You just don’t want to. Maybe it’s just that you don’t want to with me.”
Maggie swung her foot around and nudged him in the knee. “It’s not you that’s the problem, David. It’s New York. I’ve already lived in New York.”
“And you didn’t like it.”
“I liked it fine. It didn’t like me. There are people who are natural New Yorkers, David, and I’m not one of them.”
“It would be different this time, Maggie. I have a perfectly good apartment on Riverside Drive. You wouldn’t have to shack up in some godforsaken hole you’re paying fifteen hundred dollars a month for.”
“I know that.”
“And you wouldn’t be—trying all the time, if you know what I mean. It wouldn’t be a test. I think that’s what goes wrong with New York for too many people. They only go there to make their fortunes. They don’t go there to live.”
“I didn’t make my fortune, David.”
“Most people don’t.”
“I felt more like a hick after I’d been there for five years than I had when I came. Maybe it was just that I knew so much more, it was so much easier to see my inadequacies.”
“You don’t have any inadequacies.”
“Oh, yes, I do, David, yes, I do. I’m much too gullible, for one thing. I believe too much of what people want me to believe.”
“If you did, you would never have gotten to New York in the first place. From what I hear on Main Street, for most people in this town, New York is a cross between Sodom and Gomorrah and hell itself.”
“Maybe I was just interested in getting myself to Sodom and Gomorrah.”
“I think that’s usually a boy thing.”
“Have you ever really been fooled by somebody?” Maggie asked. “Have you ever really—believed in somebody—and had it not be true?”
“Of course,” David said. “It happens all the time. Did you have a bad experience with a boyfriend? Is that it?”
“What? Oh, no. No. It doesn’t have anything to do with boyfriends. It was just that—”
“What?”
Maggie got out of her chair and went to the deck railing, to look out over the ocean.
“I wish I could find out things for real,” she said. “I wish I could know what was true about people and just know, the way you know that gravity is real, or that evolution happened.”
“I don’t think life works that way, Maggie. There are people right here in this town who don’t even think evolution happened.”
“I know. I was thinking about that, too.”
“I wish you would think about coming with me to New York.”
“Sometimes,” Maggie said, “I think the world is full of secrets, and none of them is mine to give away.”
There was a breeze coming in off the water now, warm and mild. David wished they had something else to talk about, that they were somewhere else, away from Ginny Marsh and Carol Littleton and Zhondra Meyer, in New York where if Maggie felt sad he could take her to the opera or out for Tibetan food. He had spent half his life telling himself that he would come down here one day to live permanently, and now he knew that it wasn’t true. He wouldn’t be able to stand it here on the water for months at a time, with no access to the lights and the noise and the music and the people. It made him feel claustrophobic just to think of staying here for the rest of the year.
“Come back and sit down again,” he said to Maggie. “I’m getting lonely without your company.”
“Is that what you would be like in New York?” she asked, laughing. “Demanding and possessive?”
“In New York,” David said solemnly, “I would be like myself.”
Three
1
GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD SPENT his life dealing with recalcitrant bureaucracies. He had not expected to find one in Bellerton, which was a small town and which, by definition, should have been easier to handle. Instead, in the crunch, he found that he was dealing not with a town, but with a county. It was the county prosecutor he would have to convince of his “brilliant theory,” the term “brilliant theory” having been coined by Clayton Hall when they were all still up at Bonaventura and then held on to the way a leech holds on to fresh skin. They had been in Zhondra Meyer’s room at the time, with the investigation swirling around them, and Gregor had sat down on the floor to show Clayton Hall how it would work. He had been aware at once that he had put himself in a very undignified position. His pants were being stretched in odd angles. His shirt was coming out from under his belt. Clayton’s big beer belly hung in the air above him like a hot air balloon. Gregor wondered if he had one himself and what it looked like to other people. Then he turned his attention back to the pages of the suicide note/confession, spread out across the Persian carpet. The picture was there, too, the one of Stephen tangled naked with a woman nobody could identify, except that everybody knew it could be neither Lisa, Stephen’s wife, nor Zhondra Meyer. The hair in the photograph was just too light.
Do it later, Gregor had thought at the time, pushing reflexively at the pages of the suicide note in order to make them straight.
“Look,” he’d said to Clayton Hall. “There are a couple of things in this note that mitigate against the possibility that it could have been written by Zhondra Meyer. Let’s start with that.”
“Because Zhondra Meyer was a Jew.”
“Because she was Jewish, yes, that’s one thing. Look, the writer refers at one point to giving the baby a ‘baptism in blood,’ and that—”
“But Jewish people know about baptisms,” Clayton interrupted. “My daughter Jenny’s roommate from Sweet Briar was Jewish. When Jenny’s baby had her christening, Rachel was right there with a silver spoon for a present.”
“I’m not saying that Jewish people don’t know about baptisms,” Gregor said. “I’m saying that the phrase in this note is almost tossed off. The writer isn’t making some complicated theological argument. The letter just says, ‘It was my idea to dedicate her to the Goddess, to baptize her in blood.’ Just like that. As if it were the most natural thing in the world.”
“And you think that means the letter couldn’t have been written by a Jew.”
“No,” Gregor said. “I think that means the letter couldn’t have been written by Zhondra Meyer. It’s not just that Zhondra was brought up Jewish, it’s that she was something worse than an agnostic. She was impatient talking about religion no matter what religion it was, and that included the goddess worship that several of her guests were engaged in at the time of Tiffany’s murder. You would have expected her to pay some attention to that after all the mess it seems to have caused.”
“That could have been a ruse,” Clayton said. “That could have been a deliberate attempt to put us off.”
“I agree,” Gregor said. “But it’s more than just that Zhondra Meyer didn’t seem to be much interested in religion—it’s that she didn’t think in terms of religion, if you see what I mean.”
“Vaguely.”
“It’s also a question of the way the goddess religion was practiced up here. Have you ever heard anybody up here talking about a baptism in blood in any context whatsoever?”
“No, I haven’t,” Clayton said, “but if they really have gotten into human sacrifice up here, they aren’t likely to just go telling us about it. They’re going to do their best to keep it secret.”
“Of course they’re going to do their best, Clayton, but make sense for a minute. These aren’t professionals you’re dealing with. They’re not psychopaths, either. I know. I’ve met them. Do you really believe that if there had been something going on up here that was commonly described as a baptism in blood—that nobody up here would have made any mention of it in any way, even obliquely?”
Clayton opened his mouth and shut it again. He looked depressed. “No,” he said finally.
“Good,” Gregor told him. “But there’s something else you’ve got to take into consideration here. ‘Baptism in blood’ isn’t just a cute little catchphrase that somebody thought up to throw into the letter. It is something.”
“What do you mean, it is something?”
“I mean it’s a real phrase in real theology—Roman Catholic theology, to be exact, not some pseudoreligion like goddess worship that was made up from whole cloth the day before yesterday.”
“I sometimes wonder how anybody distinguishes between pseudoreligions and the real thing,” Clayton said drily. “It all seems like a lot of religious hocus-pocus to me.”
“Point taken,” Gregor said, thinking that he now knew for certain why there was no religious paraphernalia flung around the police department’s big basement room. “But now back to business. Do you know what a baptism in blood is?”