Baptism in Blood

by Jane Haddam

  Ginny had always been his anchor, and now his anchor was setting him loose.

  Six

  1

  IT WAS TWO DAYS later before Gregor was able to get out of Bellerton. The paperwork and odds and ends took much longer than he had expected them to. The waiting took forever. There wasn’t much to do except buy books at Maggie Kelleher’s bookshop and sit on David’s deck, read­ing them, while David tapped away on his computer in the study, working on his definitive history of American athe­ism—or whatever it was. When he was very, very restless, Gregor went into town and shopped for presents for people at home. Donna Moradanyan got a four-foot-tall ceramic statue of a guardian angel from Rose MacNeill’s shop. Her little son Tommy got a cap gun and caps, which were ille­gal in Pennsylvania but very legal here, where Gregor had seen dozens of little boys smashing cap strips with their shoe heels in the street. Walking around Bellerton wasn’t very comfortable. Now that the reporters were mostly gone, Gregor was the most visible stranger in town. David Sand­ler didn’t count, because he wasn’t a stranger here any­more. Gregor wasn’t sure he liked having people watch him the way they did here. It was so intense, he sometimes wondered if he were imagining it. Curtains seemed to flick in windows as he passed. Eyes seemed to move as he walked in front of them, doing nothing more important than buying an apple from the bin in front of Charlie Hare’s store. He wanted to buy a present for Bennis, but he wasn’t sure what. He wanted to call Bennis, too, but that seemed like the wrong idea. She hadn’t called him. In the end, he bought Tibor a T-shirt with University of North Carolina symbols on the front and back. He bought Lida Arkmanian a beautiful polished conch shell mounted on a frame. It was too hard to buy things for Bennis, he decided. She was too rich. She had too much already. She had ec­centric tastes. Besides, when he thought about Bennis he got restless, and the restlessness was almost unbearable. He didn’t know what he was going to do if he had to stay in North Carolina much longer.

  When the day came, he laid his suitcase out on the bed in David’s guest room and did his best to pack it “right,” although he knew that neither Bennis (who would notice) nor Lida Arkmanian (if she were home) would think he had made anything else but a mess of it. He packed shirts and shoes on top of each other, neatly folded. He packed socks rolled into balls in the corners. He packed ties that he tried not to look at, because they were almost always a mess. He had no idea why he did what he did to ties, but they always ended up ruined. Maybe, this was some trauma left over from his childhood—some unexamined grief work, as the therapists liked to say—some resistance to leaving the im­migrant ghetto of Cavanaugh Street as it had been to be­come part of the great American middle class. Examined or not, though, he was just going to have to get over it. The Cavanaugh Street that existed now was nothing like the Cavanaugh Street that had existed then. He was going back to town houses, not tenements, and women who bought their clothes at Lord & Taylor.

  The morning he was due to leave was as bright and warm as summer. Sun streamed in through the tall win­dows and skylights of David’s house, brighter than klieg lights. Gregor folded cotton sweaters and thought about David’s sleeping loft, which was the only room in the house that could be completely closed off from the sun. David’s guests, obviously, were expected to get up early. David sat in a corner of the room on a chair he had brought out from the kitchen. He had his legs stretched out and a cup of coffee in his hands. Gregor and David were the same age, but Gregor knew that David looked much younger. He was thinner, for one thing. He’d had less sadness and much, much less worry. Gregor didn’t know if he would have wanted that kind of life for himself or not. In one way, it was good. There was nothing noble about suffering, no matter how apocalyptic, or how trivial. In another way it wasn’t, because it left you cut off from reality. Gregor Demarkian had always liked reality.

  “So,” David was saying, “I think you ought to come, because you ought to meet her, at least once. I mean, that’s why I got you down here. Because I was worried it was going to be a witch hunt. Because I was worried they were going to send Ginny all the way to the gas chamber without knowing whether or not she did it.”

  “I don’t think they have the gas chamber in this state,” Gregor said. “I think they execute by legal injec­tion.”

  “Whatever. You don’t have to stay forever. Just come and watch her blow out the candles or whatever she’s going to do—”

  “Like a birthday party?”

  “Well, it is like a birthday, isn’t it? Her new birth out of jail. It was Rose who set it up, and Naomi from the library. It’s going to be a nice little party. And besides, like I said, you should see her at least once before you go.”

  “You don’t give Clayton Hall enough credit. He may sound like a rube to you, but he knows what he’s doing.”

  “I never said he didn’t know what he was doing. Come.”

  “I have a train to catch. I’m tired and I want some serious Armenian food. I want to go home.”

  “You can do it before you go to catch your train. Come.”

  “There’s somebody at your front door, David. You ought to go answer it.”

  There was somebody at the front door, too. The doorbell was ringing. Gregor could see the tall man on the front step from the guest room window—Henry Holborn, he thought, the reverend who had made all that fuss up at the camp. Gregor had talked to Holborn once or twice during his stay in Bellerton. The talks had not been long and they had not been very deep. Gregor’s impressions had been favorable, but not for any particular reason: Henry Holborn had seemed to him like a decent man, in spite of all the fire and brimstone and ingrained fear of the devil. David opened the front door and stood back to let Henry Holborn in. Gregor folded a cotton knit polo shirt he hadn’t worn once and put it next to his favorite gray wool sweater. He had worn his gray wool sweater so many times, it was un­raveling from the hem and the sleeves and coming apart everyplace else.

  “He’s over in the guest room, packing,” he heard David Sandler say. “You come along this way and I’ll get you a cup of coffee.”

  “I don’t need a cup of coffee, David,” Henry Holborn said. “I just want to talk to Mr. Demarkian.”

  Gregor put a little snow globe with a model of the state capitol in it into the suitcase. He had nothing more to pack. David Sandler and Henry Holborn were coming across the hardwood floor of the living room together, clat­tering. Gregor took his best tweed sport jacket from where it was lying across the desk and put it on.

  “There he is,” David said, coming through the guest room door. “All finished packing and everything. I’ve been trying to talk him into coming to Ginny’s coming-out party.”

  “Everybody in town is going to be at that party, al­most,” Henry Holborn said politely. “So are those report­ers that are still in town, even if there aren’t too many of them anymore. You might have a good time, Mr. Demar­kian. You’d certainly be welcome.”

  “Besides,” David said. “He saved Ginny’s life, and he’s never even met her.”

  Henry Holborn came into the guest room and looked around. “Well,” he said. “I can see you’re busy. I’m very sorry to bother you. And I know this is just silly as any­thing—”

  “That’s all right,” Gregor said. “If there’s something I can do for you?”

  Henry Holborn was looking at the big abstract paint­ing on the wall. “It’s just that it doesn’t matter anymore. Now that what’s happened with Stephen has happened, I mean. It’s just—”

  “What?”

  “Well, when I first heard about Zhondra Meyer com­mitting suicide, I knew she hadn’t, you see. I knew she hadn’t. But then, everything happened with Stephen, you see, and…” Henry Holborn shrugged.

  Gregor was intrigued. “How did you know Zhondra Meyer didn’t commit suicide? Were you there?”

  “No, no,” Henry Holborn said. “She was with me. The night before she died, I mean. She came to see me.”

  “About what?” />
  “About buying me out.”

  “Buying you out?” David Sandler said. “Jesus Christ, Henry.”

  There was a flicker of annoyance about the profanity in Henry Holborn’s face, but just a flicker, nothing more. Henry Holborn believed the things he believed, but he also lived in the world he lived in, and he was used to it.

  “I don’t know if you realize,” he said to Gregor, “but I—meaning the church, of course, the Full Gospel Chris­tian Church—have rather extensive holdings just outside of town.”

  “He’s got a hundred and thirty-three acres and fifteen buildings,” David said. “And they aren’t small buildings.”

  “She didn’t just want that,” Henry Holborn said. “She wanted the housing development. She wanted every­thing. I don’t know if anybody’s told you, Mr. Demarkian, but the church has a big tract of land out at the end of the Hartford Road, right on the county line, and we’ve built houses on it. For our members, mostly. The church handles the credit, you know, because most of them can’t go to the banks.”

  “Two hundred twelve houses up there last time I checked,” David said.

  “She offered me twenty-five million dollars for it,” Henry Holborn said. “In cash. Just like that. And I thought, you know, when I heard she was supposed to have committed suicide, that she couldn’t have. Because people don’t make offers like that and then go off and kill them­selves, not unless they’re taking drugs or doing something else to make their minds not work right, and one thing I have to give Zhondra. Her mind always worked just fine.”

  Gregor considered this. “It could have been an act of desperation,” he suggested. “Maybe she had had all she could take of hostility from the town, and she felt driven to make a really crazy offer.”

  “I think she had had as much as she could take of hostility from me and my people,” Henry Holborn said, “but I don’t think she was acting in desperation. I’ve seen people in desperation. I see it every day. I saw Stephen Harrow the day before he confessed to the murders.”

  “So did I,” David said. “He was crazy.”

  “I believe in the Devil,” Henry Holborn said. “I be­lieve that Satan is a real and existent presence in this world. But Stephen Harrow was wandering around town, seeing the Devil in the flesh right in front of his face. Zhondra was not like that when she came to talk to me. She was per­fectly calm and perfectly lucid. She acted as if she was trying to buy a good winter coat and knew she was going to have to pay more than she wanted to to get it.”

  “He said he could see the devil in the palm of his hand,” David said. “I asked him if he wanted me to help him home, but he didn’t. I thought—I don’t know what I thought. But I look back on it now, and I don’t think he was in his right mind.”

  Henry Holborn moved away from the abstract art. Gregor didn’t think he had ever really seen it. “Oh, well,” Henry said. “It’s like I said. It doesn’t matter anymore, now that all that happened with Stephen. But it was on my mind, so I decided to come to you and get it off.”

  “I don’t mind,” Gregor said. “It’s an interesting piece of information.”

  “She actually had twenty-five million dollars in acces­sible cash,” Henry said. “After she made the offer, I had her checked out. It was impossible to get all the informa­tion, of course, with people who run on that track, so much of it’s hidden. But she could get twenty-five million dollars in cash if she wanted to, and she could probably get more.”

  “I wonder what it’s like to live with something like that,” David said. “Not having to worry about money is one thing, but on that scale—” He shrugged.

  Gregor patted the top of his suitcase and looked out the window. It really was a bright and sunny day, the kind of day silly rock-and-roll songs are always talking about. He wondered what Stephen’s wife Lisa was going to do, and what Bobby Marsh was going to do, too, since the news was all over town that Ginny no longer wanted to have anything to do with him. In the detective novels Bennis gave him, the story was always over when the murder was solved. Everything was put back in order. Everyone went back to living happily, undisturbed by the sudden eruptions of blood. In real life, there never seemed to be an end to it. The repercussions went on and on and on, like ripples on the ocean, destined to never reach another shore.

  “You know,” Gregor said, “I think I’ve changed my mind. I think I will drop in on that party.”

  “Oh,” David said, surprised. “Well, good. Good. Let’s go over.”

  “You really will be very welcome, Mr. Demarkian,” Henry Holborn told him. “After everything you’ve done, I’m sure Ginny would be thrilled to have you there.”

  Gregor didn’t know if Ginny would be thrilled to have him there or not, but he did know he needed some kind of closure.

  He was also very hungry, and he knew more about David Sandler’s cooking than he wanted to.

  2

  IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO make Betsey’s House of Hominy look festive. It was a solid little diner with metal frames on the windows and vinyl on the floor, and no matter how many balloons got tacked to its ceiling, it would never be anything else. The ceiling this morning was covered with balloons, in five or six different colors. There were even a few of the shiny silver Mylar kind, filled with helium and bouncing on the currents of air that came through the open windows. There were little bouquets of balloons in every booth and at intervals along the counters. There were rib­bons and bows on every coatrack. People seemed to be stuffed into the corners and plastered to the walls, there were so many of them. What there wasn’t was a banner, of the kind Gregor had gotten used to from the parties Donna Moradanyan threw at home. There was nothing saying “Congratulations Ginny!” or “Welcome Home Ginny!” or “Happy Jailbreak Ginny!” Maybe there was nothing that could be put on a banner that the organizers of this thing thought would be appropriate. There was a cake, however, sitting on a cake stand on the counter with the two seats in front of it left empty, so that nobody would elbow it onto the floor and ruin the whole thing. The cake had almost as many tiers as a wedding cake, and was iced in white and pink. All that was written on top of it was “Ginny.”

  There wasn’t anyplace to sit. Gregor wedged himself into the crowd behind David Sandler and Henry Holborn and finally took up a place against the wall near the front door. Nobody was paying attention to him. Ginny was seated on the counter next to the cake—literally on the counter, with her legs folded under her, like a Girl Scout at a tent meeting at camp. Her hair cascaded down her back in loops and curls. The collar of her shirt was open to reveal a gold cross on a gold chain around her neck. Oddly, she was heavier than Gregor remembered thinking she would be, when he had seen her on television. For most people, the camera added pounds instead of taking them off. Maybe she had gained weight in jail, sitting alone in that single cell with nothing to do but eat. In a situation like that, Gregor himself would have found something to read, but Ginny Marsh didn’t look like the sort of young woman who liked books.

  Betsey herself had put a round of candles on the cake, and now everybody in the room started singing something, Gregor couldn’t tell what. The tune was “Happy Birth­day,” but it was obvious that the two blond women Gregor remembered as Rose MacNeill and Naomi Brent had writ­ten new words to the music. Whatever it was they were saying got a laugh from the people closest to them. Then Ginny leaned over and blew out the candles on the cake. It was right to call her Ginny and not Virginia, Gregor thought. She lacked the elegance to carry the more formal name. Ginny was, in fact, the perfect picture of a small-town nice girl, the kind of girl who would be respectful of older people and kind to younger ones, happy to canvass for the March of Dimes and diligent about donating food to the Christmas basket drive at her church. When the news had first broken about the death of the child, some of the news programs had done their best to demonize her. No­body wanted to be taken in again, not after what had hap­pened with Susan Smith. In the end, it had been impossible to demonize Ginny
Marsh. There were no demons there. She was what she appeared to be, every minute of every day. She didn’t change into a werewolf after dark.

  Somebody started to pass around the cake, and some­body else got up to leave. Gregor grabbed the empty chair and sat down. He didn’t want any cake, not at this hour of the morning, but he did want to stay awhile and watch. Rose MacNeill and Naomi Brent both looked feverish, probably because they had too much to do and weren’t used to this kind of party. Gregor saw Ricky Drake saying grace over his food—but Henry Holborn just ate his, picking it up in his hands instead of using the little plastic fork that he’d been handed. Now that the cake had been cut, people were starting to drift out. It was an ordinary workday for most of them. They had places to go and people to see.

  It was after the crowd had really started to thin out that Ginny Marsh came over to him, bouncing and weaving through the few people who were left as if she had little springs attached to the bottoms of her shoes. Maggie Kelleher had pointed him out to her. Gregor saw it happen. Ginny paused every few feet on her way across the floor to say something to somebody, to smile and nod and make small talk.

  By the time she got to him, the only people close to him were David and Henry Holborn, and they were talking to each other about the difficulties of running a small pub­lishing house. David had run one for a decade, specializing in books that argued against the propositions of Christian­ity. Holborn wanted to start one to specialize in books that would argue in favor of those same propositions. Since it all came down to paper and ink and printers’ deadlines and the First Amendment, they had a lot to say to each other.

  Ginny pulled up one of the loose chairs now littering the floor and sat astride it, with her arms across the chair back and her chin on her arms. She looked like she was in the process of posing for a Norman Rockwell painting.

  “Hello,” she said. “You’re Gregor Demarkian. You’re the great detective. Maggie Kelleher pointed you out.”