by Jane Haddam
Lisa turned to look up Main Street and then came across the porch and down the steps to the sidewalk. She came close enough to him to be heard but not close enough for him to reach out and touch her.
“Is that Carol Littleton I see with the brown paper bag?” she asked. “What did she want in this weather?”
“She wasn’t here.” Stephen went back to looking at the bell tower. “She was at Rose’s. I think she bought something.”
“Now?”
“Rose seems to be open, Lisa. If Rose is open, Carol Littleton can buy something.”
“You’d think they would all have left town by now, for God’s sake. Why do you think they stay? It can’t be comfortable for them here.”
“Maybe they have nowhere else to go.”
“Carol Littleton might not have anyplace to go to, but Zhondra Meyer does. She’s rich as Croesus. She’s only here to bother us. She wants to enlighten the poor benighted yokels.”
“Enlighten us about what?”
“Gay rights. Tolerance and diversity. All that kind of thing. You know: We’ve all been colonized by a white male culture. We have to throw off the chains that bind our imaginations and remythologize our lives into paradigms of true equality. That kind of thing.”
“Really.”
Lisa made a face. “She talked to the library reading group last week. That was Maggie Kelleher’s idea, of course. God, but she’s been a strange woman since she came back from New York. I wonder what happened to her there.”
“Probably the same things that happened to you in New York,” Stephen said. “I met you in New York.”
Lisa gave him a sideways, look. “You may have met me in New York, but I didn’t change in New York. Maggie changed in New York. She changed a lot. I remember her from when she got accepted at that silly college of hers. She was all ruffles and charm bracelets. She was the kind of girl people’s mothers always called ‘sweet.’”
“You must have been in the cradle.”
“I was eight.”
Eight, Stephen thought. That must make Maggie—what? Forty? He squinted in the direction of the bell tower roof. This was the kind of thing he ought to talk to Lisa about. She was the one who was born here. She was the one who ought to care. The Methodist Church was the oldest building in Bellerton. It was the only one still standing that had existed at the time of the American Revolution. Everything else had been destroyed one way or another: burned down in skirmishes during the Civil War; gone to rot; bulldozed for the newer and shinier and brighter and smaller mock-Greek revival places everybody here preferred to live in. The truth about Lisa was that she would bulldoze it all and put up split-levels if anybody ever gave her a chance. Lisa had no sentimentality at all and no feeling for history.
“You ought to come inside,” she said now. “We’ve got to pack a few things up and go to the high school. They say that storm is going to come right through the middle of town.”
“I’m worried about the church,” Stephen said. “About the tower. It’s such an old building.”
“You can’t take the church to the high school, Stephen. It won’t fit into the car.”
“That isn’t what I’m trying to say.”
“You can’t stay here, either.” Lisa tapped her foot against the pavement, impatient. “This is a major hurricane we’re talking about. It’s already done I don’t know how much damage. If you get in the way of it, it will blow you right to China.”
“I was thinking that maybe we could put something on the bell tower roof. Plywood boards. Something to protect it.”
“If you were going to do something like that, you would have had to start days ago. It’s too late now, Stephen. Let’s get our things and go.”
“I will go. In a minute. I just want to stay here and—think for a while.”
“Think,” Lisa repeated. She turned on her heel and started to walk away from him, back across the front lawn, back to the porch. She didn’t turn around and tell him to be careful. She didn’t even tell him to hurry up again. She just went.
Once, Stephen thought, he spent all his time imagining what Lisa was like without her clothes on. He sat across from her in restaurants and thought of the way her small breasts swelled as they hung, light and active, under the curve of her shoulders. He sat next to her on buses and thought of the way her thighs flowed into her hips, smooth and restless and very clean. Now he imagined her locked in closets and shut away in cardboard boxes, tied up and gagged, silent, sexless, free of him.
Stephen turned to go back into the house himself, but as he did he saw Ginny Marsh coming down the sidewalk at him, bouncing along with Tiffany in her Snugli sling. Ginny was not one of Stephen’s parishioners—like half of everybody else, she went to one of those big fundamentalist churches on the outskirts of town—but he knew her to talk to from seeing her around town. He knew the baby, too, because she was a good baby to play with for a man who felt uncomfortable around infants. He was worried that they were both going to be as blown away as Lisa said everybody would be. He had never been in a hurricane before, but he could feel the badness of it in the wind. The air around him was so full of water, he found it hard to breathe.
“You should be home,” he said, flagging Ginny down. “Or at the high school. There’s going to be a storm.”
Ginny stopped and adjusted Tiffany on her front. “Hello, Mr. Harrow. We’ll be all right. We’re headed up to the camp.”
“The camp?”
“That’s got to be the highest place in Bellerton,” Ginny said. “I don’t think they’re going to get any water at all up there. Unless the Lord is sending a flood.”
“I think the Lord promised Noah not to do that again. I think it’s supposed to be the fire next time.”
The quote meant nothing to Ginny. “Our pastor says God can do anything He wants to do, and that makes sense to me. Doesn’t it make sense to you?”
“Of course.”
“I’m not worried about drowning up there, Mr. Harrow. I’m worried about those women. And you would be, too, if you realized.”
“Maybe they don’t seem so strange to me, Ginny. Since I’m from the north myself.”
Tiffany was fussing. Ginny adjusted her again, not really paying attention. “Sometimes what I really worry about is bringing Tiffany up there. You know. Because lesbians are homosexuals, aren’t they? And you never know what homosexuals will do.”
Right, Stephen thought. This was not a conversation he wanted to get into. His roommate his first year in the seminary had been gay, although in those days nobody got up and shouted about it. Stephen had never understood why so many people made such a noise about homosexuality.
“I just saw Carol Littleton headed up that way,” he told Ginny. “If you hurry, you might be able to catch up to her. Carol doesn’t move very fast even when the weather’s good.”
“My pastor says the Lord wants us all to accept Christ as our personal savior. That’s the important thing. But the Devil gets to some people and he just won’t let go.”
“Is that what it is?”
“Like those people who bombed that building in Oklahoma City,” Ginny went on, talking automatically now. This was like a tape she’d heard so many times, she had it memorized. Stephen couldn’t tell if she actually understood what she was saying. “It’s all of a piece, that’s what my pastor says. Sin is all of a piece. It’s not like there are big sins and little sins. There’s just one sin. Disobedience to the will of God.”
“I guess that would cover it,” Stephen said.
“I’m going to try to bring Tiffany up so that she never has to worry about any of that, Mr. Harrow. I’m going to try to bring her up right in the heart of the Lord.”
“I guess that’s a good idea, Ginny.”
Ginny backed away. “I’ve got to go now,” she said. “I’ve got to get up to the camp. I’ve got some typing to do and we need the money. And she wants me to come.”
“Zhondra Meyer
does?”
“That’s right. I called her from Dr. Sandler’s house and said maybe I ought to forget about it today, with the weather, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She’s a very driven woman, Ms. Meyer. It’s like work has hold of her and just won’t let her go.”
“Well, maybe it’s something important she’s got for you to do. Maybe it’s something that just won’t wait.”
“When the Lord breathes upon the face of the earth, everything can wait, Mr. Harrow. It has to.”
Tiffany had closed her eyes and laid her head down on Ginny’s breast. She looked achingly sweet there, soft and round and warm, the perfection of innocence.
“Hurry on up to the camp, then, if that’s where you’re going,” Stephen said. “You don’t want to keep that baby out in the rain.”
“Oh,” Ginny said. “Oh, no. I don’t. She’d catch a cold.”
“That’s right.”
“It’s a terrible thing, when babies have colds. They hate it.”
“Say hello to Ms. Meyer for me. Say hello to Carol Littleton, too. Carol should have stopped.”
Ginny started to back away up Main Street. “See you later,” she said. “You get yourself to someplace safe, too.”
Someplace safe, Stephen thought. He watched Ginny make her way in the wind, past the storefronts, past the Greek revival houses, past the churches. Tiffany seemed to have woken up again and started looking around. Stephen went up his walk and up the steps to his porch, listening for the sounds Lisa made when she was packing, the humming, the cursing, the slamming of doors.
Lisa didn’t want children. She didn’t want sex anymore, either. Lisa wanted to live here, in Bellerton, where she had grown up. There was a church coming open in Minneapolis next summer. He’d seen the notice about it in the newsletter the national organization sent out. He had even sent a letter and a vita. He didn’t think Lisa would stand for it. He saw himself at the head of a congregation full of people who believed the way he did, who loved science and art and music, who read something besides Scripture when they wanted to know how the world worked. Lisa saw herself in the cold among a lot of people she didn’t know and probably wouldn’t like. Feminists. Goddess worshippers. Liberals. Gays.
Lisa came to the front door just as Stephen reached the top of the porch steps.
“What were you doing out there all this time?” she demanded. “What could you possibly have been thinking of?”
Stephen had half a mind to tell her what he’d been thinking of.
Divorce.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1996 by Orania Papazoglou
cover design by Heather Kern
ISBN 978-1-4532-9304-1
This 2013 edition distributed by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.mysteriouspress.com
www.openroadmedia.com
THE GREGOR DEMARKIAN
MYSTERIES
FROM MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
Available wherever ebooks are sold
Otto Penzler, owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, founded the Mysterious Press in 1975. Penzler quickly became known for his outstanding selection of mystery, crime, and suspense books, both from his imprint and in his store. The imprint was devoted to printing the best books in these genres, using fine paper and top dust-jacket artists, as well as offering many limited, signed editions.
Now the Mysterious Press has gone digital, publishing ebooks through MysteriousPress.com.
MysteriousPress.com offers readers essential noir and suspense fiction, hard-boiled crime novels, and the latest thrillers from both debut authors and mystery masters. Discover classics and new voices, all from one legendary source.
FIND OUT MORE AT
WWW.MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
FOLLOW US:
@emysteries and Facebook.com/MysteriousPressCom
MysteriousPress.com is one of a select group of publishing partners of Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.
Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases
Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.
Sign up now at
www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters
FIND OUT MORE AT
WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM
FOLLOW US:
@openroadmedia and
Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia