And One to Die On (35 page)

Dear Gregor:

I have been thinking all morning about the things you said last night, and running around trying to get you the things you said you’d need. I don’t understand it, exactly, but here they are: all the clippings from the local paper here and the bigger one up in Raleigh-Durham; a photocopy of the report the state police did right after the storm; the only picture of the body I know for sure is in existence. I looked at the picture for a long time, trying to make it be familiar. I didn’t manage it. Corpses are not what I expected them to be. They’re nothing at all like the people who once inhabited them. Looking at dead flesh makes me think that all those philosophers who believe that there are two entities, soul and body, might have had more to go on than just wishful think­ing. Looking at dead flesh makes me want to drown my life in very expensive bourbon.

I’m including a few pages of notes on what I saw and did that day, too, just the way you asked me to, but I’m afraid they aren’t going to be much help. Everything I remember is very im­pressionistic, very mundane. The first time I knew that there was something wrong was when I saw the blood in the water, and I just thought it was the storm. Hurricane Elsa. I remember the wind getting so strong it bent the trees sideways along the edge of the beach, and took the roof off Rose MacNeill’s high-towered Victorian house. An old bum named Cary Deckeran drowned in a puddle of water in the crawl space under his front porch. He’d gone there to get out of the rain and had fallen asleep with drink just as the water started rising. Four people in town died that night just from the wind and water, and forty more were injured. There was blood everywhere.

I couldn’t tell you now why it was I knew that the blood I saw was different, but I did know. When she came out of the trees a few minutes later, all cut up and wild, I was almost expecting her. I wasn’t expecting what I found later
—
all the candles and incense, that strange ritual circle with its oils and perfumes, and the body lying there on top of the table, not only dead but cut into. Maybe that is what has always bothered me most. The body was
cut into,
Gregor, with little blood-traced lines all over it, as if it had been ripped apart and stitched together again like a crocheted quilt or badly made lace. I remember asking myself frantically when it had been done, when the body was dead or when it was alive. I asked the police about it, too, the first chance I got, but I didn’t get anything like a satisfactory answer. The attitude around here seems to be that I am the stranger in this place, and the atheist, and that it’s probably all my fault one way or another anyhow. I don’t mean that anybody sus­pects me of murder. They don’t. Here they think on a much more cosmic level than we’re used to thinking in New York.

Anyway, here it all is, and I hope it does you some good. Clayton Hall tells me he will be glad to have you here, and will write and tell you so himself. I have a feeling that the state police are less glad, but they aren’t saying so at the mo­ment. You must be used to that.

It’s like I told you on the phone. Everything is a mess here, and nothing is getting done, and we’re making the papers in Los Angeles and New York for all the wrong reasons. Everybody’s edgy and nervous. No matter how many times we all tell ourselves that it has nothing to do with us, not really, it’s all those people up at the camp
—
everybody is half expecting another body to show up, or worse. And
she—
well, you’ve seen her. Talking to Connie Chung. Talking to Barbara Walters. Going on and on the way she does with that big dumb bigot always at her side, never smiling, perpetually grim. I know he has nothing to smile about. I know it was his tragedy, too. I hate the man anyway.

See what I’m turning into? Good old logical me, the one who always and everywhere brought reason to bear on even the smallest problem, and I’m talking like a spiritualist with the spooks. The next thing you know, I’m going to be seeing ghosts on Main Street and the devil in Town Hall. The big dumb bigot sees the devil everywhere, even in church.

What I need, Gregor, is for you to get down here, right now, as fast as you can, and bring me back to myself. At least get enough of this straightened out so that I can think about some­thing else for a while. My house wasn’t hit too badly by the storm, in spite of being on the beach. You can have the back bedroom and a desk to work at in the library. Don’t pay too much attention to the way I sounded on the phone last night. This is a lovely place, with lovely peo­ple in it. They don’t mean to get worked up the way they have. This is just the kind of thing peo­ple get worked up about, even me.

Blood in the water, that’s the point. So much blood in the water, it couldn’t all have been hers. Blood shot through the white foam of the caps stirred up by the storm. Blood splashed across the smooth round rocks that fanned out from the front door of the lodge up at the camp. Blood on the black tablecloth that covered the makeshift al­tar where the body was found. There have been rumors down here ever since it happened that in order to worship the devil you have to shed blood, your own as well as somebody else’s. I don’t believe that anyone worships the devil. I don’t believe in the devil. Still, you know how people get. I don’t like the way the air feels around here these days. I worry about how fright­ened everybody is.

So. Pack your bags. Send our friend Bennis off to Paris or Palm Beach or someplace else she’s likely to be able to stay out of trouble. Tell Tibor that I still haven’t had a conversion experi­ence and that I still don’t want one, although I’m still interested in a little poker anytime he wants to visit me for a game. Say all the normal things, Gregor, and then just get here.

I think I’m getting desperate.

David

F
OR DAVID SANDLER, BELLERTON,
North Carolina, had al­ways been a place of rest. Bellerton was where he came on the long spring vacations when his students were in Fort Lauderdale or the Bahamas. Bellerton was where he came in the summer, with his books packed into liquor boxes in the back of his ancient Volvo station wagon and his class notes stuffed into the glove compartment. What had made him decide to come down here on his sabbatical, when he would have to do real work, he didn’t know. He had the house on the beach now. It was the only house he had ever really owned. He liked walking through Bellerton’s small town center. He liked the flat-roofed brick buildings that held the little stores that lined Main Street. He liked the tall-columned Greek revival houses that sat back on broad lawns for the four or five short blocks with sidewalks on them that made up “town” before the country started. He even liked Bellerton’s six mainstream churches—which was funny, really, because David Sandler was the man
Peo­ple
magazine had called “The Most Famous Atheist in America.” David didn’t know if he was famous or not, but in Bellerton these days he was noted. People left Bible tracts under his windshield wipers while he was picking up milk at the grocery store. People stuffed brochures into his mailbox: glossy four-color advertising flyers with headlines that said
Have You Accepted Christ As Your Personal Sav­ior?
People even tried to talk to him, awkwardly, as if they hated to intrude. David had a bright silver decal on the back of his car: a fish with legs and the word “Darwin” written inside it. People walked around that as if it could jump off the metal and go stomping around on their feet.

On the day of the hurricane, David stood on the deck of his house looking out at the sea and thinking that he didn’t like Bellerton’s
other
churches at all. The other churches were in storefronts and shacks and private houses out along the access roads off the interstate. They had names like The Good News Full Gospel Assembly and the Bellerton Church of Christ Jesus. They also seemed to have all the parishioners. Something had happened to the coun­try in the thirty years since David had first started teaching. It was as if no one was interested anymore in what was really real. They preferred to shout at each other instead. They preferred to shout at
him.
What was worse, the more they shouted, the more they seemed to come into money.

The sea was choppy and dark. The sky was a mass of black clouds. The little portable radio David had set up on the empty deck chair was urging everybody to board up their windows and head for higher ground. It was October and it was colder than David had thought it ever could be, this far south. That was what came of spending his life in New York City, of making Columbia University his only serious home. When the article had appeared in
People
about his getting a grant to write a book in favor of athe­ism, at least two dozen people had written in to ask what else they could have expected, since Dr. Sandler was a pro­fessor at a secular humanist communist Jewish place like Columbia. Actually, David was the son of a Presbyterian minister—but that was a story he didn’t go into often, and then only if he had to.

“The National Weather Service is reporting winds over a hundred twenty miles an hour off Hilton Head,” the radio said. “If you live on the beach, get off now. This is the biggest storm we’ve seen in fifteen years. You’re not going to be able to ride this one out.”

David went through the sliding glass doors into the house. The big square living room with its twenty-foot ceil­ing was empty. David heard typing coming from the study and the singsong giggle that told him that Ginny Marsh’s baby Tiffany was awake and in need of attention. Ginny Marsh was the young woman from town he had hired to type up his notes. David was surprised she was still there. With all the talk about the storm and the way the baby was fussing, he had assumed she would have gone an hour ago.

David went to the door to the study and looked in. Ginny was sitting at the word processor with her back to him, typing away. Tiffany was enthroned in a blue plastic baby seat, covered with a tiny eyelet quilt. The baby’s eyes were big and dark and very solemn. Ginny’s work station was littered with objects: a cross on a stand; a picture of Jesus with his arms stretched out to receive the multitudes; a pile of brightly colored pencils with pictures of angels smiling on the sides of them and the words
“Jesus Loves
YOU.” The pencils were for sale in town at Rose Mac-Neill’s shop, along with lapel pins that said,
“My Boss Is a Jewish Carpenter”
and coffee mugs that said
“Jesus Is Lord.”

David coughed. Tiffany turned her head to look at him and smiled. Ginny looked back over her shoulder and then swiveled her chair around to face him.

“Oh,” she said. “Dr. Sandler. Is there something I can do for you?”

David walked into the room and took Tiffany out of her chair. Tiffany was the first baby he had ever known, and he liked her enormously. When he picked her up, she curled against him, soft and warm and breathy.

“All the weather news is bad,” David said. “You shouldn’t be here this late. Even I shouldn’t be here. There’s going to be a hurricane.”

Ginny waved this away and turned back to her typing. Her hair cascaded down her back in a curling ponytail. Her hands were full of rings, so full that her only real one—her wedding ring—seemed to get lost.

“There isn’t going to be a hurricane for hours yet,” she said confidently. “I know. I’ve been through them. I’ve got plenty of time to get this done before I have to head into town.”

“I’d still feel safer if you headed into town.”

Ginny tapped impatiently at the computer. “Besides,” she said, “you know what I’d have to do if I left here now?”

“No.”

“Go up to that camp,” Ginny said. “That’s what I’d have to do. I promised that Miss Meyer. Ms., she wants to be called. My husband says they’re worshipping the devil up at that camp. Did you know that?”

“No,” David said. “I didn’t know it. I don’t think it’s true, Ginny. They’re not devils up there. They’re just a lot of middle-aged women whose lives haven’t worked out so well.”

Ginny wrinkled her nose. “They won’t let me put my pictures up out there,” she told him. “My cross and the picture of my Lord. They won’t even let me use my own pencils because they have Jesus’ name written on them. Their hearts are hardened against the Lord.”

“Their hearts are hardened against a lot of things, I expect.”

“They’re lesbians, too,” Ginny said. “They say so right out. They don’t care what anybody else thinks. Homo­sexuals are an abomination in the sight of the Lord.”

“Somehow, I have a hard time thinking of Zhondra Meyer as an abomination. A nag, maybe, but not an abomi­nation.”

Ginny looked back over her shoulder again and grinned. “I know,” she said, giggling. “They’re just like a bunch of old maids up there. It’s terrible. But Bobby’s the one who went to Bible college. He’s the one who knows. So he must be right about it, don’t you think?”

Bobby was Ginny’s husband. David shifted Tiffany from one shoulder to the other. Tiffany was asleep.

“Right about Zhondra Meyer?” he asked. “Well, Ginny, I don’t know. By now you must realize that I don’t put much credence in—”

“Put what?”

“That I don’t believe in God,” David said.

“You just say you don’t believe in God,” Ginny said quickly. “It’s Ms. Meyer who really doesn’t believe in Him. You let me keep my pictures up. You even let me listen to the PTL Club when I stay late. They don’t even have a television up there at that camp.”

“They probably can’t afford one.”

Ginny turned back to the terminal screen and frowned at it. “Bobby says it’s a dangerous thing, denying God and worshipping Satan. He says it can get out of hand and start affecting everybody. And I know what he means. I went to college myself for a while. Out at North Carolina State. I went for two years.”

“You should have stayed.”

“I saw it in some of the people I met out there,” Ginny went on. “It’s a terrible thing, to lose your faith in the Lord. People get—crazy.”

“People get crazy with the Lord just as well as with­out him, Ginny.”

Ginny shook her head. “Bobby says people don’t really think about Hell anymore. That’s the problem. If we really thought about Hell, if we really understood what it meant, we’d never do anything wrong. We wouldn’t want to risk for even a second going down to the fire. The fire that lasts for all of eternity.”