Baptism in Blood (22 page)

“No,” Gregor said.

“He showed up again, broke both her arms and both her legs, gave her a broken jaw, ruptured her spleen so badly she very nearly died, knocked out most of her teeth, and ripped off all of her clothes in the process. I think the police department in Memphis did then deign to arrest this asshole, but you see what I’m getting at here. Alice is al­ways like that because Alice has good reason to be always like that. So do most of the women who come to stay here. That’s what this place is for.”

“I didn’t say she didn’t have good reason,” Gregor said.

“Of course you didn’t.” Zhondra Meyer put her head in her hands and rubbed her eyes. When she looked up again, she seemed faintly blurred. “All right, now,” she said. “Clayton, Mr. Demarkian. Here we are. What do we do now? I don’t want to start sounding like Alice, but things are getting very bad around here. I spend half my time wondering if I’m about to be lynched.”

“Could I clear some things up first?” Gregor asked. “I’m just a little confused about what exactly is going on here.”

“Of course,” Zhondra Meyer said. “Ask anything you like. Have a brochure.”

Gregor took the four-color glossy foldout from Zhondra’s hand. It had a picture, of the front gate on the cover and the words:
Bonaventura. A Camp for Gay Women.

“Well, that answers one thing,” Gregor said. “This is a camp for gay women. If you want to call it a camp.”

Zhondra grinned. “My grandfather called it his hunt­ing cabin, if you can believe it.”

“I live very close to the Philadelphia Main Line, Ms. Meyer. I can believe it. Is Alice a lesbian as well as a battered wife? Or did you make a concession in her case?”

“Actually, sort of both at once. When I opened this place, I thought I was going to have the sort of thing they’ve got in that town in Mississippi, you know, a place where women could come to come out or to talk about what it was like living in a very antigay culture. And I do have that, sort of. But the more I spoke and the more I listened, the more I ran into battered wives who wanted to give up heterosexuality. I don’t know, Mr. Demarkian. I’ve never been particularly attracted by heterosexuality. I sup­pose these days I’m just trying to… help out.”

“Well, that’s not a bad idea,” Gregor said. “What about all this talk of goddess worship? Were there women up here worshipping a goddess on the day of the hurricane? Which goddess?”

“The Goddess Sophia, Mr. Demarkian. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of her. She was constructed, really, by the women’s movement. Or specifically, the movement to reclaim women’s spirituality. A lot of women seem to need religion very much, even if religion hasn’t been very good to them.”

“I take it you don’t need religion very much,” Gregor said.

“Actually, I’m a rank atheist. The very word ‘spiritu­ality’ makes my eyes glaze over.”

“But you don’t disapprove of it?”

“I don’t really think about it. If a bunch of women want to go out to the pine grove and sing songs to the Great Mother of Us All, I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t.”

“And that was what they were doing the day of the hurricane? Singing songs to the Great Mother?”

“That’s right.”

“Naked?”

Zhondra fluttered her hands in the air. “I know it sounds ridiculous,” she said, “but it’s part of the ritual. Learning to honor your body. Your body is an avatar. The Great Mother lives in every woman. Every woman is there­fore beautiful.”

“And this requires running around naked in the out­doors during a hurricane?”

“Well, Mr. Demarkian, the hurricane hadn’t started when they went out to do it. They should have been done long before they had anything to worry about. It isn’t even that long a ceremony.”

“But they weren’t done.”

“No, they weren’t,” Zhondra agreed. “That’s be­cause Carol Littleton was late. She’d gone into town to buy a christening present for her granddaughter, I remember, and she didn’t get back until more than half an hour after she was expected. And they didn’t want to start without her, so they waited.”

“Had the storm started by the time they did?”

“I don’t know,” Zhondra said. “I wasn’t with them then. I’d come inside. We had a lot of people up here, getting out of the weather. A lot of people from town. I invited them. I thought it would be good public relations.”

“Was it?”

“God only knows. We were all sitting in here around the fire, with the power off and the candles on, playing out a scene from some ancient movie, I suppose, when David Sandler came in with Ginny Marsh and she had blood all over her. I don’t suppose that was good for public rela­tions.”

“I don’t suppose it was. The women who were sup­posed to be worshipping the goddess weren’t here at the time David Sandler brought back Ginny Marsh?”

“No, they weren’t.”

“Who was?”

“I really couldn’t tell you, Mr. Demarkian. We had a couple of dozen people here. I don’t remember noticing anything in particular. Or anyone.”

“Would you know just who these couple of dozen people were, if you had to know? Could you write down their names?”

“All of them? No, I couldn’t. Some were people I’d never even heard of before. They were here out of curiosity, I guess, or because they lived close. I could give you the names of about half of them, though. There were quite a few people I did know. Like Maggie Kelleher and Rose MacNeill and Naomi Brent. Rose was wearing so much religious jewelry, I thought she was going to rename her­self Trinity Christian Church and open up for services.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “We’ll get to that later. For now, let’s think about this goddess service the women were holding. How many women were there?”

“Three.”

“Were they regular guests at the camp?”

”All three of them have been here longer than a year.”

“So you knew them well.”

“I knew them.”

“Who were they?”

“Well,” Zhondra said, “Carol Littleton was one. Di­nah Truebrand was one of the other two. She wrote the litany they sang. And then there was Stelle Cary. Stelle is boring. She knew she was a lesbian from the time she was twelve. She’s only here because she wanted to spend some time in a place where that wasn’t a weird thing to be.”

“What kind of litany was this?” Gregor asked, think­ing about Jackson and his reference to various parts of the female anatomy.

Zhondra Meyer opened the long center drawer of the desk and pulled out a single piece of typing paper. “I thought somebody was going to ask for that eventually. I’ve been keeping this for days. I’m afraid Dinah has more zeal than artistic talent.”

Gregor looked down at the sheet Zhondra Meyer handed him and blinked.

“Great Mother of Us All, make sacred my body,” it read and then:

Make sacred all my limbs

Make sacred my throat and tongue

Make sacred my thighs and breasts

Make sacred the folds of my vulva

Make sacred the flower of my clitoris

Gregor tried to hand the sheet to Clayton Hall, but he wouldn’t have it.

“I’ve already seen it,” Clayton said.

Gregor put the sheet down on the desk. “Very inter­esting,” he told Zhondra Meyer. “Does this really help women find their—spirituality?”

“I wouldn’t know. It’s like I said. I’m an atheist. But you see what I mean, Mr. Demarkian. There’s nothing of devil worship about it. There’s no violence. There’s no sac­rifice. They just sing this thing or something like it, and light candles and close their eyes. They’ve done it hundreds of times in the last year or so and there’s never been any problem with it at all. Why should there suddenly be one now?”

Gregor thought about it. “You’re sure of what went on in these rituals? They couldn’t be telling you one thing and doing another?”

“I suppose they could, Mr. Demarkian, but why should they bother? I’m really quite tolerant of other peo­ple’s beliefs. I wouldn’t have stopped them, even if they had been sacrificing mice or whatever. But they weren’t. The whole point about the goddess movement is how non­violent and antihierarchical it is. What they don’t like about Christianity is the whole idea of blood sacrifice.”

“Are these three women around here someplace where I could talk to them?”

“Of course. Do you want me to get them now?”

“Not just yet,” Gregor said. “What about this pine grove or whatever. Is it close?”

“Just off the terrace and down the hill about fifty feet.”

“Could we go there right away?”

“Of course.”

Zhondra Meyer got off her chair and went to the hearth to put her sandals on. Clayton Hall started to look uncomfortable.

“You know,” he said, “we’re pretty sure the baby wasn’t killed in the grove. It wouldn’t be like you were going to view the crime scene or something.”

“I understand that,” Gregor said. “I just want to see what this place is like. So many people seemed to be inter­ested in it.”

Zhondra Meyer opened a set of French doors and stepped out onto the terrace. “Come with me,” she said. “It really isn’t very far at all. And it’s very clean, too. Goddess worshippers don’t litter.”

Gregor stepped out onto the terrace and looked around. Even from back here, the house was enormous. It looked like a hotel. He and Clayton Hall followed Zhondra. They went across the flagstones and onto the grass. Then the lawn began to slope gently toward a stand of trees.

“Be careful,” she called back to them, “there’s a path here and you’ve got to take it. The lawn is riddled with gopher holes. If you get off the track, you’re likely to break your ankle.”

Gregor stayed on the track. Clayton Hall wasn’t so careful, but nothing awful happened to him. Zhondra Meyer seemed to adhere to the path like a train on a track. It came naturally.

“That’s funny,” she said, stopping suddenly. “Some­body must have been drunk.”

“What do you mean?” Gregor came up behind her.

Zhondra Meyer pointed forward, and Gregor saw it. There was a clearing in the stand of trees, an almost perfect circle of pines. The clearing was covered with dead pine needles. At the center of it was a pile of stones made to look like the lip of a well. Next to the lip was what seemed to be a pile of old clothes.

“They never leave their things out here like this,” Zhondra Meyer said, striding forward. “They’re always very careful. I wouldn’t allow them to do this otherwise.”

Gregor put a hand on Zhondra’s arm to stop her. “I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “Not just yet.”

“Do what?” Zhondra asked.

Clayton came up behind them both and came to a dead halt. By then, Gregor didn’t see how either of them could be missing it. It seemed so clear to him, and so eerie, out here in the pines and the silence and the isolation, out here in the clear morning air.

It wasn’t a pile of clothes that was lying next to the stones.

It was a body.

H
ER NAME WAS CAROL
Littleton. That was one of the few things Gregor could find out, for certain, in all the long two hours that followed the discovery of the body. Most of what went on was what he had become used to over the last few years: the routine of securing the crime scene, and talking to witnesses, and giving the tech men the space they needed to get done what they had to get done. Oddly enough, Gregor had never experienced any of it when he was still with the FBI. Once he became head of the Behav­ioral Sciences Department, he rarely left his office. When he did, as in the few times in his Bureau career when he had been called in on a murder that occurred on federal lands, he had arrived on the scene long after the initial details had been taken care of. The FBI dealt with the Big Picture, according to J. Edgar Hoover and every director who came after him. Gregor had gotten used to thinking of murders in terms of unified psychological histories and in­terstate tracking maps and cycles of violence. He didn’t think the death of Carol Littleton was going to call for that kind of expertise. She was lying out there in the leaves, tangled in a sheet and a rough brown poncho, looking hag­gard and heavy and ill. She had two tiny gold earrings threaded through her tiny pierced ears, a single uncertain concession to femininity.

“I’m so glad she turned out to be dressed,” Zhondra Meyer said at one point in the proceedings. She was whis­pering into Gregor’s ear. It had taken the media people in town no time at all to realize that something was going on up here. Locking the front gates of Bonaventura against them did no good at all.

“I was afraid she’d come out here to do a ritual,” Zhondra told Gregor, “and then had a heart attack or something. I was afraid she would be lying there with no clothes on, and it would be in all the papers tomorrow. Christ, couldn’t you just see it?”

“She didn’t have a heart attack, Ms. Meyer, she had her throat cut.”

Zhondra Meyer stared at Gregor solemnly. Her al­ready large eyes seemed to get larger. Every visible part of her seemed to turn to glass. Gregor shifted from foot to foot, uncomfortable. It was like being watched by a machine with bad intentions.

“I wonder what she was doing out here all by her­self,” Zhondra said. “They didn’t usually come here on their own. Except to set up for another ritual, maybe, or something like that. I wonder why she was here…”

“You really have no idea?”

“No idea at all.”

“Maybe they’ll be able to find out by talking to some of the other women. Maybe she was intending to meet somebody here.”

Zhondra Meyer looked away across the crowds of po­lice and reporters. There was now a police officer doing nothing but keeping the reporters away from where the po­lice needed to be. There was a little knot of women stand­ing on the sidelines, too, but they weren’t causing any trouble. Some of the women seemed to be clones of each other, or members of the same club. They were all stocky, with blunt-cut hair and no makeup, wearing jeans or bib overalls. The rest of the women were birds of plumage, dressed up in red and blue and green. Gregor saw both of the women he had talked to about the case that morning: Maggie Kelleher and Naomi Brent. Then he wondered if it would really be this easy to tell the difference between the women of the town and the women of the camp. Certainly no woman of the town would for a moment dress the way the women of the camp did. Bib overalls and stretched-out blue jeans were not high fashion in Bellerton, North Caro­lina. Still, Zhondra Meyer did not dress like that. There might be other women in the camp who didn’t, either. If you saw a woman in town, a woman you had questions about, how would you be able to tell?