Baptism in Blood (32 page)

“I didn’t say she should.”

“It’s hard to tell just what you’re saying, isn’t it, Mr. Demarkian? All right. Let’s do it this way. I’m due to come down to Bellerton tomorrow morning. Let’s meet in the main foyer of Town Hall at nine o’clock.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Assuming you’ve got the permission of the police, I’ll bring you down to talk to Ginny.”

“Thank you. And I do have the permission of the police.”

“I’ll stay with you the whole time you do talk to her.”

“All right,” Gregor said.

“No matter who it is you are or who you think you are, this time you’re working with the police, and I can’t have my client talk to you without an attorney present. I’m the attorney. I intend to be present.”

“I understand that, Miss Dunne. I find it entirely com­mendable.”

“All right, then. As long as you do. And you must also understand that I may cut off some of your lines of questioning. Just because you think they’re interesting doesn’t mean I’m going to think they’re in the best inter­ests of my client.”

“Of course.”

“I wish I trusted this more, Mr. Demarkian. I wish I trusted you more. But I don’t.”

“Do me a favor,” Gregor said. “Over the time be­tween then and now, think about something for me.”

“What?”

“Well, I’ll tell you. A number of people I’ve talked to here have come up with the same thesis. They don’t think Ginny Marsh murdered her child, and they don’t think she helped anyone else kill it or that she’s covering up for her husband or a boyfriend. When she says she had nothing to do with it, they believe her.”

“That’s good.”

“What they don’t believe,” Gregor continued, “is that she’s telling the truth about the Black Mass or what­ever it was. And they don’t think she’s mistaken, either. They think she’s lying through her teeth.”

There was a lot of quiet breathing and coffee drinking down in Charlotte. Finally Susan Dunne said, “I find that interesting, Mr. Demarkian. In fact, I find that very inter­esting. Maybe you’re more right than I want to realize. Maybe she does need a small-town lawyer, a Bellerton law­yer even, just to keep track of all the… permutations.”

“Nobody can keep track of all the permutations.”

“Yes. Well. We can go through all this again tomor­row.”

“Of course. I’ll be looking forward to seeing you.”

“Oh, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you, too, Mr. Demarkian. I’ll be very glad to get my eyes on you at last. I’ve got to go.”

“I want to thank you again for the time you’re giving me. You must be a very busy woman.”

“I don’t think ‘busy’ is the word for it. I look forward to meeting you, Mr. Demarkian, and to discussing Bellerton’s other recent murder. That place is getting to be like Detroit.”

“I doubt it.”

“I don’t know what I doubt anymore. Good afternoon, Mr. Demarkian. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

This time the phone went to a dial tone. Gregor looked at the receiver for a moment, then put it down. Clayton Hall was sitting on the corner of a desk a few feet away, kicking one heel in the air. Gregor finally realized what it was about the police station that kept striking him as so strange: There were no religious symbols in it. Like many small towns in the South, Bellerton interpreted the Supreme Court’s decisions limiting religious expression in public places very narrowly. If the Supreme Court said you couldn’t have a nativity scene in the middle of the town green for Christmas, then Bellerton wouldn’t have a nativ­ity scene on the town green for Christmas, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t have a perfectly nice creche in the lobby of the Town Hall. If the Supreme Court said that public schools couldn’t hang copies of the Ten Commandments on public school classroom walls, then Bellerton wouldn’t hang copies of the Ten Commandments on public school classroom walls—but more than two thirds of the students in every class would be wearing crosses on chains around their necks, and some of them would show up on the schools’ front walks in the morning, praying in loud voices and holding hands. What Gregor had particularly noticed was the way in which verses from the Bible seemed to be inscribed on plaques and hung everywhere. There was one in the lobby upstairs, and one just inside the front door of the library, too, which Gregor had seen on one of his rest­less excursions around town. The police department, though, was bare. There wasn’t as much as a single cross around Clayton’s or Jackson’s neck. There wasn’t a single Bible on a single desk. There weren’t even any quotes from the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution—fa­miliar tactics, Gregor knew, because the quotes so often had God in them. Clayton Hall was watching him look, kicking his free foot higher and higher in the air.

“So what is it?” Clayton said. “You didn’t expect her to just let you go in and sit down with Ginny on your own, did you?”

“No,” Gregor admitted. “That’s all right. I was thinking about something else.”

“If you were thinking this place is a dump, I agree with you. Everybody agrees with you. It isn’t going to change anytime soon.”

“I was thinking this was the only place in town, public property or private, where I haven’t seen a single religious symbol of any kind.”

“Why should we have religious symbols in the police department? The perpetrators can bring their own religious symbols. They do, too.”

“I didn’t say I thought you ought to have religious symbols,” Gregor said patiently, “it’s just that, well, to be frank, Clayton, relative to where I come from, this is a very religious town.”

“Baptist territory,” Clayton said solemnly.

“Baptist and Assemblies of God and denominations even smaller than that. I was talking about the pervasive­ness of it. It really is everywhere.”

“Excuse me if I don’t get your point, Mr. Demarkian, but no matter how significant all that kind of thing may seem to you, it’s no big deal to me. I grew up in Bellerton. We used to be a lot more religious than we are now. The Supreme Court used to let us get away with it.”

“I’m sure they did, Clayton, but the point is—” Gregor drummed his fingers on the desk next to the phone. “Look,” he started up again, “do you think Ginny Marsh saw a bunch of women worshipping the devil in that clear­ing up at the camp?”

“I think Ginny Marsh saw a bunch of women wor­shipping the goddess,” Clayton said.

“You think she saw them on the day of the hurri­cane?”

“I haven’t got the faintest idea. She saw them. If she killed that baby, it could have been weeks before, because all she needed was the excuse, and once she’d seen them the excuse was handy. Even if there hadn’t been anybody out there worshipping the goddess at the time.”

“What about Carol Littleton?” Gregor asked. “Who do you think killed her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think she was killed by the same person who killed Ginny Marsh’s baby?”

“I don’t know. Not if Ginny Marsh killed her own baby, though. Ginny is still safely in jail.”

“Do you think Carol Littleton was killed because of religion?”

Clayton hopped down off the desk he had been sitting on. “If you mean do I think that Henry Holborn or one of his people decided to go off half-cocked and start exor­cising devils for himself, the answer is no. Henry can be pretty damned irritating at times, but he’s not violent.”

“There are people around him who could be violent,” Gregor said.

“Oh, I agree with you.” Clayton Hall nodded vigor­ously. “I was telling Henry the same thing myself just a couple of hours ago. And it worries me a little, probably more than you realize. But the fact is that we haven’t had any violence from any of them at any time for any reason. We haven’t even had any pro-life violence, and there’s an operating clinic not three miles from Henry Holborn’s church, one of the few first-rate clinics in North Carolina. You can’t lump people together, you know. You can’t say that just because there are crazy fundamentalists in Halford, Mississippi, that everybody who believes in the fundamentals is crazy.”

Actually, Gregor thought, that wasn’t the point. He wished he could get it clear in his own mind. He wasn’t one of those people who automatically thought all religions and all religious believers were dangerous, or insane, or worse. He even showed up at Father Tibor’s church every once in a while, out of politeness, and enjoyed himself there. It wasn’t that there was something wrong about reli­gion. It was that there was something wrong about religion
in this case.

“You got something on your mind?” Clayton Hall demanded. “You want to tell the rest of us about it?”

“You’re the only ‘rest of us’ there is at the moment, Clayton. And there’s nothing to tell, not in the way you mean it. I was thinking there was somebody I would like to talk to.”

“Well, if it isn’t somebody in jail or under suspicion of murder or living up in Massachusetts, I might be able to arrange that for you.”

“I’ve talked to her before, but I didn’t know her. The lady from the library. Ruth something.”

“Naomi,” Clayton said drily. “Naomi Brent. Now I can tell Henry Holborn that at least once upon a time, you read the Bible.”

“I heard Bible stories in my Sunday school classes,” Gregor said. “In Armenian. Can we go talk to this Naomi Brent?”

“Sure, if she’s in. Why don’t you let me call over to the library and find out? Then it’s just across the street.”

“I know where the library is, Clayton.”

Clayton picked up the phone. “That’s the trouble with small towns like this,” he said. “They’re too easy to get to know.”

T
HE WALK BETWEEN THE
police department and the li­brary felt endless, because for the first time in Gregor’s experience, Main Street wasn’t mostly deserted. There were the reporters on the front steps on Town Hall, but they didn’t count. There weren’t as many of them there as when Gregor had first seen them, either. Maybe the story was going stale, and some of them were being recalled to San Francisco and Tulsa. Maybe, and much more likely, all the waiting was boring beyond belief, and they took off as often as they dared to drink coffee in Betsey’s or buy magazines at Maggie Kelleher’s bookstore. What made this short walk really awful was that the people of Bellerton were out in force. Gregor saw Maggie Kelleher standing in front of her store’s plate glass window, talking to a man in a wooden rocker who seemed to own the store next to hers. He saw Ricky Drake on the steps of Betsey’s diner, stopped dead in his tracks to stare at them. A short, sharp move­ment caught his eye, and Gregor looked up to catch sight of an old woman retreating hastily behind a second-story cur­tain. He had a thick sheen of sweat across the back of his neck.

“Jesus,” he said to Clayton Hall.

The library’s big front doors were right in front of them. The doors were shut, so they wouldn’t let out any of the air-conditioning. Clayton opened one and ushered Gregor inside. Gregor landed in the lobby right in front of the plaque he had been thinking about, the one with the words
WISDOM IS THE JEWEL OF GOD AND THE CROWN OF THE JUST MAN
written on it. Gregor didn’t know much about the Bi­ble, but he did know this was a quotation from Ecclesiastics, one of the books of the Bible that Catholics accepted and Protestants did not. The Bellerton Public Library seemed to be more ecumenical than many of the church groups Gregor had heard of.

There were inner doors as well as outer ones. Every­one believed in air locks these days. The inner doors were made of glass. Through them, Gregor could see the few people who were in the library. They were mostly old peo­ple, reading newspapers at long wooden tables. There was a young woman at a little computer desk that served as the card catalogue these days, tapping things onto the keyboard with one hand and wrestling with a baby with the other. The baby was bright and cheerful and determined and strong. He kept getting away and having to be chased after.

Clayton pushed open one of the inner doors and said, “You coming? Or are you asleep on your feet?”

“Both,” Gregor told him. “It’s a good-sized library for a small town.”

“Have you been in here before?”

“Just as far as this vestibule. I poked my head in one of those mornings when I was wandering around, explor­ing.”

“It
is
a good library for a small town,” Clayton said. “The town council did a good job. They raised some money from taxes and some from fund-raisers and then they got a chunk from the state, and they used it wisely, if you ask me, No paying somebody’s second cousin to make a mess of the foundations.”

The young woman behind the checkout desk was not the one Gregor was looking for. For one thing, she was too young. For another, her hair was a bizarre shade of yellow that he had never seen before on anyone, anywhere. She was wearing a big silver cross around her neck on a deli­cate gold chain. So were at least three of the old ladies who were reading newspapers at the long table in the middle of the room. Clayton passed by them all, waving at the young woman behind the desk, whose name appeared to be Tisha. Then he headed for the staircase at the back and started climbing.

“Naomi’s office is on the second floor,” he explained. “That’s because she’s a really big noise with a doctorate in library science and everything. She’s also local, by the way. Doctorate or no doctorate, I don’t think the council would have hired her if she wasn’t local.”

“I knew she was local,” Gregor said. 

Clayton looked as if he wanted to ask Gregor how he knew, but they were at the top of the steps now. There were more stacks up here, and more wooden tables and wooden chairs—but small ones this time, just big enough for one or two people. Gregor followed Clayton to the back of the big room and found himself facing three brown metal doors. One of them was marked MEN. One of them was marked WOMEN. The third was blank.

“Here we are,” Clayton said, knocking on the blank door. He didn’t wait to hear an answering summons. He just opened the door and stuck his head in. “Naomi?”

Naomi was sitting at her desk near the windows. She had her back to the door when Clayton opened it, as if she had been watching the birds in the trees as she waited for their arrival. As soon as she heard the door swing open, she turned. Gregor thought she looked paler and more strained than the first time he had seen her.