Baptism in Blood (40 page)

Stephen ushered them all into the living room proper, shooing them ahead of him like geese to the couch. He went back into the foyer and shut the front door, hard, so that the sound of the latch catching echoed through the house. Then he came back to the living room and sat down in one of the two big chairs that flanked the fire.

“I don’t understand why we need someone from the county prosecutor’s office,” Lisa said again. She wasn’t sitting down at all, but pacing back and forth in front of the fire. She looked ready to jump out of her skin.

Stephen leaned forward and caught her by the arm. “Sit down,” he said, guiding her to the other chair flanking the fire. “Relax. We’re all going to have a little talk.”

“About what?” Lisa demanded. “You’ve been talking all night and I haven’t understood a word of it.”

“I’ve been telling her about how I killed Zhondra Meyer,” Stephen said pleasantly. “That’s what you all came here for, isn’t it? To find out how I killed Zhondra Meyer?”

“I think we’d like to hear about Carol Littleton as well,” Gregor said. “We understand why you killed Zhon­dra Meyer. With Carol Littleton, it isn’t so clear.”

“Jesus,” Clayton Hall murmured.

Minna Dorfman wasn’t saying a word.

Lisa Harrow looked ready to cry. “He’s been talking like this all night,” she said. “I don’t understand it. He couldn’t have killed anybody.”

“But I did,” Stephen said, and that’s when Gregor realized that the man’s eyes were shining. There was a light in them, literally; Gregor thought he must have taken some kind of speed, like diet pills.

“I did kill them,” Stephen said again. “I killed them both. I wanted them dead. In the beginning I thought it was all hogwash, you know, all that stuff Henry Holborn talks about all the time. The Devil. But the Devil is here. The Devil lives inside my head.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Clayton said. “He’s going to an insanity plea.”

“I don’t think ‘the devil made me do it’ is going to go over very well in North Carolina, Mr. Harrow,” Minna Dorfman said crisply.

“Carol wasn’t there when the baby died,” Gregor said, calmly, softly, gently, insistently, willing all the rest of them to shut up. “Who was there when the baby died?”

“Carol saw me with the candles,” Stephen told him. “Before the hurricane. She saw both of us. She thought we were committing an act of desecration. She thought we were blaspheming against the Goddess.”

“And later she changed her mind?” Gregor prompted. “Later she put two and two together?”

“Later she wanted to know why I hadn’t told you about the candles,” Stephen answered. “Carol was never any good at putting two and two together. I told her it was private. I asked her to come and meet me behind the rec­tory. Lisa had to go into Raleigh for something. I don’t remember what.”

“You killed Carol Littleton here? At the rectory?”

“I killed her in my car,” Stephen said. “I had to get her around, you see. I had to get her body up to the clear­ing. I had a big rubber sheet that I used for camping and I put that in the backseat before she came, and then when I got her in there I just—”

“Cut her throat?”

“Broke her neck,” Stephen said. “I cut her throat later. I think she was still alive then, but I’m not sure. I didn’t think anybody could still be alive after they’d had their neck broken, but I think she was.”

“It happens every day.”

“You can’t cut the throat of a grown person the way you can with a baby,” Stephen said. “They won’t stand still for it. I drove the car around to the back of Zhondra’s property. There’s a dirt road up there and not much else. There’s not even a real fence. Nobody ever thinks of going in that way.”

“And you put the body in the clearing,” Gregor said.

“That’s right. I threw it on the ground and dumped a bunch of things on top of it. It was very early in the morn­ing. Lisa had just left, right before I called Carol to come over, and Lisa always likes to leave early when she’s going to Raleigh. And it was hours and hours before the body was found, too, although it was earlier than I thought it would be.”

“Earlier? Why earlier?”

“I thought I’d have a couple of days,” Stephen re­plied. “I knew they weren’t going up there to worship the Goddess anymore. Zhondra put a stop to it after Tiffany died. I thought she would just lie up there for a couple, of days and decompose.”

“And all this because she saw the candles.”

“They were very special candles,” Stephen said. “They were for worshipping the Goddess and only for wor­shipping the Goddess. I had them right before the storm, and I was bringing them out the side of the house, through the kitchen. She saw me, you see. Clayton didn’t do a very good job with the searching. I don’t think he ever got to that terrace. There was blood all over that terrace when it was finished.”

“When what was finished?” Gregor asked evenly. “Do you mean after the baby was dead?”

“The baby cried and cried and then it stopped. That’s all I remember about that. There was the rain and the light­ning and the thunder and the baby was wailing on and on and on and then it was dead, lying right there in my hands pumping blood all over me, all over us both.”

“Dear sweet Jesus,” Minna whispered. “If it was pumping blood, it was
alive.
”

“You remember killing Carol,” Gregor said. “Do you remember killing Zhondra?”

“I broke her neck, too,” Stephen said. “That was a woman who could put two and two together. She had ev­erything all figured out. I was only coming up to get the candles. I would have left her alone after that. I didn’t want to go wandering around her camp. What did she take me for?”

“You typed the suicide note?” Gregor asked. “You got her hanging with the rope over the chandelier hook?”

“I used the chandelier hook as a pulley. It wasn’t hard. It was easier than killing her.”

“We would have figured it out in the end, you know,” Gregor told him. “There are ways to tell, during an au­topsy, whether a person died from hanging or not. There are ways to tell even before an autopsy.”

“But you didn’t have to figure it out,” Stephen said. “I told you all of it. I told you all of it myself.”

Tears were streaming down Lisa Harrow’s face, a great waterfall of them. “You can’t believe a word he says,” she told them woodenly. “You can’t. He must be crazy.”

“I’m not crazy,” her husband said. “I’m possessed. Don’t you know that by now? I invited the Devil into my soul, and he set up house. I think he’s set up house for good.”

“He’s been talking like that all night,” Lisa said. “He’s been telling me I’d be better off dead.”

“We’d all be better off dead,” Stephen said, and that was when Gregor saw it, coming out of the pocket of Stephen’s academic tweed jacket, a little Colt gun with a silver handle. It was a lady’s gun, the kind made to look stylish in a purse, next to a silver lipstick and compact set. It couldn’t belong to Stephen Harrow unless he’d bought it blind on the street somewhere, caring nothing at all but that he had something to shoot with.

Clayton Hall saw the gun, too, and started to rise. “Jesus Christ. Stephen. What do you think you’re doing?”

Stephen pointed the gun at Clayton and smiled. “Sit down for a while, Clayton. I’m just making sure I get my full say in before you all decide to jump me. I’ve still got a lot to say.”

“Nobody’s going to jump you until you’ve said every­thing you want to say,” Gregor told him. “There’s nothing you have to say that we don’t want to hear.”

“There’s nothing I have to say that you do want to hear,” Stephen corrected happily—and he was happy, Gregor thought, deliriously happy. He was the happiest man Gregor had ever seen in his life. “I know all about it now, from beginning to end. I know more about it than I ever thought I was going to know. I’m a genius in the spiritual life. But it’s time, you know.”

“Time for what?” Minna Dorfman asked.

“Time to do what they’re always telling you to do, all those people who think they know better,” Stephen told them. “Time to let go and let God.”

“What?”

Stephen held the gun high over his head, so that light hit the silver metal and bounced off, making rainbows. “It belonged to her, you know,” he said. “It belonged to Zhondra. I never had much use for guns. I thought they were barbaric.”

“Maybe you ought to let me have that now,” Clayton said, getting up again. “You’re going to hurt somebody with it if you go on waving it around.”

“Oh, well, Clayton. You know how it is. You never hurt anybody as much as you hurt yourself.”

“Crap,” Clayton said, making a desperate dive in Ste­phen Harrow’s direction.

It happened too fast. Clayton’s body was still in the air, mid-jump, when Stephen pressed the barrel of the gun to his own throat and blew a hole in his windpipe.

T
HE NEWS ABOUT STEPHEN
Harrow came over the radio while Maggie Kelleher was closing up shop. The shop had actually been closed to business for hours, but Joshua had been doing inventory and Maggie had been drinking wine at David Sandler’s house and now all the mundane things were left to be done that should have been done before, like cashing out the register and putting the money in the bank. Now, drifting through the rooms of the little bookstore, Maggie wished she had stayed at the beach and made love to David until dawn. As it was, they had only managed one single hurried coupling on the sand. It was so hard to figure out what was going on sometimes, when you were trying to sort out messes like sex and love. Maggie tried to imagine herself in David’s apartment in the city, and saw herself only as she had been on her own and alone in New York. Maggie the invincible, she thought now. She had a half-full glass of wine in her hand. The bottle of Vin Santo, the new one, was sitting on the desk in the front room. She thought of herself walking down Sixth Avenue in the dark, dressed in a long skirt and high-heeled boots and a short heavy coat, carrying an enormous tote bag. Maggie the invincible. Maggie the almost bag lady. Maggie who had never really been good enough to do what she wanted to do with her life, and who was now old enough to know it. That was why all this business about going to New York with David was so hard for her. The “with David” part was easy. That had been coming. It was something of a relief that it was finally here. Maggie thought she could live with David for­ever, nestled among the books. It was New York she wasn’t sure she wanted. Maybe, for David, she would be like that girl in
Lost Horizon
—beautiful and desirable as long as she stayed in Shangri-La, nothing but a skeleton and hanks of hair the moment she stepped outside it. Maggie the invinci­ble, she thought again, and laughed out loud. In Bellerton she was something special, exotic, set apart. In New York, she was nothing better than another girl who had almost had a career but then hadn’t, in the end, because it hadn’t worked out, because she hadn’t wanted it enough, because in that race there were so many other runners.

She was standing in the loft when the news about Ste­phen Harrow came over the radio, thinking of all the good things about New York—including the fact that she would not be the only one she knew who loved books like these, with their bindings and their leather. When she heard Ste­phen Harrow’s name, she took a small sip of wine and put the glass down on a shelf. When she had heard the news story through, she picked up the wine again and went to the railing of the loft. Beneath her, the big main room of the bookstore looked dark and shadowy and sinister. The only light on down there was the little one behind the desk, where Joshua was filing the last of the inventory into an IBM PC. If she married David, she would have to buy a whole new set of winter clothes. She would have to learn which subways went where again. She would have to get her books from other people’s bookstores.

She leaned over the railing and called down. “Josh? Did you have the radio on? Did you hear that?”

“Of course I heard that,” Josh said. “Jesus Christ.”

Maggie took another sip of wine and started down the curving metal stairs. Through the big plate glass window, she could see her little patch of Main Street, looking like something out of a Stephen King novel in the puddled light from the arc lamps. In Maggie’s mind, everything was like some novel or the other or some movie or the other. That was the way her brain worked. The problem was, when she tried to think of what she and David were like, she couldn’t.

She got to the bottom of the steps and took another sip of wine. Josh looked at her steadily in the darkness, until she almost thought she could see his eyes glow.

“I wonder if it’s true,” she said. “Do you think it’s true?”

“It has to be true,” Josh said. “Stephen Harrow. For Christ’s sake.”

“For someone who doesn’t believe in God, you call on the name of the Lord a lot.”

“Don’t go all religious on me. I’ve had enough of religion. Stephen Harrow. Can you imagine him killing that little baby?”

“No.”

“Well, you’d better imagine it,” Josh said trium­phantly, “because there it was, all over the news. I can’t wait to get out of here, Maggie, I’m telling you. I can’t wait to get out to some civilized place like California or Chi­cago. Towns like this are snake pits.”

Maggie sat down on the bottom of the metal steps. “Are you intending to leave anytime soon?” she asked him.

“Soon as I can get some money together. I’ve been thinking about applying to a graduate program out there. At Berkeley or San Francisco State. At least it would get me out there and give me some people to talk to. I can figure out what to do after that when I’m settled in.”

“But what about the money,” Maggie persisted. “Do you have it? Are you going to be able to get it in the next year or so?”

“Is there a reason for all this questioning, Maggie? Are you anxious to get rid of me? I thought I was doing a pretty good job for you here. If you don’t think I am, you don’t have to wait for me to go to California. All you have to do is fire my ass.”

“I don’t want to fire your ass.” Maggie finished off the wine. “I want to hire it on a much higher level.”

“I don’t think you ought to drink any more of that,” Josh said. “This is beginning to sound like sexual harass­ment.”