Baptism in Blood (43 page)

“I don’t know if you realize,” he said to Gregor, “but I—meaning the church, of course, the Full Gospel Chris­tian Church—have rather extensive holdings just outside of town.”

“He’s got a hundred and thirty-three acres and fifteen buildings,” David said. “And they aren’t small buildings.”

“She didn’t just want that,” Henry Holborn said. “She wanted the housing development. She wanted every­thing. I don’t know if anybody’s told you, Mr. Demarkian, but the church has a big tract of land out at the end of the Hartford Road, right on the county line, and we’ve built houses on it. For our members, mostly. The church handles the credit, you know, because most of them can’t go to the banks.”

“Two hundred twelve houses up there last time I checked,” David said.

“She offered me twenty-five million dollars for it,” Henry Holborn said. “In cash. Just like that. And I thought, you know, when I heard she was supposed to have committed suicide, that she couldn’t have. Because people don’t make offers like that and then go off and kill them­selves, not unless they’re taking drugs or doing something else to make their minds not work right, and one thing I have to give Zhondra. Her mind always worked just fine.”

Gregor considered this. “It could have been an act of desperation,” he suggested. “Maybe she had had all she could take of hostility from the town, and she felt driven to make a really crazy offer.”

“I think she had had as much as she could take of hostility from me and my people,” Henry Holborn said, “but I don’t think she was acting in desperation. I’ve seen people in desperation. I see it every day. I saw Stephen Harrow the day before he confessed to the murders.”

“So did I,” David said. “He was crazy.”

“I believe in the Devil,” Henry Holborn said. “I be­lieve that Satan is a real and existent presence in this world. But Stephen Harrow was wandering around town, seeing the Devil in the flesh right in front of his face. Zhondra was not like that when she came to talk to me. She was per­fectly calm and perfectly lucid. She acted as if she was trying to buy a good winter coat and knew she was going to have to pay more than she wanted to to get it.”

“He said he could see the devil in the palm of his hand,” David said. “I asked him if he wanted me to help him home, but he didn’t. I thought—I don’t know what I thought. But I look back on it now, and I don’t think he was in his right mind.”

Henry Holborn moved away from the abstract art. Gregor didn’t think he had ever really seen it. “Oh, well,” Henry said. “It’s like I said. It doesn’t matter anymore, now that all that happened with Stephen. But it was on my mind, so I decided to come to you and get it off.”

“I don’t mind,” Gregor said. “It’s an interesting piece of information.”

“She actually had twenty-five million dollars in acces­sible cash,” Henry said. “After she made the offer, I had her checked out. It was impossible to get all the informa­tion, of course, with people who run on that track, so much of it’s hidden. But she could get twenty-five million dollars in cash if she wanted to, and she could probably get more.”

“I wonder what it’s like to live with something like that,” David said. “Not having to worry about money is one thing, but on that scale—” He shrugged.

Gregor patted the top of his suitcase and looked out the window. It really was a bright and sunny day, the kind of day silly rock-and-roll songs are always talking about. He wondered what Stephen’s wife Lisa was going to do, and what Bobby Marsh was going to do, too, since the news was all over town that Ginny no longer wanted to have anything to do with him. In the detective novels Bennis gave him, the story was always over when the murder was solved. Everything was put back in order. Everyone went back to living happily, undisturbed by the sudden eruptions of blood. In real life, there never seemed to be an end to it. The repercussions went on and on and on, like ripples on the ocean, destined to never reach another shore.

“You know,” Gregor said, “I think I’ve changed my mind. I think I will drop in on that party.”

“Oh,” David said, surprised. “Well, good. Good. Let’s go over.”

“You really will be very welcome, Mr. Demarkian,” Henry Holborn told him. “After everything you’ve done, I’m sure Ginny would be thrilled to have you there.”

Gregor didn’t know if Ginny would be thrilled to have him there or not, but he did know he needed some kind of closure.

He was also very hungry, and he knew more about David Sandler’s cooking than he wanted to.

I
T WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO
make Betsey’s House of Hominy look festive. It was a solid little diner with metal frames on the windows and vinyl on the floor, and no matter how many balloons got tacked to its ceiling, it would never be anything else. The ceiling this morning was covered with balloons, in five or six different colors. There were even a few of the shiny silver Mylar kind, filled with helium and bouncing on the currents of air that came through the open windows. There were little bouquets of balloons in every booth and at intervals along the counters. There were rib­bons and bows on every coatrack. People seemed to be stuffed into the corners and plastered to the walls, there were so many of them. What there wasn’t was a banner, of the kind Gregor had gotten used to from the parties Donna Moradanyan threw at home. There was nothing saying “Congratulations Ginny!” or “Welcome Home Ginny!” or “Happy Jailbreak Ginny!” Maybe there was nothing that could be put on a banner that the organizers of this thing thought would be appropriate. There was a cake, however, sitting on a cake stand on the counter with the two seats in front of it left empty, so that nobody would elbow it onto the floor and ruin the whole thing. The cake had almost as many tiers as a wedding cake, and was iced in white and pink. All that was written on top of it was “Ginny.”

There wasn’t anyplace to sit. Gregor wedged himself into the crowd behind David Sandler and Henry Holborn and finally took up a place against the wall near the front door. Nobody was paying attention to him. Ginny was seated on the counter next to the cake—literally on the counter, with her legs folded under her, like a Girl Scout at a tent meeting at camp. Her hair cascaded down her back in loops and curls. The collar of her shirt was open to reveal a gold cross on a gold chain around her neck. Oddly, she was heavier than Gregor remembered thinking she would be, when he had seen her on television. For most people, the camera added pounds instead of taking them off. Maybe she had gained weight in jail, sitting alone in that single cell with nothing to do but eat. In a situation like that, Gregor himself would have found something to read, but Ginny Marsh didn’t look like the sort of young woman who liked books.

Betsey herself had put a round of candles on the cake, and now everybody in the room started singing something, Gregor couldn’t tell what. The tune was “Happy Birth­day,” but it was obvious that the two blond women Gregor remembered as Rose MacNeill and Naomi Brent had writ­ten new words to the music. Whatever it was they were saying got a laugh from the people closest to them. Then Ginny leaned over and blew out the candles on the cake. It was right to call her Ginny and not Virginia, Gregor thought. She lacked the elegance to carry the more formal name. Ginny was, in fact, the perfect picture of a small-town nice girl, the kind of girl who would be respectful of older people and kind to younger ones, happy to canvass for the March of Dimes and diligent about donating food to the Christmas basket drive at her church. When the news had first broken about the death of the child, some of the news programs had done their best to demonize her. No­body wanted to be taken in again, not after what had hap­pened with Susan Smith. In the end, it had been impossible to demonize Ginny Marsh. There were no demons there. She was what she appeared to be, every minute of every day. She didn’t change into a werewolf after dark.

Somebody started to pass around the cake, and some­body else got up to leave. Gregor grabbed the empty chair and sat down. He didn’t want any cake, not at this hour of the morning, but he did want to stay awhile and watch. Rose MacNeill and Naomi Brent both looked feverish, probably because they had too much to do and weren’t used to this kind of party. Gregor saw Ricky Drake saying grace over his food—but Henry Holborn just ate his, picking it up in his hands instead of using the little plastic fork that he’d been handed. Now that the cake had been cut, people were starting to drift out. It was an ordinary workday for most of them. They had places to go and people to see.

It was after the crowd had really started to thin out that Ginny Marsh came over to him, bouncing and weaving through the few people who were left as if she had little springs attached to the bottoms of her shoes. Maggie Kelleher had pointed him out to her. Gregor saw it happen. Ginny paused every few feet on her way across the floor to say something to somebody, to smile and nod and make small talk.

By the time she got to him, the only people close to him were David and Henry Holborn, and they were talking to each other about the difficulties of running a small pub­lishing house. David had run one for a decade, specializing in books that argued against the propositions of Christian­ity. Holborn wanted to start one to specialize in books that would argue in favor of those same propositions. Since it all came down to paper and ink and printers’ deadlines and the First Amendment, they had a lot to say to each other.

Ginny pulled up one of the loose chairs now littering the floor and sat astride it, with her arms across the chair back and her chin on her arms. She looked like she was in the process of posing for a Norman Rockwell painting.

“Hello,” she said. “You’re Gregor Demarkian. You’re the great detective. Maggie Kelleher pointed you out.”

“I saw her,” Gregor said. “I don’t know what kind of great detective I am. These days I seem mostly to be re­tired.”

“You haven’t been retired down here,” Ginny said. “You shouldn’t be so modest. I know what you’ve done since you came to visit David. You’ve been wonderful. I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t helped me out.”

“Here?”

“At this party.” Ginny’s right arm made a sweeping arc in the air. “I’d still be back where I was, in jail, or in the county jail. I know that. I know what all of them were thinking. Did you know that I’d separated from my hus­band?”

“Oh, yes,” Gregor said. “I heard that.”

“He didn’t believe in me, either,” Ginny said. “None of them did, not really. Some of them say they did, but it isn’t true. It’s strange what you find out about people, when you’ve been through something like this.”

“You find out a great deal,” Gregor agreed. “But most people never find themselves in a situation like this.”

“Well, it’s a good thing, isn’t it? It’s a good thing. It’s too horrible to think about, even now, after all this time. I’m glad you came down to help me, Mr. Demarkian. You did help me. You helped me more than you’ll ever know.”

“Oh, I think I know,” Gregor said. “I think I know exactly. You know what’s puzzling me, at the moment?”

“What?”

“I keep wondering how long you expect to get away with this. Because you must know you can’t get away with this forever. You have to know that that just isn’t possible.”

Gregor Demarkian had never believed in shape-changers, but now Ginny Marsh seemed to be one. She changed right in front of his eyes. Her eyes went sharp and small. Her nostrils pinched. She lost all her small-town quasiprettiness in a flash. All that was left of it was her hair, cascading blond and bright over her shirt collar and down her back.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, her voice very low, very low, impossible for anyone around them to hear.

“Of course you know what I mean,” Gregor said. “You killed your child.”

“Stephen killed my child,” Ginny said. “You proved it.”

“I proved no such thing. Stephen killed Carol Lit­tleton and Zhondra Meyer, yes, that he did, but he didn’t kill the child. You killed the child. You were the only one who could have.”

“How can you say that? Stephen went out on the kitchen terrace with Carol Littleton and took Tiffany with him. It was in his confession. It was in all the papers—”

“It wasn’t part of his confession,” Gregor said, “it was in the fake suicide note he wrote for Zhondra Meyer. And he had to have a name, of course, because he couldn’t remember killing the child. Because he hadn’t killed the child. And he had to have a reason, too, for killing Carol Littleton later. He couldn’t tell us why he really killed her. That would have destroyed everything he had been working for.”

Ginny turned her face away. “I still don’t understand what you mean. I think you’re being cruel, that’s all. I think you like to—to torment people.”

“When you cut Tiffany’s throat, she was alive, Ginny. She was alive. The blood pumped out of her. That’s what Stephen said.”

“I didn’t cut Tiffany’s throat. I’d never do anything like that. I loved my baby.”

“Oh, Ginny,” Gregor said. “You’ve never loved any­body but Ginny and you know that. I know that. I’ve watched you operate, on television before I came down, here today at this party. You’re a remarkable young woman, in a way. You killed the child with your own hands, but then you got better. You sat in that jail cell day after day and killed Carol Littleton and Zhondra Meyer and Stephen Harrow, too, all without raising a finger.”

“Stephen killed Carol and Zhondra,” Ginny said. “You told me so. And Stephen killed himself. Clayton Hall was there. He saw him. You saw him. Even Lisa saw him.”

“I know who saw him, Ginny. I know you were sitting all alone in that cell they gave you, reading your Bible and biding your time. But you killed them anyway. All the way along, all Stephen was trying to do was stay sane and pro­tect you. He did the second part reasonably well, but he didn’t manage the first. By the time Stephen Harrow put that bullet through himself, he was something worse than out of his mind. He was staring into the pit of hell and hearing it call to him.”

“He was crazy all along,” Ginny said. “He must have been, to do what he did.”

“No, Ginny. He wasn’t crazy all along. He was trou­bled, but you made him crazy. He would have confessed to killing the child if he had killed it, Ginny. He needed to confess. He wanted to.”