Baptism in Blood

by Jane Haddam

  The parsonage was a big white farmhouse-style house right next to the church itself. As Stephen stepped back to the curb to look at the bell tower’s roof, the parsonage’s front door opened and his wife walked out onto the porch. She was wearing one of those thin flowered dresses she had taken to as soon as they moved down here. If she had had a hat with flowers on it, she would have looked like one of the garden party ladies in The Manchurian Candidate. Her name was Lisa; and back when Stephen was in the semi­nary she used to wear short skirts with lace panels on the sides of them and thick black tights. She would come to the room he had rented and spend the weekend. She would drink Tequila Sunrises until her lips were red with cold. Stephen had had no way of knowing that this was not the person she really was.

  Lisa turned to look up Main Street and then came across the porch and down the steps to the sidewalk. She came close enough to him to be heard but not close enough for him to reach out and touch her.

  “Is that Carol Littleton I see with the brown paper bag?” she asked. “What did she want in this weather?”

  “She wasn’t here.” Stephen went back to looking at the bell tower. “She was at Rose’s. I think she bought something.”

  “Now?”

  “Rose seems to be open, Lisa. If Rose is open, Carol Littleton can buy something.”

  “You’d think they would all have left town by now, for God’s sake. Why do you think they stay? It can’t be comfortable for them here.”

  “Maybe they have nowhere else to go.”

  “Carol Littleton might not have anyplace to go to, but Zhondra Meyer does. She’s rich as Croesus. She’s only here to bother us. She wants to enlighten the poor be­nighted yokels.”

  “Enlighten us about what?”

  “Gay rights. Tolerance and diversity. All that kind of thing. You know: We’ve all been colonized by a white male culture. We have to throw off the chains that bind our imag­inations and remythologize our lives into paradigms of true equality. That kind of thing.”

  “Really.”

  Lisa made a face. “She talked to the library reading group last week. That was Maggie Kelleher’s idea, of course. God, but she’s been a strange woman since she came back from New York. I wonder what happened to her there.”

  “Probably the same things that happened to you in New York,” Stephen said. “I met you in New York.”

  Lisa gave him a sideways, look. “You may have met me in New York, but I didn’t change in New York. Maggie changed in New York. She changed a lot. I remember her from when she got accepted at that silly college of hers. She was all ruffles and charm bracelets. She was the kind of girl people’s mothers always called ‘sweet.’”

  “You must have been in the cradle.”

  “I was eight.”

  Eight, Stephen thought. That must make Maggie—what? Forty? He squinted in the direction of the bell tower roof. This was the kind of thing he ought to talk to Lisa about. She was the one who was born here. She was the one who ought to care. The Methodist Church was the oldest building in Bellerton. It was the only one still standing that had existed at the time of the American Revolution. Everything else had been destroyed one way or another: burned down in skirmishes during the Civil War; gone to rot; bulldozed for the newer and shinier and brighter and smaller mock-Greek revival places everybody here pre­ferred to live in. The truth about Lisa was that she would bulldoze it all and put up split-levels if anybody ever gave her a chance. Lisa had no sentimentality at all and no feel­ing for history.

  “You ought to come inside,” she said now. “We’ve got to pack a few things up and go to the high school. They say that storm is going to come right through the middle of town.”

  “I’m worried about the church,” Stephen said. “About the tower. It’s such an old building.”

  “You can’t take the church to the high school, Ste­phen. It won’t fit into the car.”

  “That isn’t what I’m trying to say.”

  “You can’t stay here, either.” Lisa tapped her foot against the pavement, impatient. “This is a major hurricane we’re talking about. It’s already done I don’t know how much damage. If you get in the way of it, it will blow you right to China.”

  “I was thinking that maybe we could put something on the bell tower roof. Plywood boards. Something to pro­tect it.”

  “If you were going to do something like that, you would have had to start days ago. It’s too late now, Ste­phen. Let’s get our things and go.”

  “I will go. In a minute. I just want to stay here and—think for a while.”

  “Think,” Lisa repeated. She turned on her heel and started to walk away from him, back across the front lawn, back to the porch. She didn’t turn around and tell him to be careful. She didn’t even tell him to hurry up again. She just went.

  Once, Stephen thought, he spent all his time imagin­ing what Lisa was like without her clothes on. He sat across from her in restaurants and thought of the way her small breasts swelled as they hung, light and active, under the curve of her shoulders. He sat next to her on buses and thought of the way her thighs flowed into her hips, smooth and restless and very clean. Now he imagined her locked in closets and shut away in cardboard boxes, tied up and gagged, silent, sexless, free of him.

  Stephen turned to go back into the house himself, but as he did he saw Ginny Marsh coming down the sidewalk at him, bouncing along with Tiffany in her Snugli sling. Ginny was not one of Stephen’s parishioners—like half of everybody else, she went to one of those big fundamentalist churches on the outskirts of town—but he knew her to talk to from seeing her around town. He knew the baby, too, because she was a good baby to play with for a man who felt uncomfortable around infants. He was worried that they were both going to be as blown away as Lisa said every­body would be. He had never been in a hurricane before, but he could feel the badness of it in the wind. The air around him was so full of water, he found it hard to breathe.

  “You should be home,” he said, flagging Ginny down. “Or at the high school. There’s going to be a storm.”

  Ginny stopped and adjusted Tiffany on her front. “Hello, Mr. Harrow. We’ll be all right. We’re headed up to the camp.”

  “The camp?”

  “That’s got to be the highest place in Bellerton,” Ginny said. “I don’t think they’re going to get any water at all up there. Unless the Lord is sending a flood.”

  “I think the Lord promised Noah not to do that again. I think it’s supposed to be the fire next time.”

  The quote meant nothing to Ginny. “Our pastor says God can do anything He wants to do, and that makes sense to me. Doesn’t it make sense to you?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m not worried about drowning up there, Mr. Har­row. I’m worried about those women. And you would be, too, if you realized.”

  “Maybe they don’t seem so strange to me, Ginny. Since I’m from the north myself.”

  Tiffany was fussing. Ginny adjusted her again, not really paying attention. “Sometimes what I really worry about is bringing Tiffany up there. You know. Because les­bians are homosexuals, aren’t they? And you never know what homosexuals will do.”

  Right, Stephen thought. This was not a conversation he wanted to get into. His roommate his first year in the seminary had been gay, although in those days nobody got up and shouted about it. Stephen had never understood why so many people made such a noise about homosexuality.

  “I just saw Carol Littleton headed up that way,” he told Ginny. “If you hurry, you might be able to catch up to her. Carol doesn’t move very fast even when the weather’s good.”

  “My pastor says the Lord wants us all to accept Christ as our personal savior. That’s the important thing. But the Devil gets to some people and he just won’t let go.”

  “Is that what it is?”

  “Like those people who bombed that building in Oklahoma City,” Ginny went on, talking automatically now. This was like a tape she’d heard so many ti
mes, she had it memorized. Stephen couldn’t tell if she actually un­derstood what she was saying. “It’s all of a piece, that’s what my pastor says. Sin is all of a piece. It’s not like there are big sins and little sins. There’s just one sin. Disobedi­ence to the will of God.”

  “I guess that would cover it,” Stephen said.

  “I’m going to try to bring Tiffany up so that she never has to worry about any of that, Mr. Harrow. I’m going to try to bring her up right in the heart of the Lord.”

  “I guess that’s a good idea, Ginny.”

  Ginny backed away. “I’ve got to go now,” she said. “I’ve got to get up to the camp. I’ve got some typing to do and we need the money. And she wants me to come.”

  “Zhondra Meyer does?”

  “That’s right. I called her from Dr. Sandler’s house and said maybe I ought to forget about it today, with the weather, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She’s a very driven woman, Ms. Meyer. It’s like work has hold of her and just won’t let her go.”

  “Well, maybe it’s something important she’s got for you to do. Maybe it’s something that just won’t wait.”

  “When the Lord breathes upon the face of the earth, everything can wait, Mr. Harrow. It has to.”

  Tiffany had closed her eyes and laid her head down on Ginny’s breast. She looked achingly sweet there, soft and round and warm, the perfection of innocence.

  “Hurry on up to the camp, then, if that’s where you’re going,” Stephen said. “You don’t want to keep that baby out in the rain.”

  “Oh,” Ginny said. “Oh, no. I don’t. She’d catch a cold.”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s a terrible thing, when babies have colds. They hate it.”

  “Say hello to Ms. Meyer for me. Say hello to Carol Littleton, too. Carol should have stopped.”

  Ginny started to back away up Main Street. “See you later,” she said. “You get yourself to someplace safe, too.”

  Someplace safe, Stephen thought. He watched Ginny make her way in the wind, past the storefronts, past the Greek revival houses, past the churches. Tiffany seemed to have woken up again and started looking around. Stephen went up his walk and up the steps to his porch, listening for the sounds Lisa made when she was packing, the humming, the cursing, the slamming of doors.

  Lisa didn’t want children. She didn’t want sex any­more, either. Lisa wanted to live here, in Bellerton, where she had grown up. There was a church coming open in Minneapolis next summer. He’d seen the notice about it in the newsletter the national organization sent out. He had even sent a letter and a vita. He didn’t think Lisa would stand for it. He saw himself at the head of a congregation full of people who believed the way he did, who loved science and art and music, who read something besides Scripture when they wanted to know how the world worked. Lisa saw herself in the cold among a lot of people she didn’t know and probably wouldn’t like. Feminists. Goddess worshippers. Liberals. Gays.

  Lisa came to the front door just as Stephen reached the top of the porch steps.

  “What were you doing out there all this time?” she demanded. “What could you possibly have been thinking of?”

  Stephen had half a mind to tell her what he’d been thinking of.

  Divorce.

  4

  MAGGIE KELLEHER KNEW THAT she shouldn’t allow herself to be impatient with people like Carol Littleton. Carol couldn’t help it if she was such a square, stolid, graceless sort of woman—or if she was so timid, either. As far as Maggie could tell, none of the women up at the camp could help anything about themselves. They had all led really terrible lives, full of abuse and betrayal. They had been beaten and raped, imprisoned and deserted, left on their own in honky-tonk bars, and dumped out of slowly moving vehicles. Zhondra Meyer could go on and on about what had happened to the women who stayed with her, and Mag­gie could listen—but that was different from actually hav­ing to listen to Carol Littleton, who was here in the store with her eyes full of tears and her hands full of a picture of the Madonna and child. Maggie wanted to shake her, or at least push her out of the way. The store was in an uproar. The storm was coming and they had barely gotten the ply­wood nailed over the big plate glass window. Now Joshua Lake, Maggie’s assistant, was throwing books into boxes and throwing the boxes on top of the highest bookshelves. Serious water damage could wipe them out, and there was likely to be at least serious water over the next few hours. This was simply not the time.

  “There was a story about it in the paper,” Carol Lit­tleton was saying. She had a hitch in her voice and a wet smear of tears running down the right side of her face. Maggie found herself wondering, absurdly, why the smear was only on the right side.

  “I got the library to subscribe to the papers,” Carol was going on. “My newspaper from home, you know. They’ll do that if you ask them.”

  Maggie knew that the library would do this if some­one asked. She was the one who had talked Naomi Brent into instituting the policy. It was a small part of the project Maggie had set for herself since coming back to Bellerton from New York. It was time to modernize this place a little. It was time to drag Bellerton into the new multicultural universe. It was at least time for the people of this town to accept the fact that half of them were now transplants from somewhere else, settling in a town that was both small and within reasonably commuting distance to Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill.

  Maggie brushed wiry black hair off her forehead and felt the line of sweat there. The motion made her oddly aware of the thinness of her arm and the fluid way it arched in the air: dancer’s movements, because Maggie had been a dancer once, good enough to get work but not quite good enough to get any more than that. Maggie had been part of Martha Graham’s dance company in New York, a very small part, not a featured principal. She had been on half a dozen television commercials, including one that was still running five years after it had been made, sending her nice but not spectacular residuals. She had even had a small part on General Hospital for a while. Always almost but not quite, Maggie decided, whenever she thought about it. She had come home exactly three hundred sixty-three days be­fore her fortieth birthday. She could read the writing on the wall, so to speak. There were dozens of women like her, almost but not quite, good but not good enough, singing in second-rate lounges and doing off-off-Broadway plays, staying in the city, staying active, going down for the count. Maggie had decided that she didn’t want to be one of them.

  Joshua Lake was trying to get all the volumes of the Ignatius Press edition of the works of G. K. Chesterton into a single box. It wasn’t working. Carol Littleton was turning the picture of the Madonna over and over in her hands, and staring at it, as if it were the picture of someone she knew. Maggie went to help Joshua.

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” Maggie said over her shoulder, “but there’s a storm coming. We’ve got work to do.”

  “I don’t think you’re being rude,” Carol said.

  Maggie got a flattened packing box from the pile next to the front desk and popped it into shape.

  “The thing is,” Carol said, “it was in the paper. You know. The announcement about the christening. And it made me feel so awful, because I never saw anything about the birth.”

  “This is your daughter Shelley you’re talking about,” Maggie said.

  “Shelley Littleton Wade.” Carol made it sound like a title. President of the United States. Supreme Pontiff. Boss of all Bosses. “She was pregnant the last time I saw her, but not very pregnant. Four months along. I remember thinking, in the middle of that awful fight, I remember wor­rying that she’d give herself a miscarriage, and then that would be my fault, too. But she didn’t.”

  “She must not have,” Maggie agreed.

  “But I didn’t see the birth announcement,” Carol continued. “I read every word of that paper every day, and I didn’t see it.”

  “Maybe there wasn’t a birth announcement,” Maggie said. “Not everybody sends one to the paper.�
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  “Maybe she didn’t send one because of me. Maybe she was afraid I’d try to send something to the baby. Or even come to see her. It’s a girl she’s had, did I tell you that?”