by Jane Haddam
“Well, I don’t want to hold you up any, Ms. Meyer. But this is very important. It’s about my going on working here after today.”
“Do you mean that you have to be leaving us? I’m sorry about that, Ginny.” Zhondra wasn’t really. Not exactly. “You’ve done a very good job.”
Ginny fiddled with the computer keys. “It’s not that I have to leave no matter what. It’s about… about our agreements here. My husband is putting his foot down.”
“About what?”
“About my not being able to put my picture of the Lord up on my desk when I work,” Ginny said. “Bobby doesn’t mind it about how you won’t let me listen to the radio. He says a lot of bosses don’t let their workers listen to the radio at work. Although why not, I’ll never know, Ms. Meyer. I mean, I type a lot faster when I’m praising the Lord with all my heart. But Bobby says that’s all right.”
“Does he.” Zhondra’s tone was dry.
Ginny wasn’t paying attention. She was fooling with the computer keys. She was squinting at the fine print on the bottom of the screen. She was touching Tiffany’s bootie-clad foot with her fingertip.
“The thing about the picture, though,” she said, “is that it wouldn’t bother anybody. It wouldn’t make any noise. Nobody would even see it unless they came in here.”
“But what if they did come in here?” Zhondra asked.
“Well, it wouldn’t be bad for them if they did. It’s a picture of the Lord I keep next to me, Ms. Meyer, not some rock star. Maybe someone would come in here and see that picture and feel called, you know, called to Christ.”
“Most of the women who are here have been Christians in their time, Ginny. Most of them don’t think it was a very pleasant experience.”
“That’s just the Devil talking,” Ginny said. “The Devil does those things to people. He counterfeits. He makes you think he’s Christ, and then he ruins your life, and you think Christ has done it.”
“Maybe.”
“But once you’ve been really and truly born again, there’s no going back,” Ginny said confidently. “Once you’ve been baptized in the Holy Spirit, you’re a child of God forever. God wants us to be His children, Ms. Meyer. He wants us to be saved.”
“I don’t want that picture up on your desk, Ginny. I don’t want the PTL Club on the radio—”
“The PTL Club isn’t on the radio. It’s on TV.”
“Whatever. I don’t want that kind of thing, here. Most of these women feel they have been very damaged by patriarchal religion. They didn’t come here to be reminded of it.”
“I asked Bobby what that meant,” Ginny said. “Patriarchal. Bobby said it meant ‘of the fathers.’ There’s nothing wrong with fathers, Ms. Meyer. God is our Father.”
“I know you think so, Ginny. I think God is a fiction that men made up to keep women down.”
Ginny tapped a single finger against a single computer key. “If I can’t at least put my picture up, Ms. Meyer, I’m not going to be able to work here anymore. I have a right to freedom of religion. Just like anybody else.”
“There’s no such thing as having a right to freedom of religion in somebody else’s house.”
There was the sound of something hitting against the side of the house: a stray branch, a piece of lawn furniture somebody had forgotten to bring inside. Zhondra and Ginny both turned toward the noise at the same moment. Ginny turned away again almost immediately. Zhondra watched her fiddling with the keys again.
“Well,” Ginny said. “I’m very sorry about this, Ms. Meyer. But I do have to make a point of it.”
“I’m afraid I have to make a point of it, too, Ginny.”
“I’ll just finish up here today,” Ginny said. “And then I won’t come back again. I’d appreciate it if you had my check for me when it was time for me to leave.”
“I think I could manage that, Ginny, yes.”
“I don’t mean to be mean,” Ginny said, “but it’s a matter of principle. That’s what Bobby says. It’s a matter of principle and a test of my love of the Lord.”
A test of my love of the Lord, Zhondra thought—and then she got a perfect vision, in Technicolor and three dimensions, of a scene from one of those bondage and discipline magazines, complete with whips and chains and leather straps to hold the woman still. Lord and master. Ball and chain. Zhondra stepped back a little, startled.
“Ms. Meyer?” Ginny asked.
“Yes,” Zhondra said. “Never mind. I just thought of something. I have to go now, Ginny. It’s like I said before. I have something I have to do.”
“Oh, yes, Ms. Meyer. That’s all right. You’ll have my check for me today?”
“I’ll have it.”
“That’s fine, then.”
Zhondra didn’t know if it was fine or not. She just knew she wanted to get out of this room, and away, before her mind came up with any more sexist filth. Sometimes it seemed as if all there ever was in her mind was sexist filth, but that was another story.
One of the good things about being very, very rich was that Zhondra didn’t have to deal with anything she didn’t want to, and she didn’t want to deal with this.
6
NAOMI BRENT BEGAN TO have trouble with the computer at fifteen minutes to twelve. By then, the Bellerton library was as secure as it was going to get. The first-floor windows had been boarded over with plywood. The first-floor books had been moved to higher shelves. The first-floor computer equipment had been brought up here, to the tall-ceilinged old rooms where the Linnet family had once slept and made love and worried about sick children. Naomi liked to imagine herself back in 1925, with a picture hat and gloves that matched her shoes. She liked to think of herself romantically, in a sense too old to apply to those nasty books they sold down at the drugstore, books with names like Passion’s Furious Flight. She was only thirty-five years old, but she was already a cliché, and she knew it. Old-maid librarian. Repressed southern spinster. Gothic horror story waiting to happen. Every morning Naomi Brent got up and looked at herself in the mirror. She counted the lines on her face and the dark circles under her eyes. She told herself that hope was useless and there was no point in going on. Then she took a shower and made herself up and forgot entirely about the fact that she had been married three times.
Of course, she had also been divorced three times. When Naomi got to thinking about her marriages, she got to thinking about her divorces, and that made her feel worse than thinking of herself as a dried-up old virgin who had never been touched. Actually, virginity was not Naomi’s strong suit. She had slept with her first boyfriend when she was fifteen years old and had just made the Bellerton High School junior varsity cheerleading squad. She had slept with her latest boyfriend just ten days before this storm. In between there was a blur of faces and bodies, hands and lips and rough-skinned backs, all rimmed round with a glow of frustration. Naomi Brent had no idea what people were supposed to feel when they had sex. She only knew she couldn’t be feeling it, because by and large she felt nothing. She got into bed with some man and let him pump and pump away at her. She closed her eyes and counted the number of stockings she remembered hanging on her line at home, or tried to pin down a piece of dialogue she’d heard at the movies and hadn’t quite understood. Her last husband had been emphatic: Naomi was a cock tease, or something worse. Naomi remembered thinking at the time that he had hair growing out of his nostrils, and how was she supposed to be attracted to that? Men always seemed to shrivel into moldy old prunes as soon as you married them. Men always seemed to end up being men. Naomi thought of her mother, married thirty years without a break. She couldn’t understand it. She especially couldn’t understand it with her father, who smelled of beer and bellowed, who was cruel in a heavy-handed, relentless way that was really a desire to kill.
On the screen of the computer, Naomi had this:
Hello! to everyone in the BHS class of ’79. This is your class correspondent, Naomi Brent, and boy, do I have a lot to report!
Naomi swiveled her chair toward the window. They hadn’t boarded anything up up here, although they probably should have. Naomi could see right down Main Street, past Maggie Kelleher’s bookstore, past Rose MacNeill’s Victorian-housed shop. Everything was boarded and dead-looking. The sky was absolutely black. Only the rain hadn’t started yet. Naomi didn’t think it would take long.
There was a sound of footsteps on the stairs. Naomi turned her chair to look at the open door to the room. She heard Beatrix Dean say, “Oh, hell,” and relaxed a little. A moment later, Beatrix was there, all five feet eleven inches of her, looking faintly ridiculous. Beatrix always looked faintly ridiculous. She had never really accepted the fact that she was tall. She had never really stopped trying to hide it.
Thunder rolled again and Naomi’s computer screen went blank. She cursed at it, then sighed.
“I know I shouldn’t be trying to do this,” she said. “I know we’re going to lose the power.”
“I can’t believe you’re still here,” Beatrix told her. “Don’t you want to go home? Don’t you have cats to worry about?”
“I used to have cats,” Naomi said, “but they all ran away on me. Like men. Maybe they were tomcats.”
“Oh,” Beatrix said.
“I think I’m going to ride out the storm right here,” Naomi said. “My house isn’t on any higher ground. And what would happen to me if I left now? I’d probably get caught in the rain. I’d probably get electrocuted by a downed power line. With my luck, I’d probably get hit by lightning.”
“You could come with me to my church,” Beatrix suggested. “I’m meeting a van out on Main Street in fifteen minutes. We’re driving all the way out on the Hartford Road. We won’t get any seawater out there.”
“I’m sure you won’t.”
“Besides, Naomi, I think it would do you good. To see the inside of a church for once.”
“I’ve seen the insides of churches, Beatrix. I got married in three of them.”
“Reverend Holborn says this hurricane is a judgment. Like that bombing out in Oklahoma City. Like that thing with the World Trade Center. Reverend Holborn says America has sold its soul to the Devil and now the Devil is having his way with us.”
“Reverend Holborn,” Naomi said carefully, “thinks hangnails are a judgment from God.”
“Well, Naomi, maybe they are. I know you don’t take religion seriously, but maybe you should. I mean, look at what’s happened to this place. To Bellerton, for goodness sake. Lesbians. And atheists. It’s like we’re turning into a spiritual sewer.”
Naomi had her pocketbook sitting next to her swivel chair on the floor. She picked it up, put it in her lap, and riffled through it for her cigarettes and slim gold lighter. Most of the time, Naomi didn’t smoke in the library building. She had gotten used to the new rules that said even a whiff of secondhand smoke could instantaneously give old ladies terminal lung cancer. Still, she needed a cigarette now, and she thought she deserved one.
The gold lighter was from Dunhill. One of her husbands had given it to her on their first anniversary. If Naomi remembered right, that marriage hadn’t lasted another six months. She put a Virginia Slims menthol into her mouth and lit up.
“Spiritual sewer,” she said through a haze of smoke, “I presume, is a direct quote from the saintly Reverend Holborn.”
Beatrix frowned. Naomi was suddenly struck by how aggressively ugly the woman was—not just unattractive, like most of those women up at the camp, but ugly. It was something that went beyond Beatrix’s weight, which was monumental. It was something that had settled into her features, like indelible grime.
“I think you should think about things more carefully,” Beatrix said. “I think you should think about the complications. Like with the school.”
“Which school?”
“All the schools. The high school. Even the elementary school. They’re moving in on them, you know.”
“The they in question being the women up at the camp?”
“That’s right. You wouldn’t believe how many of them have children. Though I don’t understand how a lesbian gets children, do you?”
“Maybe they aren’t all lesbians all of the time.”
Beatrix blushed. “But it isn’t only them,” she went on. “It’s him, too. That man with the house out on the beach.”
“Dr. David Sandler.”
“He’s not a real doctor. Not the kind that does operations. He’s just a college doctor. And he has that thing on the back of his car that, you know, says he worships Darwin.”
Naomi sighed. Her cigarette had grown a long column of ash. She tapped it carefully into the palm of her hand, winced a little at the heat, and then dumped the ashes in the empty wastepaper basket. Here was a library, full of books—and as far as she knew Beatrix hadn’t read a single one of them. Beatrix said she read the Bible, but Naomi doubted it. What Beatrix did—Naomi knew this because she had done it herself, during her holy phase, when she was married to her second husband—was to open the book at random and read stray passages from it. It was a form of divination for people who didn’t believe in divination. Open the book at random and it will speak to you. Close your eyes and put your finger on a passage and that will be the answer to your prayers.
“Look,” Naomi said. “There’s nothing wrong with David Sandler. He doesn’t worship Darwin—”
“He’s an atheist.”
“Lots of people are atheists, Beatrix, including me more than half the time. You shouldn’t go around saying things like about how people worship Darwin or the Devil or whatever. It’s dangerous.”
“You mean because I might get sued? I wouldn’t care if I got sued. I’d think of it as a trial I was undergoing on behalf of the cross of Christ.”
“I think that’s very nice, Beatrix, but it’s utterly beside the point. David Sandier isn’t going to sue you, for God’s sake—”
“—I wish you wouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain—”
“—why would he bother? Now Zhondra Meyer might sue you, just out of mean-spiritedness, because she’s a world-class bitch—”
“—Naomi—”
“—but to tell you the truth, I don’t think she’s interested, either. But it’s dangerous nonetheless, Beatrix, because talk like that gets out of hand. Talk like that can hurt people.”
Beatrix waddled over to the window, the lines set in her face, furious. She pressed her face against the glass and closed her eyes.
“Nothing can hurt them,” she said angrily. “They don’t even have to obey the law. They aren’t like the rest of us.”
“Which is supposed to mean what?”
Beatrix pulled herself away from the window. “A couple of us from church went to the child welfare people. About the children up there, you know, at the camp. With all those lesbians. It isn’t a wholesome situation. And that’s what the child welfare people are supposed to be for.”
Naomi’s cigarette had burned to the filter. She put it out against the metal side of the wastepaper basket and got another from her pack.
“I can’t believe this,” she said. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”
“They just said they’d already checked into the camp, and there was nothing there for them to concern themselves over, there wasn’t any abuse and neglect or anything like that
—but what do you call bringing little children up around all that smuttiness? Isn’t that abuse and neglect?”
“No,” Naomi said.
Beatrix was oblivious. “Later on we found out that they had a lawyer, that Zhondra Meyer had hired a lawyer, a famous lawyer from New York. And the child welfare people were afraid of the lawyer, because everything is so clean up there and everybody is so rich. They were afraid of it getting in the papers and making them look silly.”
“Good,” Naomi said.
Beatrix was nearly in tears. “I wish you’d come to church with me, Naomi, I really do. I wish you’d accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior. Because we’re in the last days, you know. And in the end you’re going to have to choose.”
“That’s your van waiting out on Main Street,” Naomi said. “Maybe you’d better pack up and get ready to go.”
“I’m all ready to go. All I have to do is leave. I just wish I could make you listen. I like you, Naomi. You’ve been good to me. I don’t want to see you go to Hell.”
There is no such thing as hell, Naomi wanted to say. Instead, she stood up and began shooing Beatrix in the direction of the door.
“You’d better hurry now, Beatrix. You don’t want to miss your ride and get stuck out here with me.”
“I wouldn’t mind being stuck out here with you if I knew I could convert you. I’d do anything to convert you.”
“Go.”
Naomi nearly shoved Beatrix out the door and onto the second-floor landing. Beatrix moved with stubborn leadenness, a prehistoric, dinosaur-sized donkey with a mind of her own.
“Go,” Naomi said again.
Beatrix went down a few steps and looked back sorrowfully. Naomi thought she was going to cry.
“Please,” Beatrix said. “Please think about it. You don’t know what will happen to you, if you don’t get born again. You don’t understand. And the forces of good always need help. They really do.”
“You’d better hurry, Beatrix. It’s getting later by the second.”
Beatrix hesitated, a mass of fat and bone. Then she turned and began to head on down the stairs again.
