by Jane Haddam
Jesus Christ, David thought, making himself move faster. He looked back at his house, but it seemed to be safe. Waves were coming up over the deck now, but nothing was wobbling, nothing looked unstable. If the water came in much farther, though, these houses he was walking among now were all going to fall.
David wove in and out of yards—yards of houses where people lived year-round now; most of the windows boarded up—and finally stumbled out onto Tolliver Road. It seemed to be deserted. Everybody must have gone up to the high school, David thought. There were soggy pieces of paper and old tin cans everywhere. Somebody must have forgotten to take in his garbage cans. There were roof shingles everywhere, too. Some of the houses had had all their shingles on one side ripped off. A big pinewood doghouse had been lifted up and deposited in the middle of the street. It had lost most of its roof shingles, too.
David made his way between two half-house cottages and then out onto Main Street finally. The rain was coming down so hard it blinded him the second he stopped shading his eyes with his hands. Rose MacNeill’s turret was sagging. Something had smashed into the side of it and cracked a support beam. The bookstore’s door was open and paperback books had spilled out, as if they were liquid, too. David saw the bright cover of a romance novel about American Indians. Only the library looked as if it had been kept reasonably safe, and how long could that last? The wind was rising again. The rain was coming harder. I should have stayed in the house, David told himself again. Then he pushed himself into the partial shelter of the hardware store’s doorway and reached for his flask.
Now that he had gotten this far—and, maybe, now that he had drunk this much—reason had returned to him. He really, really should never have left the house. What he was doing was insane, and very dangerous. At the moment, however, it made no sense to try to go back. The sea was getting worse and worse. He would only end up getting swept off the boardwalk. The radio this morning had been telling everybody to get up to the high school. That was what he was going to have to try to do.
He put the flask securely back into his pocket and went out into the wind again. It really was getting worse. It was pushing so hard at his back that he kept threatening to fall on his face, splat, slapped against the concrete like a pesky bug. He turned down a side street to get away from it. He couldn’t tell which side street, because the rain was so heavy he couldn’t read the street sign. He wasn’t even clear about which buildings he was passing, or which direction he was going in. The wind seemed to curl in on itself, to make eddies and waves, to sneak up on him from behind.
The side street did not look familiar. It must have been, because David had walked every street in Bellerton, North Carolina, a million times, but the houses all looked blank and odd. The lawns looked alien. The street was full of debris.
David didn’t know when it was he lost all sense of where he was or what direction he was going in. Away from the wind, that was all he was sure of. There was so much water in his eyes, they stung. He was wet to the bone even under his rain gear. He just kept pushing ahead, pushing ahead, away from the wind, away from the slanting direction of the rain. There was water in the street at least an inch and a half deep. He slogged through it as if he were wading on the beach.
He turned a corner and then another corner. The houses got less and less familiar. The damage got worse and better and worse again, a random scattering of disasters. The torn-off shingles were ubiquitous. Other things—dolls; dinner plates; furniture—seemed to have been chosen without sense by imps or gremlins, small sly creatures who hated people as a profession.
I’m losing my mind, David told himself.
And then he was clear of it all, the houses and the wreckage. He tried to see in the rain and got only asphalt and dirt. He thought he had to be out on Route 152. That was the closest two-lane blacktop to town. The gutters here were full of water, but he was far enough away from the worst of the storm so that there wasn’t as much broken and trampled on the ground.
Left, David told himself. If I go left I go north and if I go north I get to—the high school? the camp? He couldn’t remember. He wished he could get another swig at the flask, but he knew it would be impossible in all this wind and rain. He would just get his eyes and nose filled with water, tilting his head back the way he would have to.
His head was full of rhythms. Go on, go on, go on. Walk fast, walk fast, walk fast. Keep at it, keep at it, keep at it. Walking this way, the rain was falling against his back. It got under the collar of his jacket and ran across his neck, cold and slick.
Up ahead of him was the Bellerton Full Gospel Church—was that in the right direction? The church was as boarded up and blank as the houses in town. It wasn’t one of Bellerton’s bigger churches, not like that complex Henry Holborn had out on the Hartford Road. The Bellerton Full Gospel Christian Church had lost the cross that used to sit on the peak of its roof. The cross was lying in the road, split in two, the edges jagged. David wondered, irrelevantly, what it had been made of, and why it hadn’t been protected. Maybe, being a religious person, the pastor here had thought that Christ would protect His own.
David made his way past the church and then around its parking lot to a wider, more open space. The trees here were planted more thickly together. They seemed to be protecting each other. Not so many of them were down. Not so many were bent double with the force of the blow.
There was a shortcut through those trees to the high school. David was sure of it. He just couldn’t remember exactly where the shortcut was or which way it went. The ground was starting to rise. He had to be going in the right direction. The ground rose and rose and then it got to the high school. Then it rose and rose some more and got to the camp. That was the only high ground in town. Everything else for miles around was dead flat.
David started to search the trees, for a break, for a path, anything. He was finding it hard to breathe. He hadn’t gotten this much exercise in years. It couldn’t be good for him. He tried to take a deep breath and choked on rainwater. He turned toward the trees as he started to cough—and then he saw her.
For a second or two, with all the insanity of the storm, he thought it was just a branch or a piece of junk being thrown around by the weather. It kept coming and coming and finally he recognized it. Her. He stood up and stared, oblivious for a moment to everything that was happening around him.
Her.
My God, he thought.
Ginny Marsh.
She was reeling through the trees as if she were dead drunk, and she was covered with blood.
From the Raleigh News and Observer, October 26—
BABY MURDERED BY SATANIC CULT
Devil Worship Motive for Baby’s Death, Mother Says
BELLERTON—Satanic rituals and deals with the devil provided the motive for the murder of Tiffany Ann Marsh. So says the infant’s mother, Virginia Leland Marsh, who is charging today that devil worshippers based at Zhondra Meyer’s Bellerton women’s retreat killed the child as a sacrifice to Satan during a “Black Mass” that was held on the grounds of the retreat during the early October onslaught of Hurricane Elsa. The child’s body was discovered lying near a circle of stones in the retreat’s back garden just after the hurricane passed through Bellerton. Her throat had been cut, and marks had been made in the infant’s chest and abdomen, apparently with a kitchen knife. Mrs. Marsh says she was held immobile and forced to watch the proceedings by two women, only one of whom she recognized. The women involved in the ritual had their faces painted, thereby rendering them unrecognizable to Mrs. Marsh, who knew none of the residents well.
Robert Marsh, the baby’s father, says that there have been rumors in town for many months that Satanic rituals were being practiced at the retreat. Local police authorities, however, say that no evidence of such practices has ever been found until now. An investigation following the discovery of the infant’s body revealed pentagrams, candles, and a book with the pre-Vatican II traditional Latin Mass
printed backwards, supposedly the method by which Satan worshippers celebrate their ritual. Church leaders in Bellerton, who have long been opposed to the camp because it is known to accept residents who are openly homosexual, are now calling for its closure at least until the death of Tiffany Ann Marsh has been definitively resolved. Zhondra Meyer, who owns and runs the camp, has said that she sees no reason to close, and does not believe that any of the women residing there have ever practiced Satanic cult rituals. Ms. Meyer is a direct descendant of the famous nineteenth-century robber baron, Isaac Samuel Meyer.
Bellerton local police and North Carolina state police are both said to be actively investigating this matter. Funeral services for Tiffany Ann Marsh were held yesterday at the Bellerton Church of Christ Jesus, the Reverend Henry Holborn presiding.
PART ONE
One
1
EVER SINCE GREGOR DEMARKIAN had come to live on Cavanaugh Street, he had spent a lot of time worrying about his best friend, Father Tibor Kasparian—but he had never been afraid for him, until now. The problem had started late on the afternoon of April 19, the day of the Oklahoma City bombing, when the reports first started to drift in that the bomber might not be an Islamic fundamentalist with ties to Iran, but someone more banal and domestic. It had gotten worse after Timothy McVeigh was arrested and everybody was sure. Gregor knew that Father Tibor had had a terrible life: arrested and imprisoned in the Soviet Union when the Soviet Union was still a power; suffering through God only knew what until he could make his way overland and underground, first to Israel and then to the United States. Tibor’s wife had died in a Russian prison. Tibor himself limped slightly, and had only partial use of his left arm. Once, in the dark of a long night spent watching Jaws on videotape in the living room of the tiny rectory-apartment behind Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church, Tibor had told Gregor the most frightening thing Gregor thought he had ever heard: that blood is the color of dirt, really, once it dries; that there are people who like the way corpses look, especially covered with dust and laid out on the ground.
“It’s not,” Gregor Demarkian told Bennis Hannaford, one early morning in late October, months after the rest of the country had lost interest in Oklahoma and gone back to obsessing about the Simpson trial, “it’s not as if I were an unsophisticated man. I spent most of my career chasing serial killers. I’ve seen a lot of blood and badness in my time. I’ve been depressed as hell about it. But this is different.”
“Mmm,” Bennis Hannaford said.
Gregor looked at Bennis’s thick black hair and perfectly almond-shaped, enormous blue eyes, and signed. Bennis was beautiful and Bennis was bright and Bennis loved Tibor, but she had quit a two-and-a-half-pack-a-day cigarette habit less than a month ago, and lately she just didn’t seem to be mentally home. They were sitting facing each other in the window booth of the Ararat Restaurant. Gregor could look through the tall pane of glass at a bright, hard, cold fall day. It was only five minutes after seven. By seven-thirty, they would no longer be alone. Half the single people on the street ate their breakfasts at the Ararat. Half the married people did, too, when they were fighting with their spouses or not up to cooking anything or just in the mood to see people early. At night, the Ararat was Cavanaugh Street’s main tourist attraction. It got written up in the restaurant section of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Tourists from Radnor and Wayne came in to see what “real Armenian cooking” was like. In the daytime, the Ararat resembled a diner with eccentric furniture. Hard vinyl floors and inexpensive green wallpaper clashed with tasseled sofa cushions and hand-crocheted antimacassars. As far as Gregor knew, the Ararat was the only restaurant of any kind, anywhere, that used antimacassars on the backs of straight-backed aluminum chairs.
“Bennis,” Gregor said.
Bennis dragged her eyes away from the window. She looked unfocused. As far as Gregor knew, she hadn’t done a single hour’s work since she threw her Benson & Hedges menthols in the trash. Even unfocused, she was beautiful. Heading toward forty, she still had not a single wrinkle on her face. Her bone structure was extraordinary: fine but strong, sharp-edged and well defined. She was also a very successful fantasy novelist, but somehow Gregor never attached that to her, as part of her identity for him. Her apartment was full of papier-mâché castles and plastic unicorns. Her head was full of knights in shining armor and crones with magical powers. Gregor tried not to think about it, the way he would have if she had had something wrong with her that he thought she would find it embarrassing for him to notice.
“Bennis,” Gregor said again, louder this time.
Bennis blinked and shook her head. She had a cup of coffee in front of her, barely touched. It had been sitting there barely touched for over half an hour.
“I’m sorry,” Bennis said. “Excuse me, Gregor. Yes. I know. Tibor. It is worrying.”
“It’s more than worrying. It’s downright terrifying. We’ve got to do something about this, Bennis.”
Bennis took a sip of her coffee and made a face. It had to be stone cold. “I thought you’d already decided to do something about it,” she said. “I thought you’d decided to take him with you down to North Carolina. To investigate this child murder case.”
“I’ve decided to ask him, yes. I haven’t talked to him about it yet.”
“I wonder if he even knows it’s happened,” Bennis said. “I mean, you’d think, with all the publicity, he could hardly have failed to notice.”
“Trobriand Islanders know about Ginger Marsh,” Gregor said.
“Still,” Bennis went on, “the way he’s been—Maybe he has noticed it, and it’s only made everything worse.”
“I wouldn’t know. I haven’t talked to him about it. I haven’t talked to him about much of anything in weeks.”
“There was the Susan Smith case, too,” Bennis said. “But that was different. And maybe I’m just overreacting here. That didn’t seem to bother him much. Not like the Oklahoma thing.”
Linda Melajian came out of the door at the back of the room. Gregor waved to her and Linda nodded, holding up a Pyrex pot of coffee with steam coming out the wide open top of it. People were getting used to Bennis’s drifting off. They had started to make allowances for it.
“I don’t think Tibor sees individual cases like Susan Smith and Ginger Marsh as having the same—gravity as what happened in Oklahoma City,” Gregor said. “They lack the political element.”
“There was a story in Ms. about the politics of motherhood,” Bennis said. “They’ve got that kind of political element.”
“These days, everything’s got that kind of political element. That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”
Linda Melajian had arrived with her pot of coffee. She gave Bennis a new coffee cup and filled it. Bennis didn’t notice.
“Bennis,” Linda said.
“Oh.” Bennis looked up. “Oh, Linda, hi. Could I have another cup of coffee? I let this one get cold.”
Linda took the cup of cold coffee off the table and looked at the ceiling. Bennis didn’t notice that, either.
“It’s not that I think Tibor will be interested in the Ginger Marsh case,” Gregor said. “It’s that I don’t like the idea of going off and leaving him for what could be a solid month. I don’t like the shape he’s in.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“And it’s not like I can count on the people around here looking after him,” Gregor said. “Not lately. Lida’s always off in California—what does she do in California, anyway?”
“Maybe she likes it there.”
“And you’re the next thing to useless these days. If you don’t mind me saying so.”
“Mmm,” Bennis said.
“And old George is much too old to take on this kind of responsibility. He doesn’t get around well enough.” Gregor drummed his fingers against the table. “I don’t really know what I ought to do here. It’s not that I think the Ginger Marsh case will interest Tibor. It barely interes
ts me. If David Sandler hadn’t written me directly, I don’t think I would have paid any attention to it at all.”
“Satanism and witchcraft and child sacrifice?” Bennis looked up, her attention caught at last, frankly surprised. “You must be kidding. It got everybody else’s attention. I’ll bet the trial is going to be enormous.”
“The trial is going to be a nonissue. Give it a couple of more months. They’ll look into all their leads. They’ll do the conscientious investigative probe. Then they’ll arrest Ginger Marsh and she’ll plead guilty.”
“You really believe that.”
“The only difference between Ginger Marsh and Susan Smith is that Ginger Marsh has a more elaborate sense of the theatrical. Pentagrams and candles and a bloody knife beat a phantom carjacker any day. But they’re just as bogus. And they’re just as cheap. That woman murdered her own child.”
“I don’t think I can remember you being this cynical before.”
“It’s not cynicism. It’s experience. I was in the Federal Bureau of Investigation for twenty years. I know these people.”
“Which people?”
“The Ginger Marshes of this world. The Susan Smiths. The Terry McVeighs. There really isn’t much difference, you know. It’s all the same—attitude, I guess you’d call it. The same arrogance. And if you don’t mind my saying so, Bennis, I think that in my old age, I’m getting tired of it.”
“You’re not old, Gregor. For God’s sake.”
“I’ll be sixty-one on my next birthday. Any day now, they’ll stop talking about how I’m in early retirement. And like I said, I’m getting tired of it. More tired than you know.”
“Then why do it? You’re not obliged to go down there. The case will go on without you.”
“I know it will.”
“So?”
Gregor shrugged. “David Sandler is a friend of mine. He hasn’t had much experience. He thinks there’s something mysterious in what’s happening down there. If I do what he’s asking me to do, it might ease his mind.”
