by Jane Haddam
Gregor was sitting in first class on the Amtrak train—why, he didn’t know. Normally, he didn’t like to go to that extra expense, even though he could afford it. First class was almost deserted. There was an old woman with a powder blue cardigan over her shoulders playing solitaire on her tray table. There were two very young women, dressed up in leather that had been studded with metal things. Gregor had both seats in his row to himself. He had the empty seat on the aisle filled with books and papers. Every once in a while he would look at it, annoyed and vaguely upset, and realize he was expecting to see Tibor in it. He had been hatching the plan to take Tibor with him to North Carolina ever since David Sandler’s second letter arrived. Now he felt bottled up and frustrated. It wasn’t just that Tibor wasn’t here, when he ought to be. It was that Gregor himself needed somebody to talk to. He had all these maps and clippings that David had sent him, and these books on abnormal psychology and child abuse he had bought at the University of Pennsylvania bookstore. He had a book called The Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother, by Shari L. Thurer, which he thought was going to tell him how mothers felt about their children, but didn’t, quite. He had no idea why he was going to such great lengths to do research for a case he was sure would end up being open-and-shut. He didn’t know why he kept looking out the train window and thinking how flat everything was. When his wife was still alive, he had let her drive them down to Florida every couple of years or so, for what was supposed to be a vacation. He had always been able to tell exactly when they had crossed the state line from Virginia into North Carolina. The land seemed to flatten out. The air seemed to change color. The houses on the side of the road definitely got poorer and more rickety and more forlorn. There hadn’t been many houses like that this time, Gregor had noticed, although there had been one or two. These days what appeared on the roadsides were small brick ranches with curving front windows. He supposed that was an improvement. Had things improved down here, since the days when he had prayed not to be assigned here because he didn’t want to have to deal with racial problems and running guns? Bible thumping and ATF agents. Backyard stills and really murderous hate. Gregor didn’t have a wonderful vision of the American South. Still, he thought, this was said to be the up and coming place. People were moving down here in droves. Surely they wouldn’t do that if the South were as awful and backward a place as he had always assumed it to be. That was the problem with getting what you knew about something from television, especially television that was twenty years out of date. He could still see the dogs and the Federal marshals in Birmingham, George Wallace in his wheelchair, old Strom Thurmond switching parties so he wouldn’t have to be in the one that was hell-bent on helping the… Negroes.
Gregor looked down at the mess he had made in the seat next to him. The map was spread out across most of it, green and blue and red, showing the route Interstate 95 took south from Richmond. Gregor stood up and brushed past it all into the aisle. He was so big, the aisle felt too narrow, although it wasn’t. The ceiling was definitely too low. There was a bar and snack stand one car back. Gregor headed for that, even though he wasn’t hungry. None of his thoughts would settle into a pattern. At the coupling between cars, the doors felt too heavy for him. He was so used to being a big man with powerful muscles, he was surprised.
The problem with this little favor he had promised to do for David Sandler, Gregor realized, was that he hadn’t taken it seriously even yet. His picture of the South was so firmly fixed in his mind, he kept expecting the whole thing to turn out like a Beverly Hillbillies episode. Virginia Marsh would turn out to be itching to run off with her husband’s brother. The baby would turn out to have been the product of incest between Virginia and her own brother. The whole thing would blow up and land on Sally Jessy Raphael, which he would watch in stupefied amazement, unable to understand how anybody could be this dumb.
There was a drunk in the car, but Gregor ignored him. He was a drunk with a Yankee accent, which at least did nothing to excite Gregor’s prejudices. He asked for a diet Coke and paid nearly two dollars for it. He looked out the window behind the bartender’s head and saw rolling flatlands, as gentle as the waves on the surface of the water in a protected inland. Everything was green and bright and warm. True fall hadn’t come to North Carolina yet. The cars on the road all seemed to be very new and bought from Ford.
“Raleigh coming up,” the bartender said suddenly. It was as if one of the figures in a wax museum had started talking.
“Excuse me?” Gregor said.
“Raleigh coming up,” the bartender repeated. He had a soft southern drawl, like the ones Gregor had rarely heard outside the movies. “It’ll be less than five minutes. I’d go back to my seat if I had any luggage.”
“Oh,” Gregor said. “Yes. Thank you.”
“They’re going to cut this run, did you know that?” the bartender said. “The Republicans. Everybody votes Republican down here these days. My granddad would have died first. You a Republican?”
“I’m not an anything,” Gregor said, thinking that right now he would sooner admit to being an extraterrestrial.
The bartender was cleaning his counter with a rag. The drunk had gone to sleep.
“What I notice,” the bartender said, “these days, everybody up North is a Democrat, and everybody down here is a Republican. Opposite of what it used to be. You see what I mean?”
“I think so.”
“It’s the fault of the liberals,” the bartender said solemnly. “The liberals ruined the Democratic party. It was much better when it was full of people like us.”
“I think I’d better go back to my seat,” Gregor said. “I think I’d better pack up my books and get ready to go.”
“Nobody down here would vote for Jesse Helms if there was a decent Democrat running,” the bartender said. “I don’t think there’s been a decent Democrat running since Harry Truman.”
The bartender didn’t look like he was much more than twenty-five years old. How much could he possibly know about Harry Truman?
“Yes,” Gregor said, backing up. “Well.”
He turned around and headed for the coupling of the cars, hurrying. There were windows open in the bar car. He could feel the warm outside air fighting against the frigidity of the air-conditioning. The drunk was snoring next to his beer. Gregor went through the coupling and back into first class. The woman who had been playing solitaire had packed up her cards. She was now half-curled in her seat, reading a book called How to Have a Wonderful Sex Life at Any Age at All.
Gregor scooped up his maps and his books and his newspaper clippings and sat down in the aisle seat. The train had begun to shudder and rattle, the way trains did when the tracks under their wheels got complicated. Outside, Gregor could see the start of a small industrial center, the smokestacks and metal-sided buildings, the warehouses and big flat parking lots full of heavy trucks. Gregor got his briefcase off the floor and stuffed the mess into it. Then he got the still unopened diet Coke out of his pocket and decided he didn’t want to drink it after all.
Really, Gregor thought. I don’t know anything at all about the New South. I don’t know anything at all about North Carolina. It’s not only wrong to judge by stereotypes, it’s stupid, especially when you’re involved in a murder case.
Out beyond the tracks, the warehouses gave way to billboards. Some of them advertised HBO and termite extermination services. More of them advertised cigarettes and Jesus Christ. It was as if the only way to save your soul was to die of lung cancer while praying.
I have to stop this, Gregor told himself.
Then he stood up and began to get his luggage down off the overhead rack. The train was swaying so much, he nearly fell twice.
Out on the tracks, a billboard with Jesse Helms’s face on it appeared out of nowhere, fat and round and big enough to swallow Detroit.
2
THE FIRST THING GREGOR noticed about North Carolina was that the
women there dressed in brighter colors than the women in Philadelphia. Where train stations in Philly were full of brown and black and beige, this one was overrun with pastels and primaries. Gregor saw a woman in a lemon yellow suit and lemon yellow shoes, and another in a dress that must have been fuchsia. She had fuchsia shoes on, too. Then there was the hair, and the makeup. Bennis Hannaford went weeks without wearing makeup. Gregor didn’t think Donna Moradanyan had ever worn any makeup at all. These women all seemed to have eye shadow coordinated with their nail polish—and their nail polish wasn’t chipped, either. How did women learn to do things like this to themselves? What did it mean that they did? Gregor threaded his way carefully through them, realizing, after a while, that he had started to be much more polite, and much more tentative, than he usually was around women. Maybe that was supposed to be the point, but he didn’t think Bennis Hannaford’s thoroughly feminist soul would like it any.
David Sandler was waiting for him at the place where the platforms spilled their passengers into the main concourse. It wasn’t much of a concourse, not like the one in Philadelphia, but it was bright and clean and cheerful. Even David Sandler was cheerful. Gregor was used to him in his Columbia University professor mode: tweed jackets, dark ties, dark slacks, black leather shoes. This David Sandler was wearing a pair of battered-looking chinos and a bright orange T-shirt. He was carrying a sky blue windbreaker in his hands. Obviously, Gregor thought, whatever it was about colors that had infected the female half of the North Carolina population had infected the male half just as much.
Gregor excused himself to a young woman in a green-and-white-striped skirt and three miles of curling dark hair and waved to David Sandler with the hand he was holding the briefcase in. David held out his own hand and captured the briefcase.
“There you are,” he said to Gregor. “I didn’t recognize you. You look depressed as hell.”
“Thanks a lot,” Gregor said.
“I’m the one who’s supposed to be depressed as hell,” David said. “I guess I am, most of the time. But it was a good ride up here. North Carolina is a beautiful place.”
They were headed out of the terminal into the parking lot. All Gregor could see were cars and billboards.
“Is Bellerton far from here?” he asked. “I tried to look it up on the map, but all I got was confused. You get down to the coast and it looks like you run out of road.”
“You do, sort of. Bellerton’s not on any kind of main thoroughfare. It’s on the water.”
“I know that, David.”
“Yeah, well. There are advantages to being out of the way like that. Things you wouldn’t necessarily think about. Like drugs.”
“Drugs?”
“Right.” David was leading them across the parking lot, threading them through cars and pickup trucks. “The two big drug routes on this side of the country are 95 and 301. Anyplace with access to either of those highways tends to be absolutely full of dope. Why not? You’re going to run a shipment up to New York, you might as well stop off in a few small towns on the way and make a fast buck or two. Drugs.”
“And Bellerton doesn’t have drugs,” Gregor said carefully.
David snorted. “Of course Bellerton has drugs, Gregor. Two-bit elementary schools in Montana have drugs these days. Bellerton doesn’t have as many drugs as, say, Raleigh itself. Or Chapel Hill. Anyway,” David said, “it isn’t only the drugs. It’s the tourists. We get tourists. We get a lot of tourists. I started out down here as a tourist. The thing is, we don’t get the kind of crowds you get in places like Hatteras. It’s quieter that way.”
Gregor thought of all the clippings in his briefcase. “I wouldn’t think it was very quiet now. With the Oklahoma City thing on hold for the moment and nothing new happening to O.J., you people seem to be the biggest game in town.”
“I know. I find myself wishing that something awful would happen to somebody else, so I wouldn’t have to watch the media invade Rose’s gift shop anymore. But there you are.”
“Is Rose one of the people I’m supposed to meet?”
“You’ll have to meet everybody,” David said. “Small towns are like that. And this small town is an absolute hotbed. It makes Peyton Place read like children’s literature.”
“You didn’t put any of that in your letters.”
“I didn’t want to. Christ, Gregor—and I use the word ‘Christ’ advisedly—you wouldn’t believe the kind of thing that goes on. Even I didn’t know about most of it until all this happened and people started talking to me.”
“I would believe it,” Gregor said. “But what kind of thing are you talking about? Sex?”
“Of course I’m not talking about sex. Sex would be normal.”
“Sex isn’t always normal.”
“In Bellerton, sex isn’t always sex,” David said. “But it isn’t sex I’m talking about. It’s religion.”
“Do you mean cult religion? Like these devil worshippers the Raleigh paper is always talking about?”
“I mean religion, Gregor. Plain old ordinary religion. Christianity, just like we all grew up with, except people who are lucky, like Zhondra Meyer, who grew up as Jews.”
“I think there are several hundred thousand Moslems in the country now,” Gregor said, straight-faced.
David Sandler stopped dead in his tracks. “Gregor, listen. I have spent my life campaigning against religion. I don’t believe in God. I do believe that most of the worst things that have happened to the human race have been the result of believing in a God who isn’t there, because there isn’t any God anywhere and we all know it if we’re honest with ourselves. I’ve written articles full of scare stories about the religious right and felt I was doing the right thing. But do you know what, Gregor? I thought I was exaggerating. I thought I was exaggerating.”
“And?”
“And I wasn’t. Hell, I was understating the case. I’m telling you. You absolutely won’t believe what’s going on down here. You couldn’t have the faintest idea. This is the car,” David said.
David put his hand down on the hood of a purple Ford pickup truck. Gregor felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. The bed at the back of the truck was filled with lumber and fertilizer. Gregor didn’t think he had ever ridden in a pickup truck before.
“Where’s your car?” he asked David, trying not to sound panicked. “You don’t drive this thing in New York.”
“I don’t drive anything in New York. I can’t get insurance I can afford. I’ve got a regular car down in Bellerton, Gregor, but I had some things I had to pick up. You’re not worried about riding in a truck, are you?”
Gregor was silent.
David got his keys out of his chinos. “I’ve got one of those Darwin magnets for the back of this thing, but I took it off to come up and get you. They’re always telling you how suffocating and intolerant small towns are, Gregor, but I tell you, I’d much rather be driving around with that thing on my car in Bellerton than here. No Christian Nazis in Bellerton.”
Gregor didn’t think David should call anybody a “Christian Nazi” while he was standing in the middle of a parking lot in the Bible Belt. Gregor put his foot up on the silver steel footboard and tried to haul himself up. It didn’t quite work. David took the luggage.
“You’ve got to grab on with your hands and pull,” David said. Then, instead of helping Gregor in, he went around the front of the truck and got in himself.
Gregor grabbed onto the sides of the doorway and pulled. He tried to remember what it had been like to climb into a tank when he was in the army, but he had only done that once, and the experience wouldn’t come back to him.
“You all right?” David asked him.
Gregor knew David didn’t really want an answer. The truck’s engine was already humming. Gregor leaned halfway out of the cab and slammed his door shut, and as soon as he did the truck began to back out of its parking space. Gregor fumbled frantically for his seat belt. The sides were tangled up in each oth
er.
“It’s a nice ride down to Bellerton.” David spoke over the roar of what Gregor thought must be a defective muffler. “You wait and see. I’m going to move down here permanently when I’m ready to retire.”
Like talking about “Christian Nazis” in the parking lot, Gregor thought this was probably a bad idea. City boys did not move easily into the country. Gregor knew that from his own experience. David was something more exotic than a simple city boy, too. He was a true intellectual, one of the last in existence. Heresy was a necessary ingredient in the very air he breathed.
