Baptism in Blood

by Jane Haddam

  Since the media people had stopped camping out on his doorstep, Stephen had begun to think he must know what those women had to live with. He felt blanked out, unreal, nonexistent. He paced back and forth in his study until Lisa came in and demanded that he stop. Pacing back and forth made the floorboards creak. She could hear the creak upstairs and it drove her crazy. Everything was driv­ing Stephen crazy. When he tried to sleep, he got visions of what it had been like, in the middle of the storm. When he tried to make himself breakfast or work on a sermon or read a book, his eyes kept straying to the television set—but there was nothing on it anymore except David Sandler or one of the media people. Stephen had started to wonder if he shouldn’t write a book.

  There had been a little piece in the local paper that morning about the coming of Gregor Demarkian. Stephen had made himself read it very carefully, twice. Usually he read only the Raleigh paper. It was much more cosmopoli­tan and—sane—than the one put out here on Main Street. The Bellerton Times tended to go in heavily for articles about accepting Jesus. It also favored stories about miracle healings at tent meetings throughout the South. Cripples throwing away their crutches. Paraplegics leaping out of their wheelchairs and racing across the stage. Still, the Times had a story about Gregor Demarkian, and the Ra­leigh paper didn’t, and the television news shows didn’t, either. Maybe it wasn’t true.

  Lisa was out on the back porch, sitting in the glider. Stephen could see her, bent over one of those paperback romance books from Maggie Kelleher’s store. Her hair was braided down the back of her neck. Her face looked like it belonged on one of those medieval Madonnas, narrow and stern.

  Stephen folded the paper up so that it showed the article on Demarkian and nothing else. Then he got up and went to the porch door. The door creaked. Lisa didn’t stop reading her book or turn around to look at him.

  “Lisa?” Stephen said.

  Lisa wagged a foot in the air. “I was wondering how long you were going to sit at that table. You never seem to do anything around here anymore.”

  “I was reading the paper.”

  “You’ve been reading the paper for two hours.”

  “There was something interesting in it. In the Bellerton paper. Not the News and Observer.”

  “Is it something about you?”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Then I’m surprised you find it interesting.”

  Lisa was still staring down at her book. Stephen felt a pulse start at the base of his throat, that pulse of anger he got more and more these days, whenever he tried to talk to Lisa. He swallowed against it and walked around the glider until he was facing her. He held out the copy of the Bellerton Times and waited. When she still didn’t look up, or make any move to take the paper, he shoved it across the top of her book and stepped back.

  “Look at that,” he said. “Will you please.”

  Lisa picked up the paper in her left hand and looked at it. “So?”

  “That’s Gregor Demarkian they’re talking about, don’t you see? The man who was involved in those murders in the exercise place up in Connecticut.”

  “I know who Gregor Demarkian is, Stephen. I read the same magazines that you do.”

  “Lisa, for God’s sake. The Bellerton Times is saying that he’s coming here. To Bellerton. To look into the Ginny Marsh thing.”

  “He is coming here,” Lisa said. “Naomi Brent told me all about it. He’s a friend of David Sandler’s. David asked him to come down and Clayton Hall is ecstatic to have him, so he’s supposed to be here any day now. Today, maybe. I can’t remember.”

  “Couldn’t you at least have told me about it?”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s important, for God’s sake. It changes everything. I thought this would all blow over in time, you know, the media thing and—”

  “You never thought the media thing would blow over,” Lisa said flatly. “You thought you’d turned into a movie star.”

  “—but the way it is,” Stephen went on stubbornly, “with Demarkian here, the story is going to get a brand new lease on life. It’s going to be everywhere. It’s going to be places it’s never been before.”

  “Stephen, there aren’t any places it hasn’t been. It’s been worse than the Beatles arriving in the United States for the first time, and you know it. It’s been a lot worse than the Susan Smith thing down in South Carolina.”

  Stephen looked away, off the porch and into the yard. The trees were heavy with green, even this late in the air. It was always so warm here. Winter meant what early fall would have back home. Spring meant a change in the atmo­sphere, not in the weather.

  “Do you still think that that’s what all this is about?” Stephen asked Lisa. “That it’s like that Susan Smith thing? Do you still think Ginny killed the baby?”

  “Yes, of course,” Lisa said. “Everybody thinks it. Clayton Hall thinks it. He just can’t go barging off arrest­ing people before he has his evidence nailed down.”

  “You think she did all of it? Split the baby’s throat and cut it up like that?”

  “I think she had to make it look good,” Lisa said. “If there’s one thing we’ve all learned from Susan Smith, it’s that half-assed stories only get you so far.”

  Stephen turned around to look at Lisa again. “But why would she do something like that? Why would any­body?”

  Lisa pitched her romance novel onto the seat of the glider. “I expect there’s a man in it somewhere. There usu­ally is. Some man who’s been talking trash to her and telling her he’d marry her if only she didn’t have any living children.”

  “You don’t think Carol Littleton and all those women were up there worshipping the Devil?”

  “I think they might have been worshipping the Devil, but I don’t think it has anything to do with this. You wait and see. That’s what they want Demarkian here for. Just like they got the FBI down in Union so the town cops didn’t look too much like heavies, although I’ve got to say, the town cops down there took a lot more responsibility than Clayton Hall is taking here. But just you wait. They’ll arrest Ginny sooner or later, and after that everybody will say that they knew all about it all along.”

  “You don’t like Ginny Marsh, do you?”

  “I don’t care about Ginny Marsh one way or the other.”

  “Sometimes I think you don’t like anybody at all,” Stephen said. “Not Ginny Marsh. Not Carol Littleton. Not Naomi Brent. Not me.”

  Lisa laid her head back on the glider and stared up at the porch ceiling. “Actually,” she said, “I think I’m hav­ing a crisis of faith. I think I’ve decided that God is dead. I’d talk to you about it, but you think God is dead, too. Do you ever wonder what it is you’re doing, being the minister of a church?”

  “Religion is more than a lot of fairy tales in an an­cient book,” Stephen said, as gently as he could. “I thought we’d been over this. Bishop Spong says, in his book about the Resurrection—”

  “Bishop Spong doesn’t believe in the Resurrection,” Lisa said. “And neither do you.”

  “Of course Bishop Spong believes in the Resurrec­tion. And so do I. How can you say things like that?”

  Lisa got to her feet in one fluid but violent motion. “You don’t believe it really happened, really really, like rain happens. You think it’s some kind of symbol. You think everything’s some kind of symbol. There weren’t any wise men. There wasn’t any Star of Bethlehem. There wasn’t any virgin birth. Symbols, symbols, symbols.”

  “Don’t say you’ve started to believe in parthenogene­sis at this late date.”

  “I think I believe in honesty. I understand David Sandler. I understand Henry Holborn. You and Bishop Spong, I don’t understand at all. I’m going to get some lunch.”

  “Lisa, for God’s sake. Aren’t you going to tell me what this is all about?”

  “No,” Lisa said.

  Any other woman would have started screaming at him then, but Lisa didn’t. She just turned away from hi
m and walked into the house, as if they’d been having a dis­cussion about the refreshments she was going to serve at the Bible study meeting this week. Except that they couldn’t have a discussion about that, because he’d can­celed the Bible study meeting this week. He was too dis­tracted, with everything that had been going on, and not many people came anymore anyway. In the last six weeks, Stephen had lost two-thirds of his Bible study group to the Bible study group Henry Holborn ran in that big barn of a church of his just outside of town.

  Maybe I ought to start telling people I’ve been kid­napped by UFOs, Stephen thought—but that wouldn’t help, that wouldn’t get him back what he wanted, that wouldn’t turn things around and make them what they had been be­fore. Only one thing would do that, and he didn’t know—quite yet—how to arrange for it.

  3

  FROM WHERE SHE SAT next to Clayton Hall’s desk in the basement of Town Hall—official police headquarters for the Town of Bellerton; official interrogation room when the interrogating was being done by Clayton instead of by one of the men from the state—Ginny Marsh could see the Carver sisters, two old ladies with fluffy hair, carrying big brown grocery bags full of stuff out of Rose MacNeill’s store. The Carver sisters had a niece whose baby was being christened this weekend at the Episcopal Church. Ginny’s church didn’t believe in infant baptism, but Ginny liked the practice, with its white gown for the baby and its solemn ceremonials. Maybe if Tiffany had been baptized, Ginny wouldn’t be feeling so very awful now. And she was feel­ing awful. She was feeling raw to the bone. The problem was that she couldn’t get it out from inside her and make it show on her skin. Even Bobby was beginning to wonder if she hadn’t killed the baby. Ginny knew that. They all wanted her to cry and carry on, to weep and wail and go insane. She just couldn’t do it. Every time she thought she was about to get started, everything inside her would freeze. There she would be, sitting in front of all those cameras, grinning like she was having a wonderful time. It put her in mind of what the Reverend Holborn was always saying about being possessed by the Devil. Ginny surely thought she was being possessed by something. It had taken over her heart and started to eat her soul.

  In the meantime, Tiffany was lying dead somewhere, buried in a funeral Ginny hadn’t been allowed to see, and Clayton Hall was finding less and less to say, and those newspeople from New York and Chicago and Atlanta were camped out on Main Street, waiting for what they thought was the inevitable to happen. Because Ginny knew, of course. She knew that everybody thought she had murdered Tiffany and carved those marks on her body and then served her up like a pot roast, proof positive that the Devil was doing his dirty work at Zhondra Meyer’s camp. Ginny, however, knew she had done no such thing.

  Reverend Holborn was always saying that nobody could go to Heaven if he hadn’t been baptized. Babies like Tiffany who died before they could accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior were full of corruption and original sin. They went to Hell like any other unbeliever. What Ginny had been trying to do over the last few weeks, whenever they let her alone long enough to let her think, was to try to talk herself out of believing this. She wanted to think of Tiffany in Heaven with God and the angels. She wanted to think of Tiffany wearing wings.

  Mostly, though, she didn’t want to think. She wanted to float. Pain was an ocean, warm water holding her up, holding her high over the heads of all these people who had never understood a thing. Pain was a tidal wave, and if they would just let her go, she would gladly drown in it.

  Bobby kept talking about what they would do once all of this was over, but Ginny didn’t believe this would ever be over. It would go on and on, on and on, on and on. There would never be anything called the future, and she would never be alive again.

  Four

  1

  GREGOR DEMARKIAN WAS TWENTY-FIVE years old the first time he slept in a bed that didn’t have a city surrounding it, twenty-five years old and finished with college and his first year of graduate school and newly inducted into the United States Army. Lying awake in the guest bedroom of David Sandler’s small but spectacular post-and-beam beach house reminded Gregor very much of that first country bed. That one had been in the South, too, far away from here, in Alabama. The young men who slept around him had been younger than he was and less well educated. Those were the days when there were unspoken assumptions, in the U.S. military and the U.S. government and U.S. society at large, about who you were and who you could be based on what you had been born into and the kind of last name you wrote down on application forms. Most young men who had graduated from an Ivy League college and gone on to get a master’s degree at Harvard were shuffled right into officers’ training, or advised in the direction of the National Guard. Gregor was dumped right in with the farm boys and the juvenile delinquents from Queens. The first drill ser­geant who saw him thought he was Jewish, and told him so, in language Gregor did his best not to remember. The U.S. Army, at the time, was not famous for its efforts against anti-Semitism, and that in spite of the fact that this was after World War II. The camp in Alabama had been flat and hot and clogged with Spanish moss. The campgrounds im­mediately around the barracks had been barren, but oddly so, as if it had been done deliberately. Up until that point, Gregor had either lived with his mother—his father was dead; his older brother was dead, too, killed at the end of World War II in a battle that probably should never have been fought—or in university dormitories, where there were people whose job it was to make him feel at home. It had never occurred to him that there were places where he would naturally not be at home. He had expected to be comfortable anywhere in the United States, and maybe in Armenia, too, although he had never been in Armenia. Peo­ple on Cavanaugh Street in those days made a point of showing everyone how thoroughly American they were. Those were the days when Cavanaugh Street was poor. A big tenement had stood where Lida Arkmanian’s town house was now. The apartments at the back of it had had no windows. A pawnshop had stood next door to where Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store was now—and had been then, for that matter—but in the pawnshop’s place there was now a gift store that sold fancy glass balls and vases painted over with purple flower petals.

  Gregor turned over in David Sandler’s guest bed. There was nothing poor about David Sandler’s house, al­though David had been poor once. He had been a scholar­ship student in Gregor’s class at the University of Pennsylvania. The ceiling above Gregor’s head rose into a high peak. The beams that threaded across the air beneath it smelled of cedar. David seemed to have come to some sort of accommodation with the changes life had brought him that was more graceful than anything Gregor had man­aged for himself. Gregor thought he spent too much time remembering what it had been like when he was twelve, with the bare linoleum on the walls and the window in the back bedroom they couldn’t afford a shade for at all and the nights when all that would be on the table was pasta and bread, because that was all they had left. A picture of that pasta and bread had once come back to him, full force and in Technicolor, while he sat over dinner in a Washing­ton restaurant with the then vice president of the United States. He had looked around and seen Henry Kissinger at the next table and Barbara Walters two tables away, and been so disoriented he thought he was going to pass out. Right now he just wished he was female. Women could ask themselves questions like this. How did you learn to forget? What did you do to help yourself start believing in your life? Men thought about things like this and then talked about fishing.

  What had reminded Gregor of Alabama—and all the rest of it—in David Sandler’s house was the smell just un­der the smell of the ocean, the flat damp badness of vegeta­tion gone to rot. In Alabama, that smell had been everywhere. In spite of the fact that he had spent only two weeks at that camp, Gregor had carried the smell with him ever since, and it was still part of what he thought of when he heard the words “the South.” One thing about being an overeducated ethnic had been very good, even at the time. None of the officers in that Alabama camp had been able to
stand him, and none of them wanted to deal with him, and so at the first possible moment, faster than he would have dreamed was possible in the U.S. Army, he had been shipped off to a training facility in Massachusetts, and put on the list for the Officer Training Corps, and that was that. Gregor had all he had ever wanted to have of being a grunt in one of the army’s classic proving grounds in the Bible Belt. Just why the army always seemed to want to build their forts on swampland and great plains, Gregor never did learn to understand.

  The clock on the night table next to the bed said 5:45. Gregor untangled himself from his light coverlet and got to his feet. Then he went to the door and looked into the big central main room of the house. Everything was quiet. David Sandler’s sleeping loft was quiet. Gregor went into the living room and looked around. The sunlight coming in through the windows was very strong. It didn’t seem to matter down here that it was late in the month of October. Gregor looked at the paintings on the walls that he hadn’t paid much attention to yesterday, and the books in the bookcases, too. The paintings were all prints from the Re­naissance. People expected militant atheists to be modern, but David had always had more than a little of the classical scholar in him. The books were all books for work—books on the history of religion; tracts on various denominations and sects; the really classic literature of atheism, like Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Gregor made a face. Reading ought to be for pleasure as much as for work, he thought. His apartment back in Philadelphia had almost nothing in it but crime manuals or forensic textbooks, and the entire set of Bantam’s paperback editions of the Nero Wolfe novels. Gregor took another look at David Sandler’s door—David was unlikely to wake up soon; he had stayed up late the night before; David was a night person—and went back to the guest room. He shut the door and shucked off his pajamas, navy blue with red piping, a gift last Christmas from old George Tekemanian. Really hip men didn’t wear pajamas, according to Bennis. Really hip men wore nothing to bed at all. Gregor reminded himself that he neither was, nor aspired to be, a really hip man, and went in to the guest bath to take a shower.