by Jane Haddam
“Sure,” Clayton Hall said.
Gregor put out his hand and touched John Chester on the arm. “Just a minute, do you mind? Could I ask you one or two more things?”
“If you’re going to ask how I know her throat wasn’t cut here, I don’t want to answer. You shouldn’t need me to tell you.”
Gregor didn’t need John Chester to tell him. He could see, even now and at a distance, that there was no significant amount of blood anywhere near the circle of stones.
“I just want some intelligent guesses to go on with,” he said. “Do you think it will turn out that she was killed by having her throat cut?”
John Chester nodded. “Oh, yeah. You get a good look at it, you can see she was good and alive when that cut happened. She lost a lot of blood. Her skin is absolutely white. What I’m not so sure of is, whether that was what her murderer intended her to die of, if you see what I mean.”
“No,” Gregor said.
John Chester gestured to the circle of stones. “It bothers me,” he said, “all this concentration on the stones, all this hokey-looking evidence to say that there was some ritual involved.”
“So you don’t think Ginny Marsh was telling the truth when she said she saw devil worshippers kill her baby at a Black Mass?”
“I know she wasn’t telling the truth when she said the baby was killed here,” John Chester said. “It couldn’t have been.”
“Do you think Ginny Marsh killed her baby?”
John Chester shrugged. “I think it’s most likely she did or Bobby did. Her husband, Bobby Marsh, the baby’s father—”
“I know,” Gregor said.
“The common thing is for it to be one or the other, or both of them together. Or a boyfriend, of course, but I don’t know of any boyfriend in this case. You go around and around it, don’t you? All the usual explanations.”
“But Ginny Marsh couldn’t have killed Carol Littleton,” Gregor said. “You just told us that yourself.”
“I know. But Bobby could have. He’s big and strong and dumb enough. Not that I’ve got anything against Bobby Marsh, you understand, he’s just not too bright.”
“The other thing, of course, is that you haven’t answered me,” Gregor said. “You didn’t tell me if you thought they did it, either one of them or the two of them together.”
John Chester sighed. “I don’t exactly have an answer for you, Mr. Demarkian. I guess I thought it would all be cleared up by now. Ginny would just—bend under the strain and tell us what happened.”
“Which she hasn’t,” Gregor said.
“She definitely hasn’t,” Clayton Hall said. “If anything, she’s getting quieter and quieter by the minute.”
“What about Bobby Marsh?” Gregor asked.
“Mostly he drinks,” John Chester said. “He’s in the bars every night, and out on the road by two in the morning, too. One of these days I’m going to have to scrape him off the highway.”
“Do you think that indicates guilt or innocence?”
“I think it indicates that Bobby and the Reverend Holborn are having their problems again,” John Chester replied. “Bobby is a deacon in Henry Holborn’s church. Whenever they’re on the outs, Bobby goes to hell. I think he may be trying to get there literally.”
“Do you think they’ve fallen out over the murder of the baby?”
“No way to tell,” John Chester said.
“Do you think this murder and the murder of the baby are connected?”
“I couldn’t really say. They’d have to be connected at least superficially, though, wouldn’t they? Even if it was just a copycat kind of thing, somebody trying to make us think the murders were connected.” John Chester sighed. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help than this,” he said. “It’s just that there isn’t much to go on with all this. And there are a lot of people involved I don’t know. The women who live up here, for instance.”
“And that makes a difference?”
“When you know people, you have a fair idea of what they’re likely to do,” John Chester said. “Not always and not completely. It’s easy to get fooled. Even so, you’ve got some parameters. But with strangers—” He shrugged again.
“Do you think this murder was committed by a stranger? Do you think the murder of the baby was?”
“I think none of this makes any damn sense at all,” John Chester said. “I think—oh, Jesus.”
“What is it?” Gregor said.
“God damn it to hell,” Clayton Hall said. “How did they get in here? I’m going to bust somebody’s ass just for letting them in here.”
“What is it?” Gregor asked again.
There were too many people milling around in the clearing, that was the problem. Gregor had a hard time seeing past the cops and the women. Then he realized he was looking in the wrong direction. It wasn’t the path where the commotion was. The disturbance was arriving from the other direction, from the far side of the clearing, through the thick stand of trees.
The disturbance was being led by a six-foot cross painted gold and mounted on a long stick. The cross was held high in the air, and it came with chanting.
Dear sweet Jesus Christ, Gregor thought. Now what have I gotten myself into?
3
IT WASN’T JUST A cross and chanting. It was dozens and dozens of people. It took only moments for that to become clear. It took only moments more for the implications of that to be felt. The clearing was really very, very small. Gregor was pushed back into the knot of women and separated entirely from the uniformed police. The uniformed police were pushed in the other direction. They should have responded, but they seemed to be stunned. The cross advanced inexorably. People fell away from in front of it, like vampires in a Bela Lugosi movie. Then Gregor realized that what he had first thought of as chanting wasn’t chanting at all, but singing, done badly. They were trying to do “Give Me That Old Time Religion,” but too many of them were tone-deaf.
He turned around and saw Maggie Kelleher standing beside him, her arms wrapped around her chest, her forehead furrowed into deep lines.
“What is this?” he asked her. “Who are these people?”
“It’s Henry Holborn and the Full Gospel Christian Church,” Maggie said. “It looks like the whole Full Gospel Christian Church. Henry is the older man next to the cross.”
It was a young man who was actually holding the cross. Gregor turned his attention to the man beside that one and decided there was nothing much to see. Henry Holborn seemed to be an ordinary, well-kept man in late middle age, not somebody you would notice twice on the street.
“Somehow, with everything I’ve heard about him, I thought he’d be more—charismatic,” Gregor said.
“He’s charismatic enough,” Maggie told him. “Just you watch. I can’t believe he’s doing this.”
“Doing what?” Gregor asked.
In the center of the clearing, the cross had been raised high into the air. It was stuck up among the pine boughs now, partially out of sight. Henry Holborn had his eyes closed and his head thrown back.
“Lord God Almighty, Lord Jesus Christ, hear our prayer,” Henry Holborn cried.
The rest of the crowd who had come with Henry Holborn, and some of the people who had not, said something fuzzy that Gregor took to be “Amen.”
“Lord God Almighty, evil has been done in this place,” Henry Holborn said. “Satan has been worshipped in this place. The powers of Hell have been called into being in this place.”
Where were the police? Gregor wondered. Where was Clayton Hall? If Henry Holborn and his people were doing nothing else, they were destroying a vital evidence scene. At least the state police ought to be doing something, even if Clayton didn’t have the resources.
“Lord Jesus Christ,” Henry Holborn said. “Cleanse this place. Take the evil out of it.”
“Amen,” the crowd said.
“Soften the hearts of these evildoers and bring them to Your righteousne
ss.”
“Amen.”
“Cast the Devil and all his minions into the outer darkness.”
“Amen.”
“Cleanse this place.”
“Henry Holborn ought to be locked up,” Maggie Kelleher said furiously. “I can’t believe Clayton is letting him get away with this.”
“I can’t even see Clayton,” Gregor said. “Are there people here who belong to Holborn’s church but aren’t in the core group?”
“Half the town belongs to Holborn’s church. Excuse me, Mr. Demarkian. I’ve got to get out of here before I commit a murder of my own.”
Gregor had no idea how Maggie was going to get out of this crowd. He could barely move himself. Henry Holborn and his entire congregation seemed to be swaying, like tall grass in a high wind. The young man who was holding the big cross on the stick had put the stick down in the middle of the circle of stones, as if he were claiming the circle and all it influenced for his sovereign Lord.
“Lord God Almighty, in the name of Christ Jesus, cast the Devil out and preserve Your good and faithful servants from the evil and destruction he brings whenever he is called.”
“That’s enough,” Clayton Hall said, appearing suddenly out of nowhere. It took Gregor a full second to realize who he was. Standing in the middle of Henry Holborn and his followers, Clayton looked a little ridiculous—and smaller than Gregor had remembered him.
“That’s enough,” Clayton said again, louder this time, so that everybody heard him and the noise in the clearing began to ebb. “When I say it’s enough, I mean it’s enough.”
Then Clayton took his gun out of the holster, aimed it into the air, and fired.
Two
1
THE REPORTERS WERE ALL up at the camp, milling around the edges of the clearing, trying to get one of Henry Holborn’s people to talk to them. Naomi knew, because she had just come down from the camp herself. Gregor Demarkian had been there, and Clayton Hall, and all the police and state police from this part of the state. Naomi had watched them work with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, a kind of heat that made her think of what a hot flash might be like. She still didn’t know what it was she had gone up there for. It had seemed natural at the time. When she left the library and started to walk toward Zhondra Meyer’s place, she found herself in a whole drift of people headed the same way. Maggie Kelleher had been there, and Rose MacNeill, and even Charlie Hare. Later, she had seen people up there she never would have expected, like David Sandler, and Stephen Harrow from the Methodist Church. They couldn’t all have been listening to the police band. Naomi had a CB radio in her office at the library, and a few other pieces of equipment, too, computers and fax machines. She kept ordering equipment and the Town Council kept giving it to her, reflexively, as if they didn’t even bother to read the requisition forms she filled out. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe, like her, they were all much too busy chasing ambulances in their heads and wondering what kind of trouble it was their friends and neighbors had gotten into this time. Naomi had seen more than one member of the Town Council up at the camp this morning. They had eager looks on their faces and hair slicked back with the sweat of excitement, just like everybody else.
Coming back down into town again, Naomi began to wish that she had never gone up. She was wearing very high heels with open toes and skinny straps. It hurt to walk in them, and one of the straps had torn away and fallen off in her travels, she didn’t know when. Besides, she was feeling more than a little ashamed of herself. What was it she had expected to see? What was it any of them had expected to see? Naomi seemed to remember thinking that there would be a corpse up there, out in the open—but she was smart enough and old enough to know that was impossible. She remembered Carol Littleton, vaguely: a stout, stolid, plain woman who did nothing at all to take care of herself. Sometimes Naomi wanted to take the women from the camp and shake them by the shoulders. It wasn’t necessary to cut your own hair with kitchen scissors or let your body run to fat or dress in thick denim sacks with no shape to them. Even if you didn’t want to wear makeup—Naomi couldn’t imagine a woman not wanting to wear makeup—there were things you could do to your face to make it look more alive, more human, more important. Carol Littleton had been one of those women who look perpetually on the verge of tears. When those women were from the South they drank, secretly, and sat on the broad platforms of their columned front porches, looking dazed. Carol Littleton had always looked dazed. Who on earth would want to cut her throat? There was no reason to murder a woman like that. It was so much more effective just to ignore her.
Main Street was deserted, although Naomi could tell she wasn’t the first one back. She could see Charlie Hare through the plate glass window of the feed store. The OPEN sign was hanging on Maggie Kelleher’s bookshop door, in spite of the fact that this was the one day a week she didn’t have any help. Naomi looked at the library and bit her lip. She didn’t really want to go back there just yet. She really could be fairly sure that it would be deserted. It was the reporters she had to deal with most these days. They all wanted to use the microfilm machine and read old copies of the Bellerton Times. They filed stories about racial incidents that took place in 1899 and religious revivals that went bad in 1902 as if it had all happened the day before yesterday. Naomi wanted to plant something for them to find: stories of space aliens; stories of pastors talking to little green men from Mars right in the middle of the Hartford Road. These people from New York were so stupid, and so prejudiced, they would probably believe them.
Naomi stopped on the sidewalk and saw she was standing next to Rose MacNeill’s big Victorian house. In the window of the curving tower that faced the street was a stained glass sun-catcher, spelling out the message JESUS IS LORD. Naomi saw Rose MacNeill, too, through a window closer to the front door. She was fussing with a display of something, talking to someone who was out of sight.
I don’t have to stand here in the middle of Main Street, Naomi thought. I can go into Rose’s shop just like anybody else. Then she looked guiltily down the street, at the library again. They paid her to work, for God’s sake, not to visit at Rose’s, not to run all over town trying to get a look at a body. She had been away from her desk for hours.
Naomi turned off the sidewalk onto Rose MacNeill’s brick front walk, went up the steps to the front porch, and started to knock on the door. Then she remembered that this was not a house any longer, but a store, and went right in. The big front hall inside was very cool, almost frigid. It was funny, Naomi thought, the things you didn’t think to notice about your neighbor’s business. You wanted to know who was sleeping with whose husband and which wife had a fit about the drinking and threw which husband out—but a simple thing like this, that Rose must have had this big old house retrofitted for central air, didn’t catch your attention at all.
“Naomi?” Rose stepped out from behind a pile of books. The books were all paperbacks by Hal Lindsey—The Late Great Planet Earth; The Liberation of Planet Earth; Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth—and Naomi felt a rush of contemptuous impatience. It wasn’t that Hal Lindsey was more than a little bit harebrained in his theories of life, death, and resurrection. A lot of people were a little harebrained. The problem with Hal Lindsey was that he wrote badly, and for that Naomi could never forgive him.
Rose was brushing dust off her hands onto her apron. “I saw you up at the camp,” she said. “I think I came down before you did. Can you believe it? It’s turning into a charnel house up there. Bodies with their throats cut. At least this time it wasn’t a baby.”
“She used to come into the library sometimes,” Naomi said. “She seemed harmless enough. There was nothing unusual about her.”
“She came in here once, too.” Rose was nodding. “It was the day of the hurricane, the day little Tiffany was killed. I was just telling that man Gregor Demarkian about it. I got sort of stuffed into a corner with him while they were clearing out Henry Holborn and his people. M
y, my. Can you imagine Henry acting like that? I still think of him as being back in high school, raising hell and being good-for-nothing.”
“I think he’s still good-for-nothing,” Naomi said. “What did Carol Littleton want in the store on the day of the hurricane?”
Rose had started fussing with another display. This one was of angels: angel dolls in robes and chiffon net gowns; angels on pins and angels on desk calendars. There were even angel bookmarks printed with the words The Angel of the Lord Declared unto Mary. Underneath the display there was another pile of books. These were a single title in hardcover, called Angels: How to Tell the Good Ones from the Bad Ones and Bring the Power of God into Your Life. Rose straightened a couple of these, although they didn’t look like they needed it.
“She was looking for a christening gift,” Rose said, “for her granddaughter, I think it was, but really, it was pitiful. She didn’t even know the right word for it.”
“For what?”
“For a christening,” Rose said. “Can you imagine someone being brought up so ignorant of religion that she doesn’t even know what to call a christening? In the United States, for Heaven’s sake. In this day and age.”
“Some people belong to churches that don’t have infant baptism,” Naomi said. “When they baptize adults, they don’t call it a christening. And Jews don’t have christenings at all.”
“I didn’t say everybody had christenings. I said most people knew what they were. Knew the word for them, at any rate. She bought a present for her granddaughter anyway.”
“She did? What was it?”
“One of those Madonna pictures you hang on the wall. One of the midsize ones, in a frame. She didn’t know what to call that, either. She kept asking for a picture of a mother and a baby. I felt sorry for her after a while, and it was funny, because when I first knew she was in the store, I was scared stiff.”
