Baptism in Blood

by Jane Haddam

  “It was a middle-aged woman with a grown daughter and a new grandchild. She lived up at this camp that Zhondra Meyer runs, the one for lesbians. Did I ever ask you if you knew Zhondra Meyer?”

  “Yes, you did, Gregor. I don’t know Zhondra Meyer. I know of her. Even I couldn’t have met every debutante in the industrial northeast. Not that Zhondra and I would have run into each other on the deb circuit in our day, anyway.”

  “Why not? Because you came out in Philadelphia and she came out in New York?”

  “No, idiot. Because she’s Jewish and I’m not.” Ben­nis laughed. “I mean, for God’s sake, Gregor, what do you think debutante parties are for?”

  “I’ve never had the faintest idea.”

  “Well, I don’t have the faintest idea what they’re for now, but in my day the idea was to get the girl married before she had to graduate from college. All the girls I knew had dropped out of Smith by their senior year and had big weddings.”

  “You didn’t drop out to get married.”

  “No, I didn’t, and from what I remember Zhondra Meyer didn’t, either. I don’t think she’s ever been married. Which makes two of us. Nobody gets married anymore, Gregor.”

  “Of course they do. Donna Moradanyan got mar­ried.”

  “That’s not what I meant. So what about this middle-aged woman who died? Was her death connected to the death of the baby?”

  “I think so.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the methods appear to be similar. Because some effort was made in each case to make it appear that the murders had taken place in a stand of trees behind Zhondra Meyer’s house. Listen to me call it a house. Do you know what that place is like? Bonaventura?”

  “I’ve seen pictures of it. It’s infamous in a way, Gregor. The old man went down there and built this enor­mous thing, and in those days nobody he’d ever heard of lived anywhere around. People couldn’t figure out what he was doing.”

  “I’ll bet they still don’t know. Do you know anything about Zhondra Meyer? Does she have a reputation?”

  “What kind of reputation?” Bennis asked. “I mean, for God’s sake, Gregor, the woman’s sex life has been in every tabloid and magazine for decades. It’s not as if she were making herself out to be a virgin.”

  “That wasn’t the kind of reputation I mean. I don’t know if I can explain it. She seems very imperious. In spite of all the rhetoric about patriarchy and revolution, if I had to describe her to somebody, I’d say she was very much like one of those robber baron matriarchs. A will of iron. The unshakeable conviction that any way she does anything is the right way to do it.”

  “I don’t think the robber baron matriarchs had that much self-confidence,” Bennis said. “I seem to remember they were always social climbing, until it finally occurred to them that they had more money than anybody else and they could do what they wanted to do. But I know what you mean. I’ve met women like that.”

  “But not Zhondra Meyer. You haven’t heard anything like that about her on the grapevine?”

  “Gregor, for God’s sake. I’ve been off that particular grapevine for years. I don’t hang around with debutantes anymore. I live on Cavanaugh Street and write fantasy novels.”

  “I wish I had someone on some grapevine some­where,” Gregor said. “I hate these things where I’m trying to figure out people I don’t know and can’t get a handle on. It’s like bouncing around in the dark, playing ghost.”

  There was a pause on the line while Bennis lit another cigarette. Gregor heard the flare of the match.

  “I thought you had this all sewn up before you left,” she said. “I thought you said the mother had killed the baby, or her husband or her boyfriend had, and it was just a matter of waiting until somebody confessed to it.”

  “I still think that sometimes.”

  “So what’s the matter? Did you meet her and decide that she was just too wonderful to be guilty?”

  “I haven’t met her.”

  “What?” Bennis was astonished. “How can you not have met her? Won’t her lawyer let you talk to her?”

  “I haven’t asked to talk to her.”

  “But why not? For God’s sake, Gregor, under the cir­cumstances, I’d think that was the first thing you would do. I mean, she’s the one they’ve arrested.”

  “Actually,” Gregor said, “they haven’t arrested her. They have her in protective custody. It’s a little fuzzy, just what’s going on around here with that. And it isn’t as if I’ve never seen her. She was on that talk show. You taped it for me.”

  “She was on that talk show by satellite hookup from jail.” Bennis sounded something worse than exasperated. “Gregor, are you all right? What are you doing down there?”

  Gregor Demarkian sighed. “At the moment, I’m sit­ting in the middle of David Sandler’s living room, running up my AT&T calling-card bill. How’s everything up there? Is Tibor coming out of his slump?”

  “Tibor’s fine. Tibor’s always been fine. It’s you I’m worried about. You haven’t been yourself lately, to be origi­nal about it.”

  “I’ve never been anybody but myself,” Gregor said. “Really. I’ve been fine. I am fine. I’m just a little tired. I miss Cavanaugh Street.”

  “Well, that’s healthy enough.”

  “Maybe I’m past this sort of thing, Bennis. Maybe I ought to give up murders and write my memoirs.”

  “Maybe you ought to see a doctor as soon as you get home. Gregor, what’s going on with you these days?”

  “I’ve got to go now,” Gregor said. “That’s David’s car pulling into the garage. I’ve been a terrible guest ever since I got here. I’d better make some time to talk to him.”

  “You’re trying to get out of having to talk to me,” Bennis said.

  “I’ve got to go now,” Gregor insisted. “Right away. Really. I’ll call you in a couple of days.”

  “I’ll make that appointment with the doctor for you myself.”

  “I’ll talk to you in a couple of days,” Gregor said again. “Say hello to Tibor for me. And Donna. And Lida, too, if she’s gotten home by now. Say hello to everybody.”

  “Gregor—”

  Gregor put the receiver back into the cradle. It wasn’t true that David’s car had just pulled into the garage—and even if it had, Gregor couldn’t have heard it from the living room. David Sandler’s garage wasn’t attached to the house, because state environmental regulations said that you couldn’t park a car directly on the beach. David kept his car in the lot near the boardwalk. Gregor put the phone back on the end table. His head hurt.

  No matter what Bennis thought, it wasn’t true that there was something wrong with him. He was a little tired, but that was perfectly natural. Then again, he had been thinking about Elizabeth a lot, too much maybe, more than he had for years. If that was a symptom of something, Gregor didn’t know of what. He got up and poured himself another glass of wine from the bottle he had left on the coffee table. It was some sort of red something that David had told him was supposed to be served at room tempera­ture. After the glass was full, Gregor took a sip off the top of it—necessary, to keep it from spilling; why had he poured it so high?—and then went back out on the deck to look at the moon again.

  When he and Elizabeth had first been married, when they had both been very young, they had talked often about owning a house near the sea, a place where they could go and simply be together. That was before they had realized that Elizabeth would never be able to have children. They had imagined themselves with a family, toddlers filling buckets with thick wet sand, ten-year-olds running through the kitchen to pick up a glass of milk on their way to do important goofing off in the upstairs bedrooms. Gregor sometimes wondered how different he would have been, how different Elizabeth would have been, if there had been children in their lives. He tried not to think about the possi­bility that she might not have died when she did if she had given birth at least once. The kind of cancer Elizabeth died of was far m
ore prevalent in women who had never had children.

  The moon kept drifting behind clouds that made it look as if it were twisting and writhing. In the first year after Elizabeth died, there had been times when Gregor had thought that he could hear Elizabeth’s voice, calling to him from other rooms. Now her voice sang to him from out across the water. He could see her as clearly as if she were standing beside him. “Elizabeth,” he said to her, out loud, and she answered him with music. Then the breeze got chilly and his body went all over cold, and he knew that he was alone.

  After a few more minutes, he went back into the house and then into the guest room where he was supposed to sleep. He closed the door without turning on the light.

  Since there was nothing he wanted to see, he didn’t need the light to see it by.

  2

  NOW IT WAS MORNING, and Gregor was standing in the kitchen, turning David Sandler’s refrigerator note over and over in his hands. David was home, and asleep. Gregor knew that because David slept in an open loft on the house’s minimal second floor, and he snored. Gregor got orange juice out of the refrigerator and poured himself a glass. In the bright sunshine of this morning, it didn’t seem possible to Gregor that he had been hearing Elizabeth’s voice on the water in the dark. He never heard Elizabeth’s voice anymore. It had left him when he moved back to Cavanaugh Street and started to live his life again. Gregor put his glass of juice down on the counter and fumbled around among the equipment there, looking for the means to make coffee. David had a formidable aluminum coffee machine, but as far as Gregor could tell, he had never used it. It was as shiny and clean inside as the day it had been brought from the store. Gregor poked around in the cabi­nets and came up with a large jar of instant, fortunately not Taster’s Choice. If there was one thing Gregor truly couldn’t stand, it was those silly commercials with the Brit­ish woman and the American man. He put the kettle on to boil and dumped instant coffee into the bottom of a large white mug. When the water boiled, he poured it over the coffee and stirred more vigorously than he needed to. He had too much energy this morning. He was restless and jittery, eager for someplace to go. He thought about calling Clayton Hall, and decided against it. He wasn’t ready for Clayton Hall yet. He finished his orange juice, rinsed the glass out in the sink, and left the glass to dry in the white plastic drainer. David was still snoring away upstairs. Gregor thought it was a good thing that David had never married. With a snore like that, he would have been kicked out of the marriage bed and down the hall to the study in a week.

  Gregor got his coffee half finished, and made up his mind. The loft was reached by a spiral staircase. Gregor had never understood the attraction of spiral staircases. They showed up everywhere people had the money to pay for them, but they were damned hard to climb. Gregor climbed this one very carefully, holding on to the rail with one hand and his coffee with the other. When he got to the top, he made himself walk a full foot onto the platform before he looked back and down. Looking down didn’t make him feel as sick as he thought it would, which he found somehow reassuring. There was a big bookcase that served as the headboard of David’s bed on one side and as a shield from the living room on the other. Gregor went around it and found David sleeping in a T-shirt, wound into the sheets as if he had tried to braid himself into the bed. Gregor pulled up the small armchair that was resting against the bureau and sat down. Then he cleared his throat as loudly as he could. It didn’t make a dent in the noise. It would have taken a freight train to make a dent in the noise.

  So Gregor leaned forward and grabbed David by the shoulder. “David,” he said. “David, wake up.”

  David Sandler shuddered, and turned, and snored more loudly. Gregor pushed him again.

  “David, for heaven’s sake. I want to talk to you.”

  David opened his eyes and squinted, his eyelids full of early morning grit.

  “Gregor? What is it? Has something happened?”

  “I wanted to have a chance to talk to you before I went out.”

  “What… time is it?”

  Gregor looked down at his wrists and found them bare. He had been forgetting his watch more and more lately. “I don’t know,” he told David. “I think it’s about six-thirty or seven. I woke up at six.”

  “Six-thirty or seven… and you woke up at six. Do you do that all the time?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Right.” David Sandler sat up in bed. His T-shirt had UNC TARHEELS printed across the front, and what looked like a college seal. His hair was a mass of tangles. He settled the sheet down around his waist and yawned. “So what is it? Is there something going on? What’s your hurry this morning?”

  “I want to go into town and talk to Clayton Hall, but I don’t want to do it without asking you a few questions. I’ve got to have a long talk with Clayton Hall. And I suppose it’s time I faced the inevitable.”

  “What’s the inevitable?”

  “At least attempting to talk to Ginny Marsh. I’ve been avoiding it. I’ve been avoiding it very conscientiously. It wasn’t until I talked to Bennis last night that I realized it.”

  “You talked to Bennis last night? I hope she’s well. I hope you gave her my regards.”

  “I didn’t give her anybody’s regards. It wasn’t that kind of conversation. Don’t you want to get up and get dressed or something?”

  “I don’t want to get up at all,” David said. “If I get dressed, I’ll never get back to sleep. I was out until two this morning.”

  “All that time in Chapel Hill?”

  “Actually,” David said, “I stopped at Maggie Kelleher’s house on the way back and had a couple of glasses of wine.”

  “Ah.”

  “Don’t say ‘ah’ to me, Gregor. I’m a grown man and she’s a grown woman. It’s not like we were a couple of teenagers sneaking out when her parents weren’t looking.”

  “It’s just that I didn’t realize you were involved with somebody down here.”

  “I’m not,” David said. “Not yet. I’m just—working on it.”

  Gregor decided to let this part of the conversation go. He didn’t want David to ask if he was involved with anyone himself. It would be a question that would be impossible to answer. Yes—if it meant that there was somebody he cared about. No—if it meant that he was sleeping with her. He took a long sip of coffee and put all thoughts of sleeping with Bennis Hannaford out of his head. He didn’t even want to think about thinking about it. It disturbed him.

  “Go back to the first murder,” he said instead. “When you found the mother coming at you covered with blood, as you put it. She was alone?”

  “Absolutely alone,” David agreed.

  “Fine. Did she actually tell you that the baby was in that clearing at the back of the house? Did she say that specifically?”

  David thought about it. “No,” he said. “She just said the baby was dead and the body was behind the house. She didn’t say where behind the house.”

  “Did you follow her immediately and look?”

  “No, I didn’t. I went into the house itself, into the study, where all these people were sitting around. There were people in the living room, too, but the people I knew were mostly in the study.”

  “People like who?”

  David got into a cross-legged position and scratched his head. “Maggie,” he said finally, “and Zhondra Meyer herself, of course. And Rose MacNeill. I remember be­cause she kept praying all the time. And Naomi Brent. I think Stephen Harrow might have been in there, too.”

  “Might have been?”

  “It was dark, Gregor. The electricity was out. There was a fire going in that enormous fireplace—have you seen the fireplaces up there yet?—and there were some candles, but you know what it’s like trying to make anything out in light like that. Stephen was around later, I know, because I talked to him. After we’d all gone up the hill and found the baby.”

  “And the baby was there, in the clearing, already dead.”

  “Oh,
yes.”

  “What about Carol Littleton, the woman who died? Did you know who she was at the time?”

  “Oh, yes. I knew her, and I know Dinah and Stelle. At least I recognize them. They might have been in the living room. They weren’t in the study.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “But they also weren’t in the clearing when you got to it.”

  “Nobody was in the clearing. The place was a mess. I don’t know how I can explain it to you when you didn’t see it. This was a major hurricane we were dealing with here.”

  “I know that. But Stelle Cary told me yesterday that they were in the clearing for the whole of the storm. That they were trapped there by the storm.”

  “Well, they weren’t there when we got there, that’s all I know. But maybe it’s not as much of a contradiction as it seems.”

  “How not?”

  “Well, by the time we actually made our way up there, the storm had started to die down. Maybe Dinah and Stelle and Carol left just as we were making our way up.”

  “Wouldn’t they have had to come down by the same path?”

  “It would have been simpler,” David admitted, “but they might not have been able to find the path. It would have been hard to find anything in all that chaos.”

  “That still leaves the problem of the baby,” Gregor pointed out. “If Stelle and Carol and Dinah did what Ginny Marsh is accusing them of doing, then fine. They were there. They killed the baby. The body of the baby was there. But if they didn’t kill the baby, then you have to ask how and when the body was put in the clearing, and by whom.”

  “I thought you had already decided by whom. I thought you were one of the people who believed it was Ginny who did it.”

  “Ginny may have done it, but if the sequence of events is the way we’ve just worked it out, she didn’t put the baby’s body in the clearing. She didn’t have the baby with her when you found her.”

  “No,” David said. “No, she didn’t.”

  “Was she out of your sight for any significant period after that?”