Baptism in Blood

by Jane Haddam

  “Yes, I have.”

  “Somebody will search this place even if we don’t. The Staties will search it.”

  “I’m looking for something in particular.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You can’t just go on saying you don’t know like that, Gregor. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I know,” Gregor said. “Let’s go look in the dresser.”

  “For you don’t know what.”

  “Right.”

  It was, Gregor thought then, very good for him that he was now a famous man. This was the kind of behavior the police did not put up with from people who were nobody in particular. Gregor went over to the dresser and opened the top drawer. It felt clumsy in his hands. His fingers didn’t seem to work right in the cotton gloves. He pulled the drawer out as far as it would go without falling on his feet and then felt along the bottom of it, but there was nothing. Then he drew the drawer all the way out and put it on the floor. It was filled with good silk underwear, trimmed in lace, in five muted but distinctive colors. Gregor knew nothing at all about women’s underwear, but he knew expensive when he saw it, and this stuff was definitely expen­sive. It was outrageously expensive. It was so expensive, even Bennis didn’t own anything like it, and Bennis truly loved to spend money.

  ”Underwear,” Clayton Hall said. “Really great underwear. But that’s all there is.”

  Gregor ignored him and slid out the second drawer. He checked its underside, as he had with the first, and then he pulled it all the way out, too. This one was filled with sweaters, all cashmere, all impossibly thick. Gregor checked each and every one of them, carefully running his hands up the sleeves and down under the necks. There was nothing.

  “I wonder what something like this costs.” Clayton Hall picked up a long black turtleneck tunic.

  Gregor might know nothing about women’s under­wear, but he knew a great deal about women’s sweaters. Bennis practically lived for sweaters. “About six or seven hundred dollars,” he told Clayton Hall as he went back to the dresser for the third drawer.

  Clayton let the sweater fall back onto the pile from which it had come. “Six or seven hundred dollars? For one sweater?”

  Gregor checked under the third drawer and then pulled it out. This one had more sweaters, but cotton ones, and what seemed like hundreds of silk scarves. Gregor stepped back and looked around the room. This was ridiculous. He was going about it entirely the wrong way. If he was Zhondra Meyer, where would he have hidden it? He had no doubt that she would have hidden it. She wouldn’t have kept it in her desk. It would have been too easily found there. She wouldn’t have put it in her safe. She wouldn’t have had easy access to it there and besides, someone might suspect. Where would she have put it? Or, Gregor amended in his head, more likely, them.

  Zhondra Meyer’s bedroom had enough furniture in it to stock a warehouse. Besides the dresser and the wardrobe and the bed, and the chair that had been used to make it look like Zhondra had killed herself, there were two more dressers and another wardrobe. In front of the fireplace there were two green velvet-covered wing chairs and a long oval coffee table. The coffee table was covered with photographs in silver frames. Both the photographs and the frames were old. Gregor saw a picture of a man and woman in twenties hairstyles and full riding habits, leaning against each other and laughing.

  “That’s it,” he said.

  “What’s it?” Clayton asked.

  Gregor picked up one of the frames. “That’s where she hid them,” he said. “Or some of them. There could be dozens and dozens around this house. But maybe not. Maybe they’re all here.”

  “What are here?”

  “Zhondra Meyer’s personal insurance policy against untoward publicity.” Gregor opened the back of the frame and peeled away the stiff cardboard backing. He took out the three small snapshots that had been stuffed back there and looked at them. They were not photographs of anyone he knew, just pictures of women, naked, making love to other women.

  “Jesus,” Clayton Hall said. “What was she doing? Peddling pornography on the side?”

  “Zhondra Meyer didn’t have to peddle pornography,” Gregor told him. “She just wanted to keep her name out of the papers. I should have realized there would be something like these around. She’s been remarkably lucky about her publicity for this place. Not a single disgruntled recanter. Not a single confused, lonely, psychologically disturbed woman going to the press with—well, God knows what.”

  “Goddess worship,” Clayton Hall said.

  Gregor was opening photograph frame after photo­graph frame, but coming up with nothing but more women and more women. He came upon a picture of Alice in a very embarrassing position and passed it by immediately. He had no wish to shame or embarrass anyone. Maybe there were other places in the house where pictures were hidden. Maybe he would look and look, and never find what he was looking for.

  “You got something in particular you’re trying to go after?” Clayton Hall asked him.

  Gregor picked up a long frame with a photograph of dozens of people gathered together for a formal dinner and opened the back of it. There were at least eight snapshots nestled behind the photograph. He took them out and started to go through them. Women and more women. Women looking happy. Women looking sad. Women look­ing like they didn’t know what was happening to them and never would.

  The picture he was looking for was second from the last. He came upon it so unexpectedly, he almost missed it. Then the shape of the body alerted him and he stopped: a man this time, instead of a woman. He held the picture closer to his face.

  “Now what?” Clayton demanded, when Gregor handed it over. Then he looked down at the picture and blanched. “Holy Christ. It’s Stephen Harrow. From the Methodist Church.”

  “It had to be him,” Gregor explained, “because he was the only one who wasn’t here. On the night of the storm. I’d ask people who had been in the study on the night of the storm who they had seen there, and he was never one of the ones. But he was here afterward. Plenty of people saw him then.”

  “He could have been in another room.”

  “He could have been, but it won’t work out that way, Clayton, trust me. There’s only one way all of this makes sense, and it starts with Stephen Harrow. But I don’t think it’s going to end with him.”

  Clayton studied the photograph. “I wish I knew who that woman was,” he said. “She looks vaguely familiar, but I can’t even guess. But I damn well know who she isn’t. She isn’t Stephen Harrow’s world-class bitch of a southern wife.”

  Two

  1

  THE NEWS ABOUT WHAT had happened to Zhondra Meyer, or what Zhondra Meyer had done to herself, was on all the news shows at six o’clock, and around town long before that, for anybody who happened to be listening. Henry Holborn should have heard about it long before he walked into Betsey’s House of Hominy to get something to eat at six; Henry was the most well-connected man in town. More of the people in Bellerton went to his church than went to any other. Then, too, there was Janet, who had her hooks into half a dozen networks in half a dozen places. Janet always knew who had just had a miscarriage or who was getting a divorce or who was picked up for drinking in Raleigh or Chapel Hill. The problem was that Henry Hol­born was not at home listening to Janet, or to anyone else. He had not been home all day. He had kissed Janet good­bye that morning, and come into town, and had his little daily talk with Clayton Hall—and then he had just stayed in town, walking around, doing nothing, until the bells in the Methodist Church told him that it was six. He knew some­thing had happened up at the camp. The reporters had gone racing up there at one point, and come racing back later, to make phone calls in their cars and write things on note­pads. An ambulance had gone up there, too, with siren blasting. Henry had been way on the other side of town when that had happened, near the sea and up past Dennisson’s Point, and he had thought that there was something silly about the fuss the a
mbulance was making. People al­ways made so much noise about life and death, emergen­cies and calamities. Turn on the television these days and you were as likely to get a doctor running up the hospital stairs to respond to a Code Blue as you were to get sex and violence. It was as if everybody on earth had decided that there was no reason anymore to hide their need to celebrate disasters. They even made them just to watch them, as far as Henry could tell. Was there any other reason for what was happening in Rwanda and Bosnia? In the end, of course, there was only one reason. There was God in His Heaven and His plan for the people of this world. Even the Devil was part of God’s plan. Henry very firmly believed this. No matter how bad things were beginning to look, it was all a sham and a delusion. These were the last days. Any minute now, the Antichrist would rise up and ask all the people of the earth to wear the mark of the Beast. Any minute now, Christ would come in glory on His throne, surrounded by an army of angels, singing hosannah in the highest. All day today, Henry had been able to hear the angels singing, as if they were just out of sight behind a curtain of clouds. The earth was full of dark things, now, with tentacles that lashed like whips and tongues that stuck like needles. Henry saw it in the way the dark waves of the ocean rolled against the white sand of the shore. He saw it in the faces of the men who sat in wooden chairs outside Charlie Hare’s store. He even saw it in the display cases that lined Rose MacNeill’s front windows. Bright perky little girl angels with off-kilter halos and desperate smiles, meant to be pinned onto the collars of women’s everyday blouses. Pictures of Christ with His eyes rolling back in His head and His arms stretched out, as if He were about to be tortured, as if He were about to faint. There was a sign on the board in front of the Methodist Church announcing a christening for this coming Sunday. When Sunday came, they would baptize an infant who didn’t know what they were doing and think they had done something holy in the sight of God. Henry’s heart ached so badly that he thought, on and off, that he was having an ordinary heart attack. Maybe this was what the Rapture would be for him: dead on Main Street in an instant, with God before Clayton Hall got to ask another bothersome question.

  When the bells of the Methodist Church rang, Henry Holborn was on Main Street, not half a block from Maggie Kelleher’s shop. The bells rang and he stopped in the mid­dle of the street, looking up. He had been this way before in this long day of walking. He knew that Maggie Kelleher had a copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species in her front win­dow and a sign that said: SEE WHAT ALL THE TROUBLE IS ABOUT. He knew that Rose MacNeill had come home not half an hour ago, upset and looking disheveled. He knew that Stephen Harrow was working in his study, poring over books and listening to the small television he kept on a bookshelf between his books on theology and his books on the history of science. Henry only wanted to walk and walk and walk, until his legs fell off or until something happened, which­ever came first.

  Instead, when the bells rang, Henry Holborn decided he was hungry. As he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, this was not surprising, but it surprised him. It surprised him, too, that Main Street was so deserted. He didn’t know when Charlie Hare had closed up shop and disappeared, along with all the old men he’d been sitting with, but Charlie was gone and the sidewalk in front of his store was empty. He didn’t know when Maggie Kelleher had hung the Closed sign in her window in front of all those copies of Darwin’s book, but the Closed sign was there and the bookstore was dark. Town itself was getting dark. It was that odd time of year, when night came neither early nor late. The sun was setting behind the spires of Zhondra Meyer’s lesbian camp, making the old house look like Dracula’s castle, covered in blood.

  Henry found himself just outside Betsey’s House of Hominy and stopped. The place was packed, mostly with reporters. There wasn’t much of anywhere else to eat in the town of Bellerton, unless you counted the sandwich place attached to the health food store, which most people didn’t. The reporters didn’t want to drive out to the mall to have dinner at McDonald’s or farther out still, where there were good restaurants that served steak and lobster and French food, all at exorbitant prices. It struck Henry Holborn sud­denly that he had been fourteen years old before he had ever eaten in a restaurant of any kind. Before that, he hadn’t even stayed to have his lunches in the cafeteria at school. That first restaurant had been very much like this one, not much more than a diner. Henry had thought it was magic anyway.

  He went up to the door and opened it to look inside. Betsey had her air-conditioning turned up high, in spite of the fact that it was a cool night. The television was on behind the counter. Everybody seemed to be watching it.

  Henry came all the way inside, letting the door close behind him. There was only one stool left at the counter, with Naomi Brent on one side of it and a stranger on the other. The stranger was probably a reporter, but there was no help for it. Henry sat down on the stool and looked up at Betsey’s enormous wide-screen TV. A perky blonde with a ribbon in her hair was sitting behind a curved desk, trying to look solemn. For Henry, this was exactly what was wrong with the entire concept of feminism. If you put red and orange together, the colors clashed. If you put a woman in a suit and tried to make her look solemn, she looked hopeful instead, spoiling the effect.

  “Police at this time are not revealing just what was in the note Zhondra Meyer left when she took her own life,” the anchorwoman said, “but speculation has been rife that it was a confession to the two murders that have taken place in Bellerton over the last month. Sources close to Bellerton Police Chief Clayton Hall say that enough evidence was found in Zhondra Meyer’s bedroom to answer most of the questions that have become important in these cases. If a Satanic cult really has been operating out of Bonaventura House, state officials now say they have enough to go on to get it closed down.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” somebody in the back of the room said. “They can’t close down a Satanic cult. It’s a religion.”

  “Shhh,” somebody else said.

  The television went to a commercial. Millions of chil­dren seemed to have descended on a McDonald’s restau­rant at once. Henry Holborn turned to Naomi Brent.

  “Naomi? Did I hear that right? Zhondra Meyer com­mitted suicide?”

  “That’s what everybody’s been saying,” Naomi said. “Weren’t you around this afternoon? They had the ambu­lance up there and everything.”

  Betsey came down from the other end of the counter, her apron out of true, her expression harried. “Good eve­ning, Henry. Can I get you something?”

  “You could get me a cup of coffee and a tuna fish sandwich,” Henry told her. “Betsey, am I hearing this right? Zhondra Meyer committed suicide? And confessed to what? Killing Ginny Marsh’s baby?”

  Betsey brushed hair out of her face with the flat of her hand. “That’s what everybody’s saying, and that’s the offi­cial word, too, but I’ve heard other things. You just sit here for a while and you’ll hear other things, too.”

  “One of them says that Zhondra Meyer was mur­dered,” Naomi Brent said, tossing her head backward, meaning to take in all the reporters in the room. “But no­body’s buying it. It’s just what they want to think. They don’t want to imagine for a minute that one of their pre­cious New Yorkers could come down here and cause a lot of mayhem and blame it on us.”

  Betsey had gone away to get some coffee. Now she came back again, cup in hand. “It’s true, what Naomi says. They want to make us look like a bunch of murdering cre­tins. They think we go to church on Wednesday nights and have fits.”

  “I, for one, think it makes perfect sense that Zhondra Meyer killed them,” Naomi Brent said. “Not that I think that she was worshipping the Devil or anything like that. I don’t believe that people really worship the Devil. No of­fense meant, Reverend.”

  “No offense taken,” Henry Holborn said automati­cally.

  “They think we’re all violent and dangerous down here,” Betsey said, “and ignorant, too. You should hear the way they talk to me sometimes. It mak
es me sick.”

  “And they lie, too,” Naomi said. “They lie to make their stories come out better. They only interview people the rest of us would consider a little odd. They only listen to what they want to hear. But it’s true, you know. It makes much more sense that Zhondra Meyer killed them.”

  The man on the stool on Henry’s other side stirred. He was a young man, with hair that hung a little too far over his ears, and eyes that looked ready to fall out of his head. He had a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich in front of him and a big plate of fries, but he didn’t seem to have touched either.

  “Wait a minute now,” he said. “What about Susan Smith? She was a southerner from a small town. She was religious. She killed her children.”

  “Susan Smith was a mentally disturbed girl with a history of depression,” Naomi Brent said, “and she wasn’t religious. She didn’t belong to any church that I ever heard of.”

  “She talked about God all the time,” the reporter said. “She talked about her faith. What do you call reli­gious?”

  Betsey had disappeared again. Now she was back, with Henry’s tuna fish sandwich on a plate.

  “I call religious giving your life to Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior,” she said. “I call it making a com­mitment to the Lord, not just mouthing off about how God is up there somewhere and you’re sure He loves you be­cause you can just feel it.”

  “Oh, Lord,” Naomi Brent groaned.

  “It wasn’t Zhondra Meyer who started all that talk about worshipping the devil,” the reporter said. “It was some preacher. And you’ve got to admit. Religious people aren’t very tolerant.”

  “Oh, tolerant,” Naomi said. “We’re tolerant enough if people just behave themselves.”

  “But that’s the point,” somebody else said now, an­other reporter from another part of the room, a woman. “People have a right to live their lives as they see fit. They shouldn’t have to deal with people who are trying to im­pose their religion on everybody else.”