Baptism in Blood(101)

“Well?” Clayton Hall demanded. “What do you think?”

“I think it’s a very interesting letter,” Gregor said carefully. “I think it’s one of the few sincerely genuine confessions I’ve ever read. Don’t you?”

“You think it’s genuine?” Clayton Hall said.

Alice exploded. “I knew it was going to be like this! I knew it. Zhondra never killed anyone in her life. And she didn’t kill herself. It’s just what you want to think. It gets you off the hook. It makes it so that you don’t have to go after some man.”

“I can’t believe you think it’s genuine,” Clayton Hall insisted. “It’s typed, for God’s sake. Whoever heard of a suicide who typed her farewell note?”

“I’m sure there are some who have,” Gregor replied, “but it doesn’t matter in this case, because a suicide didn’t write it. Can we look at the body now?”

The small woman with the black braid scurried for­ward. “I’ll take you up there,” she said. “You ought to get a look at it. She shouldn’t just be left there, as if she weren’t anybody, and nobody cared for her.”

“What’s your name?” Gregor asked her.

“Grace,” she said.

“Well, Grace,” Gregor said, “maybe you ought to lead the way up, and Clayton and I will follow.”





2


ZHONDRA MEYER’S BEDROOM WAS like Zhondra Meyer’s study. There were other bedrooms in the house, and other studies, but Zhondra had chosen the best and most impor­tant ones. It was an instinct Gregor had noticed in her from the first. Magnificence was Zhondra Meyer’s birthright. She had been born into a world where the van Goghs on the dining room walls were real.

She was, as Grace had said downstairs, hanging from a rope that had been swung over the chandelier hook in the middle of the fifteen-foot ceiling. Gregor looked around and saw that the other end of it had been weighted to the sash of the window that overlooked the front drive. That had been very smart. Furniture, no matter how heavy, could move. If you weighted a suicide rope to a piece of furni­ture, you might jump off your chair and find that you dragged it all with you, so that you landed on the ground with nothing awful happening to you at all. There was a chair, too, a high-backed, heavily carved wooden thing with a thick green seat cushion made of velvet. It looked a lot like the ones Gregor had seen downstairs. Maybe one of the matriarchs who had come to Bonaventura before Zhondra had been the kind of women who liked “sets.” Maybe, if Gregor went carefully through the house, he would find the infamous “twelve of monogrammed everything” it had once been thought necessary for every bride to bring to her first marriage house.

Gregor looked up at the body. Zhondra Meyer was hanging fairly high in the air, making it difficult to get a good look at her face. Everything in the room conspired to make it difficult to get a good look at anything. What was it the Victorians had loved so much about the dark? The big white marble fireplace surround was the only touch of lightness in this sea of dark. The bedspread and the bed curtains were both made of heavily embroidered, wine-dark damask. The bed itself was made of thick dark wood, or­nately carved. The curtains were deep green damask. The carpet was a muddy, jumbled mess of dark red and dark green, in a paisley. Even the painting over the fireplace was dark. It was, Gregor saw, an authentic Caravaggio, and Caravaggio in one of his least optimistic moods.

The ambulance was now at the front of the house, right under the windows of the room. Gregor went to the center window and looked out. The reporters were here, too, but not as many townspeople as he had expected. Maybe they had begun to get tired of it all, it was happen­ing so frequently.

“Gregor?” Clayton Hall said.

“The ambulance just arrived,” Gregor said.

“That’s good. I’ll be happier still when the state police get here.”

“So will I. What do you think of all this?” Clayton gestured to take in the whole room, almost making the corpse seem a matter of decoration. “Does it make sense to you?”

“Some things make sense to me,” Gregor said. “Have you seen her face?”

“I’ve been trying to.”

“It’s hard, I know, but if you tilt back you can just make it. Get a good look. Get a good look at her tongue.”

“I can’t see her tongue.”

“Exactly. Neither can I. You ever see a hanging victim before?”

Clayton Hall stroked the side of his face thoughtfully. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “I have. A couple of times.”