Baptism in Blood(104)

“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 ambulance 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.