Baptism in Blood(109)

“I didn’t make my fortune, David.”

“Most people don’t.”

“I felt more like a hick after I’d been there for five years than I had when I came. Maybe it was just that I knew so much more, it was so much easier to see my inade­quacies.”

“You don’t have any inadequacies.”

“Oh, yes, I do, David, yes, I do. I’m much too gullible, for one thing. I believe too much of what people want me to believe.”

“If you did, you would never have gotten to New York in the first place. From what I hear on Main Street, for most people in this town, New York is a cross between Sodom and Gomorrah and hell itself.”

“Maybe I was just interested in getting myself to Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“I think that’s usually a boy thing.”

“Have you ever really been fooled by somebody?” Maggie asked. “Have you ever really—believed in some­body—and had it not be true?”

“Of course,” David said. “It happens all the time. Did you have a bad experience with a boyfriend? Is that it?”

“What? Oh, no. No. It doesn’t have anything to do with boyfriends. It was just that—”

“What?”

Maggie got out of her chair and went to the deck rail­ing, to look out over the ocean.

“I wish I could find out things for real,” she said. “I wish I could know what was true about people and just know, the way you know that gravity is real, or that evolu­tion happened.”

“I don’t think life works that way, Maggie. There are people right here in this town who don’t even think evolu­tion happened.”

“I know. I was thinking about that, too.”

“I wish you would think about coming with me to New York.”

“Sometimes,” Maggie said, “I think the world is full of secrets, and none of them is mine to give away.”

There was a breeze coming in off the water now, warm and mild. David wished they had something else to talk about, that they were somewhere else, away from Ginny Marsh and Carol Littleton and Zhondra Meyer, in New York where if Maggie felt sad he could take her to the opera or out for Tibetan food. He had spent half his life telling himself that he would come down here one day to live permanently, and now he knew that it wasn’t true. He wouldn’t be able to stand it here on the water for months at a time, with no access to the lights and the noise and the music and the people. It made him feel claustrophobic just to think of staying here for the rest of the year.

“Come back and sit down again,” he said to Maggie. “I’m getting lonely without your company.”

“Is that what you would be like in New York?” she asked, laughing. “Demanding and possessive?”

“In New York,” David said solemnly, “I would be like myself.”





Three


1


GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD SPENT his life dealing with re­calcitrant bureaucracies. He had not expected to find one in Bellerton, which was a small town and which, by defini­tion, should have been easier to handle. Instead, in the crunch, he found that he was dealing not with a town, but with a county. It was the county prosecutor he would have to convince of his “brilliant theory,” the term “brilliant theory” having been coined by Clayton Hall when they were all still up at Bonaventura and then held on to the way a leech holds on to fresh skin. They had been in Zhondra Meyer’s room at the time, with the investigation swirling around them, and Gregor had sat down on the floor to show Clayton Hall how it would work. He had been aware at once that he had put himself in a very undignified position. His pants were being stretched in odd angles. His shirt was coming out from under his belt. Clayton’s big beer belly hung in the air above him like a hot air balloon. Gregor wondered if he had one himself and what it looked like to other people. Then he turned his attention back to the pages of the suicide note/confession, spread out across the Per­sian carpet. The picture was there, too, the one of Stephen tangled naked with a woman nobody could identify, except that everybody knew it could be neither Lisa, Stephen’s wife, nor Zhondra Meyer. The hair in the photograph was just too light.

Do it later, Gregor had thought at the time, pushing reflexively at the pages of the suicide note in order to make them straight.

“Look,” he’d said to Clayton Hall. “There are a cou­ple of things in this note that mitigate against the possibil­ity that it could have been written by Zhondra Meyer. Let’s start with that.”

“Because Zhondra Meyer was a Jew.”

“Because she was Jewish, yes, that’s one thing. Look, the writer refers at one point to giving the baby a ‘baptism in blood,’ and that—”