“I sometimes wonder about the justice of God on a day-to-day basis. Did people really do things like that? Good Christ.”
“The historical record is difficult to verify,” Gregor said. “Remember, the winners write history, and Christians wrote what we now know about the early Church and the way the Roman Empire responded to it. By the time we get around to the age of the Church fathers, however, it doesn’t matter, because everybody believed it had happened that way, and that left the theological problem to be solved. That’s how we got the baptism of blood. Dying in defense of the faith confers baptism on the martyr whether he thought he wanted baptism or not. It doesn’t matter if he’s a believer or an unbeliever. It doesn’t matter if—”
“—if she’s a child,” Clayton said.
“Actually,” Gregor sighed, “it does matter. In cases of children below the age of reason, it’s really very complicated. We’re getting past what little I know about the subject.”
“I’m amazed at how much you know about the subject.”
“Yes, well, I have a friend who’s a priest. An Armenian priest, not a Catholic priest, although I know a few Catholic priests, too. Anyway, my friend the Armenian priest—lectures me sometimes. On the things he’s working on. He writes theology quite often.”
“And he’s lectured you on the baptism in blood.”
“It was years ago,” Gregor said, “but it stuck in my mind. Anyway, we’re talking about a fairly sophisticated concept here, and it occurs to me, just in passing, that when you go by the board in front of the Methodist Church, under the hours for services there’s a line that reads ‘Stephen Harrow, A.B., A.M., Th.D.’”
“You’re right,” Clayton Hall said. “It does.”
“I think it’s fairly common these days in a number of the mainline denominations. Getting a doctorate in theology, I mean.”
“But you can’t say that it had to be Stephen Harrow who wrote this letter,” Clayton said, “not just because he’s had a lot of schooling in theology. Henry Holborn has had a lot of schooling in theology. I may not like him, but he did go off and go to Bible college.”
“It’s not the same thing. As far as I know, baptism in blood is not a concept accepted in fundamentalist Protestantism. From what I’ve been able to see, Bible colleges of the type you’re talking about mostly teach biblical interpretation.”
“Yes, yes, they do.”
“And from what I hear,” Gregor said, “listening to the radio and the television programs, the fundamentalist churches aren’t much interested in finding excuses for why people can be saved without being baptized.”
“I think they make an exception for infants these days,” Clayton said, “but not all of them do.”
“Whatever. So far, Stephen Harrow is the only person in town connected to Bonaventura who would have known of the concept and who would have been able or likely to use it casually. And there’s one other thing to take Henry Holborn out of the picture.”
“What?”
“He was sitting in his own church at the time that Tiffany Marsh died. He was there all day. Dozens of people saw him. Unless you’re going to tell me that Henry Holborn has learned to fly through the air like Peter Pan, I think we’re both going to have to concede that he was sitting in that church on the Hartford Road the whole time the first murder was going on.”
Clayton picked up the photograph of Stephen Harrow and turned it around and around in his hands. “Christ preserve me from ever showing up in a picture like this,” he said. “Everybody on earth looks ridiculous in pictures like this.”
“Look at the background,” Gregor told him. “It’s fuzzy, but you can make it out if you try. Trees and leaves and pine needles.”
“The trees behind Bonaventura House?”
“I think so, yes.”
“They did their screwing up by the circle of stones?”
“Probably a little way off. They look like they’re actually lying under some branches, instead of directly in a clearing. I hate pictures taken with telephoto lenses, unless the lenses are the really expensive kind, and nobody goes in for those except a couple of private eyes I know and the government. Zhondra must have bought this one at her local camera shop and decided it would do.”
“It did do,” Clayton said. “It did very well. If you’re right, it managed to get her killed.”
“Oh, I don’t think it was this photograph that got her killed. I don’t think Stephen Harrow knows we have it. I don’t think he knows it even exists. No, my guess is that Zhondra got fed up with everything that was happening to her plan, and decided to try to put two and two together.”