Baptism in Blood(122)

“David wants to go back to New York. He was going to write this book he’s working on down here, but it hasn’t been working out. He’d go back to New York and I’d go back with him.”

“Smart move.”

“In the meantime, I’d have to have somebody here who could look after the store, because I don’t think I want to give it up, not yet.”

“For insurance,” Joshua said wisely. “Just in case this thing between you and David doesn’t work out.”

“Anyway, I thought that you could take over and I could pay you a higher salary and that would work for a while until I knew what I wanted to do. But if you’re going out to California right away—”

“I don’t have the money to go out to California right away.”

“Well, then.”

“I wish you seemed happier about it. That’s what I hate most about small towns like this. They make every­body ambivalent.”

Maggie took another sip of wine and closed her eyes and rested her head against the staircase railing. I am happy, she thought. I’m not ambivalent about anything.

The odd thing was, really, that it was true. She wasn’t ambivalent about anything. She knew just what she wanted to do about David. She had known now for a couple of years, ever since they had started to be together. She won­dered why all those other things mattered so much—pride and career and status and whose money was whose—but she didn’t have an answer to that and she didn’t have the strength to find one. She just wanted to go out to her place, and in the morning she wanted to get up and pack—even though she knew perfectly well that they wouldn’t be leav­ing that soon.

“Maggie?” Josh said.

“Shh,” Maggie said.

“I’m about to go home now,” Josh said. “Maybe you ought to get up and go home now, too.”

Maggie Kelleher took another long sip of her wine, and laughed.





2


EVER SINCE ZHONDRA MEYER had been murdered, Rose MacNeill had been afraid—so afraid she found it hard to breathe, so afraid she found it hard to walk, so afraid she thought she was going to die right on Main Street. The fear was complicated by her anger, which was still white-hot and strong, even after she knew that Zhondra would never be able to feel it anymore. Hell was the first thing Rose MacNeill had thought of, when she heard that Zhondra Meyer was dead—Hell the way she had been taught to think of it in her childhood, when hellfire-and-brimstone preachers had been hellfire-and-brimstone preachers in­stead of gung-ho positive-thinking pep club leaders who only wanted to let you know that God’s love was there for you. It wasn’t God’s love Rose wanted, but God’s hate, that white-hot fire of retribution that was supposed to visit all the wicked on the last day and before. Henry Holborn was right, she thought. The camp was like a village of the damned. The women there were a pestilence and an abomi­nation, and they would bring the curse of God down on all their neighbors.

“I don’t think you understand,” Zhondra had told her, in that clipped New York voice with its faint trace of soci­ety caw. Behind her, the fire had been raging and leaping, a figure of Hell for Rose to contemplate, while the interview went on, much too slowly, turning her out.

“I don’t take lovers from among the women who stay in this house,” Zhondra had said. “I don’t admit as guests women who want to be my lovers. Especially if I don’t want to be theirs. It’s much too complicated.”

Complicated, Rose had thought at the time. Compli­cated, complicated, complicated. The fire was leaping and dancing and she was so cold, so cold. She wanted to leap across Zhondra Meyer’s big desk and put her hands around the woman’s throat. It was bad enough to be turned away by a man. It was worse to be turned away by a woman and worse yet, worse yet—what? She had thought she was go­ing to go up the hill to the camp and never come down again. Now she not only had to come down, but to do it slowly, and in humiliation. The pictures on the walls of Zhondra’s study were all portraits, big and brooding. Rose had thought they were all staring at her, getting ready to laugh. She was laughable, really. She was worse than laughable. She was a sagging middle-aged woman with delusions of grandeur. She had honestly thought that just because she was attracted to Zhondra Meyer, Zhondra Meyer would have to be attracted to her. She had honestly thought that just because she was dying of love for Zhondra Meyer—what? Rose had been with enough men in her life to know that this was not the way love worked. Why did she think love with women would be different?