Her.
My God, he thought.
Ginny Marsh.
She was reeling through the trees as if she were dead drunk, and she was covered with blood.
From the Raleigh News and Observer, October 26—
BABY MURDERED BY SATANIC CULT
Devil Worship Motive for Baby’s Death, Mother Says
BELLERTON—Satanic rituals and deals with the devil provided the motive for the murder of Tiffany Ann Marsh. So says the infant’s mother, Virginia Leland Marsh, who is charging today that devil worshippers based at Zhondra Meyer’s Bellerton women’s retreat killed the child as a sacrifice to Satan during a “Black Mass” that was held on the grounds of the retreat during the early October onslaught of Hurricane Elsa. The child’s body was discovered lying near a circle of stones in the retreat’s back garden just after the hurricane passed through Bellerton. Her throat had been cut, and marks had been made in the infant’s chest and abdomen, apparently with a kitchen knife. Mrs. Marsh says she was held immobile and forced to watch the proceedings by two women, only one of whom she recognized. The women involved in the ritual had their faces painted, thereby rendering them unrecognizable to Mrs. Marsh, who knew none of the residents well.
Robert Marsh, the baby’s father, says that there have been rumors in town for many months that Satanic rituals were being practiced at the retreat. Local police authorities, however, say that no evidence of such practices has ever been found until now. An investigation following the discovery of the infant’s body revealed pentagrams, candles, and a book with the pre-Vatican II traditional Latin Mass printed backwards, supposedly the method by which Satan worshippers celebrate their ritual. Church leaders in Bellerton, who have long been opposed to the camp because it is known to accept residents who are openly homosexual, are now calling for its closure at least until the death of Tiffany Ann Marsh has been definitively resolved. Zhondra Meyer, who owns and runs the camp, has said that she sees no reason to close, and does not believe that any of the women residing there have ever practiced Satanic cult rituals. Ms. Meyer is a direct descendant of the famous nineteenth-century robber baron, Isaac Samuel Meyer.
Bellerton local police and North Carolina state police are both said to be actively investigating this matter. Funeral services for Tiffany Ann Marsh were held yesterday at the Bellerton Church of Christ Jesus, the Reverend Henry Holborn presiding.
PART ONE
One
1
EVER SINCE GREGOR DEMARKIAN had come to live on Cavanaugh Street, he had spent a lot of time worrying about his best friend, Father Tibor Kasparian—but he had never been afraid for him, until now. The problem had started late on the afternoon of April 19, the day of the Oklahoma City bombing, when the reports first started to drift in that the bomber might not be an Islamic fundamentalist with ties to Iran, but someone more banal and domestic. It had gotten worse after Timothy McVeigh was arrested and everybody was sure. Gregor knew that Father Tibor had had a terrible life: arrested and imprisoned in the Soviet union when the Soviet union was still a power; suffering through God only knew what until he could make his way overland and underground, first to Israel and then to the United States. Tibor’s wife had died in a Russian prison. Tibor himself limped slightly, and had only partial use of his left arm. Once, in the dark of a long night spent watching Jaws on videotape in the living room of the tiny rectory-apartment behind Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church, Tibor had told Gregor the most frightening thing Gregor thought he had ever heard: that blood is the color of dirt, really, once it dries; that there are people who like the way corpses look, especially covered with dust and laid out on the ground.
“It’s not,” Gregor Demarkian told Bennis Hannaford, one early morning in late October, months after the rest of the country had lost interest in Oklahoma and gone back to obsessing about the Simpson trial, “it’s not as if I were an unsophisticated man. I spent most of my career chasing serial killers. I’ve seen a lot of blood and badness in my time. I’ve been depressed as hell about it. But this is different.”
“Mmm,” Bennis Hannaford said.
Gregor looked at Bennis’s thick black hair and perfectly almond-shaped, enormous blue eyes, and signed. Bennis was beautiful and Bennis was bright and Bennis loved Tibor, but she had quit a two-and-a-half-pack-a-day cigarette habit less than a month ago, and lately she just didn’t seem to be mentally home. They were sitting facing each other in the window booth of the Ararat Restaurant. Gregor could look through the tall pane of glass at a bright, hard, cold fall day. It was only five minutes after seven. By seven-thirty, they would no longer be alone. Half the single people on the street ate their breakfasts at the Ararat. Half the married people did, too, when they were fighting with their spouses or not up to cooking anything or just in the mood to see people early. At night, the Ararat was Cavanaugh Street’s main tourist attraction. It got written up in the restaurant section of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Tourists from Radnor and Wayne came in to see what “real Armenian cooking” was like. In the daytime, the Ararat resembled a diner with eccentric furniture. Hard vinyl floors and inexpensive green wallpaper clashed with tasseled sofa cushions and hand-crocheted antimacassars. As far as Gregor knew, the Ararat was the only restaurant of any kind, anywhere, that used antimacassars on the backs of straight-backed aluminum chairs.