Baptism in Blood(38)
“No,” Gregor said. “Of course. I wouldn’t.”
Still, he thought, a woman who not only wanted to do good but wanted to get other people upset about it was not what he would call harmless.
Three
1
WHEN ROSE MACNEILL FIRST heard that Gregor Demarkian was coming to Bellerton, she did absolutely nothing about it. That was right after the hurricane, when there was so much to do and all that trouble with Ginny Marsh on top of it—not that that trouble with Ginny Marsh had ever ended, not to this very day, because it hadn’t. Rose MacNeill hadn’t known the baby, Tiffany, and for that reason she had a hard time thinking of it as real. When she tried to focus on Tiffany, what she saw was a package in a harness on Ginny, with no eyes or nose or mouth to distinguish it. She got a much better picture in her mind of Zhondra Meyer, and what Zhondra must have looked like when the baby was discovered dead. She could have seen Zhondra’s face at the time, since she was up at the camp getting out of the storm herself, but she had been otherwise occupied. It was the storm Rose really fixated on, no matter how hard she tried to think of other things. Rose had been in hurricanes before, but never anything like Elsa. She had come roaring in on them all at once, all wind and water and battering debris. Rose remembered standing in the doorway of her shop and watching the wind slice the roof right off of Lisa Cameron’s house on Ellerver Street, and that was before the real trouble started. That was at the very beginning, when Rose had decided that going to the high school wouldn’t be enough. She would have to get to even higher ground. The wind was battering against the windows of the shop, making them rattle. The rose petal stained glass window in the pantry hall shook itself to pieces. All along Main Street, the power lines were down. Telephone poles were snapped and twisted and hanging sideways. The thin black cables for the cable TV were ripped off the sides of houses and twisted into snakelike coiling heaps on the ground. All the people had disappeared—and that, Rose had found to her surprise, was a wonderful thing. There was something truly magical about Bellerton with no people in it.
The second time Rose MacNeill heard that Gregor Demarkian was coming to Bellerton, she was standing in Charlie Hare’s feed store, buying a packet of seed for the basil she liked to grow in pots on the ledge over her kitchen sink—and then it struck her. By then it was all over, theoretically. The plywood had come off the windows of the stores on Main Street. Maggie Kelleher had even put out a little display stand full of paperback books, horror novels with cutout covers and silver foil letters and pictures of the Devil glaring through fiery eye sockets that had nothing in them but flames. Still, there was no way to ignore the fact that Something Had Happened, the Something at the time being represented not by the debris still scattered over Main Street itself or the number of houses without roofs that could be seen by standing on the front steps of the library, but by the CBS News truck parked in front of Town Hall. Something had happened, all right, and that something was Ginny Marsh and her dead baby and what might or might not have gone on up at the camp while the storm was going on everywhere else.
“It was David Sandler’s idea,” Charlie Hare told her, as he put her seed packet into a small brown paper bag. Rose’s mother used to put her school lunches in paper bags just like that one, when Rose was in elementary school. “Sandler knew him from somewhere. Clayton Hall says it’s okay for him to be here, too, because with a case like this, it’s good to look like you’re doing everything you can.”
“Oh, yes,” Rose said. “I suppose it would be. Why is the name so familiar to me?”
“It’s familiar because it’s in People magazine all the time,” Charlie said. “The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. That one.”
Something went click in the inner recesses of Rose MacNeill’s brain. She looked down at the paper bag with the seed packet in it and caught her hands instead, long-fingered and beginning to go rough.
“The thing is,” Charlie continued, “what’s got a lot of people worried, is that if Sandler is an atheist, maybe this Demarkian is an atheist, too. And it’s like Henry Holborn is always saying. You don’t want an atheist mixed up in a case like this.”
“What?” Rose said.
Charlie’s face went round and bloated with self-satisfaction. The little gold cross he wore on a chain around his neck gleamed in the light from the fluorescent patch above his head. “Atheists don’t believe in God, do they?” he asked her. “And because atheists don’t believe in God, they’ve got no resources against the Devil. And you have to admit it, Rose, no matter what you think about religion. The Devil is what we’ve got here, one way or another. The Devil pure and simple.”