Baptism in Blood(40)
Rose tapped a series of input numbers on the keyboard, waited for the system to get into form, and wrote:
GREGOR DEMARKIAN
GLOBAL REQUEST
Then she sat back and waited to see what would happen. Usually, nothing did happen, not at once. It took at least half an hour, or sometimes more. This time she must have caught the system just as somebody useful was logging on to it. In no time at all, a blizzard of words appeared on her screen and her printer began to whirr.
Rose had expected that the information she got would be more or less along the lines of the information she’d heard—the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot; the darling of People—but instead what came up on the screen was all about the Federal Bureau of Investigation and serial killers. Rose MacNeill bit her lip.
Really, she thought. This might be more interesting than she’d thought it would be. This might be something she could get involved in, even if she couldn’t make the baby be real to her, as real to her as Zhondra Meyer and the camp.
Lately, nothing seemed very real to her anyway, and her head always seemed to ache. She had always been a very religious woman. The store was full of religious things. She still wore her pin that said Let Go and Let God. She still believed that the Bible was the inerrant word of God and that evolution had never happened and that the problem with the children in the schools today was that they didn’t pray enough. It was just that, since the storm, everything seemed to be mixed up.
The computer was whirring and pulsing. Rose’s head was whirring and pulsing, too. She rubbed her eyes with her hands and reached for the printout that was beginning to pile up next to her printer. Before this was over, she would have pages and pages of words about Gregor Demarkian—and it would be much easier for her to think about that than to think again about all these other things.
2
FOR THE FIRST FEW days, Stephen Harrow had felt very, very important. He had been up there at the time, up at the camp, and he was known to be nothing more than an intelligent bystander. Newspeople wanted to interview him. He looked good standing in front of a camera, tweedy and academic, like a college professor. His long, thin face and narrow, elegant hands showed well on videotape. His eyes actually looked bluer on television than they were in real life. Stephen found it hard to convince himself that it was him up there, flickering and ghostly in the dark of the bedroom at eleven o’clock. He found himself wondering if this was what actors felt like when they saw themselves for the first time in the movies. Maybe everybody this happened to felt unreal and a little uneasy. Maybe everybody found it hard to distinguish between themselves and the picture on the screen.
Stephen wasn’t sure when things had started to change, but he knew why they had changed, and that was enough: He was not a real celebrity, and David Sandler was. Worse than that, of course, was the fact that it was David Sandler who had come stumbling across a blood-spattered Ginny Marsh and gone off with her to find the baby. Stephen had been sitting at the table in the kitchen at the camp at the time, trying not to notice that the women around him wore much fewer clothes than the women he was used to. It wasn’t that he was aroused by the show. He couldn’t have been. They were ugly women up there at the camp, with the exception of Zhondra Meyer herself. Most of them didn’t shave their legs, and none of them wore makeup. Their clothes were funny, too—boxy and made of synthetic fabrics; cheaply made and badly cut. Where Stephen came from, women paid attention to their appearance. Even the women who called themselves feminists had a great deal of interest in matters of style. These women had skin that hung limply away from their bones, that puckered and darkened in unexpected places. Stephen found it painful to look at them. Part of him kept insisting that it must hurt, physically, for women to be so unattractive. They had to have pain like arthritis in all of their joints. It pained him to look at them, and it embarrassed him, too.
Since the media people had stopped camping out on his doorstep, Stephen had begun to think he must know what those women had to live with. He felt blanked out, unreal, nonexistent. He paced back and forth in his study until Lisa came in and demanded that he stop. Pacing back and forth made the floorboards creak. She could hear the creak upstairs and it drove her crazy. Everything was driving Stephen crazy. When he tried to sleep, he got visions of what it had been like, in the middle of the storm. When he tried to make himself breakfast or work on a sermon or read a book, his eyes kept straying to the television set—but there was nothing on it anymore except David Sandler or one of the media people. Stephen had started to wonder if he shouldn’t write a book.