Baptism in Blood(41)

There had been a little piece in the local paper that morning about the coming of Gregor Demarkian. Stephen had made himself read it very carefully, twice. Usually he read only the Raleigh paper. It was much more cosmopoli­tan and—sane—than the one put out here on Main Street. The Bellerton Times tended to go in heavily for articles about accepting Jesus. It also favored stories about miracle healings at tent meetings throughout the South. Cripples throwing away their crutches. Paraplegics leaping out of their wheelchairs and racing across the stage. Still, the Times had a story about Gregor Demarkian, and the Ra­leigh paper didn’t, and the television news shows didn’t, either. Maybe it wasn’t true.

Lisa was out on the back porch, sitting in the glider. Stephen could see her, bent over one of those paperback romance books from Maggie Kelleher’s store. Her hair was braided down the back of her neck. Her face looked like it belonged on one of those medieval Madonnas, narrow and stern.

Stephen folded the paper up so that it showed the article on Demarkian and nothing else. Then he got up and went to the porch door. The door creaked. Lisa didn’t stop reading her book or turn around to look at him.

“Lisa?” Stephen said.

Lisa wagged a foot in the air. “I was wondering how long you were going to sit at that table. You never seem to do anything around here anymore.”

“I was reading the paper.”

“You’ve been reading the paper for two hours.”

“There was something interesting in it. In the Bellerton paper. Not the News and Observer.”

“Is it something about you?”

“No, it’s not.”

“Then I’m surprised you find it interesting.”

Lisa was still staring down at her book. Stephen felt a pulse start at the base of his throat, that pulse of anger he got more and more these days, whenever he tried to talk to Lisa. He swallowed against it and walked around the glider until he was facing her. He held out the copy of the Bellerton Times and waited. When she still didn’t look up, or make any move to take the paper, he shoved it across the top of her book and stepped back.

“Look at that,” he said. “Will you please.”

Lisa picked up the paper in her left hand and looked at it. “So?”

“That’s Gregor Demarkian they’re talking about, don’t you see? The man who was involved in those murders in the exercise place up in Connecticut.”

“I know who Gregor Demarkian is, Stephen. I read the same magazines that you do.”

“Lisa, for God’s sake. The Bellerton Times is saying that he’s coming here. To Bellerton. To look into the Ginny Marsh thing.”

“He is coming here,” Lisa said. “Naomi Brent told me all about it. He’s a friend of David Sandler’s. David asked him to come down and Clayton Hall is ecstatic to have him, so he’s supposed to be here any day now. Today, maybe. I can’t remember.”

“Couldn’t you at least have told me about it?”

“Why?”

“Because it’s important, for God’s sake. It changes everything. I thought this would all blow over in time, you know, the media thing and—”

“You never thought the media thing would blow over,” Lisa said flatly. “You thought you’d turned into a movie star.”

“—but the way it is,” Stephen went on stubbornly, “with Demarkian here, the story is going to get a brand new lease on life. It’s going to be everywhere. It’s going to be places it’s never been before.”

“Stephen, there aren’t any places it hasn’t been. It’s been worse than the Beatles arriving in the United States for the first time, and you know it. It’s been a lot worse than the Susan Smith thing down in South Carolina.”

Stephen looked away, off the porch and into the yard. The trees were heavy with green, even this late in the air. It was always so warm here. Winter meant what early fall would have back home. Spring meant a change in the atmo­sphere, not in the weather.

“Do you still think that that’s what all this is about?” Stephen asked Lisa. “That it’s like that Susan Smith thing? Do you still think Ginny killed the baby?”

“Yes, of course,” Lisa said. “Everybody thinks it. Clayton Hall thinks it. He just can’t go barging off arrest­ing people before he has his evidence nailed down.”

“You think she did all of it? Split the baby’s throat and cut it up like that?”

“I think she had to make it look good,” Lisa said. “If there’s one thing we’ve all learned from Susan Smith, it’s that half-assed stories only get you so far.”