Stephen turned around to look at Lisa again. “But why would she do something like that? Why would anybody?”
Lisa pitched her romance novel onto the seat of the glider. “I expect there’s a man in it somewhere. There usually is. Some man who’s been talking trash to her and telling her he’d marry her if only she didn’t have any living children.”
“You don’t think Carol Littleton and all those women were up there worshipping the Devil?”
“I think they might have been worshipping the Devil, but I don’t think it has anything to do with this. You wait and see. That’s what they want Demarkian here for. Just like they got the FBI down in union so the town cops didn’t look too much like heavies, although I’ve got to say, the town cops down there took a lot more responsibility than Clayton Hall is taking here. But just you wait. They’ll arrest Ginny sooner or later, and after that everybody will say that they knew all about it all along.”
“You don’t like Ginny Marsh, do you?”
“I don’t care about Ginny Marsh one way or the other.”
“Sometimes I think you don’t like anybody at all,” Stephen said. “Not Ginny Marsh. Not Carol Littleton. Not Naomi Brent. Not me.”
Lisa laid her head back on the glider and stared up at the porch ceiling. “Actually,” she said, “I think I’m having a crisis of faith. I think I’ve decided that God is dead. I’d talk to you about it, but you think God is dead, too. Do you ever wonder what it is you’re doing, being the minister of a church?”
“Religion is more than a lot of fairy tales in an ancient book,” Stephen said, as gently as he could. “I thought we’d been over this. Bishop Spong says, in his book about the Resurrection—”
“Bishop Spong doesn’t believe in the Resurrection,” Lisa said. “And neither do you.”
“Of course Bishop Spong believes in the Resurrection. And so do I. How can you say things like that?”
Lisa got to her feet in one fluid but violent motion. “You don’t believe it really happened, really really, like rain happens. You think it’s some kind of symbol. You think everything’s some kind of symbol. There weren’t any wise men. There wasn’t any Star of Bethlehem. There wasn’t any virgin birth. Symbols, symbols, symbols.”
“Don’t say you’ve started to believe in parthenogenesis at this late date.”
“I think I believe in honesty. I understand David Sandler. I understand Henry Holborn. You and Bishop Spong, I don’t understand at all. I’m going to get some lunch.”
“Lisa, for God’s sake. Aren’t you going to tell me what this is all about?”
“No,” Lisa said.
Any other woman would have started screaming at him then, but Lisa didn’t. She just turned away from him and walked into the house, as if they’d been having a discussion about the refreshments she was going to serve at the Bible study meeting this week. Except that they couldn’t have a discussion about that, because he’d canceled the Bible study meeting this week. He was too distracted, with everything that had been going on, and not many people came anymore anyway. In the last six weeks, Stephen had lost two-thirds of his Bible study group to the Bible study group Henry Holborn ran in that big barn of a church of his just outside of town.
Maybe I ought to start telling people I’ve been kidnapped by UFOs, Stephen thought—but that wouldn’t help, that wouldn’t get him back what he wanted, that wouldn’t turn things around and make them what they had been before. Only one thing would do that, and he didn’t know—quite yet—how to arrange for it.
3
FROM WHERE SHE SAT next to Clayton Hall’s desk in the basement of Town Hall—official police headquarters for the Town of Bellerton; official interrogation room when the interrogating was being done by Clayton instead of by one of the men from the state—Ginny Marsh could see the Carver sisters, two old ladies with fluffy hair, carrying big brown grocery bags full of stuff out of Rose MacNeill’s store. The Carver sisters had a niece whose baby was being christened this weekend at the Episcopal Church. Ginny’s church didn’t believe in infant baptism, but Ginny liked the practice, with its white gown for the baby and its solemn ceremonials. Maybe if Tiffany had been baptized, Ginny wouldn’t be feeling so very awful now. And she was feeling awful. She was feeling raw to the bone. The problem was that she couldn’t get it out from inside her and make it show on her skin. Even Bobby was beginning to wonder if she hadn’t killed the baby. Ginny knew that. They all wanted her to cry and carry on, to weep and wail and go insane. She just couldn’t do it. Every time she thought she was about to get started, everything inside her would freeze. There she would be, sitting in front of all those cameras, grinning like she was having a wonderful time. It put her in mind of what the Reverend Holborn was always saying about being possessed by the Devil. Ginny surely thought she was being possessed by something. It had taken over her heart and started to eat her soul.