The front door to the Town Hall was locked. Gregor had tried it. He had gone around to the side of the building in search of another door, and found instead a statue in honor of Bellerton’s Civil War dead. The statue was of a slouching Confederate soldier with a ragged coat standing on a pedestal. The pedestal had six names engraved into the side of it. Gregor went around to the back and found a small parking lot with three cars in it. He also found a door, although not a door to the basement. You had to go up a rickety set of steps to get to it.
Gregor was just wondering whether to try this door or to go around to the one side of the building he hadn’t seen yet when the door opened, and a well-preserved middle-aged woman came out, wearing a flowing flowered dress and very high heels. Gregor worried about women in heels, especially when they were trying to negotiate steep stairs like this set. This woman sailed down them without looking at her feet, and hardly touching the banister. The banister was just a thick metal pipe anyway, tacked on, it looked like, at the last minute, because somebody less surefooted than this had fallen.
The woman was looking him over without pretending not to be. Her gaze seemed to be neutral. Gregor stepped away from the stairs and put his hands behind his back.
“Can I help you?” the woman asked, when she got to the little patch of sidewalk at the bottom of the steps. “Are you looking for something?”
“I’m looking for the police department,” Gregor said. “I found it, in a way. I looked straight into one of its windows. It seems to be open. I just can’t figure out how to get in.”
“The police department’s always open,” the woman said. “Not that there’s a lot of crime out here. But we’ve got drunks just like every place else.”
“I’m sure you do.”
The woman cocked her head. “I thought you were another of those reporters, but you aren’t, are you? You’re that man they wrote about in the paper, the one who’s a friend of David Sandler’s. Gregory—”
“Gregor Demarkian.”
“That’s right. The world’s most famous detective. So what is it now? You and Dr. Sandler don’t think the police department in a place like Bellerton is up to investigating a thing of this kind?”
“I think the police department in Bellerton is doing a wonderful job.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because David Sandler asked me to come. Because I got a letter from a man—Clayton Hall, I think the name was—saying it would be a good idea if I came. In his opinion, that is.”
“Clayton knew you were coming? He thought it was all right?”
“He wrote me a letter. He said he thought it was all right.”
“We get tired of it, you know,” the woman said. “All this hogwash about what a backwards little place we are. Oh, they don’t come out and say it. They don’t stand up there on the six o’clock news and announce that Bellerton is a hick little hollow full of mental defectives. But they imply it. They go out of their way to imply it.”
Gregor cleared his throat. “I’m sorry if they do,” he said. “I’m afraid I haven’t had much time to watch the news of this on television.”
“It’s the people they pick to talk to,” the woman said. “I learned that when I was up at the university in Chapel Hill. This town has dozens of good people in it. Dozens of intelligent people, too. So who do these television people put in front of a camera as soon as they have a chance? Bobby Marsh and Ricky Drake.”
“Isn’t Bobby Marsh the child’s father?”
The woman ignored this entirely. “None of them understands any of it anyway. They don’t understand what it was like down here, just twenty-five or thirty years ago. They don’t understand where these people are coming from.”
The woman seemed to snap out of it. “Never mind,” she said, smoothing her hands along the sides of her dress skirt. “It doesn’t matter. You want to see Clayton Hall?”
“If he’s in. I want to go to the police department.”
“You just go around the side of the building there. There’s a little set of steps going down, like cellar steps except right out in the open and they’re made of concrete. There’s a police car parked around that side, too. That’s how you can tell.”
“I was just going to check that side. Thank you for telling me.”
“The first four or five days, there were reporters just spilling out of there, and all over the Town Hall steps, and everywhere else you could see. And equipment with cables, too. You’ve got to worry about children around cables, you know.”