“I’ve been walking around town,” he said. “Looking at things. I had breakfast in a place called Betsey’s House of Hominy. It was interesting.”
“I’ll bet everybody thought you were a reporter,” Jackson said.
“They did at first. There was a woman there named Maggie Kelleher—”
“Oh, Maggie,” Clayton Hall said. “Now, Maggie is an interesting woman. Good-looking, too.”
“She’s got to be forty,” Jackson said scornfully.
“She knew who I was,” Gregor said. “Some other people might have, too, but she was the one who said so. There was also somebody there named Ricky Drake.”
Jackson dropped his head into his hands. “Oh, dear sweet Jesus.”
Gregor let this pass. “Then when I came over here, I met a woman coming out, who said her name was Naomi Brent. From the library.”
“That’s right,” Clayton said. “She does run the library. Has for years now. She’s not exactly your old maid librarian, though.”
“She didn’t seem so to me, no,” Gregor agreed. “But what I’m trying to get to here, what struck me, is that what everybody wanted to tell me was that there was no way they thought Virginia Marsh could have killed her baby. In fact, it seemed to be a general consensus.”
Clayton Hall and Jackson looked at each other. “It is a consensus,” Clayton said slowly. “In town, at any rate.”
“I’d been given the impression by David Sandler that the consensus ran exactly the other way. That one of the reasons he wanted me down here was that he was afraid it was being taken as a foregone conclusion, that Virginia Marsh was guilty, and that he wanted someone here who would look at things differently for a while.”
The second coffeepot was now full of coffee. Clayton Hall adjusted it on its metal plate, fussing with it, giving his hands something to do. “Mr. Demarkian, given everything you’ve ever heard about this case, what is it that you think it’s going to turn out to be?”
“I think it’s going to turn out to be Virginia Marsh, or Virginia Marsh’s husband, or Virginia Marsh’s boyfriend, if she has one. That’s what it always turns out to be.”
“Exactly,” Clayton Hall said. “That’s the point. And she was there, Ginny was. Up at the camp. And she lied to us and everybody else about why she was up there.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ginny told David Sandler, among other people, that she was going up to the camp in the middle of the storm because Zhondra Meyer had refused to let her off the hook for work that day. But it wasn’t true. Ginny never called Zhondra Meyer and asked to be excused from work that day. Zhondra would have been more than happy to give her the afternoon off. Not much work was going to get done up there anyway, what with the storm.”
“Couldn’t that be what Zhondra Meyer is saying now? Maybe Ginny is telling the truth and it’s Zhondra Meyer who’s lying.”
“We’ve got the phone records, Mr. Demarkian. There were no incoming calls to the camp that morning. None. Zero. Zilch.”
“Ah,” Gregor said.
“And it isn’t just the phone call.” Clayton Hall was getting worked up now. “There’s the blood to account for. When David Sandler found her, Ginny was covered with blood. Some of it was her own blood. Some of it was Tiffany’s blood. She was soaked in it.”
“All right.”
“Yeah,” Clayton said. “All right. The point here is wider, though. Because that was all the blood we found. All of it. There wasn’t a drop of Tiffany Marsh’s blood anywhere on the premises of the camp. Not in that grove where Ginny keeps saying she saw the Satan worship. Not anywhere. And we searched that place—Christ, it took days.”
“The blood could have been washed away. We are talking about the middle of a hurricane here. A major hurricane.”
“The blood couldn’t have been washed away from everything,” Clayton insisted. “We should have found flecks of it. We should have found something. And then there were these women Ginny says she saw worshipping the Devil. Carol Littleton was the only one she said she recognized. Well, Mr. Demarkian, Ginny Marsh had been working up at the camp for months. And I know Ginny Marsh. I don’t believe there were three women up there she wouldn’t have been able to recognize, stark naked or not.”
Gregor considered this. He had read about the stark naked business. That was one detail the papers never omitted.
“What about this Carol Littleton?” he asked. “What did she say?”