“Do you mean he’s one of the few people in town who thinks she’s actually guilty?” Gregor asked.
Clayton threw his arms in the air. “We don’t know what to think. He and Ginny were always close. Now he won’t talk to us and he won’t talk to her and we don’t know what’s going on. Do you want to talk to Ginny before you go up to Zhondra Meyer’s place? She’s available. Her lawyer is a personal friend of mine. All it would take is a phone call.”
Outside the window, the bird had flown off. There was nothing more to see.
“No,” Gregor said. “I don’t think I’m ready to talk to Ginny Marsh just yet. Let’s go up and see what we can find out about goddess worship.”
“Goddess worship,” Jackson said, starting to crack up. “Maybe they’ll put on a demonstration. Can’t you picture it? All those sagging old ladies. All those drooping old—”
“Jackson,” Clayton Hall said. Then he looked at Gregor and shrugged. “Sometimes I wish Jackson here would get religion. It would surely improve the tone of this place.”
Six
1
WHEN THE CALL CAME in from Clayton Hall, Zhondra Meyer was sitting at her desk in the big study on the main floor of the west wing, reading the papers. She had already read her way through the Bellerton Times and the Raleigh News and Observer. She had started in on the New York Times, too, but had ended up bored in the middle of an editorial about the Middle East. Zhondra’s mother was always telling her that she didn’t take the State of Israel seriously enough. Zhondra’s friends were always telling her that, too, although for reasons her mother would undoubtedly deplore. It didn’t matter. Zhondra couldn’t think about the Middle East for more than three seconds without feeling her head start to ache. Nothing made any sense over there, and she had the sneaking suspicion that nobody wanted it to. Besides, she had USA Today to read, and what was there was a disaster. Being in USA Today was like being in People. Lots of pictures. Lots of scrupulously reported innuendo. At least, Zhondra thought, they weren’t on the front page this time. The crime had occurred far enough back to spare them from that. The story about the camp was on pages two and three of the first section—all of pages two and three. There were pictures of the big front gate with its curving crown, like the gate to an old movie studio. There were pictures of Alice and Dinah and Carol in town, all looking dumpy and tired. There were even a few pictures of Zhondra herself, none of them recent. The one that made Zhondra cringe was her coming-out photograph, taken with fifteen other young women, all dressed in white gowns, just before the Christmas Cotillion and New Year’s Ball in Manhattan. It seemed impossible to Zhondra that she had ever been that woman: so thin, so stupid, so unaware.
Clayton Hall had wanted to know if he could bring this Demarkian person up to talk to her and the rest of the women about what had happened on the day of the storm. That was how Zhondra thought of it: what had happened on the day of the storm. Thinking about it any other way made her feel sick. She had heard that David Sandler was bringing this Demarkian to North Carolina. She even knew who he was. There had been a profile of him in Vanity Fair, which she still read, mostly secretly, in the bathroom. It was one of the few times Vanity Fair had ever done a profile without the subject’s cooperation, and Zhondra had found it an interesting piece. Zhondra had no idea what kind of mental attitude it took to want to look into crimes and solve them. Even simple acts of stealing bewildered her beyond belief. Trying to think about what had happened on the day of the hurricane blanked her out completely. Zhondra was not a sentimental woman. She wasn’t particularly fond of children, and she sometimes loathed infants, who seemed to have been designed to make their mothers’ lives impossible. Children were a trap. She had said it often, in the days when she was still speaking and teaching, before she opened the camp. Children are patriarchy’s most lethal weapon. She only allowed them at the camp because their mothers insisted on bringing them, and lately it had begun to be considered antifeminist not to allow them. Even so, Zhondra had never wanted a child, and surely not one as small and helpless and pliant as Tiffany had been.
Clayton wanted to bring Gregor Demarkian up here. Zhondra was glad to have them both, and anybody else directly connected to a law enforcement agency, instead of those reporters who had camped out in town. Clayton and Demarkian wanted to question the women who had been taking part in the goddess ritual—well, Zhondra was perfectly happy about that, too. Zhondra knew all the theories behind goddess worship: reclaiming the sacredness of the body; repairing our relationship with nature and the earth; reempowering the spirituality of women. Zhondra thought it was all bunk. If you wanted to give up religion, you should give it up. You should walk right out on it, just like Zhondra had walked out on Judaism. Inventing religions that had never existed and pretending that they came from the beginning of time made no sense to her at all.