Zhondra looked down at the spread-open pages of USA Today one more time, decided she had looked hideous in miniskirts, and got up from her chair. She walked to the tall French doors that opened onto the back terrace and pulled back the curtains that covered them. Alice was out there, just where she said she’d be, cleaning out the big stone birdbath. Around her, the shrubs were carved into hearts and spades and diamonds and clubs, just as they had been in Zhondra’s grandfather’s time. Zhondra had no idea why she had never changed it.
Zhondra went out onto the terrace and waved to Alice, who was hanging almost upside down from the birdbath’s center tier. Alice saw her and waved back. Then she circled herself up into a sitting position and began the slow process of getting herself to the ground. The birdbath was still full of water. Alice’s jeans were soaked through and her thin cotton peasant blouse was dotted with damp. She had to leap like a gymnast to get clear of the birdbath’s bottom tier, and when she landed it looked as if it hurt.
“Hey,” Alice said, standing up straight and brushing water and bits of grass off her thighs. “What is it? I practically had that thing straightened out.”
“Did you start from the top or from the bottom?” Zhondra asked, honestly curious.
“From the top,” Alice replied. “You always lose some muck to the next tier down. Is there something in particular you wanted? This birdbath really needed cleaning out. Our lawn service is worthless.”
The lawn service wasn’t useless. It just didn’t do bird-baths. “Clayton Hall just called,” Zhondra said. “He wants to bring Gregor Demarkian up here to see us.”
“He does? When?”
“Now.”
Alice look nonplussed. “For Christ’s sake, Zhondra,” she said. “My hair’s a mess. My clothes are a mess. I smell like a stagnant pond. Do you mean right now now?”
“As soon as they can get up here from town, Alice, yes. Clayton said something about wanting to go over some paperwork with Demarkian and we shouldn’t expect them for about forty-five minutes, but that’s the upshot of it. I don’t think they’re going to care about what you look like.”
“I care about what I look like. Are you glad he’s coming? Gregor Demarkian? When I saw the piece in the Bellerton Times, I didn’t know what to think.”
“I think it would be a good idea if we got all this cleared up. Fast.”
“I agree.”
Zhondra shook her head. “I don’t think you realize. I’ve been coming here since I was two years old, and I know this place. Half the people in town probably think that Ginny Marsh is telling the God’s honest truth, and we’re holding Black Masses up here and worshipping the Devil.”
“I know that.”
“Yes, Alice, you know that, but you don’t know what it means. Down there there’s somebody—Henry Holborn or somebody else—planning something right this minute. I don’t know what, and I don’t know when, but it’s coming. And when it does, there’s going to be real trouble.”
“I don’t mean to get you pissed off or anything,” Alice said, “but I think you underestimate the people in Bellerton. In spite of the newspaper snipes and a few people like Henry Holborn, they’ve mostly been very nice, at least to me. They don’t seem like the kind of people who would, I don’t know, dress up in hoods or whatever you’re suggesting.”
“Not in hoods.”
“What is it, then? There really isn’t anything they can do to us, Zhondra. You own this place. They can’t revoke the lease or anything. And they can’t run us out of town, either. Your lawyers are better than their lawyers.”
“There are a lot of things people can do.” Zhondra sounded enigmatic when she didn’t want to. “Where are they all, Dinah and Stelle and Carol?”
“Stelle’s sleeping. Dinah and Carol were in the dining room, last I heard.”
“Get them all together and bring them down here to my study. I want to talk to them before Clayton gets here with Demarkian.”
“You mean you want to prime them?”
“No,” Zhondra said, “I don’t want to prime them. I just want to talk to them. Will you please go and bring them here?”
“Sure.”
Zhondra turned away. It was a warm day, but there was the beginning of cold in it, like an undercurrent. Her grandmother probably walked across this terrace the way she was walking across it now, tall and imperious and just a little angry. Lately, Zhondra had been finding all kinds of connections between that ancient matriarch and herself. Sometimes she thought of the jewelry that had been left to her, passed down from one generation of Meyer women to the next, and wondered what it would be like to walk with it covering her, the heavy round dinner rings and diamond tiaras, the diamond chokers and diamond and ruby breastplates. When nineteenth-century women dressed up to go out, they knew how to dress up.