“Yes, Janet. Thank you. Thank you very much.”
“There’s nothing to thank me for,” his wife replied. “I wanted to do it. I want them out of here even more than you do. After all, I’m another woman. They don’t make people think odd things about you just because they’re there. You’re a man.”
It took Henry a while to unravel this sentence, and by then Janet was gone. The church’s front doors were still hissing closed behind her. The air from outside was still spilling over him like a warm bath. Henry stood up and went back to the door of the big main room of the church. Catholics would call it the church proper, but Henry had no name for it that he felt comfortable using. “Chapel,” which was what he had used when he first started preaching, seemed positively ridiculous in the sight of all these seats.
Crazy, Henry thought. Maybe that was the answer he was looking for. Maybe he could blame it all on the insanities of everyone involved.
In the meantime, he had to think it through very thoroughly, and make sure it wasn’t the Devil talking to him in his head.
There had been times in his life when Henry had found it very difficult to distinguish between the Devil’s voice and God’s.
3
IN THE THICK PATCH of trees at the bottom of the hill on which Zhondra Meyer’s huge house stood, Bobby Marsh was sitting in a nest of pine needles, murdering a mouse. He had found the mouse, half asleep and scared to death, nibbling disinterestedly at the bottom of his brown paper lunch bag. He had picked it up without having to chase it at all, and it was so small he had no trouble holding it caught in his hand, squeezing at its neck until he felt the bones break under his fingers. The sensation was unreal, like liquor or marijuana or something worse. When the first bone snapped, Bobby felt something leap with joy inside him. That was what he wanted to happen to all of them, all those women up at the camp and all those other people, too, Hall, Sandler, it didn’t matter. They were a roadblock made of flesh standing in his way. They were the worst news he had ever heard. They were taking Ginny away from him. Bobby knew he ought to be thinking about Tiffany. He had been trying and trying to think about Tiffany for days. He just hadn’t been able to do it. It was Ginny he thought about, and what a perfect gift she had been to him, what a miracle, turned now to dust.
They have everything and they want everybody else to have nothing, he thought, and then he crushed the mouse in his hands, twisted it and twisted it, until its flesh tore and blood began to spurt out onto his fingers.
The blood was red and hot and warm and almost invisible under the pine trees, and Bobby Marsh suddenly found it all so sad, he started to cry.
Seven
1
THE FIRST THING GREGOR Demarkian noticed about Zhondra Meyer’s place was that it had a name, threaded into the wrought iron scrollwork at the top of the gate: Bonaventura. The next thing he noticed was that there was a certain Philadelphia Main Line sensibility going on here. This house was not a camp, or a lodge, or even a mansion. It was some sort of palace. The roof was as spiked as a Viking warrior’s helmet. The walls were made of dark gray stone and twisted into peaks and arches more Gothic than anything to be found on an Ivy League campus. The drive curved around a large stone fountain where a curving stone whale spewed water from its spout. Gregor found himself wondering if the man who had built this place had been ignorant of what whales used their spouts for, or if he had had some artistic reason for making this spout do what it did, or if he just hadn’t cared, because people with money like this didn’t have to care. Clayton Hall drove them through the gate, in his little Ford Escort, oblivious.
“They used to open this place to the public when Zhondra’s grandmother owned it,” Clayton said. “They had it all set up like a museum, like one of those palaces in England, and people came through and looked at the furniture. They had Christmas parties, too, with the place all decorated inside and out and the children’s choirs from the school in to sing carols. It was a very nice setup. Brought a lot of tourist money into the town.”
“And Zhondra Meyer changed that?”
“Not exactly. The grandmother died and Zhondra was off in college or something. So the place closed and stayed closed until a couple of years ago, when Zhondra started in with this. First thing she did was give an interview to Town and Country magazine that made all the wire services and ended up on The CBS Evening News. About lesbians.”
“Mmm,” Gregor said.
“One thing about Zhondra,” Clayton said. “She’s no shrinking violet. She likes to stick your face right into it.”