Baptism in Blood(6)
“Storm,” the woman said stupidly. “Oh, yes. Yes. I was in the library, you see—”
“The library is open today?”
“It was. For a little while this morning. And I’d heard about the storm, of course, but I didn’t think, you know—”
“Hurricane Hugo knocked out a third of the South Carolina coast,” Rose said. “We had a storm down here a couple of years ago that took down half the houses on the beach.”
The woman’s skin mottled again. “That was the kind of thing they were saying at the library. The woman there, the one with the lace collars and the green glasses, she told me—”
“Naomi Brent.”
“Excuse me?”
“Naomi Brent,” Rose repeated. “That’s the name of the woman at the library who wears the lace collars and the green glasses. Naomi Brent. She tried out for Miss North Carolina the year she was eighteen, but she didn’t make it.”
“I wanted to buy a gift,” the woman said. “For a baptism. I wanted to buy one of those pictures, you know, with the mother and child—”
“A Madonna.”
“—and I thought you’d have one. A big picture in a frame. That you can hang on a wall.”
“Are you a Catholic?” Rose asked.
The woman looked startled. “Catholic? No. No, of course not. Why would you think that?”
“That’s who mostly wants Madonnas,” Rose said. “Catholics. It’s a kind of Catholic specialty.”
“Oh.”
“Regular Christians want pictures of Jesus. Either that or they’re grandmothers, and then they like angels, especially for granddaughters. You shouldn’t buy a Madonna for a regular Christian.”
The woman’s face seemed to close off. “I want one of those pictures of a mother and child,” she said. “One that can hang on a wall. With a frame.”
Rose moved around from behind the counter. She didn’t have many Madonnas. There were more Catholics in North Carolina now than there had been when she was growing up, but there still weren’t a lot. She went over to a shelf along the west wall and took down what she had: four different pictures in four different frames, ranging in size from a three-by-five card to a cabinet door. The woman reached immediately for the one the size of the cabinet door. It was the most sentimental one Rose had, with a baby Jesus that looked like he had just eaten all the icing off a cake.
“How much is this one?” the woman asked.
“Fifty-four fifty.”
“Oh.” The woman stepped back. “Well.”
Rose put her hand on the next size down. “This one is thirty-four fifty,” she said. “The next smallest is twenty- nine ninety-five. The little one is fifteen dollars.”
The woman looked at the little one. It was a murky picture, hard to see anything in. She picked up the next size larger, the one that would cost twenty-nine ninety-five, and turned it over in her hands.
“I’ll take this one,” she said.
“There’ll be sales tax on it,” Rose said. “It’ll come to—”
“I know.” The woman was turning out the pockets of her shorts. The shorts seemed to be full of money, dollar bills, loose change. The woman went to the counter next to the cash register and laid the money out next to the bookmarks and enameled pins. Rose went to the counter, too.
“Thirty sixty-eight,” she said.
The woman counted her money out again, and pushed it across the counter with the flat of her hand.
Five minutes later, Rose was standing at the shop’s front window, watching the heavyset woman walk back up Main Street. Kathi had come out from the back and was watching, too, her hands full of prayer books with thick gold crosses etched into their fake white leather covers.
“What do you think she really wants it for?” Kathi asked. “Those people don’t get their children baptized, do they?”
“I don’t think she has any children,” Rose said. “I don’t think any of them do, up at the camp.”
“Ginny Marsh says they worship a goddess up there. They sit around naked in a circle and call out to spirits. Ginny saw them.”
“Ginny is a stupid little fool and so are you if you believe them. Let’s get moving here. Can’t you hear the wind?”
Kathi pressed her face against the small pane of glass. “I wonder what she really wants with that picture, Rose. I wonder what she’s going to do with it. Doesn’t it make you feel creepy, just thinking of what she might have had to get it for?”
Rose pushed Kathi away from the window and started to close the interior shutters. There were exterior shutters, too. She would have to go around front and get those when she was done inside. She tried to think of the plain, heavy woman doing something evil with a picture of the baby Jesus. Instead she got a picture of Zhondra Meyer again, a picture so clear she could almost touch the curling tendrils of that thick dark hair.