Clayton pulled his car right up to the curve in front of the front doors and cut his engine. Gregor assumed there must be a back lot somewhere, with a garage. Clayton climbed out onto the gravel drive and stretched. Gregor climbed out and looked around. The big front doors were carved from top to bottom in what looked like curvaceous leaves. On either side of them were tall narrow windows made of stained glass.
“Look at this place,” Clayton said. “Man who built it—not the grandfather, I think; the great-grandfather—his wife was dead and his children were grown. He put this place up and came down here to vacation for six weeks every year, mostly by himself. With a dozen servants, but they slept out over the garage. If you see what I mean.”
“Did he have guests?”
“He must have had guests,” Clayton said. “I remember in the brochures they used to give out, it talked about the parties he gave. People down from New York. Caviar brought in from I don’t know where—and there weren’t planes to fly it in, not readily available. I don’t think people build places like this anymore even if they can afford it.”
“In Hollywood, maybe,” Gregor said. “Or one of those new billionaires, like Donald Trump or Bill Gates.”
“There was this guy Michael Milken once. I thought he’d have a place like this. I don’t know how many hundreds of millions of dollars he made every year. Turned out, all he had was an ordinary house, not even very big. I could have owned it myself; if it was built out here instead of in California.”
Clayton climbed the steps to the front door and rang the bell. There was a rope to pull instead of a button to push. The rope was made of something shiny and gold, and it was very well kept.
“Zhondra Meyer can’t be letting down the side entirely,” Gregor said. “Somebody’s keeping this place up. Somebody’s keeping it up very well. I think you have to rake gravel drives to make them look like that.”
“You surely do. Half the town seems to work up here in one capacity or another. I didn’t say Ms. Meyer didn’t keep the place up.”
“So what is it that you disapprove of so much?” Gregor asked. “It’s obvious that you disapprove. I can see it in your face.”
“Well,” Clayton Hall said, “it’s like this—”
But he didn’t have time to finish. The bellpull wasn’t only pretty. It worked. One of the big double doors was drawing open. Gregor stepped back politely to wait. A moment later, he saw the figure of a small, dumpy woman in ragged jeans that bagged out at the knees and thighs. She was peering out at them, worry written all over her face.
“Excuse me?” she said in a high, tight little voice. “Can I help you?”
“It’s Clayton Hall, Alice,” Clayton said patiently. “I called Zhondra a few minutes ago. She knows we’re coming. This is Gregor Demarkian.”
Alice turned her head in Gregor’s direction and squinted. She was wearing contact lenses. They were tinted ones, a little off center, so that Gregor could tell. She still seemed to be having trouble seeing him. She looked him up and down and paused for a long moment to stare at his shoes. Then she stepped back even farther and motioned them both in.
“We have to be very careful,” she said primly, mostly (Gregor assumed) for Gregor’s benefit. “We’re always in danger here. We never know what we’re going to find when the doorbell rings.”
“Now, Alice,” Clayton Hall said. “You know that isn’t true. You haven’t had a single spot of trouble since Ms. Meyer opened this camp.”
“We’ve had rhetoric,” Alice retorted self-righteously. “And rhetoric matters. Rhetoric can turn to action at any moment.” She shut the door firmly behind them and turned to Gregor. “We send people into the churches, you know, undercover. People they don’t think belong to us. We tape them.”
“Tape them doing what?” Gregor was startled.
“We tape the sermons,” Alice said. “You should hear some of the things we get. Especially down at Henry Holborn’s place. They’re all crazy, down there. In any truly just society, free from patriarchy, they’d all be locked up.”
“Henry Holborn talks the same way about beer as he does about you,” Clayton Hall said, “and he isn’t rampaging around the countryside, shutting down liquor stores.”
“People did,” Alice said. “There was a woman named Carrie Nation who went around smashing up bars with an ax. Ideas have consequences. You wait and see.”