“I live very close to the Philadelphia Main Line, Ms. Meyer. I can believe it. Is Alice a lesbian as well as a battered wife? Or did you make a concession in her case?”
“Actually, sort of both at once. When I opened this place, I thought I was going to have the sort of thing they’ve got in that town in Mississippi, you know, a place where women could come to come out or to talk about what it was like living in a very antigay culture. And I do have that, sort of. But the more I spoke and the more I listened, the more I ran into battered wives who wanted to give up heterosexuality. I don’t know, Mr. Demarkian. I’ve never been particularly attracted by heterosexuality. I suppose these days I’m just trying to… help out.”
“Well, that’s not a bad idea,” Gregor said. “What about all this talk of goddess worship? Were there women up here worshipping a goddess on the day of the hurricane? Which goddess?”
“The Goddess Sophia, Mr. Demarkian. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of her. She was constructed, really, by the women’s movement. Or specifically, the movement to reclaim women’s spirituality. A lot of women seem to need religion very much, even if religion hasn’t been very good to them.”
“I take it you don’t need religion very much,” Gregor said.
“Actually, I’m a rank atheist. The very word ‘spirituality’ makes my eyes glaze over.”
“But you don’t disapprove of it?”
“I don’t really think about it. If a bunch of women want to go out to the pine grove and sing songs to the Great Mother of Us All, I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t.”
“And that was what they were doing the day of the hurricane? Singing songs to the Great Mother?”
“That’s right.”
“Naked?”
Zhondra fluttered her hands in the air. “I know it sounds ridiculous,” she said, “but it’s part of the ritual. Learning to honor your body. Your body is an avatar. The Great Mother lives in every woman. Every woman is therefore beautiful.”
“And this requires running around naked in the outdoors during a hurricane?”
“Well, Mr. Demarkian, the hurricane hadn’t started when they went out to do it. They should have been done long before they had anything to worry about. It isn’t even that long a ceremony.”
“But they weren’t done.”
“No, they weren’t,” Zhondra agreed. “That’s because Carol Littleton was late. She’d gone into town to buy a christening present for her granddaughter, I remember, and she didn’t get back until more than half an hour after she was expected. And they didn’t want to start without her, so they waited.”
“Had the storm started by the time they did?”
“I don’t know,” Zhondra said. “I wasn’t with them then. I’d come inside. We had a lot of people up here, getting out of the weather. A lot of people from town. I invited them. I thought it would be good public relations.”
“Was it?”
“God only knows. We were all sitting in here around the fire, with the power off and the candles on, playing out a scene from some ancient movie, I suppose, when David Sandler came in with Ginny Marsh and she had blood all over her. I don’t suppose that was good for public relations.”
“I don’t suppose it was. The women who were supposed to be worshipping the goddess weren’t here at the time David Sandler brought back Ginny Marsh?”
“No, they weren’t.”
“Who was?”
“I really couldn’t tell you, Mr. Demarkian. We had a couple of dozen people here. I don’t remember noticing anything in particular. Or anyone.”
“Would you know just who these couple of dozen people were, if you had to know? Could you write down their names?”
“All of them? No, I couldn’t. Some were people I’d never even heard of before. They were here out of curiosity, I guess, or because they lived close. I could give you the names of about half of them, though. There were quite a few people I did know. Like Maggie Kelleher and Rose MacNeill and Naomi Brent. Rose was wearing so much religious jewelry, I thought she was going to rename herself Trinity Christian Church and open up for services.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “We’ll get to that later. For now, let’s think about this goddess service the women were holding. How many women were there?”
“Three.”
“Were they regular guests at the camp?”
”All three of them have been here longer than a year.”