John Chester looked like he had heard this lament before. “Listen, Clayton,” he said. “I’ve got work to do. Why don’t you drop over to my house this afternoon and we can go over what I’ve got?”
“Sure,” Clayton Hall said.
Gregor put out his hand and touched John Chester on the arm. “Just a minute, do you mind? Could I ask you one or two more things?”
“If you’re going to ask how I know her throat wasn’t cut here, I don’t want to answer. You shouldn’t need me to tell you.”
Gregor didn’t need John Chester to tell him. He could see, even now and at a distance, that there was no significant amount of blood anywhere near the circle of stones.
“I just want some intelligent guesses to go on with,” he said. “Do you think it will turn out that she was killed by having her throat cut?”
John Chester nodded. “Oh, yeah. You get a good look at it, you can see she was good and alive when that cut happened. She lost a lot of blood. Her skin is absolutely white. What I’m not so sure of is, whether that was what her murderer intended her to die of, if you see what I mean.”
“No,” Gregor said.
John Chester gestured to the circle of stones. “It bothers me,” he said, “all this concentration on the stones, all this hokey-looking evidence to say that there was some ritual involved.”
“So you don’t think Ginny Marsh was telling the truth when she said she saw devil worshippers kill her baby at a Black Mass?”
“I know she wasn’t telling the truth when she said the baby was killed here,” John Chester said. “It couldn’t have been.”
“Do you think Ginny Marsh killed her baby?”
John Chester shrugged. “I think it’s most likely she did or Bobby did. Her husband, Bobby Marsh, the baby’s father—”
“I know,” Gregor said.
“The common thing is for it to be one or the other, or both of them together. Or a boyfriend, of course, but I don’t know of any boyfriend in this case. You go around and around it, don’t you? All the usual explanations.”
“But Ginny Marsh couldn’t have killed Carol Littleton,” Gregor said. “You just told us that yourself.”
“I know. But Bobby could have. He’s big and strong and dumb enough. Not that I’ve got anything against Bobby Marsh, you understand, he’s just not too bright.”
“The other thing, of course, is that you haven’t answered me,” Gregor said. “You didn’t tell me if you thought they did it, either one of them or the two of them together.”
John Chester sighed. “I don’t exactly have an answer for you, Mr. Demarkian. I guess I thought it would all be cleared up by now. Ginny would just—bend under the strain and tell us what happened.”
“Which she hasn’t,” Gregor said.
“She definitely hasn’t,” Clayton Hall said. “If anything, she’s getting quieter and quieter by the minute.”
“What about Bobby Marsh?” Gregor asked.
“Mostly he drinks,” John Chester said. “He’s in the bars every night, and out on the road by two in the morning, too. One of these days I’m going to have to scrape him off the highway.”
“Do you think that indicates guilt or innocence?”
“I think it indicates that Bobby and the Reverend Holborn are having their problems again,” John Chester replied. “Bobby is a deacon in Henry Holborn’s church. Whenever they’re on the outs, Bobby goes to hell. I think he may be trying to get there literally.”
“Do you think they’ve fallen out over the murder of the baby?”
“No way to tell,” John Chester said.
“Do you think this murder and the murder of the baby are connected?”
“I couldn’t really say. They’d have to be connected at least superficially, though, wouldn’t they? Even if it was just a copycat kind of thing, somebody trying to make us think the murders were connected.” John Chester sighed. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help than this,” he said. “It’s just that there isn’t much to go on with all this. And there are a lot of people involved I don’t know. The women who live up here, for instance.”
“And that makes a difference?”
“When you know people, you have a fair idea of what they’re likely to do,” John Chester said. “Not always and not completely. It’s easy to get fooled. Even so, you’ve got some parameters. But with strangers—” He shrugged again.