“Lord God Almighty, in the name of Christ Jesus, cast the Devil out and preserve Your good and faithful servants from the evil and destruction he brings whenever he is called.”
“That’s enough,” Clayton Hall said, appearing suddenly out of nowhere. It took Gregor a full second to realize who he was. Standing in the middle of Henry Holborn and his followers, Clayton looked a little ridiculous—and smaller than Gregor had remembered him.
“That’s enough,” Clayton said again, louder this time, so that everybody heard him and the noise in the clearing began to ebb. “When I say it’s enough, I mean it’s enough.”
Then Clayton took his gun out of the holster, aimed it into the air, and fired.
Two
1
THE REPORTERS WERE ALL up at the camp, milling around the edges of the clearing, trying to get one of Henry Holborn’s people to talk to them. Naomi knew, because she had just come down from the camp herself. Gregor Demarkian had been there, and Clayton Hall, and all the police and state police from this part of the state. Naomi had watched them work with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, a kind of heat that made her think of what a hot flash might be like. She still didn’t know what it was she had gone up there for. It had seemed natural at the time. When she left the library and started to walk toward Zhondra Meyer’s place, she found herself in a whole drift of people headed the same way. Maggie Kelleher had been there, and Rose MacNeill, and even Charlie Hare. Later, she had seen people up there she never would have expected, like David Sandler, and Stephen Harrow from the Methodist Church. They couldn’t all have been listening to the police band. Naomi had a CB radio in her office at the library, and a few other pieces of equipment, too, computers and fax machines. She kept ordering equipment and the Town Council kept giving it to her, reflexively, as if they didn’t even bother to read the requisition forms she filled out. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe, like her, they were all much too busy chasing ambulances in their heads and wondering what kind of trouble it was their friends and neighbors had gotten into this time. Naomi had seen more than one member of the Town Council up at the camp this morning. They had eager looks on their faces and hair slicked back with the sweat of excitement, just like everybody else.
Coming back down into town again, Naomi began to wish that she had never gone up. She was wearing very high heels with open toes and skinny straps. It hurt to walk in them, and one of the straps had torn away and fallen off in her travels, she didn’t know when. Besides, she was feeling more than a little ashamed of herself. What was it she had expected to see? What was it any of them had expected to see? Naomi seemed to remember thinking that there would be a corpse up there, out in the open—but she was smart enough and old enough to know that was impossible. She remembered Carol Littleton, vaguely: a stout, stolid, plain woman who did nothing at all to take care of herself. Sometimes Naomi wanted to take the women from the camp and shake them by the shoulders. It wasn’t necessary to cut your own hair with kitchen scissors or let your body run to fat or dress in thick denim sacks with no shape to them. Even if you didn’t want to wear makeup—Naomi couldn’t imagine a woman not wanting to wear makeup—there were things you could do to your face to make it look more alive, more human, more important. Carol Littleton had been one of those women who look perpetually on the verge of tears. When those women were from the South they drank, secretly, and sat on the broad platforms of their columned front porches, looking dazed. Carol Littleton had always looked dazed. Who on earth would want to cut her throat? There was no reason to murder a woman like that. It was so much more effective just to ignore her.
Main Street was deserted, although Naomi could tell she wasn’t the first one back. She could see Charlie Hare through the plate glass window of the feed store. The OPEN sign was hanging on Maggie Kelleher’s bookshop door, in spite of the fact that this was the one day a week she didn’t have any help. Naomi looked at the library and bit her lip. She didn’t really want to go back there just yet. She really could be fairly sure that it would be deserted. It was the reporters she had to deal with most these days. They all wanted to use the microfilm machine and read old copies of the Bellerton Times. They filed stories about racial incidents that took place in 1899 and religious revivals that went bad in 1902 as if it had all happened the day before yesterday. Naomi wanted to plant something for them to find: stories of space aliens; stories of pastors talking to little green men from Mars right in the middle of the Hartford Road. These people from New York were so stupid, and so prejudiced, they would probably believe them.