Baptism in Blood(71)

Naomi stopped on the sidewalk and saw she was standing next to Rose MacNeill’s big Victorian house. In the window of the curving tower that faced the street was a stained glass sun-catcher, spelling out the message JESUS IS LORD. Naomi saw Rose MacNeill, too, through a win­dow closer to the front door. She was fussing with a display of something, talking to someone who was out of sight.

I don’t have to stand here in the middle of Main Street, Naomi thought. I can go into Rose’s shop just like anybody else. Then she looked guiltily down the street, at the library again. They paid her to work, for God’s sake, not to visit at Rose’s, not to run all over town trying to get a look at a body. She had been away from her desk for hours.

Naomi turned off the sidewalk onto Rose MacNeill’s brick front walk, went up the steps to the front porch, and started to knock on the door. Then she remembered that this was not a house any longer, but a store, and went right in. The big front hall inside was very cool, almost frigid. It was funny, Naomi thought, the things you didn’t think to notice about your neighbor’s business. You wanted to know who was sleeping with whose husband and which wife had a fit about the drinking and threw which husband out—but a simple thing like this, that Rose must have had this big old house retrofitted for central air, didn’t catch your atten­tion at all.

“Naomi?” Rose stepped out from behind a pile of books. The books were all paperbacks by Hal Lindsey—The Late Great Planet Earth; The Liberation of Planet Earth; Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth—and Naomi felt a rush of contemptuous impatience. It wasn’t that Hal Lindsey was more than a little bit harebrained in his theories of life, death, and resurrection. A lot of people were a little harebrained. The problem with Hal Lindsey was that he wrote badly, and for that Naomi could never forgive him.

Rose was brushing dust off her hands onto her apron. “I saw you up at the camp,” she said. “I think I came down before you did. Can you believe it? It’s turning into a charnel house up there. Bodies with their throats cut. At least this time it wasn’t a baby.”

“She used to come into the library sometimes,” Naomi said. “She seemed harmless enough. There was nothing unusual about her.”

“She came in here once, too.” Rose was nodding. “It was the day of the hurricane, the day little Tiffany was killed. I was just telling that man Gregor Demarkian about it. I got sort of stuffed into a corner with him while they were clearing out Henry Holborn and his people. My, my. Can you imagine Henry acting like that? I still think of him as being back in high school, raising hell and being good-for-nothing.”

“I think he’s still good-for-nothing,” Naomi said. “What did Carol Littleton want in the store on the day of the hurricane?”

Rose had started fussing with another display. This one was of angels: angel dolls in robes and chiffon net gowns; angels on pins and angels on desk calendars. There were even angel bookmarks printed with the words The Angel of the Lord Declared unto Mary. Underneath the dis­play there was another pile of books. These were a single title in hardcover, called Angels: How to Tell the Good Ones from the Bad Ones and Bring the Power of God into Your Life. Rose straightened a couple of these, although they didn’t look like they needed it.

“She was looking for a christening gift,” Rose said, “for her granddaughter, I think it was, but really, it was pitiful. She didn’t even know the right word for it.”

“For what?”

“For a christening,” Rose said. “Can you imagine someone being brought up so ignorant of religion that she doesn’t even know what to call a christening? In the United States, for Heaven’s sake. In this day and age.”

“Some people belong to churches that don’t have in­fant baptism,” Naomi said. “When they baptize adults, they don’t call it a christening. And Jews don’t have chris­tenings at all.”

“I didn’t say everybody had christenings. I said most people knew what they were. Knew the word for them, at any rate. She bought a present for her granddaughter any­way.”

“She did? What was it?”

“One of those Madonna pictures you hang on the wall. One of the midsize ones, in a frame. She didn’t know what to call that, either. She kept asking for a picture of a mother and a baby. I felt sorry for her after a while, and it was funny, because when I first knew she was in the store, I was scared stiff.”

“You were?” Naomi was bewildered. “Why?”

Rose made a face. “Well, you never know, do you? And the things I heard. I didn’t know anybody up at the camp then. From the things Henry Holborn was saying, I thought they had horns and tails up there.”