Baptism in Blood(76)

“I was going to go into Maggie’s and buy a book.”

“Well, good. You go do that. Maggie could use the company. The store is absolutely dead.”

“I’m sure it is.” David hesitated. Part of him did not want to leave Stephen on his own. Stephen had been reel­ing. Stephen had been close to passing out. Another part of him didn’t want to hang on to Stephen when Stephen didn’t want to be hung on to. One of the cardinal principles of David Sandler’s life was that people ought to be left alone when they wanted to be left alone. People had the right to make stupid decisions as well as wise and good ones.

“Are you sure now?” David said. “You can make it back to the church on your own?”

“I won’t have any problems at all.”

“I’d go see a doctor pretty soon if I were you, though. It never hurts to check.”

“I’ll take your advice under consideration. Really, David. I’m all right. You don’t have to worry about what’s going to happen to me.”

Stephen shook his arm free and moved on. David stood on the sidewalk watching him go. The farther away Stephen got, the faster he seemed to go and the straighter he seemed to get. It really was all right, David told him­self—but it still didn’t feel right, and he wished he could think of something to do about it.

Instead, he turned back the way he had come. It was an oddly beautiful day, bright and clear—but empty, much too empty, and much too quiet, too. Maybe it was just that he still had the sound of Henry Holborn and his people singing “That Old Time Religion” in his head, but he kept thinking that he ought to hear something besides tree leaves rustling and sand scraping along in the gutters.

On the way back down the sidewalk, he passed in front of the Town Hall on the side where the jail window was, but on the other side of the street. He thought for a moment that he saw Ginny Marsh in there, looking out, counting his footsteps on the pavement.





Three


1


AFTER A WHILE IT got to the point where there was noth­ing left to do. The crowd was dispersed, as Clayton Hall insisted on describing it. He meant that after he had fired a few shots in the air, most of the people who had been watching from the sidelines decided they had things they would rather do. That was the case even with some of the reporters, who had all begun to look nervous and jumpy. After all, none of them had volunteered for combat duty. This was not supposed to be a dangerous assignment in the same sense as spending a few weeks in Sarajevo or Beirut. What Gregor noticed was that the people from town were faintly irritated and the strangers were more than a little alarmed. The people from town knew Clayton too well not to know what he was doing with a weapon. The strangers didn’t want to take anything for granted. After all, you never knew what people would do, especially these people, especially down here. These were the people who joined the National Rifle Association and claimed to keep at least two guns in their houses at all times. In the end, however, it was Henry Holborn who set the tone for everybody else. When the shot was fired, it seemed to change something in him, something deep. Gregor saw the metamorphosis in the older man’s face, working itself out like the plot of a bad soap opera. As soon as it was done, Henry Holborn’s face collapsed. His shoulders slumped. His body seemed to half melt into putty. He turned around to the people behind him and waved his arms.

“Wait, wait,” he called out. His voice had none of the boom to it that it had had when he was praying. Gregor could barely hear him. Few of his followers could hear him, either. The crowd on the edges of the clearing had begun to thin. Gregor saw Maggie Kelleher slip away, and Naomi Brent, and David Sandler. He recognized a few other peo­ple, too, like Betsey from the diner. Ricky Drake was in among Henry Holborn’s people, looking both belligerent and scared. Gregor started to fade back, toward the trees.

“Wait,” Henry Holborn called out again—and then a vast murmuring went up, a thousand tinny voices talking at once. Up until then, Henry Holborn’s people had been ab­solutely quiet. Now they were all talking at once, and it was like listening to bees humming along the telephone wires. In the sudden normality of this scene, they had become normal, too—not zealots and monsters, but ordinary men and women, old and middle-aged and young, small-town people who had come to witness another death they didn’t believe they had anything to do with.

It took a while to get the clearing free of civilians, and a while more for the tech men to do what they needed to do and pack up their equipment. Gregor spent all that time sitting on a rock just into the trees, thinking. This was not an easy operation. There was no wide path up here that an ambulance could take. The ambulance was parked down in Bonaventura’s back drive, along with the police cars and the mobile crime unit that belonged to the state police. Gregor watched Clayton Hall writing down things in a small steno pad, but he didn’t ask what those things were. He knew a look of bewilderment when he saw it, and he was bewildered enough himself. He was also enormously tired. He hadn’t paid much attention to the time he had gotten out of bed this morning, but it had been early, and he had been moving ever since. He wanted to lie down and take a nap, but there was no place to do it among the trees. He wouldn’t have lain down in the clearing even if it hadn’t been full of people. Over the course of the afternoon, the clearing had taken on a personality for him. Ghosts floated above it, and bodiless voices whispered in the trees. He stared and stared at the stones, but there was nothing in them that could tell him what it was about this place that was so important to somebody, so central, that it had be­come the stage of choice whenever a body was supposed to be found. There was just something about this place.