“Did you call your lawyers?”
“Oh, yes.”
“And?”
“They’re going to send somebody down here in the morning. It’s wonderful what having a couple of hundred million dollars can do. People just fall all over you to be nice to you.”
“I’m sure they do.”
Zhondra Meyer tapped the desk at the side of her keyboard. “I really do think you ought to go now, Mr. Demarkian. There’s nothing you can do here at the moment. There’s nothing I’m really willing to let you do. Rack it up and call it the end of a bad day.”
“Do you really want to find out who murdered Tiffany Marsh?”
“Of course I do,” Zhondra said.
“Do you really want to know why somebody is using your place as a dumping ground for dead bodies?”
“I think these are ridiculous questions, Mr. Demarkian. I don’t understand what it is they have to do with you.”
Gregor came all the way into the room, found a tall yellow wing chair, and sat down in it. “I would like to talk to Dinah and Stelle, if I could. Right this minute. After I talk to them, I’ll be more than willing to go back to town on my own two feet, without having to be propelled in that direction by you.”
“What if I don’t want you to talk to Dinah and Stelle?”
“I don’t think that circumstance is likely to come up, Ms. Meyer. In spite of your tone of anger and exasperation, it’s my very good guess that you’re scared to death. I promise you I won’t grill either of your guests. I just want to ask them a few questions.”
“If you were Clayton Hall, I’d throw you out on your ear.”
“But I’m not Clayton Hall.”
Zhondra Meyer seemed to consider this seriously, watching Gregor’s face all the time. Then she reached out and grabbed the phone that had been pushed to the side of the desk by the computer equipment.
“Alice?” she said, after she had punched a few buttons and waited a while. “Is that you? Are Stelle and Dinah there?” She listened. Then she nodded. “All right. Send her to me in the study, will you? I’ll talk to Dinah when she gets back. And Alice—pay attention to me. I don’t want parsnips again tonight, do you understand? I don’t care how wonderfully healthy they’re supposed to be.”
Zhondra hung up the phone and looked at Gregor. “Well,” she said, “there you are. Stelle is on her way. Dinah went into town about half an hour ago and isn’t expected back until evening. If you think I’m going to leave you alone in here with Stelle, you’re out of your mind.”
“You don’t have to leave me alone in here, Ms. Meyer. I’m not going to say anything I don’t want you to hear.”
“It’s not what you’re going to say that worries me, Mr. Demarkian. It’s what you’re going to do. You’d better behave yourself.”
Gregor was going to tell her that he always behaved himself—but he didn’t. The room was oppressive. The air was thick with humidity. He was tired. He was staying focused by an act of will. Whenever he began to relax, his mind started to drift. It drifted right out of the room and back up to the clearing, where it made light conversation with the wind.
2
THE APPEARANCE OF STELLE Cary should not have been a shock, but it was—and in that shock Gregor Demarkian realized just how odd this whole trip had been. Stelle Cary was a black woman, tall and middle-aged and bony, with a little potbelly that strained against the fabric of the smock she wore over her jeans. Her face was free of makeup, but her ears were hung with beaded strands in bright colors and silver disks that seemed too heavy. If it hadn’t been for the earrings, Stelle would have provided the perfect picture of a woman you wouldn’t look at twice on the street. Her clothes were worn and nondescript. Her face was worn and nondescript. Her carriage was halfway between youth and defeat.
What had shocked Gregor when Stelle first walked into the room was her color. He had become so used to seeing white people, and only white people, in Bellerton, that race had become a nonissue, unimportant because the conditions for it did not exist. He had, he realized, especially not expected to find a black woman at the camp, at least not as a guest. In his experience, institutions like the one Zhondra Meyer was trying to set up appealed almost universally to middle and upper-middle-class white women with axes to grind. Other women, poor or black or whatever else they might be, didn’t have time for retreats into the North Carolina pines. Here Stelle was, however, and she didn’t look ready to go away. She stood at the side of Zhondra Meyer’s desk like a sentinel with bad posture.