“About what? Did you ask?”
“I asked. She said something about Shelley, and about how you could never trust anyone, not really, you could never really know them, people were entirely unpredictable. It was quite a hash. Carol got that way when she talked about her daughter.”
“Was she coming out of this room here?”
Stelle shook her head. “I don’t think so. I wasn’t really paying much attention, but it’s my impression that she was coming out of one of the center sets of doors, the ones that open on to the living room.”
“Does that make sense to you, now that you think about it? Was that a likely way for her to come?”
“It depends on where she was coming from,” Stelle said reasonably. “I guess I just assumed that she’d come down from upstairs and was taking the shortest way out. The big front staircase is just outside the living room door.”
Gregor hauled himself to the edge of his chair and put his elbows on his knees. “So,” he said, “Carol came out of the house, and the two of you got together, and then you went to the clearing. Am I right so far?”
“Right.”
“And this woman Dinah was there when you got there.”
“She was sitting on a rock. Dinah’s the one who is really into all this stuff. Carol and I just did it because—well, I like to get high, and Carol needed something to take her mind off the new baby and how she wasn’t getting to see it. But Dinah’s a believer. She won’t even stand inside the circle of stones. She says it’s blasphemy.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “So then you were all together. What came next?”
“Well.” Stelle shot Zhondra a look. Zhondra gave an elaborate shrug.
“It’s all right, Stelle,” Zhondra said. “He knows all about it.”
Stelle sighed. “I suppose by now the entire state of North Carolina knows about it. Maybe the entire world. What came next, Mr. Demarkian, is that we got out of our clothes.”
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
“What did you do with them?”
“We put them in a pile under one of the trees. It didn’t matter what happened to them as long as they were out of the way while the ceremony was going on.”
“Fine,” Gregor said. “What did you do next?”
“We took up positions around the circle of stones and knelt down.”
“And?”
“And we started praying. We were singing this chant thing, this song that Dinah wrote. About how wonderful women are and how beautiful all their parts are. It was weird, really. I mean, there was all this thunder and lightning, and it worked somehow. I mean, it all seemed part of the ceremony. Crash. Bang. Boom. Chant. When the rain really started coming down, I was surprised as hell.”
“Did you run for the house when that happened?”
Stelle Cary burst out laughing. “Mr. Demarkian, we couldn’t run anywhere. We were stuck. The trees were whipping around like jump ropes. The rain was coming down in buckets. There was hail. All we could do was take cover under one of those trees, hold our clothes over our heads, and hope we didn’t get hit by something serious. We were there all night.”
“All night?”
“Well, all day and most of the evening, anyway. We didn’t get out until the storm was all over and Zhondra came looking for us and told us the baby was dead. And told us that Ginny was saying we killed it. I thought I was going to bust a blood vessel, and Carol started to cry and couldn’t stop.”
“Ginny Marsh was never in the clearing that day?”
“Not that any of us saw.”
“The baby wasn’t either?”
“Again,” Stelle insisted, “not that any of us saw. I suppose they could have been hiding in the trees. Especially if the baby was, well, you know, already dead. So that it wouldn’t cry.”
“Is that what you think happened? That somebody killed it and then hid in the trees near the clearing?”
“I don’t think anything, Mr. Demarkian. Except I think Ginny probably killed the child. I never did like Ginny much. She’s too—intense.”
“That’s interesting,” Gregor said. “Everybody else I’ve talked to seems to like her a great deal. They keep trying to convince me that she couldn’t possibly have killed her own baby.”
“Mothers kill their children every day,” Stelle said. “And I think if that girl didn’t kill the baby, she’s fronting for the man who did. And it would have to be a man, wouldn’t you think?”
“It usually is,” Gregor admitted.