Stelle Cary leaned back and stretched her arms and back, arching. “Do you know what I think?” she asked Gregor. “I think it’s all very simple, and the only reason Carol was killed was to make it look like it wasn’t. I think Ginny and that husband of hers are in it together, and I think the good Reverend Henry Holborn is masterminding the whole thing. I think I’m sick and tired of the South and I’m sick and tired of religion and I’m sick and tired of being a lesbian feminist, too. I think I’m going back to my old neighborhood in Chicago and see who’s still around that I know.”
“I think,” Gregor said carefully, “that that would be both unfortunate and unwise.”
Stelle hopped off the desk, grinning brilliantly. “I think you can take that advice and stuff it where the sun don’t shine,” she told him. “And now, if you two will excuse me, I think I’m going off to get something to eat.”
Stelle Cary headed for the study door and disappeared into the hall. Zhondra Meyer watched her go, then blew a raspberry and collapsed into the chair behind the desk.
“Honestly,” she said. “Some people.”
Four
1
THE NEXT MORNING, GREGOR Demarkian woke to find that David Sandler had written dozens of notes to him on sticky paper and stuck them all over the house. The one on the refrigerator said:
Where have you been? Make some time to talk.
This, Gregor thought, was not entirely fair. He’d had plenty of time to talk the night before, which he had spent sitting by himself on David’s deck, looking out over the ocean. Last night had been David Sandler’s night to go up to Chapel Hill, where he taught a once-a-week seminar in the philosophy of free thought at the University of North Carolina. Gregor remembered wondering whether anybody ever used the words “free thought” anymore, or even knew what they meant. At any rate, Gregor had been alone, with the first glass of wine he’d had in months. The waves had pounded against the thick wooden pilings that held up David’s house. The full moon had floated in the blackness above the water, looking fat and smug. In the long run, Gregor didn’t think it had been such a good idea, being on his own like that. He had spent too much time on his own in the first six months after Elizabeth died. He had sold the apartment they had lived in together for so many years, and rented a smaller one, and spent night after night sitting on its little balcony, watching the traffic on the Beltway. After a while the cars had begun to look like gigantic beetles, chasing each other and snapping their jaws. Like most other men of his generation, Gregor had never learned to take care of himself emotionally. He had had Elizabeth for that, and before Elizabeth his mother. Every once in a while, there had been gaps, like during the time he had spent in the army, but he had taken care of those by bulling through them, and making sure they didn’t last too long. After Elizabeth died, the gap seemed to last forever. He wondered sometimes if he had gone back to Cavanaugh Street in the hope of finding a place to rest, like a shark looking for a place to die. God only knew, he hadn’t been able to think of anything to do with himself, or any reason to go on getting up in the morning, when he had been left to himself. Even the work that he had done for twenty years had failed to move him. He thought of the country filling up with rapists and murderers and drug dealers and kidnappers, and he just didn’t care.
He didn’t know what it was—the moon, maybe, or the uncustomary wine—but after a while he couldn’t sit in the silence and not hear another human voice. He went back into the house and turned on the television in the study. He found three religious stations and the networks. Two of the networks were showing sitcoms. The third, CBS, had one of those tabloid news shows, with a story about a man in Tennessee who had first been suspected of being a serial murderer because of the way he treated his cats. He locked his cats up in his garage for days at a time; without food or water, and made it impossible for them to get out. The religious stations all seemed to be showing preachers of one kind or another, appalled at the state of the country and the state of the world. Gregor stopped and listened to the nun for a few minutes, because she was the only one of the three who didn’t sound hysterical. She was talking about a movie called Priest, which she didn’t like. All the priests in it were either terrible people, or untrue to their vows of celibacy. Then the program went to a break, and the station logo came on. Gregor found that he was watching something called the Eternal Word Television Network. He wasn’t ready for eternal words. He turned the television off and got up and went into the living room.