So Gregor leaned forward and grabbed David by the shoulder. “David,” he said. “David, wake up.”
David Sandler shuddered, and turned, and snored more loudly. Gregor pushed him again.
“David, for heaven’s sake. I want to talk to you.”
David opened his eyes and squinted, his eyelids full of early morning grit.
“Gregor? What is it? Has something happened?”
“I wanted to have a chance to talk to you before I went out.”
“What… time is it?”
Gregor looked down at his wrists and found them bare. He had been forgetting his watch more and more lately. “I don’t know,” he told David. “I think it’s about six-thirty or seven. I woke up at six.”
“Six-thirty or seven… and you woke up at six. Do you do that all the time?”
“Pretty much.”
“Right.” David Sandler sat up in bed. His T-shirt had UNC TARHEELS printed across the front, and what looked like a college seal. His hair was a mass of tangles. He settled the sheet down around his waist and yawned. “So what is it? Is there something going on? What’s your hurry this morning?”
“I want to go into town and talk to Clayton Hall, but I don’t want to do it without asking you a few questions. I’ve got to have a long talk with Clayton Hall. And I suppose it’s time I faced the inevitable.”
“What’s the inevitable?”
“At least attempting to talk to Ginny Marsh. I’ve been avoiding it. I’ve been avoiding it very conscientiously. It wasn’t until I talked to Bennis last night that I realized it.”
“You talked to Bennis last night? I hope she’s well. I hope you gave her my regards.”
“I didn’t give her anybody’s regards. It wasn’t that kind of conversation. Don’t you want to get up and get dressed or something?”
“I don’t want to get up at all,” David said. “If I get dressed, I’ll never get back to sleep. I was out until two this morning.”
“All that time in Chapel Hill?”
“Actually,” David said, “I stopped at Maggie Kelleher’s house on the way back and had a couple of glasses of wine.”
“Ah.”
“Don’t say ‘ah’ to me, Gregor. I’m a grown man and she’s a grown woman. It’s not like we were a couple of teenagers sneaking out when her parents weren’t looking.”
“It’s just that I didn’t realize you were involved with somebody down here.”
“I’m not,” David said. “Not yet. I’m just—working on it.”
Gregor decided to let this part of the conversation go. He didn’t want David to ask if he was involved with anyone himself. It would be a question that would be impossible to answer. Yes—if it meant that there was somebody he cared about. No—if it meant that he was sleeping with her. He took a long sip of coffee and put all thoughts of sleeping with Bennis Hannaford out of his head. He didn’t even want to think about thinking about it. It disturbed him.
“Go back to the first murder,” he said instead. “When you found the mother coming at you covered with blood, as you put it. She was alone?”
“Absolutely alone,” David agreed.
“Fine. Did she actually tell you that the baby was in that clearing at the back of the house? Did she say that specifically?”
David thought about it. “No,” he said. “She just said the baby was dead and the body was behind the house. She didn’t say where behind the house.”
“Did you follow her immediately and look?”
“No, I didn’t. I went into the house itself, into the study, where all these people were sitting around. There were people in the living room, too, but the people I knew were mostly in the study.”
“People like who?”
David got into a cross-legged position and scratched his head. “Maggie,” he said finally, “and Zhondra Meyer herself, of course. And Rose MacNeill. I remember because she kept praying all the time. And Naomi Brent. I think Stephen Harrow might have been in there, too.”
“Might have been?”
“It was dark, Gregor. The electricity was out. There was a fire going in that enormous fireplace—have you seen the fireplaces up there yet?—and there were some candles, but you know what it’s like trying to make anything out in light like that. Stephen was around later, I know, because I talked to him. After we’d all gone up the hill and found the baby.”
“And the baby was there, in the clearing, already dead.”
“Oh, yes.”
“What about Carol Littleton, the woman who died? Did you know who she was at the time?”