“I’m sure they did, Clayton, but the point is—” Gregor drummed his fingers on the desk next to the phone. “Look,” he started up again, “do you think Ginny Marsh saw a bunch of women worshipping the devil in that clearing up at the camp?”
“I think Ginny Marsh saw a bunch of women worshipping the goddess,” Clayton said.
“You think she saw them on the day of the hurricane?”
“I haven’t got the faintest idea. She saw them. If she killed that baby, it could have been weeks before, because all she needed was the excuse, and once she’d seen them the excuse was handy. Even if there hadn’t been anybody out there worshipping the goddess at the time.”
“What about Carol Littleton?” Gregor asked. “Who do you think killed her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think she was killed by the same person who killed Ginny Marsh’s baby?”
“I don’t know. Not if Ginny Marsh killed her own baby, though. Ginny is still safely in jail.”
“Do you think Carol Littleton was killed because of religion?”
Clayton hopped down off the desk he had been sitting on. “If you mean do I think that Henry Holborn or one of his people decided to go off half-cocked and start exorcising devils for himself, the answer is no. Henry can be pretty damned irritating at times, but he’s not violent.”
“There are people around him who could be violent,” Gregor said.
“Oh, I agree with you.” Clayton Hall nodded vigorously. “I was telling Henry the same thing myself just a couple of hours ago. And it worries me a little, probably more than you realize. But the fact is that we haven’t had any violence from any of them at any time for any reason. We haven’t even had any pro-life violence, and there’s an operating clinic not three miles from Henry Holborn’s church, one of the few first-rate clinics in North Carolina. You can’t lump people together, you know. You can’t say that just because there are crazy fundamentalists in Halford, Mississippi, that everybody who believes in the fundamentals is crazy.”
Actually, Gregor thought, that wasn’t the point. He wished he could get it clear in his own mind. He wasn’t one of those people who automatically thought all religions and all religious believers were dangerous, or insane, or worse. He even showed up at Father Tibor’s church every once in a while, out of politeness, and enjoyed himself there. It wasn’t that there was something wrong about religion. It was that there was something wrong about religion in this case.
“You got something on your mind?” Clayton Hall demanded. “You want to tell the rest of us about it?”
“You’re the only ‘rest of us’ there is at the moment, Clayton. And there’s nothing to tell, not in the way you mean it. I was thinking there was somebody I would like to talk to.”
“Well, if it isn’t somebody in jail or under suspicion of murder or living up in Massachusetts, I might be able to arrange that for you.”
“I’ve talked to her before, but I didn’t know her. The lady from the library. Ruth something.”
“Naomi,” Clayton said drily. “Naomi Brent. Now I can tell Henry Holborn that at least once upon a time, you read the Bible.”
“I heard Bible stories in my Sunday school classes,” Gregor said. “In Armenian. Can we go talk to this Naomi Brent?”
“Sure, if she’s in. Why don’t you let me call over to the library and find out? Then it’s just across the street.”
“I know where the library is, Clayton.”
Clayton picked up the phone. “That’s the trouble with small towns like this,” he said. “They’re too easy to get to know.”
2
THE WALK BETWEEN THE police department and the library felt endless, because for the first time in Gregor’s experience, Main Street wasn’t mostly deserted. There were the reporters on the front steps on Town Hall, but they didn’t count. There weren’t as many of them there as when Gregor had first seen them, either. Maybe the story was going stale, and some of them were being recalled to San Francisco and Tulsa. Maybe, and much more likely, all the waiting was boring beyond belief, and they took off as often as they dared to drink coffee in Betsey’s or buy magazines at Maggie Kelleher’s bookstore. What made this short walk really awful was that the people of Bellerton were out in force. Gregor saw Maggie Kelleher standing in front of her store’s plate glass window, talking to a man in a wooden rocker who seemed to own the store next to hers. He saw Ricky Drake on the steps of Betsey’s diner, stopped dead in his tracks to stare at them. A short, sharp movement caught his eye, and Gregor looked up to catch sight of an old woman retreating hastily behind a second-story curtain. He had a thick sheen of sweat across the back of his neck.