“It was the night of the hurricane, Mr. Demarkian. I’ll remember it all my life.”
“Good. I take it you ended up in the study at Bonaventura during the storm. You were there when David Sandler came in with Ginny Marsh and said that the baby was dead.”
“He didn’t say that the baby was dead,” Naomi corrected. “He hadn’t seen the baby yet. He said we had to find the baby.”
“All right. So he said you had to find the baby, and he had Ginny with him, and she was—”
“All wet and covered with red. Her clothes were soaked through with red. Some of it was dye that had run from her shirt, but some of it was blood, and there was blood all over her hands and her arms. The paper came out and said it, later.”
“Who else was in the study at the time that David Sandler got there?”
“Oh, lots of people. Zhondra Meyer herself, of course. She spent the whole storm sitting behind that big desk of hers, behaving like a queen bee. It was something to see. And Maggie Kelleher was there, sitting on the rug in front of the fire. And Rose MacNeill. Oh, and that woman Alice, you know, Zhondra Meyer’s assistant.”
“And that was all?”
“Oh, no, Mr. Demarkian. There were dozens of people there. All of the women from the camp. The women were mostly in the living room next door, where we couldn’t see them, but they were there. I meant, those were the people from town that I was talking to. You know, the people I know.”
“You didn’t see Carol Littleton?”
“No, Mr. Demarkian, I didn’t.”
“Would you have known who she was?”
“Sure. She came into town all the time. Some of them up there almost never come in, but Carol did. She came into the library every Tuesday and Thursday, right at eleven o’clock. And she was in the library on the morning of the storm, too. That’s how I knew that Zhondra Meyer was taking people in up at the camp. Carol told me. And I thought, you know, that Bonaventura was a hell of a lot more interesting than the Bellerton Public High School, so why not?”
“Is that how most of the people from town who went up to the camp found out it was okay to go there? Because Carol Littleton told them?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Demarkian. But she surely was telling lots of people. It was one of the only two topics of conversation she had that morning.”
“What was the other one?”
“Her granddaughter. Her daughter’s daughter. The one that was going to have the christening she wasn’t going to be allowed to go to. Not that that matters much anymore.”
“Mmm,” Gregor said.
The phone on Naomi Brent’s desk rang and she picked it up. She said hello and then listened in silence, frowning more deeply every second the tinny little voice came at her over the line. Finally she said, “All right, just a minute, let me put him on,” and handed the phone across the desk to Clayton.
“It’s Jackson,” she told him. “I think he’s saying that something else has gone wrong up at that house.”
Clayton Hall and Gregor Demarkian looked at each other. Then Clayton put the receiver to his ear and said, “Jackson? What the hell is up?”
There was more tinny noise coming over the line, and then a small click: Jackson hanging up. Clayton handed the phone back across the desk to Naomi and turned to Gregor Demarkian.
“We better go,” he said. “If Jackson has his ass on straight, Zhondra Meyer just committed suicide.”
PART THREE
One
1
THEY WERE ALL UP there on the terrace when Clayton and Gregor arrived, all the women who lived at the camp. Later, Gregor knew, the rest would arrive: the reporters, the people from town. That only went to prove that it wasn’t a question of being a hick or not being one. The reporters would tell each other that they were only up here because they were doing their jobs. The truth was that they craved even more blood lust excitement than the rest of the world. Gregor was surprised to see how many women there were. Every time he thought he had the group all together, there seemed to be more of them than before. He recognized the woman called Alice, and Stelle Cary, standing in two separate knots of women on opposite sides of the terrace. He recognized one or two others he didn’t have names for. There was a wind high in the trees, bending the tops of the pines back and forth above his head. The air was warm and thick with water. Bonaventura, Gregor thought, didn’t belong here. It was a cold weather house, built by a cold weather man. It ought to be somewhere that snow could fall on it, and the fires lit in its fireplaces.
Gregor and Clayton had expected all the women to be staring toward the stand of trees and the circle of stones. In fact, they had expected them to be in the stand of trees and trampling through the circle of stones. Instead, they were all standing on the terrace, looking at each other, watching Clayton and Gregor come around the side of the house on the narrow gravel path.