Baptism in Blood(99)

Clayton went up to the woman named Alice and took off his hat. Alice looked ready to explode. It was obvious that she had already been crying. Some women could pro­duce tears with no wear and tear on their faces, no bloating, no redness, no streaks of strain. Alice was not one of them.

“Now, Alice,” Clayton said. “What have you done with her? Is she still in the clearing?”

“Of course she isn’t in the clearing,” Alice said. “She’s never been in the clearing. She’s upstairs in her own room.”

“Did you move her, Alice? I know it’s natural, with a suicide—”

“She didn’t die in the clearing,” a woman said, a small woman with a black braid down her back and a flow­ered dress. “She died upstairs in her room. We didn’t move her.”

“We didn’t want anybody to be able to say we’d messed everything up,” Alice said. “We didn’t want to read in the papers that the reason you were never able to catch Zhondra’s murderer was that we destroyed all the evidence.”

“She’s up there hanging,” the small woman with the black braid said. “She has the rope swung over the chande­lier hook. We would have taken her down if we could. None of us could figure out how.”

“It’s just as well that you didn’t,” Clayton said. “Al­ice was right. It would destroy evidence.”

The woman with the braid blushed deep scarlet. “There’s one other thing,” she said, looking from Gregor to Clayton and back again. “She left a note.”

“She left it upstairs?” Gregor asked. “Near where you found the body?”

The small woman nodded.

“Is it still there?” Gregor said.

The small woman looked at Alice and blushed again.

“Well, it made sense to read it, didn’t it?” Alice demanded defiantly. “It was right there out in the open where anybody could see.”

“It had ‘to the police’ written on the envelope,” one of the other women said, a middle-aged one with lines of disapproval on either side of her mouth. “I thought it was like opening somebody else’s mail.”

“It wasn’t mail,” Alice said. “It was a note. It was probably a forged note. We had to see what it said.”

“I think we should have left it where it was,” the small woman with the braid said stubbornly. “I know how you feel about it, Alice, but it just makes sense. There was no hurry for us to read if. We could have let the police handle it and read it later when it was released.”

“If it ever was released,” Alice said. “And how would we have known that the same letter was released as the one they got? Once they had it and none of us had read it, they could have said anything. They could have made up whatever they wanted.”

“Do you have the letter?” Clayton asked, holding out his hand. “Come on now, Alice. No matter what’s hap­pened to Zhondra and what hasn’t happened to her, there have already been two murders on or near this property. Let’s go at this with a little common sense.”

Alice hesitated, looking more mulish by the second. Then she plunged her hand into the pocket of her jeans and came up with a crumpled envelope. Even in the battered state it was in, Gregor could see that it was made of very good, very expensive paper, the kind people ordered from jewelry stores with their initials engraved on it. It was al­most as thick as cardboard and made of cream linen, but Zhondra Meyer’s initials were nowhere to be seen.

Clayton took four small sheets of paper out of the envelope and began to read them over. Gregor could see that the words on them had been typed, and that there were no initials on these pages, either. He tried to remember if he had ever seen notepaper with Zhondra’s initials on it anywhere at Bonaventura, but it wasn’t the kind of thing he noticed if he had no reason to, and up until now he had no reason to. Still, Gregor thought it was odd, the first solid piece of evidence he had seen that Alice and his own instincts might be right, that it made no sense at all for Zhondra Meyer to have committed suicide. Zhondra Meyer was the kind of person who should have had good notepaper with her initials engraved on it. Clayton handed the little typewritten note to him, and Gregor took it.

“To Whom It May Concern,” it said, and then:

    I have tried as long as I could to go on with this, but it really isn’t any good, and it isn’t going to get any better. For the past few weeks, ever since Tiffany died, I have been in agony. Many of us here have been. I’m not going to name any names. As impossible as it might be for the po­lice and others of that kind, we never intended to kill anyone. We never expected that to happen. We thought we were just going out to the woods to worship the Goddess, to be part of nature and to glory in it. We should have realized. The God­dess has always been worshipped with blood. When the Jesuits dug through the pits of the Incan ziggurats they found piles of skulls of in­fants, piled up at the bottom where the fire had been. Maybe Henry Holborn is right. The God­dess calls to you, and what she wants is some­thing more dramatic than allegiance. We gave her what she wanted, Carol Littleton and I.