Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 05 - Play With Fire

by Play

  "He told me to tell you he intimidated her with his male superiority. I told him even I wasn't dumb enough to say that to Kate Shugak. So then he told me to tell you he showed her his ID and said he was investigating a murder."

  "Since when are you calling it murder?"

  "We aren't."

  "Oh. And?"

  "And she caved and let him see Seabolt's file."

  "Hmm." Even an entrenched bureaucrat could be cowed by a threatened charge of obstructing justice, it seemed. Good old Jack. Morgan's Second Law was

  "Evidence first, admissibility second, and don't be too lavish with the truth when you're interviewing potential witnesses, either." Jack Morgan always took ruthless advantage of the fact that the D. A."s investigators were not cops. He could always, and always did, bat his eyes and say innocently, "What do I know? I just work the cases APD is too understaffed to handle, clean up the messes they leave behind." It endeared him neither to the D.A. nor to the cops but it got the job done. Morgan's First Law was

  "The nearest and the dearest got the motive with the most est but that was a different case and another story. "What was in the file?" Kate said.

  "To begin with, there was one almighty stink in Chistona over Seabolt's teaching practices."

  "Ah. Specifically?"

  "Specifically, he was teaching the theory of evolution."

  She'd heard that before, but this time Kate also heard an audible click, as if the last tumbler had fallen into place and the safe door was about to swing wide. "As in we come from monkeys?"

  "Yup."

  "As in the earth is about four million four hundred and ninety-five thousand years older than his father preaches?"

  "Yup."

  "I bet his father loved that. How do we know all this?" "Jack says the first half of Seabolt's file is filled with letters of testimonial from Simon Seabolt and all of his parishioners, recommending him for the position of teacher at Chistona, pointing out his family ties in the community, citing chapter and verse from his last employment in Oklahoma."

  "When did the tone of the file change?"

  "Seabolt taught at Chistona for two years. The school district got the first letter of complaint just before school let out the first year, May something, 1992."

  "What'd it say?"

  "It wasn't a letter of complaint, really. It was very polite, and very politely pointed out that since Chistona Public School was a public school and supported by taxpayer dollars, that all of the relevant theories of the creation of the universe should be taught there, and not just the one that held current political favor in Washington, D. C."

  "The significant word in that sentence being '."

  "Uh-huh. She wanted the district to understand that she wasn't protesting the teaching of the theory of evolution, and Jack says she underlined the word theory. She was merely pointing out that it was only a theory, and that other theories should be given equal time."

  He flipped the page in his notebook. "That was it for that year.

  School lets out, summer vacation, school starts again. October 10, another letter from Mrs. Gillespie."

  "Gillespie?"

  "Yeah," he frowned at his notes, "Mrs. Sally Gillespie." He looked over at her. "Why?"

  "We've met."

  "She the one who stiffed you when you were asking questions?"

  "One of them. Go on, what else?"

  He looked back down at his notes. "Now she's complaining about a time line Seabolt is having his students draw, one that runs from prehistory to the present." His eyes narrowed, trying to make out a word. "Jack said something about the Pest--the Pless--"

  "The Pleistocene."

  "Right, the Pleistocene. And something about Babe the Blue Ox?"

  "Blue Babe, the steppe bison on display in the UAF museum."

  "Um," he said dubiously, regarding his notes. "Maybe that was it.

  Again, Mrs. Gillespie was very polite. Again, she suggested equal time for alternative points of view. But this time, she wasn't alone." Kate smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. "The rest of the Chistona Little Chapel weighs in."

  "In spades. Jack and I looked on the calendar. There were twenty-one letters, all saying the same thing as Mrs. Gillespie, and all dated on the same Monday or the day after."

  "Following the Sunday sermon."

  "I don't care what people say about you, Shugak, you are smarter than the average bear."

  "You're too kind. What else did Jack say?" "He said there were a few letters supporting Daniel Seabolt, too. One of them came from a Philippa Cotton. She was a member of the school board, and she was a lot less polite. She said she didn't believe that God had brought down the Holocaust on the Jews because the Jews were responsible for killing Christ, and she didn't want her children being taught that in a school supported by her tax dollars."

  Kate swiveled to stare at him incredulously, and he said, "Uh-huh. Ms.

  Cotton further stated that if the school district continued to allow 'those churchy people," quote end quote, to run the Chistona school that she was going to yank her kids out and, furthermore, she'd call the Anchorage Daily News and tell them why."

  "Oho."

  "Uh-huh. There were a couple of other letters, one from a Gabrielle Jordan, one from a Smitty Taylor, who said pretty much the same thing."

  Jim refolded his notebook and stowed it away.

  Kate sat still, thinking. "Pastor Seabolt must have brought in a ringer." "Yeah," he said, "that's what we figured."

  "One of the elders of the church, maybe."

  "Or a guest speaker, air-freighted in from Glenn alien or Anchorage."

  "Did Jack ask Ms. Sleighter if she knew about the ringer?"

  He shook his head. Mutt stuck her muzzle over the back of the seat and he reached up to scratch her behind the ears. Her eyes half-closed; if she'd been a cat she would have been purring. Disgusting. "We only figured it out on the phone. He was going to go back to see her this afternoon. He's going to call me in Glennallen tonight. But we figure she had to know."

  "Just won't say until forced to it."

  "The Cover-Your-Ass Principle of good government," Jim agreed cheerfully. "You learn it your first year of public service or you're out on said ass the second. If there's trouble, you run. There was a lot of trouble at Chistona Public School last year. From what Jack said, Sleighter must be getting close to retirement." He grinned. "And I'm here to tell you, a retirement pension from the state of Alaska is a pension you can live on. You don't jeopardize one of those with the truth, especially if the truth makes you look bad."

  Kate sat in silence for a moment longer. "I'd like to talk to one of those letter-writers. Not one of the churchy people. One of the disloyal opposition."

  He raised his eyebrows in well-simulated surprise. "Would you indeed?

  Philippa Cotton, perhaps?" She eyed him suspiciously. "Perhaps." He started the engine and pulled the cruiser level with her truck. "Zen vollow me to zee casbah, pretty lady. She's living in Glennallen now, and I just happen to know where." "It was one hell of a mess," Philippa said. She was a bouncy, apple-cheeked woman with short, shiny brown hair. Her brown eyes had laugh lines around them and a merry grin to match, neither in evidence at the moment. "They had the school district superintendent down from Fairbanks, the president of the State Board of Education, a lawyer from the ACLU, hell, there was even a guy here from the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith in Seattle. Oh my yes, we had a fine time there for a while. The ACLU guy told us that giving equal time to the creation theory was unconstitutional. Some school in Louisiana tried it and the parents sued and in, oh, in 1986 I think he said, the courts ruled that teaching creationism in the public schools promoted a certain religious belief in which all the students might not share and therefore violated the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of religion." She paused. "He said the case went all the way to the Supreme Court."

  "The Supreme Court of Louisiana?"

  She shook her head. "The Supreme Court
of the United States of America."

  "In Washington, D. C.?"

  Philippa gave a single, firm nod. "The same."

  "Were Pastor Seabolt and the rest of them made aware of this?"

  "Of course."

  "And they still brought in a ringer."

  "Yes, one of the church elders, a guy by the name of Bill Prue. He didn't have a teaching certificate, but the district superintendent said he could come in anyway."

  "Frances Sleighter?"

  The nod again. "She came down in January, I think it was, on an inspection tour or something, and gave this speech about the Molly Hootch law, and how the most important thing about it was that it won for the people in the Alaskan villages who chose to have high schools built in their communities the right to have a say in what their children were taught."

  Kate sat up straight in her chair. "The intent of the Molly Hootch law was not to promote the teaching of any community's pet religious theories."

  "No? Doesn't matter. Ms. Sleighter said she was happy to see the community of Chistona taking such an interest in the curriculum. She said she wished more citizens got involved in their children's education." Phil's words were bitten off and bitter.

  "She didn't say anything about obeying the Constitution of the United States of America. She didn't say anything about the oath teachers have to sign, swearing they will uphold both the constitution of the state of Alaska and the Constitution of the United States of America."

  "Then what happened?"

  "Then she left. And the very next week, the Chistona Little Chapel wasn't letting the grass grow under its feet, Bill Prue came in and told my daughter and her ten classmates that it didn't do to take everything scientists said too literally or too seriously."

  Kate and Jim laughed.

  Phil wasn't laughing. "Then he moved from science on over into history, biblical history, and explained that the Old Testament was one long account of how God kept smiting the Jews for their collective sin of egregious pride. The gist of it was He visited Hitler on them because they were too proud."

  Kate closed her eyes and shook her head.

  "Yeah. So, you'd think Pastor Seabolt and the rest of them would be satisfied. They got their licks in, the kids had been exposed to an alternative look at the beginning, middle and ending of the world. But noooooooo. Then they had to start banning books."

  "Which ones?"

  Phil fortified herself with coffee. "First it was only books out of the library, books we could have at home if we wanted to let the kids read them. When we didn't make too big a fuss over that, they started in on the textbooks." She saw their expressions and nodded again, that single, decisive gesture that seemed to be characteristic of her. "They went after the science books first, the ones with the E word in them.

  Evolution," she added, in case they didn't know.

  They did, and they didn't like it. "Then what?" Jim said.

  "The history books were next. Seabolt and company didn't care for the chapter on ancient history, or the one on World War II." She gave a thin smile. "And then one of the kids brought home a poem. I will never forget the title of it as long as I live. "Church Going," by Philip Larkin."

  "What's it about?" Jim said.

  "A guy who goes to church and finds nobody home," Kate said. "What happened next?"

  "As if that wasn't bad enough," Phil said grimly, "next the teacher plays them a song, another title I will never forget, "Something to Believe In," by a rock group named Poison."

  "What's it about?" Jim said. "Or do I have to ask?"

  "Pretty much the same thing," Kate said, "and no, you didn't." "Smart ass," Jim said, but so only she could hear him.

  "What happened?" Kate asked Phil.

  Phil's usually merry mouth was stretched into a tense line. The time had obviously been a bad one and she wasn't enjoying reliving it. "The English teacher, she quit the following spring, before they could fire her, you know what she told me? She told me if she'd wanted to participate in a religious war she'd have moved to Jerusalem where she'd heard tell there was one already in progress. All she wanted was to try to draw some parallels, make the kids realize poetry could be as everyday as rock and roll. I mean, it's hard enough trying to get a generation raised on MTV to pay attention in class--I hate satellite dishes--but when you're trying to get adolescents with five-second attention spans to read literature and understand it ... " She shook her head and drank coffee.

  "So, she sent them home with an assignment to compare and contrast the poem with the song lyrics. One of Seabolt's congregation got hold of the textbook with the poem in it, and so then they started purging the English books."

  "Purging?" " Jim said.

  "Purging," Phil said with that single nod of her head. "I don't know what else you'd call reading through them and blacking out with Marksalots whatever you found objectionable."

  Kate didn't either.

  "That wasn't the worst of it, though."

  Kate didn't see how it could get much worse, but she didn't say so.

  "You know how it is with the smaller schools in the bush; one teacher winds up teaching three subjects to six different grades." Kate nodded.

  "It's the same in Chistona, one school, kindergarten through the twelfth grade, forty students, two full-time teachers, two part-time. Dan taught history and science, and his second year it was his turn to teach P. E." and of course that meant he got stuck with the health class, too."

  "AIDS," Jim said immediately. "I knew that was coming." "AIDS?" Kate said, momentarily confused by this jump from the lyric to the epidemic.

  "Sex education," Phil explained. "The churchy people wanted the school to teach abstinence, period. Actually, they didn't want the school to teach anything at all. on the subject, but if the state insisted, a lecture on abstinence was in order." She added, voice acid, "Essentially what they said was that they'd rather bury their kids than teach them how to protect themselves from what's out there." Kate thought of Bobby, and the girl in the bathtub.

  Phil ran a hand through her hair and made a face. "Sorry. I don't mean to sound so bitter. Anyway, Daniel didn't agree. He told the ninth through twelfth grades where babies came from, and about sexually transmitted diseases and AIDS."

  "I knew it," Jim said.

  "My daughter, Meta, was in that class. He told them the only sure way not to catch any or all of the above was, in fact, abstinence. He even told them that joke about the pill, you know the one how the pill is one hundred percent effective only if you hold it between your knees?

  Meta said he got a big laugh out of that. And then he told them that sometimes abstinence wasn't the first thing you thought of in situations where abstinence might be required, and the smart thing was to be prepared, and he suggested a couple of methods. He even showed them one." "Condoms," Jim said.

  "Uh-huh," Phil said.

  "Horrors," Jim said, "the C word." "Uh-huh," Phil said.

  "He wasn't preaching sexual permissiveness," Kate said. "What were they so afraid of?"

  "You mean other than the twentieth century?"

  Phil got up and refilled everyone's coffee cups and passed around a plate of doughnuts, still hot to the touch. They ate them in silence around the table, in a kitchen filled with the not unpleasant smell of deep fried fat. The linoleum floor was scrubbed down to its fading pattern, the top of the oil stove gleamed blackly, the refrigerator was festooned with clippings from the newspaper, coupons and a history quiz graded with a big, red C on it and Meta Cotton's name written in pencil in the upper right corner.