by Jane Haddam
“Colin,” Bennis said. Then she shook her head. “No, maybe that’s the other one. I didn’t know he had children. Did you?”
“Yes, I did. He’s made a point of making sure most people don’t know about it. Trying to save their privacy, I’d guess, or their sanity.”
“Is that Jack Bullard person insane?” Bennis asked. “He sounds insane. How can anybody really not know if he’s really real?”
Gregor thought he had met a lot of people who didn’t know if they were really real, and that those people had included all the serial killers whose cases he had ever been involved with. He wished Father Tibor were here, instead of back on Cavanaugh Street being driven to distraction by Donna Moradanyan Donahue. It was not a matter of belief in God or lack of belief in God, or of belief in an afterlife and the supernatural or the lack of it. Gregor had known murderers who were believers and murderers who were not believers. He had known saints who were believers and saints who were not believers. It was not so simple as what sort of philosophy people had come to accept as some sort of conscious act of the will. Most people felt real, and some people just did not. The people who analyzed serial killers got it wrong most of the time. Serial killers did not think they were the only real people in the world. They didn’t think they were real at all. They killed because—
“But he wasn’t a serial killer,” Gregor said.
“What?” Bennis said.
“Jack Bullard,” Gregor said. “He wasn’t a serial killer. Even if he did really kill Kendra Rhode, with intent, I mean. He wasn’t a serial killer.”
“I’d noticed that,” Bennis said. “Or I would have, if I’d bothered to think about it. The ceremony is going to start any moment. They’re fussing around at the back there for the bride to come in.”
“I was thinking of the way murderers think,” Gregor said. “There’s a piece of conventional wisdom about serial killers, that each of them thinks he’s the only real human being on earth. I’ve been thinking these last few weeks that that’s exactly backward.”
“You mean that they don’t think they’re real themselves? Gregor, for goodness’ sake, if that was what made somebody a serial killer, we’d have thousands of them roaming around the landscape. A lot of people don’t think they’re really real these days. That’s why they’ll take their shirts off for Girls Gone Wild or go on Jerry Springer and admit to sleeping with their daughter’s husband. There’s got to be something more to it than that.”
Gregor was sure that there did have to be something more to it than that, but he didn’t know what, and Annabeth Falmer was proceeding up the aisle carrying a big bouquet of hot house flowers. The organ was playing, too, and he didn’t know when it had started. He tried to imagine his own wedding to Bennis in a few months’ time, but realized that there was too much he just didn’t know. Was there going to be an organ? Were the bridesmaids going to be in special, hideous dresses? Annabeth had no bridesmaids at all, and she looked just fine.
“You’ll notice,” Gregor said, whispering into Bennis’s ear much as Stewart’s son was whispering in Marcey Mandret’s. “It took them a few weeks, and it’s a lovely wedding.”
“Tell that to Donna Moradanyan,” Bennis said. “And then duck.”
Keep reading for a sneak peek at
Jane Haddam’s next mystery
LIVING WITNESS
Available soon in hardcover from Minotaur Books
1
If Ann-Victoria Hadley had been forced to tell the truth—and she never had to be forced; she always told the truth—she would have had to admit that this was not the first time she had been the most hated person in Snow Hill, Pennsylvania. In fact, for most of her ninety-one years, she had made something of a hobby of it. It had started in 1926, when she was ten. That was the first and last time she had ever entered the Snow Hill Historical Society’s annual Fourth of July Essay Contest. The winner of the contest got to read her essay from the reviewing stand at the end of the Fourth of July parade.
“Right in front of everybody!” Annie-Vic’s fifth-grade teacher had said, as if that was the most important thing in the world—doing whatever you did “right in front of everybody.” The teacher was old Miss Encander, a creaking wreck of medical problems held together by nothing but her own smugness. It had seemed to Annie-Vic, at the time, that everybody in Snow Hill was held together by smugness, and that not even the oppressive June heat that always accompanied the last week of school could excuse Miss Encander for requiring her class to enter that contest. Besides, it wasn’t fair. In elementary school, the hill kids were still mixed in with the kids from the town. They sat at the back of the classroom in stolid, silent rows and stared at their hands if the teacher called on them. The essay that won the contest was always called something like “Today We Thank Our Founding Fathers.” What did the hill kids have to be thankful for?
There was no plumbing up there in those shacks, and no electricity either, and once or twice a year one of the men died from drinking the stuff they made in a still they kept out of sight in an abandoned mine.
“It’s better when they die,” Annie-Vic’s father had said, at the dinner table, to Annie-Vic’s mother. “It’s worse when they go blind or crazy and there’s nothing you can do for them.”
Annie-Vic’s father was the one “real” doctor in town, but he had wanted to be a lawyer. Then his older brother Thomas had decided to be a lawyer himself, and their father, Annie-Vic’s Grampa Hay, had decided that there wasn’t enough room for two lawyers in Snow Hill.
“It would never have occurred to him that I could pack up and move away and be a lawyer somewhere else,” Annie-Vic’s father said. “It never even occurred to me.”
Annie-Vic called her essay “Patriotism,” and that was accurate. It was an essay about patriotism. Mostly, it was an essay about why patriotism was bad for you, and why they should give up celebrating the Fourth of July until they’d cleaned up everything that was wrong with the country. Annie-Vic had mentioned the hill kids, but she had also mentioned Music and Art and Learning, which were so much more advanced in Europe. That was why old Miss Encander had ended up calling her not just a Communist, but a snob.
These days, people were calling Annie-Vic an atheist, or—worse yet, in the eyes of most of them—a secular humanist. Annie-Vic had never heard the term before all this fuss started, and she’d ended up having to look it up on the Internet. Annie-Vic had a cable Internet connection on her computer at home and a wireless card in her laptop, for when she was traveling. She did a lot of traveling. Her last trip had been just last July, to Mongolia, to see a total eclipse of the sun. She had gone with an AAVC tour group and had her picture taken with her arms around a yak.
“Asinine,” Annie-Vic thought now, looking down the long straight line of Main Street. She was thinking of the now, of course, but she was also thinking of that long-ago fuss with Miss Encander. She had known even then that she could have written a much more insulting essay. She could have written one titled “Snow Hill, Pennsylvania, The Town with the Stupidest People in the World,” or “Miss Encander Should Learn Something Before She Tries to Teach It.” It was a testament to Annie-Vic’s mother that Annie-Vic could never force herself to be that rude.
Main Street had stores on it—and churches. There were half a dozen churches, even though Snow Hill was a small place. The churches were not the same ones Annie-Vic remembered from her childhood. The buildings were the same—except for the Holiness Church, which was new, and all the way at the end of the street—but the denominations in them had switched around. The Congregationalists were gone. They had become the United Church of Christ and then just sort of disappeared. Their building had been taken over by the Assembly of God. The Baptists had moved into the church that had once belonged to the Episcopalians. The Mt. Sinai Full Gospel Church had moved into the Baptists’ old building. Only the Lutherans had stayed where they’d started out, and almost nobody went to the Lutherans anymore.
Annie-Vic leaned over and check
ed the laces on her running shoes. She did not run—she was ninety-one, and she hadn’t even liked to run when she was at Vassar; it was a new thing, this driving need to race about everywhere and be athletic—but she did walk every day, up and down Main Street if she were in town. In Mongolia she had not walked because she had hiked every day with her group, but on another AAVC trip, to China, she had risen every morning and paced three or four times around her hotel. The Chinese police were not happy with the idea of an American walking around the streets on her own, for what looked to be no reason of any kind at all.
There were people on Main Street who were waiting for her and Annie-Vic knew it. They’d waited for her when she’d come home on her first vacation from college. In those days it was strange for a girl to go to college at all. It was an affront that a girl would go away to a place like Vassar, which was for people who were richer than the Hadleys were, for people who were not Folks. It was important to almost everybody in Snow Hill to be Just Folks. Annie-Vic had always wondered if they had waited for her on Main Street when they found out that she wasn’t coming home after college, that she had enlisted in the Navy instead. That was in 1937, and four short years later America was at war. That time, Annie-Vic had managed to stay away for damned near a decade. She still thought of it as the happiest time of her life, in spite of the fact that she’d spent two years of it in a Japanese prisoner of war camp.
“Asinine,” she said again. Then she started off down the sidewalk, moving more quickly than most people twenty years younger than she was could have managed, staring straight ahead as she did. The people who were waiting for her were not going to slow her down, or change her mind. If they weren’t all boneheaded stupid, they’d know it.
The first stretch of Main Street was clear of people. It was a working day in the middle of the week, and most of the people who lived in Snow Hill were away at jobs in Harrisburg. Yes, Annie-Vic thought, even Snow Hill was changing. Even Snow Hill couldn’t stay stuck in the mud of provincial ignorance forever, although it sure as Hell intended to try. Annie-Vic was an imposing figure, and she knew it. She was tall for a woman, even these days, and so spare she could have served as a flagpole with very little alteration. Her arms and legs pumped, the way she had been taught to make them in the cardiovascular health class she’d taken at the community college. Her hair was thick and wild and gray as dirt. Her eyes were clear of cataracts and in no need of glasses except when she wanted to read. Her spine was as straight as a metal rod.
“Use it or lose it,” she whispered to herself, under her breath.
That was just the moment she was coming up on the Snow Hill Diner, and on Alice McGuffie, standing right outside.
“Filthy little bitch,” Alice McGuffie said, in a voice loud enough to carry all up and down the street. “You’re going to burn in Hell.”
2
Nicodemus Frapp saw Alice McGuffie come out onto Main Street just as old Miss Hadley was about to pass, and he knew—even standing all the way up at the other end of town—that it was not a situation likely to end in an exchange of “Good mornings.” At least, it wasn’t going to end that way for Alice. Annie-Vic was polite to a fault. She was polite in that way that highly educated, highly sophisticated people often were, with such a meticulous dedication to detail that she seemed to be insulting you in a way you couldn’t put your finger on. It was the kind of ability Nick had envied endlessly when he was growing up. He had even envied it in old Miss Hadley, since he had grown up in Snow Hill. Now he knew that it was not the kind of thing he would ever be able to do, and that it wouldn’t be good for him if he could. There were people in his congregation who thought Nick was highly educated himself. He’d been “away at school” long enough to have figured out the difference between the Oral Roberts University and Vassar.
Main Street was bright and hard this morning. It was too cold for this late in the winter. Nick watched Annie-Vic on her walk, the upright posture, the heel-to-toe “power foot” execution. He’d grown up in the hills. His people were miners and farmers. His own father hadn’t lasted but a few months past his fiftieth birthday. Nick could remember himself coming down to school every day with his lunch packed into a plastic beach bucket. All the hill kids had beach buckets to carry their lunches in, because the buckets went on sale cheap at Kmart at the end of the summer, and because it was much too expensive to buy lunch at the cafeteria at school. Nick was willing to bet that Annie-Vic had been able to buy her lunch when she was in elementary school, or, if the cafeteria didn’t exist yet—Nick was only thirty-six; some parts of the town’s social history still confused him—able to walk home and have it served to her by her mother. Nick’s own mother had had a job at a package store most of the time he was growing up. The package store would have killed her, if his father hadn’t gotten around to doing it to her first.
Nick took one last look at Annie-Vic, going by the hardware store, and Mr. Radkin stepping out to talk to her. That ought to be a conversation, he thought. But there was no conversation. Annie-Vic didn’t stop moving. Nick looked up at George Radkin and back at Annie-Vic and then around at his own new church, built from scratch less than ten years ago, from money made by the people who had once had to send their children to school with beach buckets. Then he turned his back to the town and went inside. There was a time in his life that he’d thought that he was turning his back on this town for good. He’d thought he would get himself ordained and go to work in a church in a place he’d never seen, an exotic place, like Florida. He didn’t know why he’d decided, in the end, to come back home, but he had this to hold on to: He believed in God the way most people believed in their own left shoulders. He could feel the presence of the Almighty with him at every hour of the day and night. He knew that God understood him better than he understood himself, and that God wanted only good things for him. Nick was not the kind of preacher who promised hellfire and destruction. He wasn’t even the kind of preacher who believed in it.
Inside the church, two of the men from the Men’s Study Group, Harve Griegson and Pete DeMensh, were painting the front of the new choir box. Nick hadn’t been sure about putting in a choir, but some of the women had really wanted it, and he didn’t think it would do any harm. Still, it was a lot different from the Holiness Church he remembered from his childhood, which had been in the old minister’s ten-by-twelve-foot living room in a house where the “driveway” was nothing but mud ruts dug by the minister’s big pickup truck. It had been a blessing to get to the summer and be able to worship in a field, no matter how hot it was. It had been a blessing when no more than two people had to be taken to the hospital, too, and not just because there was a legitimate worry about somebody dying from the rattlesnake venom. Dear Lord, the way the nurses at the emergency room had looked at them, every time.
“Nick?” Harve Griegson said.
“I was thinking about the snakes,” Nick said. He had turned his back on the two men while he was thinking, and he didn’t turn around now. He was looking at the row on row of shiny wooden pews, every one of them planed and sanded and stained and waxed so that they looked like something out of a Hollywood movie about church. Was there something wrong with that? America had moved on since the days when his father had been a boy. It had moved on in the days since he himself had been a boy. Wasn’t it right that the hill people should be moving on too?
“You’re not thinking about bringing back the snakes, are you, Nick?” Harve Griegson asked. “Because, you know, I thought that was one of your better changes. My daddy died from one of those snakes. You got to wonder what people were thinking.”
“They were thinking that God keeps his promises,” Nick said, but then he was sorry he’d said it. Harve Griegson had a house with indoor plumbing, two trucks, and a big flat-screen TV, but he’d still never gone beyond his sophomore year in high school, and he barely got through that. It was one of the few things that could make Nick really angry after all these years. It was a joke, what the town used to c
all an “education” for the hill kids. It was worse than a joke. The only way Nick himself had been able to overcome it was that he was a natural reader. He read everything and anything, and he sat in the library one afternoon for six hours until they broke down and let him have a library card. The hill kids he’d grown up with had barely learned to read at all, and barely learned to figure, and as soon as they got within shouting distance of their fifteenth birthdays they’d gotten the message that everybody would be glad if they would just go.
“Nick,” Pete said, sounding worried, “are you all right?”
“He’s thinking about bringing back the snakes,” Harve said. He sounded worried.
Nick turned around to look at them. “I’m fine. I’m not thinking about bringing back the snakes. I just saw Annie-Vic have a run-in with Alice McGuffie.”
“Annie-Vic,” Harve Griegson said.
“I still don’t get it,” Pete said. “I don’t get why we aren’t part of that lawsuit.”
“We’ve got no reason to be part of that lawsuit,” Nick said. “Our children don’t go to the public school. We’ve got our own school.”
“She thinks she’s better than everybody,” Harve said. “Just look at her. Fancy college. Going off all over the place. She thinks the rest of us are brick stupid.”
“Which doesn’t change the fact that we can’t be part of a lawsuit against the teaching of anything at all at the public schools, when our children don’t go to the public schools.” Nick walked all the way down the center aisle and looked at the choir box. Some churches had choir lofts, but they hadn’t planned for that when they built the building, so the choir was going to be in a small boxlike enclosure at the front, to the left of the pulpit and a little ahead of the first lefthand pew. It looked nice, Nick had to admit, even though he was sure there had never been anything like it in any Holiness Church anywhere.
“Somebody’s going to do something about that woman someday,” Harve said. “She doesn’t have any children in the public schools, either. She doesn’t have any children. She’s a radical feminist. Why’s she even on the school board?”
