Cheating at Solitaire

by Jane Haddam

  “She’s on the school board because she ran for a place and the people elected her,” Nick said firmly, “and that’s the essence of democracy. We’ve got to learn to live with it. We’ve also got to learn to live with what’s about to happen in this town come the trial starting up in a couple of weeks. Have any of you talked to the Hendersons like I asked you to?”

  Pete and Harve both looked away.

  “They’re not easy to find,” Harve said.

  “Well, we’d better find them,” Nick said. “Because as sure as the sun rises and the moon sets, they’re going to be the first citizens of Snow Hill, Pennsylvania, to hit the cable news networks, and you know it. There’s going to be no monkey trial in Snow Hill without the media trying to make Christians look bad.”

  “Monkey trial,” Harve said. “You got to be an intellectual to be stupid enough to believe this crap.”

  Nick went past them into the vestibule in the back. It was a good, solid building, after years in the shacks and shifting arrangements of the hills. It was a good thing they’d done, too, getting so many of their people into better jobs, and building a school so their children could get real educations and not be forced out by the snobs on the public school faculty. All the things they’d done were good, Nick was sure of it, but there was no getting away from the fact that they were who they were, they were Holiness, they spoke in tongues, they got slain in the spirit, and some of them—some of them—handled snakes.

  Oral Roberts University wasn’t Vassar, but Nicodemus Frapp had seen how the outside world lived. He didn’t give a flying damn whether the public schools of Snow Hill taught evolution or intelligent design or creation or the origin myths of H. P. Lovecraft, but he did mind what was about to happen here, because it was about to happen to him.

  Sometimes he thought he couldn’t be angry enough at Annie-Vic.

  3

  Henry Wackford had always wanted to like Ann-Victoria Hadley, just as he always wanted to like anyone he could consider an ally in his lifelong war against Ignorance, Stupidity, and Unreason. He thought of the terms in just that way, with capital letters, as he thought of the term Reason itself. He didn’t know where he’d picked up that habit, but he was sure he’d had it for a very long time, at least since the days when he’d been in high school in Snow Hill. There were teachers still teaching at Snow Hill High School who remembered him. There were even some who remembered his greatest local triumph, when he’d received his scholarship to Williams and become the first local person since Annie-Vic to go off East to college. Maybe there was something about Snow Hill that made people come back after they’d gone off, and after they knew better. Henry didn’t know. He only knew that this last thing had also been the last straw. There was just so much crap he could put up with. Then he couldn’t put up with anything more.

  He was standing at the window of his office, looking down from the second story of his building onto Main Street. He could see Annie-Vic pumping along, her arms and legs moving like a robot’s, with too many angles to be human. Henry wanted to like her, but he couldn’t, even if she was crucial to this lawsuit. She was a publicity hound; that was the trouble. And what was worse, she didn’t know what to do with publicity when she got it. When Henry had first decided to file this lawsuit—and yes, it was his decision; he even had children in the system to give him standing; nobody else would have thought of it in a million years—he had imagined himself as a sort of spokesman for science. He had seen himself standing up in front of a bank of microphones at press conferences, or at single microphones held by reporters he’d watched on television, laying out the case for keeping “Intelligent Design” out of the Snow Hill public schools.

  “Backwardness and superstition cannot be allowed to strangle the advance of science,” he would say, or something like that. You had to be careful when you went before the cameras. Reporters were good at making people look like fanatics, and they especially liked making nonreligious people look like fanatics. It was a conspiracy, Henry had always been sure of it. People had laughed at Hillary Clinton for saying that there was a “vast right-wing conspiracy” dedicated to taking her husband down, but she’d been absolutely right. Religions wouldn’t survive for a minute if they depended on what people actually believed. Nobody could believe that tripe for five minutes if they thought about it. That was why the conspiracy had to keep people from thinking about it. It had to keep people from focusing on their fantasies of God and Heaven and get them focusing on their neighbors, especially the ones they could hate. Henry Wackford was sure he was one of the most hated people in all of Snow Hill, even though the town had elected him to the school board six terms running—right up until it had defeated him, this last time.

  Underneath his window, Henry could see not only Annie-Vic, but the storefronts on the north side of the street and the reflection of his own firm’s sign in the window of the hardware store. wackford squeers, the sign said, just as it had in his father’s time. Henry had no idea why he’d never changed the name of the firm. Old Gander Squeers had been dead for a decade before Henry had graduated from the law school at Penn State, never mind passed the bar. For a while, Henry had thought his father would change the firm’s name to “Wackford and Wackford,” or even “Richard Wackford and Son,” but he never had. He hadn’t named Henry after him, either. Henry had asked him about that, but he would never say. Richard Wackford never would say much. After Henry’s mother died, he barely said anything at all.

  Annie-Vic was passing the Baptist Church now. Henry half-expected one of the theocrats to come rushing out to threaten her, but nothing happened. They were all theocrats, all the religious people in Snow Hill, all the religious people everywhere. They wanted power, and when they got it they wanted to kill all the people who dared to breathe the truth about the world. It was true. Look at history—look at the witch burnings, and the Inquisitions, and the reigns of terror from one end of Europe to the other. It wasn’t just Europe, either. Henry had read enough to know that Islam was as bad, or worse, if you looked at the right places in the right centuries. It wasn’t Christianity or Islam that he was afraid of, it was Religion, which was another term that always had a capital letter in his mind. It was Religion that would go on trial here in Snow Hill in just three weeks, and Henry Wackford was ready for it, even if no one else was.

  Down on Main Street, Annie-Vic pumped on past the Assembly of God, but nobody came out of there, either. She looked neither to the right nor to the left. This was her daily ritual when she was at home, which she was only about half the year. There were people who said she was a force of nature, and Henry tended to agree. She was like a black hole. She sucked in all the light. What reporters had come to town so far, in anticipation of the suit, had all been interested in talking to her, and nobody else. There was even talk of doing a spot on her for 60 Minutes. Henry sometimes thought he was losing his mind. She didn’t understand anything. She really didn’t. She might not be religious, she might not even believe in God, but she didn’t understand anything. He wasn’t even sure she wasn’t religious. He only knew he never saw her coming out of any of the churches on Sunday, and that no denomination claimed her as a member and no denomination wanted to throw her out for supporting the legacy of Charles Darwin. What did it mean? What did any of it mean, when you were crushed down under the weight of provincial belligerence? That was how Henry Wackford saw himself, in spite of being the richest lawyer in town, in spite of having been six times chairman of the school board. He was crushed down, hemmed in, stified—suffocating, under the weight of all this small-town pettiness, without a chance in Hell of getting out.

  The door to the office opened behind him, and Henry turned to see Christine Lindsay walk in with a stack of file folders in her arms. Christine was Henry’s personal secretary, and she was always careful to wear her gold cross right in the hollow at the bottom of her throat, as if she’d been branded with it. Henry would have preferred to hire somebody who was an ally in the war against Un
reason, but there was nobody like that in Snow Hill who had also taken a secretarial course.

  “I’ve got the material you wanted on the Brander Mills development,” Christine said. “I ran the schedules and put them on the computer if you want them that way. Do you want me to send in your nine o’clock? It’s Mrs. Hennessy about the wills.”

  “Give me a minute,” Henry said. He looked out on Main Street again. Annie-Vic was still walking. She was ninety-one, but she walked more than he did, and she walked faster. He ran his tongue along his lips and wondered why they hurt.

  “If you don’t need me,” Christine said.

  “Did you ever meet Annie-Vic?” Henry asked her. “Meet to talk to, I mean.”

  “Of course I’ve met Miss Hadley,” Christine said. “She’s come here, you have to remember. She’s come to talk to you about the lawsuit. With those people from Fox Run Estates, and that lawyer from Philadelphia.”

  “Ah,” Henry said.

  “I don’t like it,” Christine said. “I don’t like those people over at the development. They move here from wherever. They don’t even have real homes, if you think about it. They don’t put down roots. They don’t care about their neighbors. They just come in here and all of a sudden we’re all supposed to change to suit them.”

  This was new. Christine didn’t usually talk like this. Or maybe she did, at home or at church, but she didn’t usually talk like this in the office. They’d taught her better than that at Katie Gibbs. Henry looked at her long and hard. She was young and pretty in that small-town way that wouldn’t last, all fair skin and “cute” features. She had a small solitaire diamond on the ring finger of her left hand. The boy she was engaged to had never managed to make it past his second year at community college, but he had a “good” job doing something or the other at one of the technical companies, where all the really good jobs went to the people who lived in the development, and who had moved here from somewhere else.

  “I don’t like it,” Christine said again, obviously getting ready to go. “And I don’t like Miss Hadley, either. She thinks she’s better than the rest of us. She thinks she’s smarter. She thinks we’re all idiots. But she doesn’t know everything. She doesn’t know the Lord.”

  Henry cleared his throat, but Christine ignored him. Surely she knew he “didn’t know the Lord” any more than Annie-Vic did, but there was that thing again, that thing Annie-Vic did to people. If she was in the room, nobody noticed anybody else.

  Christine turned on her heel and walked out, closing Henry’s office door behind her. In another kind of woman, the exit would have said volumes, none of it pleasant. Christine was incapable of making that kind of gesture, or any kind of gesture, with any kind of force.

  Henry went back to the window and back to looking at Annie-Vic. It wouldn’t work out, in the long run, if things kept on going as they’d been going. Annie-Vic didn’t know enough about what was going on to be the sole spokesperson for the lawsuit. She wouldn’t know what to say when the time came to say it, or she would say whatever came into her head, whether it helped the cause or not. Besides, it was Henry who filed the lawsuit in the first place. It was Henry who put the coalition together.

  “Damn,” Henry said, so close to the window that his breath fogged it.

  On the street, Annie-Vic looked as strong and vigorous as a forty-year-old. She really was a force of nature. She wasn’t likely to be going anywhere anytime soon.