Living Witness

by Jane Haddam

  “Well,” Lyman said.

  Alice shrugged. “I couldn’t help myself,” she said. “I can’t always be polite, Lyman, you know that. I can’t always be Christian. It’s a failing. But that woman.”

  “Which woman?”

  “Annie-Vic.”

  “Ah,” Lyman said.

  Alice made a face at him, behind his back. “It’s all well and good to say ‘ah,’ ” she said. “But that woman does real damage. We wouldn’t be in this lawsuit if it wasn’t for her.”

  “It was Henry Wackford’s idea to file the lawsuit,” Lyman said. “He’d have done it whether she wanted to go along with it or not.”

  “Still,” Alice said. “You know what I mean. She’s right in the middle of it. Who does she think she is, anyway? It was a vote. The majority won. The minority is supposed to shut up and like it.”

  “Well, that’s true enough,” Lyman said. He started to pull big metal tubs out of the refrigerator: shredded lettuce; shredded cheddar cheese; black California olives; tomato slices; onion slices. It was the setup for lunch. Most of the people who came in for lunch wanted hamburgers of one kind or another.

  “I think they make it all up anyway,” Alice said, taking two of the tubs from him and carrying them over to the sandwich counter. “I don’t think it has anything to do with science. How stupid do they think we are? Nobody could believe that stuff they’re saying, and then they throw in all those words—like you’re supposed to be scared of their words. ‘Allele,’ that was one of those words. Do you know what that word means? Nobody knows what that word means. They make it up. And then that fussy old maid just came right out and lied. Do you know what she said?”

  “No,” Lyman said. He had brought out the big stack of American cheese slices for the grilled cheese sandwiches.

  “She said that survival of the fittest had nothing to do with the theory of evolution. Can you believe that? Nothing to do with it! What’s the theory of evolution anyway, except survival of the fittest? Everybody knows that. Everybody always has known it. They think you’re going to be scared of them. They prance around with their noses in the air and they think you’re just going to curl up and die because they went to Vassar and they went to Wellesley and they have degrees and you’re just an ignorant moron who ought to shut up and stay in your place. Well, we didn’t shut up, did we? We’re not going to shut up.”

  “It’s a good thing you’re doing,” Lyman said. “I liked the idea right off, right when Frank came and asked you to run for the school board. I’d have run myself except I knew it wouldn’t look good, because I didn’t graduate. But you graduated.”

  “If it wasn’t for Annie-Vic, there wouldn’t be any lawsuit,” Alice said again. “The whole school board would be united. Henry Wackford wouldn’t have dared file a lawsuit then. He wouldn’t have dared. I don’t know what people in this town were thinking, voting for that old hag. She’s an out-and-out atheist. You watch.”

  “Henry Wackford is an atheist,” Lyman said.

  “They all think they’re so smart,” Alice said. “They all think they’re smarter than anybody else. Just you watch. Just you wait and see what happens when the television people get here. They’ll make us look like a bunch of hicks. But it won’t matter.” Alice suddenly stopped still. “Lyman?” she said. “It won’t matter, will it? We’re going to win this one. The judge is going to be just folks.”

  “Appointed by George W. himself,” Lyman said.

  “Yes,” Alice said, “I know.”

  She tried to think it through, but it wouldn’t come. She didn’t trust the judge, even if he had been appointed by George W. George W. was just folks, but you couldn’t trust these people who had gone to fancy schools, and it seemed to Alice that everybody who ended up a judge had gone to some fancy school or the other. Oh, Lord. She couldn’t stand these people. She couldn’t stand the way they thought they were smarter than everybody else.

  “It would have been better,” she said, but Lyman wasn’t listening to her. Lyman was getting out the big bag of hamburger rolls they kept in the freezer overnight.

  Alice went to the narrow closet and got out the stack of lunch menus. Annie-Vic was probably still out there somewhere on Main Street, walking in that stupid heel-toe way and lording it over everybody else in town, all the people who hadn’t gone to fancy schools and didn’t buy the crap the liberal media was always trying to sell them. Those people always got everything they wanted. They got it and then they acted like they’d earned something. Alice wanted to wipe every one of them off the face of the earth.

  “You got to ask yourself,” she said, “what’s keeping that woman alive. I mean, she’s older than dirt, isn’t she? Don’t people that age drop dead all the time?”

  She turned around to see that Lyman hadn’t heard her. He was taking out a small stack of hamburger patties to make ready on the grill. It was edging on up to eleven o’clock. Alice shrugged and headed out to the floor again.

  People as old as Annie-Vic died all the time, she thought.

  Hell. Most people as old as Annie-Vic were already dead.

  5

  Judy Cornish was sure there were many wonderful things about living in Snow Hill, Pennsylvania. There was the landscape, for one. Before they’d come out here, Judy had thought that big green spaces like this, full of trees and not much in the way of roads, had become restricted to national parks. It was—interesting—to find out that some people lived their lives in the middle of green, especially on the East Coast. Judy was from the state of Washington, originally. Until two years ago, she’d thought of “the East” as a collection of industrial cities and their high-priced suburbs. Snow Hill was not a suburb. It didn’t come close.

  The other thing Judy thought was wonderful about living in Snow Hill was the price of housing. They’d never been able to afford the kind of house they had here in any of Dan’s other postings. Hell, in Palo Alto, they’d barely been able to afford much more than a matchbox, and in Houston they’d found enough space for the new baby only by saddling Dan with ninety-minute commute. Now they had enough space for all three of their children, and more. They had a six-thousand-square-foot Victorian that had taken only a little time to fix up, including a kitchen the size of their first apartment and a big curving stairway that looked as if it should have debutantes parading down it. Judy loved her house. She loved the stained-glass windows in the ground-floor alcove and the high ceilings in the master bedroom. She loved the walk-up attic, which they had converted to a play room for the children. The attic had a round turret the children could pretend was a medieval castle. Really, the house was perfect. Or it would have been, if it had only been located someplace in civilization.

  The parking lot at the Adams IGA was not anywhere near empty enough, Judy could see that right off, and she could tell—from the sudden stiffening of Shelley Niederman’s body—that Shelley was thinking the same thing herself. It wasn’t a big parking lot, and it wasn’t full, but at least half the spaces were occupied, and none of them were occupied by the right kind of car. Judy had learned to read the cars over these last few months, when she and Shelley had gone from being just odd people living in the development to The Enemy. The right kind of car was one like her own, a Volvo Cross Country station wagon, or a Saab, or even a Subaru Forester, although that last one was sometimes iffy. People out here didn’t hate Subarus they way they hated Volvos. The wrong kind of car was a Chevy Cavalier, or a Ford Focus, or, the very worst, any kind of pickup truck made by an American car company. God. Judy had told her share of pickup truck jokes in college, and she and Dan had even gone to see Jeff Foxworthy on the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, but for some reason she’d never thought of any of it as real until she’d come here. It really shouldn’t have been real. It really shouldn’t have been the case that anybody on earth should want to be the kind of person the people here both were and thought was just plain fine.

  That last sentence made no sense. Grammar and syntax seemed to be
two of the casualties of her stay in Snow Hill. They were getting to her, these people were. They were turning her into some kind of ignorant, stupid, low-rent hick.

  Judy pulled the Volvo into a parking place sufficiently far from the store and killed the engine and just sat. Beside her in the front passenger seat, Shelley Niederman rubbed the palm of her right hand rhythmically against her right knee. It was one of the things Shelley did when she was nervous and didn’t have room to pace.

  “Well,” Judy said.

  “Maybe we should take the time and go out to the mall,” Shelley said.

  “We don’t have time to go out to the mall,” Judy said. “We talked about it. We’ve got to pick up the food for the meeting and then we’ve got to get some actual work done on organizing the project materials, or the girls are never going to get this thing in in time for the judging. And Mallory has a piano lesson at two, so I’ve got that.”

  Mallory was Judy’s fifteen-year-old daughter. She also had an eight year-old daughter named Hannah, and Danny, still small enough to be wearing a diaper in a child-protective seat in the back. Judy looked at him in the rearview mirror. He was asleep.

  “Still,” Shelley said.

  Judy took her keys out of the ignition and put them in the inside pocket of her Coach Basic Bag. She’d always had Coach bags, but she’d had to order this one online, because the nearest Coach store to Snow Hill was in Harrisburg. Actually, it was worse than that. The nearest Starbucks was forty-five minutes away, at that same mall Shelley wanted to drive to, and that was the nearest place with a decent bookstore, too. It was as if they’d been dropped down on an alien planet, stuck not only in the 1950s, but in the 1950s in the hinterlands. Judy kept expecting Jethro Bodine to show up at any minute.

  “Shelley,” she said.

  “I just don’t like being yelled at,” Shelley said. “Is that so strange? I don’t like being followed around and yelled at. Especially not by those people. All they ever want to say to me is that I’m going to rot in Hell.”

  “They say it to Mallory and Hannah,” Judy said. “In school. Mallory came home in tears the other day. But we can’t let that matter to us. We can’t. What kind of chance do you think you have of being able to get out of here any time soon?”

  “Oh, God,” Shelley said. “Steve told me that Sun Dynamics is thinking of expanding the campus and moving all their operations out here. Sometimes I think we’re going to be stuck in this godforsaken place for decades.”

  “I heard the same thing from Dan,” Judy said. “We can’t let it happen this way. We can’t. We’ve got a right to a decent education for our children. We’ve got a right to our own beliefs. They’re not gods, these people here. As far as I’m concerned, some of them are barely human.”

  “Alice McGuffie,” Shelley said, with a little puff of laugher.

  “Exactly,” Judy said. “We had every right to sue, under the circumstances, and we have every right to win the suit. And we’re going to win it. And we’re going to be here a long time after that. So we might as well brave it out. I went to Evolvefish and ordered a Darwin fish for the car. You should do it yourself.”

  “The car will get vandalized,” Shelley said.

  “Then we’ll file a complaint and get the police to find the vandals,” Judy said. “We’ll just do it and do it and do it. It’s time Snow Hill, Pennsylvania, entered the twenty-first century. I mean, for God’s sake. ‘Intelligent design.’ What is that? It’s just the same old creationism with a fancy new name, and you know what it will mean. You can kiss the Ivy League good-bye. The kids will never get the SAT scores. You can kiss any kind of decent life good-bye. The kids will end up dropping out of school at sixteen and working in convenience stores. Or worse. They’ll get religion and start lecturing you about having a glass of wine with dinner. They’ll turn in to people like them.” Judy motioned vaguely in the direction of the parking lot. “They’ll turn in to troglodytes.”

  “I do believe in God,” Shelley said, dubious.

  “I believe in God, too,” Judy said. “I just don’t believe in a stupid God. And that’s all you get out here. Stupid God. You know why we don’t go to church since we’ve been out here? We tried three churches and they were all the same. Praise Jesus! Get saved! Run and hide from the evil liberals! I never thought of myself as a liberal until I came here, but I sure as Hell do now. And I’m going to run for school board at the end of the year. Henry Wackford asked me to.”

  “Really?” Shelley said.

  “It’s not just the creationism,” Judy said. “It’s everything. These people have a stupid God and they’re stupid themselves, if you ask me. Think of the construction on the new school. It’s stalled—there’s not a thing going on. We’re never going to get that school finished if we don’t get rid of the people who think anybody who’s graduated from the fifth grade is a pointy-headed intellectual. And there are enough of us in town now to swing an election.”

  “Look,” Shelley said. “It’s Annie-Vic. That woman is amazing.”

  Judy looked. Annie-Vic was just passing the entrance to the parking lot, doing her power walk. She looked like she had more energy than most people Judy’s age.

  “They say Franklin Hale is ready to kill her,” Judy said. “He’s absolutely livid that she didn’t go along with the textbook change, and then of course she joined the lawsuit. Henry Wackford says Franklin really expected to have a unanimous board so that he could say that intelligent design was the will of the people, or some crap like that.”

  “I just hope she doesn’t drop dead in the middle of all this,” Shelley said. “It’s got to be such a strain.”

  “She doesn’t look like she’s about to drop dead,” Judy said. Then she popped open her car door and started to climb out. “Let’s go,” she said. “I don’t care who yells at me. If they try to give you pamphlets, don’t take them. Maybe we should go further than that. Maybe I should order some material from the Council for Secular Humanism. You know, to hand back to them. When they hand out tracts.”

  “You’re really bad,” Shelley said. “You’re going to get into trouble. Those people are dangerous.”

  “Psychochristians,” Judy said. “Let’s go get the stuff. If they start yelling at us, we can yell back. I’ll think of some good things to say.”

  Actually, Judy couldn’t think of anything to say. She hadn’t been able to think of anything when Mallory had come home in tears because Barbie McGuffie had backed her into a wall at recess to tell her that she was going to Hell, and her whole family was going to Hell, because they were atheists and worshiped the devil. Mallory hadn’t even known what an atheist was.

  There had to be a way, Judy thought, there really had to be. There had to be a way to make these people see how ridiculous they were.

  Lately, Judy had begun to think that she might really want to be an atheist, if only because it meant she was nothing at all like the longtime population of Snow Hill, Pennsylvania.

  6

  Gary Albright had been a cop in Snow Hill almost from the day he left the Marine Corps. He had been a legend since one long winter weekend in 2006. The legend part made him nervous, although he understood it, more or less. Mostly, he understood why people seemed to be in awe of his missing leg. He’d been in awe of Marines with missing limbs, once. It had seemed like the worst thing in the world that could happen to anybody. Gary had been an athlete in high school, on the football, basketball, and baseball teams of a small-town school that didn’t have the student population to throw up much in the way of competition. He’d understood that from the start. He hadn’t been pro-ball material, or even college-team material. He didn’t have a chance in Hell of marching off into the sunset after high school graduation and showing up in a Dallas Cowboys uniform. Still, he’d been in good shape, active and happy in his own body. The idea of having less of it—less of that body—was what had scared him enough to put off enlisting for three solid months.

  This morning Gary was do
ing what he had been doing since the day they’d found him lying up there in the hills with his leg gone. He was going through the endless paperwork that was now required even of small-town police forces. Not that Snow Hill had much of a force. There was Gary, who had been named chief at the ridiculously young age of thirty-six after the old chief, the one who had been there since Gary was a kid, had been caught dealing marijuana to black kids in Harrisburg. There was Eddie Block, who served as patrolman for the west side of town. There was Tom Fordman, who served as patrolman for the east. It was a simple enough system, and since nothing ever happened in Snow Hill except domestic disputes and teen-agers getting stupid, it worked well enough.

  Gary was working well enough, this morning. That was a good thing because he was feeling very tired. Even Humphrey had noticed it, and when Humphrey thought Gary was upset he was likely to get crazy. The town put up with having the dog in the police station—they had to put up with it; after the whole thing with Gary on the hill and the dog and the baby, nobody in town could have refused—but they wouldn’t put up with it long if Humphrey started shredding furniture on a regular basis. Fortunately, Humphrey was a very good dog. He only lost it when he thought Gary was losing it, too.

  “I’m not losing it,” Gary said out loud, still staring down at the papers on his desk.

  Across the room, from the desk next to the guard rail that was supposed to keep the public and the officers separated, Tina Clay looked up.

  “Did you say something, Gary? Is there something I could get for you?”

  Tina was one of those people who seemed to think that because Gary was missing most of his left leg, he couldn’t do anything for himself. It was one of those things he found impossible to understand; and there were a lot more things in that category. In truth, Gary found most human beings completely mystifying, and he was sure that this had made him less of a police officer than he should have been.