by Jane Haddam
8
Franklin Hale considered himself a sensible man, but he was really a man who believed that everyone on earth was trying to trick him. Well, maybe not everyone. Alice McGuffie wasn’t capable of it, and most of the old biddies who ran the Outreach Mission at the Baptist Church wouldn’t dare to try. No, it was people like Catherine Marbledale who were trying to trick him, and all the people like her, the ones who were about to be piling into town to turn this lawsuit into a freak show. On one level, Franklin didn’t blame them. This was a freak show. It was a bad joke. Everybody knew that the United States had been founded as a Christian nation, and that the Founding Fathers—with the maybe exception of Jefferson, who seemed to have been some kind of hippie in training all the way back in the days of the Revolutionary War—had wanted this country to stay true to the principles God gave it. That was why American law was based on the Bible, and why Americans took their oaths of office on the Bible, and said “so help me God” when they were through. Except for old Annie-Vic, of course, and Annie-Vic was, was—
Every time Franklin thought about Annie-Vic his head hurt, and then his sinuses started to get infected. If Franklin had believed in witches and devils—but he didn’t. Not every Christian went in for that kind of thing. Franklin thought Satan himself was enough evil for anybody—he’d have considered Annie-Vic to be dabbling in the dark arts. When she’d refused to swear on the Bible, and refused to say “so help me God,” he hadn’t even been surprised. When she’d brought out that copy of the Constitution and pointed to Article 6, and then to that one with the oath for the President, without a single mention of the Bible and without “so help me God,” he damned near plotzed. He’d spend the entire next day looking at other copies of the Constitution just to check, because he’d been sure she’d done something to the copy she had.
Of course, Franklin didn’t believe for a minute that those things proved what Annie-Vic said they proved—who’d ever heard of the Founding Fathers wanting to keep religion out of government? That was Communists and liberals, that’s what that was—but he had come to the reluctant realization that even good intellectuals were more intellectual than they were good. He could just imagine what they were thinking, back then. They were thinking that everybody knew what they meant and why they were doing what they were doing. They were thinking they didn’t want to keep the Quakers out of government because they wouldn’t take oaths, or something like that. What they weren’t thinking was what the Enemy would do when He got ahold of the kind of thing they’d actually done.
Annie-Vic was right in front of him, as a matter of fact. She was taking her walk. Franklin could see her pumping around the end of Main Street and saying something to Nick Frapp. Franklin didn’t like Nick Frapp much more than he liked Annie-Vic, even though Nick was a Christian. In Franklin’s view, Christians should stick together. If they didn’t stick together, the secular humanists were going to force that evolution crap right down their children’s throats, and then what would happen? The kids would all be out taking drugs and screwing like rabbits. They did that even when they had a good Christian upbringing. Franklin knew, because that was what his life in high school had been like. He’d been captain of the varsity football squad and captain of the varsity baseball squad, and he’d spent every weekend night of his life anesthetized from the neck up and not nearly anesthetized enough from the waist down. God, but that was a long time ago. Franklin had turned fifty-four at his last birthday. He’d have gone back to all that tomorrow if he could have, and he wouldn’t have given a damn if his mother complained about the vomit on his shoes.
Annie-Vic didn’t actually stop to talk to Nick. She pumped away in place, her knees going up and down like pistons. Most women that age were dead. It wasn’t fair that that woman was healthier than Franklin’s own wife and likely to last another decade. The real problem was that they had not been entirely clear in their campaign literature when they decided to unseat the old school board. They’d had to base their arguments on incompetence, and God only knew there was incompetence to spare. That damned junior high school building, or middle school building, or whatever it was had been hanging out there on the edge of town for a couple of years, and there was still no sign of it getting done. It was crap that construction was being held up for lack of money. The town taxed the Hell out of everybody. There had to be enough money. Old Henry Wackford was always bitching and moaning about money. He liked to get his hands on it. That was the thing. Henry Wackford and all the members of the old board just liked to control all the money and do everything their own way.
If they’d been able to run the campaign straight, though, Franklin thought, they would never have gotten themselves saddled with Annie-Vic. The voters would have understood. There had been talk around town for years now. Those people from the development were like invading aliens, that’s what they were. They came here bringing all their secular humanist crap and then they tried to take over the public schools, and people like Catherine Marbledale helped them. The voters would have understood the need to put a Godly board in place to bring God back into the schools and to keep out the evil rot that was ruining everything, but they hadn’t been able to say anything about that. Those lawyers they’d talked to had been adamant. Once they got into court, everything they said would be used to prove that they were trying to inject religion into the public schools, and if it looked as if they were trying to do that, then there would be a lawsuit.
Well, Franklin thought, they hadn’t done any of that, they hadn’t said a word about God or religion throughout the whole campaign for school board, and now they were in court anyway.
Annie-Vic was laughing at something Nick Frapp had said. Now she was moving on up Main Street on her rebound round. Franklin wanted to just go out there and ring her neck. It was what she deserved. It was what all those people deserved. All of them. Everywhere.
There was a slight cough behind him, and Franklin stepped back from the window, almost instinctively. He didn’t want to be where Annie-Vic could see him when she passed. Not that she’d pay any attention to him. She never paid any attention to him except to argue with him, and he hated it when she argued with him. She always got people to laugh at him. Well, she wouldn’t be laughing for long. Someday soon, she’d be confined to that great lake of fire and he’d be able to sit up in heaven and look down on every scream she let out—for all eternity. Franklin liked to contemplate eternity. His eternity had nothing at all to do with sitting on clouds and playing harps.
The cough came from behind him again, and this time he turned. It was hard to do, because he was standing right up against the plate-glass window that formed the front wall of the store and was wedged in between two tall stacks of tires. Hale ’n’ Hardy, tires, that was the name of the store. He’d started it with his brother–in–law when they’d both been out of high school maybe ten years, and they still had it now, after all this time. In another month or so, they were going to open a branch out on the highway in a new strip mall that was going up with a Wal-Mart as an anchor. Franklin Hale wasn’t afraid of Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart was for people who already knew what they were doing. Hale ’n’ Hardy was for people who didn’t know a lug nut from a banana split.
The cough was coming from Louise Brooker. Louise always coughed, or “hmmed,” or something like that, instead of using actual words when she wanted to get his attention. It drove Franklin crazy. He kept himself from yelling at her by reminding himself that she couldn’t live a very happy life. She was plain as ditch water. She had the kind of figure you’d be more likely to see on a mule than a woman. She had nothing to look forward to in her life. The feminists had gotten to her, that was what Franklin thought, back when she was young, before she joined Franklin’s church, the feminists must have gotten to her, and now what was going to happen to her? She was going to die old and alone, with nobody to talk to but her cats.
Franklin hired all his help from people he met at church. He would never hire somebody who wasn’
t a Christian to work in one of his stores. You could never tell with people who weren’t Christians. Some of them were all right, but most of them had no morals. How could they have morals? They didn’t believe in a God that gave out rules for living.
Louise was hovering. Franklin hated hovering.
“What is it?” he asked her.
Louise cleared her throat again. “It’s that man. From the place in Michigan. The law place.”
“The Ave Maria School of Law.”
“No,” Louise said, sounding desperate. “The other place. The one with institute in its name.”
“The Discovery Institute,” Franklin said. “That one’s in Oregon.”
“Yes, excuse me. I’m sorry. I really am very bad at remembering things. Anyway, he’s called here before. He wants to talk to you.”
“All right,” Franklin said. He didn’t move. Annie-Vic was coming closer and closer. She didn’t look like she was breathing hard. How could anybody be in that kind of shape at the age of ninety-one? She probably didn’t even believe in death. She probably thought she was going to live forever. That was why she was the way she was.
Louise coughed again.
“All right,” Franklin said, without turning his head.
Annie-Vic was coming right up to the window. She was right on the other side of the plate glass. Her face was flushed, but it was flushed in a good way, a healthy way. Her hair was coming loose of that bun she always put it in. Franklin wanted to shove his hand through the glass and grab her by the neck and shake her and shake her and shake her until the bones broke into pieces and her head came loose. He could almost see the blood on the sidewalk, the deep, thick red spreading out against the white of the pavement. The pavement was very white. It was that kind of chalk white it got when it had been covered with rock salt and then the salt had melted. Annie-Vic was pumping and pumping and pumping and Franklin was thinking about blood, and then she was gone.
“Mr. Hale . . .” Louise said, close to hysterical.
Franklin Hale turned away from the window. His head hurt again. His muscles felt as if they belonged in somebody else’s body. He felt the way he did when he and Marcey almost made love but didn’t quite, and then she turned away from him and left him hanging.
“I’m coming,” he said, to forestall another sigh.
Then he strode right past Louise and to the back, where his office was.
9
Annie-Vic didn’t usually power walk all the way home after she’d taken her exercise. It had been at least a decade since she’d been able to do that without feeling that she was about to fall over at the end of it. Today, though, she was feeling invigorated, and she was fairly sure it wasn’t because of the weather. My, but growing up in a town like this developed your antennae, and coming back to it after having been away made those antennae sharp. Or maybe not sharp. Maybe antennae couldn’t be sharp. She couldn’t remember, and for once she didn’t care. If she had been one of those people who thought everything happened for a reason, she would have decided that the reason she had never just bolted from Snow Hill and not looked back was because of this day.
Home was up off Main Street to the north, on Carpenter, and then left up the hill on Jerusalem Cemetery Road. The Cemetary along side the road had belonged to a small church—Congregationalist it was when it was still in operation—that served people who had moved here from New England. Annie-Vic wasn’t old enough to remember that, and she didn’t think anybody else was either, not the way this world worked. No, the Congregationalists had built their own church right on Main Street around the time of the American Revolution, and that was probably the last time the Calvinists had really had any influence in this part of Pennsylvania.
“Fanatics,” Annie-Vic’s father used to say, when she was in high school and deemed old enough to hear “serious” discussion. Ah, but Annie-Vic’s father had never been able to let go of his need for all kinds of discussion. Annie-Vic had heard it from the cradle, and so had her brothers and sisters, the whole lot of them sitting around that dinner table every night while Papa railed on and on about religion and politics and the moral philosophy of the Greeks. They’d all gone off to “good” colleges, too, in the East, just as Papa wanted them to, and they’d all left Snow Hill forever soon after that. Annie-Vic didn’t know why she had never really gone, all the way, since she’d come so close a couple of times.
At Jerusalem Cemetery Road, Annie-Vic stopped power-walking and just walked. The hill was relatively steep, and her own house was at the top of it. The church had never moved their cemetery. She could still see the thin, plain headstones row on row among the weeds and brambles. The weeds and brambles grew up every summer and every winter brought them down, as if something in nature wanted you to notice where the bodies were buried. Maybe they hadn’t known how to move a cemetery back then. Annie-Vic wasn’t entirely sure how they moved it now. Did they dig up the bodies? If they didn’t, what got moved? What would it mean to people if they came out to visit their loved ones and visited only a stone? Did people care?
This was the way she got when she was tired: she asked questions she didn’t know the answers to. She reached into her utility belt and came up with her little thing of water—there was a name for the thing, but she couldn’t remember it. Her grandniece had given it to her. Her grandnieces and nephews gave a lot of things to her, and one of them had represented her when she’d threatened to sue the AAVC over not being allowed to go to Mongolia.
Up the hill. Into the house. Have some yogurt. Make some tea. Sit down in the living room and listen to the next lecture in the Music History series she’d bought from The Teaching Company. What she really needed was a series on evolution. She hadn’t been able to find one of those.
The house was big and dark. It had been her father’s house, and her grandfather’s. It had eight bedrooms. People in town had called it a mansion when Annie-Vic was growing up, and she supposed that in the middle of the Great Depression it had looked like a mansion. It wasn’t one, though. It had only had a single bathroom back then. Every morning was an agony of waiting in line.
Annie-Vic let herself into the pantry door and sat down on the bench there to take off her walking shoes. They were the kind of shoes she would have called “sneakers” when she was younger, but you couldn’t call something a “sneaker” when it cost a hundred and fifty dollars at the discount store. There were four bathrooms in this house now, “retrofitted” in the early eighties at the insistence of her plain nieces and nephews, whose parents had all been dying out and who saw old Aunt Annie-Vic as some kind of parental substitute. Annie-Vic didn’t understand any of that nurturing stuff. She really didn’t. Psychology, like music history, was not something she’d spent a lot of time studying at Vassar.
She’d left a pair of ballet flats under the bench for when she came inside. She was damned if she was going to start wandering around the house in her slippers like an old person. She put on the ballet flats and went through into the kitchen. It had been updated in the eighties, too, but it looked old-fashioned, nevertheless. Annie-Vic wasn’t much interested in her kitchen.
One of those things she remembered about being very young was Halloween, and running in among the gravestones of the Jerusalem Cemetery, as if by making enough noise they could raise the dead. People thought they were crazy, those Hadley children, running around in there among the tombstones as if it didn’t matter. But then, people had thought they were crazy anyway, all the time. If Annie-Vic had to put a finger on what it was that made her so angry about this town—and she was angry about it; the place made steam want to come out of her ears—it was the way people had been about the cemetery. It was bad enough to be ignorant. It was something truly evil to be proud of being ignorant, and that was what too many people in this town were.
“Proud of being ignorant and proud of being stupid,” Annie-Vic said out loud, because at her age she could talk to herself in her own house without being branded some kind of basket c
ase.
There was something very wrong with people who were proud of what they didn’t know and proud of what they couldn’t understand, and there was something even more wrong with a place that encouraged it. That was what this whole thing with evolution was all about. It wasn’t about religion. Not really. Most of the religious people in town didn’t care one way or the other, or they took their problems up with their Sunday school or they sent their children to Nick Frapp’s Christian academy.
No, no, what this thing was really about was the temerity of some people to consider themselves smarter than Franklin Hale and Alice McGuffie, a pair of prime idiots at the best of times and now worse off than the Sweeney child at the other end of the road, and the Sweeney child had Down syndrome. It was the resentment, the anger, the endless carping and fury at the mere existence of people who were not only intelligent but willing to work at it, who wouldn’t sit down and pretend that being stupid was just as good.
“I’m just as good as you are,” Alice McGuffie had said, coming out of the diner this morning with her voice at full shriek.
“No, you’re not,” Annie-Vic had told her, and then gone on power-walking up Main Street while Alice went on shrieking, this time something about burning in Hell.
Annie-Vic was old enough to remember when respect was something that had to be earned, and something that could be lost, too. She didn’t believe in Hell any more than she believed in heaven, but she knew that Alice McGuffie wasn’t even just as good as Richard Nixon, who had been a vile man but not a willfully stupid one.
Annie-Vic hated stupidity more than she hated anything else on earth.
She went on through to the dining room. The swinging door with its felt covering rocked a little on its hinges. She would have to ask the proper grandnephew to do something about it before it fell on her foot. The dining room table was covered with papers having to do with the lawsuit, legal papers and informational brochures sent out by the National Center for Science Education explaining evolution in the simplest, clearest, most concise possible way, as if it were possible to get through to people like Franklin Hale, which it wasn’t.
