by Jane Haddam
“No, you have that right,” Gary Albright said. “But I know, and everybody in town does, too, and that’s a problem there’s no easy way around. I could call in the state police, but I don’t want to. I don’t like the way they behave, and they don’t like me.”
“Gary . . .” John Jackman said carefully.
“. . . is a Christian,” Gary finished for him. “And I mean it. I’d like to have somebody I can trust come in and look at this. Especially because I’m not the only Christian on the suspect list. In fact, everybody on the suspect list is somebody who at least calls himself a Christian. As to whether or not they are really are Christians, I’ve got a pastor who says that’s up to God and not me to judge.”
“Ah,” Gregor said. “Well, that’s unusual too, isn’t it? That everybody on the list would call himself a Christian. It would be unusual here in Philadelphia, unless you were including Catholics under the term ‘Christian,’ which I take it you’re not.”
“No,” Gary said. “And it would be unusual even for Snow Hill these days. We’ve got a chapter of the American Humanist Association now. Well, we always did have it. Henry Wackford started it years ago, before I was even born, but it’s got a lot of members now. Something like thirteen. There are new people. People who’ve moved in to work at the high tech firms. That’s the governor’s big idea on how to improve the economy of Pennsylvania.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “But the chief suspects are all Christians, by which I’ll assume you mean evangelical Protestants of some kind. Why?”
Gary Albright made a quick look of distaste. It would be the only time Gregor would see him break his impassivity during this conversation. “There was a deception,” he said. “A big one.”
“What kind of deception?” Gregor asked.
“End of last summer, we had elections for school board,” Gary said. “School board is a big deal in a place as small as Snow Hill. It’s where we play out all the drama the town has. School board and town council. There was a school board election. The board that was sitting at the time of the election had been in place for something like a decade, maybe more. Henry Wackford had been chairman for more than that. Some of the other individuals might have gone in and out. Anyway, some people were unhappy with the way the board was conducting business. I was.”
“You were unhappy, why?” Gregor asked. “You didn’t like the curriculum? You didn’t like the teachers they were hiring?”
“I didn’t like the confusion,” Gary Albright said, “and I wasn’t the only person in town to feel that way. Things were sloppy. They didn’t get done on time. We’re building a new school building, for instance. A junior high school building. The project’s been going on for years and it’s stalled. Then there was the library at the high school. It was in such poor shape we got put on probation by the accreditation committee. So, when Franklin Hale asked me if I’d run for the board, I said I would.”
“And who is Franklin Hale?” Gregor asked.
“A son of a bitch,” Gary said, but he was still impassive. It was as if he were imparting a matter of fact. “He owns a tire store, tires, auto parts, whatever. In town. His prices suck lemons, if you ask me, but lots of people from the development don’t know enough about cars to get them started in the morning without a manual, so they go to Franklin and he babies them through whatever they need and then he charges them through the nose. He was running for board chairman. He got a few other people to run, including me.”
“And I take it you won,” Gregor said, “and displaced the old school board?”
“Yeah, we did,” Gary said, “except that one of the displacers wasn’t one of Franklin’s hand-picked slate of candidates. All the old members of the board were forced off, but one of the seats on the board went to a woman named Ann-Victoria Hadley, who was, well, what can I say? Not Franklin Hale’s favorite person.”
“Not yours, either, I take it,” Gregor said.
“No,” Gary Albright said. “I have to admit there’s something admirable about that woman. I hope I’m in half as good shape at ninety-one. But no, I don’t like her much. Her family’s been the town’s wealthiest since forever. She went off to Vassar College. She thinks she’s smarter than everybody else and she’s even more than half right. But she’s arrogant and she’s not a Christian.”
“Does she belong to, what did you call it, the American Humanist Association?” Gregor asked.
“I don’t know,” Gary said. “But I’d be surprised if she agreed to belong to anything Henry Wackford was running. Anyway, Franklin had asked this guy named Holman Carr to run, and Holman didn’t make it. Holman goes to our church. The Baptist Church. So does Alice McGuffie. Everybody Franklin asked goes to our church. I should have realized something was up. Especially since Holman—let’s just say Holman isn’t the kind of guy you’d expect to be on a school board.”
“Wouldn’t expect, how?” Gregor asked.
“Wouldn’t expect because he’s barely got a high school education,” Gary said, “and he isn’t exactly a self-taught genius. Come to think of it now, that’s true about Alice, too. But it didn’t occur to me. I thought it was a good idea, getting the old board out. I still think it was a good idea. It was just that Franklin had an agenda he didn’t apprise me of.”
“And that agenda was?” Gregor asked. He noticed that John Jackman had suddenly started to stare at the ceiling. Gary Albright was looking down at his hands.
“He wanted to change the science curriculum to teach Creation Science as well as evolution in biology classes. Starting with what I’d guess you’d call middle-school science.”
“Ah,” Gregor said.
“You’ve got to understand,” Gary said, “I think the idea of teaching Creation is just fine. More than fine. I don’t think Darwin’s theory has a leg to stand on, logically or scientifically. And the real problem is the way it’s used, used to convince people that there’s no such thing as morality. So, you know, if Franklin had broached the idea to me, I wouldn’t have been against it. Necessarily.”
“Necessarily?” Gregor asked.
“Yes, well,” Gary said. “I’m studying nights, you know. I’m thinking I’d like to be a lawyer, so I’m doing courses to get me into law school. It’s not very interesting, being on the police force when I can’t get around in the field. I had a course in Constitutional law last fall that covered a lot of the cases having to do with evolution and Creation in public schools. I knew as soon as I heard Franklin’s proposal that we were going to get sued, and we were going to lose.”
“So you opposed it?” Gregor asked.
“I opposed the original proposition,” Gary said, “but later Franklin scaled it down some, and we decided that what we’d ask for was a disclaimer in all the biology books, saying that Darwin’s theory was just a theory, and not a fact, and that any student who wanted to investigate a different view could go to the school libraries and take out this book, Of Pandas and People, that told about Intelligent Design. There hasn’t been a case yet about intelligent design.”
“I’d never even heard of it,” John Jackman said.
“It relies on the fact that some biological structures are irreducibly complex,” Gary said. “That means that they work the way they are, but if any part of them is missing they don’t work at all. So they couldn’t have evolved in little steps, you know, because none of the steps would have made any difference in their ability to reproduce. That’s what Darwin’s theory says. That traits get passed down because they make the animal more likely to reproduce.”
“I think it’s a little more complicated than that,” Gregor said.
“There hasn’t been a case about Intelligent Design, as far as I know,” Gary repeated. “I tried looking it up. And I went along with that proposal, because I thought it was the right thing to do. I thought we had a good chance of getting a general agreement, because the whole thing was completely noncoercive. Nobody had to learn about intelligent design unless they wante
d to, or their parents wanted them to. The idea was to get the whole board to vote for the policy unanimously. But that didn’t work out, because of Annie-Vic.”
“She voted against the policy,” Gregor said. “All right, from what I’ve heard about her, that makes sense.”
“She didn’t just vote against it,” Gary said, “she joined the lawsuit against it, which started up less than a month later. Henry Wackford brought it, with a bunch of people—”
“Wait,” Gregor said. “Henry Wackford. That’s the man who was the old chairman of the school board? The one who was displaced by Franklin Hale.”
“That’s right,” Gary said. “And I do think that there’s more than a little revenge going on here. He’s a lawyer, anyway. He filed suit with a bunch of different co-plaintiffs, Annie-Vic, some of the parents from the development. That’s where most of the new people live. In the development. And Franklin, you know, was furious. But mostly he was furious about Annie-Vic, because she was breaking ranks.”
“Did Franklin Hale expect her not to break ranks?” Gregor asked.
“It’s hard to know what Franklin expects,” Gary said. “There’s part of me that sometimes wonders if he doesn’t have a drinking problem that he’s hiding pretty well. Maybe he did expect her to go along, at least with the second policy, the one we actually voted in, because when she didn’t he had a fit. And he kept hounding her. He wanted her to resign from the board.”
“And she didn’t?”
“No, she didn’t,” Gary said, “and if you’d known her, you’d have known she wouldn’t. She’s not the kind of person who backs down under pressure. But that left us going into the lawsuit with a member of our own board on the other side, and the closer we got to the court date the more frantic Franklin got, and the more furious Alice McGuffie got, and there was a lot of bad feeling in town.”
“When is the lawsuit due to start?” Gregor asked.
“Next week.”
“It won’t be delayed because one of the plaintiffs is, I think I heard somebody say, in a coma?”
“No,” Gary Albright said. “There are other plaintiffs and she isn’t the chief one. But here’s the thing. On the day the assault happened, any one of us, any of the members of the board that support the policy, could have hit her. We were all right there on Main Street. We all saw her taking her walk that day, same as always. We all went somewhere or the other in the time just after she left Main Street and went back home. And it’s not just us. It’s the pastors of the two churches that supported the policy. They were there, too. And it’s the congregations. A lot of people resented the Hell out of that lawsuit. They still do.”
“And you’re sure that was why she was assaulted?” Gregor asked. “There couldn’t have been a more mundane reason, like robbery, for instance?”
“She was wearing one of those fanny packs,” Gary Albright said, “and it had four hundred dollars in it in tens and twenties. And everybody knew she carried cash when she walked. When she went anywhere, really. But the fanny pack wasn’t touched, and her house wasn’t broken into. She’s got grandnieces and nephews, and living brothers and sisters, I think, but none of them live in town and none of them were anywhere near it at the time of the attack. I checked. So it wasn’t robbery, and it wasn’t her heirs trying to get rich quick. And if you saw what the town was like over this lawsuit, you’d see why I think—why everybody thinks, really—that that’s what’s going on here.”
3
Gary Albright had somewhere else to go in the city of Philadelphia.
“It’s an errand I’ve got to do for my pastor,” he said.
Gregor stayed behind on John Jackman’s new wing chair and waited until the coast was clear. John came back from showing Gary Albright all the way to the outer door and sat down in the other wing chair instead of behind the desk. He looked exhausted.
“That man makes me more nervous than my mother used to when I knew I was about to get in trouble,” he said. “In about the same way, too.”
“Gary Albright makes you feel guilty?
“Something like that,” John said. “I don’t know. You know anything about him? Anything about his story?”
“No,” Gregor said. “I knew he was military as soon as I saw him, of course, and fairly recent military. It’s hard to mistake the bearing.”
“The story about the leg made all the news shows,” John said. “I thought you might have heard about it. It was a couple, three years ago. I don’t remember. He was a regular cop in Snow Hill then. He got called out on a domestic in the middle of the night in the middle of a snowstorm at one of those places, you know, up a dirt road, in the mountains, that kind of thing. Found the couple drunk to the gills and too falling-over-incapacitated to do much of anything, and a baby, couldn’t have been more than seven or eight months old, left wandering around on its own. So, he took the baby and got out of there. He figured it made more sense to make sure the baby was safe than try to bring the couple in given the weather and conditions and that kind of thing.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “I can see that.”
“Yeah,” John said. “So can I. It isn’t the kind of trouble we ever had on any police force I was ever on, but I worked in cities. But, here’s the thing. He had a dog with him. Did I tell you he had a dog?”
“No.”
“He did. Not a police dog, his own dog. Dog he’d had for years. He had the dog in the backseat for company. Most nights he didn’t get called on for anything and he was out wandering around on his own. Where was I? Oh, okay. He took the baby with him, worked up an impromptu car seat for the kid in the back, I guess the parents didn’t have one. The couple. Whoever they were. He took off and headed back to town thinking he’d turn the baby in at the hospital. They’ve got social workers. But the weather was really, really, bad, and the road wasn’t a real road, it was a dirt rut, and he got lost. He ended up down a ditch and into a snow bank. They were out there for a week.”
“A week?” Gregor sat up.
“Car went down a hill, sort of, and they landed at the bottom of it, no communications working, and he’d cracked his leg, that leg, so he couldn’t just stand up and march them all out. And it kept snowing. It stopped and then there was another system that came through. They should all have been dead.”
“And they weren’t? He got the baby out alive?”
“He got the baby and the dog out alive,” John said, “because when push came to shove, when they had to have something to eat or starve, he used what he’d learned in the Marines and took his leg off. And fed it to the them. The dog and the baby.”
“Dear God,” Gregor said.
“I know,” John said. “You don’t know how to respond to it, do you? I don’t. Part of me is sickened beyond anything. Part of me thinks there was something almost impossibly heroic about the whole thing. If he needed something for himself and the baby to eat, he could have killed the dog. I’d have killed the dog.”
“Dear God,” Gregor said again. “That’s an interesting person.”
“Oh, I agree,” John said. “His CO was in my platoon in Vietnam. That’s how he happened to end up coming to me. I talked to Derek about him and Derek had the same kind of thing to say. You don’t know how to take the kid. He’s got an almost superhuman sense of responsibility. He’s completely reliable. He’s very straight in the military sense of the word straight. Not straight as in not gay, but you know—”
“Dudley Do-Right,” Gregor said.
“Yeah, that,” John said, “but not exactly. Dudley Do-Right is a mental defective. I don’t think Gary Albright is a mental defective.”
“No, I don’t either,” Gregor said. He considered the story again, as far as he was able. It was hard to imagine anybody behaving like that. It was especially hard to imagine anybody behaving like that in order to save a dog. “Do you think Gary Albright was incapable of battering this old woman?” he asked.
John shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s hard to sa
y what somebody will do when they lose control, and that’s what it would have had to be if Gary Albright is guilty of this thing. He’d have had to lose control. But there’s a part of me that thinks that if he had done that, he wouldn’t have concealed his involvement. He’d have come right forward and confessed.”
“Of course,” Gregor said, “that’s the perfect cover, if you think about it. It’s so totally unlike you, nobody would suspect, but just to make sure, bring in a hired gun so you can’t be confused of a conflict of interest. What’s his problem with the state police?”
John Jackman shrugged. “Religion, as far as I can make out. Gary Albright is very religious, the guy he deals with in the staties doesn’t like it. Or Gary Albright doesn’t like that the statie isn’t. Or something like that.”
“Does he know that I’m not very religious?”
“I told him you were an out-and-out atheist,” John said. “I was trying to spare you the bother, if I could. Aren’t you getting married in a few weeks?”
“It depends on whether Bennis and Donna can ever finish making arrangements. Bennis thinks it would be a good idea if I went up and helped out. It would get me out of her hair, and everybody else out of mine.”
“So you’re going to go up and do it?”
“I think so,” Gregor said. He stared at the door Gary Albright had left through. “It’s not my usual kind of thing, of course, but it may be any minute or two. I don’t suppose you have any way of finding out what kind of condition this Ann-Victoria Hadley is in.”
“I’ve got phone numbers,” John said. “Tell me the truth. It isn’t Ann-Victoria Hadley. It’s Gary Albright. You can’t get your mind off Gary Albright.”
Gregor’s coat was on the rack next to John’s office door. He got up out of the wing chair and went over to get it.
