Living Witness

by Jane Haddam

  “You have to go home,” Franklin said, trying to be calm. He was not calm. Marcey could panic him, sometimes. She always panicked him when she got like this.

  “I’m not going to go home,” Marcey said, her voice rising up into the stratosphere. “I’m not going to go home and hide away like I’m ashamed of something. I’m not ashamed of anything. I’m not your crazy old aunt you can hide away in the attic. I’m your wife. And I want something done. I want something done about Barbie McGuffie and I want something done about Janey and I want something done now. I’m not going to have Janey suspended from school just because you won’t listen to me.”

  “Marcey,” Franklin said.

  “If you don’t do something, I’ll scream,” Marcey said.

  And then she did. Franklin had known, from the moment he had realized she was in the store, that it was going to come to this. And she knew exactly what effect it would have, too. He could see it in her eyes. They weren’t teary anymore. They were hard and bright with malice. They sparkled.

  “Marcey,” he said again.

  She just put back her head and let it rip, a long, high-pitched wail that could be heard all the way out to Main Street, the sound of an animal in pain and dying, a sound that could break eardrums.

  It only took a second before people were pounding on the bathroom door.

  2

  Henry Wackford was with a client when he heard the screaming start, and he knew what it was as soon as it pierced the glass of his closed front window. Edna Milton knew what it was, too, and Henry was willing to bet pretty much anything that everybody else on Main Street knew, too. After all, Main Street was a small street, Snow Hill was a small town, and Marcey Hale was very, very loud. She was loud even when she was screaming through the walls of her builder’s colonial out on the Cashman Road, and her neighbors there were a lot farther apart than Franklin’s neighbors were here.

  When Henry stopped looking at the window and turned around to look at Edna, she had her head tilted and a smile on her face. Edna Milton was one of Henry’s closest allies in what he thought of as the War Against Idiocy, but told everybody else, in public, was the War Against Mediocrity. That had always seemed to him to be the best way to put it when he was running for school board. There wasn’t a parent alive who wanted his child to grow up to be a mediocrity. At least, there wasn’t one alive who would admit it out loud. Henry had the feeling that there were definitely people in Snow Hill who would be satisfied with nothing else but mediocrity in their children. Anything better than that would mean that their children were getting to be “stuck up.”

  Edna was clucking. She was a short, compact middle-aged woman who didn’t like to fuss with herself, as she put it. She wore very little makeup, she had let her hair go grey long ago, and she cut it off short so that it wouldn’t be much of a bother. Even so, she’d been married twice, and she could have been married again if she’d wanted to be. That was partly force of personality, and partly the fact that she had a very good head for business.

  The paperwork for Edna’s latest real estate deal lay sprawled across Henry’s desk. Henry did all Edna’s legal work up here; she had some expensive lawyers in Harrisburg for the deals she did there. Sometimes Henry wondered why she bothered to stay in Snow Hill. She couldn’t lack the money to leave.

  “Honestly,” she said. “It takes the kind of mind that populates this town to think that that man would be better at managing anything than you. He can’t even manage his own wife. He can’t even cope with her.”

  “I hear rumors that she drinks,” Henry said carefully. “But I’ve never seen her drink.”

  “It’s not drinking,” Edna said. “It’s Oxycontin and probably half a dozen other prescription medications. That’s why she stopped going to Dr. Dumont here in town. He wouldn’t go on writing prescriptions for her. She got some guy up in Harrisburg, and as far as I can tell he just gives her what she wants. If I were Franklin, I’d shove her straight into rehab.”

  “I don’t think it’s that easy to shove somebody into rehab if they don’t want to go,” Henry said.

  “Well, it should be,” Edna said. “Honestly. There are some people who just can’t take care of themselves, and it’s time we recognized it. We’re strangling in a mythology of equality, the wrong kind of equality. We don’t give a damn what kind of money people have, and what is that? It’s like letting them have loaded weapons at their disposal when they can’t think their way out of paper bags. And we let them vote for school boards, which is worse.”

  Henry stiffened. “I thought I did a pretty good job on the school board.”

  “You did,” Edna said. “But it wasn’t going to last, was it? Of course it wasn’t. The board was going to go straight on over to the yahoos sooner rather than later—”

  “I was chairman of that school board for over ten years.”

  “Yes, and then what happened? Franklin Hale happened, that’s what,” Edna said. “There couldn’t have been anybody in town who didn’t know what he was up to even if he didn’t say it right out loud. Oh, except maybe the people from the development, of course. They don’t know him. But the rest of us did, and if most of the rest of us hadn’t voted for him, he wouldn’t be where he is. And what do we get? We get what he wanted us to get all along. People living alongside the dinosaurs and God creating the world in six days.”

  Henry cleared his throat. Edna was one of those people. Once she got going, it was hard to get a word in. “I don’t think they’re actually asking for God creating the world in six days,” he said. “This is a new kind of Creationism. They call it Intelligent Design.”

  “I know what they call it,” Edna said. “But I know Franklin Hale, and so do you. He thinks the world was created in six days and he thinks it’s less than ten thousand years old and the only reason he isn’t saying so is that he wouldn’t get help from that fancy think tank to go to court with if he did. He a small-town, small-minded idiot loon. You’ve got to wonder what goes on in that church of his, except you don’t have to wonder, do you? We all know. So why do we think it makes sense to let people like that be on a school board? Or people who agree with him run for school boards? Education should not be amateur night. It should be left to the people who know something about it.”

  “Teachers,” Henry said solemnly.

  “Oh, teachers,” Edna said. “Half the teachers are just as bad as Franklin is. It should be left to people with good doctorates, that’s what. We should have a national curriculum, that all schools have to follow, and home schools, too. All schools. Even the private ones. That’s what they do in Europe. That’s why they’re so much better educated over there.”

  “Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 1925,” Henry said.

  Edna waved it away. “We make a fetish of the Constitution. We do. We act like it’s scripture. It’s not. That sort of thing was all right when the world was a different place, before we knew anything about science, but it’s a disaster now. You can’t leave that sort of thing in place. Think of the children. Think of the future. And when we do have democracy, which we do here, not only do we not get a decent education for our children, we don’t even get all that competence Franklin was blithering about. I ran into Catherine Marbledale this morning. She’s climbing the walls. She’s had another call from the teachers’ union.”

  “Has she,” Henry said. He was feeling a little distracted. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate Edna. He did. In a town like this you had to really treasure the people who understood what was what and were willing to stand by you. Henry thought it was too bad that all Edna’s children were grown, so she was unable to join the lawsuit. He could have used her in the courtroom.

  “Henry,” Edna said. “You ought to at least listen when I talk to you. Catherine’s had a call from the teachers’ union, and they’re hopping mad. The schedule on the new contracts was supposed to be out weeks ago—and has Franklin done a single thing about it? No, he hasn’t. Of course he hasn’t. He’s a p
iss-poor businessman, if you ask me. The only reason that shop of his stays in business is that too many of the new people don’t know a lug nut from a cherry tree. And it’s not only the teachers’ contracts. It’s that damned school building, too. He was going to fix that up and get the building back on schedule, you remember that? Well, there it sits, and not a brick has been moved for six months. Honestly, what do people think they’re doing when they vote for a man like that? I always said I thought it would make sense to give intelligence tests to people before we let them vote, but whenever I say that you all look at me like I’ve gone over to Hitler.”

  “Catherine can handle the teachers’ union,” Henry said. “And she’s lucky enough not to have anything to do with the building. We’ll muddle through until we get them out of here.”

  “Are you sure we’re going to get them out of here?” Edna said.

  “Every other town that’s gone through this has done it,” Henry said. “Hell, the entire state of Kansas did it. People don’t actually want Creationism in the schools, no matter what they say. When they know that that’s what’s on offer, they vote for somebody else. I think we have to live with this until the spring, and then there will be another vote and we’ll take back over. Don’t you want to do something about this stuff you brought me? You look to me as if you’re buying huge piles of rocks nobody is going to be able to move.”

  “I’ll move them,” Edna said. “Don’t you mind about it. What about that man Gary Albright brought in? Have you met him?”

  Henry blinked. “He got here about a minute and a half after you did. I saw him get out of Gary’s truck when you were using the ladies’.”

  Edna nodded. “Now, there’s something I approve of. I looked him up on the Internet, and I asked some people I know in Harrisburg. He’s not just a big noise, he’s very good. And he’s not about money. I don’t know if that’s a character trait or a matter of circumstances. He’s about to marry a ton of it. Still, you’ve got to wonder what Gary Albright is up to. You have to wonder what any of those people are up to. I don’t trust anybody who says he gets down on his knees and talks to an imaginary friend every night. It’s bad enough if he’s lying, but it’s worse if he’s telling the truth. Marcey’s still screaming. Can you hear it?”

  Henry could hear it. He was sure everybody could hear it. Down the street from the shop the noise ended up being something in the background after a while, but you never lost the understanding that it was there. If you were actually in the building where it was happening, though, that was something else. Then it was like a form of torture. Marcey was not only loud, she was extremely high pitched and could hold a note damned near forever.

  “Listen,” Edna leaned over Henry’s desk. Her eyes were lit up. They glittered. “I heard something. And not only from one place, and it wasn’t just idle gossip. I heard the federal judge they’ve got coming down here for the trial is getting death threats. Lots of them. I heard the FBI has been called in. They think there’s going to be an assassination attempt.”

  “Really,” Henry said.

  Edna sat back in her chair. She was smiling. “Well,” she said, “what can you expect? Religion is a form of insanity, isn’t it? And you never do know what crazy people will do.”

  3

  Miss Marbledale had heard the rumors about the death threats to the judge for the same reason everybody else had: because Edna Milton had been spreading them. She was not particularly upset about them, and she didn’t expect she would ever have to be, because she was fairly sure that they were nothing but Edna getting some attention again, just like the time Edna claimed that the Bush administration was spying on her peace group. Catherine Marbledale had almost as little use for Edna Milton and her peace group as she had for Franklin Hale and anything he was involved in. It was all part and parcel of the same thing. It was all another manifestation of a descent into irrationality. Miss Marbledale had pinned it the first time she realized that conspiracy theories were no longer the exclusive province of village cranks and village drunks. Now half her students thought that the Republicans had blown up the Twin Towers themselves, or that the Democrats were in secret negotiations to get the UN to invade Washington and suspend the Constitution in favor of European law. It all depended on who their parents were. None of their parents made any sense at all.

  It wasn’t the rumors about the judge that made Miss Marbledale decide she had to get out of the building for lunch. It wasn’t even her runins with Alice McGuffie and Judy Cornish. Those women might be on opposite sides of the political divide, but they had identical tendencies to shriek. And their children, Miss Marbledale thought, were identically warped by their enthusiasms. Granted, she’d rather have a student like Mallory Cornish than one like Barbie McGuffie any day of the week. Mallory was going to get stellar SATs and go off to a name college one of these days, and she would always know how to respond to Shakespeare and have her history homework outlined in the meantime. Still, Mallory was in her own way just as much of a bully as Barbie, and in this time and place that was going to cause a lot of trouble. People like Judy Cornish didn’t understand what the issues were. They thought they did, but they didn’t. Catherine Marbledale was ready to bet lots of money that Judy Cornish had been a popular girl in a high school where popular girls had damned well better have the grades to go off to someplace first rate, or they wouldn’t be popular at all.

  Catherine was just thinking of calling her sister, Margaret, for moral support when one of the secretaries in the outer office buzzed her, and she found herself face to face with little Mrs. Morton. Try as she might, she couldn’t remember the woman’s first name. What did that say about the state of her memory? The Mortons were town, not development. Catherine had had Ted Morton in class when she was still teaching. For all she knew, she’d had this woman too, although she couldn’t remember it. It was hard to tell. It was hard to bring her into focus. She was a mousy thing, and she was in tears.

  “I’m very sorry, I really am, about the way Elaine behaved,” Mrs. Morton said, sniffling, “and I do know there’s no excuse. But I can’t help but thinking, well—you know. I mean, it isn’t really her fault, is it? I mean, it’s her fault that she made fun of those other girls, yes, I understand that, and it was wrong to write things on them, you can’t trust Barbie McGuffie, really, she’s too forward. But still.”

  The day looked cold and hard outside the office window, and Catherine was tired. “But still what?” she asked. “I should think it’s a fairly simple issue.”

  “But it isn’t, is it?” Mrs. Morton said. “I mean, I heard you speak at the school board, you know, and I know how you feel about this, but it’s a controversial issue, isn’t it? It’s controversial. People say all kinds of things about it. You don’t know who to believe.”

  “People say all kinds of things about bullying?”

  “No, no,” Mrs. Morton said. “About evolution. They say all sorts of things about that. It’s a matter of opinion, isn’t it? And everybody has the right to their opinion.”

  “Mrs. Morton,” Catherine said, dredging up the energy from she didn’t know where, “evolution is not a matter of opinion. Evolution is a fact.”

  “Well, I know you think so,” Mrs. Morton said, “but that’s just your opinion, isn’t it? Other people don’t agree with it. And everybody has the right to express his opinion. That’s free speech, isn’t it?”

  “It has nothing to do with free speech. Would you want our science classes to teach that the earth is flat, or that water flows up?”

  “Well, no, of course not,” Mrs. Morton said, “but that’s the thing, you see. That’s the difference. Those are things everybody knows. There’s nothing controversial about those. But this is something else. It’s not like water flowing up.”

  “It’s exactly like water flowing up,” Catherine said.

  “If it was, there wouldn’t be so much disagreement about it,” Mrs. Morton said.

  She really was a mousy thing, Ca
therine thought, staring at the top of her head. Her hair frizzed. It was some light color, or maybe an absence of color. And she looked mulish, the way children do when they refuse to be persuaded that they are not going to get their own way.

  “I think it’s wrong to tell people they can’t express their opinions,” Mrs. Morton said. “I do. It’s un-American. It’s against free speech. Everybody should be able to express their opinion. And everybody should have their opinion heard. That’s all that Franklin Hale and the school board want, and I don’t think it’s right that you won’t let them have it. I think that’s what causes these—these situations.”

  “You think your daughter is writing nasty words on the backs of other students because she can’t get her opinion heard on evolution? What’s stopping her? She can express her opinion about anything she wants.”

  “But then you say it’s wrong,” Mrs. Morton said triumphantly. “You say she’s wrong and those other children are right, and how is that supposed to make her feel? You take sides with those other children and then they make fun of her, they make fun of all of us. Then they call her stupid and things happen. I don’t see why you should be surprised. I don’t see why my Elaine should be the only one punished. You should punish those other children for calling her stupid. And you should let other opinions be heard and not, you know, make them seem like they’re wrong, because it’s all a matter of opinion.”

  Catherine Marbledale’s head hurt. She didn’t want to call Margaret anymore. She’d only yell at her if she did, and Margaret had done nothing to deserve that. She stood up from behind her desk and tried to make it clear that this interview was over.

  “It’s an in-school detention,” she said firmly, “and I really am not preventing Elaine from expressing her opinions, only from physically attacking other students.”

  Mrs. Morton had stood up, too. She looked even more mulish. “It’s a matter of opinion,” she said. “You’re not God. You don’t know everything. Everybody has a right to their opinion, and nobody has a right to tell them their opinion is wrong.”