Living Witness

by Jane Haddam

  The long-range implications of this sort of policy were staggering. Catherine thought about pointing them out to Mrs. Morton, but she had the horrible realization that even if she tried, it just wouldn’t work. Mrs. Morton wasn’t interested in listening to reason; she wasn’t interested in reason at all. Catherine wondered which of the various conspiracy theories Mrs. Morton adhered to. It would have something to do with UN troops massing in Canada, or liberals plotting to fix the next election, take over the White House, and declare martial law. Catherine was sure of it.

  They were both on their feet. It was only a matter of getting the woman out of her office but the exact protocol for this was eluding her. She headed for the door; Mrs. Morton followed her, still talking. She was still talking about how everybody had the right to his opinion, except she wouldn’t say “his,” or even “his or hers,” she would say their, because for the Mrs. Mortons of the world grammar was a matter of opinion, too. Catherine got the office door open and stood next to it, and Mrs. Morton went scurrying out.

  “It isn’t fair,” she was saying, “it’s all a matter of opinion.”

  When the door was shut and Catherine was alone again, she suddenly realized she couldn’t stay that way. She couldn’t just sit here and stare at the four walls of her office. She couldn’t eat the salad and the thermos of soup she’d brought with her from home this morning. Sometimes she thought she was going to go crazy.

  Her coat was hanging on a coat tree in a corner near the door. She’d bought it the last time she and Margaret had spent a long weekend in Philadelphia. It was a good coat, with some percentage of cashmere—a city coat—not a parka or snow jacket, which was what most people wore in Snow Hill. Catherine got it down and put it on. Then she went into the outer office. Everything was quiet in the outer office. The girls were typing at their stations. No students were at the counter, looking for help or excuses. Mrs. Morton was gone.

  “I’m going to run home,” Catherine said. “I think I can be away for an hour without everything getting completely messed up, but if there’s an emergency I’ll have my cell phone on.”

  “Go eat something decent,” one of the women said. “I saw that salad. It looks dead.”

  It probably did look dead, Catherine thought. She didn’t notice what she ate, at least during the school terms. When she and Margaret traveled, they went to good restaurants, and she noticed then. Now she just nodded at the women and went on through to the big front foyer of the school. She’d have to be fast, because she had a meeting with the rep from the teachers’ union at one thirty. For God’s sake, the teachers’ union. She wasn’t supposed to be negotiating with the teachers’ union. She wasn’t supposed to be talking to the contractors for the new school. She wasn’t supposed to be having meetings with the suppliers’ salespeople, either. Nothing was getting done. Not a thing. That’s what happened when you got somebody on the board like Franklin Hale, who didn’t care that the board’s major purpose wasn’t to set school curricular policy but to run the goddamn district.

  I must not swear, Catherine told herself as she reached her car. She didn’t actually approve of swearing, because it was the kind of thing you did if your vocabulary was inadequate to the situation—and Catherine’s vocabulary was usually adequate to any situation. Her car was a shiny silver Prius she had waited six months to get her hands on. She unlocked it and got in behind the wheel. She shut the door against the cold and started up.

  Really, she thought. If she didn’t know what kind of a disaster would happen here if she ever left, she’d quit right this minute and let Franklin Hale take care of the blowback.

  SIX

  1

  Gregor Demarkian worked, most of the time, as a consultant to police departments. Police departments, being government entities, didn’t like to spend money when they didn’t have to, mostly because they could be sure there would be editorials in the papers about how many of the taxpayers’ dollars they were wasting even if they did have to. But because of this, and because he was expensive to hire, Gregor was used to having the media’s attention on the case he was working on. After all, it took something special to justify calling him in; and if he got involved otherwise, it was usually because he’d volunteered. What he was supposed to do about a situation like the present one, where the press was coming out of everybody’s ears, but why none of the reporters seemed the least bit interested in an attempted murder, he didn’t know.

  Main Street had gotten far less deserted in the few minutes Gregor had spent on it. By the time he and Gary Albright went into the police station, there were several people from the town popping out onto the sidewalks to see what there were doing, and men and women burdened by camera and sound equipment were everywhere. Gregor took a quick look at them and then let Gary lead him into the building. It was the kind of place that might have served as a sheriff’s office in Mayberry, except that it was a separate building instead of part of the courthouse. Gregor found himself wondering where the courthouse was. It had to be close, but he didn’t think he’d seen it right on Main.

  Most of the first floor of the police station was open. There was a counter for the public to stand at when they wanted something. Gregor guessed that most of the people here had known Gary Albright since childhood, which meant they weren’t likely to be all that patient about standing at a counter to talk to him, or to his officers, either, who were likely to have been in town forever, too. There were three desks on the other side of the counter, only one of which was occupied. That one was serving as a computer station to a woman with wispy hair and too many metal things holding it back. She looked up when Gregor and Gary came in and Gary nodded to her.

  “Tina,” he said. “Mr. Demarkian. This is Tina Clay.”

  Tina Clay waved. She was the kind of woman who would wave indoors. The longer he looked at her, the longer Gregor was sure she was almost excruciatingly self-conscious.

  “Tom and Eddie out?” Gary asked her.

  Tina nodded and then tried a smile. It didn’t quite come off.

  “Tom and Eddie are our officers,” Gary said, heading toward the back where there were two more doors leading, Gregor supposed, to regular offices. “We don’t usually need more than that in Snow Hill. We wouldn’t need that if it wasn’t for the drugs. People don’t spend a lot of time killing each other here.”

  “There are robberies,” Tina said helpfully. “Breaking and entering, you know.”

  “Mostly, there are domestics,” Gary said. “I can’t say I’m all that fond of the new approach to policing domestics. I don’t have anything against arresting a guy even if the wife doesn’t want to press charges. That’s sensible enough. It’s all this treatment that gets me.”

  “Gary isn’t very fond of treatment,” Tina said. The delivery was completely deadpan. Gregor had no idea if she had meant to be funny or not.

  “I’d be fond of it if I thought it worked,” Gary said. “But it doesn’t work, does it? These guys go in and they take anger management classes and get signed up for AA, and it’s all fine as long as they’re locked up because as long as they’re locked up there are guys who can make them do all that. Then they get out and what happens? They head straight for the liquor store, if we’re lucky. If we’re not, they head for some of Nick Frapp’s less respectable church members and the next thing you know it they’re pounding the Hell out of somebody and there’s blood on the walls. There we are again.” Gary gave Gregor a look. “Are you one of those guys who are really impressed with treatment?”

  “No,” Gregor said. “In my opinion, the common house cat knows more about human nature than most of the psychologists I’ve met.”

  “Exactly.” Gary looked very satisfied. He was also standing next to the door to Gregor’s left. The door to Gregor’s right contained an office of the usual configuration. There was a desk, covered with work, but not messily covered with work. Gregor got the impression, once again, that Gary Albright was more organized than any human being had a ri
ght to be.

  Gary opened the other door and stepped back. “We fixed this up as an office for you,” he said. “It’s not completely adequate. It isn’t supposed to be an office.”

  “It’s supposed to be a closet,” Tina said. “But it’s got a window, and it’s got heat, so we thought it might do.”

  It also had a desk, a chair, and a computer and had been thoroughly cleaned out. Gregor stepped inside and immediately felt more than a little claustrophobic. It was very small. He would have to keep the door open. There was a thick manila folder on the desk. He picked it up and looked at it.

  “That’s everything we know so far,” Gary Albright said. “We thought we’d put it on a hard copy and you could take it home with you if you wanted to. But it’s on the computer, too, and you can send the files to yourself, or Tina can send them. That way you can look at them off site, too. We weren’t sure what you would need.”

  Gregor wasn’t sure what he needed either. “I take it Miss Hadley is still alive?”

  “Alive and in a coma,” Tina said. “The hospital has orders to call here if there’s any change. I went up to see her myself the other day. It’s very sad. She just lies there. She doesn’t have the, I don’t know, whatever it is she had when I used to see her.”

  “General cussedness,” Gary suggested.

  “Oh, really,” Tina said. “She wasn’t like that at all, Mr. Demarkian. Not like some of them, if you know what I mean. Some of the Darwinists, I guess. She wasn’t like Henry Wackford, or those awful people in that organization he started. Mad at us, mad at themselves, mad at the world. She wasn’t like that at all.”

  Darwinists, Gregor thought. He let it go. “Was she on the old school board, too?” he asked. “The one that mostly got thrown out by this new bunch?”

  “No,” Gary said. “The old board had been in place for years, but they had a gap—Edna Milton had to resign last year because she had some medical thing—”

  “Drying out, if you ask me,” Tina said.

  “Some medical thing,” Gary said firmly. “Anyway, for some reason she had to drop out, so Henry asked Annie-Vic to run in her place. We were all a little surprised that she said yes. She doesn’t have a lot of use for Henry.”

  “She doesn’t have a lot of use for anybody who speechifies all the time,” Tina said, “which I think is entirely to her credit. Anyway, I have to admit, it was a good thing she got on, even if it did mean we ended up in this lawsuit—”

  “Annie-Vic isn’t the reason we ended up in this lawsuit,” Gary said, “no matter what anybody says. Even if the board had been unanimous, somebody would have sued. That was inevitable.”

  “Well, the people in the development,” Tina started.

  Gary shook his head. “It’s not the people in the development, not entirely, and you know it. You and I both know people who’ve been in town forever who are on that side of things. And not just Henry Wackford and his people. If you ask me, I don’t think they should teach anything at all about evolution or creation in the public schools. There’s no consensus. It doesn’t matter which side a school board takes. There’s always trouble. I don’t understand why they can’t leave all that to the colleges and let the school districts alone.”

  “The way I understand it,” Gregor said, “evolution is the foundation of modern biology, so if you don’t teach evolution, you don’t teach modern biology.”

  Gary waved this away. “We didn’t learn about evolution in high school here when I was a student, and we still learned lots about biology. Cells. Animals. Plants. Personally, I don’t see why evolution is necessary to any of that, but even if it is, my point stands. There’s no consensus. You can’t even discuss the subject without everything going to pieces. We’ve got people in this town who’ve known each other since they were in diapers, whose grandparents knew each other since they were in diapers, who aren’t talking to each other over this thing, and it’s not going to get better when the judge hands down the ruling. People have said things they’re not going to be able to take back. They’ve said things they won’t forget. And that’s a damn shame.”

  “And it also means that nothing’s getting done, again,” Tina said. “In case you were wondering, Mr. Demarkian, the town didn’t elect the new school board to do something about evolution. They elected it because nothing was getting done. And I do mean nothing. I talked to Catherine Marbledale just this morning and she was tearing her hair out because some guy from the teachers’ union was coming in today. The school board is supposed to deal with the teachers’ union, but it isn’t. It’s doing this, so still nothing is getting done, and the union is threatening to take the teachers’ out on strike if there isn’t some kind of movement on contract terms this week.”

  “That was what Franklin was supposed to fix,” Gary Albright said. “Then it turned out that he is as much a lunatic about Creationism as Henry Wackford is about the holistic curriculum—”

  “What?” Gregor said.

  “The holistic curriculum,” Gary Albright said. “Don’t ask me to explain it. I can’t. It had something to do with integrating something or the other into something or the other, and bringing in speakers from the outside to ‘broaden’ people’s minds. Student minds. That and sex ed, which is supposed to be abstinence-only here, but Henry didn’t like it. It was a mess.”

  “Did Miss Hadley have positions on any of these issues?” Gregor asked.

  “Not really,” Gary said.

  “Well,” Tina said, “she did say once that teaching abstinence-only was like leaving a loaded gun in the middle of a room full of toddlers and telling them not to touch it.”

  “It wasn’t a major issue,” Gary said. “But at least she got down to work on the practical stuff, and now it seems as if nobody is going to do that until the trial is over. It’s good of Miss Marbledale to meet with the union rep, but she can’t actually do anything. It’s the board that has to approve contract terms. We’re just going to sit and burn money while a bunch of people fly in from New York and call us all a bunch of hick-town idiots.”

  “Unless somebody shoots the judge,” Tina said. “There’s rumors everywhere that there’s been a death threat on the judge, and the judge called in the FBI to protect him. Wouldn’t that be something? All we’d have to do is kill a judge over this thing, and this town will go down in history as no better than—well, no better than anything.”

  “Maybe I’ll sit down and read through the file for a while,” Gregor said. “When I’ve done that, I may know where I need to start.”

  “Go right ahead,” Gary said. “Tina will get you anything you need. There’s a diner up the street if you want something to eat. You can take stuff out and eat it here if you don’t want to hassle the place at lunchtime.”

  It was a long time before lunch, Gregor was pretty sure. He just shook his head and took himself around the desk to the chair. It really was a very small room.

  But it wouldn’t do him any good not to get started.

  2

  The first thing Gregor did was open the file the department had put together for him, and as soon as he did so he could see it was going to take some weeding out. There were all kinds of things in it. Some of those things were part of standard operating procedure. There were reports from the hospital and from two local doctors. There was a forensics summary that seemed to include not only the scene itself but most of Miss Hadley’s house. There were background notes on a good two dozen people. Gregor hadn’t heard of most of them, and he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to make of them. The longest set of notes concerned the pastor of the big church at the end of Main Street, Nicodemus Frapp. Nicodemus, Gregor thought. That must have been some way to go through high school.

  In the end, he put the file away on the other side of the desk and tried to think his way through what he’d heard. He did have a telephone. Somebody had plugged one in to a jack somewhere out in the big room. Gregor could see the thin clear cord snaking away from his phone and thr
ough his door. He got out his cell phone anyway, because ever since he’d had it he’d developed complete amnesia about phone numbers. There had been a time when he’d been able to remember a dozen or more. Now, he didn’t even know Bennis’s number, and he probably called Bennis two or three times a day.

  He wasn’t going to call Bennis now. He really was not up for another round of wedding preparations. He thought that if the wedding preparations went on much longer, they’d rival the plans for celebrating the year 2000. Hell, they’d rival the conspiracy theories about a worldwide computer meltdown.

  He punched around on his keypad for a while—it bothered him how quickly he’d gotten used to that; he’d never used his thumb for so much before Bennis had given him this phone, and now he could practically touch-type phone functions. He got to the address book and scrolled through it a little, trying to make up his mind whether it made more sense to stay local or go straight to Washington. He decided that he’d hated it when people had gone over his head to Washington when he’d been a field agent. Besides, how could the citizens of the United States of America expect the Bureau to operate efficiently with its own field offices if they treated the field offices like—

  Gregor didn’t know like what. Lackeys? Nobody used the word “lackeys” any more. He found his number and pressed the little green circle. You didn’t have to dial anything anymore. The phone dialed for you.

  This was not the time to indulge in morbid nostalgia for a technology-free universe. The phone had been picked up on the other end, and a woman’s voice was saying, “Federal Bureau of Investigation, Harrisburg Office. Office of the Director.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “Hello. My name is Gregor Demarkian. I was wondering if I could talk to Kevin O’Connor for a moment.”