Living Witness

by Jane Haddam

  “Ann-Victoria Hadley was a scientist?” Gregor was surprised.

  “No,” Evan said. “That’s just how these people talk. There’s another one. Edna something or the other.”

  “Edna Milton,” Molly said.

  “That’s the one,” Evan said. “She’s going around saying there have been death threats against the judge sitting on this case—did Kevin tell you about the judge? Old Ham Folger, for God’s sake. A man so self-important he takes himself more seriously than God.”

  “Kevin did tell me about that,” Gregor said. “He also said it was a no-go.”

  “It is,” Molly said. “There have been no threats against Hamilton Folger. And I mean none. Not even nonviable ones. But according to this woman—”

  “Edna Milton,” Gregor said.

  “Yes, according to her, the fundamentalists are going to murder Judge Folger unless he flies right and decides the case their way. It’s driving us crazy. We can’t not check out the rumors when they come. They’ve got us running ourselves ragged checking out sheer nonsense.”

  “And is the nonsense all from one side?” Gregor asked. “It’s all the evolution side talking about the Creationism side?”

  “Hardly,” Evan said. “There’s Franklin Hale. He says Henry Wackford whacked the old lady because he can’t get over being voted out. Although why he’d do that, I don’t know. You’d think if Wackford was angry about being voted out, he’d go after Franklin Hale. He’s the new chairman.”

  “And there’s a woman named Alice McGuffie; she and her husband own this diner, as a matter of fact,” Molly said. “She says that Henry Wackford did it because he wants to make ‘good Christian people’ look bad. She always says it that way. ‘Good Christian People.’ As if it were in capitals.”

  “Both those claims seem pretty lame,” Gregor said. “They’re certainly as lame as the ones the evolution people are making.”

  “In general,” Evan said, “you’ll find that the evolution side seems, at least on the surface, to have more rational arguments than the Creation side. About who assaulted Ann-Victoria Hadley, I mean. But it’s only on the surface. Once you start talking to them, they’re all equally crazy. And I, for one, just don’t get it.”

  “No,” Molly agreed. “I don’t get it, either. You’d be amazed at what’s going on in this town. Even the children are beating each other up, both figuratively and literally. And over what? It isn’t as if the new board actually wanted to stop the teaching of evolution, or even to start the teaching of Creationism—”

  “Intelligent Design,” Evan said. “It’s not the same thing.”

  “It doesn’t matter what it is,” Molly said. “All the new board wants is to put a little thing in books saying that some people don’t accept Darwin’s theory and if you have questions you can go to the library and take out this book. That’s it. How many times did you go to the school library when you were growing up? I honestly don’t understand what all the fuss is about.”

  “I don’t either,” Evan said. “And if you explained all this on the evening news, I’d bet you anything most of the American people wouldn’t understand it. It would be a different thing, you know, if they wanted to hold classes talking about God passing over the face of the waters or something, but they don’t.”

  “Although Franklin Hale probably would like to,” Molly said. “But Evan is right. The way things stand, it really doesn’t make any sense. And of course this Miss Hadley was against the idea, and she joined the lawsuit. The whole thing is just ridiculous.”

  Gregor’s club sandwich came. He looked at the remains of the food on Evan’s and Molly’s plates. They’d eaten lunch before he got there, which made sense, since he wasn’t meeting them for lunch. They’d both eaten club sandwiches, though. Gregor picked up one quarter of his own—like all club sandwiches, the thing was cut into four little triangles—and then put it down again. The bacon looked hard as a rock. The lettuce looked like it had been frozen and was still full of ice crystals.

  “Could any of these people have committed the assault?” he asked. “Or didn’t you check that out?”

  “We definitely checked it out,” Evan said. “And the answer is yes. Anybody on either side of the lawsuit could have gone up there and whacked the old lady. You’d have to ask the doctors about it to get the specifics, but as far as I can tell, she was found nearly right away.”

  “If she hadn’t been, she’d have been dead,” Molly said.

  “That was mostly a fluke,” Evan said. “But all the people involved were out and about at the time. They were all wandering around Main Street or back and forth to the schools complex or something. So any of them could have done it.”

  “Who found Miss Hadley? Does she have servants in that house? Were there people around?”

  “No servants,” Molly said, “except for a woman who comes in to clean twice a week. No, it was a woman named Catherine Marbledale who found her. She’s the principal of the high school. She’d gone up there to deliver some papers about something or the other—not the lawsuit, some stuff to do with the school. And it was a good thing. If Miss Hadley had been there for another hour or so—” Molly shrugged.

  Gregor looked into his coffee and suddenly realized. He hadn’t ordered coffee. He’d ordered a mineral water.

  “Huh,” he said.

  “He just got it,” Molly said.

  “They do that to everybody,” Evan said. “Couple of days ago, this woman who works for Fox had a complete fit in here because she kept ordering mineral water and they kept giving her coffee. We don’t think they even have mineral water. At least, we haven’t seen it.”

  “It isn’t on the menu,” Molly said.

  Gregor sighed. “I suppose the next thing is to talk to the doctors,” he said. “Is there a guard at the hospital, looking after this woman?”

  “Not that we know of,” Evan said.

  “She is a living witness,” Gregor said. “If she comes to, she might be able to finger her attacker.”

  “True,” Evan said, “but if her attacker is who we think it is—”

  “Meaning some local asshole just out for a grab,” Molly said.

  “—he’s not going to go back after her anyway,” Evan said. “And seriously, Mr. Demarkian, we can’t see that it would be anyone else. No matter what kind of trash is being talked around here, there’s really no reason to beat the woman up just because she won’t resign and the school board wants to put some stickers in some textbooks. And that’s about all it comes down to.”

  “But I was told that she had money on her.” Gregor asked. “If it was smash and grab, shouldn’t whoever smashed’ve done some grabbing?”

  “Maybe this Marbledale woman came by right as the guy was going for that,” Molly said. “Maybe she scared him off. Anyway, you should try to talk to the doctors. They can give you more information than we can. With any luck the old lady will come to, and then you won’t have to do anything accept take her statement.”

  2

  There was no such thing as a taxi in Snow Hill, Pennsylvania. Gregor should have guessed, but he was so used to living in cities the question never occurred to him. Instead, back in his “office” after “lunch” with Molly and Evan—was everything connected to this place going to need to be put into scare quotes?—he went futilely through the yellow pages, trying one car service or another, until he got to the point where he thought it might make sense to pretend he was a funeral.

  In the middle of all this, with Gary Albright still missing somewhere in town, both of Snow Hill’s regular officers came in to check on what was happening. Very little was happening, as a matter of fact, in spite of the upcoming trial and the news people with their mobile production units everywhere, and the fights that were breaking out between teenagers over one thing or another. Gregor came out and introduced himself to them. They were not friendly, but they weren’t hostile, either. Gregor supposed that was to be expected.

  “It’s not th
at we don’t want you here,” the one called Eddie Block said. “It’s just that we both have a lot of respect for Gary, and we don’t like the idea that anybody would think he’d beat up an old woman.”

  “I’m not sure anybody does think that,” Gregor said. It was only half true, but there was no point in going through all the ambiguities he saw in Gary Albright’s personality with these two men. “I thought it was his idea to bring me in.”

  “Oh, it was,” the one called Tom Fordman said. “But that’s the thing. He wouldn’t have had to think of calling you in if it wasn’t for the fact that some people might suspect he—you know. We don’t like it.”

  “If Gary was going to go after someone,” Eddie Block said, “he’d do it straight. He wouldn’t sneak up behind them with an aluminum bat. He’d face them straight on and shoot them.”

  “And he wouldn’t do that,” Tom Fordman said. “He’s never shot anybody in his life except, you know, maybe in the military.”

  “He’d’ve had to shoot somebody in the military,” Eddie Block said. “He was in combat.”

  Gregor’s head hurt. They were all out in the big room, which was a good thing. If they’d been having this conversation in his office, they would have sucked all the oxygen from the air by now. Gregor looked around, found a chair, and sat down. It was one of those computer chairs on wheels. He hated chairs on wheels. He was convinced they were going to shoot out from under him.

  “All right,” he said. “Let me ask you two a few things. You said hit from behind. That isn’t something I’d heard before. How do you know she was hit from behind?”

  The two men looked at each other. They were, Gregor thought, chronologically older than Gary Albright, but they’d had less real world experience, and it showed. Gregor got out of his chair, went back into his office, and got the big thick file Tina had left for him. Then he came back out and sat down again.

  “Just a minute,” he said. He flipped through page after page. The file was much too thick. “Here it is. ‘Bruising consistent with a frontal assault,’” he read. “Who did this examination?”

  “Somebody out at the hospital, I’d guess,” Tom Fordman said. “That guy Willard, maybe. He’s not from around here.”

  “We say it’s the Snow Hill Hospital, but it isn’t, not really,” Eddie Block said. “It’s three towns together. We’re not big enough to have one for ourselves.”

  “It’s a private thing,” Tom Fordman said. “You know, not government. It’s got some kind of foundation and they hold fund-raisers and like that, and that’s how we got a hospital you can get to from here. Which is a good thing, because I think the next real hospital is in Harrisburg.”

  “Does it have a morgue?” Gregor asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Eddie Block said. “It’s got one of those.”

  “How about a medical examiner?”

  The two men looked uneasy. “We usually use the state police for that,” Eddie Block said. “There isn’t call for that kind of thing out here, not very much. We get the usual domestics, you know, and there’s always one or two kids a year who kill themselves on drugs or driving drunk.”

  “It’s mostly driving drunk,” Tom Fordman said. “Not that we don’t have drug problems, because we do, but drugs are expensive and it’s easier to get liquor. Except last year when we had a couple of meth labs.”

  “Out in the trailers,” Eddie Block said. “They rig up these labs and then they blow themselves sky high. Don’t know what else you would expect of a bunch of people would’ve flunked chemistry in high school if they’d stayed long enough to take it.”

  “But there it is,” Tom Fordman said. “We’re mostly quiet around here. Which makes the thing with Annie-Vic so weird. And you said, what? Frontal assault. So somebody came right at her. Must have been somebody she knew.”

  “Of course it was somebody she knew,” Eddie Block said. “This is Snow Hill. She knew just about everybody, except the people from the development, and she knew a lot of those. And the people from the development don’t go wandering around town much. What would one of them have been doing out at the Hadley house?”

  Gregor flipped through the file again. Small towns always made him nervous. They made him even more nervous when they seemed to be full of people too naive to be real.

  He closed the file again. He hadn’t really been looking for anything in it. He’d sit down and read it through tonight, but for the moment it was just a matter of hearing and seeing what he could hear and see.

  “Let me ask you a few things,” he said, “if you’ve got a minute. Would you say that Ann-Victoria Hadley was well liked by people here? I mean, I suppose somebody must have liked her, they voted her on to the school board.”

  “Well, her election to the school board was practical,” Eddie Block said. “Annie-Vic may be old, but she knows how to do business. She always has. Father left her that house up there and the money had to be divided between all the brothers and sisters, and Annie-Vic put it in the stock market and made a pile. Or so everybody thinks. So people just figure, if she could do that, she could fix some of the financial problems the school district was having, because Henry Wackford didn’t want to do crap when it came to the practical stuff.”

  “We’ve got a problem with teachers’ unions you wouldn’t believe,” Tom Fordman said. “I wish I was in a union like the one the teachers have. I could’ve retired when I was forty.”

  Tom Fordman didn’t look thirty. Gregor bit his lip. “So what does that mean?” he asked. “That people didn’t like Ann-Victoria Hadley?”

  “Well, people liked her and people didn’t,” Eddie Block said. “I guess the general take was that she was a snob, because she was that. Is that. Hard to talk about her lying up there the way she is. But she always was a snob. Came from the richest family in town. Went away to some fancy college in the East.”

  “Vassar,” Tom Fordman said. “Jacqueline Kennedy went there. And Jane Fonda. And that blond girl from Friends.”

  “Yeah, well,” Eddie Block said. “She went away to this fancy college and she came back and thought she was smarter than everybody. Or maybe she always thought that. That was before I was born. But you see how it is, people resented it, a little. That’s not surprising. That’s not the same thing as saying they hated her.”

  “Alice McGuffie hated her,” Tom Fordman said, “but Alice hates everybody, and she’s never done anything about it before. Except bitch, you know. She does that day and night.”

  Gregor thought about it for a second. “Alice McGuffie,” he said. “She owns the diner?”

  “Alice and her husband, Lyman, yeah,” Eddie Block said. “Own it and run it. That’s Lyman, though, not Alice. Alice couldn’t run a business if her life depended on it.”

  “I was just over at the diner,” Gregor said. “She wasn’t there.”

  “She takes off a lot during the day,” Tom Fordman said, “unless she’s waiting tables, or the counter or something. Most people around here figure she’s more of a liability to Lyman than an asset. She really does bitch. To everybody. And she isn’t above being rude as Hell, either.”

  “Better not let Gary hear you swearing in the office,” Eddie Block said.

  “Well, how else would you put it?” Tom Fordman said. “If she doesn’t like you, she’ll tell you so right to your face, even if you’re having lunch in her own place. You should hear her talking to Catherine Marbledale. Except it doesn’t work with Miss Marbledale, because Miss Marbledale does it right back, and she uses really big words. Alice ends up like to pop.”

  “Was she ever rude to Ann-Victoria Hadley?” Gregor asked.

  “Alice is rude to everybody,” Eddie Block said.

  “Could she have killed Ann-Victoria Hadley?” Gregor asked.

  “I don’t know what you mean by could she have,” Tom Fordman said. “Do you mean did she have the time? I’d guess so, sure. It’s not that far from Main Street to the Hadley house. And I’d guess she’d have the psych
ology, too. I’d bet anything there are dozens of people Alice would like to kill.”

  “Starting with Miss Marbledale,” Eddie Block said. “Alice had Miss Marbledale as a teacher in school.”

  “But here’s the thing,” Tom Fordman said. “You wouldn’t think she’d have the strength to do it, if you know what I mean. She’s a small woman, Alice is, short, I mean, not skinny. And she’s middle-aged. And she’s not exactly what you’d call physically fit. I keep thinking it must have taken a lot of strength to do what was done to Annie-Vic.”

  “It might have,” Gregor agreed. He looked down at the folder. At some point while he was unaware of it, he had put it down on the desk nearest his chair. He tapped the top of it. “Is there any way I can find somebody to drive me around a little? I want to go out to the hospital and talk to the doctors who treated Miss Hadley when she was brought in. And I want to go out to the house where the attack happened. And then I’m going to want to talk to some people.”

  Somewhere on the other side of the room, the phone rang and Tina picked it up. Eddie and Tom looked at each other and then at Gregor Demarkian. Gregor thought they must have known that he didn’t drive. That was why Gary Albright had come all the way into Philadelphia to get him. It was possible that they hadn’t really believed it until right that minute.

  “Well,” Eddie Block said. “It’s a police case, so we could probably get you where you want to go, if nothing else came up.”

  “Nothing much else ever comes up,” Tom Fordman said.

  “We could take you around in the patrol car,” Eddie Block said.

  “As long as Gary doesn’t mind,” Tom Fordman said.

  They looked back and forth at each other. Gregor thought about hiring a car and a driver for the next week, but it occurred to him that doing that would make him look like an even bigger snob than Annie-Vic.