Living Witness

by Jane Haddam

  Gregor was just about to suggest some kind of compromise, he wasn’t sure what, when Tina Clay came over to them.

  “Listen,” she said. “I think there may be some kind of emergency.”

  3

  The “some kind of emergency” was happening at the Hadley house, and if Tina Clay hadn’t been as confused and concerned as she was, they could all have walked. People had been saying that—that the house was close to Main Street—since Gregor had first been asked to look into the incident, but for some reason he hadn’t really visualized what that meant. The house was not just “close to” Main Street, it was not far off it, up a steepish hill on a tiny side street lined with the kind of two-story frame houses that comprised the heart of every small town in the Northeast. The houses were single family, too, or at most two-family conversions with a second door stuck hastily on the side. Gregor could imagine a time during the Great Depression when the families in those houses had been the luckiest ones. The poor people would have lived off and away from things, in the country, in the hills. It was only after World War II that the bias against living in town had begun.

  They started out from the police station. The town was quiet, there were a few cars on the street, and those mobile news vans were parked along the curbs, but there were few people out anywhere and nothing like traffic. Eddie Block was careful not to put on the siren when they started for the Hadley place. There wasn’t that far to go, and he didn’t want to attract the attention of the news crews. Then, in a blink, they were there, so fast that Gregor hadn’t really had a chance to assimilate the fact that there was “something” happening that might connect to his case. They were parked at the hedge outside an older house with half timbering accented by brick and stone, set well back from the road. Another car was parked there, too. It was a dark Volvo station-wagon of the kind Gregor associated with certain towns on the Main Line, and there was a very young woman with blond hair leaning against the side of it and sobbing.

  Eddie and Tom were in the front seat. They got out first. Gregor waited a moment while they walked over to the young woman and then got out himself. He could see how this had been the house of the richest family in town, even though they wouldn’t have been rich by city standards. He suspected that people in Snow Hill still thought of the Hadleys as “rich.” They would have just enough to be enviable.

  Eddie and Tom had reached the small blond woman. Gregor sped up to be sure he heard everything that was said.

  “She was taking too long,” the woman was saying. “She said she’d be just a minute and it was minute after minute, I was just sitting here, and you know there are things to do, I have my children to pick up at school and she has, she had hers, she was supposed to, we were both supposed to, because we can’t just leave them there now, can we. I mean, there are all the problems they’re having, those horrid children, yelling at them, calling them names, playing tricks. They used to ride the school bus but we can’t do that anymore. We really can’t. We have to pick them up and she said she’d only be a minute and then it was all so long so I thought I’d just go to the door and tell her we had to go and then the door was wide open so I walked right inside and it felt wrong to do that it wasn’t my house but there it was, you see what I mean, and there she, there she—”

  “Take a deep breath,” Eddie Block said, not unkindly. “Take a deep breath, hold it in for a second, then let it out. Then I’d appreciate it if you told me your name.”

  The woman took a deep breath and held it. She looked like she was about to turn blue. She let the breath out again. “Shelley Niederman,” she said. “My name is Shelley Niederman.”

  “Good,” Eddie Block said. “Very good. Now, I take it you live in town.”

  Shelley Niederman blinked. “Yes,” she said, sounding faintly annoyed. “Of course I live in town. I live in Fox Run. So did she. So did Judy.”

  “Who’s Judy?” Eddie Block said.

  Now Shelley Niederman looked very annoyed. “You don’t have to do this, you know? You don’t have to pretend you don’t know who we are. I mean, for God’s sake, what’s wrong with you people here? You’re all a pack of savages, that’s what you are. I don’t know why Steve wanted to take this job, I really don’t. The money is good, I know that, but there are other things beside money, and we’re stuck out here with a bunch of hillbillies who still think the earth is flat and then this happens—something like this happens and—”

  “I still don’t know who Judy is,” Eddie Block said calmly. “It’s not that uncommon a name.”

  “Judy Cornish,” Shelley Niederman said. “And you know who she is and you know who I am. Everybody in this godforsaken town knows, because we had to file a lawsuit to make sure our kids got a decent education, because if we’d left it up to you people you’d have been presenting Noah’s Ark in history class. God, I hate this place. I really hate it.”

  Eddie Block was taking deep breaths himself. So was Tom Fordman. Gregor stepped forward a little.

  “Excuse me,” he said.

  Shelley Niederman looked him up and down. “I know you. I know who you are. We saw your picture on the Internet. You’re Gregor Demarkian. Well, it’s a good thing you’re here. Now there’s a murder for you to solve. That’s probably why they brought you in in the first place. They probably knew there was going to be a murder to solve. I don’t understand what’s wrong with these people. I don’t understand what’s wrong.”

  Gregor took a deep breath of his own and shot a look at Eddie Block. He would have shot one at Tom Fordman, too, but he was looking at the ground. Both of these men were ready to strangle this woman, and Gregor didn’t entirely blame them.

  “What you’re saying,” he said, “is that this woman, this Judy Cornish, has been murdered?”

  “Of course she’s been murdered,” Shelley Niederman said. “How else could that—Could that—” The tears welled up again and threatened to spill over. Then they did spill over. Shelley put a hand to her face and wiped them away. “She’s in there, don’t you understand? She’s right in there and she was only going in for a minute, just to check something, it didn’t make any sense to me but then nothing ever makes any sense to me around here. She was only going to be a minute and then she was gone too long and I called out to her and she didn’t answer and then I went inside and then there she was and then I came out here and called on the cell phone because I’ve got a cell phone, of course I do, I’m not a Neanderthal like some people around here—honest to God, you’d think technology was the devil. You’d think everything was the devil. They see the devil under their beds and they probably hunt witches, really, they probably burn them right on that green thing with the war memorial—”

  “Wait,” Gregor said. It was like standing under a waterfall. “Judy Cornish has been murdered, and her body is—where?”

  Shelley Niederman blinked again. “I told you where the body is,” she said. “I told you first thing.”

  “Maybe you told Officer Block or Officer Fordman, and I didn’t hear.”

  “All right,” Shelley said. “It’s up there.”

  “In the house?”

  “Yes, of course in the house.”

  “Where in the house?”

  “In the dining room,” Shelley said. She put her head in her hands. “It’s right there, in the dining room, in the doorway to another room, I don’t know which, I wasn’t paying attention. Because she was just there, wasn’t she? She was dead and then I ran out here and I called on the cell phone and how far are we from the police station, anyway? It doesn’t take a minute but you people took forever and I was just standing out here and she was lying in there dead and—”

  “How do you know she was dead?” Gregor asked patiently.

  “What do I mean, how did I know? I’m not an idiot, am I? Anybody could see she was dead. There was blood everywhere—”

  “Did you try to take a pulse? Or check for breathing?” Gregor asked.

  “Oh, Hell,” Eddie Block s
aid.

  Then both he and Tom Fordman took off running.

  Gregor and Shelley Niederman watched them go.

  “Of course she’s dead,” Shelley Niederman said. “She couldn’t be alive with so much blood everywhere. Nobody could be alive like that.”

  PART II

  It is tempting to quarrel over Harris’s use of the term “unintelligent design.” But there is a more important problem with his statement, namely, that it ignores the true reason why so many people reject the position that life on earth has evolved entirely through a natural process. That reason, of course, is a lack of fossil evidence supporting the notion that evolution explains variations between, not just within, species.

  Mike S. Adams, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice,

  University of North Carolina at Wilmington,

  “Second Letter to a Secular Nation,” Townhall.com 4 April 2007

  6. There are no intermediate fossil forms.

  This is a claim for which there is a monosyllabic definition: lie. Not error, which implies honest ignorance, but lie, because the people who make this claim are generally fully aware of the fossil record and simply choose to misrepresent it. Archaeopteryx, the earliest known fossil bird for a long time (some recent finds may be earlier) has a thoroughly reptilian skeleton with a bony tail, teeth, and four paws with jointed fingers (not merely the horny skin growths at the middle joint that a few modern birds have). And it has feathers. If that’s not an intermediate, what is? More recently, evidence is accumulating that some dinosaurs had hair and feathers. If we’d lived 100 million years ago, we might have put birds, mammals and reptiles in the same class or at least put the divisions very differently from today. Therapsids are the intermediates between reptiles and mammals, crossopterygians and ichthyostegids are the intermediates between fish and amphibians, and so on.

  Steve Dutch, Professor of Natural and Applied Sciences,

  University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, “Ten Myths About Evolution,”

  The Steve Dutch Home Page, 21 January 2003

  ONE

  1

  It was never possible to tell if the victim of a battery was really dead, not by just looking at him, but Gregor Demarkian was willing to bet that this was as close to certainty as he was ever going to get. The two officers had raced to the house and gotten there well before him. When he came in through the dark central hall, he could see Tom Fordman kneeling next to the body, bent over the head as if he were about to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. A moment later he leaned back and then stood up, shaking his head. Gregor saw Eddie Block turn his away from the body and look at the walls, the ceiling, everywhere. There was a lot to look at. Even in the gloom—and gloom seemed to be practically the theme of this house—it was obvious there was blood everywhere.

  “It’s like something out of a horror novel,” Eddie Block was saying as Gregor came in. “You ever been in this house before? You ever know it was this dark?”

  “I’ve been in the parlor,” Tom Fordman said.

  Gregor was just then passing the entry to the “parlor,” which he would have called a living room. It was dark, too, but the effect was less oppressive than it was in the hall, because the room had a big line of cross-hatch windows looking out on the front lawn. Still, the effect was heavy and funereal, and not just because there was a lack of natural light. Everything about the place was dark. The furniture was upholstered in dark colors where it was upholstered at all. Otherwise, it was made of dark woods. The woods were highly polished, but that only made them look darker. The walls were painted white where they were painted at all, but in other places there was dark wood paneling or ancient wallpaper in dark colors and closely figured. It was a house meant to express the sober thoughtfulness, the gravity of the person who owned it. Gregor was willing to bet it hadn’t been changed in fifty years.

  He reached the officers and the body, which was lying half in and half out of the dining room. Here the darkness was absolute, in spite of the two great windows in one wall. There were curtains on those windows, and the curtains had been pulled shut. The dining room table was piled high with books and papers. They looked a mess. The body was so bloody it looked as if its head had been ground into hamburger and left to rot.

  Gregor did not bend down to check it out. He had seen enough dead bodies in his day. They had never added a single clue to his investigation. Medical examiners knew about bodies. He knew about crime scenes. He looked at the walls and then at the ceiling. Yes, there was blood on the ceiling. Not a lot of it, but blood. There was blood on some of the papers on the table. There was blood on the single pair of shoes someone had left next to the door that led to the kitchen.

  Coming back around to the two officers, Gregor was astonished to see they were still just standing there.

  “Isn’t there something we ought to do?” he said gently. “There’s the obvious to consider here.”

  “We need to call Gary,” Tom Fordman said. “Gary will know what the procedure is.”

  “Gary can’t work on this,” Eddie Block said. “That’s why we have Mr. Demarkian here. Mr. Demarkian is supposed to lead the investigation. That’s what Gary said.”

  “We don’t know that he’s supposed to lead this investigation,” Tom Fordman said. “We don’t know if the two things are connected. Annie-Vic and this. Just because this woman is in Annie-Vic’s house doesn’t mean—”

  “Of course it means,” Eddie Block said. “She’s in the house and she’s one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, isn’t she? She’s that woman from the development—”

  “Wait,” Gregor said.

  They turned to look at him as if they were surprised to find him there. This was not a good sign. It was obvious that these two men were not used to dealing with murder, and whatever training they had received hadn’t mentally prepared them to take on something of this kind. Gregor didn’t know where to start. He wondered what had happened when Annie-Vic was attacked. Gary probably got the call and he at least would have been mentally prepared, if only because he had served in combat zones.

  Gregor tried to go slowly. “Didn’t you tell me, didn’t somebody tell me, that Annie-Vic has family here, visiting from out of town?”

  “That’s right,” Eddie Block said. “A grandniece and a grandnephew. Or a grandnephew and a great grandniece. Or something like that.”

  “Do they come from far out of town?” Gregor asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Eddie Block said. “I think one of them is from Chicago.”

  “Fine,” Gregor said. “Where are they staying now?”

  Eddie Block and Tom Fordman looked at each other. Gregor had no idea if he was getting through to them. They looked confused.

  “I don’t know,” Eddie said. “I just assumed they were staying, ah, staying—”

  “Here?” Gregor suggested.

  “They would stay here, wouldn’t they?” Tom Fordman said. “That would be the normal thing.”

  “I think so too,” Gregor said. “And that brings us to the question, where are they?”

  The two officers looked at each other again. Gregor didn’t really think they were stupid, just inexperienced. Maybe that was a hopeful sign, that there were still small towns in America where people weren’t killing each other often. Still, this was an emergency and he needed to get that across to them.

  “Do you mean you think one of the relatives did it?” Tom Fordman said. “But the relatives couldn’t have attacked Annie-Vic. They weren’t anywhere near Snow Hill.”

  “Maybe it was one of the relatives who attacked this woman and somebody else who attacked Annie-Vic?” Eddie Block tried.

  “Listen,” Gregor said. “This woman has been murdered. She’s in the house of someone she knew—what? Well? Slightly?”

  “They’d have to know each other at least a little,” Eddie Block said. “Because they were both plaintiffs in the lawsuit, you know.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “Would you say she knew
Ann-Victoria Hadley well enough to be in a position to just walk into her house whenever she wanted to, without an invitation, without being let in?”

  “Oh,” Eddie Block.

  “Nobody was like that with Annie-Vic,” Tom Fordman said. “You didn’t know her, but you can trust me. She wouldn’t have put up with that kind of thing from anybody. Even the relatives knocked.”

  “Fine,” Gregor said. “Then what the Hell is this woman doing here? How did she get in? Did someone let her in? If someone did, where is the someone? Could she have just walked in? Did Annie-Vic usually leave her doors unlocked? What about the relatives? Would they have left them unlocked if they went out?”

  “Ah,” Eddie Block said.

  “I don’t think the relatives would have left the doors unlocked,” Tom Fordman said. “I mean, they’re from out of town. They live in big cities and people don’t do that kind of thing there.”

  “Do they do that kind of thing here?” Gregor asked. “Do people leave their doors unlocked in Snow Hill?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Eddie Block said. “I can’t remember the last time I locked mine. Maybe when we went away on vacation last summer, but maybe not. But I’m with Tom. The relatives would have.”

  “Fine,” Gregor felt as if he were swimming through molasses. “Then here’s what we’ve got. We’ve got a woman dead on the floor who has no reason to be in this house and, as far as we know, no way to get into it. We’ve got a woman outside who was with her but who didn’t come in, and if the murderer had run out the front door and down the front path, that woman would have seen him. Or her. Never mind. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

  “The murderer might have gone out the back way,” Eddie Block said.

  “Is there a back way?” Gregor asked, although he supposed that there would have to be. “Never mind,” he said. “Yes, the murderer might have gone out the back way, or he might not have. He could still be in the house. The times are close enough that that’s not impossible. And there’s another thing to worry about. Something else might be in the house.”