by Jane Haddam
“Yeah,” the paramedic said. “Who’d’ve thought? I mean, we get murders up here, you know, but not like this. We get the ordinary stuff. Guy gets drunk as Hell and kills his girlfriend. Couple of guys get too happy in a bar and take out the knives. But this. This is brutal.”
“Yes,” Gregor agreed, “it certainly is that.”
“If you ask me, it’s because we’ve taken God out of the schools,” the paramedic said. “Just wait till this investigation is over. It will turn out to be some high school kid looking for a thrill. They don’t have morals anymore, these kids, because they don’t know anything about God. They go to school and their teachers tell them there isn’t any right or wrong, everything is relative, it doesn’t matter what they do. What do you expect? We didn’t used to have murders like this in places like this.”
Gregor thought about Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, with eleven people dead in Nebraska and Wyoming in the early fifties, and Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, leaving the entire Clutter family dead in Kansas in 1959, all years before the U.S. public schools had ended their practice of praying at the start of the school day.
He thought about them, but he didn’t mention them, because there didn’t seem to be any point.
TWO
1
It was the only serious mistake Catherine Marbledale ever made in her career—but it was a very serious mistake, and she should have seen it coming. It wasn’t that she had spent her entire teaching life in this particular small town, or even that she’d grown up in another one just like it. She knew these places, strung out along the rim of Appalachia, scattered across the Midwest, set down in tangles of kudzu and moss throughout the South. It wasn’t true that “news travels fast” in such places. Most news never even got in. Catherine was willing to bet her life that she could stop the first fifteen people she met on Main Street and not one of them would be able to name the prime minister of Great Britain or the president of France. Genocide raged in Darfur, and most of these people never had never heard of it. War broke out in Central Europe, and the only time it made a dent was when somebody’s son, away in the Marines, was deployed. Other kinds of news, though, not only traveled fast, it traveled instantaneously—even before the advent of cell phones.
She knew something was wrong as soon as she pulled into the parking lot in front of the school. She had her special assigned place, marked PRINCIPAL, closer to the building than any others except the handicapped spaces right next to the main doors. Of course, she already knew there was “something wrong,” a lot wrong. She had a cell phone of her own. The office had called her as soon as they had gotten word that Judy Cornish was dead. The Cornish children would need to be told, but their father would do that. He was already on his way out. There were arrangements to be made: Catherine would have to talk to the teachers to make sure the children were not loaded down with homework at a time like this; she had to make sure they knew they could go home or stay at school, whatever made them feel best. There was so much that needed to be figured out.
She got out of her car, thinking that she would have to call a meeting this afternoon. She would have to talk to that Mr. Demarkian who Gary Albright had brought in, and have her teachers talk to him, too. This had something to do with the school, even if she didn’t believe it had anything to do with “Intelligent Design.” They’d all known Judy Cornish. They might have information the police would find valuable. She went in through the big glass double doors. Most of the front wall of the school was glass. The glass had replaced tight but crumbling bricks in a remodeling a few years ago. The remodeling had taken forever, just like everything else the school board was asked to handle.
The foyer at the front of the building was large and open. The left wall was lined with display cases, full of trophies for one thing or another. Every once in a while, Snow Hill fielded decent sports teams. The boys who played on them almost never got athletic scholarships, though, or they only got them for small schools that wouldn’t matter much. Catherine Marbledale could remember a time when every college mattered. Just going to college mattered. The world as it had come to be made no sense to her at all.
She headed to the right, to the row of doors to the offices, and it was then that she saw Mallory Cornish standing alone against the cheap polished paneling. A class period was just letting out. There were people coming into the foyer, students with books in their arms, because there was a policy that backpacks had to be left in lockers during the school day. She felt as if she were trapped in gelatin. Everything was moving impossibly slowly, except, all of a sudden, it wasn’t.
Mallory Cornish stepped away from the wall. She was a pretty girl, small and compact, and with that obvious air of intelligence girls had when they were destined to be valedictorians. Catherine watched as Mallory advanced into the foyer, and then, a second too late, realized why it was happening. Barbie McGuffie and those two idiot friends of hers were marching their way from the east to the west wings.
Mallory got out into the middle of the open space, put her arm out, and stopped Barbie in her tracks. Barbie was furious.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.
Barbie was supposed to be in detention, Catherine remembered that; that was decided right before she left school and went driving around. And Dan Cornish couldn’t possibly have gotten here already. Mallory shouldn’t even have known what was going on. But it wasn’t like that, was it? This was the kind of news that traveled instantaneously. And there were cell phones.
“Your mother is a murderer,” Mallory Cornish said. She said it so loudly, it literally bounced off the walls. It sounded as if it had come over the intercom. Everybody in the hall stopped dead.
“Your mother is a murderer,” Mallory said again, “and she’s going to die for it. There’s the death penalty in this state. They’re going to stick a needle in her arm and she’s going to die for it, and then do you know what’s going to happen to her? She’s going to be a rotting corpse, just a lot of dead meat with maggots all over her, rotting in the ground.”
“Get the Hell away from me,” Barbie McGuffie shrieked. “You’re going to Hell, that’s what’s going to happen to you. You’re going to Hell and so is your mother. You’re both going to burn for all eternity.”
“There is no Hell,” Mallory said, and Catherine could see the gleam in her eye, the triumph, as if this had been bottled up for so long it was an achievement to let it out. “There is no Hell. There is no life after death. There is no God. Only stupid people think there is. Stupid people who want to make the rest of us all stupid, too, and it isn’t going to work. Because you know the truth, Barbie McGuffie. There is no God. There is no life after death. Your mother is going to die from that lethal injection and then she’s going to rot.”
Barbie McGuffie threw her books on the floor and advanced on Mallory Cornish, but Mallory wasn’t moving. “You listen to me,” Barbie said, “there is a God and there is a Hell and your mother is in it right this minute, your mother—”
“Angels floating in the sky, Barbie? Women having babies when they haven’t had sex? Noah and his ark, for God’s sake. Tell me this, Barbie, what happened to all the shit? You know. There were all those animals there. They must have shit. They must have shit a lot. Where did all the shit go? Noah must have been up to his eyeballs in shit by the second day.”
“You shut up,” Barbie shrieked again. She had her hand on Mallory’s shoulder. She shoved. Mallory still didn’t move. She shoved again. “You’re going to Hell! You’re going to Hell!”
“You’re going nowhere,” Mallory said. “Twenty years from now you’ll still be sitting in Snow Hill, working at the diner and getting fat, when I’m out doing something with my life and then that will be it. Only stupid people believe in God and you’re the stupidest of the bunch, except for your mother, and she’s going to die. She’s going to die right there in the death chamber. It’s going to be on American Justice. And then she’s going to rot in the gr
ound. And that’s what’s going to happen to you.”
This time, when Barbie shoved, it was with the full weight of her body behind it. Mallory stumbled back, and as she did Barbie stumbled forward, and teetered, and then fell, right down onto the hard linoleum of the foyer floor, onto her knees. Catherine could hear the crack of a bone all the way from where she stood at the doors.
Mallory caught her balance and walked back to where Barbie was, kneeling and howling at the top of her lungs.
“Your mother murdered my mother,” Mallory said, “and I know it and so do you. She said she was going to do it, and now she’s done it. I heard her say she was going to do it. I’m going to tell the police all about it, and when I do they’ll arrest her, and she’ll go on trial, and she’ll be found guilty, and that’s when they’ll put her to death. To rot. As a corpse in the ground. With maggots coming out of her eye sockets. To rot with nothing to show for her life, just like the rest of you idiots.”
“My leg is broken,” Barbie screamed. “My leg is broken.”
“Well,” Mallory said, “why don’t you pray to God and have Him heal it? Just pray to God, and I’m sure, if He’s listening, He’ll just go zap and put it back togther. Because, you know, it says in the Bible that if you pray you’ll be healed, so that’s going to happen.”
2
There were lawyers involved in this case, lawyers besides himself, Henry Wackford knew that, but he didn’t think this issue was ever going to be resolved in a courtroom. No, it wasn’t. This issue wasn’t about courtrooms, and it didn’t matter how many judges told these people that they were being stupid, that they were breaking the law—no, that didn’t matter either. Henry was having a hard time breathing. It was all so obvious to him. All of it. You had to make people see the truth, and it was a truth they didn’t want to see. No, Henry thought, most people didn’t want to see the truth even for a minute, and that was why you had things like this, that was why this country had descended into a medieval cesspit complete with torture chambers and grand inquisitors.
All right, Henry admitted. Not torture chambers. Not literally. But that was the problem, too. People took things far too literally. People thought that if somebody said that religion was good for them, that it made people happy and pleasant and industrious and kind, then that must be true, just because somebody said it. Or maybe because a lot of people said it over the course of a lot of years. Hundreds of years. He wasn’t thinking straight. Even so, he knew what he meant to think, and that was enough, at least until he got in front of a camera and made somebody listen to him. Religion was not good for people. It made them believe in delusions. It made them stupid. It made them vile. That was the message that had to get out, somehow, someday, if the good people were ever going to get this country back from the bumpkins and the idiots and the yahoos, if this country was ever going to be great and honorable—well, he wouldn’t say again. Henry Wackford didn’t think the country had ever been great and honorable before now, except maybe for a few years during the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And even then, there was the racism to consider.
He really was spinning his wheels here, he thought. He made himself stop and take a deep breath. He was in his office, but he’d been outside just a little while ago, listening to the talk on Main Street. By now everybody in town had to know that Judy Cornish was dead, and that she’d been battered to death just the way Annie-Vic had been battered almost to death. It was a pattern, that’s what it was. It was obviously the same person, or persons, and they were following a pattern. He just had to make people see the obvious. They were all of them, out there—just like his ex-wife had been.
“What the Hell makes you get out of bed in the morning?” she would yell at him. “What do you bother to go on living? If it’s all going to end up in nothing, what’s the point?”
Yes, Henry thought, he understood, he really did. These people were afraid to face their own mortality. They were afraid to live every day knowing that it would all come to an end some day and that end would be the end, the absolute end, with nothing to make up for their disappointments or their failures or any of the rest of it. God wouldn’t reward them for being “good” and really pushing ahead to get that promotion, or not chucking their “obligations” to go off to school. God wasn’t there to make up for all the things they’d missed. God just wasn’t there. No wonder they got murderously violent, the whole pack of them. They couldn’t stand the thought that they weren’t important, that they didn’t mean anything, that if they failed they failed and there was nothing and nobody who could make it up to them. Here was the thing, though, Henry was sure. Down deep somewhere, they knew. They knew there was no God. They knew evolution was true. They knew the Bible was nothing but a pack of lies and fantasies. They knew it. That was why they had to kill anybody who threatened to prove it.
Henry took another deep breath. It didn’t do for him to think about his ex-wife, or the girls he’d dated in college, or even the decision, so long ago now, to come back home to practice law. He didn’t believe in dwelling on the past, for one thing, and for another it got him too worked up to think. He had to think now, it was important: first Annie-Vic, then Judy Cornish. There was no telling how many more attacks there would be before this thing was over. The FBI had two agents in place. Henry knew that. They weren’t even bothering to maintain a cover. They also weren’t taking any of this seriously. It was just like with the militias a few years ago. Those were the same kinds of people, too. Small-town backwoods Christians. And what came out of that? Timothy McVeigh, that’s what. Timothy McVeigh and that big gutted federal building in Oklahoma City. The woods were full of these people, and nobody ever paid attention to them.
He took yet another deep breath. Christine was in the outer office, talking on the phone and crying. He could hear her. She was definitely on the other side, but he hadn’t had a choice about hiring her. She was the best he could get in Snow Hill. He hated the idea of her in the outer office all day, saying little prayers over her lunch and sending up little “messages to God” in the hopes he would have a change of heart. He knew she was doing both, and that she always asked the Baptists to pray for him when there was a call for intentions on Sunday.
He went to his office window and looked out on Main Street. The cable news vans were still standing where they had been all morning. Henry thought they would have moved if anybody had told them about the murder. Nobody would have told them, though, because they were outsiders, and because the yahoos here were intimidated by them. That was something else that came of being stuck in wretched small towns like this day after day and year after year. The big world out there started to intimidate you. It made you feel every one of your inadequacies.
Christine was probably praying for the soul of Judy Cornish. She probably also thought Judy had gone straight to Hell. Henry’s ex-wife had prayed for him a lot, and her family had prayed for him too, because they’d all been convinced that she would “bring him to the Lord” one of these days. The marriage had started to go sour as soon as she realized that that was never going to happen. She would have been happy to live forever in Snow Hill. She’d come from a nearly identical small town in Michigan, and when the marriage was over she’d gone back there.
“I’m not going to be in Snow Hill much longer,” Henry said, to the air. His breath fogged the window in front of him. There were people in the mobile news vans. CNN and Fox. It wouldn’t be hard to pick one over the other.
Henry had never taken off his coat. He’d unbuttoned it, and now he left it unbuttoned. He went through to the outer office. Christine was still on the phone. Tears were running down her face, and her mascara was running as well, making dark rivulets down both her cheeks. She looked like a gargoyle, or one of those whores with the hearts of gold from the old noir detective films. She’d go to seed in another ten years and look like all the other women around here. She’d gain weight and her hair would frowse. He didn’t even know if “frowse” was a word.<
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“Oh, Mr. Wackford,” Christine said as he walked past. “Isn’t it terrible? Isn’t it the most terrible thing you’ve ever heard? I’ve been praying and praying, but I just don’t understand it.”
Henry was tempted to tell her she would never understand anything by prayer, but he didn’t see the point of it.
“I’m going out,” he said, and then he was out, all the way into the cold air again. Main Street was not deserted now. People seemed to come out of the cracks in the sidewalk when something really awful happened. It was as if they lay in wait, their lives on hold, until there was gossip that was really going somewhere.
Henry crossed Main Street and went up a block and a half, toward the CNN van. The familiar logo calmed him down a little. There it was, the emissary from the outside world, the ambassador from sanity. Of course, nothing in the United States was entirely sane, if it was they wouldn’t have elected the Shrub for a second term—Henry refused to say that the man had been elected for his first—but there were degrees of insanity, and CNN was considerably more sane than Snow Hill.
He went up to the van’s cab and looked inside. It was empty. He went around to the back. It was closed up. He looked up and down the street. They had to be somewhere, these people.
Half a block further, the door to the diner swung open and a young woman came out with a young man. The young woman was dressed in a skirt and sweater and the young man looked like he’d just walked out of a Greenwich Village beat joint from the fifties. Henry took notice.
The young man and the young woman were talking. They were also carrying Styrofoam cups of coffee. As they got closer, Henry could hear the man saying: “Something’s going on. I grew up in a place like this. People don’t get this way unless something’s going on.”
