Living Witness

by Jane Haddam

  “I’m Gregor Demarkian,” he said. “Gary tells me your name is Dale Vardan and you’re with the state police.”

  “We can take over here now,” Vardan said. “I knew we were going to have to, soon as I heard the first reports on that Hadley woman. These small town police departments, they don’t know what they’re dealing with. They’re not—equipped—to handle the pressure.”

  “I don’t think we’re having trouble with pressure,” Gregor said. “And from what I’ve understood so far, the Snow Hill Police Department isn’t interested in having you take over the investigation of anything. What they did was ask for assistance.”

  “Uh-huh. Well,” Vardan said, “I’ve been asked for assistance before. They’re out of their depth, that’s what it is. They’ve got some guy running around smashing up people with an aluminum baseball bat, and they don’t know what to do about it.”

  “How do you know it was an aluminum baseball bat?”

  “It was a figure of speech,” Vardan said. “It could have been anything, just a blunt instrument. I’ll find out what it is, exactly, once I get this investigation organized.”

  “And how do you know it was one person,” Gregor said. “And how do you know it was a he? You’re making a lot of assumptions here.”

  “You think there are two people running around smashing in women’s faces with blunt instruments?” Dale Vardan demanded. “That’s what you got, you bring it in here from the FBI and the city of Philadelphia? How many times you think that’s going to happen, two people, fifty people, all running around bashing faces in, and all the faces belong to people who are suing the school board?”

  “It only has to happen once,” Gregor said mildly.

  “Yeah, sure, it only has to happen once. Let me tell you what’s happening here, Mr. Demarkian from the FBI.”

  “It’s been close to a decade since I was with the FBI.”

  “You just listen to me,” Dale Vardan said. “This is hillbilly country, up here. That’s what you’ve got, a bunch of hillbillies. You think you don’t, ’cause this is Pennsylvania and not West Virginia, but this is Appalachia and we all know it. And these people here, they like to think they’re a cut above that, living in town the way they do, and not up in some shack somewhere with a still in the back shed, but they’re nothing but hillbillies, either, and it shows.”

  “Ann-Victoria Hadley doesn’t seem to me to be a hillbilly.”

  “No, she isn’t,” Dale Vardan said, “but Gary Albright surely is, and so are his boys, and as far as I’m concerned they could all kill each other off one fine spring morning and the entire state of Pennsylvania would be better for it. The entire country would be better for it. And then there’s that other one. He’ll be involved in this somewhere.”

  “What other one?” Gregor asked.

  “Dale is talking about Nick Frapp,” Gary Albright said. “Dale has big problems with Nick Frapp.”

  Gregor was going to point out that Gary himself had big problems with Nick Frapp, but he didn’t. “I don’t see what the Reverend Frapp has to do with any of this,” he said instead.

  “The Reverend Frapp.” Dale Vardan spit on the ground. “Reverend, my ass. Went out to Oklahoma where they have an entire college for hillbillies, that idiot Oral Roberts, saw a nine-foot-tall Jesus in his backyard. That’s what hillbillies do when they’re not drunk on their asses. They see Jesus in the backyard. Jesus in a ham sandwich. You name it, they’ve got Jesus in it.”

  Gregor looked at the small, round bald spot directly on top of Dale Vardan’s head. It was difficult for him to look at anything except the top of Dale Vardan’s head, because Vardan had not backed up.

  “If you’re assuming, as I take it, that the assaults are the work of someone angry with the people who filed the lawsuit against the school board,” Gregor said, “then I don’t see what the Reverend Frapp has to do with it. He doesn’t have anything to do with the public schools. His church runs a private school. Why would he care, one way or the other, what happened with the lawsuit?”

  Dale Vardan raised his eyes to heaven. “It’s Jaysus!” he said. “That’s the reason for everything. It’s Jaysus!”

  “Ah,” Gregor said.

  “They’d kill their own mothers for Jesus,” Dale Vardan said. “Then they’d speak in tongues and roll around in the mud and writhe like they’re having a fit. That’s the power of the Holy Ghost for you. That’s the power of the Lord. Then they get bit and they end up in the emergency room half dead. Stupid assholes.”

  “Ah,” Gregor said again.

  “Sit back and watch me work,” Vardan said. “I’ve been waiting for this a long time. I’ve been waiting for one of them to pull something they couldn’t get out of by shutting all their people up. If you don’t know what you’re doing, I do.”

  “I think I know what I’m doing,” Gregor said. “And I will repeat, I’ve been hired by the Snow Hill Police Department to run this investigation. They have the right to do that, and I have the right, as head of this investigation, to decide both what help I want from the state police and what help I’ll do without. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll make some use of your crime lab and your tech personal, both of which you have to put at my disposal. It’s the law, and don’t think I don’t know it. Beyond that, I doubt if your services will be necessary.”

  Vardan backed up this time. He really was a small man, Gregor thought, tiny, and it was as if he was refusing to admit it to himself. He wore clothes that were too big for him the way some women always wore clothes that were too small, because they didn’t want to admit to their real size. Vardan was looking him up and down, back and forth, side to side.

  “Well,” he said. “I can always start my own investigation. I can always declare this a state police matter.”

  “Not without a plausible excuse,” Gregor said pleasantly, “or a way to claim jurisdiction, neither of which you have. I’ve got some people I need to talk to now. I suppose I’ll run into you later.”

  “You’re just like all of them,” Dale Vardan said. “You come in here from the city, you think you know what’s going on. You don’t. You don’t understand these people. You don’t know them. You don’t even begin to get the picture.”

  Gregor thought he got the picture perfectly well, but what bothered him was that Dale Vardan was a distraction, and would probably stick around to be a distraction.

  “I’m sorry,” Gregor said to Gary Albright, almost whispering in his ear. “I should have listened.”

  Gary Albright shrugged. “It’s going to be late by the time we finish up here. You might want to think about staying over instead of going back to Philadelphia tonight. Unless it’s impossible, you know, what with the wedding coming up, and that kind of thing.”

  “It’s not impossible,” Gregor said. “I was thinking myself that it might make sense, if I’m going to wait around to hear some of the tech people give preliminaries. Where’s the nearest motel?”

  “Fifty miles away out on Route 10,” Gary Albright said. “The best thing would be for me and Sarah to put you up. She won’t mind, the food is half decent, and we’ve got a perfectly good spare room.”

  “Ah,” Gregor said.

  “Oh, don’t start,” Gary Albright said. “I’m about ready to explode. Come home with me and eat meatloaf and you don’t have to talk about the case if you don’t want to. Lord only knows I don’t want to.”

  FOUR

  1

  Sometimes, Franklin Hale thought the world was full of women who thought they knew everything. Annie-Vic Hadley was that kind of woman, and this one who had just died, this Judy Cornish, she was one, too. Right now there was another one on the television set, and it wasn’t even Hillary Clinton. As far as Franklin was concerned, Hillary Clinton was the ultimate in women who thought they knew everything. She was your mother and your bossy fourth-grade teacher and that nurse in that movie all rolled into one. The woman on the television was not that bad, exactly, but Franklin kne
w the type. They’d all gone to fancy-ass colleges in New England and talked like they were in the middle of writing a textbook. Franklin hated New England. It was as if the place existed only to breed more of these women, and the women it couldn’t breed it transformed, like people being turned into zombies in an old black-and-white horror movie. Franklin did like black-and-white horror movies. He could remember going to them on Saturday afternoons at the Palace Theater in town, before that closed because of the competition from the multiplex out in Dunweedin. Sometimes he could almost understand these evolution people. All life is change. All life is competition. Eat or be eaten. Kill or be killed. He remembered the guy who had owned the Palace Theater, too. He was one of those guys always whining about how they were getting killed by the “big fellas.” Franklin hated assholes who talked about the “big fellas.” It was like juvenile delinquents who talked about how they only did what they did because their daddies weren’t around.

  The woman on the television was named Eugenie Scott, and she was head of something called the National Center for Science Education. Franklin watched her head bob up and down and she explained something or the other to Larry King. National Center for Science Education, my foot, Franklin thought. None of these people cared a damn for science education. If they did, they’d actually listen to the science. By now it was no secret. Even the scientists didn’t believe in evolution anymore. They just thought they could go on fooling the American public forever. Pastor Jack down at the Baptist Church said that they did that because they wanted to win souls away from God and for the devil, but Franklin thought that was a crock, too. What they wanted was to prance around preening themselves on how smart they all were, smarter than anybody else, so smart they didn’t even have to talk to all those ordinary stupid people. It was what that kind of person always wanted, and there were lots of that kind of person out there running around. There was Larry King, for one. There was any news anchor on MSNBC. Franklin had to thank God for Bill O’Reilly, because as far as Franklin was concerned, Bill O’Reilly was the only honest news reporter in the history of television.

  Somewhere, off on the other side of the house, he could hear somebody knocking at their front door. He looked down into his coffee cup and frowned. The cup was only half full of coffee. As soon as he’d come in tonight, he’d taken out his private stash of Johnny Walker to stiffen it up with something serious. It had been one Hell of a day, what with Marcey acting up the way she had, and right down at the store, too. Not that anybody in town didn’t know about Marcey by now, but even so. You had to keep your work life and your home life separate. That was the way it had been for Franklin’s parents, and he was sure that that was the way it should be for him. But Marcey had come down, and then there was the problem of getting her back here, and then there was the problem of getting himself back to the store. And in the middle of all that, somebody had killed this Cornish woman.

  Franklin got up out of the Barcalounger he had been sitting in and went to the bookshelf built right into the paneling of the wall. He’d never liked bookshelves much, but on this one he kept the prizes he’d won for football and track in high school, and there was a loose board on the bottom shelf that could be pried open to reveal an empty space underneath. The empty space was just big enough to fit his bottle of Johnny Walker. That was a good thing. Marcey didn’t drink—it would be easier on all of them if she did; at least they could explain it to their friends—but Franklin thought it was just taking precautions to make sure she couldn’t drink, at least when she was at home. That stuff she took did not work well with alcohol.

  Franklin put another slug, a good long one, into his coffee cup. Then he put the bottle back and fixed the shelf again. He could hear Janey’s footsteps coming down the carpet in the hall that led to the foyer. Marcey was quiet now, knocked out not so much by another round of pills as by the sheer exhaustion of a day spent creating one scene after another. She had taken another round of pills, though. Franklin was sure of it. Sometimes he went around the house trying to find her stashes and eliminate them, but it was a losing battle. Marcey knew more places to hide pills than a Jew knew where to hide money. And what good did it do, in the long run? She was going to kill herself one of these days. Franklin understood that. He thought even the children understood that. Marcey was going to end up in the emergency room with an overdose of that Oxycontin and then he wouldn’t have to think about this any more. This was not the way he had expected his life to work out, back when he was at high school. This was not the way he thought it should be working out, now. The world was supposed to be a simple place. You did what you had to do. You met your responsibilities. You followed the rules. There shouldn’t ever be a case where bad things happened to good people, because God was watching over the earth.

  Janey came to the door of the rec room and stuck in her head. “It’s Mr. Carr,” she said. “He’s out in the hall and he says he wants to see you.”

  Holman Carr. Franklin hadn’t thought much about Holman Carr lately. He was a good man. You could count on him to help out at the church. You could count on him to help out. It was too bad he’d lost the election for school board, and to Annie-Vic, of all people. But Holman was like that. He was so mousy and so quiet, nobody ever noticed him.

  “It’s Uncle Mike, too,” Janey said helpfully.

  “Well, send them on back,” Franklin said. “I’m not doing anything.”

  He looked back at the television. That woman was still on. She was nodding and explaining, still. Franklin shuddered and took a long drink out of his coffee cup. There had still been enough coffee in it when he’d added this latest shot of Scotch that the whole thing tasted funny, but he really didn’t care.

  The door opened again, and it was Mike who came in first. Holman would never come in first, not anywhere, and not for any reason. Franklin wondered what he did when there was nobody else with him.

  Mike looked at the television set. “What are you doing?” he asked. “What’re you watching Larry King for?”

  Franklin waved his cup at the set. “That’s Eugenie Scott,” he said. “That’s a name, isn’t it? Her mother must have thought she was just too perfect. Now she runs something called the National Center for Science Education.”

  “Oh,” Holman Carr said. He sounded surprised. Then he blushed. “It’s just—well, she’s on the list. I mean, that organization is on the list. To testify in the trial.”

  “On the atheist side, I take it,” Franklin said.

  “Let’s not worry about sides,” Mike said. “How can you be watching that now? We’ve got a situation, if you haven’t noticed. We’ve got a problem.”

  “And I can solve it?” Franklin said. “I didn’t kill that Cornish woman. It doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

  “If you’d been watching the local news,” Mike said, “you’d have seen old Henry Wackford, telling anybody who’d listen that it’s us that did it. He says we’re killing off the people who filed the lawsuit, like we think if they’re all gone the suit will go away.”

  “That’s cracked,” Franklin said. He took another long drag at his coffee cup. Mike and Holman wouldn’t care if they found out he was drinking. He could just go over to the bookshelves and get himself some more when he was done.

  Mike grabbed a chair from next to the coffee table and turned it slightly, so that he could sit down and look Franklin in the face at the same time. “Henry isn’t just making noise this time,” he said. “He’s making accusations. That didn’t make the news. The television stations aren’t crazy. They don’t want to get sued. But he’s talked to a dozen people by now and he’s come right out and said he thinks he knows who did it. Who did them both. Annie-Vic and this one.”

  “Who?” Franklin asked.

  “Me,” Holman Carr said.

  Franklin started to laugh. “Oh, God,” he said.

  “It isn’t funny,” Mike said. “That is what Henry’s saying, and you know Henry. Once he starts saying it, he’s going t
o go on saying it. And it isn’t as if we can shut him up by threatening a lawsuit.”

  “Especially not now,” Holman said. “Especially not when nobody knows who did do it.”

  “And what is supposed to be Holman’s motive for killing one woman and practically killing another?” Franklin demanded. “Oh, I know. It’s Henry, so it must be evolution. Holman’s running around killing people because it’s the only way to keep evolution out of the Snow Hill public schools. Do you know what a crock that is? Evolution is already in the Snow Hill public schools. Miss Catherine my-shit-don’t-stink Marbledale put it there, and she doesn’t give a crap what the rest of us think. Excuse me. I think I’m going to start drinking for serious. It’s been a very long day.”

  “It would help if we had a little more public support,” Mike said. “Part of the problem here is that you didn’t get elected to get evolution out of the public schools, you got elected to fix the mess Henry Wackford and his people left the school district in, and nothing’s been getting done about it. You’ve been so busy worrying about Intelligent Design that there’s still a problem with the new school construction and there’s still a problem with the teachers’ unions and the contracts and the pension funds and I don’t know what else. So people aren’t disposed, if you see what I mean, to come running to our side to help.”

  “You can’t just come out and tell people things,” Franklin said. “You know that. You’ve got the courts to worry about, they’re all in the hands of the secular humanists. Think of that mess a few years ago in Dover. You’ve got to come at it sideways.”

  “You’ve also got to do something about the day-to-day,” Mike said.

  “Well, Annie-Vic was doing something about the day-to-day,” Franklin said. “She seemed to like it. It’s not my fault that somebody smashed her head in. Which isn’t to say I’m surprised. Somebody should’ve done it long ago.”

  “Franklin, for God’s sake,” Mike said.