Living Witness

by Jane Haddam

  Franklin got up and went back to the bookshelf. They really would not care. Or they would, but they’d put up with it.

  “I can’t help it if somebody is killing off these women,” he said. “I’m sick to death of women, if you want to know the truth. I’m sick of the nagging and I’m sick of the, the thing, whatever you want to call it. I’m going to drink until I don’t give a shit anymore, and then I’m going to get up tomorrow morning and blame my hangover for the mood I’m in. Far as I can see, there isn’t a damn thing else I can do about things.”

  “Well,” Mike said. “You could think a little more seriously about what it means that that Gregor Demarkian person is in town, and what it means that Gary Albright brought him here.”

  2

  Nick Frapp didn’t watch CNN. He didn’t watch MSNBC. He didn’t even watch Fox, which he thought of as the news’s version of professional wrestling, with everybody shouting apocalypse at each other for no apparent reason. When he watched the news at all, instead of getting it from newspapers or the Internet, he watched the “local” channels, which were only local in the sense that they originated somewhere in Pennsylvania. There was no news service that was truly local to Snow Hill, or to any of the even smaller towns south and east of it, and Nick didn’t expect there ever would be. If there was one thing that was eternally true of the fallen and temporal world, it was that the people who inhabited it were only interested in other people who were richer and more privileged than they were.

  The “local” news was actually semi-local tonight, though. There was footage from the crime scene up at Annie-Vic’s house, pictures of yellow police tape strung out between trees and cars parked every which way in that long, curved, gravel and rut drive. If Nick had gotten himself up out of his chair and gone to the window, he could probably have seen something of what was happening, if anything still was. The parsonage was attached to the church. It was right there on Main Street, or a little off, in the compound they had built on the land behind.

  Nick could remember walking past the Hadley house when he was a boy. It was the great secret of his late childhood and early adolescence. Maybe there was something to Gary Albright’s constant refrain all the years they had gone to school together. Maybe he was a freak. No, Nick thought, he was a freak. He’d known it growing up, and he knew it now. A freak was not necessarily a bad thing to be.

  When Nick was growing up, he’d stay behind until all the other kids around him were already on their way to school, or stay behind after when they had already scattered at the end of the day, and work his way around so that he could pass that house. At the time, he’d thought he was looking at the rich people, that it was Annie-Vic’s money that had intrigued him. Whatever it was had certainly seemed to have something to do with money. There was the house itself, large and imposing and almost like a fortress, way back there, with its gate. There were the people who worked inside and on the grounds. Nobody in Snow Hill had full-time servants, of course. That would have been considered putting on airs, and if there was one thing the people of Snow Hill would not tolerate, it was putting on airs. Annie-Vic had women who came in to “do” for her, and she had men who worked in the yard a couple of times a week. But then, Annie-Vic was definitely somebody who put on airs, and Nick was fairly sure, even then, that not having enough money to hire a cleaning woman to come in and do the dusting was not the problem.

  The picture on the screen now was of the woman who had died, Judy Cornish. The news anchor called her “Judith Leighton Cornish,” the way he would have done if she’d been a writer or a Supreme Court justice. The details were a little sketchy. The woman had gone up to the house and parked in the drive. She’d left her friend in the car and gone into the house itself. Her friend had waited and waited and waited, and then gone in herself to see if there was something wrong. That was when she found the body. It was simple and straightforward enough, except of course that it made no sense at all. Why had that woman gone to Annie-Vic’s house in the first place, and then why had she gone in when there was nobody home? No, Nick thought, that wouldn’t do. There might have been somebody in the house, and that somebody might have asked her to come inside. That could be the murderer. It still left the question of why Mrs. Cornish had gone up there to begin with, and it was fairly obvious by now that the news reporter didn’t have a clue. There were always people who lamented that the American public wasn’t really interested in news. Television news divisions were being cut back, budgets were being slashed. All of that might be true, but as far as Nick could see, television news had too much time on its hands. There wasn’t really all that much news out there. The reporters went in front of the cameras and said the same things over and over again for hours on end. And this with the murder wasn’t even a particularly bad case. At least there had been a murder. At least there was actually something to worry about. The very worst was in the hour or two before the polls closed on an election day. Then there was no news at all, and the reporters and the anchors just stood there blithering about nothing in particular for minutes on end.

  Nick got up and went to the window. He had always liked the fact that he could get a glimpse of Annie-Vic’s house from here. At night, when he was here alone and Annie-Vic was alone herself, he could sometimes see her lights coming through the darkness and the trees. He didn’t know how long it had taken him before he understood what it was she represented for him, or how long after that it had been before he realized that she was not a particularly good specimen. Still, she had been there, it had been there, the faint promise of something else besides the life he’d grown up with, and something else besides the life he saw all around him. It wasn’t true that poor people thought about nothing but the material things they lacked. He’d almost never thought about those. What he’d thought about were books, and the way the librarians sometimes looked at him when he came in to read in the library.

  There was a light on in the church’s main floor annex, the place where the offices were. He rubbed the side of his head with his long, thin fingers and wondered what was going on now. He had his Rosetta Stone program open on the computer. The computer was against the wall opposite the television set. It had originally been in the study, but he hadn’t liked it in there. Living alone the way he did, there was too much silence. He’d dragged the computer in here so that he would at least have a little background noise to keep him company. The Rosetta Stone program was for Italian, which he had been working on learning to read for about six months. He really ought to get a dog. Either that, or he ought to bite the bullet and get married. The problem was that he’d never met a dog or a woman that seemed to fit him for more than a week or two.

  Unmarried pastors are disasters waiting to happen, he thought. Then he took another look at the light in the annex. There were definitely people down there. That was all right: The annex was used for all kinds of things, and members of the church had the right to be there. But usually if there was going to be something going on, somebody told him about it. If for some reason the police had wanted to search the place, they would have had to come to him with a warrant. He was sure of that. He wasn’t sure why he half-expected the police to want to search the place. But that was how it was in a place like Snow Hill. In the end, the most expedient course of action was to blame the hillbillies.

  Nick went out his front door and looked around. It was dark, and Main Street was crammed solid with news trucks. This was going to be bigger than the trial on its own ever could have been. He wondered what Gregor Demarkian was doing right this minute. He wondered how Gregor Demarkian was getting along with the state police. That was what they’d said on the news, that the state police had been called in. Nick had met that idiot from the state police. The man had to be a joy to work with.

  It was cold, but the annex was only a few steps away. Nick didn’t see any point in going off to find a coat. He crossed the small courtyard on the cement path and let himself in the annex’s back door. He could hear voices coming fr
om the big room at the front where they sometimes held meetings of the church board. The voices were anxious, and they all had that twanging drawl that meant they belonged to hill people. Nick wondered if there would ever come a time when that particular accent would no longer signify stupidity, and brutishness, and ignorance. These people weren’t stupid or brutish or ignorant at all, but anyone who heard them would assume them to be all three. It was a terrible thing, stereotyping. Or maybe it was just human nature.

  The door to the meeting room was open. Nick could see through it as he came up the hall. Harve Griegson was there, and Pete DeMensh, and Susie Cleland’s brother Martin. A few more steps, and Nick could see Susie, too. They none of them seemed to be doing anything. They were just standing around and looking unhappy.

  He got to the door and knocked. Pete jumped. Susie cried out. You would have thought they were all in a horror movie.

  “It’s just me,” Nick said. “I saw the light.”

  “We didn’t mean to bother you,” Harve said. “We were just talking.”

  “About what?” Nick asked him.

  The four of them looked at one another. Susie looked away first, and then looked at the floor. “I know it’s not a good thing to gossip,” she said, “but this isn’t gossip really. I don’t think it is. And it might be important.”

  “What might be important?” Nick asked.

  The four of them looked at one another again. By now, Susie was blushing brick red.

  “Well, here’s the thing,” she said. “You can’t help but notice it, can you? It isn’t as if she’s quiet about it. She was screaming her head off for nearly an hour this afternoon. Everybody on Main Street must have heard it.”

  “She, who?” Nick asked, although he knew. That was the kind of incident where everybody knew.

  “Marcey Hale,” Susie said. “She came down to Franklin’s shop and I don’t know what she wanted, but she ended up screaming her head off. And then he had to get her home—it must have been terrible for business—so he took her out the back. And yes, I looked. I couldn’t help myself. I was worried about her. He was throwing her around as if she were a sack of potatoes, he really was. I thought he was going to end up throwing her on the ground. He looked so angry. And he had the truck back there and he shoved her into it and then he slammed the door. He could have taken off her hand.”

  Nick looked from one of them to the other. None of them was willing to meet his eyes, and Susie had taken on that defiant attitude people got when they were forced to admit to they thought something was discreditable. Nick cleared his throat.

  “I can see how you’d feel better if Franklin were kinder to Marcey, and more careful about the way he handled her, physically,” he said. “And if it were one of you, I’d definitely be counseling more gentleness and delicacy than Franklin tends to show to anybody. But Marcey’s hard to handle when she gets like that. And it can be hard on a man who has to try to deal with it over an extended period. I take it he didn’t break any bones that you could see.”

  “It’s not what he did with Marcey that’s got us worried,” Harve said.

  “Really?” Nick said. “Then what does?”

  “I know I shouldn’t have been looking,” Susie said. “I mean, I should have come on back here to work and let him get on with what he was getting on with. But I was worried, you see what I mean. He shoved her in the car, and he shut the door on her, and then he used that thing he has, the gizmo that lets you lock the doors from the outside.”

  “I’m getting one of those the next time I get a car,” Pete said.

  “Anyway,” Susie said. “He did that. And then after he did that he left. He walked on around back of us here, right through the Serenity Corner—”

  “He came onto our property here?” Nick asked.

  “Exactly,” Susie said, sounding suddenly satisfied. “And you can’t blame me for watching him then, can you? I mean, it’s not like we’ve got barbed wire and security around the place. We don’t mind people coming in most of the time. But what was he doing there? I mean, really. If he wanted to go up to Annie-Vic’s place, why didn’t he do it on the sidewalk like a normal person?”

  Nick leaned back. “He went up to Annie-Vic’s place,” he said.

  “Well, I assumed so at the time,” Susie said. “Where else would he be going, going up that hill? There’s nothing much out there except Annie-Vic’s and some other houses here and around, and he wouldn’t be going to any of them, would he? And Annie-Vic’s is right at the top of that hill, isn’t it? And then he was gone a long time. It must have been fifteen or twenty minutes. And now there’s this woman, murdered, and murdered right up there. So I don’t see what it was I was supposed to think, or what it was I was supposed to do about it.”

  3

  Gary Albright never wondered, even for a moment, if Sarah would be ready to receive an overnight guest on less than an hour’s notice. That was not one of the things anybody had to worry about with Sarah, unless she was truly and significantly ill, and she was almost never that. Gary had had his ideas about what marriage should be like before he ever considered getting himself into it, but he was honest enough about himself to understand that it would be the person who mattered most to him in the end. If Sarah had wanted to go to law school, or to work full-time as soon as the children were in kindergarten, he would have been willing to adjust himself and his life to make her happy. It was his luck that she had wanted for her life what he had wanted for his: a home, and children, and the ease that came with having one person dedicated to taking care of both.

  His house was a new one, not in the development—nobody could afford a house in the development on what the town paid its chief of police—but in a row of raised ranches along a leafy and otherwise undeveloped stretch of Route 107. There were five houses on that row, all on the same side of the road, and all of them built to be identical. It was their colors that distinguished them, and now, five years or so since they’d been built, so did some of the additions and oddities their owners had tacked onto them for the duration. Gary’s house now had a large, octagonal deck off the back of it. He and his brother-in-law had built it together. It was big enough to serve for an outdoor party with just about everyone he knew. He was hoping it would one day serve as a graduation party for Michael or an after-prom for Lily. He pulled up into the driveway and didn’t worry at all about what Gregor Demarkian would think of it. It didn’t even occur to him to worry. It was an achievement, buying a house like this, supporting a family like this. Gary expected people to recognize it.

  The light was on over the front door as they came in. It was already dark, and what had been a cold day was now a frigid evening. Gary turned the ignition off and got out, waiting for Gregor to get out too before locking up. The front door opened and Sarah stuck her head out. Seeing them, she came forward all the way onto the front steps and waved.

  “Eddie Block called,” she said. “He says don’t bother to call him back, but you should know Henry Wackford called and demanded police protection. Honestly, I’d like to protect that man myself.”

  “This is Gregor Demarkian,” Gary said.

  “How do you do, Mr. Demarkian,” Sarah said, holding out her hand for him. “I’ve got your room all set up for you. It’s right downstairs, and it’s at the front, so you’ve got windows on two sides. It is off the playroom, I’m afraid, but the children go to bed early and they’re not allowed down there with the television on on school mornings, so you should be all right. Oh, and there’s a bathroom just off, and I’ve set up some towels for you. Oh, and I’ve left you some pajamas, and some boxer shorts, brand-new ones, still in their package. Gary said you were about the same size, and you are. It’s really amazing. When I was growing up, all the men I knew were short, and now the world is full of tall people. You should go down and freshen up a little. Dinner will be ready in half an hour.”

  They were in the front hall now. Stairs led up half a flight to the main level and down half a
flight to the lower level. Sarah was leading the way down, to make sure Gregor Demarkian got where he needed to go without getting lost. Gary saw that the playroom down there was empty, which was unusual. The children were usually down there watching videos after they’d done their homework. The playroom had the only television in the house. Sarah didn’t approve of televisions in the living room. Sarah caught his eye.

  “I’ve got them up reading that Bible stories book my aunt Evelyn gave them,” she said. “I’ll let them come down and watch a video while we’re all having supper. They’ve been fed already. I know you like us to eat together as a family, Gary, but it was getting late and I didn’t know when you’d be home.”

  “I didn’t know when I’d be home either,” Gary said. He looked at Gregor Demarkian, who was looking around the playroom and the door that led off of it to the spare bedroom. “Why don’t you relax for a minute or two and Sarah can call you for supper? Or you can just come up whenever you’ve settled in.”

  “I’ll send Michael down with some coffee if you like,” Sarah said. “We do have some beer in the house if you’d like that, but I don’t let Michael carry it, so—”

  “I’m fine,” Gregor Demarkian said. “I really am. I just need to make a couple of phone calls.”

  “Of course,” Sarah said.

  “Of course,” Gary said.

  Then both moved off, a little awkwardly, leaving The Great Detective on his own. That was how Gary thought of Gregor Demarkian, as The Great Detective, but he hadn’t until that moment realized it. He must have been thinking that way about Gregor all along.

  They made their way to the upper level in silence. Then Sarah turned and looked down the stairs again.

  “Well,” she said. “He doesn’t look all that frightening. In fact, he seems very nice.”

  “He is very nice,” Gary said, going over to the dining table and pulling out a chair. Michael and Lily were sitting together on the couch, pouring over a book that had ten times as many pictures as words, which was about right for their age. “We ended up having to call in the cavalry,” he said.