by Jane Haddam
“And they didn’t station you in a city overseas?”
“Nope. In combat zones once or twice. I think one of those places used to be a city. I don’t know. I would have reupped if it hadn’t been for Sarah and the kids. After 9/11—” Gary shrugged.
“In cities,” Gregor said, as they began bumping along the blacktop on what he presumed was the way back to town, “any area that seems to have no people in it only seems to have no people in it. There are always people, but they’re sometimes out of sight. And it’s never good news when all the people are out of sight.”
“You mean, like, they’re lying in ambush?”
“Sometimes,” Gregor said. “That’s the worst case scenario. But the more likely thing is that what you’ve got around you is drug addicts. Depending on the drug, that can be various kinds of bad news.”
“I never understood drugs,” Gary said. Then he paused, seeming to consider something. “A couple of times, when I was first in the Marines, I tried smoking some marijuana. A lot of the guys did it. But I couldn’t see the point. It was like having about three beers, and I don’t see the point in that, either. You get fuzzed out. You can’t think. I was bored as Hell.”
“Yes, well,” Gregor said. “The kind of drug addicts I was thinking of tend to take one of three things. They take heroin, they take cocaine, or they take methamphetamine. A heroin junkie on a full high is no trouble to anybody unless he overdoses, because heroin pretty much acts like a sedative. When a junkie is flying, he’s pretty much passed out at the same time. He just lies there and feels completely calm. Mind you, he could be freezing to death in the middle of an ice storm. He won’t notice. We’ve got people who go into abandoned buildings looking for these guys when things get bad—”
“You mean the police do that?”
“No,” Gregor said. “We’ve got organizations in the city, mostly volunteer. Quite a few of them run by churches. The hard core of homeless people in Philadelphia, the hard core of homeless people anywhere are either addicted to something or mentally ill, and there’s nothing anything can do except for involuntarily committing them to get them off the streets permanently. And we can’t involuntarily commit them just because they’re living on the street—”
“False imprisonment,” Gary said, nodding.
“And they’re not going to be willing to go into a shelter for the long term, because shelters have rules, the first one always being that they have to give up any substance they’re using, which they don’t want to do.”
“Really don’t want to?” Gary asked.
“Some of them, yes,” Gregor said. “I think we underestimate how much of a role choice plays in addiction. Which doesn’t mean that most of these guys aren’t out of control, or that they could quit any time without help if they wanted to, but the fact is that they can’t quit at all if they don’t want to, and quite a few of them don’t. They’re engaged in a form of slow suicide, really. They think they’ve made a complete waste of their lives, which may be true, and that there’s no point in cleaning up because there’s no way to atone for the things they’ve done, no way to build a life no matter how clean they are, and getting clean would mean nothing but having to face all that and living in pain. So, yes, there are some of them who don’t want to.”
They had turned onto another two-lane blacktop. The houses here were on both sides of the road, set way back and often on a downs-lope, so that the front lawns made for fairly decent sledding hills. Gary Albright was thinking. Gregor was surprised how easy it was to tell that that was the case. Most of the time, it was impossible to read anything in Gary’s face.
“Here’s the thing,” Gary said, finally. “That thing that you described, these people who don’t want to get clean because they’ve got nothing to live for, they’ve got no way to build a life. It isn’t true. If you’re right with God, that’s never true. It would always be possible for you to get clean and to build a life in Christ. Do you see what I mean?”
“I’ve got no idea how many of these people believe in God,” Gregor said. “And I don’t think you can assume that, just because they’re addicts, they don’t.”
“I’m not assuming that,” Gary said. “I’m just trying to say—I mean, think about it. When you give your life over to Christ, there’s always something to live for. There’s always something He can do with you. Christ works in all of us. He uses us for His own purposes. I mean, yes, He wants you to live without sin, but we don’t all manage to do that. Most of us fall. Adam and Eve fell. But even if we fall, even if we spend forty years in a mess of drugs, living on the street, being out of it most of the time, even then, our lives our not a waste if we give them over to Christ and let him use us as He wants to use us. Even if we only have a couple of weeks left between the time we accept Him and the time we go to Him, even then, our lives haven’t been a waste. Even if we only have a couple of minutes. Do you see what I mean?”
“I understand what you’re saying, if that’s what you’re asking,” Gregor said.
“Not exactly,” Gary said. They had made yet another turn, and now they were entering Main Street from its least populated end. “If I know that Christ has a plan for me,” Gary said carefully, “if I know that He wants me, that He can use me, then I’ve got an incentive to get clean no matter how long I’ve been addicted. But if I don’t know that, if there’s nothing but just this life right here, nothing more anywhere, nothing else anywhere, then the behavior of the addicts you’re talking about makes perfect sense. What would be the point of any of them getting clean when they’re not going to live very long and they have nothing to look forward to?”
They were coming right up to the police station. There was a parking lot in the back. Gary was pulling into it.
“And?” Gregor asked.
Gary pulled into a parking space. “I went over to the high school the other day, and Miss Marbledale has a big exhibit up. All about evolution. She’s got posters up, I don’t know. ‘Evolution is change over time.’ DNA. Fossils. And you know what? It’s all beside the point. I don’t care if animals evolved or not. I don’t care if humans evolved or not. Not a single one of us who wanted the ID book in the library—and that’s all it was, we wanted the book in the library, and we wanted a little sticker in the textbooks telling people it was there—none of us cares if evolution happened or not. That’s not the point. And it’s not the point for Henry Wackford, either.”
“I would have thought it was the whole point,” Gregor said.
“Do you ever read that guy, Richard Dawkins?” Gary asked. “He doesn’t think it’s the point, either. He thinks evolution proves that God doesn’t exist, and we have to teach children evolution because that’s the only way to raise a generation that will believe that God doesn’t exist. Henry Wackford will tell you the same thing—just listen to him on television. Well, I’m not interested in raising a generation that believes that God doesn’t exist. I don’t think it’s good for them. I think it leads to depression, and addiction, and hopelessness, and all your addicts who want to stay addicts because they have nothing to live for. I think I’ve known a lot of decent people who aren’t believers and a lot of nasty people who are believers, but at the end of the day, all the hopeful people I know believe. And that’s my bottom line. The science doesn’t matter a damn one way or the other.”
3
Every once in a while, Gregor thought about actually learning to drive. He had a driver’s license and renewed it religiously every time the paperwork came in the mail, but he didn’t think he had been behind the wheel in years. The last time he remembered was in a small Pennsylvania town called Holman, and then he’d only been trying to divert a horde of paparazzi. He had been only nominally successful.
Still, there were times when he wished he could drive instead of be driven, because there were times when being driven meant losing all sense of where things were and how far they were from each other. When Gary Albright went into the police station, Gregor stayed
in the small back parking lot and looked around. Then he went out to Main Street and looked at that. Then he took his notebook out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket and looked at that. The problem with small towns was that they were, very often, not really small. When people said “small,” what they really meant was “only lightly populated.” It was the lack of people they noticed, not the physical size of the place. Gregor had been in “small towns” in Kansas and Nebraska whose square footage would overwhelm places like Los Angeles and New York, at least if you stuck strictly to the city limits. That was because of the farms. People had farms out there that felt as large as some small countries, but there were very few people on them.
Gregor didn’t think there were farms of that kind anywhere near Snow Hill. The landscape was wrong, for one thing. For farming on the scale of the American Midwest, you needed a lot of flat, and not much about Snow Hill was flat. Still, he had no idea what the physical size of the town was, or what people thought of as “walking distance.” People seemed to come and go, back and forth, up and down, and Gregor had no sense of what that meant in terms of time, or of effort. It was one thing to go up to Annie-Vic’s house on foot when it was a distance you would walk on any stray day. It was something else to go up there if it took an extra expenditure of effort to make the trip. There was that, and there was the question of cars. It seemed to Gregor, given what people had told him about the things they’d done over the last few weeks, that at least some of the people from “the development” went everywhere in cars. He thought that the people who were really local, deep local, probably did not. It was very hard to work out.
He looked to his left. Nick Frapp’s church was down there, on the end and a little tilted, so that that end of Main Street was almost like a cul de sac. On his right, up about a block and a half, there was the Snow Hill Diner, where the infamous Alice McGuffie held sway on most days. Another block and a half or farther in that direction, the road began to make its way out of town. But Gregor thought, from what he remembered about the drive to Gary’s the night before, there were more houses before “town” ended.
He was thoroughly exasperated with himself. He went to his right, looking back and forth, at the store fronts, at the very few street signs, at the churches. There were churches everywhere, and they were by far the biggest buildings on the street. He checked out the Baptists from across the street. Then he looked through the windows of the Snow Hill Diner. The diner was doing a very good business, probably half full of the people who belonged to the news vans parked up and down the street, still. Gregor was beginning to think of them as fixtures. The diner had those little gingham cafe curtains, on rods that were placed only midway up the glass. Gregor had never understood the attraction of that particular look. He did understand it was supposed to represent something “homey.” Gregor thought of suggesting something to Bennis that took in the idea of homey, and her imagined reaction was so immediate, he almost winced.
He got to the end of Main Street proper, to the end of the stretch where the street was lined with stores on either side. Like the other end, where Nick Frapp’s church was, there was a little slant that made it almost seem as if the street was closed off. It wasn’t, though. It just angled off to the right, and there was a steepish hill. Gregor wondered if it made people claustrophobic to live in a town where the Main Street looked like a closed loop. He imagined that some people found it comforting, as if they were being protected from something.
He stopped where the street angled and looked around. The hill really was steep, but the road beside it had been well plowed and sanded. The only snow was on the bare ground behind the Main Street buildings, and there wasn’t much of it left. He turned around and around and around, trying to place everything in reference to everything else. Then he went back to looking up the hill. The branches on the trees were bare and black, except toward the top of the hill, where there were evergreens. He went a little ways up the angled road and looked to the left. There wasn’t much there, but it wasn’t entirely barren, either. There were houses, older houses mostly. They looked like they might have been built in the twenties, in that last big building boom before the Great Depression. He looked to the right and saw only one house, and that set back from the road.
It wasn’t until he saw the police tape that he realized what he was looking at. Then he walked back a little, looked up and down Main Street again, and returned to where he had first understood what he was seeing. The house was right here. Anybody who was on Main Street could have walked to it, right on the road. It was likely that he could have been seen, too, without anybody thinking anything of it.
Gregor started to climb. He didn’t get all that much physical exercise, but he was large and powerfully built. There was a time in his life when people had tried to talk him into playing football. Football was not his kind of thing, then or now. Walking was, but he went slowly, so that he could look around.
There wasn’t much to see. The houses looked empty, but that didn’t mean anything. Houses of that era often looked empty, because they were dark and hulking things. He wondered who these particular houses belonged to. He had been given an excellent rundown on the Main Street locations, or non–Main Street locations, of most of those on the suspect list during the day, but he knew nothing at all about where they went at night.
He got to the top of the hill, and he was right there. There was a state policeman sitting in a car at the end of the driveway, and another, in another car, on the far side of the front walk. Gregor wondered if they had somebody in back, guarding the back door. He supposed they did. He stopped and looked the house over again, up and down, the hedges, the entry with its overhang, the blank windows on the second floor. That was when the policeman at the front entrance got out of his car and came over.
“Can I help you?” he said. He was polite, but he sounded faintly disgusted. Maybe he’d had enough rubberneckers for this lifetime.
“I don’t think I need any help,” Gregor said, looking up to the second floor again. “I was just trying to get myself oriented. I’m Gregor Demarkian.”
The policeman hesitated, then looked closer, then stepped back. “Well,” he said. “You are.”
“I didn’t mean to bother you,” Gregor said.
“No bother. You don’t know the kinds of crap we’re getting, though. People from everywhere coming by, just to see where the body was. And not just people from here, either. They’ve come all the way from New York, some of them. I’ve seen the plates.”
“But some of the people have been local?” Gregor asked.
The state policeman shrugged. “Sure, I suppose so. And there’s the grandniece, or whatever she is. She came by and complained about the mess in the dining room. There was a woman bludgeoned to death in the dining room, and she was worried about papers being all over the floor. Can you believe that?”
“It does seem like the wrong priority,” Gregor said.
“I think it’s bats, myself. Papers on the floor. According to this woman, the grandniece, whoever, according to her, the woman who usually lives here, the first one who was attacked, always kept her stuff very neat, kept paperweights on it to make sure it wasn’t blown away, that kind of thing. And then when she, the grandniece—when she got here today to pick up her things the papers were blown all over the place and they didn’t have their paperweights, and they had them when the grandniece left the house on the morning of the murder, and blah blah blah. I couldn’t believe the whining.”
“Yes,” Gregor said.
“Some people,” the state policeman said. “I’ve been doing this job for twenty years, and I still can’t get over some people. I don’t know. Maybe it isn’t a good thing, being in police work for the long haul. You get peculiar. You get so you don’t trust anybody anywhere. You want to go in and have a look around? The crime scene boys have been here and gone. Well, girls maybe—the ME is a woman—but you know what I mean. We’re authorized to let you in any time you want to go.”<
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Gregor looked at the house again. It could have served as the setting for a fifties horror movie. He couldn’t imagine an old woman living there alone. He turned and looked down the hill again.
“All right,” he said, finally. “I would like to have a look around, if it wouldn’t be putting the two of you out.”
“Not at all,” the state policeman said. “It’s like I said, we’re supposed to allow you in if you want to go. And, to tell you the truth, I’ll be glad to have somebody in there that’s alive and well and sane. This place creeps the Hell out of me.”
SIX
1
Henry Wackford saw Gregor Demarkian go in to the Snow Hill Diner at one of those odd times between breakfast and lunch that could not be explained by any normal-sounding reason. There was a coffee machine in the police station, for God’s sake. Henry had been on the town council that had authorized the payment for it. It wouldn’t be the greatest coffee ever made, but if Demarkian thought he was going to do better at the Snow Hill Diner, he was in for a rude shock. Alice wasn’t just one of the stupidest women in Snow Hill, she was also one of its worst cooks. If that diner had had any competition close enough to matter, it would have gone out of business long ago.
Henry reminded himself that he was in favor of small, independent outfits of any kind and against their corporate behemoth competitors—at least in principle—and tried to concentrate on what Christine was saying. She had been on at him all morning, and he still couldn’t figure it out. Part of that was the fact that he was more than a little distracted. This murder—this murder. He had a hard time putting it into words in his head. There were events that changed the world. This wasn’t anything so momentous, but it might be. It might be. It might change his world, and for the moment he thought that was enough.
