Living Witness

by Jane Haddam

  There was something in the sound of that voice that Gary didn’t like. Franklin could get—odd—sometimes. Gary was sure that Franklin never did drink to excess, and equally sure that he never took drugs, but every once in a while it was as if Franklin caught drunkenness and drug addiction just from talking to Marcey on the phone.

  “I’m not going to talk to you, Dale, I’m really not,” Franklin was saying. “I don’t give a crap who you think you are. I want to talk to Gregor Demarkian. Gregor Demarkian is in charge.”

  Gary pushed through the crowd the rest of the way to the counter and took Franklin by the arm. It was one of those times, Gary thought. Franklin looked glassy-eyed. Dale Vardan looked like he was going to punch him.

  Gary pulled Franklin away. “He’s through here,” he said, trying to sound soothing, although that wasn’t always a good idea.

  Franklin didn’t seem to notice. “Asshole,” he said, meaning Dale Vardan. “I know what I want. I’m not an idiot. I want to talk to Gregor Demarkian.”

  Gary got the hinged section of the counter open and pushed Franklin through. “Right through there,” he said. “He’s using that room next to mine for an office while he’s here.”

  “That’s a broom closet,” Franklin said. “You put the great Gregor Demarkian in a broom closet. What does he think he’s so great for, anyway? Why do any of them think they’re so great? Where do they come from, these people? Why don’t they go the Hell back home.”

  Gary pushed Franklin again and they were standing in Gregor Demarkian’s makeshift office. Gregor Demarkian was standing behind the desk, looking as if he didn’t know what to do next. Gary didn’t know, either.

  “This is Franklin Hale,” he said, pushing Franklin slightly forward. “He’s the chairman of the board of education. He wants to talk to you.”

  “My name is on the lawsuit,” Franklin said. “You think it would be the name of the town on the lawsuit, but it isn’t. It’s Wackford v. Hale, because I’m the chairman of the school board, like Gary says. I won it in an election, fair and square. I ran against that son of a bitch, Henry Wackford, and now he pulls this. He’s only doing it for spite. He’s a spiteful person, Henry is. He’s spiteful and he only wants to get his own back, and he’s an atheist secular humanist and he has no morality and that’s what I wanted to tell you. You need to know that. You need to know what you’re up against. Except you’re probably an atheist secular humanist yourself. I told Gary he shouldn’t bring you here.”

  Gary put his hand on Franklin’s arm again. “Come on,” he said. “Maybe you ought to go home and rest up a bit. You can tell Mr. Demarkian all this tomorrow.”

  “Mr. Demarkian,” Franklin said. “You all sound like idiots, that’s the truth. Mr. Demarkian. Who’s Mr. Demarkian, anyway? What kind of name is Demarkian? It sounds foreign.”

  “It’s Armenian,” Gregor Demarkian said, sounding helpful. “My parents immigrated from Armenia.”

  “I told you it was foreign,” Franklin said.

  “Come on,” Gary said, feeling desperate now.

  “Just a minute,” Gregor Demarkian said.

  Gary still had his hand on Franklin’s arm. He kept it there. He had never seen Franklin be violent, not even with Marcey, but there was always a first time. Gary didn’t like the way Franklin looked. It was almost as if Franklin had a fever.

  “Just a minute,” Gregor Demarkian said again. “Just let me ask you a couple of things.”

  “Ask away,” Franklin said. “I don’t have anything to hide. I’m not even hiding that my wife is addicted to that Oxycontin stuff. Everybody knows it. That’s the virtue of small towns, Mr. Demarkian. There’s nothing to hide. Everybody knows your business.”

  “It’s the accounts,” Gregor Demarkian said. “I’ve got notes on three accounts. The teachers’ union pension fund. The operating budget for the school. And the construction money, the money to put up the new schools complex.”

  “That was bullshit,” Franklin said. “New schools complex, like we needed one. That’s all these people can think of. Kids aren’t learning anything in school, throw some money at it, throw all the money in the world at it. Maybe they’re depressed because the don’t have a new school. Maybe the teachers need higher salaries. Let me tell you, we had better teachers than they have now and we didn’t pay them anything to speak of. What’s a teacher, anyway? She’s a babysitter most of the time. What’s Catherine Marbledale but a stuck-up bitch who thinks she’s better than everybody else because she went to college. She didn’t even go to real college. She went to education school. Education school. Isn’t that a crock?”

  “So you were going to do what,” Gregor Demarkian said, “stop the construction?”

  “Hell, no,” Franklin said. “We would have if we could have, but it would just have been money down the drain, millions of dollars. Do you think a place like Snow Hill has millions of dollars? We don’t, that’s the truth, and just raising taxes isn’t going to get it for us. Although I’d really like it if the town council raised the taxes on those people in the development. God, I hate those people. Coming in here and swanning around like they owned the place. I’m not surprised a couple of them got killed.”

  Gary nearly jumped out of his skin. “Franklin,” he said. “You can’t say things like that in the middle of a murder investigation.”

  “It’s all right,” Gregor Demarkian said. “I’m just trying to figure this out. You went ahead with the construction?”

  “Yeah, we’re going ahead with the construction,” Franklin said. “In the spring, when the weather gets better, we’re going ahead with it. It’s not important, it’s just stupid. I concentrate on the important things. I concentrate on saving our schools, because they have to be saved. They have to be.”

  Gary moved his hand to Franklin’s back. This was something he’d seen before, too. “I think I’d better take him home, Mr. Demarkian. He looks—I don’t know exactly—but he’s been this way before.”

  “I’m just trying to understand,” Gregor said again. “There’s nothing happening with the construction now? There’s nothing being done on the site?”

  “No,” Gary said, because Franklin seemed to have lost interest in the discussion. He was looking around the “office.” He was looking vague, and vaguely lost. “There’s nothing that can be done, with the weather the way it is. If the shell was closed up, maybe, but it isn’t. They’ve been going at it for years and the shell still isn’t closed up. Is that what you wanted to know?”

  “Well, there are the other two things, “ Gregor Demarkian said. “The teachers’ contracts and their pension fund, and the school operating expenses.”

  “We don’t do anything with the pension fund,” Gary said. “We contribute to a fund the union has, that’s all. And the school operating expenses should be the easiest thing to figure out. We publish a balance sheet in the newspaper every quarter.”

  “That’s not what’s important,” Franklin Hale said. “Everybody goes running around worrying about the construction, and the teachers’ contracts, and are we going to have textbooks and are we going to have supplies. None of it matters. We’ve taken God out of the schools, that’s what we’ve done, we’re raising a whole generation of kids who don’t know the Lord. And if we go on this way, Mr. Demarkian, if we go on this way, the Enemy will have won. That’s what the Bible says. We have to watch out for the Enemy because he’s prowling around us like a hungry lion. He’s prowling around us, and if we let down our guard for a minute, he’ll be right here inside the house. Evolution, my ass. Atheism, that’s all it is. They want to turn our kids into atheists. And I won’t let them.”

  “Come on,” Gary Albright said.

  Gregor Demarkian had sat down in the chair behind his desk and started to look thoughtful. Gary had no idea what he was finding to look thoughtful about. He hated hearing his own ideas coming out of Franklin Hale’s mouth. When Franklin said them, they sounded ignorant and belligerent. They sounded lik
e the kind of thing somebody would say after he’d decided that he’d failed and there was nothing he could do about it.

  “Come on,” Gary said again.

  And then, for an instant, he thought of Sarah and Lily and Michael at home. A man wasn’t worth anything as a man if he didn’t do what he did for the people who waited for him at home, if he didn’t protect them and help them and keep them safe from just that prowling lion. It sounded wrong when Franklin said it, but it was not wrong; it was absolutely right. It was what each and every man had to do with his life, and what each and every person had to make sure he did not forget.

  There really was a prowling lion loose in the world, and in the last few weeks it had come to Snow Hill and lain right down in the middle of Main Street.

  3

  Annie-Vic could not remember, later, how she first realized that she could now open and close her eyes at will. There was a time when she could not, and there was a time when she could, but that was all she was sure about. It felt good, being able to do this thing, even though it was a very small thing. She thought it probably meant that she would be able to do more and more in the days to come. This was something of a relief. She wouldn’t admit it if she ever found herself able to talk again, but there had been a part of her that was very worried. There was a part of her that had begun to think that she was dead, and that this was what death was like. Death was being trapped in a body that would not move anymore.

  Annie-Vic blinked. Then she blinked again. The thoughts about death had been less than intelligent, she thought. If she had been dead, she would not have been in the hospital. She was very glad that neither Lisa nor Cameron was interested in taking the tubes out of her. They could have killed her, any time they wanted. She wouldn’t have been able to stop them. Now that she could make her eyelids move up and down, there seemed to be something different about her sight, too. For most of the last however long it had been—she had no idea of the time that had gone by; she had no idea if she had been like this for hours or days or weeks or months or even years—anyway, her sight had been different. When her eyes were open she had “seen” things, but the seeing was different than this, than normal seeing, which is what she had now. The room was too bright, that was the first thing she noticed. All the lights were on, and they glared.

  She tried moving her eyes to the right, not really expecting anything to happen, and was both surprised and elated when the project worked. It worked when she tried moving them to the left, too. She tried moving her head, or thought she did, but that did not work—not quite. Before, when she had tried to move her head, nothing had happened at all. It hadn’t moved and she hadn’t felt anything. Now when she tried, she felt as if she was pushing against a boulder or as if her head was secured to the bed with restraints. She was fairly sure it wasn’t, but that didn’t matter. It felt like something. It really felt like something.

  She tried taking a deep breath. She tried drawing a great ocean of air into her lungs and letting it out very slowly. That worked, too. She could control how fast and how slowly the air went in and out of her. She could feel the air in her lungs and the lack of it when she forced it out. She thought of all the times in her life when she thought she was about to die, about the prisoner of war camp, about a whitewater rafting trip in Colorado when the kayak had flipped over in the water and she hadn’t been able to make it turn up. Death was not going to be what she had always expected it to be. Death was also not going to be anytime soon.

  She heard the door to the room open and felt someone come in. It was the nurse, and she was wearing those white rubber-soled shoes that never made any noise. Annie-Vic tried to move her head, but that still wouldn’t work. She tried to move her arms, but that was completely hopeless. The nurse, the young one who always wore a loose violet tunic with little flowers on it, came over to the bed and picked up the chart.

  Annie-Vic looked at the woman. The woman did not look at her. Annie-Vic looked for some time longer, and after a while the woman did look up, the way they do when they sense they are being watched. Annie-Vic stared straight into the woman’s eyes, and then looked away, and then looked back again.

  It was like watching a delayed-action sequence in a movie. The nurse went very still and then moved in, closer, staring into Annie-Vic’s eyes. Annie-Vic looked away and then looked back again. She looked at the ceiling and then looked back. She looked in the other direction and then looked back.

  “Oh, my God,” the nurse said.

  And then she was gone.

  THREE

  1

  The news about Annie-Vic Hadley came in a phone call from Dr. Thomas Willard, so early in the morning that Gregor had a hard time remembering where he was or why it mattered that this woman was suddenly awake and alert.

  “Not talking yet, mind you,” Dr. Willard said, going off in a spiral of information Gregor had to struggle to retain. “She’s not moving much yet, either, but she’s definitely awake and out of the coma. She can open and shut her eyes at will. She can follow your movement around the room at will, and she will respond to questions and requests by blinking. That may not sound like much, Mr. Demarkian, but under the circumstances, given her age and what she’s been through, it’s really remarkable. And that last thing, about blinking yes or no to answer questions, that’s an incredibly good sign. It means that whatever happened to her in this attack, it didn’t make her mentally incapable. At least not completely. There’s some of her mind left. We won’t know how much of it for a few days. But still, I didn’t really expect the news to be half this good.”

  Gregor sat up in bed and looked around. He was in the little lower-level guest room at Gary Albright’s house. The bed was pushed up against one wall. On the other side of it was a night table with a lamp and an alarm clock, which Gregor had not used, because he always used his cell phone as an alarm clock when he was sleeping away from home. He tried to remember what he had done before he had the cell phone, which he hadn’t had for very long. He tried to remember why he had resisted getting one for so long, but he couldn’t remember that either. The room was cold, and there was a sharp clicking sound against the windows that probably meant sleet, at the very least. On the wall against which the bed was pushed there was a framed picture of Jesus in a meadow with a little girl in a pinafore.

  Gregor ran his hand through his hair. “What about her memory?” he asked. “Have you any idea if she remembers what happened to her?”

  “I didn’t even try to ask,” Dr. Willard said. “And I don’t think you should, either, at least not yet. She might start talking and volunteer the information, and then of course we go with it, but for the moment I don’t want her unduly tired out. She’s been through more than most women her age could survive.”

  “I know,” Gregor said. “But two other women didn’t survive it, and I don’t know what’s going on here. At least, I don’t know completely. I’m not sure there won’t be somebody else.”

  “Yes, I understand that,” Dr. Willard said. “And I sympathize. But it won’t help you to kill this one off after she’s just managed to show signs of recovery. Take it slowly. Take it one step at a time. She’s been asleep for some hours now. We’ll see what’s happening when she wakes up.”

  Gregor thought about it. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Get a nurse and put her in that room. Somebody who will stay there and stay awake. Don’t leave her alone.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “Oh, God,” Dr. Willard said. “You can’t really think that somebody would come in here in the dead of night—”

  “Well, whoever it was tried to kill her once,” Gregor said. “There’s nothing to say he won’t try to kill her again. I’ll talk to Gary Albright and we’ll try to get somebody up there on a permanent basis, a police guard, something. But in the meantime—”

  “Yes,” Dr. Willard said. “Yes. All right, I’ll find somebody. It didn’t used to be like this around here, did you know that? I moved out here from Philad
elphia years ago and the first thing I really loved about the place was that you didn’t have to worry about crime. You’d be amazed at what we get out here these days, in a rural area like this.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said, although he wouldn’t have been surprised at all. He had been in rural areas; he knew what they got. He closed his cell phone and tried to pull himself togther. It was only five o’clock, but when he listened he could hear people moving on the floor above him. Five o’clock in the morning, he thought. Bennis got up at five o’clock in the morning. In fact, most of the adults he knew these days did, and those kinds of early hours were endemic in an organization like the Bureau. But where did that come from? When Gregor was growing up, it was the hallmark of adulthood to stay up late and watch Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. Now the only people he knew who watched The Tonight Show were teenagers trying to pretend they didn’t still have acne.

  He got his legs out onto the side of the bed and counted to ten. He needed a shower. He needed a shave. He needed to move. He especially needed to contact Molly Trask and Evan Zwicker and see if they had found out anything for him. He got his cell phone off the table and opened it. Bennis was number two on his speed dial. Number one was voice mail. There was a reason Bennis had set up the phone that way, but that was just another in the long list of things Gregor couldn’t remember this morning.

  A second later, Bennis picked up on the other end and said, “Hello?” She didn’t sound sleepy.

  “You sound wide awake,” Gregor said. “I’m not, but I’m supposed to be.”

  “I’ve got some stuff to do this morning, and I’m meeting Donna at the Ararat,” Bennis said. “Are you all right. You sound frazzled.”

  “It’s a frazzled kind of situation,” Gregor said. “I thought you’d want to know, I’ve had a call from the hospital, and your Annie-Vic is out of her coma! She’s not talking yet, and she’s not moving much, but she seems to be definitely awake and alert and able to answer at least simple questions by blinking yes or no. It doesn’t sound like much when I say it, but the doctor was really excited.”