Living Witness

by Jane Haddam

  “It sounds wonderful,” Bennis said. “The woman is in her nineties and she got bludgeoned. By all common sense, she ought to be dead. I’m glad she isn’t.”

  “So am I. I’m going to be especially glad if she starts talking and it turns out she can remember who beat her up. Because I’ve got an idea who it has to be, but I don’t know that I can prove it, and there are two younger women who weren’t as lucky. Are Leda and Hannah and Sheila still mad at Tibor?”

  “Well,” Bennis said, “they’re talking to him again. He might not find that an improvement. Don’t worry about it, Gregor. Really. It’s just their way. They’ll get over it on the day of the wedding and it will be like it never happened. Concentrate on what you’re doing.”

  “I am concentrating on what I’m doing,” Gregor said.

  “I’ve got to go take a shower,” Bennis said. “Janet sent some new chocolate samples from Box Hill. I’m going to weigh a ton and a half by the time we’re actually married. Oh, and I’ve firmed up the honeymoon. Liz Toliver called and I ended up not being able to withstand the force of her arguments, if you know what I mean.”

  “You mean she badgered you.”

  “Well, yes,” Bennis said, “but in a nice way, and it’s a really spectacular house, and I like Montego Bay. So we’ll do that.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “I don’t really care. I’d hole up for two weeks at the local Holiday Inn, if that’s what you wanted.”

  “I want to go take a shower,” Bennis said. “Call me if there’s any more news about Annie-Vic. It would be nice if she made it through this thing.”

  “It would be nice,” Gregor said.

  And that was all. Bennis was gone. He put his phone down. It wasn’t just that he never told her he loved her. She never told him she loved him, either. He wondered what it meant, not that he found it difficult to say—he didn’t find it difficult to say, it just never occurred to him to say it. In movies, couples seemed to express their love all the time. In real life—Gregor wasn’t sure what went on in real life. He’d never noticed. It bothered the Hell out of him that he was the age he was, and getting married for the second time, and still hadn’t figured out any of this.

  He got up from the bed and picked up the clean towel Sarah Albright had left for him. It was easier to figure out who had murdered whom, and he thought he would stick to that.

  2

  Gary was dressed and standing next to the dinette table when Gregor got upstairs, but he didn’t look as eager to get started as he had the day before.

  “I got a call from Eddie Block,” he said. “The hospital called the station, and Eddie said he gave them your number.”

  “He must have. Dr. Willard called me,” Gregor said.

  “He didn’t want to wake me up,” Gary said. “What is that? He’s never cared about waking me up before. Is there news? Is Miss Hadley dead?”

  “No,” Gregor said, “quite the contrary. She’s out of the coma. According to Dr. Willard, she’s not talking and or moving, but she’s awake and responsive and she can answer simple questions by blinking.”

  “And they’re sure that’s real?” Gary asked. “I’ve heard about people, you know, in comas, and in persistent vegetative states, who look like they’re doing that, but they aren’t really. It makes people think, well. That they’re getting better, when they’re never going to get better.”

  “Dr. Willard said nothing about a persistent vegetative state,” Gregor said. “And he definitely sounds sure that she’s coming around. Which brings up another issue that cannot be ignored at this point, if you see what I mean.”

  Sarah had been bustling around the kitchen, pouring coffee, setting a fork and a spoon and a knife down near the place at the table Gregor was standing closest to.

  “Sit down,” she said now. “You’re both ridiculously early. There’s no point in leaving for town at this hour of the morning. There’s nothing you can do there. I can make you some eggs if you want them, Mr. Demarkian. And some bacon.”

  Gregor thought fondly of his breakfasts at the Ararat, scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, hash browns and toast, but he shook his head. “I’m fine with coffee,” he said. “And I think getting in a little early wouldn’t hurt. We really do have to arrange something to protect Annie-Vic now that she’s conscious, because it’s not impossible that she remembers what happened to her. And that means—”

  “Oh,” Sarah said, startled. “Oh, no.”

  Gary Albright looked a little shocked himself. “I feel like an idiot,” he said finally. “I should have seen that right off. Of course, if she’s awake, he’ll want to come back and finish the job. Or she will. Are you still saying you don’t know if it’s a man or a woman who’s doing this?”

  “I’m keeping my options open,” Gregor said.

  “I’d better get on the line and get somebody out there,” Gary said. “We may have to ask the state police for this. I’ve only got Eddie and Tom. And I can’t just deputize a couple of people from town. I don’t know who we can trust.”

  “If it helps,” Gregor said, “I think I can say that I know for a fact you had nothing to do with it.”

  “It helps,” Gary said. “It just doesn’t solve this.”

  “I asked Dr. Willard to put a nurse on duty in there until we had time to provide a police guard,” Gregor said. “You’ve got a little while before you have to panic about this. I don’t think anybody knows about this yet, except for us.”

  “Don’t believe it,” Gary said. “Lots of people at the hospital have to know, and if they know then their relatives and friends know. Word gets around in a place like this. And I’m not comfortable with just a nurse. She’ll mean well, but she won’t know what to look out for. I mean, whoever this is just killed a woman maybe fifty feet from two state policemen. He’s not stupid.”

  “No,” Gregor said, “but in that last case, he was desperate. Maybe he’s been desperate all along. Maybe that’s what I got wrong at the beginning.”

  “Give me a second,” Gary said.

  Gregor watched as Gary took his cell phone out of his pocket and poked at it. Then he turned to Sarah. She did not look sleepy, and she did not look messy. She reminded him of the mothers on all the television shows of his childhood, the ones who were perfectly groomed all day and all night, no matter what they were doing. At the age of ten, Gregor had been convinced that this was the chief difference between having “real American”parents and having immigrant ones—the immigrant ones were often a mess around the house.

  Gary finished up and put the cell phone away. “Okay,” he said. “I managed to bypass Dale completely. He’s apparently at home asleep. The state police are sending an armed guard right away, and they’ll be there twenty-four seven for at least another week. After that, we’re going to have to renegotiate. We’ll have to call the hospital and give them a heads-up.”

  “Call the hospital in a minute,” Gregor said. “There’s been something I’ve been meaning to ask you. Or rather, there’s been something I’ve needed to know, and for some reason it just occurred to me that you’d know it, because you’re on the school board. Textbooks and supplies and that kind of thing.”

  “Do you mean the school operating budget?” Gary looked confused. “We have one of those. Everybody has to have one of those.”

  “Who controls it?”

  Gary considered this. “I don’t know if you could say that anybody controls it,” he said. “It’s got a couple of different aspects. There’s a drawing fund. We put a predetermined amount of money in there for specific uses, like chalk and paper and that kind of thing. There’s an account for maintenance and repair. There’s an account for salaries. That kind of thing. Why?”

  “Are any of these accounts large?” Gregor asked.

  “Well, the one for salaries is,” Gary said. “It has to be. We have forty teachers between the three schools, and they’ve got a union, so that’s not cheap. But we’ve also got the secretaries, the school nu
rses, an educational psychologist that serves the whole town, and the janitors—that kind of thing.”

  “What about sports?” Gregor asked.

  “Oh, I forgot about sports,” Gary said. “That was a big deal when I was here. It’s not so much anymore. And then there’s pay to play, which, if you ask me, sucks.”

  “Gary,” Sarah said.

  “What’s pay to play?” Gregor asked.

  “It’s just what it sounds like,” Gary said. “If you want to play sports these days, you have to pay for it. Not the entire cost, but it’s not cheap, and it keeps some kids off the teams because their families just can’t afford it. We don’t have the money in the budget anymore to fund the teams and fund the academic programs at the same time. And the academic programs have gotten really expensive, because now we’ve got No Child Left Behind, and it costs a mint to make sure the kids can pass those tests.”

  “How much is it you have to pay to play?”

  “One hundred seventy-nine dollars a sport,” Gary said. “It used to be common for guys to play football in the fall, basketball in the winter and baseball in the spring, but not anymore. It costs close to six hundred dollars to do that. And the kids from the hills, you know, a lot of them can’t come up with even one of those, although Nick Frapp’s people do a good job of raising the cash for at least some of them.”

  “I thought Nick Frapp’s people sent their kids to his Christian school,” Gregor said.

  “They do,” Gary said, “but it doesn’t go all the way through high school yet. So if they’ve got a kid who wants to play football, they’ll take up a collection. The hill kids who don’t belong to Nick’s church just don’t get to play. They’ve got no incentive at all to stay in school.”

  Gregor nodded. Here was a question for the ages, he thought: Where had all the money gone? When he was growing up people were much poorer than they were now. They had smaller houses. They had fewer clothes, and not designer clothes. Things that came from “dry goods” stores. Even so, in those days, you would never have heard of a public school charging its students to play on its sports teams. The whole thing was crazy.

  “Mr. Demarkian?” Gary said.

  “Sorry,” Gregor said. “I was drifting. What happens to this money that the kids pay into the system? Does it go into this same account for sports activities?”

  “The very same one.”

  “And is that a lot of money? Is there a lot of money in that account?”

  “It depends on what you mean by a lot,” Gary said. “I’d say there was ten thousand or so in it at the beginning of a school year. Less as you go along.”

  “And the money churns? There’s a lot of depositing and withdrawing?”

  “There’s a lot of that in all the accounts,” Gary said. “There has to be. This is schools we’re talking about. At least during the school year, they’ve got a lot to do.”

  “And who keeps the records on the accounts?”

  “We’ve got a bookkeeper for the school district,” Gary said. “She’s sixty-five and been with us forever. Mrs. Carstairs. Then we’ve got an accountant in Harrisburg.”

  “And how often are the books audited?”

  Gary Albright laughed. “If you think somebody is embezzling from the operating budget,” he said, “you can give it up. Franklin Hale is an idiot about a lot of things, but on this he had his head on straight. About five years ago, long before he decided to run for school board, he got the town council to initiate monthly statements. Mrs. Carstairs double-checks everything and then it’s all published in the town paper.”

  “It used to drive Franklin crazy, the money that was spent,” Sarah put in. “He’s not really very bright about money, in spite of the fact that he runs a business—”

  “It’s Mike who takes care of the money,” Gary said.

  “Mike is Franklin’s brother-in-law,” Sarah said. “He and Franklin own the business together. But Franklin would see this money being spent—at the end of the year the reports would say things like ‘fifty thousand dollars for miscellaneous’—and it made him crazy. So he hammered and hammered and got this put through, and now everything is itemized right down to the least little pencil, and it’s all published once a month.”

  “And has the amount of money that’s being spent on operating expenses gone down as a result?” Gregor asked.

  “It’s gone up, to tell you the truth,” Gary said. “Franklin really doesn’t understand the kind of money a school needs to be properly run. I agree we shouldn’t be profligate about it, but he seems to think we should be able to run the schools on the kind of budget that barely made sense in my grandfather’s day.”

  “And some of it is just sexism,” Sarah said. “It bothers him no end that teachers make forty or fifty thousand dollars a year when they’re women. In Franklin’s mind, if it’s something a woman does, it should be paid for in pin money. It was one of the reasons why I wasn’t sure I wanted Gary to run for school board on the same slate. Franklin has no respect for schools. He has no respect for learning. He’s bone ignorant and he’s happy to be that way.”

  “All right,” Gregor said, “but does he have control of the funds in the operating budget? Is that something the school board does, hand out that money?”

  “We hand out the salaries,” Gary said. “In fact, I’ve been doing it myself since Annie-Vic was attacked. She’d taken on the job of doing it before then. But the other stuff, the supplies and the sports, it’s Catherine Marbledale who oversees all of that. It’s more efficient that way than if she has to come to us with everything. She hands out the money, one of her assistants keeps the books on it, and it all gets published once a month.”

  “And Franklin still thinks we’re spending too much money,” Sarah said. “Last year, he wanted to end the school busses, if you can believe it. We’ve got kids coming in from miles away, and he wants their transportation left up to their parents, who can probably barely make it to work as it is. He thought it would save on gas money. Honestly, if it was up to Franklin Hale, we’d just abolish the schools altogether and send kids to work when they’re fourteen years old. We certainly wouldn’t educate them.”

  “Franklin thinks there are enough pointy-headed intellectuals in the world,” Gary Albright said, deadpan.

  It took Gregor a moment to realize it was supposed to be a joke.

  3

  They got in to town “late,” as Gary put it, meaning at almost seven thirty, and there was already enough going on to make Gregor sit up and take notice. The news vans were still there. They were such a constant presence Gregor was beginning to think the technicians slept in them. The diner looked as if it might be full to the gills. Gregor saw people in every single booth and all along the counter as they passed. Several of the stores and shops already had lights on in them as well, although Gregor was sure none of them opened before eight, and many of them probably did not open until nine. Down at the end of the street, Nick Frapp’s church compound was not only lit up but busy. Parents were dropping off children. Children were running around in between the buildings, heedless of snow and ice and sleet. There was sleet, too. It had been coming down most of the time Gregor and Gary were driving in, and it had only let up slightly. It was the kind of weather that made school districts declare a snow day, but Snow Hill had not. Maybe having “snow” in its name made its people more likely to put up with the weather.

  “This is going to be nasty,” Gary said as he parked behind the police station. “I hate this time of year. It isn’t good for anything. It’s not good skiing weather. It’s too cold to do much else outside. And the roads are always screwed up.”

  “Was it this time of year that you . . .” Gregor said. “Ah. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”

  “There’s nothing to pry into,” Gary said. “The story’s been, well, everywhere. They even wanted to interview me on CNN, but I turned them down. I didn’t want to make a fuss. And no, it wasn’t this time of year. It was dead of w
inter. If it hadn’t been, we’d never have gotten that much snow, and if we hadn’t gotten that much snow, I wouldn’t have ended up lost. I don’t usually end up lost.”

  “I don’t suppose you do,” Gregor said. “What happened to the dog?”

  “Humphrey?” I’ve still got him. We’ve just been keeping him out back in the dog house while you’re here. I didn’t know if you were allergic or something.”

  “I’m not allergic. I hate to think of the dog suffering in the cold for my sake.”

  “I wouldn’t let him suffer,” Gary said. “I love that dog.”

  “You must.”

  Gary shook his head. “No, Mr. Demarkian. I didn’t do it because I loved the dog. I did it because I was responsible for the dog. And for the girl, you know, she was just a baby. And nobody had taken any responsibility for her yet. Nobody. It’s the thing you learn in the Marine Corps, except I learned it before then. I learned it from my family. Responsibility is the key. Or have I given you this speech before?”

  “I think you might have mentioned it,” Gregor said.

  “Yeah, I mention it a lot,” Gary said. “Michael told me it’s become my ‘mantra,’ which is a thing from Hinduism. I don’t understand where we’ve gotten to these days, when they can teach Hinduism in the public schools but they can’t even mention anything to do with Christianity. We can’t even sing Christmas carols at Christmas, and Henry Wackford tried to tell us we should rename Christmas vacation ‘winter break’ in case somebody tried to sue us. Winter break, when practically everybody in town except Henry himself celebrates Christmas. Even some of the Jewish families get Christmas trees and they don’t seem to have any trouble saying ‘Merry Christmas’ when they pass you on the street. But that’s Henry for you. If it was Christians getting killed instead of the evolution people, I’d have said Henry was your best bet for a serial murderer.”