Living Witness

by Jane Haddam

  “Bennis did not want to be married in Holy Trinity Church,” Father Tibor said, “but she was not the one giving us the problem.”

  “No,” Gregor agreed.

  Then he drifted off a little. It had been a long time since he had thought of Elizabeth. When he had first come back to Cavanaugh Street, he had thought of her every day. Of course, she had been newly dead then, and newly buried, and he had come here only because her grave would be near, in the Armenian-American cemetery just on the edge of the city.

  Then and now, he thought, but it was harder to get his mind around than that. His life had changed so drastically since the days when he and Elizabeth were both growing up on Cavanaugh Street. Cavanaugh had changed drastically, too. Time is the measure of change. That’s what they had taught him at the University of Pennsylvania. He could close his eyes and see Cavanaugh Street exactly as it had been then: the tall tenements with their railroad apartments; the women on their knees scrubbing the sidewalks because the street cleaners never seemed to bother; the tiny storefronts offering shoe repair and check cashing. The Ararat had been in its usual place, but it had been small, too, with tiny windows and bare floors. Gregor had been away in the FBI, living in Washington, D.C., when the Melajians had done the remodeling. He had no idea when the tenements had come down to make way for the town houses. Someday, he thought he ought to ask.

  “Tcha,” Tibor said. “Krekor, if you do not make small talk, we will make you get into your tails. Then you won’t be able to sit down without getting them wrinkled.”

  3

  People started arriving just after ten. Some of them caused a lot of fuss and had to be ushered onto Cavanaugh Street with a police escort.

  “That’s Liz and Jimmy,” Russ said, from his new place looking out the window. “And Mark and Geoff. In tuxedos. Has Geoff hit puberty yet? You should see him in a tuxedo.”

  “He was telling us about the phony construction company,” Tibor said. “Listen.”

  “I was thinking it was about time we all got dressed,” Gregor said. “If we’re late, I think Bennis will probably kill us.”

  “No she won’t,” Russ said. “That’s because she’ll be late. I think that’s a Rolling Stone. I mean it. He looks embalmed and he’s brought a girl who looks younger than—well, younger than legal, quite frankly.”

  “The phony construction company,” Tibor insisted.

  “Well,” Gregor said, “there’s not much to say. Henry Wackford wanted to get out of Snow Hill for good. And the reason he wanted to get out was exactly what he said it was, because he hated the people there. Because he thought they were all stupid. You name it. What threw me off in the beginning was that he wasn’t faking any of that. He wasn’t even faking his announcements of how the Christian fundamentalists were out to murder everyone who wanted to keep evolution in the public schools. He really believed that.”

  “He must have been a very stupid man,” Tibor said.

  “I don’t think stupidity is his problem,” Gregor said. “What’s that thing Bennis is always talking about? We all have narratives we use to shape our lives. Christianity is a narrative. She claims to have one of her own she won’t tell me. Well, this was Henry Wackford’s narrative.”

  “Still,” Russ said. “He knew there weren’t any Christian fundamentalists committing violence in this case. He was committing the violence himself.”

  “Well, yes,” Gregor said, “but as I understand it, logic is not a big element in these narratives. Anyway, what he did was actually very simple. When the town finally agreed to build the new schools complex, they put him in charge of the project. And he invented a construction company, and awarded it the contract. Then he subcontracted the actual work out to various firms, always being careful never to use one firm for very long. That’s why the construction was taking so long. There was very little continuity. Not that he minded, of course, because the longer the project went on, the longer he could skim money off the top of it. And he would have been all right, really, except for two things. The first one was Annie-Vic. The second one was that silly impulse he had to put the Marbledale sisters on the disclosure forms as owners of Dellbach Construction.”

  “And he did this because they won the lottery?” Tibor said. “When people win the lottery in Pennsylvania, they are all over the news.”

  “I know,” Gregor said. “But they won it in New Hampshire, and New Hampshire allows winners to remain anonymous. Still, he knew about it, somehow, and he thought it would be a good blind if push ever came to shove. Then something entirely different tipped me off. That woman I was telling you about, Alice McGuffie. She had a picture of the ribbon cutting on the project. She was there, because at the time she was president of the PTA. Henry Wackford was there, because he was chairman of the school board. Catherine Marbledale should have been there, both because she was principal of the high school and because she was supposedly head of Dellbach Construction, but she wasn’t there. And her sister Margaret wasn’t there either. Margaret wasn’t there because she had no reason to be there. Catherine wasn’t there because she was down with the flu, but Margaret should have been there. If you own a company like that that has just been awarded a major project, you make sure somebody attends the ribbon cutting. And nobody from Dellbach did. Alice McGuffie thought that the fact that Catherine Marbledale wasn’t in that picture was proof that Catherine Marbledale was guilty of something, but she had it backwards. It was proof that Catherine Marbledale wasn’t guilty. That, and the other thing.”

  “What other thing?” Russ asked. He was still at the window.

  “The fact that Catherine Marbledale couldn’t have killed Judy Cornish without being seen,” Gregor said. “But that’s not the funniest thing about all this. You know what’s the funniest thing?”

  “What?” Russ said. “That’s Senator Casey out there. Did you know Senator Casey was coming?”

  “I think Bennis gave a ton of money to his campaign,” Gregor said.

  “I want to know what the funniest thing was,” Tibor said.

  “Ah,” Gregor said. “Well, that had to do with Henry Wackford’s secretary, Christine Lindsay. On the day before we arrested him, she quit. Not over anything illegal he was doing. She wouldn’t have understood that. In fact, Henry Wackford tended to hire secretaries who were not necessarily too bright because he didn’t want them prying into anything he had going. She quit over the lawsuit, Darwin, and all the rest of it. And after she was gone, Henry went looking for the copy of the disclosure form he’d kept for himself. It was in a folder he’d labeled Books to Print, but when he looked through the files, he couldn’t find the folder. The two times I talked to him, he was engaged in a frantic search for the thing, and he never did find it. Because he had to keep that disclosure form out of sight. Anybody at Snow Hill who looked at it would have realized immediately that there was something wrong.”

  “So what happened to it?” Russ said. “Did she take it to the police?”

  “No,” Gregor said. “She’d actually removed it nearly a month before. She had no idea there was anything wrong with it. She just knew it said it was a file of things to print, so she’d taken it and everything in it to the printers. It was still waiting there when Gary Albright made the arrest. He picked it up later. She’d seen the number one hundred seven on the folder, which was there for God only knows what reason, but she decided that was how many copies needed to be made, so she made them. Gary ran her down at her married sister’s house in Lehigh and she told him she’d just assumed this was material needed for the new school board. She’d never thought anything of it, and she certainly hadn’t read any of it.”

  “This was perhaps a good thing,” Tibor said. “If she’d read it, he’d have had to kill her, too.”

  “I don’t think so,” Gregor said. “She isn’t all that bright, so I don’t think she would have figured it out, and she’s very deferential to authority, at least according to Gary. If her boss told her something, she’d probabl
y believe it. And all that was good, because murdering Christine Lindsay would have blown the cover story. Christine is not a fan of Darwin. She’s very devout, very devoted to her church, and publicly Christian. It would have been hard to pin any murder of her on crazed fundamentalists looking to rid the land of Darwinism.”

  “And the old lady?” Tibor said. “She is going to be all right?”

  “She’s going to be fine,” Gregor said. “Bennis knows her, do you know that? Annie-Vic went to Vassar. Anyway, she’s up and around, recovering much faster than she should at her age, and writing an article on her experiences for the Vassar Quarterly. Then she says she’s going to spend the summer on an ecotour of the Amazonian rain forest, but I think they’re trying to talk her out of that.”

  “Who’s that?” Russ demanded. “That’s the tallest man I’ve ever seen in my life. He’s taller than you are.”

  Gregor came to the window. “Ah. That’s Nicodemus Frapp. He wasn’t one of our suspects anymore, so I didn’t see any reason not to invite him. He’s a very interesting man.”

  “You invited a suspect?” Father Tibor said.

  “Look at that,” Russ said. “That’s Oprah Winfrey. That’s Oprah Winfrey. She’s got more security than the President of the United States.”

  4

  It was at the last minute, when he was already dressed and ready to go, that he went into his bedroom and locked the door behind him. Russ and Tibor were also ready and dressed, but they were out in the living room, looking down on the crowd from the windows, trying to spot people they knew. There would be plenty to spot, because Bennis was like that—a best-selling author, a former Main Line debutante. She knew people.

  Gregor sat down on the edge of his bed and leaned over to open the bottom drawer in his dresser. Bennis knew about this drawer. He’d made a point of telling her about it. He had not shown it to her, because he never looked at it himself. Mostly, he didn’t want to. He did want to now.

  The drawer stuck. It was part of an older piece of furniture. He tugged until he got it open and then reached in for the single thing it contained, a long cardboard box. He put the box on the bed and took the lid off it. He took out the framed photograph of Elizabeth he had always kept on his desk when he was at the Bureau and reached for the small album just underneath it. It was his wedding album, the first one, and he hadn’t looked at the pictures inside it for a very long time.

  Time is the measure of change, he thought again, but then he thought of something else, one of the things that had been part of the packet about evolution he’d insisted on reading when he got back from Snow Hill: Nothing makes sense except in the light of evolution. There had been evolution here, all right. He had evolved from a young man to a middle-aged one, from a poor man to a “comfortable” one, from an ignorant boy to something he liked better.

  But he knew this: if Elizabeth had lived, he would have stayed married to her. Even if he had met Bennis under whatever circumstances, he would not have left his marriage. He had been in love with Elizabeth then, and in many ways he was in love with her now. It was supposed to be impossible to find a love that lasted forever, but he had done it.

  What struck him was that he was sure he had actually done it twice.

  He flipped through the pictures one after the other: Elizabeth in the wedding dress she had bought at a “good” department store; himself in a rented tuxedo; the long bar at the place they had rented for the reception; his own mother and father, and hers. It was odd to think how many of the people he had grown up around were already dead. It was odd to think that Elizabeth herself was dead, and that he had once sat on this very bed in this very bedroom and talked to the pictures of her, and thought that she might be talking back.

  He took one more look through the pile and then put everything back into the box and the box back into the drawer. He closed the door and stood up. Things happened, and then other things happened, and in no time at all your life was something you had never expected it to be. That was not all bad. In fact, a lot of it was good, at least in his case. Even so, you needed to keep control of it. You needed to make sure you did not forget, just because living got in the way.

  “Culture,” one of his professors at Penn used to say, “is our conversation with the dead.”

  Gregor didn’t know about culture, but he did know about life, and there were plenty of conversations with the dead in that.

  5

  Twenty minutes later, Gregor Demarkian was standing all the way at his end of Cavanaugh Street, just a few feet away from the police barriers. Tibor was at his side, holding the rings in one hand and looking uncomfortable. Russ was at Tibor’s side, still looking through the crowd for people he recognized. At the police barriers themselves, in the place where a priest would have stood if they were in a church, was John Henry Newman Jackman, mayor of the city of Philadelphia, and, as he would tell anybody who would listen, on the way to being President of the United States. John was confident about only two things. One was that he himself would be President. The other was that Gregor and Bennis would last forever. That one was all Gregor cared about.

  Down at the other end of Cavanaugh Street, where Russ and Donna had their town house, there was a stir, and Gregor realized that this was it. They were going. There was a band somewhere. Gregor had no idea where they had been placed. There were folding chairs stretched out for blocks on both sides of the street. There were flowers, and ribbons, and a little girl, no more than four years old, with a basket full of rose petals.

  A second later, Gregor saw the bridesmaids, Donna in that expensive dress Russ had complained about. It was a very beautiful dress. Bennis did not seem to be of the opinion that bridesmaids ought to look ugly. After Donna came Linda Melajian. After Linda Melajian came a woman Gregor didn’t know—a cousin, the last female member of Bennis’s family alive and young enough to be here. Bennis’s brothers would be in the crowd somewhere. Gregor thought he would deal with them later, or just get Chris in a corner and pretend the rest of them didn’t exist. Especially the one who was just out of jail.

  Then there was Bennis, all the way at the back, with a huge bouquet of flowers in her hands. She was not being walked down the aisle by anyone at all, which made sense, but made Gregor feel a little disoriented. She was wearing a spectacular dress, the top part of which seemed to be made entirely of off-white beads that sparkled in the sun. She had her hair up and back. She was wearing pearls that had belonged to her mother. That was because “wearing diamonds before dark is tacky.” She had told him that. Gregor felt dizzy. She was, he thought, a remarkably beautiful woman, and the beauty had not drained away because she’d passed the age of forty. He was finding it a little difficult to breathe.

  Then she was standing right next to him, and handing the bouquet to Donna Moradanyan Donahue. John Jackman picked up the book he’d been holding in one hand and said:

  “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today—”

  It was the Episcopal wedding service. Why was he using the Episcopal wedding service? John was a Catholic. Gregor had been baptized in the Armenian church. Bennis had been an Episcopalian once, but Gregor was sure she wasn’t one anymore. At least, he’d never seen any sign of it.

  Gregor looked over to Bennis, who was staring straight ahead, ignoring him.

  And then she turned her head very slightly, bit her lip to control a grin, and winked at him.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Months ago, in the middle of working on the long series of corrections and cuts that I do in the final phase of writing a book, I told my editor that I was going to need at least four or five pages for the acknowledgments section. I needed them not because of all the people I had to thank, although I have a lot of people to thank. I needed them because I wanted to rant, without being compromised by the filter of a character’s point of view, on the American obsession with the theory of evolution.

  Comes time to write this final word, and I find that I don’t have a rant left in me. All
the things I knew to be true when I started writing, I still know to be true. In fact, my knowledge has been perfected, because I have read my way through books and articles not only by scientists and others supporting evolution, but by scientists and others supporting everything from Intelligent Design to young earth Creationism. I’ve read Behe as well as Prothero, Johnson as well as Eugenie Scott. I sat down with books called Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters and Evolution: A Theory in Crisis and pasted them full of Post-It notes in an attempt to compare and contrast them. I spent hours on the Web sites of TalkOrigins (www.talkorigins.org) and The Discovery Institute (www.discovery.org). I went to see Ben Stein’s movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed and then read through the information debunking it at the National Center for Science Education’s dedicated site, Expelled Exposed (www.expelledexposed.com).

  So what do I know to be true?

  First, I know that evolution is a fact. There is also something else, called the “theory of evolution,” which attempts to explain this fact, but evolution itself remains a fact. It’s the same with gravity—there’s the fact of gravity, but there is also the theory of gravity—and with the germ theory of disease. It is a fact that germs cause many diseases, in spite of our habit of calling that fact the “germ theory.”

  Second, I know that evolution is not what most of the people fighting it are really fighting. Oh, some of them are. There are still a few young earth Creationists out there who believe that the Bible gives them a time frame for the creation of the earth. The dating always seemed to me to be a little squishy—nowhere in Genesis does it say anything about 10,000 years—but there are people who believe that proof of anything else would make their religion untrue, and who fight that anything accordingly.