Living Witness (32 page)

Janey came to the door of the rec room and stuck in her head. “It's Mr. Carr,” she said. “He's out in the hall and he says he wants to see you.”

Holman Carr. Franklin hadn't thought much about Holman Carr lately. He was a good man. You could count on him to help out at the church. You could count on him to help out. It was too bad he'd lost the election for school board, and to Annie-Vic, of all people. But Holman was like that. He was so mousy and so quiet, nobody ever noticed him.

“It's Uncle Mike, too,” Janey said helpfully.

“Well, send them on back,” Franklin said. “I'm not doing anything.”

He looked back at the television. That woman was still on. She was nodding and explaining, still. Franklin shuddered and took a long drink out of his coffee cup. There had still been enough coffee in it when he'd added this latest shot of Scotch that the whole thing tasted funny, but he really didn't care.

The door opened again, and it was Mike who came in first. Holman would never come in first, not anywhere, and not for any reason. Franklin wondered what he did when there was nobody else with him.

Mike looked at the television set. “What are you doing?” he asked. “What're you watching Larry King for?”

Franklin waved his cup at the set. “That's Eugenie Scott,” he said. “That's a name, isn't it?
Her
mother must have thought she was just too perfect. Now she runs something called the National Center for Science Education.”

“Oh,” Holman Carr said. He sounded surprised. Then he blushed. “It's just—well, she's on the list. I mean, that organization is on the list. To testify in the trial.”

“On the atheist side, I take it,” Franklin said.

“Let's not worry about sides,” Mike said. “How can you be watching
that now? We've got a situation, if you haven't noticed. We've got a problem.”

“And I can solve it?” Franklin said. “I didn't kill that Cornish woman. It doesn't have anything to do with me.”

“If you'd been watching the local news,” Mike said, “you'd have seen old Henry Wackford, telling anybody who'd listen that it's us that did it. He says we're killing off the people who filed the lawsuit, like we think if they're all gone the suit will go away.”

“That's cracked,” Franklin said. He took another long drag at his coffee cup. Mike and Holman wouldn't care if they found out he was drinking. He could just go over to the bookshelves and get himself some more when he was done.

Mike grabbed a chair from next to the coffee table and turned it slightly, so that he could sit down and look Franklin in the face at the same time. “Henry isn't just making noise this time,” he said. “He's making accusations. That didn't make the news. The television stations aren't crazy. They don't want to get sued. But he's talked to a dozen people by now and he's come right out and said he thinks he knows who did it. Who did them both. Annie-Vic and this one.”

“Who?” Franklin asked.

“Me,” Holman Carr said.

Franklin started to laugh. “Oh, God,” he said.

“It isn't funny,” Mike said. “That is what Henry's saying, and you know Henry. Once he starts saying it, he's going to go on saying it. And it isn't as if we can shut him up by threatening a lawsuit.”

“Especially not now,” Holman said. “Especially not when nobody knows who did do it.”

“And what is supposed to be Holman's motive for killing one woman and practically killing another?” Franklin demanded. “Oh, I know. It's Henry, so it must be evolution. Holman's running around killing people because it's the only way to keep evolution out of the Snow Hill public schools. Do you know what a crock that is? Evolution is already in the Snow Hill public schools. Miss Catherine my-shit-don't-stink Marbledale put it there, and she doesn't give a crap
what the rest of us think. Excuse me. I think I'm going to start drinking for serious. It's been a very long day.”

“It would help if we had a little more public support,” Mike said. “Part of the problem here is that you didn't get elected to get evolution out of the public schools, you got elected to fix the mess Henry Wackford and his people left the school district in, and nothing's been getting done about it. You've been so busy worrying about Intelligent Design that there's still a problem with the new school construction and there's still a problem with the teachers' unions and the contracts and the pension funds and I don't know what else. So people aren't disposed, if you see what I mean, to come running to our side to help.”

“You can't just come out and tell people things,” Franklin said. “You know that. You've got the courts to worry about, they're all in the hands of the secular humanists. Think of that mess a few years ago in Dover. You've got to come at it sideways.”

“You've also got to do something about the day-to-day,” Mike said.

“Well, Annie-Vic was doing something about the day-to-day,” Franklin said. “She seemed to like it. It's not my fault that somebody smashed her head in. Which isn't to say I'm surprised. Somebody should've done it long ago.”

“Franklin, for God's sake,” Mike said.

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.”

 

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 from 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.