Living Witness (45 page)

“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.

 

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 winter. 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.”

“Do you mean he's a psychopath?” Gregor asked.

“Nah, I don't think so,” Gary said. “I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him, mind you, but I don't think he's Jack the Ripper. It's just that he's seriously pissed. He's pissed because the board is so obviously Christian. Henry doesn't like Christianity. He thinks it's the root of all evil. But he's pissed because he lost at all, to begin with, and he's pissed because he's no longer lawyer for the school board.”

“This is Henry Wackford who used to be the chairman of the school board?” Gregor asked, surprised.

“Right,” Gary said. “And you don't even have to bring it up. It was an incredible conflict of interest. But Henry was chairman of the school board and the school board had to hire a lawyer and he hired himself and he went on with it for ten years. During which time, by the way, there was nothing for him to do but collect his yearly retainer. Now that there is something for a lawyer to do, we have a firm from up in Harrisburg. We all thought we'd better get somebody who knew how to handle a federal lawsuit.”

“Henry Wackford,” Gregor said.

They were coming around to the front of the building. Gregor looked up the street. The were lights on deep within the offices of Wackford Squeers, Attorneys at Law, but they weren't just safety lights.

Somebody had to be already in place at Henry Wackford's office.

 

 

 

Christine had been gone for less than twenty-four hours, and Henry Wackford's life was already a mess. Not that he actually needed Christine, meaning Christine herself. In fact, she was one of the most annoying aspects of living in Snow Hill. She had that thing they all had, that thing Henry had gone away to college to get away from. It wasn't just that she was religious. No. Henry thought he could work up some respect for
seriously
religious people. Thomas Aquinas, say, or Bonaventure—the Middle Ages were full of religious people who were intelligent and thoughtful and attuned to complexity. Maybe that was only possible before science got seriously into gear and started explaining the universe. Henry didn't know. He only knew that religion in Snow Hill was straight off a Hallmark card, full of fuzzy feel-good niceness and floating around in a sea of love and angels. Henry would have hired a fellow atheist to be his secretary if he could have, but he hadn't been able to find one of those. Christine had shown up at the door with her little gold cross on its little gold chain around her neck, and she knew how to operate the computer and had a fair idea of what was supposed to happen with a filing system, and he'd taken her.

Now he looked around the office and there were files everywhere. Either Christine knew better how to handle a filing system, or she had changed the one he had, and Henry was sure it was the latter. He was not an idiot, and he had nothing but contempt for those Hollywood movies about how the secretary moves out and the boss can't wipe his own ass without her help. He was not an idiot, and in the long three weeks he'd been without a secretary before Christine, he'd managed just fine.

He sat down behind his desk and looked at the stack of folders. He had been through them once. He would go through them twice. The folder he was looking for should be labeled Books to Print, and it belonged in the B cabinet in alphabetical order with everything else that was there. He was now more than sure that that file was not in the filing cabinet. Christine had either misfiled it, or relabeled it and filed it somewhere else, or lost it, or something.

He picked up the file on top of the stack. It was labeled Barrington Cross Hunt, and he should have had it put in storage years ago. He remembered Barrington Cross Hunt. He'd been the “village atheist” when Henry was growing up, because nobody in Snow Hill would dare to call old Annie-Vic any such thing. It was to Barrington that Henry had gone when he had first been thinking about starting a chapter of the American Humanist Association, and it was Barrington who had explained to him why it would never work.

“There's too much downside in it,” Barrington had said, sucking on a pipe as if it were a baby bottle. “Of course there are humanists here, and atheists and agnostics. There always have been, and there always have been more of them than anybody would guess. But to come out and say that's what you are is a disaster in a place like Snow Hill. Everybody would stop talking to you. You'd barely be employable.”

Henry put the folder down. It was only half true, all of that. The town hadn't ostracized Barrington Cross Hunt, and it hadn't ostracized Henry, either. The hostility was more subtle. It was in the way people talked to you, and in the things they said when they knew you weren't quite out of hearing. And there was more, of course. There
were the things they said to each other in private, and the things that had gotten two people killed already with maybe a third to come. It was this tightwire act they were all engaged in, this trying to believe things they had to know were not true. Part of Henry didn't believe they did believe them. He thought they only wanted to believe them. That was why they got so crazy when something came along to make what they believed obviously untrue. It was as if you'd knocked the foundation out of one of their houses.

Books to Print, Henry reminded himself. The damned thing had to be around here somewhere. He had to find it, and he had to find it today. He had work to do. It didn't matter if Christine was there to help him do it or not.

Maybe there was some woman in the development who would like a job as a legal secretary. That would be something. Henry loved the people in the development. They were like a promise from another world. Out there somewhere, away from Snow Hill and all the places like it, there was a real world with real people in it.

The sound he was hearing was definitely a knock. It was a very faint knock, which meant it must be coming from the outer office, or maybe all the way from the front door. Christine had left her keys on her desk when she'd marched out of the office yesterday. Maybe she'd changed her mind and wanted to come back.

Henry got up and went out. In the other office, the knocking was louder. When he opened the door to the entryway, the knocking was a pounding. That would not be Christine, that would be a man.

Henry hesitated. There were murders going on here. There were
things
going on. You never know what those people might do. You couldn't count on them, because they didn't rely on their reason. They didn't rely on logic. They relied on fantasies, and all fantasies were murderous in the end.

Henry went into the entryway. Somebody was pounding and calling. Three pounds, then the call. Boom, boom, boom. The a muffled voice that sounded as if it were calling his name. What movie was that from? The original version of
The Haunting
, he thought. Henry had
read the book,
The Haunting of Hill House
, by Shirley Jackson, when he was much younger. He didn't read that sort of thing anymore. Ghosts, for God's sake. It wasn't good to encourage that kind of thing anymore. It wasn't good to say “for God's sake.” The fundies always jumped on it when you did. Aha! You said “for God's sake!” You must
really
believe in God, even if you're hiding it from yourself.

Henry pulled the front door open. The light was just beginning to get strong on Main Street, but it wasn't that strong. There was no angry mob storming his door with torches. The man on the doorstep—Gregor Demarkian. Henry recognized him from television. He looked past Demarkian and up the street.

Henry stepped back and waved Gregor Demarkian inside. “Sorry,” he said. “I'm in a bit of a mess. My secretary quit, and now I can't find anything.”

“Your secretary quit?”

Demarkian was in the front hall. Henry closed the door behind him. He dwarfed the place. He made the ceiling look too low, and the hall not as wide as it should have been. Henry thought he was at least as tall as Nick Frapp, or close, but he was bulked out more. He looked like he might have played football.

“It's this lawsuit,” Henry said, going back toward the outer office and waving Demarkian to follow him. “It's got the whole town in a mess. And Christine was not exactly on my side, if you catch my drift. It's impossible to find a secretary in this town who would be on my side in this. The kind of people who understand and respect science, and reason, well, if they're in Snow Hill, they tend to move out. And stay out. Which is what I should have done.”

“Which one?” Demarkian asked. “Move out or stay out?”

“Stay out,” Henry said. “I went to college and law school, and then I came back. Don't ask me why. I mean, I remember my reasoning at the time, but looking back on it from this perspective, I think I must have been crazy. I was on my own, you see. My parents were dead, and I didn't want to go corporate. There's a reason they call them soulless corporations. I don't know. I thought that it would be easier here, to get
started on my own, to function on my own. And then there was Mickey Squeers, who'd done the same thing in his time. He took me in.”

“That's the Squeers of Wackford Squeers, outside?”

“That's right,” Henry said. “He's been dead for years now, of course, but I don't see any reason to change the name of the firm. Or maybe I'm just like Scrooge. Maybe I keep the name so that I don't have to go to the expense of changing the sign. I hate that novella, don't you, Mr. Demarkian? More sentimental treacle. More fuzzy suffocating nonsense that doesn't do anybody any good and that does a lot of harm. We make a point of going on with business as usual at the Snow Hill Humanist Association, right through the holidays. Somebody has to step up and do something, or nothing will ever change.”

“Bah,” Gregor Demarkian said. “Humbug.”

Henry turned, but Demarkian's face was completely blank. He might not have said what Henry thought he'd heard. Henry leaned over and took a pile of files out of one of the chairs and gestured Gregor to it.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “Maybe I'm assuming too much. Maybe you're a religious man.”