Living Witness (13 page)

“I'm going to be negative about that ape girl hammering on Stacey,” Shelley said. “Why shouldn't I be?”

“You should be, you should be,” Judy said. “But here's the thing. Every time one of these things happens, what do we do? We try to stop it. Yes, yes, of course we should do that, but is that all we should do? Even the lawsuit. The lawsuit is entirely negative.”

“What else can it be?” Shelley asked. “You don't really think we should let them teach a lot of Creationist stupidity in science classes?”

“No, of course I don't.” Judy sighed. This was going to be harder than she had thought. When the idea first occurred to her, it had seem to be so obviously the solution that she'd been amazed she hadn't thought of it before. It surprised her Shelley wasn't getting it.

“Look,” Judy said, “maybe, instead of just doing the negative stuff, we should do some positive stuff.”

“What positive stuff?”

“Maybe, instead of telling people what we're against, we should tell them what we're for. Have you ever heard of the Equal Access Act?”

“No,” Shelley said.

“It's a law,” Judy said. “It applies to any school district that gets federal money, and Snow Hill gets federal money. Lots of it. So Snow Hill has to abide by the Equal Access Act.”

“What a minute,” Shelley said. “Is this the thing about Bible clubs? Is this the law about letting kids have Bible clubs in public schools?”

“Sort of,” Judy said, “but not exactly. Listen, I'm just on my way to
the school. Meet me in the parking lot and I'll explain the whole thing. Mallory made me think of it, really. And it might work. Anyway, we have to do something. We can't let these hillbillies take over our children. It's as if half this town never arrived in the twenty-first century.”

 

Nicodemus Frapp had been hearing the same things everybody else in town had been hearing, but Nick had the best intelligence network in the county, and more people he could trust than Christ had had on the day of the Last Supper. Of course, that last one was sort of ironic—and not the sort of thing he could say in front of his congregation. Oral Roberts might not be Vassar, but it was light-years away from spending your life in these hills, and “sophistication” was part of the problem it left you with. Nick didn't believe that everything was relative, but he did believe this was. It was a matter of what you were used to. He was used to two different kinds of things. Only one of them was acceptable as the public face of a Holiness Church.

Still, Nick thought, it was a wonderful thing. The idea of Gregor Demarkian himself, right here in Snow Hill, and there hadn't even been a murder yet. True crime was one of the things Nick loved passionately. Maybe it was the idea that murder happened even among the people who had looked down on him all those years he was growing up, and probably looked down on him still. Maybe it was just that this kind of murder was different than the kind of murder he was used to. People in the hills killed each other all the time. The reality of Appalachia was not the Beverly Hillbillies. Men beat their wives into bloody pulps. Men and women both got so wasted on moonshine that they were damned near brain damaged by the time they picked up the rifle and started shooting holes in the fabric of time. God, Nick knew all about that kind of thing. It wasn't gone yet, although he'd been trying ever since he got back from Oklahoma to make it stop. The problem was, as crime, it wasn't interesting. It was hard to get interested
in a couple of sky-high idiots laying waste to the landscape and then coming to on a jailhouse floor, wondering what the Hell had happened to them.

Gregor Demarkian did not deal in that kind of crime. He was too expensive, for one thing. Police departments didn't call him in to “do something” about yet another pair of crackers getting liquored up and violent. Gregor Demarkian was called in when there was a real mystery, when there was a chance that the killer would never be caught by ordinary police work. Or he was called in when the people involved were rich and famous, or “prominent,” or one of those things that made treading softly a good idea. Nick didn't think he would ever be the kind of person the police would feel they had to “tread softly” with. Even if he expanded this church into the kind of megachurch that had its own services on big infomercial hunks on cable TV, he would still be a hillbilly. It was bred in his bones, and everybody who met him knew it.

Nick was so excited about the prospect of Gregor Demarkian in town, though, he had almost forgotten his position. This was unprecedented. He had made his life on remembering his position, on knowing precisely what it was and acting accordingly. The problem was that it was hard to remember anything when he was looking up Main Street, waiting to see how Demarkian would arrive. Nick didn't think it would be in a limousine; Demarkian didn't seem like that kind of person. Nick wondered if this meant that old Annie-Vic was dead, or about to die. Everybody thought she would die. Nick wasn't so sure. She was a tough old woman. She might come to yet. Then there would be no need for Gregor Demarkian. She'd just sit right up in bed and tell the world who'd tried to do her in.

Nick was standing at the window in the big pastor's office on the second floor of the church. Below him, the one-level school building that housed their Holiness Gospel School looked active and humming, even from the outside. He saw Alice McGuffie leave the diner and start on out of town in the direction of the public school complex. He was fairly sure he knew what all that was going to be about. Main
Street was clogged through with reporters, and it was going to get worse before it was going to get better, but if somebody killed Barbie McGuffie before it was over, Nick wouldn't be entirely unsympathetic.

There was a tap on the door behind him, and Sister Cleland poked her head in. They had to be careful with the finances of this church. There were a handful of well-off members, but most of them were either poor, or just in the process of climbing out of poverty, so it wouldn't do to spend too much money where it didn't have to be spent. Sister Cleland was a volunteer. There were three church women who volunteered as church secretary every week, and that way all of them could keep jobs at Wal-Mart and the church still got its typing done.

Sister Cleland's name was Susie. If Nick had just met her, he would have remembered it. There was an old Scottish folk song about a girl named Susie Cleland. Susie met a man her fathers and brothers didn't like, and they burned her at the stake when she wouldn't give him up. This Susie Cleland had just been left with the debts from five no-account brothers, and the care and feeding of a father whose brain was lost to alcoholism long before Susie and Nick both had reached the fifth grade.

Susie came all the way into the office and shut the door behind her. She looked better now than she had when Nick had first come back from college. She took care with her clothes and her hair and had something done about her teeth. (Doing something about teeth was something Nick insisted on with all his parishioners. Dental hygiene was a big issue at every grade at their Christian school, and they even brought in a dentist for a free clinic twice a year.)

Susie looked over her shoulder at the door, as if the CIA were out there somewhere behind it. Then she turned back to him. “There's somebody to see you,” she whispered. “Not somebody you know.” She hesitated a good long while. “It's a reporter.”

“Is it,” Nick said.

Susie nodded vigorously. “From New York, I think. She seems like
she's from New York, anyway. It isn't one of the famous ones, if you know what I mean. I think they want to interview you for the television.”

Nick considered this. He had, of course, expected it. Once the national media started pouring in, it couldn't be long before they found out what a “Holiness” church was, or heard about the “holy ghost people.” One of the people in town would tell them, even if they didn't ask. Alice McGuffie would tell them, and so would Franklin Hale. Nick supposed there were a dozen more just waiting to swing the spotlight away from the nice people of Snow Hill and onto the crazy stupid hill folk. He wondered if this woman was sitting in his waiting room, looking all around her for poisonous snakes. This was one of those times he wished he had a few.

“I saw Alice go out toward the schools,” he said. “Do you know what that's about?”

Susie Cleland shrugged. “Something to do with Barbie, I'd guess. Why Alice McGuffie doesn't know her own daughter is the next best thing to a terrorist, I'll never know. Do you want me to send this woman away? She makes me nervous. She makes me think something is wrong with my hair.”

“Does she have a camera with her?” Nick asked. “Does she have somebody with her who's carrying a camera?”

“No, not at all,” Susie said. “It's just her. Dressed sloppy, if you know what I mean, so I don't know why she makes me feel so self-conscious about my clothes. It's odd, isn't it, the way people are? She's got a tape recorder.”

“All right,” Nick said. “We'll ask her to leave the tape recorder with you.”

“She's got a tote bag,” Susie said. “There might be something in that. It looks full. Maybe she has a camera.”

“Maybe.” Nick was pretty sure she didn't. Here was something Oral Roberts University was probably much better at than Vassar. They understood what a media onslaught was. Christian preachers were the victims of media onslaughts every day. Oral Roberts himself
had been a prime target. In this case, Nick was willing to bet that this woman was just advancing for another, more important reporter. She'd want to check him out and see if he was worthy of airtime.

He went over to his desk and sat down. He was so tall and thin he found it difficult to sit behind a desk like a normal person. He seemed to explode in a profusion of knees. “Send her in, Susie,” he said. “She won't bite you.”

“I'd like to bite her,” Susie said. “You should see the way she's behaving. She keeps looking behind the furniture.”

Which meant she was looking for snakes, Nick thought. Susie was out the door. He sat back a little and waited. This room was full of books, and they were not just window dressing. Nick liked to read. He especially liked to read history. He did not restrict himself to what came out of the Christian publishing houses.

The door swung in yet again and Susie came back, followed by a small, very young woman in jeans and a parka. Susie had been right about the sloppiness. The woman looked like she had slept all night in those clothes, then rolled out of bed this morning and pretended she hadn't.

“Ms. Charlene Holder,” Susie said. She was very stiff. “Ms. Holder, this is Reverend Frapp.”

Then Susie got out, fast, as if shooting were about to start.

Nick had gotten to his feet. This was one of the first acts of politeness he had ever learned and he wasn't interested in giving it up. He held out his hand to the woman and waited until she shook it. Then he waited until she sat down. She was really very, very small. Nick towered over most people. Beside her he was like a tree next to a daisy.

He sat down again and stretched his legs out under his desk. “Well,” he said. “You're from CNN. What can I do for you?”

“Ah,” Ms. Holder said. She looked at her hands. “Your secretary took my tape recorder. I'd kind of like to get something of our conversation on tape.”

“I'm not really ready for tape,” Nick said. “What was it you wanted to have a conversation about?”

“Well,” Ms. Holder said. She was looking carefully around the room, in all the corners, at the floor. Nick watched her. She did not seem to be aware that she was leaving long stretches of dead air.

“You're not going to see anything,” he said mildly. “We don't handle snakes in the church.”

“What?”

“We don't handle snakes in the church,” he said patiently. There was no point in being rude to these people. They could hurt you. Even so, he wished he could hit her over the head with something right this minute. “There's no point in looking around as if a rattlesnake is going to jump out and bite you. There are no rattlesnakes here. We don't handle snakes in church.”

“Ah,” Ms. Holder said.

“Most of us don't handle snakes in church at all anymore,” Nick said. “It's an old-fashioned practice. We move with the times like everybody else. And nobody's drunk poison around here for a good thirty years.”

“Ah,” Ms. Holder said again.

“So if that's what you were looking for,” Nick said. He tilted his head. “If that's what you were looking for,” he said again, “as you can see, I can't help you.”

This got Ms. Holder's attention. Nick had no idea why. Maybe she was just paranoid about rejection. She forced herself to look directly at him. Her eyes stayed on his face for a good ten seconds before they began to scan the room again.

“It's not about snakes,” she said. “It's about the lawsuit. We're here to cover the lawsuit. We thought we'd get a few, ah, you know, we'd talk to a few people. Creationists. You're a Creationist, aren't you?”

“If you mean do I believe that the world was created as the Bible says it was, then yes, I'm a Creationist.”

“Yes. Well. That's it, you see. We want to get a few on camera interviews with Creationists.”

“You want me to talk about the biblical account of creation?”

“Um, yeah,” Ms. Holder said. “That would be good. Also, you
know, why you think it should be taught in the public schools.”

“I don't think it should be taught in the public schools,” Nick said.

“What?”

“I don't think it should be taught in the public schools,” Nick said. He wondered if he was going to have to repeat everything for this woman. She just wasn't listening. “We have a Christian school here, run by this church. It's enough for me that Creation is taught in the Christian school.”