Living Witness (15 page)

“It's just that I don't understand it,” Gary said finally. “Not being
married, I mean. Life is a lonely place. I'd think everybody would get married, if they could. Even homosexual people want to get married. But Miss Hadley could have. From what I've heard, she could have a couple of times over. She was in the Navy, did you know that?”

“No,” Gregor said.

“She was a WAVE, in World War II,” Gary said. “She was a prisoner of war for a while, with the Japanese. Not for long. There's people who say that she was proposed to by an admiral.”

“They could have gotten that wrong.” In Gregor's opinion, small towns got most things wrong. They also got most things in their worst possible light.

“Maybe,” Gary admitted. “But there was a guy in town, a guy I knew, died a couple of years ago. He was a judge before he retired. He asked her to marry him, and she turned him down. She said she didn't want to give up her independence. Do you understand that?”

“I don't know that I do. I do know there are a lot of women who say they feel that way.”

“In her case it wasn't as bad as it could have been,” Gary Albright said. “She had a lot of brothers, so she's got a lot of nieces and nephews and grandnieces and nephews. They come up to visit a couple of times a year. She has them all up to that place of hers, dozens of them, so many there're people sleeping on her floors. I still don't understand it.”

“Maybe she was hard to get along with.”

“Miss Hadley?” Gary considered it. “I don't think so. I mean, she wasn't exactly easy. She wanted her own way and she tended to get it. It's kind of funny. There's somebody else like that, right in town, and she isn't married either. Miss Marbledale.”

“Who's Miss Marbledale?”

“She runs the school, pretty much,” Gary said. “You'll meet her. She's on the suspect list for the case. Not that I think she killed anybody, mind you, or even tried, as it is, and really if she killed anyone, it'd be Franklin Hale. Or maybe Alice McGuffie. But, here's the thing. She's a lot like Miss Hadley. Only—I'm not sure I know how to put this—only with less of a spirit of adventure, I guess.”

“No stint in the Waves,” Gregor suggeted.

“And no running around on foreign trips,” Gary said. “Miss Hadley went to Mongolia and lived in a tent for a couple of weeks. That was only last year. Miss Marbledale's only been foreign maybe two or three times that I remember, and it's always been to regular places like, you know, Rome or England. With a tour with other schoolteachers. And then she brings back slides. You know how that goes?”

“Yes,” Gregor said. He did, too. He knew exactly. He had had teachers like that when he had been in school.

“I was out of the country when I was in the Marines,” Gary said. “But I haven't been except for that. I don't see the point. I belong here. I can't see they have anything that we don't have. Art, you know, but I'm not that big on art. I like Beethoven.”

“That's good,” Gregor said.

“It was Miss Marbledale who turned me on to Beethoven,” Gary said. “Now I've got the beginning of the Fifth Symphony as my ring tone. But she doesn't teach much anymore, if you know what I mean. She's an administrator.”

“Why is she on the suspect list?” Gregor asked. “You said you didn't think she'd kill Ann-Victoria Hadley. There must be a reason.”

“Oh, there is,” Gary said. “And maybe you'll change the suspect list when you get your hands on it, but I put everybody involved in the suit on it if they were in the position to have done the battery. If they were in the vicinity, you know. Miss Marbledale used to be a science teacher. She presented the science teachers' case when the policy was being debated before the school board. As if the science teachers' side was the official side of the school.”

“Not in favor of Intelligent Design, I take it.”

“No,” Gary said. He looked suddenly unsure of himself. The moment passed and was gone. He looked impassive again. “Here's the thing,” he said. “It was the first thing that made me think there might be something to it. To Darwin's theory, I mean. Miss Marbledale is the smartest person I've ever known. And she's not like Miss Hadley in one way that's important. She doesn't create a fuss just to create a fuss.
I could see Miss Hadley being all insistent on evolution because she thought it would make people upset, but I can't see Miss Marbledale doing that. If Miss Marbledale says she thinks evolution is true, then she really thinks evolution is true. And I'd bet anything she's really looked into it.”

“And you don't think evolution is true?” Gregor asked.

Gary Albright made a face. “I'm not a scientist,” he said, “but I wasn't bad at science in school, and I've tried to read this stuff. And it makes no sense to me. The people who want Intelligent Design say things that do make sense to me. Think of all the things there are. Your spleen, you know, and that kind of thing. All that stuff works together, and if one of the parts is gone it doesn't work. I mean, everybody knows that. They can't just take your pancreas out and have the rest of the parts go on working. That's why you die of pancreatic cancer in the first place. I think I'm making a mess of this explanation.”

“No,” Gregor said. “I understand what you're saying. I also understand that there's an answer to that particular objection.”

“That's what she said,” Gary Albright said. “Miss Marbledale, I mean. At the first board meeting we had on the subject, she said that the problem was that we were thinking as if the thing a thing did now was what it always did. But she said that wasn't the case. Sometimes a thing evolved to do one thing, and then as more evolution happened, the body started using it for something else. So it could have been important to the animal in its first use and that's why it evolved at all, but then it became important later in its second use when its first use wasn't needed anymore. I'm not an idiot. I can understand that. I just—”

“What?”

Gary Albright shrugged. “I just don't buy it, I guess. Not entirely. Because I don't think this is an argument about animals and how they got their parts. It might be that for Miss Marbledale, but it really wasn't that for Miss Hadley and it really, really, really isn't that for the people who are bringing this lawsuit. Henry Wackford, I mean. And the people from the development.”

“Who's Henry Wackford?”

“He's the village atheist,” Gary Albright said, making a face. “He's somebody who likes to make a fuss just to make a fuss. Started a chapter of the American Humanist Association in town a few years ago. Now he's got half a dozen people or so who meet at his house every month and talk about I don't know what. And the people from the development, Mrs. Cornish and those people, they come from out of town, they move in to take jobs and then move out again. I don't think any of them really know anything about Darwin's theory. I mean, they can't explain it when you ask them. Miss Marbledale can explain it.”

“If they don't believe in the theory, why do they want it?” Gregor asked.

“Well, that's the thing, isn't it?” Gary said. “It's not about biology, it's about religion. It's about taking people away from religion, taking children away from it. Making religion look stupid. And it's about morality. If religion is true, it isn't all right for people to go off doing whatever they feel like—drugs, sex, you name it. But if religion isn't true there's no reason why people shouldn't be doing those things.”

“I know a man,” Gregor said carefully, “a priest in the Armenian church, who would say you were wrong.”

“Wrong about what?” Gary said. He didn't wait for an answer. “It's all about how they think we're all hicks and hillbillies. I mean that's what it's all about for the people in the development. And for Henry Wackford, it's all about how he's smart and nobody else is. But I know this isn't an argument about biology, even if Miss Marbledale thinks it is.”

“So you've put all these people on the suspect list? Henry Wackford? Mrs. Cornish? I thought you said all the suspects called themselves Christians.”

“All of them except Henry Wackford,” Gary said. “And I don't really think of him as a suspect. Most people don't try to kill off their allies. But he was there that morning. They were all there that morning. They were all in and around Main Street. Any one of them could have gone up the hill and got to Miss Hadley. So I've tried to be inclusive.
But mostly it's just a mess, and there are reporters. Dozens of them. The trial is due to start at the beginning of the week.”

Gregor looked around. The landscape was getting less and less urban. He thought they might be out by Hardscrabble Road, where the nuns were. He wondered what Sister Beata Maria would think of Intelligent Design, and lawsuits about Darwin. He knew what Tibor thought about it. He wondered again, as he had in John Jackman's office, if there had ever been a case in which somebody was killed for not being a Creationist, and then he reminded himself, for the thousandth time, that nobody was dead yet.

Gary Albright was looking much happier. “This is better,” he said. “We're almost out in the country. I hate feeling all cooped up in between the buildings.”

 

In the end, Snow Hill was almost exactly what Gregor had expected it to be. It was not so far north as Holman, the last small town in Pennsylvania that Gregor had spent any time in, and not so high into the mountains. It didn't feel quite as claustrophobic. It was probably smaller. When Gary parked the truck in front of the modest little storefront that offered a sign saying Snow Hill Police Department, Gregor wondered where all the people were. It was odd to see a town this deserted in the middle of a good weather day.

He opened his door and got down to the ground as best he could. He felt as if he was climbing out of a child's jungle gym, something he hadn't liked to do even as a child. It really was much colder here than it had been in Philadelphia, but he was prepared. He was wearing a heavy winter coat. It was a city coat. Gregor felt it was wrong for the pickup truck, and possibly wrong for Main Street altogether.

On his feet and solid ground, Gregor took a moment to look around. There were churches everywhere. The most impressive one was all the way down at the end of the street, a big white and stone modern thing that seemed to have several smaller buildings behind it
or maybe attached to it. It was hard to tell. There was a diner, called the Snow Hill Diner—not much to go on there. There was a tire dealership. There was what would have been the most impressive church in town fifty years ago, the Episcopalian one, all stone and arches. He checked one side of the street and then the other. There were a few news vans parked at the curb on the other side, but there was no more sign of the people who belonged in them than there was of the people who belonged to the town.

Gary Albright had come around to see what Gregor was doing. Gregor pointed vaguely up and down the street.

“Where's the public library?” he asked.

Gary Albright looked embarrassed. “We don't have one,” he said.

“You don't?” That went against the grain of everything Gregor knew about American small towns, at least in the Northeast. Small towns always had libraries. In Gregor's childhood, they had been staffed by women who had desperately wanted an education and been unable to afford one.

“Did you never have one?” he asked. “That's unusual for Pennsylvania, isn't it?”

“We used to have one.” Gary looked up one side of the street and down the other. “It wasn't exactly public public. I mean, it was a public library. The town paid for it. But the town didn't set it up. Miss Hadley's grandfather did. It was known as the Hadley public library.”

“And then what?”

Gary shrugged. “I don't know. Maybe ten years or so ago, the town council decided it was too much money to go on spending. Not all that many people used it, you know. And there were always, well, you know, problems.”

“Problems?”

“With books,” Gary said. “And with the Internet. What you could do with them and what you couldn't. What you could give to children. And then there was some lawsuit somewhere about the Internet, and about libraries not being able to use filters for the porn, or something, and so the town council decided it didn't make sense to go on with it.
Except I think the thing about the Internet was an excuse, really. Nobody could see the point.”

“Nobody could see the point of books?”

“People don't read much anymore,” Gary Albright said. “It's a fact. It might not be a good thing, but it's a fact.”

“What became of the library building?” Gregor asked. “You didn't just abandon it, did you?”

“Oh, no,” Gary said. “The thing was, it turned out the town didn't own it. The way the original agreement was set up, when Miss Hadley's grandfather turned the running of the library over to the town, it turned out he hadn't deeded the building to the town. So it reverted to Miss Hadley and her brothers and all that.”

“What did they do to it?”

“They rented it to Nick Frapp,” Gary said. He turned around and pointed down the street to the big modern church Gregor had been so impressed with. “They only charge him a dollar a year. It's part of that big complex of buildings now that the church has got. Anyway, Nick and his people took it lock, stock, and barrel, except they took out the computers. They've got computers in the school. They took all the books, though. Even the, uh, objectionable ones.”

Gregor didn't want to ask what the objectionable ones were. “Is that your church?” he asked. “Is that the one where you and the other members of the board—”

“Oh, no,” Gary said quickly. “That's a
Holiness
Church. The Holy Ghost people. You know. Hill people.”