Living Witness (20 page)

He turned in that direction and walked slowly down past the storefronts. He had no idea what he was expecting to see. The stores and other buildings were what you would expect in a small town like this. A lot of them were churches of one kind or the other, the very biggest was the Baptist one, but it seemed to Gregor to be much less impressive than Nick Frapp's semi-modern. There was a tire store—could something be called Hale 'n' Hardy?—and a place for greeting cards
and gifts. That one had a Hallmark sign, which meant somebody must have gotten lucky. The nearest mall must not be so near after all. There was a feed store, proof that people around here raised cattle or horses. There was a “package store,” which was how liquor stores liked to disguise themselves when they had opened up in nice neighborhoods.

He got to the big semi-modern church and stopped. There was a lot of activity here, if you looked for it, although not in the church itself. The buildings behind the church seemed to house some kind of school. There were a couple of dozen children shivering on a playground, not quite motivated by the adult who was trying to spur them into action. Gregor smiled. He remembered that. Why was it so many adults were so convinced that fresh air was good for children, no matter what the temperature of the air.

He heard somebody cough low in the throat and looked up to see that tallest, thinnest man he had ever encountered standing just outside the church's front doors. He was more than tall and thin, though, this man. He was straight out of central casting. He could have starred in a remake of
Elmer Gantry
tomorrow, and been more convincing than Burt Lancaster ever was.

The tall, thin man had his hands in the pockets of the pants to a very good, but not spectacular, wool suit. He held out his hand.

“It's Gregor Demarkian,” he said. “I've seen you on television. I'm Nick Frapp.”

It wasn't just the look. It was the voice. Okies had that kind of voice. Hillbillies had that kind of voice. Gregor reached out and took the man's hand.

“How do you do,” he said.

“You ought to come inside,” Nick Frapp said. “It's freezing out here, and there's going to be another one of those reporters any minute.”

“Another one?”

“They hear about us and all they want to talk about is snakes,” Nick Frapp said.

Gregor followed him through the open door of the church. It was not particularly unusual for a church: it had a big wide open vestibule with racks for pamphlets and a big box with a sign that designated it a collection for the poor. Nick Frapp saw him look at the sign and shrugged.

“We get maybe a couple of dollars every week in that,” he said. “It's not a bad idea. I don't find it as useful as organizing something concrete, though.”

“Do you organize a lot that's concrete?”

“Sure,” Nick said. “In a way, this whole place is an organization of something concrete. We've got half a dozen outreach programs running. We go up to the prison in Allentown. We have a halfway house for those of our people who get out on parole, or anybody else who wants to use it. We've got a mothers and children drive, which is important, because the social workers won't go up into the hills anymore. And of course, we've got the school.”

They had been moving as they spoke, and now they were in a long hall lined with photographs of people who were posing too self-consciously to look natural. Gregor tried to catch the nature of those poses but couldn't. Nick was up ahead, holding a door for him.

“Susie Cleland is around here somewhere, but I don't know where she's got to,” he said.

“Susie Cleland?”

“Our volunteer secretary for today,” Nick said. “We can't really afford to hire too much in the way of full-time staff, and I'd rather spend money hiring teachers for the school than getting myself a fancy church secretary, so some of the women volunteer. They're very good. Can I get you a cup of coffee? We've got coffee all over the place. Susie really likes to make coffee.”

“Thanks,” Gregor said. “I'd like that.”

He was standing in Nick Frapp's office now, and the first thing that hit him was the books. There were literally hundreds of books. Every single available space on all four walls of the room was a bookshelf. Nick Frapp didn't restrict himself to whatever the Christian presses
were publishing, either. He had Aristotle and Kant. He even had Spinoza. Gregor looked from shelf to shelf. Thomas Aquinas. Hobbes and Lock. John Stuart Mill. Saint Irenaeus.

“I know somebody else who reads like this,” Gregor said. “I don't suppose you sneak Judith Krantz novels on the side.”

“True crime.” Nick was coming back with coffee. He handed Gregor a cup and gestured across the room. “Cream and sugar and that over there,” he said.

“But you've obviously read these,” Gregor said. “Or somebody has. They're not here for show. Where did you go to college?”

“Oral Roberts University.”

“Are they this good with the Western Canon? I didn't think anybody was this good with the Western Canon anymore, except that place in Maryland, you know, that does the great books.”

“They're all right,” Nick said. “I was reading this stuff before I went there, though. And I still read it. I'm looking for something I know I'll find, eventually, except probably not until after I'm dead.”

“What?”

“The face of God,” Nick said. “That's what all these people were looking for, really, even the ones who didn't think they believed in God. It's what we're all looking for. Man cannot rest until he rests in Him.”

“If you're quoting, it's going to be wasted on me,” Gregor said. “Maybe what I'm trying to say is that I don't understand it. What are you doing here? If you do this sort of thing, if this is the way you think, you could have gone off to graduate school and ended up at a university. Instead of—”

“Instead of ending up in a backwater small town where most of my neighbors can't pronounce Liebniz, never mind read him?”

“Something like that.”

Nick sat down behind his desk. It was a big desk, which was good, because he needed big furniture to accommodate him.

“How come you came to me first?” he asked. “Did Gary Albright point me out as a prime suspect?”

“No, not at all. He did say a few things. None of which I understood.”

“Gary and I went to high school together,” Nick said. “Hell, we went all through school together. And I've got to admit it up front that Gary's a remarkable man. He had a record of courage in the Marine Corps. And there was that thing with the leg. Not many men could do what he did, and even fewer would do it to save a dog.”

“But,” Gregor said.

“But,” Nick agreed. “In the end, Gary can't help being who and what he is. He was the football hero. I was the trash. We were all trash to the people in town, all of us who came from up in the hills. We'd come down here to town for school and we might as well not have bothered, because the teachers all assumed we were mentally retarded and they treated us that way. You don't know how many of the boys I grew up with ended up in prison before they were twenty. Real prison, not juvenile hall. And dead of drugs and alcohol. And all the rest of it. Year after year, decade after decade, going back generations. Because there's no point in trying to educate the retards.”

“You got educated,” Gregor said.

“I did indeed,” Nick said. “But that was Miss Marbledale, combined with the fact that I have an unusual amount of drive. When I finished college and came back here, I looked around and I saw that it was still going on. They were still treating the hill kids like retards. So I went back up into the hills and I started preaching, and after a while we managed to buy this place. And after that we managed to start the school. We don't have it all done yet. I mean to have a full high school by the time we're finished. But we do the first eight grades now. And, lo and behold, our hill kids do better on every standardized test than anybody from town.”

“It makes me wonder,” Gregor said. “I'd think they'd like you for that. Gary Albright seems mad at you.”

“Yes, I suppose he is. We didn't join the lawsuit. Although, you know, I'm not sure just what old Franklin Hale wanted us to do. Our kids don't go to the public school. We aren't interested parties. But he
wanted us to do something. Stand up in solidarity, or something. I'd say he wanted us to file an amicus brief, but I don't think Franklin knows what that is.”

“Why didn't you file an amicus brief?” Gregor asked. “Are you teaching Darwin here on top of everything else?”

“Our eighth graders are asked to read parts of
The Origin of Species
in their world history class. But no, since that's what you're asking, our biology classes don't teach evolution here. Or rather, they do, but they concentrate on the problems with the theory. Yes, and I do know that there aren't any problems the scientists think they can't answer, but then we're not worried about the science when it comes to evolution. Nobody is. Did you know that?”

“Gary Albright said as much,” Gregor said. “It's a little beyond me. Evolution is a scientific theory. If you aren't worried about the science, what are you worried about?”

“The culture,” Nick said firmly. “There's a lawsuit going on in this town and it has nothing to do with the science. Franklin Hale wouldn't know science if it bit him in the ass and left a note. It's the culture that matters, the culture that says that people who believe in God are ignorant idiots, that there is no grounded morality of any kind, that it doesn't matter what you do with yourself or your life, it's all just—choices, I suppose. You have no idea how I hate that entire ideology of choice.”

“Choice as in abortion?”

“I'm not in favor of abortion, either,” Nick said, “but it's not abortion I'm talking about here. Not directly. It's the idea that there is no right and wrong, no good and evil, no
solidity
. Everything is just a choice. And our choices are not very important, because men and women are just animals, like cats. You don't get angry at cats for killing mice or getting pregnant by five different fathers. Why should you care if people do the same thing? It's their nature. Christianity says we were all born children of God and we're all called to perfection, even if we can't reach it on this earth. And let me tell you, starting with that as your basic assumption, you'll lead a much better life than you would living it their way.”

“But you didn't join the lawsuit,” Gregor said.

“No,” Nick said. “We don't have anything to say about the public schools. And I'm not sure that this approach somebody has sold Franklin on would really work, anyway. Intelligent Design. Do you know what this suit is actually about?”

“Teaching Intelligent Design instead of evolution?” Gregor hazarded.

“No,” Nick said. “If it was, this lawsuit would make a lot more sense. They don't want to teach it instead of evolution. They don't even want to teach it alongside evolution. They want to put a sticker in all the biology books that says that some people don't accept Darwin's theory, but accept Intelligent Design instead, and that if you want to know about Intelligent Design, there will be a book in the library called
Of Pandas and People
that you can take out to read about it. That's it. That's all they want. They just want to
suggest
that people might want to take in another view. And that got Henry Wackford and those people in the development to start a federal case—literally a federal case—to stop it. You've got to wonder about that, don't you think? You've got to wonder why it's not supposed even to be mentioned. And what harm they think is going to come to their children if it is mentioned?”

“I don't know,” Gregor said.

“I don't either,” Nick said. “But you didn't come here for that, did you? You came because of Miss Hadley. I think I was probably the last person to talk to her before she went on back to her house and got beaten up.”

“What did you talk about?”

Nick shrugged. “The usual. What an idiot Franklin Hale is. How much trouble there was going to be if the school board didn't do something about the teachers' contracts and the school construction and the textbook orders. She was all worried about the textbook orders, because if you don't have them in on time, the books don't get here when they need to be in September. She just did her little rant thing and then she went on up Main Street and then up the hill to her house.
Except I shouldn't say that. I didn't really see that. After she left I went back into the church and got some work done.”

“She didn't seem unusually upset by anything? Or fearful?”

“Annie-Vic was never fearful,” Nick said. “She was just not a fearful woman. But she was always ‘upset,' sort of. She always had a head full of steam about something. And that day, like I said, it was all the nuts and bolts stuff the board was supposed to do, but mostly the textbooks.”

 

 

 

Gary Albright had been very careful to stay away from ordinary policing for most of the long stretch since he had been stuck behind his desk, but today he was restless, and he couldn't help himself. It was not that he resented having Gregor Demarkian in Snow Hill, or on the case, or any of the rest of it. It had been his idea to ask the man in. He'd had to do something, under the circumstances, and he had a bad feeling that the circumstances were only going to get worse as time went on. It wasn't that Gregor Demarkian was probably a “secular humanist,” either. Gary wasn't entirely sure he knew what that meant, anyway. Obviously, a secular humanist was an atheist, but if that was all it was, why not just say they were “atheists”? He had asked his pastor about it once. Pastors were supposed to know that kind of thing. What he'd got as a reply was something along the lines of “Well, they call themselves secular humanists because people don't like atheists.”