Living Witness (24 page)

“All right,” he said. “Let me ask you two a few things. You said hit from behind. That isn't something I'd heard before. How do you know she was hit from behind?”

The two men looked at each other. They were, Gregor thought, chronologically older than Gary Albright, but they'd had less real world experience, and it showed. Gregor got out of his chair, went back into his office, and got the big thick file Tina had left for him. Then he came back out and sat down again.

“Just a minute,” he said. He flipped through page after page. The file was much too thick. “Here it is. ‘Bruising consistent with a frontal assault,'” he read. “Who did this examination?”

“Somebody out at the hospital, I'd guess,” Tom Fordman said. “That guy Willard, maybe. He's not from around here.”

“We say it's the Snow Hill Hospital, but it isn't, not really,” Eddie Block said. “It's three towns together. We're not big enough to have one for ourselves.”

“It's a private thing,” Tom Fordman said. “You know, not government. It's got some kind of foundation and they hold fund-raisers and like that, and that's how we got a hospital you can get to from here. Which is a good thing, because I think the next real hospital is in Harrisburg.”

“Does it have a morgue?” Gregor asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Eddie Block said. “It's got one of those.”

“How about a medical examiner?”

The two men looked uneasy. “We usually use the state police for that,” Eddie Block said. “There isn't call for that kind of thing out
here, not very much. We get the usual domestics, you know, and there's always one or two kids a year who kill themselves on drugs or driving drunk.”

“It's mostly driving drunk,” Tom Fordman said. “Not that we don't have drug problems, because we do, but drugs are expensive and it's easier to get liquor. Except last year when we had a couple of meth labs.”

“Out in the trailers,” Eddie Block said. “They rig up these labs and then they blow themselves sky high. Don't know what else you would expect of a bunch of people would've flunked chemistry in high school if they'd stayed long enough to take it.”

“But there it is,” Tom Fordman said. “We're mostly quiet around here. Which makes the thing with Annie-Vic so weird. And you said, what? Frontal assault. So somebody came right at her. Must have been somebody she knew.”

“Of course it was somebody she knew,” Eddie Block said. “This is Snow Hill. She knew just about everybody, except the people from the development, and she knew a lot of those. And the people from the development don't go wandering around town much. What would one of them have been doing out at the Hadley house?”

Gregor flipped through the file again. Small towns always made him nervous. They made him even more nervous when they seemed to be full of people too naive to be real.

He closed the file again. He hadn't really been looking for anything in it. He'd sit down and read it through tonight, but for the moment it was just a matter of hearing and seeing what he could hear and see.

“Let me ask you a few things,” he said, “if you've got a minute. Would you say that Ann-Victoria Hadley was well liked by people here? I mean, I suppose somebody must have liked her, they voted her on to the school board.”

“Well, her election to the school board was practical,” Eddie Block said. “Annie-Vic may be old, but she knows how to do business. She always has. Father left her that house up there and the money had to be divided between all the brothers and sisters, and Annie-Vic put it in
the stock market and made a pile. Or so everybody thinks. So people just figure, if she could do that, she could fix some of the financial problems the school district was having, because Henry Wackford didn't want to do crap when it came to the practical stuff.”

“We've got a problem with teachers' unions you wouldn't believe,” Tom Fordman said. “I wish I was in a union like the one the teachers have. I could've retired when I was forty.”

Tom Fordman didn't look thirty. Gregor bit his lip. “So what does that mean?” he asked. “That people didn't like Ann-Victoria Hadley?”

“Well, people liked her and people didn't,” Eddie Block said. “I guess the general take was that she was a snob, because she was that. Is that. Hard to talk about her lying up there the way she is. But she always was a snob. Came from the richest family in town. Went away to some fancy college in the East.”

“Vassar,” Tom Fordman said. “Jacqueline Kennedy went there. And Jane Fonda. And that blond girl from
Friends
.”

“Yeah, well,” Eddie Block said. “She went away to this fancy college and she came back and thought she was smarter than everybody. Or maybe she always thought that. That was before I was born. But you see how it is, people resented it, a little. That's not surprising. That's not the same thing as saying they hated her.”

“Alice McGuffie hated her,” Tom Fordman said, “but Alice hates everybody, and she's never done anything about it before. Except bitch, you know. She does that day and night.”

Gregor thought about it for a second. “Alice McGuffie,” he said. “She owns the diner?”

“Alice and her husband, Lyman, yeah,” Eddie Block said. “Own it and run it. That's Lyman, though, not Alice. Alice couldn't run a business if her life depended on it.”

“I was just over at the diner,” Gregor said. “She wasn't there.”

“She takes off a lot during the day,” Tom Fordman said, “unless she's waiting tables, or the counter or something. Most people around here figure she's more of a liability to Lyman than an asset. She really does bitch. To everybody. And she isn't above being rude as Hell, either.”

“Better not let Gary hear you swearing in the office,” Eddie Block said.

“Well, how else would you put it?” Tom Fordman said. “If she doesn't like you, she'll tell you so right to your face, even if you're having lunch in her own place. You should hear her talking to Catherine Marbledale. Except it doesn't work with Miss Marbledale, because Miss Marbledale does it right back, and she uses really big words. Alice ends up like to pop.”

“Was she ever rude to Ann-Victoria Hadley?” Gregor asked.

“Alice is rude to everybody,” Eddie Block said.

“Could she have killed Ann-Victoria Hadley?” Gregor asked.

“I don't know what you mean by could she have,” Tom Fordman said. “Do you mean did she have the time? I'd guess so, sure. It's not that far from Main Street to the Hadley house. And I'd guess she'd have the psychology, too. I'd bet anything there are dozens of people Alice would like to kill.”

“Starting with Miss Marbledale,” Eddie Block said. “Alice had Miss Marbledale as a teacher in school.”

“But here's the thing,” Tom Fordman said. “You wouldn't think she'd have the strength to do it, if you know what I mean. She's a small woman, Alice is, short, I mean, not skinny. And she's middle-aged. And she's not exactly what you'd call physically fit. I keep thinking it must have taken a lot of strength to do what was done to Annie-Vic.”

“It might have,” Gregor agreed. He looked down at the folder. At some point while he was unaware of it, he had put it down on the desk nearest his chair. He tapped the top of it. “Is there any way I can find somebody to drive me around a little? I want to go out to the hospital and talk to the doctors who treated Miss Hadley when she was brought in. And I want to go out to the house where the attack happened. And then I'm going to want to talk to some people.”

Somewhere on the other side of the room, the phone rang and Tina picked it up. Eddie and Tom looked at each other and then at Gregor Demarkian. Gregor thought they must have known that he
didn't drive. That was why Gary Albright had come all the way into Philadelphia to get him. It was possible that they hadn't really believed it until right that minute.

“Well,” Eddie Block said. “It's a police case, so we could probably get you where you want to go, if nothing else came up.”

“Nothing much else ever comes up,” Tom Fordman said.

“We could take you around in the patrol car,” Eddie Block said.

“As long as Gary doesn't mind,” Tom Fordman said.

They looked back and forth at each other. Gregor thought about hiring a car and a driver for the next week, but it occurred to him that doing that would make him look like an even bigger snob than Annie-Vic.

Gregor was just about to suggest some kind of compromise, he wasn't sure what, when Tina Clay came over to them.

“Listen,” she said. “I think there may be some kind of emergency.”

 

The “some kind of emergency” was happening at the Hadley house, and if Tina Clay hadn't been as confused and concerned as she was, they could all have walked. People had been saying that—that the house was close to Main Street—since Gregor had first been asked to look into the incident, but for some reason he hadn't really visualized what that meant. The house was not just “close to” Main Street, it was not far off it, up a steepish hill on a tiny side street lined with the kind of two-story frame houses that comprised the heart of every small town in the Northeast. The houses were single family, too, or at most two-family conversions with a second door stuck hastily on the side. Gregor could imagine a time during the Great Depression when the families in those houses had been the luckiest ones. The poor people would have lived off and away from things, in the country, in the hills. It was only after World War II that the bias against living in town had begun.

They started out from the police station. The town was quiet, there
were a few cars on the street, and those mobile news vans were parked along the curbs, but there were few people out anywhere and nothing like traffic. Eddie Block was careful not to put on the siren when they started for the Hadley place. There wasn't that far to go, and he didn't want to attract the attention of the news crews. Then, in a blink, they were there, so fast that Gregor hadn't really had a chance to assimilate the fact that there was “something” happening that might connect to his case. They were parked at the hedge outside an older house with half timbering accented by brick and stone, set well back from the road. Another car was parked there, too. It was a dark Volvo station-wagon of the kind Gregor associated with certain towns on the Main Line, and there was a very young woman with blond hair leaning against the side of it and sobbing.

Eddie and Tom were in the front seat. They got out first. Gregor waited a moment while they walked over to the young woman and then got out himself. He could see how this had been the house of the richest family in town, even though they wouldn't have been rich by city standards. He suspected that people in Snow Hill still thought of the Hadleys as “rich.” They would have just enough to be enviable.

Eddie and Tom had reached the small blond woman. Gregor sped up to be sure he heard everything that was said.

“She was taking too long,” the woman was saying. “She said she'd be just a minute and it was minute after minute, I was just sitting here, and you know there are things to do, I have my children to pick up at school and she has, she had hers, she was supposed to, we were both supposed to, because we can't just leave them there now, can we. I mean, there are all the problems they're having, those horrid children, yelling at them, calling them names, playing tricks. They used to ride the school bus but we can't do that anymore. We really can't. We have to pick them up and she said she'd only be a minute and then it was all so long so I thought I'd just go to the door and tell her we had to go and then the door was wide open so I walked right inside and it felt wrong to do that it wasn't my house but there it was, you see what I mean, and there she, there she—”

“Take a deep breath,” Eddie Block said, not unkindly. “Take a deep breath, hold it in for a second, then let it out. Then I'd appreciate it if you told me your name.”

The woman took a deep breath and held it. She looked like she was about to turn blue. She let the breath out again. “Shelley Niederman,” she said. “My name is Shelley Niederman.”

“Good,” Eddie Block said. “Very good. Now, I take it you live in town.”

Shelley Niederman blinked. “Yes,” she said, sounding faintly annoyed. “Of course I live in town. I live in Fox Run. So did she. So did Judy.”

“Who's Judy?” Eddie Block said.

Now Shelley Niederman looked very annoyed. “You don't have to do this, you know? You don't have to pretend you don't know who we are. I mean, for God's sake, what's wrong with you people here? You're all a pack of savages, that's what you are. I don't know why Steve wanted to take this job, I really don't. The money is good, I know that, but there are other things beside money, and we're stuck out here with a bunch of hillbillies who still think the earth is flat and then this happens—something like this happens and—”

“I still don't know who Judy is,” Eddie Block said calmly. “It's not that uncommon a name.”

“Judy Cornish,” Shelley Niederman said. “And you know who she is and you know who I am. Everybody in this godforsaken town knows, because we had to file a lawsuit to make sure our kids got a decent education, because if we'd left it up to you people you'd have been presenting Noah's Ark in history class. God, I hate this place. I really hate it.”

Eddie Block was taking deep breaths himself. So was Tom Fordman. Gregor stepped forward a little.

“Excuse me,” he said.

Shelley Niederman looked him up and down. “I know you. I know who you are. We saw your picture on the Internet. You're Gregor Demarkian. Well, it's a good thing you're here. Now there's a murder for
you to solve. That's probably why they brought you in in the first place. They probably knew there was going to be a murder to solve. I don't understand what's wrong with these people. I don't understand what's wrong.”