Living Witness (28 page)

He really was spinning his wheels here, he thought. He made himself stop and take a deep breath. He was in his office, but he'd been outside just a little while ago, listening to the talk on Main Street. By now everybody in town had to know that Judy Cornish was dead, and that she'd been battered to death just the way Annie-Vic had been battered almost to death. It was a pattern, that's what it was. It was obviously the same person, or persons, and they were following a pattern. He just had to make people see the obvious. They were all of them,
out there
—just like his ex-wife had been.

“What the Hell makes you get out of bed in the morning?” she would yell at him. “What do you bother to go on living? If it's all going to end up in nothing, what's the point?”

Yes, Henry thought, he understood, he really did. These people were afraid to face their own mortality. They were afraid to live every day knowing that it would all come to an end some day and that end would be the end, the absolute end, with nothing to make up for their disappointments or their failures or any of the rest of it. God wouldn't reward them for being “good” and really pushing ahead to get that promotion, or not chucking their “obligations” to go off to school. God wasn't there to make up for all the things they'd missed. God just wasn't there. No wonder they got murderously violent, the whole pack of them. They couldn't stand the thought that they weren't important, that they didn't mean anything, that if they failed they failed and there was nothing and nobody who could make it up to them. Here
was the thing, though, Henry was sure. Down deep somewhere, they knew. They knew there was no God. They knew evolution was true. They knew the Bible was nothing but a pack of lies and fantasies. They knew it. That was why they had to kill anybody who threatened to prove it.

Henry took another deep breath. It didn't do for him to think about his ex-wife, or the girls he'd dated in college, or even the decision, so long ago now, to come back home to practice law. He didn't believe in dwelling on the past, for one thing, and for another it got him too worked up to think. He had to think now, it was important: first Annie-Vic, then Judy Cornish. There was no telling how many more attacks there would be before this thing was over. The FBI had two agents in place. Henry knew that. They weren't even bothering to maintain a cover. They also weren't taking any of this seriously. It was just like with the militias a few years ago. Those were the same kinds of people, too. Small-town backwoods Christians. And what came out of that? Timothy McVeigh, that's what. Timothy McVeigh and that big gutted federal building in Oklahoma City. The woods were full of these people, and nobody ever paid attention to them.

He took yet another deep breath. Christine was in the outer office, talking on the phone and crying. He could hear her. She was definitely on the other side, but he hadn't had a choice about hiring her. She was the best he could get in Snow Hill. He hated the idea of her in the outer office all day, saying little prayers over her lunch and sending up little “messages to God” in the hopes he would have a change of heart. He knew she was doing both, and that she always asked the Baptists to pray for him when there was a call for intentions on Sunday.

He went to his office window and looked out on Main Street. The cable news vans were still standing where they had been all morning. Henry thought they would have moved if anybody had told them about the murder. Nobody would have told them, though, because they were outsiders, and because the yahoos here were intimidated by them. That was something else that came of being stuck in wretched small towns like this day after day and year after year. The big world
out there started to intimidate you. It made you feel every one of your inadequacies.

Christine was probably praying for the soul of Judy Cornish. She probably also thought Judy had gone straight to Hell. Henry's ex-wife had prayed for him a lot, and her family had prayed for him too, because they'd all been convinced that she would “bring him to the Lord” one of these days. The marriage had started to go sour as soon as she realized that that was never going to happen. She would have been happy to live forever in Snow Hill. She'd come from a nearly identical small town in Michigan, and when the marriage was over she'd gone back there.

“I'm not going to be in Snow Hill much longer,” Henry said, to the air. His breath fogged the window in front of him. There were people in the mobile news vans. CNN and Fox. It wouldn't be hard to pick one over the other.

Henry had never taken off his coat. He'd unbuttoned it, and now he left it unbuttoned. He went through to the outer office. Christine was still on the phone. Tears were running down her face, and her mascara was running as well, making dark rivulets down both her cheeks. She looked like a gargoyle, or one of those whores with the hearts of gold from the old noir detective films. She'd go to seed in another ten years and look like all the other women around here. She'd gain weight and her hair would frowse. He didn't even know if “frowse” was a word.

“Oh, Mr. Wackford,” Christine said as he walked past. “Isn't it terrible? Isn't it the most terrible thing you've ever heard? I've been praying and praying, but I just don't understand it.”

Henry was tempted to tell her she would never understand anything by prayer, but he didn't see the point of it.

“I'm going out,” he said, and then he was out, all the way into the cold air again. Main Street was not deserted now. People seemed to come out of the cracks in the sidewalk when something really awful happened. It was as if they lay in wait, their lives on hold, until there was gossip that was really going somewhere.

Henry crossed Main Street and went up a block and a half, toward the CNN van. The familiar logo calmed him down a little. There it was, the emissary from the outside world, the ambassador from sanity. Of course, nothing in the United States was entirely sane, if it was they wouldn't have elected the Shrub for a second term—Henry refused to say that the man had been elected for his first—but there were degrees of insanity, and CNN was considerably more sane than Snow Hill.

He went up to the van's cab and looked inside. It was empty. He went around to the back. It was closed up. He looked up and down the street. They had to be somewhere, these people.

Half a block further, the door to the diner swung open and a young woman came out with a young man. The young woman was dressed in a skirt and sweater and the young man looked like he'd just walked out of a Greenwich Village beat joint from the fifties. Henry took notice.

The young man and the young woman were talking. They were also carrying Styrofoam cups of coffee. As they got closer, Henry could hear the man saying: “Something's going on. I grew up in a place like this. People don't get this way unless something's going on.”

Nobody had told them. Very good. They were practically at the van.

Henry waited. It was still very cold. He wanted to button his coat, but he was afraid he would look like a hick if he did it.

He approached the man and woman as they got to the van. The man said, “Can we help you with something?”

“I thought you might like to know what's going on,” Henry Wackford said.

The man looked him up and down again. Then he held out his hand. “Mitchell Frasier,” he said, “and this is Charlene Holder.”

“I'm Henry Wackford,” Henry said. “I'm the Wackford in Wackford Squeers, the law firm, up there.”

“And you're one of the plaintiffs,” Charlene said. “I remember that name.”

“Do you remember the name Judy Cornish?” Henry said.

Charlene Holder paused. “I remember a Cornish. Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Cornish?”

“Judy would be the Mrs. Cornish,” Henry said.

“So what happened?” Charlene asked. “Did she do something about the case, did she withdraw, or something like that?”

Henry blinked. Did these people honestly believe you could get an entire small town buzzing just because one plaintiff, out of God only knew how many, had decided to drop out of a suit? Besides, Judy hadn't decided to drop out, she'd never have done that.

“She's dead,” Henry said, although that wasn't the way he'd intended to tell them. “She was battered to death out at the old Hadley house just a couple of hours ago. Somebody left her dead and bloody on Annie-Vic Hadley's dining room floor.”

Maybe it was a lot for these two people to take in. Henry didn't know. They weren't reacting the way he was expecting them to. What had happened to the old crusading spirit and the scoop reporter? Shouldn't they be leaping into the van and taking off to report on what was going on?

“For God's sake,” Henry said, and then there was something in the back of his mind that said he ought to stop saying that. Too many of the yahoos thought that if you said that you secretly believed in God, or why else would you call on his name, even in vain?

“Up there,” he said, pointing in the direction of Annie-Vic's house. “It isn't far. If you go in that direction, you'll find the whole pack of them. Everything but the ambulance. That already went. You must have heard it. Don't you realize what's happening?”

The two of them still seemed to be hesitating. The young woman rocked back and forth on her legs, obviously freezing and obviously completely unwilling to dress for the weather. Henry thought the “stupid” in “stupid American” was applying to more and more of his countrymen by the day.

“They're killing us off,” Henry said patiently. “The Creationists. They're killing us off one by one, because they don't care what they
have to do to get their religion imposed on everybody in the country; they don't care if they have to commit murder. They're going to make this a Christian nation no matter what any of the rest of us wants. And I'm going to tell the world about it. I'm going to call a press conference, with all the remaining plaintiffs on this case, and we're going to
tell
the American people what these Creationists are really like.”

 

Alice McGuffie got home late, so late that the whole town was full of it, full of the murder, and full of that idiot Henry Wackford, mouthing off for the TV cameras on every television set in town. On every television set in the country, as far as Alice could tell. She wasn't thinking straight. It was so hard to know what to do. It was harder because there had been so much in between. Barbie was hurt, hurt by that little bitch of a secular humanist, or whatever these people liked to call themselves. It was atheism, pure and simple, as far as Alice was concerned, and she knew what came along with atheism. Atheists had no morals. How could they have? They didn't believe in God, and they didn't believe in Hell, so they had no reason at all not just to do whatever they wanted. If you asked Alice, and nobody every did, they thought she was stupid, or, worse, a hick, or something worse than that, a hillbilly, but if you asked her, it was a crock, all this stuff about atheism and secular humanism. There wasn't a person on earth who didn't believe in God. These people were just looking for an excuse, that was all. They wanted a reason to go on doing what they wanted to do instead of what they were supposed to do, throwing over their families and run off to jobs on the other side of the country, dumping their kids on nannies so that they could pose around like big executives, calling themselves “vice president” this and “doctor” that. Oh, the women were the worst. Alice knew. She'd been living with these people all of her life.

Her hand hurt. Barbie needed her painkiller prescription picked up at the pharmacy. She could call Holman Carr and have him send it
home with Lyman. Except that she'd have to get the prescription in somehow. It didn't used to be that way. It used to be that if you called Holman and read him the thing over the phone, he'd make it up for you and bring it over and then check the slip on your doorstep. He couldn't do that now because
they
had come.
They
wanted all the rules followed.
They
were always talking about “unacceptable risks” and “inappropriate behavior.” If there was a word Alice had come to truly hate in the last three or four years, it was definitely “inappropriate.” None of those people came out and said they thought something was wrong. None of them even called you a name to your face. They just said that whatever you wanted to do was “inappropriate,” as if that was supposed to mean something, as if that was supposed to be a reason for stopping.

Barbie was in the living room, on the couch, whimpering. They'd given her painkillers at the hospital, but those were going to wear off in another hour or two. She'd need something more, and something stronger than Advil. Alice hated the very idea of going into town. She didn't even want to go into the diner, and she would have to do that. Lyman couldn't run the place by himself. It would be full of people now, too, just the way they had expected it to be when the trial started next week. Those newspeople would come in and swarm this murder. They'd interview everybody. They'd want to interview her. She was a member of the school board. She was on the side of Right and Good. Of course they'd want to interview her. They'd want to make her look like a fool.

“Mama?” Barbie said from the other room.

Alice looked around. She was standing in her own kitchen. She was never in her kitchen in the middle of the day, except on Sundays, because they didn't open the diner on Sundays. Let them go to the mall and eat at one of those places that were run by corporations that didn't care about the Sabbath, or about honoring the Lord, or about anything. Let them do whatever they wanted to do. She just wished that Holman had been elected to the school board instead of that stuck-up snobby Annie-Vic Hadley. If Holman had been on the board, none of this would have happened.

“
Mama
,” Barbie said again.