Living Witness (36 page)

“Can I help you?” he said. He was polite, but he sounded faintly disgusted. Maybe he'd had enough rubberneckers for this lifetime.

“I don't think I need any help,” Gregor said, looking up to the second floor again. “I was just trying to get myself oriented. I'm Gregor Demarkian.”

The policeman hesitated, then looked closer, then stepped back. “Well,” he said. “You are.”

“I didn't mean to bother you,” Gregor said.

“No bother. You don't know the kinds of crap we're getting, though. People from everywhere coming by, just to see where the body was. And not just people from here, either. They've come all the way from New York, some of them. I've seen the plates.”

“But some of the people have been local?” Gregor asked.

The state policeman shrugged. “Sure, I suppose so. And there's the grandniece, or whatever she is. She came by and complained about the mess in the dining room. There was a woman bludgeoned to death in the dining room, and she was worried about papers being all over the floor. Can you believe that?”

“It does seem like the wrong priority,” Gregor said.

“I think it's bats, myself. Papers on the floor. According to this woman, the grandniece, whoever, according to her, the woman who usually lives here, the first one who was attacked, always kept her stuff very neat, kept paperweights on it to make sure it wasn't blown away, that kind of thing. And then when she, the grandniece—when she got here today to pick up her things the papers were blown all over the place and they didn't have their paperweights, and they had them when the grandniece left the house on the morning of the murder, and blah blah blah. I couldn't believe the whining.”

“Yes,” Gregor said.

“Some people,” the state policeman said. “I've been doing this job for twenty years, and I still can't get over some people. I don't know. Maybe it isn't a good thing, being in police work for the long haul. You get peculiar. You get so you don't trust anybody anywhere. You want to go in and have a look around? The crime scene boys have been
here and gone. Well, girls maybe—the ME is a woman—but you know what I mean. We're authorized to let you in any time you want to go.”

Gregor looked at the house again. It could have served as the setting for a fifties horror movie. He couldn't imagine an old woman living there alone. He turned and looked down the hill again.

“All right,” he said, finally. “I would like to have a look around, if it wouldn't be putting the two of you out.”

“Not at all,” the state policeman said. “It's like I said, we're supposed to allow you in if you want to go. And, to tell you the truth, I'll be glad to have somebody in there that's alive and well and sane. This place creeps the Hell out of me.”

 

 

 

Henry Wackford saw Gregor Demarkian go in to the Snow Hill Diner at one of those odd times between breakfast and lunch that could not be explained by any normal-sounding reason. There was a coffee machine in the police station, for God's sake. Henry had been on the town council that had authorized the payment for it. It wouldn't be the greatest coffee ever made, but if Demarkian thought he was going to do better at the Snow Hill Diner, he was in for a rude shock. Alice wasn't just one of the stupidest women in Snow Hill, she was also one of its worst cooks. If that diner had had any competition close enough to matter, it would have gone out of business long ago.

Henry reminded himself that he was in favor of small, independent outfits of any kind and against their corporate behemoth competitors—at least in principle—and tried to concentrate on what Christine was saying. She had been on at him all morning, and he still couldn't figure it out. Part of that was the fact that he was more than a little distracted. This murder—this murder. He had a hard time putting it into words in his head. There were events that changed the world. This wasn't anything so momentous, but it might be. It might
be. It might change his world, and for the moment he thought that was enough.

Christine was hovering around his doorway. She looked reluctant to come in, at the same time that she had that mulish expression on her face that said she refused to go out. You work with people for years and you don't really know them, Henry thought, but he was convinced he knew Christine. The gold cross around the neck. The little gold stud earrings. The Sunday mornings helping out in the Sunday School over at the Baptist Church. The fiancé stashed in the background somewhere, who would learn to keep his hands to himself except on one or two occasions when neither of them could help it, because sexual repression brought sexual explosion, and then she'd end up pregnant five months before the wedding.

At the moment, she wasn't pregnant. She was just standing there. She had a file in her hand, Henry had no idea what it was for. He was still standing at the window. Maybe Gregor Demarkian had gone in to the diner to grill Alice McGuffie. He wished to Hell he had that one on videotape.

“Mr. Wackford,” Christine said.

“Gregor Demarkian just went into the diner,” Henry Wackford said. “Has he talked to you yet? He'll be talking to everybody in town. That's how these people work. Maybe I'll go over there and see if I can talk to him myself.”

“Mr.
Wackford
,” Christine said.

Henry forced himself away from the window. God, it was impossible, living in this place. People had no sense of occasion. They had no sense of the immensity of the world outside their little plastic prison. He wished he'd never come back to town to practice. He wished he'd never seen Snow Hill in the first place.

He made himself sit down behind his desk. He put his hands flat against the felt blotter. He looked up. This was the way bosses and secretaries were supposed to interact. Maybe it would allow her to say whatever she needed to and get it over with.

“Well,” he said. “Do I have an appointment, is that it?”

Christine took a deep breath. “You do not have an appointment,” she said. “There are some people who want to see you, from Fox News, I think—”

“Fox?” Henry was interested. “I always said if I ever got the chance, I'd refuse to talk to Fox, but that could be counterproductive. They've got the best ratings of all the cable news organizations, and they reach the enemy. And I think I may have talked to them the other day, I don't remember. But that was off-the-cuff stuff, not a real interview. We could be making history here, Christine. Do you realize that?”

“I don't want to make history,” Christine said. “I want to do my job every day and go home at night and have nothing on my conscience. And I can't do that here. I can't do that when you're trying to get God out of the United States government and out of the schools and take away the right to free speech from every Christian.”

Henry's chair was one of those tilting, swivelled ones—not the new kind made for computers—the old kind. It had been made for his father, out of good mahogany wood, and it had arms like the arms of a captain's chair on a particularly expensive cruise ship.

“God has nothing to do with the United States government,” he said. “If you'd ever believed He did, you should have been disabused of the notion by the administration of George W. Bush.”

“And there's that,” Christine said. “Why do you have to insult the President of the United States. He's the President. We're supposed to respect the President.”

“It would take a tree sloth to respect George W. Bush,” Henry said, “and he's not the President any more. He's been out of office for months. Did you really come in here to talk to me about George W. Bush?”

“I came in here to quit,” Christine said. “I've been trying to do it for days, but you never let me get a word in edgeways.”

“You mean you're giving me notice?” Henry was flabbergasted. “How can you do that? There's a pile of work out there. Somebody has to do it. If you think you're going to be able to bring a new girl up to speed in two weeks, or even find somebody who can replace you in two weeks—”

“It's nothing to do with two weeks,” Christine said. “I'm not giving you notice. I'm quitting. I'm quitting now. Right this minute. I'm leaving my book on my desk and then I'm going home. I'm not going to be a party to this anymore, Mr. Wackford, I really am not. I gave my life to Jesus Christ when I was eleven years old and I've never regretted it. Not for a single minute. I can't go on helping you persecute Christians the way you do.”

“I don't persecute Christians,” Henry said. “What are you talking about? It's the Christians who are persecuting me. Shoving their prayers down my throat. Hell, going to a school board meeting these days is like listening to an official town pronouncement that I'm not even an American citizen. One nation under God, for God's sake.”

“It is one nation under God,” Christine said, “and I like it that way, and I'm not going to help people like you ruin it and turn this into—I don't know what you want to turn this into. It doesn't matter. I'm going to put this folder on your desk and then I'm going to leave and I'm not going to come back. I don't care what you say. Get that Edna Milton woman to help you if you need help. She's just like you. She hates God, too.”

Henry watched her back out of the room. Why was she backing out of the room? You'd think she thought he was King of England, or something equally ridiculous? She was ridiculous. He'd never seen anybody so ridiculous. He jumped out of his chair and ran over to her.

“You're the one who's ruining the country,” he barked at her. “You and all the people like you—superstitious, petty, stupid, racist—oh, yes, you're all racist as Hell. You hide behind religion but what you really care about is keeping the black people out of here and out of everywhere. And don't I know it. Religion, my eye. None of you cares any more about God than I care about butter pecan ice cream, and I'm allergic to ice cream.”

“I'm going,” Christine said.

She had left her coat lying across the top of her desk. The outer office was deserted except for one young man in a black blazer and a
black T-shirt. Henry was vaguely aware that this was some kind of media look. He thought it might have been out of date.

“You're the one who's ruining the country,” Henry said. “Doesn't that religion of yours teach you any responsibility? Doesn't it teach you to abide by your obligations? You have an obligation here. You can't just leave me in the lurch. There's work to do.”

“It's evil work that you're doing,” Christine said, “and you can get somebody else to do it for you. There isn't anything in the world that could make me stay here.”

She was out the door a second later. Henry stood watching her go, watching the door swing open and shut, listening to the sound of the street door open and shut. The man in the black blazer had put down his magazine and was looking up expectantly. Henry thought he was far too interested in what he was seeing.

“Mr. Wackford?” the young man said.

Henry gave another long look at the door. “Welcome to Snow Hill,” he said. “That's what happens when you run your life on superstition instead of reason. The whole world goes to Hell. If we let these people win, we'll all be back in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages. That's what we call the time when religion ruled the world. Come in and tell me what I can help you with.”

 

The note was waiting on the shelf of her cubby when Alice came in to work, and that was impossible, because the diner had been closed all night, and she was just opening up. She was so tired, what with staying up with Barbie half the night, and taking phone calls from everybody she knew, she almost didn't see it. She was just putting her coat onto the hook when a breeze coming in from the back door made the note flutter, and she put her hand up to touch it. It was an ordinary note. It wasn't anything like she'd seen in movies. There were no words cut out of magazines. It was just a plain piece of lined white notebook paper, cut in half and then folded, and the words on it said:

I saw what you did up at Annie-Vic
's.

Lyman was over on the other side of the room, fussing with the grill. He always fussed with the grill first thing in the morning. Alice put the note in her pocket and told herself there was nothing to worry about. She had been up at Annie Vic's, yes, but she'd been alone. Somebody must have seen her go in or come out. That was a problem, a bigger one than her brain could really get around, but it was not a catastrophe. It was not the kind of thing that deserved an anonymous note. It was nothing to worry about. And the note might not even be for her. It didn't have her name on it. She could drop it on the floor in the dining room and nobody would know who it belonged to. Maybe that was what she would do, later. Maybe she'd just let it fall next to one of Their chairs, if one of Them ever came in for a cup of coffee. They almost never did. They preferred the Starbucks out at the mall. They didn't want coffee so much as they wanted coffee-flavored milk shakes.

She felt a small rivulet of sweat go down the back of her neck, in spite of the fact that the kitchen wasn't really warm yet. Barbie was staying home from school today. Alice thought that the Cornish children probably were, too. She couldn't imagine what it was like being the Cornish children. She didn't believe it when people said they just didn't believe in God, or the afterlife, or judgment. She was sure they knew, deep down there somewhere, that God was real and that the way they were living meant they would spend eternity in horror. What must it be like to be the Cornish children, knowing all the time that your mother had been condemned to Hell, that she was down there somewhere burning, and that the best you could hope for is that you would never see her again?

By the time Gregor Demarkian came into the diner, Alice had passed through the phase of thinking about Judy Cornish in Hell, and was thinking about the writer of the anonymous letter burning in Hell. It was a wicked thing to write anonymous notes, and it was dangerous, too. She was a good Christian woman. She was just going to sweat about it for a while. Send a note like that to somebody who really
was a criminal, though, and you had no idea what you'd get: a knife in the back? An ambush on the way home from work or school? A little drop of poison in your coffee?