Living Witness (50 page)

“And you think that's true of me?” Gregor said. “That I collaborate with death, and don't even see the issue?”

“No,” Nick said. “But I think you're unusual. You're unusually intelligent. You're unusually thoughtful. And you're unusually free of that thing so many people have of needing to prove to themselves how wonderful they are by proving that everybody else is awful. And for unbelievers, that's usually trying to prove they're smart by ‘proving' that anybody who believes must be stupid.”

Gregor Demarkian looked puzzled. “Is this going someplace?” he asked.

Nick nodded. “Just call it the background to what I'm going to say. Four of my parishioners came to me last night to tell me that on or around the time that Shelley Niederman was murdered, they saw Franklin Hale go up to the Hadley house by that path through the woods at the back of Main Street.”

“Did they,” Gregor Demarkian said.

“But I've got more than that,” Nick said, “because I saw Alice McGuffie come down that same path just before we heard about Judy Cornish's murder. But I didn't just see her go down. I saw her go in.”

“Into the house?”

“Exactly,” Nick said. “If you want to come over to the church later, I'll show you the view from my office window. When the leaves are on
the trees, I can't see anything, but on days like we've been having, with the cold, and the trees bare, I can see anything all the way up there, and I saw Alice go in and not come out again for at least fifteen minutes.”

“That is interesting,” Gregor said.

“Here's the thing,” Nick said. “I'm not the only person with a view up that hill Several other people have a good line of sight there, all the buildings that line that side of Main—”

“Which doesn't include either the Snow Hill Diner or Hale 'n' Hardy.”

“No, it doesn't,” Nick said. “But consider this. Judy Cornish was up there for no more than a couple of minutes before she was killed. From what I hear in town, Shelley Niedeman was up there for forty-five minutes or so, and she was killed. But Alice wasn't killed, and it doesn't look to me like anybody has tried. And nobody has tried with Franklin, either.”

“So what do you make of that?” Gregor asked.

“Well,” Nick said. “I don't make of it that somebody is killing over plaintiffs in the lawsuit, and I don't think that's what you make of it, either.”

“No,” Gregor said. “I don't.”

Nick got up. “I hope I've been some help,” he said. “You don't know how much I've enjoyed having you here. I'm still amazed that I ever got to meet you. I hope you'll drop by before you leave.”

“Maybe I will,” Gregor Demarkian said.

Nick walked back out to the big front room, nodded to the sullen woman at her computer, and made his way to the street. Sometimes he wished he had gone about living his life another way, that he had understood what Oral Roberts University was, or that after he'd graduated he'd made his way to someplace bigger, more exciting, more full of possibilities for the realization of ambition. On days like today, however, he had no doubts. There were very few men in the world lucky enough to make a significant difference in the lives of other people, and he was one of those men. There were few shacks in the hills these days, at least around here, and they sometimes went four or five
months without the police being called in to break up a “domestic dispute.” He had ten-year-olds in his religion class who could read their way through Martin Luther's
The Freedom of a Christian
and explain what it meant. He had more who could identify Plato and Aristotle and Gandhi and Leonardo da Vinci.

Nick couldn't remember when he had first realized what was going on out there, something that had to do with books but, more important, had to do with minds. People had lived and died in the world who thought about all the same things he thought about, who wanted to understand what it meant to be a human being and how to be a good one, who looked at the manifest tragedy of human existence and turned it into El Greco's
Crucifixion
and Dante's
Divinia Comedia
. It was a seven-thousand-year-old conversation, a way of talking to the dead and having them talk back to you, and everything was better when you were a part of it. Even pain and suffering were better.

He walked back down Main Street to the church, only half realizing that he'd come out without his coat, again. They would build a high school soon, and Nick had already planned its curriculum. It would be a Great Books curriculum, and it would include all the books that mattered, the pagan ones and the Christian ones and the beautiful ones and the ugly ones. He would take these children of moonshine artists and grandchildren of coal miners, these one-step-away-from-going-barefoot-to-a-backyard-privy teenagers, and turn them into the next generation of American scholars. They would not be scholars in the new sense, holed up in universities and writing endless articles about the place of food in the novels of Jane Austen. They would be scholars the way John Adams had been a scholar, and Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. They would be men and women who lived in the Great Tradition the way fish lived in water.

It was a good thing he had come home to stay. Nicodemus Frapp did not experience the world as purposeless or random. He felt the meaning of it in his bones. The meaning of it for him was this, and he came back and back and back to the fact that he could never have been as happy as this doing anything else.

 

Catherine Marbedale was tired. She was tired in the ordinary sense, because it had been a bad day, and it was going to get worse. The student protestors were out of her office now, and the microphone was back in the hands of the people it belonged to, but there had been news cameras up here and not only local ones. The trial was going to start in a matter of days, and everybody was here, everybody wanted a chance to show the world what a backwards hillbilly place Snow Hill was. There were going to be protests. The parents from town would demand to know how she dared to try to stop their children from praying. The parents from the development would demand to know how she dared to let those other students “marginalize” their children by putting on a sectarian religious display. It went around and round and round, and next year it would go around again, and that's why she was tired in the other way.

It hadn't been what she'd wanted for herself, all those years ago. She hadn't imagined that she would take a job in some godforsaken small town and then just sit there, year after year, getting older and grayer and weaker in the process. For a while she thought it would be enough as long as she and Margaret got away to Europe for the summers. They could walk through Florence and Madrid and Athens and see the art and talk about books. It was almost as if they were children again. Catherine Marbledale remembered her childhood. She remembered going to the library with Margaret and taking out all the best books,
Anna Karenina
and
David Copperfield
and
Pride and Prejudice
and
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. She didn't know how long it was before she discovered that you weren't supposed to read like that, jumping around among the different time frames, paying no attention to literary history. She didn't care. It was the best way to read, and she hadn't read that way in many years.

She had the door to her office closed. The secretaries were out there, dealing with things. She thought they could deal with them a little while longer. She thought about Florence again, and about
Athens, about walking up the steep hill to the Parthenon and down again, and stopping at a little place on Nikis Street to have galatoboureko and coffee.

She pulled her phone to her and picked up the receiver. She wondered how long phones like this would last. Everybody had cell phones now. It was close to one o'clock. Margaret would be in her office. Margaret was always in her office. Catherine punched the numbers in, and Margaret picked up on her cell phone.

“Are you alone?” Catherine asked.

“I am,” Margaret said. “I've been watching you on the news this morning.”

“It's over now,” Catherine said. “I have a headache, but I was wondering . . .”

“About what?”

“About money,” Catherine said. “Remember, a couple of years ago, we talked about it? There would come a time that we couldn't handle it anymore. That we couldn't go on fighting a war we knew we were never going to win?”

“And you've come to that point,” Margaret said. “Because of the protestors?”

“It's not the protestors,” Catherine said. “It's everything, really. It's the lawsuit, and the school board, and the fact that nothing ever gets done unless I do it. It's having to live day after day with people who are just so damned proud of their ignorance they glow. I don't know. I take it you don't feel the same way.”

“I feel the same way,” Margaret said. “I'm just not quite as close to the end of my rope as you are.”

“Well, I'm at the end and beyond it,” Catherine said. “And I've been sitting here ever since they let me back into my office, thinking that if I have to do this for one more year, I'm going to have a breakdown. I can't fix people, Margaret. I accepted that long ago. I can't fix people, and I don't want to live with the people I can't fix.”

“So?”

“So I was thinking it was about time for me to bail,” Catherine
said, “and I was just wondering, that being the case, whether we have the money for me to do it. I know I should be better about these things, Margaret, but you were always better about these things than I was.”

“I, at least, look at our bank statements every month. You want to know how much we have in the retirement accounts?”

“That was the idea,” Catherine said. “Yes.”

“At the end of last month, it amounted to five point eight million dollars.”

“That's more than I thought,” Catherine said.

“It's less than it could have been, if you hadn't insisted on sticking to government bonds,” Margaret said.

“I wanted to be safe,” Catherine said. “It was so complicated. Getting the money and getting it put away, I mean. And I didn't think we'd ever have that chance again.”

“I think we can retire, if we want to,” Margaret said. “We can't stay in five-star hotels and eat out of the Michelin Guide, but we can definitely retire.”

“That's good,” Catherine said.

And suddenly, she felt much more relaxed.

She could take anything now, because she could see the light at the end of the tunnel. She could see the end of her misery.

She could taste escape.

 

 

 

Gregor Demarkian did not go to see Alice McGuffie in jail. For one thing, it was too far a drive at a time when he had a lot to do much closer to home. For another, he knew almost everything she had to tell him without asking, and he didn't like the idea of asking her. There are some people in this world who are always in a state of crisis, no matter what is happening to them. A mildly offhand remark in the supermarket is interpreted as a gross insult, or a racial slur, or the first step in sexual harassment. A driver who won't get out of the way so that the people behind him can pass is an example of incipient road rage, or deliberately attempting to prevent our heroine from getting to work, because he's always been jealous, even back in the third grade. It went on and on, with no good ever coming of it, and often a lot of harm. Its practitioners were male as well as female, every possible color, every possible nationality. Gregor sometimes thought that some nationalities—the Armenian, for instance—practically turned it into an art form. It didn't matter, because what it came down to was that it was tiring, and he avoided that kind of person, and the events they generated, when he could. Fortunately, there really was nothing Alice
McGuffie could tell him that he didn't already know. He listened to her brother when he called and agreed to take a look at the photograph Alice wanted him to see, and that was that.

“It won't kill her to sit in jail for a few hours,” Gregor told Gary, Eddie, and Tom, as he spread papers out across Gary's desk. He'd given up on using his own desk. The space was too cramped, and he needed room. “My guess is that she has a picture of the building launch. Would there have been any reason for her to go to that?”

“Sure,” Gary said. “She was president of the PTA when that happened. Say what you want about Alice, she's very concerned about her kid's education. Why would she think it would be important to see a picture of the launch?”

“Because there's somebody who's not in it,” Gregor said.

“Who's not in it?” Eddie asked.

“Catherine Marbledale,” Gregor said. “She should be in it. She's the principal of the high school. But my guess is that she's not in it.”

“And that's important?” Gary asked.

“In a peripheral way, yes,” Gregor said, “but not in the way Alice thinks it is. You've got to understand that all of this, from the very beginning, was about money. And if Annie-Vic Hadley hadn't been elected to the school board, nobody would ever have gotten hurt. Except the taxpayers of the town, of course. They'd have been out several million dollars with nothing to show for it. But there'd have been no reason to go running around town, bashing people on the head with baseball bats. Note I said bats, plural. I'm fairly sure they were each of them disposed of as soon as possible after the event. There'd be no point in keeping them around.”

“I want a case like on
CSI
,” Eddie Block said. “You know, there's a forensics lab, and they take a hair, and they get everything, name, rank, serial number, DNA, phone number, last known location—”

“Why was it Annie-Vic who had to be elected to the school board?” Gary asked. “Wasn't it the case that anybody new who was elected to the school board would cause the same problem? I mean, just because you have one group of people hoodwinked doesn't mean that you're
going to be able to pull the wool over the eyes of the new ones who come along.”