Living Witness

by Jane Haddam

  “Is he married?”

  “Gary Albright? I don’t think so,” John said.

  “What happened to the baby?”

  “I don’t know,” John said.

  “It would be interesting to know, wouldn’t it, what went on in that man’s head. It would be interesting to know what this case is really about, too.”

  “Somebody bashed in an old lady’s skull.”

  “Because she opposed putting something calling ‘Intelligent Design’ in public school science classes?” Gregor said. “Seriously, John, have you ever heard of anything like that happening? We’ve had monkey trials without measure in this country, and nobody’s been killed over one yet. The usual motives are love and money. And Ann-Victoria Hadley has money.”

  “You just heard Gary Albright said he checked out the relatives and none of them were near the scene. Or even in the same state, I think.”

  “They could always have hired somebody,” Gregor pointed out.

  Then he put on his coat and headed out the door.

  THREE

  1

  There were rumors all over town that Gary Albright had gone to Philadelphia to bring in a hired gun to investigate what had happened to Annie-Vic Hadley, and Alice McGuffie just knew that if that was true, Gary had done it because of the television cameras. The television cameras were everywhere these days. There were big mobile production vans all up and down Main Street, right from Nick Frapp’s white trash church down to the courthouse itself, and there were people who were saying that the judge had received death threats. Alice McGuffie wasn’t surprised about that any more than she was surprised about any of the rest of it, but part of her truly wished that she wasn’t making so much money off television people who came to eat in her diner.

  “They’re atheists, every last one of them,” she said to Lyman on Thursday morning. The big, open front room was stacked with people she had never seen before, and the men among them ate like horses. It had to be tiring work, carrying that equipment around all day. The men came in and ate the kind of breakfasts Alice had last seen commonly on farmhouse tables: stacks of pancakes with butter sandwiched between the layers; double orders of sausages and hash browns; coffee by the bucket. If Alice drank that much coffee, she’d be on the ceiling for days.

  “Just leave them alone,” Lyman said, looking out onto the floor, too. He was exhausted. Alice knew it. If she didn’t also know that this surge in business wouldn’t last a day beyond the end of the trial, she’d suggest taking on somebody to help Lyman with the cooking.

  “It’s a shame you can’t even hope they’ll do the right thing,” Alice said. “If they weren’t all secular humanists, maybe they’d see something. See how good this town is. Want to come to God. But you know what secular humanists are like.”

  Lyman made a little snort of assent, and then the phone on the kitchen wall rang. The phone on the kitchen wall almost never rang. It was a different line than the one in the office. People only called it when they wanted Alice to put aside something for them to pick up. They’d had a lot of that kind of business since the television people came. It was as if those cameramen had black holes in the middle of their stomachs. They’d eat like crazy in here, and an hour later they’d be calling up for something to take out. Alice had heard a couple of them complaining about her pizza, but she knew what she thought they could do about that.

  The phone was still ringing. Lyman was paying no attention to it. Alice looked him over and sighed. Men were men. There wasn’t anything you could do about them. They didn’t notice things the way women did. At least Lyman was a good Godly man, and he had this business. Alice was sure that that was better than anything those television women could say about their husbands, assuming they even had them.

  Alice picked up the phone. One of the television women sat alone at one of the tables in the dining room, but she wasn’t eating anything. She was only drinking coffee, black and without sugar. If the men from the television crews ate without ceasing, the women never seemed to eat at all, and they were all so thin they looked ready to snap in half. What Alice really didn’t like, though, was the suits. She never thought a woman looked good in a suit, and women looked just stupid in pants suits. Take Hillary Clinton. The woman looked like—well, Alice didn’t know what she looked like, but the first question that came to Alice’s mind was, who did she think she was? Really. Who did Hillary Clinton think she was? Who did any of those women think they were? What were they trying to prove? They were just women, like any other women.

  Alice thought she might have been holding the phone for longer than she should have been. She put it to her ear and said, “Hello?” It wouldn’t matter if they missed one take out order, and they probably wouldn’t miss it anyway. Whoever it was would probably think there was something wrong with the phone and call right back.

  “Hello,” somebody said on the other end of the line said. It took Alice a minute to realize she was talking to Catherine Marbledale. Ms. Marbledale. Talk about somebody who ought to get the starch taken out of her panties.

  “Snow Hill Diner,” Alice said. This did not bode well. Ms. Marbledale never called up to get something to take out. She never ate at the diner. She bought fruits and vegetables from the fresh produce stands and then did things to them that she found in foreign cookbooks.

  “Hello, Alice,” Ms. Marbledale said. “I recognized your voice. I expect you recognize mine.”

  Alice made a face. She expects I do, does she? God, it was just like that woman.

  “It’s the middle of the breakfast rush,” Alice said. “I’ve got work to do.”

  “I’m sure you do have work to do,” Ms. Marbledale said. “But so do I, and we have a situation on our hands this morning. I have Barbie in my office, and both of the Cornish children.”

  “Those kids should learn to leave Barbie alone,” Alice said. “If you weren’t such a secular humanist yourself, you’d see what was going on here. Those kids are persecuting my Barbie, and all the other Christian children in school. That’s what they’re doing. People like you are trying to drive all the Christians right out of school.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Then Ms. Marbledale said, “You know, Alice, I’m not interested in having this conversation, not now and not in the future. I think I heard you through at least once by now. I’m going to let it go. If you want to find out what’s going on, I suggest then you come down here and listen to me. In the meantime, Barbie will spend the day in detention. I suggest you talk this over with Lyman, Alice, because we’re getting very close to the point where the Cornishes are going to have grounds to sue.”

  “Sue me?” Alice said. “I’ll sue them, bringing their atheism into the school. Trying to turn my children away from God.”

  “That’s enough, Alice.”

  The phone was hung up on the other end of the line, and Alice found herself staring at the receiver still in her hand. She put it back into its cradle. It wasn’t hard to remember what it had been like to be in school when she was Barbie’s age or even older. Alice thought she had never hated anything as much as she’d hated school, and that had not been her fault. There were people who had called her stupid, but she wasn’t stupid. She just didn’t like being in there among the snots and the snobs, the little crapola people who thought they were just so wonderful because they read stupid books that no sensible person would ever want to read. Alice wasn’t even sure she believed they read them. They just liked to make fun of people, those people did. At least, in her day, they didn’t make fun of people for believing in God.

  “It was better when we were going to school,” Alice said out loud.

  Lyman turned to look at her. While she had been on the phone with Ms. Marbledale, Lyman had gone back to the grill. He was now standing in front of a huge pile of breakfast sausages and a long line of white stoneware plates.

  “That was Ms. Marbledale who called,” Alice said. “I’ve got to go over to the school.”r />
  “Now?” Lyman looked startled. “We’re full up. Is Barbie hurt?”

  “I don’t know.” This was true. Ms. Marbledale hadn’t been clear about what exactly had happened, so Alice had no way of knowing if she’d been hurt or not. If Barbie had been hurt, Alice thought she had grounds for a lawsuit herself. She could sue the school for religious discrimination.

  “It was better when we were in school,” Alice said, before Lyman had a chance to go back to his sausages. “I don’t mean it was good. It was just better. There wasn’t all of this stuff around. I never learned about Darwin in school, did you?”

  “That might have been later,” Lyman said. “Or it might have been in the college course. I wasn’t in the college course.”

  “I don’t understand why she thinks she can talk to me that way,” Alice said. “I’m her boss, no matter how much she doesn’t like it. Me and Franklin Hale are her boss. She ought to have sense enough to be afraid of us.”

  “Do you have to go over right now?” Lyman asked. “I’m up to my neck. Can’t it wait half an hour?”

  “No,” Alice said. She didn’t know if that was true. The way Ms. Marbledale had talked, it might have been okay to let it go all day. It was only detention. Alice had spent a lot of time in detention when she was in school, and staying after, too, because teachers thought their work was the only thing that ought to count in your life.

  “It isn’t fair,” Alice said. She had moved through the kitchen to the vestibule in the back. She was standing next to the little rack where she and Lyman and the girls who worked the floor all hung their coats.

  As far as Alice McGuffie was concerned, nothing about life was fair. All the good things went to people like Ms. Marbledale. No matter how long your walk with God was, you could never catch up to the Ms. Marbledales of this world, and the Annie-Vic Hadleys were worse. They all thought they were better than you. They all thought they were smarter than you. They all looked down their noses at you and sneered, and what for? Because you believed in God, that was what for, and they thought only stupid people believed in God.

  Alice wound a scarf around her neck. It could have been hers, or it could have been Lyman’s. They didn’t make distinctions. Out the back door she could see the snow and the icicles that had been hanging around for days. It ought to be spring by now, but it wasn’t, at least not as the weather went. Annie-Vic was up at the hospital these days, lying in a bed with tubes coming out of her. One of the women in church worked as a volunteer there, taking the gift cart around and handing out pamphlets. She’d seen Annie-Vic all trussed up like a turkey, and looking bad enough to die.

  Bad enough to die, Alice thought, and suddenly her day felt much better.

  Annie-Vic was bad enough off to die, and then what would happen to her? She would end up face to face with God, that was what would happen to her, and then she’d spend eternity in a lake of fire. It said so, in the Bible, and it said that believers would have all eternity to watch the suffering of the souls in Hell.

  Alice honestly thought she’d like that very much.

  2

  When Judy Cornish first got the call from Catherine Marbledale, she was panicked. Then Ms. Marbledale let her speak to Mallory directly, and after that, she was all right. She was better than all right, really. Judy had expected what she’d gotten the last time that venomous little Barbie McGuffie had gone after Mallory and Stacey, meaning hysteria and tears, but Mallory had sounded downright calm. Eerily calm. It was like listening to a grown woman who had just decided to kill her husband. There was no trace of emotion in that voice at all and quite a lot of rigidly controlled anger.

  Judy had been in her kitchen when the call came. It was a spectacular kitchen, better than the one she had had in Somerville when they had been living near Boston. Housing was not a minor consideration for Judy. She liked ten-foot ceilings and two-story great rooms and all those little rooms that made life so much easier. In this house she had a laundry room as large as the dining room had been in their first house, and a mud room with built-in benches and cabinets so that people didn’t track in dirt and snow when they came in from school, and a clutter room that was was for messy school projects like posters and dioramas. This was the kind of thing you got when you worked hard and applied yourself—especially when you applied yourself at school. Education was the key to everything, and that meant education at a name college. The Ivy League would be best, but it wasn’t strictly necessary. Anything in the first tier would do. If you didn’t get that, you might as well curl up and die, as far as Judy was concerned. You might be able to pull your life out of your ass if you managed to get into a first-rate graduate school, but not many people managed to do that, and Judy thought she knew why. Being a slacker was like having a disease. It might even be catching.

  The mud room was in the back, in a sort of passage to the garage, although it had a door to the real outside, so that the children could use it coming in from the yard. Judy had loved her own childhood. It had been full of things to do, things she’d found unavailable in Snow Hill to give to her own children. She had had piano lessons, and tennis lessons, and gymnastics lessons. She had had sleepaway camp for two weeks every summer—although that, she’d managed, even from here. She sent Mallory and Hannah to her own camp in New Hampshire, and Danny to Camp Awosting in Connecticut. Stacey Niederman went to camp with Mallory and Hannah. Sometimes Judy thought they were all out here re-creating civilization from scratch, as if there’d been a nuclear holocaust or some kind of supervirus that had wiped out all traces of it across the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It was scary to think about it, but maybe it was like this over most of the United States. Maybe that was what “red states” were about, and that explained why the country kept voting in Republicans. Judy couldn’t understand why anybody ever voted for Republicans, although her mother told her that all the best people used to, the people like the ones they’d grown up with.

  “It was in about 1980 that it started to change,” Judy’s mother had said. “And I don’t know what happened, really, but suddenly it was all about those religious people, and so I changed parties. I had to, don’t you think?”

  Judy didn’t know. She couldn’t imagine what the Republican Party had been like before “all those religious people.” She didn’t care. She took her best parka out of her own personal cubicle—it had her name stenciled on it above the hook, at the top—and headed out to the garage and the Volvo. She’d been seven years old when her mother sat her down at the kitchen table with a pile of what looked like books and told her the way the world worked. The pile had not been of books but of college catalogues, which Judy’s mother had sent away for even though Judy wasn’t out of primary school.

  Her mother had stretched out one set of them and said, “Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania. That’s the best. That’s the Ivy League.” Then she had stretched out a second set and said, “Vassar, Smith, Wellesley, Mt. Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Barnard, Radcliffe. That’s the seven sisters. That’s almost as good, for a girl, but Radcliffe will be Harvard in a few years. It won’t matter. Then there’s this.” She had flipped over the last book. “That’s Stanford, in California. That’s the only place worth going to in the West.”

  Judy had to admit she didn’t understand much of any of this at the time. The whole episode scared her, though, because she had understood that there were conditions on her life going as she wanted it to. She would have to have something to do with these places her mother was showing her, and no other places, if she wanted her mother to go on being proud of her. It was a big looming mountain, right in front of her face. Good people, nice people, people like her parents and their friends, went to these places, and after they left they had jobs in companies that everybody had heard of. Other people didn’t matter.

  Judy climbed into the Volvo and put her seat belt on. She put it on automatically, even if she was just going to sit behind the wheel and no
t drive anywhere, and so did all of her children. She flicked the button on the garage door opener and watched the garage door pull up behind her. She started the car and put the heat on. It was so cold she was finding it hard to breathe.

  By the time she was eleven or so, she had it all figured out. The people who did not go to the kind of colleges her mother had mentioned, the people who went to state schools and then went to work in the small local companies that were everywhere, even in the kinds of towns where Judy grew up, those people did nothing important with their lives. “Most men live lives of quiet desperation,” Henry David Thoreau had said, in the book they’d read in Judy’s gifted class, and Judy thought she knew what he’d meant. He’d meant those people, the ones in remedial everything, or the ones who were just average, who didn’t go to lessons, who didn’t care about anything. At least, Judy didn’t see that they cared about anything. They had all sorts of stuff they did, but none of it was stuff that would help them in the long run.

  What we have to do here, Judy thought, is make Snow Hill the kind of place children can grow up in and succeed. We need to tear down that elementary school and build modern schools, a primary school and a middle school and a high school. If there were modern schools, there wouldn’t be this problem we’re having with Barbie McGuffie.

  Judy’s cell phone was in her purse. It was a pink Razr. Dan had offered to get her an iPhone, but that hadn’t made sense to her. The children all had iPhones. They liked music and looking at the Internet when they got bored with school, which they often were. Honestly, Judy thought. She’d never understood why people were unhappy with the public schools until she’d come to Snow Hill. When public schools were like this, she was unhappy with them, too.

  Judy held down the number 6 and waited until the phone started automatically dialing Shelley Niederman’s number. She hoped she hadn’t waited so long that Shelley had already started driving to the school. She looked at her eye makeup in her rearview mirror. She didn’t wear much eye makeup anymore. She used to wear a lot.