Living Witness

by Jane Haddam

  “The women did? Alice McGuffie did?”

  “The other children did,” Shelley Niederman said. “The first few times it happened, Mallory was nearly hysterical. Mallory is, was, Judy’s daughter. I don’t know what tense I’m supposed to use. It’s impossible to know what tense I’m supposed to use.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Gregor said. “Would you mind if I asked you a little about today? I’m not really clear about today.”

  “She’s dead,” Shelley Niederman said. “What else do you want to know about today.”

  “Well, for one thing, I’d like to understand why the two of you came here. From what I’ve been able to figure out, two of Miss Hadley’s relatives are staying here for a short while while she’s in the hospital. Were you looking for them?”

  “I don’t know,” Shelley said.

  “You don’t know?”

  “Judy didn’t say,” Shelley said. “She just—we were talking about the children. At school. You know, the trouble they’d been having, and Judy said—this was before—she said that we were going about it the wrong way. We were always playing defense, and that instead we should learn to play offense. Because they were playing offense. And then she said there was something called the Equal Access Act, and we could use that to make the school allow Mallory and Stacey—Stacey is my daughter, she and Mallory have been best friends since we moved here—Judy said that we could make the school allow Mallory and Stacey and their friends form a Biblical Criticism Club, or something like that, that would talk about the stories in the Bible that weren’t really true and how we knew they weren’t true. It sounded, I don’t know. . . . It was the kind of thing Judy would think up and Mallory would go along with. It was just to cause trouble, you know, and I understood the point and all that but it sounded so serious, if you see what I mean. And then we were driving along and we were passing this place and all of a sudden Judy said there was something she wanted to see about. And then we pulled into the driveway.”

  “She didn’t tell you what it was she wanted to see about?”

  Shelley Niederman shook her head. “I think, the way she was behaving, I think she might have seen something. Or somebody. Anyway, I said, you know, whatever, and she said she was just going to go up and knock on the door and she went. But you can’t see from here to the front door, not really. There’s that hedge thing in the way and the porch, and it’s so dark. So she just sort of disappeared and I thought somebody must have been home because she was gone so long, and then I got nervous and went up there and the door was open—”

  “The front door was open?”

  “Wide open. Almost all the way back. And I went in and I called out and nobody answered.”

  “Did it feel to you as if somebody were in the house?”

  Shelley Niederman shrugged again. “I didn’t think about it. It was very quiet, you know. There wasn’t a television on or anybody talking or anything like that. So I just kept walking forward along this hall, but then there wasn’t anywhere to go except what looked like a private area in the back, you know, a back door, that kind of thing. There wasn’t anywhere in that direction so I backed up a little and went into the living room, and when I got into the living room I saw her legs on the floor. Right there next to the dining room table. Under it. Next to it. I can’t remember. She was just there and there was blood everywhere, blood on the walls, and her head looked like, her head looked like—like sponge. Like sponge.”

  Shelley Niederman’s head went up. Then she turned away from Gregor, opened the door next to her, leaned out, and began to vomit onto the ground.

  Gregor waited until it was over, and it was not over for a very long time. Beyond the car’s windshield he could see the crime scene investigation still going on, a little more organized now, at least on the surface, men and women with crime scene kits going in and out of the front door. Judy Cornish’s head had looked like a sponge. He had seen it himself. He had seen other heads that looked like sponges.

  Shelley Niederman sat up. She closed the door next to her and then twisted around to rummage in the back. She came up with some bottled water and a box of tissues.

  “Judy always had everything on hand,” she said. “She was always very organized. I’m not so organized. But I hate these people, do you know that? I’ve never hated anybody else before in my life, but I hate these people. They’re just so petty and crabby and pinched—somehow, I don’t know the words. They’re so small. And they hate you for things, because you went to a good college, or you read books instead of watching American Idol, or whatever and they just . . .they just . . . I don’t know. If this is what religion is like, it’s not surprising that people become atheists. I mean, it isn’t. I can’t imagine not believing in God, but the God I believe in isn’t like this. He isn’t hateful and small. He isn’t—”

  Shelley put her forehead down against the steering wheel and closed her eyes.

  “It’s all right,” Gregor said, thinking as he said it that he had no idea what he meant. Of course it wasn’t all right. “Just tell me one thing, if you don’t mind. Just tell me if you touched anything, anything at all, when you went into the house.”

  Shelley sat up and blinked at him. “Touched anything? Like what? What am I supposed to have touched?”

  “I don’t know. The walls. The door. A piece of furniture.”

  “Oh, wonderful,” Shelley Niederman said. “Now they’re going to think I did it. I was here, and she was supposed to be my friend, so they’re all going to think I did it. Because none of them could be guilty, could they? I’m a secular humanist. They’re all good Christian people.”

  2

  Back in the middle of the chaotic yard, Gary Albright was still standing against his police car, as if he had been carved out of wood and left to rot there. Gregor skirted another little clutch of technical people—the state police had always had a lot of technical people, and a few years ago they’d received an enormous grant from the Department of Homeland Security, so that they now had too many technical people—and stopped next to Gary. His face was blank. There was no way to tell what he was thinking.

  Gregor looked up at the house, and said, “The relatives should be back soon. They should talk to them. When I was with the FBI, the thing I hated most about investigations was how clueless we were about real conditions on the ground. It’s impossible to come into a small town, or even a large city, to come in cold and know what you need to know to do an effective investigation. That was why I was never the kind of special agent who liked to take over from the local police forces. The local police forces usually knew better than I did what I needed to pay attention to.”

  For a moment, Gary Albright didn’t seem to have heard. Gregor watched his face. They taught you to do that in the military, that look of blank openness, as if you were so completely honest and honorable that you had nothing to hide. Most men lost it after they left the service. A few months, sometimes a few years, and dealing with ordinary human beings on an everyday basis made that whole pretense of calm impartiality a liability, and it was more of a liability if it wasn’t a pretense. You learned, Gregor thought. He had learned. He wondered why Gary Albright had not.

  Gary finally looked away, and then up, straight into the atmosphere, as if he were trying to see a comet pass by. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to know that you need to know,” he said. “If I did I might not have had to call you in here. I don’t even know what I need to know.”

  Gregor gestured toward the Volvo with his head. “I was just talking to that woman, Shelley Niederman. She is, I take it, from ‘the development,’ as everybody here calls it.”

  “She surely is that,” Gary Albright said. “They’re all like that, you know. Like Shelley Niederman and Judy Cornish.”

  “Everybody out at the development?”

  “All the women,” Gary Albright said. “I got around a little, you know. I saw women like that once or twice. But there were never women like that in Snow Hill
before the development.”

  “Women like what?”

  Gary shrugged. “I don’t know how to put it. As if they were channeling some women’s magazine all the time. The words they use. ‘Proactive,’ that was a big one. And they say things like, ‘I had a meeting with Johnny’s teacher so that we could work out strategies to help him succeed.’ I mean, what kind of talk is that? What kind of a way is that to think of school? School is school. If you’ve got a brain in your head and you do your work, your grades are good. If not on either account, they’re not. And that’s not all.”

  “I didn’t think it was,” Gregor said.

  “It’s like they think they can control everything,” Gary said. “I don’t mean they run around trying to boss people. I mean they define everything as a problem to be solved.”

  “They didn’t do that in the Marines?”

  “We didn’t do it like that,” Gary said. “We didn’t define people as problems to be solved. No, that’s not what I mean. It’s the way they do it.” Gary looked into the sky again. Then he shook his head. “There was this woman, Miss Marbledale was telling me about it a few weeks ago. She’s got a son, he’s fourteen, and he just won’t do his homework. So she, the woman, not Miss Marbledale, she took this kid to a psychiatrist. They did all this testing to find out if he had attention deficit disorder. They got him a shrink and put him into therapy for his ‘problem,’ but for God’s sake, Mr. Demarkian, what problem? He’s a fourteen-year-old boy who doesn’t want to do his homework. That isn’t a psychiatric disorder, it’s puberty. And they’re like that about everything. It’s never the case that the kid isn’t very bright, he must need medication. It’s never the case that the kid is undisciplined and not much interested in changing that; if he thinks that way he must have psychological problems. They define being human as a psychological problem. Am I making any sense?”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “Quite a lot of it.”

  “A fourteen-year-old must need a therapist because he doesn’t want to do his homework. Or, you know, God forbid, he doesn’t do it and then he lies about it to stay out of trouble. It must be a pathology. Mark Twain was wrong.”

  Gregor smiled. “They seem to think you’ve got a lot of pathologies,” Gregor said. “At least, according to Shelley Niederman.”

  “Well, yeah,” Gary said. “They think believing in God is a pathology. And voting Republican. We can’t really know what we’re doing and mean to do it. We must be sick.”

  “She said that she and the woman who died, Judy Cornish, were harassed at the supermarket, among other places. That they were called names, mostly, I think. And that their children were called names. She mentioned somebody named Alice McGuffie. I’m pretty sure that’s one of the names on the school board list you gave me in that folder you left for me this morning.”

  “It is,” Gary said. “And if Mrs. Niederman said Alice was following her around in the supermarket calling her names and, say, telling her she was about to go to Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised. Some guy said once that the best argument against Christianity was Christians, and when he said that, Alice was the kind of Christian he was talking about.”

  “I take it she’s someone you know well.”

  “Alice is what we call ‘deep local,’ ” Gary said. “She’s from here. Her parents were from here. Her great-grandparents were from here. Her family’s been here at least as long as the Hadleys have been. Everybody knows her. Which is too bad, if you ask me. She’s a nasty piece of work, and she is not getting better with age. In either direction.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “She’s got a daughter,” Gary said. “Just the one. Which, considering the fact that Alice is opposed to birth control and willing to tell you why you’re going to Hell for using it, is an interesting fact. Her daughter’s name is Barbie and Barbie is, if anything, worse than she is. Barbie McGuffie is a world-class bully, and like most bullies, she’s got less self-respect than pond scum.”

  Gregor considered this. “Would you say that this Alice McGuffie was violent? Would you say her daughter was violent?”

  “If you mean physically violent, no,” Gary said. “If you’re thinking of that in there,” he looked up at the house, “I’d sincerely doubt it. Hell, Mr. Demarkian. Alice doesn’t want people dead. What fun would that be? She wants them where she can torture them.”

  “What about other people who share her point of view?” Gregor asked. “Are there a lot of these people in town? People who resent the people from the development? Who would have resented Ann-Victoria Hadley because she was like the people in the development in some way?”

  “I’m sure half the town resents the development,” Gary said. “I don’t find that surprising. They’ve got a town here, and a way of life, and these people come in, and they don’t even try to fit in. And it’s not just that the people in the development think they’re better than us, it’s that we think they’re better than us. More education. More money. More sophistication. So, yeah, there’s a lot of resentment. But I don’t think anybody would have committed murder over it.”

  “No,” Gregor said. “I know what you mean. It doesn’t seem very plausible to me, either.”

  “Besides,” Gary said. “It isn’t just resentment that people in town are feeling. Some people in town actually think the people from the development might be a good thing. In some ways. You know.”

  “No, I don’t. Who thinks that, and in what ways?”

  “Well,” Gary said, “I do, a little. I mean, these people, they don’t just expect their kids to go to college, they expect them to go to Yale. There’s nothing wrong with ambition. And it matters what the people you’re with are like. If they’re all ambitious, you’re more likely to be ambitious, too. I don’t have my heart set on my kids growing up and growing old in Snow Hill.”

  “All right,” Gregor said.

  “And then there’s Nick Frapp and his people,” Gary said. “The people from the development don’t have any preconceived ideas about who people are and who they come from, so since they’ve been voting, Nick’s had less trouble getting his easements and things. People around here just tend to think he’s a hillbilly and his people are hillbillies and they don’t want them hanging around bringing down the town, but the development people just listen to his plans for a new school building, read the plans, and decide it sounds like a good idea. And I suppose it has been. A good idea, I mean. That church. That school. The hill people mostly down here instead of holing up in the hills the way they used to do.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “Hill people are not pacifists,” Gary Albright said. “You’re looking at a very old and very insular culture there. Up to the point where Nick got all that up and running, the ATF used to lose two or three guys a year up there. They’d disappear and never be found again. There’s probably something like an elephants’ graveyard in those hills somewhere, bones stacked on bones over the course of decades.”

  “Do you think one of them would be willing to murder one woman and almost murder another to stop the teaching of evolution in Snow Hill public schools?”

  “They don’t go to Snow Hill public schools,” Gary pointed out, “and I can’t imagine anybody committing a murder over that. Not even Alice McGuffie or Franklin Hale, and Alice is mean and Franklin is a nutcase. But I can’t imagine any of the development people committing a murder to keep evolution in the schools, either. It’s not the kind of thing people commit murders about. No matter what they’re saying this week on MSNBC.”

  “Funny,” Gregor said. “I was thinking the same thing myself.”

  “There’s Dale Vardan,” Gary said. “He’s brought an entourage.”

  3

  Dale Vardan had not brought an entourage so much as he’d brought a small army, in uniform, that seemed to have nothing to do but wait for his instructions. Gregor Demarkian watched him walk across the now muddy expanse of the driveway with some curiosity. Gary Albright did not seem t
he kind of man who took a visceral dislike to anybody. Even with people he did not like, Gary tended toward patient forbearance. But it wasn’t only Gary Albright who didn’t like Dale Vardan. The entire Snow Hill Police Department recoiled automatically at the mere mention of “calling in the state police.” Gregor thought it was a lot of energy to expend on a small, thin man who looked too small for his suit.

  A moment later, with Dale Vardan literally in his face, Gregor changed his mind. Dale Vardan might be too small for his suit, but he was too big for his britches—which was one of those things rural people were supposed to say, but that Gregor had never heard it from them. Vardan was the kind of man who liked to come right up to your chest and stick his nose into your own, except this time it didn’t quite work, because Vardan was no taller than five four, and Gregor was six four the last time anybody had measured him. Gary Albright was well over six feet, too. Gregor couldn’t imagine that a man like Dale Vardan could intimidate him.

  “You’re Gregor Demarkian,” Vardan said. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

  The trick was not to back up, even instinctively. This was dominance behavior. This was like cats. What Vardan wanted was to take control of the space. Gregor needed not to give it to him.