Living Witness

by Jane Haddam

  Annie-Vic made her mind stop. Alice McGuffie. There was something about Alice McGuffie. On the day that this had happened, she had been thinking about it. Now it was gone, lost because of the condition she was in or lost for no other reason than old age. It didn’t matter why. Alice McGuffie was not just proud of being ignorant, she was also furious at people who weren’t. She wasn’t stupid, that wasn’t the point. She was willfully stupid. Annie-Vic wouldn’t have believed, back all those years ago when she had set off for Poughkeepsie and college, that anybody on earth could be willfully stupid.

  The other thing Annie-Vic believed was that too much money wasn’t good for people. She knew that these things were cyclical. There was a short, intense period of wealth-building followed by a longer, less intense period of wealth consolidation. She had learned that in economics in 1936, and she’d brushed up on it since. Periods of wealth building were all about money. New people replaced the old families and all the new people had to distinguish themselves was money, so they spent it. They threw it around. They wore the labels on the outside of their clothes. It was only natural. But it wasn’t good for people, Annie-Vic thought. It really wasn’t. Money was like a drug, if you had to much of it. You couldn’t really say it was a religion. Religions provided explanations, and consolation, and hope. When the world got into those times when money was the only thing that mattered, that was ugly, too, almost as ugly as ignorance.

  Gregor Demarkian was walking around the room, looking at her things, looking at the equipment the hospital staff had left. There seemed to be a lot of equipment in the room. Annie-Vic had no idea what it was for, or who had put it here. She had an IV in her arm, which was giving her food and water, in a clear stream of glucose or something. She knew what that was for. As for the rest of it, she didn’t seem to need it. She wasn’t on a breathing machine. She wasn’t on a machine to make her heart beat.

  Somebody else came into the room. It took Annie-Vic awhile to realize who it was. It was Lisa. This made her feel immediately better. Annie Vic always liked it best when Lisa was in to visit, although it had to be a mortal bore for the poor girl. Annie-Vic tried to remember what Lisa did with her life, but the information wouldn’t come. She was in college, maybe. That sounded about right. The last thing Annie-Vic wanted was to wake up from this thing and go immediately senile.

  Mr. Demarkian and Lisa were talking. There was something about papers and something about the dining room.

  “I didn’t look through any of it to begin with,” Lisa was saying. “I’m sorry, Mr. Demarkian. I really do want to help. You have no idea how much I want to help. I don’t understand people like the people who did this. I really don’t.”

  Mr. Demarkian said something Annie-Vic couldn’t catch. It was so damned frustrating. Her hearing had been going for years, of course, but she could do well enough if she could just look people in the face.

  “I went through every piece of paper that was there,” Lisa said. “I looked at all of them. There was a lot of stuff about a new contract for the teachers. Stuff about the teachers’ union, and about teacher pensions. There was a lot about textbook requisitions. Not just this new one about Intelligent Design—”

  Intelligent Design, Annie Vic thought indignantly. More like moronic idiocy.

  “But I don’t know what was there to begin with, if you see what I mean.” Lisa sounded close to tears. “It was all such a mess when I got home after that, after that thing. And I can’t stay there now, of course. Cameron can’t, either. It was never just because it was a crime scene, you know, we just can’t stand the idea of it. But it never occurred to me to look through those papers when I first got there, and I never did. So I just don’t know what’s missing.”

  More vague, fuzzy noises from Gregor Demarkian. Annie-Vic wanted to hit something. Here she had a Great Detective right in the room with her, right in Snow Hill, and she’d bet the only person in town getting any use out of him was Nick Frapp.

  Here was something else Annie-Vic believed. You had to treat human beings like human beings. You couldn’t rope off one whole segment of humanity and declare that they were too addled to know their own minds or too malevolent to be let loose with a printing press. That was what Franklin Hale did to people, and it was what Henry Wackford did to people, too. They were practically Siamese twins, those two. They just had different vocabularies to describe what they were doing. Annie-Vic had lived through the age of totalitarianism. She knew what a totalitarian looked like when she saw one.

  Something in her head stopped, again, and she tried to focus. She found it impossible. She did focus sometimes, but it was always involuntary. Since she’d been like this, she hadn’t been able to make herself sit still and zero in on any particular thing, on purpose. And yet there was something. Something about the dining room table. Something about Gregor Demarkian in this room.

  “I suppose you’re right,” Lisa was saying. “All the papers I looked at were financial. I don’t think there was much of anything about evolution and Intelligent Design. Or maybe I’m wrong. I’m sorry, Mr. Demarkian. I’m being fairly useless here. Maybe you can ask Cameron. He might have noticed more.”

  The dining room table, Annie-Vic thought, but it was useless.

  She was drifting off to sleep.

  SEVEN

  1

  Gregor Demarkian did not like to think he was avoiding Dale Vardan, but he was avoiding Dale Vardan, and as he stepped out of Eddie Block’s police car in front of the Snow Hill Public School Complex. He looked around for a moment, not knowing what in particular he expected to see. It was a school complex like hundreds of others across the United States. There hadn’t been one like it in Philadelphia when Gregor was growing up, and there wasn’t one there now, but that was only because Philadelphia was a city and its students rode public transportation. In suburbs and small towns there was the question of what to do about school busses, and also how to make sure there was enough land for athletic fields. The athletic fields here seemed to be off to the back, covered with snow, marked only by their goal posts and score boards. Beyond even those, all the way at the back, the semi-stalled construction of the new school building rose up out of the hills, a skeleton of ice and steel.

  Eddie Block didn’t bother to lock up, which Gregor thought was a very bold move. If Gregor had been a seventeen-year-old boy, bored to Hell in trigonometry, the chance to take a police car on a joy ride with the sirens wailing would have been far too tempting to give up.

  Of course, if Gregor had done something like that, when he was seventeen, the worst that would have happened to him was a fine and a lecture from a judge, or—if this was his third or fourth offense—maybe a night in jail, just to “scare some sense into him.” These days, any kid who tried it would probably actually be sent to jail, and kept there for a year or two.

  “It doesn’t make sense, what we do about incarceration these days,” Gregor said.

  Eddie Block looked surprised. “Excuse me?” he said. “It’s not a jail, it’s the school. I mean, it felt like jail when I was here, you know, but it isn’t really. I know that now. I’ve seen real jails.”

  “Right,” Gregor said. He made a gesture toward the door, and Eddie started to lead him inside.

  It really didn’t make sense, what they did about incarceration these days. It was as if the whole country was in a rut. There was never any more than one answer to any question, and often only one answer to several questions. He suddenly wondered what would happen to Mallory Cornish, Judy Cornish’s oldest daughter. Somebody had told him this morning that she had pushed another girl yesterday and the other girl had injured her knee and been forced to take a few days off school.

  “But her mother had just been murdered,” Gregor said. Then, realizing he had said it out loud, he looked to see if Eddie Block had heard him.

  Eddie was standing in the big front doorway with a tall, thin, no-nonsense-looking woman in late middle age.

  “Mr. Demarkian,” he said, wa
ving Gregor over. “This is Miss Marbledale.”

  Gregor was impressed. Most school administrators these days would have put several layers of people between them and any kind of visitor. There would at least have been a secretary to come out and lead them to the office. Gregor walked over to the door and noticed that Miss Marbledale wasn’t wearing a coat. He looked inside and saw one of those vast open foyers that had been one of the defining characteristics of school architecture for several years in the early 1980s.

  “Mr. Demarkian,” Miss Marbledale said, holding out her hand. “I’m so glad to see you here. Come inside and we’ll get you a cup of coffee. The wind is awful here.”

  The wind was awful. Gregor had been so distracted, he hadn’t noticed it. Miss Marbledale held open the door and waited for him to walk through. He went into the foyer and looked at the big display case that lined one wall. There was some kind of exhibit up at the moment, but he couldn’t puzzle out what it was supposed to be about.

  “We turn the display case over to student groups every now and again,” Miss Marbledale said. “They do all sorts of things. This is where I’m supposed to be enthusiastic about their learning, but mostly I’m just grateful none of them have done anything drastic as of yet. We used to have the sports trophies in there, but eventually, I just couldn’t stand it. So I had them moved to the gym. Will you come with me, please?”

  The office was on the right side of the corridor as they stood looking into the school. Gregor went in through the office door and found, again, what he would have expected to find. There was a counter separating the public—or, in this case, the students—from the secretaries at the desks in the open area beyond, and then a small row of doors to the private offices. The offices were labeled generically: principal; vice principal; guidance counselor. Miss Marbledale lifted the movable part of the counter and waved him through.

  “Didn’t somebody tell me you have been here for many years?” Gregor asked.

  “I’ve been here my entire career,” Miss Marbledale said. “It’s been decades. Four, at least, and then some. I could work it out if I tried.”

  “Have you been principal long?”

  “For the last fifteen.”

  Miss Marbledale had her office open. Gregor could see through the door and across the desk through the windows, to the big oval front lawn ringed by the asphalt driveway that would let busses come in and out without getting in each other’s way.

  “You can’t see the construction from here,” Gregor said.

  “Ah, the construction,” Miss Marbledale said. “You have no idea how long I waited for this town to approve this project, and I’ve been waiting ever since. I don’t understand people sometimes. There’s work to be done here, real work, not arguing about whether teaching evolution gets students thinking that there is no God. I’ll admit I wasn’t happy when Franklin and the new board were elected, but I had some hopes for Annie-Vic. She’s got her priorities straight. And then, of course, now this.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “This. Did Annie-Vic have her priorities straight, as you put it? I thought she was involved in this lawsuit.”

  “Only pro forma,” Miss Marbledale said. “Henry Wackford went to the ACLU, and to the local chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. The ACLU, I think, found him a lawyer, and the lawyer gave him some advice on how to put together a set of plaintiffs.”

  “Henry Wackford is the old chairman of the school board?” Gregor said. “I thought he was a lawyer himself.”

  “Oh, he is,” Miss Marbledale said. “And for all I know, he may be a good one. But this is a federal case, literally. A federal court and a Constitutional question. And the stakes are high. Nobody wants to take any chances.”

  Gregor looked around the office. Miss Marbledale’s degrees hung on the wall, including a doctorate. There was a picture in a frame on the desk, of Miss Marbledale with a woman who could have been her clone. Gregor supposed that was a sister.

  “Try to help me understand something,” he said. “From Gary Albright, I’ve gotten the impression that no matter what I’ve heard on the news, this is not a case where the school board wants teachers to teach Creationism, or Intelligent Design, I suppose I should say, anyway, they don’t actually want teachers to teach it in school.”

  “That’s right,” Miss Marbledale said. “The courts have been fairly clear about that. There would be no point in trying that here or anywhere else, given the relevant case law.”

  “What they want,” Gregor said, “is for there to be some kind of notice in the biology textbooks, saying something about how evolution is one way some people try to explain the great variety of living things on earth, and Intelligent Design is another way, and if students are interested in Intelligent Design, there’s a book in the library they can go to see.”

  “Yes,” Miss Marbledale said. “To be specific, the book is called Of Pandas and People. It’s a famous book in its way. It started out as a straightforwardly Creationist text, and then with the outcome of the case in Arkansas, when it was clear the courts wouldn’t allow it in the schools, the book was retooled for Intelligent Design. There’s a woman named Barbara Forrest who’s done excellent work tracking the history of that book.”

  “Well,” Gregor said, “what occurs to me, and what I think would occur to a lot of other people, is that this lawsuit seems a little like overkill. It’s a disclaimer, and a book in the library. It’s not teaching Genesis in science class, or even mentioning Intelligent Design in science class. So why file a suit against the school board over something that innocuous.”

  Catherine Marbledale looked Gregor Demarkian up and down and back and forth. Then she took her seat behind her desk.

  “Are you a supporter of Intelligent Design?” she asked.

  “To tell you the truth, I know nothing at all about it, except what I’ve heard since I came here,” Gregor said.

  “That woman I mentioned, Barbara Forrest,” Miss Marbledale said. “She’d be a good place to start to understand why the fuss, as you put it. But let’s start with me. The problem, for me, is just this: that disclaimer is functionally a lie, even though it may technically be true.”

  “Which means what?”

  “Which means,” Miss Marbledale said, “that it’s true enough that ‘some people’ accept evolution and ‘some people’ reject it for Intelligent Design, or outright Creationism, for that matter, but putting a disclaimer like that in a science textbook implies that the ‘some people’ who reject evolution for Intelligent Design are scientists who have scientific reasons for rejecting evolution.”

  “And that’s not true?” Gregor said. “I thought I’d seen scientists who support Intelligent Design.”

  “Oh, you have,” Miss Marbledale said. “There aren’t many of them, and the only biologist of any standing is Michael Behe, who’s from Lehigh, not that far up the road here. But he doesn’t prefer Intelligent Design for scientific reasons. He prefers it for religious ones. And the one ‘scientific’ idea he’s come up with to ‘challenge’ evolution is a recycled chestnut that’s been around for a hundred and fifty years.”

  “And that is?”

  “He calls it irreducible complexity,” Miss Marbledale said. “To put it simply, it says that some organs are so complex, that if you take away even a single one of their parts, they’d cease to function. So natural selection can’t account for those, because in order for those organs to evolve, they would have to come into existence, poof, all at once, with all their parts intact exactly as they are. And that is—and everybody agrees on this—impossible.”

  “But you said it is an old chestnut,” Gregor said, “so I assume it’s not impossible.”

  “Oh, it’s impossible, all right,” Miss Marbledale said, “but the fact is that nobody is claiming any of that. Certainly evolutionary biologists aren’t. Behe assumes, like the people who have proposed the same idea before him, that each one of those parts has never had any other purpose but th
e one it has now in the organ in question. But that’s not true. There are plenty of examples of parts of organs that serve purposes now that they didn’t originally—Behe’s big example, for instance, of the flagellum, has been exposed time and again. There’s a good article by Kenneth Miller, if you want it. I have it around here somewhere.”

  “Later, maybe,” Gregor said.

  “And there’s the eye and the inner ear,” Miss Marbledale said. “We’ve been able to trace prior uses for parts of those organs. The whole concept of ‘irreducible complexity’ depends on the entirely false idea that whatever function an organ or a part of an organ has now is the one it must always have had.”

  “And that’s it?” Gregor said. “The entire case for Intelligent Design rests on the work of one man?”

  “It rests on nobody’s work,” Miss Marbledale said. “At least, it rests on nobody’s scientific work. There is no scientific work in Intelligent Design. There are no peer-reviewed papers. There are no reproducible experiments. There are no falsifiable predictions. None. The entire movement consists of people sitting around saying, ‘I don’t see how evolution could have made that happen, so God must have done it.’ And that, you see, is the point. They don’t want to advance the cause of science. They don’t want to expand human knowledge. All they want is to make it seem, to the general public, that there’s something wrong with the theory of evolution, that it’s just a guess, that it’s probably not true.”

  “And you think it’s true?”

  “Of course I think it’s true,” Miss Marbledale said. “If you’re actually willing to look at the evidence, there’s nothing else to think. Evolution is a fact. Virtually everything that book says about it is false. Everything. Evidence in the fossil record? There’s a ton of it, a huge, overwhelming mountain of it. Macroevolution? We can prove it. We have transitional fossils out the wazoo, full transitional sequences between reptiles and birds, for instance, and many more. The only point of that book is to lie and lie and lie again until it gets children so confused they don’t know what’s true, and the purpose of that, in the long run, is to discredit science. It’s science that those people are afraid of.”