Living Witness

by Jane Haddam

  “Do you mean he’s a psychopath?” Gregor asked.

  “Nah, I don’t think so,” Gary said. “I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him, mind you, but I don’t think he’s Jack the Ripper. It’s just that he’s seriously pissed. He’s pissed because the board is so obviously Christian. Henry doesn’t like Christianity. He thinks it’s the root of all evil. But he’s pissed because he lost at all, to begin with, and he’s pissed because he’s no longer lawyer for the school board.”

  “This is Henry Wackford who used to be the chairman of the school board?” Gregor asked, surprised.

  “Right,” Gary said. “And you don’t even have to bring it up. It was an incredible conflict of interest. But Henry was chairman of the school board and the school board had to hire a lawyer and he hired himself and he went on with it for ten years. During which time, by the way, there was nothing for him to do but collect his yearly retainer. Now that there is something for a lawyer to do, we have a firm from up in Harrisburg. We all thought we’d better get somebody who knew how to handle a federal lawsuit.”

  “Henry Wackford,” Gregor said.

  They were coming around to the front of the building. Gregor looked up the street. The were lights on deep within the offices of Wackford Squeers, Attorneys at Law, but they weren’t just safety lights.

  Somebody had to be already in place at Henry Wackford’s office.

  FOUR

  1

  Christine had been gone for less than twenty-four hours, and Henry Wackford’s life was already a mess. Not that he actually needed Christine, meaning Christine herself. In fact, she was one of the most annoying aspects of living in Snow Hill. She had that thing they all had, that thing Henry had gone away to college to get away from. It wasn’t just that she was religious. No. Henry thought he could work up some respect for seriously religious people. Thomas Aquinas, say, or Bonaventure—the Middle Ages were full of religious people who were intelligent and thoughtful and attuned to complexity. Maybe that was only possible before science got seriously into gear and started explaining the universe. Henry didn’t know. He only knew that religion in Snow Hill was straight off a Hallmark card, full of fuzzy feel-good niceness and floating around in a sea of love and angels. Henry would have hired a fellow atheist to be his secretary if he could have, but he hadn’t been able to find one of those. Christine had shown up at the door with her little gold cross on its little gold chain around her neck, and she knew how to operate the computer and had a fair idea of what was supposed to happen with a filing system, and he’d taken her.

  Now he looked around the office and there were files everywhere. Either Christine knew better how to handle a filing system, or she had changed the one he had, and Henry was sure it was the latter. He was not an idiot, and he had nothing but contempt for those Hollywood movies about how the secretary moves out and the boss can’t wipe his own ass without her help. He was not an idiot, and in the long three weeks he’d been without a secretary before Christine, he’d managed just fine.

  He sat down behind his desk and looked at the stack of folders. He had been through them once. He would go through them twice. The folder he was looking for should be labeled Books to Print, and it belonged in the B cabinet in alphabetical order with everything else that was there. He was now more than sure that that file was not in the filing cabinet. Christine had either misfiled it, or relabeled it and filed it somewhere else, or lost it, or something.

  He picked up the file on top of the stack. It was labeled Barrington Cross Hunt, and he should have had it put in storage years ago. He remembered Barrington Cross Hunt. He’d been the “village atheist” when Henry was growing up, because nobody in Snow Hill would dare to call old Annie-Vic any such thing. It was to Barrington that Henry had gone when he had first been thinking about starting a chapter of the American Humanist Association, and it was Barrington who had explained to him why it would never work.

  “There’s too much downside in it,” Barrington had said, sucking on a pipe as if it were a baby bottle. “Of course there are humanists here, and atheists and agnostics. There always have been, and there always have been more of them than anybody would guess. But to come out and say that’s what you are is a disaster in a place like Snow Hill. Everybody would stop talking to you. You’d barely be employable.”

  Henry put the folder down. It was only half true, all of that. The town hadn’t ostracized Barrington Cross Hunt, and it hadn’t ostracized Henry, either. The hostility was more subtle. It was in the way people talked to you, and in the things they said when they knew you weren’t quite out of hearing. And there was more, of course. There were the things they said to each other in private, and the things that had gotten two people killed already with maybe a third to come. It was this tightwire act they were all engaged in, this trying to believe things they had to know were not true. Part of Henry didn’t believe they did believe them. He thought they only wanted to believe them. That was why they got so crazy when something came along to make what they believed obviously untrue. It was as if you’d knocked the foundation out of one of their houses.

  Books to Print, Henry reminded himself. The damned thing had to be around here somewhere. He had to find it, and he had to find it today. He had work to do. It didn’t matter if Christine was there to help him do it or not.

  Maybe there was some woman in the development who would like a job as a legal secretary. That would be something. Henry loved the people in the development. They were like a promise from another world. Out there somewhere, away from Snow Hill and all the places like it, there was a real world with real people in it.

  The sound he was hearing was definitely a knock. It was a very faint knock, which meant it must be coming from the outer office, or maybe all the way from the front door. Christine had left her keys on her desk when she’d marched out of the office yesterday. Maybe she’d changed her mind and wanted to come back.

  Henry got up and went out. In the other office, the knocking was louder. When he opened the door to the entryway, the knocking was a pounding. That would not be Christine, that would be a man.

  Henry hesitated. There were murders going on here. There were things going on. You never know what those people might do. You couldn’t count on them, because they didn’t rely on their reason. They didn’t rely on logic. They relied on fantasies, and all fantasies were murderous in the end.

  Henry went into the entryway. Somebody was pounding and calling. Three pounds, then the call. Boom, boom, boom. The a muffled voice that sounded as if it were calling his name. What movie was that from? The original version of The Haunting, he thought. Henry had read the book, The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson, when he was much younger. He didn’t read that sort of thing anymore. Ghosts, for God’s sake. It wasn’t good to encourage that kind of thing anymore. It wasn’t good to say “for God’s sake.” The fundies always jumped on it when you did. Aha! You said “for God’s sake!” You must really believe in God, even if you’re hiding it from yourself.

  Henry pulled the front door open. The light was just beginning to get strong on Main Street, but it wasn’t that strong. There was no angry mob storming his door with torches. The man on the doorstep—Gregor Demarkian. Henry recognized him from television. He looked past Demarkian and up the street.

  Henry stepped back and waved Gregor Demarkian inside. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m in a bit of a mess. My secretary quit, and now I can’t find anything.”

  “Your secretary quit?”

  Demarkian was in the front hall. Henry closed the door behind him. He dwarfed the place. He made the ceiling look too low, and the hall not as wide as it should have been. Henry thought he was at least as tall as Nick Frapp, or close, but he was bulked out more. He looked like he might have played football.

  “It’s this lawsuit,” Henry said, going back toward the outer office and waving Demarkian to follow him. “It’s got the whole town in a mess. And Christine was not exactly on my side, if you ca
tch my drift. It’s impossible to find a secretary in this town who would be on my side in this. The kind of people who understand and respect science, and reason, well, if they’re in Snow Hill, they tend to move out. And stay out. Which is what I should have done.”

  “Which one?” Demarkian asked. “Move out or stay out?”

  “Stay out,” Henry said. “I went to college and law school, and then I came back. Don’t ask me why. I mean, I remember my reasoning at the time, but looking back on it from this perspective, I think I must have been crazy. I was on my own, you see. My parents were dead, and I didn’t want to go corporate. There’s a reason they call them soulless corporations. I don’t know. I thought that it would be easier here, to get started on my own, to function on my own. And then there was Mickey Squeers, who’d done the same thing in his time. He took me in.”

  “That’s the Squeers of Wackford Squeers, outside?”

  “That’s right,” Henry said. “He’s been dead for years now, of course, but I don’t see any reason to change the name of the firm. Or maybe I’m just like Scrooge. Maybe I keep the name so that I don’t have to go to the expense of changing the sign. I hate that novella, don’t you, Mr. Demarkian? More sentimental treacle. More fuzzy suffocating nonsense that doesn’t do anybody any good and that does a lot of harm. We make a point of going on with business as usual at the Snow Hill Humanist Association, right through the holidays. Somebody has to step up and do something, or nothing will ever change.”

  “Bah,” Gregor Demarkian said. “Humbug.”

  Henry turned, but Demarkian’s face was completely blank. He might not have said what Henry thought he’d heard. Henry leaned over and took a pile of files out of one of the chairs and gestured Gregor to it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Maybe I’m assuming too much. Maybe you’re a religious man.”

  “Not the last time I checked,” Demarkian said.

  “Then you’ll know what I mean,” Henry said. “We have to do something about these people. We have to do something that brings this country back to the path of reason and science. We’re drowning in a sea of religiosity. We can’t be a leader in the twenty-first century if our minds are in thrall to the thirteenth. Never forget: When religion ruled the world, they called it the Dark Ages.”

  Gregor Demarkian made no response at all to that. Henry sat down and clasped his hands. He was suddenly very nervous.

  “Well,” he said. “I’m sure you didn’t come all the way over here this early in the morning to hear me natter on about fundamentalists and the religious right. Is there something I can do for you?”

  The words came out in too much of a rush. Henry swallowed. There was something very disconcerting about this man. He was too still. And Henry didn’t really know what he thought about religion. He wished the man would talk.

  Gregor Demarkian shifted a little on his chair. Henry twitched.

  “Well,” Demarkian said, “for starters, I think you know both of the women who were murdered, Judy Cornish and Shelley Niederman. They were both plaintiffs in the lawsuit.”

  “That’s right,” Henry said. “Most of the plaintiffs were from the development. I think Annie-Vic and I might have been the only Snow Hill natives proper. Oh, and of course, Miss Marbledale, who is on our side even if she isn’t a formal plaintiff. Although we talked about that, back when all this started. We thought it might be an interesting thing if the science teachers sued the school board. But some of them didn’t want to.”

  “Some of your science teachers are sympathetic to the board’s position?”

  “Oh, no,” Henry said. “Some of the other teachers are, the ones who don’t teach science, but the science teachers are squarely behind the teaching of evolution. It’s not that way everyplace. You wouldn’t believe how many science teachers across the country reject evolution and want to teach Creationism themselves. But that hasn’t been our problem here. No, the thing is, there’s no percentage in it. The science teachers are going to have to go on teaching here, and the town has already shown its willingness to elect a school board that will persecute anybody who doesn’t toe the line on its fundamentalist beliefs. Although, if you ask me, that’s just because too many of our own people are completely irresponsible.”

  “Irresponsible how?”

  “They don’t vote,” Henry said emphatically. “I’m serious, Mr. Demarkian. The people in the development, they represent the best hope Snow Hill has of emerging in the modern world. Finally. But they come from places where they don’t have to worry about this kind of thing. They come from New York and California and Connecticut, where nobody would ever think of putting Creationist nonsense into the schools. There are barely any people who believe in Creationist nonsense. But we’re here, aren’t we? And Snow Hill is full of the kind of people who would be more than happy to shove a ten-thousand-year-old earth down the throat of every child within screaming distance. So when the people from the development didn’t vote, and the people from town did, well, you see what we got. Franklin Hale and the God-intoxicated stupids.”

  “So that’s why you and the other members of the old school board lost the last election? Because people from the development didn’t vote?”

  “Exactly,” Henry said. “Oh, some of them did, of course. Judy Cornish did. She was a wonderful woman, Mr. Demarkian. She really was. But a lot of them up there just weren’t thinking. And they didn’t know Franklin Hale or Alice McGuffie either. They didn’t realize what they were going to be stuck with if they didn’t get out and vote.”

  Demarkian appeared to be only half-listening. Henry went back to fiddling with the folders on his desk.

  “If you’re looking around and see one of those that says Books to Print, I wish you’d tell me about it,” Henry said. “It’s the file I’m looking for. I can’t find it anywhere. I used to think Christine was good at filing things, but I guess she wasn’t. The damned thing isn’t here anywhere.”

  “I thought,” Gregor Demarkian said, “that the reason the old school board was rejected and the new one was elected was essentially a practical issue. People tell me that the problem was your own and your board’s lack of attention to necessary details. The teachers’ contract issues, for instance. And the new school complex.”

  “Bullshit,” Henry said. “The new school complex? There wouldn’t be one if it weren’t for me. You don’t know what this place is like. They resent every dime they have to spend on education. Every dime. They’d let the schools go without paper and pencils. We’ve already had to start charging our kids to play sports. The buildings are falling down. They’re antiquated and inadequate. It took me six years to get that project approved, and then it was only halfhearted approval. Franklin Hale would end it altogether if he could.”

  “But the building on the project has gone on for a while, hasn’t it?” Gregor said. “It’s been something like five years?”

  “Because I could never keep the town on track to keep the funding up,” Henry said. “We do our school budgets by referendum, you know. Every year, we have to go to the town and beg for money, and most of the time we can’t get a budget approved for months. Hell, there have been years we haven’t been able to pay our teachers, or anybody else, until practically Thanksgiving because we haven’t been able to get a budget through. As soon as there were cost overruns on the project, we were in trouble, because we had to go back to the town and ask for more. And the town never wants to give more. Never. If it wasn’t for the state and state law, they’d throw out the teachers’ contracts, set a salary scale that looked like it was written for waitresses at the Snow Hill Diner, and refuse to hire anybody who wouldn’t work for that. We’d end up with teachers who’d flunked out of ed school, or worse. We’d end up without any teachers at all.”

  “I thought teachers’ contracts were another of those things the town thought your board wasn’t handling very well,” Gregor Demarkian said.

  “They only thought we weren’t handling it well because they
didn’t want to pay the going rate for teachers,” Henry said. “Most of these people have no respect for what teachers do. Their idea of education is a lot of rote recitation of what they think of as Timeless Truths: God Loves You, the United States of America Is Never Wrong, Don’t Have Sex Until Marriage. Not that many of them listened to their own advice when they were in high school. Marcey Hale almost didn’t make it to her own high school graduation, she was that close to showing. It doesn’t matter. They don’t think they have to make sense. They don’t have the decency to be ashamed of their hypocrisy. They weren’t ever going to like any of the teachers’ contracts as long as the contracts had defined benefit pension plans, and that’s not going to change unless the unions go bust. Which they won’t.”

  “All right,” Gregor Demarkian said.

  “It makes me nuts when I hear people say that they voted for Franklin Hale because of practical considerations,” Henry said. “It’s a lie. It’s a bald-faced, unvarnished lie. There isn’t anybody in this town who doesn’t know who and what Franklin is, except for some of the people from the development, and they’d never vote for him anyway because he doesn’t want to spend money on schools. But as for the people of Snow Hill, the regulars, the ones who have been here forever—if they voted for Franklin Hale, it’s because they wanted what he had to offer, and what he has to offer is religion in the Snow Hill Public Schools.”

  2

  Catherine Marbledale knew this was going to be a bad day, but she had had no idea just how bad before the students began piling out of the school busses at eight o’clock. The busses were late, too. She’d even considered calling a snow day, since there was a sleet storm to provide an excuse for it, but in the end she’d decided to let the day unfold. If you had too many snow days, they tacked on extra school days in June. None of the kids liked that, and she didn’t like it, either. It was bad enough trying to teach students who didn’t want to learn in the first place. It was worse trying to teach them when they felt that their sacred vacation time had been violated. Sometimes she wondered why she was still doing what she was doing. Back about ten years ago or so, she could have moved on to any private school in the country. She could have taught at Exeter and had nothing to worry about but academically gifted, intellectually ambitious kids. She should have done it. She was delusional to think that she was on a mission from God.