Living Witness

by Jane Haddam

  It was like that movie she had seen once very late at night on television, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It was in black and white. It starred this man Alice recognized because she’d seen him in a million old movies, but whose name she could never remember. She thought of him as “the man with the jaw.” He had a big jaw, but that didn’t matter. What mattered were the pods. There were pods in the basement, and when they popped open people popped out—bodies, not real people—but their bodies looked like the bodies of real people, they looked like people you knew.

  She was really very dizzy. She was so dizzy she didn’t think she could stand up. She hadn’t tried to stand up, though, so she didn’t know. She didn’t want to try to stand up, because then she would have to look at it all: the bars, the woman in the uniform, the corridor where the other cells were. She was alone in this cell. She didn’t know why. From the noise she could hear, the other cells seemed to have lots of people in them. She was glad she wasn’t with lots of other people. She didn’t want to see people. She didn’t want to talk to people. She had no idea what she would say.

  “Hello. I’m Alice McGuffie. I’m being persecuted by secular humanists.”

  It was the kind of joke they would make on those late-night television shows. Alice hated those late-night television shows—David Letterman, Conan O’Brien. Who were those people? Why did they think they knew so much? She didn’t understand half the things they said. They were always talking about things that made no sense and then everybody was laughing. Alice couldn’t see what there was to laugh at. Lyman couldn’t see it, either. Maybe there was nothing to laugh at and they were tricking people—people who were too embarrassed to admit they didn’t understand what was going on. That was what happened with the Emperor’s new clothes. Nobody wanted to say the Emperor was naked because they thought everybody else could see his clothes. They didn’t want people to think they were stupid. Alice had spent her entire life trying to keep people from thinking she was stupid. They thought it anyway. It was like she had a brand on her forehead. It was all Catherine Marbledale’s fault, and the fault of people like Annie-Vic, and the fault of secular humanists. There were secular humanists under the bed. There were secular humanists in the refrigerator. There was no refrigerator. What was she thinking of?

  She was lying on a very narrow cot that was shoved right up against the wall. Alice thought it might be bolted into the wall. She didn’t want to look. She had a blanket on top of her that felt like horse hair. It was rough, and the few times she had opened her eyes she had seen it was gray. There was a sheet under her, but no sheet on top of her. She always had a sheet on top of her at home. Maybe this was what they did to you in prison. Maybe they took away all your sheets. Maybe they would execute her, and first she would have to lie on a gurney somewhere and sing at the top of her lungs to keep from being afraid. She was afraid, though. She was so afraid all her muscles had gone rigid, so that none of her joints had been able to bend. Then they had given her that shot, and everything had melted. It was melted now.

  She opened her eyes and stared straight up at the ceiling. The ceiling was filthy. It was as if nobody had ever cleaned it, not in all the years it had been up there. How long ago had this jail been built? Alice didn’t know. She didn’t pay much attention to the news, except for things going on locally, and nothing much ever went on locally. This would be something going on locally. Everybody in town would watch it on television. They would buy newspapers and read about it. Maybe it would be in a magazine somewhere. Look at the crazy Christians. Watch them kill everybody. Her head hurt. The pain was far away, on the other side of a barrier of fuzz. Her mouth was dry.

  “There was a picture of me on the dining room table,” she said. The words came out as clear as the sound of her television. There was no fuzz at all.

  Over on the other side of the bars, the woman in uniform stood up and turned toward Alice. Alice could feel her looking.

  “What did you say?” the woman said.

  “There was a picture of me on the dining room table,” Alice said again. “So I took it. I brought it home and I put it in my sewing table.”

  The words were not crisp anymore. They were going in and out of blur. She was very tired. She wanted to go back to sleep again.

  “I don’t think you should be worrying about your sewing table now,” the woman in uniform said. “There are other things to think about now.”

  If she didn’t force herself to speak, she would fall asleep again. The woman in the uniform was making a note. She would probably pass it along to other people in uniform. Alice watched all the cop shows. She liked cop shows. She liked thinking that there were people out there who lived in terrible places full of crime, while she was safe and happy right there in Snow Hill.

  If she didn’t concentrate, she would forget. If she didn’t concentrate, she would drift back into space and the secular humanists would be there, they would be there, they were always there, they were all around us. They were that devouring lion. That’s what they were.

  “Listen,” Alice said.

  “I’ll listen if you want me to,” the woman in uniform said. “But you’ve had a very powerful sedative, you know. You ought to get some rest.”

  “Listen,” Alice said again. Then she made one last, great effort. She pushed by the barrier of fuzz that was all around her. She pushed by the flitting ghosts that were really memories, because you couldn’t have ghosts of people who were still alive. They were there all around her. They were waiting for her to fall asleep.

  “Listen,” she said for the third time, and then it worked. She was in a place where she could talk. She was in a place where she could think. The ceiling still looked dirty. The walls of the cell looked dirtier. There was a toilet screwed into the back wall, right out in the open, as if they expected her to relieve herself like that where anybody could see her.

  “I want,” she said, “to talk to that man. I want to talk to Gregor Demarkian.”

  “What?” the woman in uniform said.

  “It was a picture of me and I took it,” Alice said, and then she fell back to sleep again.

  2

  It was the arrest of Alice and Lyman McGuffie that made up Nick Frapp’s mind for him, but he’d been on the verge of making it up on his own for an hour or more before that. He had been thinking about it all night, in fact, and the more he thought about it the more sure he had been that, in the last analysis, it was civilization that mattered.

  “Civilization,” his old philosophy professor had said, “is not something we have. It’s something we do.”

  Philosophy professor. Dr. Raydock. Dr. Raydock was always in trouble with the university administration because he wasn’t quite Christian enough, he wasn’t quite with the program. It was not the kind of thing Nick had understood before he’d gone to Oklahoma, but it hadn’t taken him long to learn. Civilization is something we do, Nick told himself now, and that was right. It was absolutely right. And if you stopped doing it, you found yourself howling in the wilderness.

  He stuck his head into the main office where yet another one of the church women, Marianna Beck, was filling in as church secretary.

  “I’m going to go out for a bit,” he said.

  Marianne looked up and pulled a drawn face. It didn’t entirely hide the excitement in her eyes. “Isn’t it terrible?” she said. “Alice McGuffie, of all people. I never would have believed it. But then, you never know with people, do you? Especially people like the McGuffies. Kept themselves to themselves. Like my mother always said, you’ve got to watch out for people like that. You always know something is wrong when people are too quiet.”

  Nick didn’t think Alice McGuffie had ever been quiet for an hour in her life. He thought she might even talk in her sleep. He let it go and went downstairs and out the door onto Main Street. The town was quieter now than it had been the last time he’d seen it. He’d come out to watch with everybody else when the police cars came and the police raced into the S
now Hill Diner. People were saying it was just like a movie, and they were right, but not in the way they meant it. It was like a movie because it was so completely exaggerated. Men in black uniforms with rifles slung over their backs, to arrest Alice and Lyman McGuffie? It was like taking out a kitten with a bazooka.

  Nick went down the street to the police station. He had seen them all come in, Gary and Tom and Eddie and Gregor Demarkian. He went up the front steps and let himself into the building. The woman behind the counter was working at something on a computer. He cleared his throat and waited. She looked up and then looked annoyed.

  “Is there something I can do for you?”

  “I’d like to talk to Mr. Demarkian, if I can,” Nick said.

  “I’ll see what he’s doing,” the woman said. “We’re in the middle of a murder investigation, in case you didn’t know. Do you have information about the murder investigation?”

  “Maybe,” Nick said.

  The woman looked suspicious, but she got up and went to the back. A second later, Gregor Demarkian emerged, looking rumpled.

  “Reverend Frapp,” he said. “Good to see you. Why don’t you come on back?”

  Nick gave the woman a smile, but she turned away from him. He followed Gregor “on back,” and found himself in what he was sure was supposed to be a utility closet. The utility closet had a desk and two chairs. Nick sat down in the chair that was not behind the desk.

  “This is interesting,” he said.

  “It’s adequate, believe it or not,” Gregor Demarkian said. “Although I have to admit, it makes me feel a little claustrophobic. Do you really have information for me, or did you just want to talk?”

  “Did you authorize the arrest of Alice and Lyman McGuffie?” Nick asked. “Was that your idea?”

  “No,” Gregor said. “We seem to be beset by a state police detective who thinks he knows everything.”

  “Ah,” Nick said. “So it was a Dale Vardan special. All right. I didn’t think it was you, but I thought I’d better ask. Have you ever been to Holland?”

  “Holland?”

  “I went last year,” Nick said. “I don’t travel much. There’s too much work here, with the school and church and everything, but I went last year to a conference. And it’s Holland I think of when I think about all of this. About Alice and Lyman. About the teaching of evolution in the public schools. About the murders. Because that’s what Holland is all about these days, you know. It’s about death.”

  “Excuse me?” Gregor Demarkian said.

  Nick threw his head back and stared at the ceiling. He wondered if this room would feel so small if it was being occupied by people closer to normal size than either he or Demarkian were.

  “They have all these things,” Nick said. “Abortion. And what they call ‘assisted suicide.’ They kill off their children and they kill off their old people and they just don’t see it. They don’t see that they’re sinking into an orgy of death. They think it’s freedom. And in the end, you know, that’s my bottom line. If you wake up one morning and find out you’re collaborating with death, you ought to understand that you’re doing something wrong. In the end, that’s the difference I see between people of faith and people without it. When people of faith collaborate with death, they know they’re doing something wrong. When people without it do, they often don’t even realize they’re collaborating. I don’t really think it matters whether you’re a Protestant or a Catholic or a Hindu, for that matter. I think there are probably many ways to God, but the reason I know God exists is because people who believe in him feel guilty about collaborating with death and people who don’t not only don’t feel guilty, they don’t even realize there’s an issue.”

  “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 M
ain 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.

  3

  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.