Living Witness (39 page)

Gregor looked up at the new school building yet again, and then got into the car next to Eddie Block. Eddie started up the engine and turned up the heat right away. Gregor was grateful. He never understood why March had to be so cold, when it was supposed to be the start of spring.

Gregor had put the books on the floor at his feet. He caught Eddie Block eying them.

“Well,” he said. “Have you read any of these? Miss Marbledale was your teacher, wasn't she?”

“Miss Marbledale was everybody's teacher,” Eddie Block said. “No, I haven't read those books.”

“Did you listen to what she said?”

“Sure I listened to what she said. Everybody listens to Miss Marbledale. She's the kind of person people listen to.”

Gregor was going to point out that, technically, she was Dr. Marbledale, but he didn't. She hadn't used the title, for whatever reason. He waited while Eddie backed up and got them turned around, pointing to the way out. Then he said, “So, what about it? Are you like Gary Albright? Do you think the Intelligent Design people ought to get to put their book in the library?”

“Maybe,” Eddie said.

“Maybe?”

Eddie looked uncomfortable. “Here's the thing,” he said. “It's a book in a library. I mean, I know it's the school library, but still. A couple of years ago, Henry threatened us with a lawsuit—”

“Another one?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Henry likes to sue the town. Anyway, there was this book by this guy, Sam Something.
The End of Faith
. We got it in to the library and then Alice complained, because Alice complains.
Henry likes to file lawsuits and Alice likes to complain. Anyway, she complained and the librarians put it behind the desk so that people could only get it if they asked for it, and Henry tried to sue the town because he said putting it back there like that where people had to ask for it would discourage people from reading it, because they might be embarrassed to ask for it and have everybody know they were taking it out when this is such a fundamentalist town. You got that?”

“Sort of.”

“Yeah, my point exactly,” Eddie said. “I mean, for God's sake, Mr. Demarkian. Henry's an atheist and he's been shouting it from the rooftops since he was in high school. People roll their eyes, but they don't bother him about it. He's even got a secretary straight out of some Christian television program. And it's not that I agree with Alice on this, either, because I don't. But that's the thing, see? If it was censorship or whatever it was to keep that book behind the librarian's desk when the Christians complained about it, then why isn't it censorship to keep that
Pandas
book out of the library when the atheists complain about it? It always seems like there are two different sets of rules for different people. One rule for the Christians and another rule for the atheists.”

“Miss Marbledale says she isn't an atheist.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Well, you know.”

“What?”

“Well, that's the thing, isn't it?” Eddie said. “The Bible lays it all out. In the beginning, and then it says how God did it, right?”

“Maybe,” Gregor said.

“I don't see that there's any maybe about it,” Eddie said. “I've read that part of the Bible. I read it in my Bible study group at church. And it seems to me, you know, that it's clear. If that evolution stuff is true, then the Bible can't be true. And if the Bible isn't true in that place, it might not be true in any place. And then what happens? There's no Jesus Christ, and no salvation, and no life after death. There's no anything.”

“A lot of Christian denominations see Genesis as a metaphor,” Gregor said. “They think it's poetic, a kind of allegory—”

“Meaning a lie,” Eddie said. “That's all all that stuff means, Mr. Demarkian. A lie.”

“I don't think fiction is a lie,” Gregor said carefully. “Bennis—Bennis is the woman I'm about to marry—Bennis says that a writer named Ken Kesey said that literature is something that's ‘the truth, even though it didn't happen.' That you can tell the truth about something through scenes and images that get to the core of what you're trying to say, but are still imaginative and dramatic renderings.”

Eddie was staring straight ahead. “I still think that comes down to a lie,” he said. “But I'm not going to argue about it. There's no point in arguing about it. I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, and I'm going to trust in him, and not in a bunch of science books. And I think evolution is just a theory, not a fact, no matter what Miss Marbledale says. And I think the least we could do is say so, so the kids don't get the idea that there is no God and the Bible is all a lie. You know what kids are going to do with that. They're going to think that if there isn't any God, there isn't any reason to behave themselves, and then it's all going to go to Hell in no time flat. You can't get around it, Mr. Demarkian. No matter what Miss Marbledale says, or what the Pope says either, you can't have evolution and God at the same time, and anyone who says you can isn't a real Christian.”

Gregor would have given some thought to this restrictive definition of what made a Christian—a definition that wiped out not only all liberal Protestants, but all Roman Catholics and most of the Eastern Orthodox churches as well—but they were coming around a long curve in the road leading back to town, and something three-quarters of the way down had caught his eye.

He leaned a little forward in his seat and squinted. There was yellow police tape, which made sense. That was Annie-Vic's house, which was still a crime scene. There was a police car—that made sense, too. There were two state policemen standing guard, which was something Gary Albright should have thought of when Annie-Vic was attacked. Still, there was something. He leaned forward even more, until his seat belt strained and his forehead nearly touched the windowshield.

“Is there something wrong, Mr. Demarkian?” Eddie Block asked. “If you're not feeling well, I could always pull over and let you get out for a little air.”

“I'm feeling fine,” Gregor said. “We have to stop at Annie-Vic's house.”

“At Annie-Vic's house? What for?”

“Because I think something has happened.”

Gregor sat back in his seat and bit his lip. By now they were halfway down the hill and he could see it clearly: the red and white ambulance with its lights pulsing convulsively in the grey late-morning light. Another ambulance meant another body, that might or might not be dead.

 

The body was, in fact, dead. It was dead and lying in what seemed to be an untouched heap in the doorway to Annie-Vic's house, while the two men from the ambulance stood around near the gate, one of them smoking. Gregor Demarkian dismissed images of oxygen canisters exploding in flames to concentrate on Dale Vardan, who was on the scene and giving orders, apparently to no effect.

“She has to have gotten here some way or the other,” Dale Vardan was saying, poking his finger at the chest of the same state police officer who had talked to Gregor this morning. “You were here. You were keeping watch. You must have seen something.”

“But I didn't see anything,” the officer said. “I was around the back, I told you. She wasn't here when I went around there and when I got back she was.”

“So what about
you
?” Vardan demanded of the other state police officer. “Didn't it occur to either one of you idiots that one of you should be out front here keeping watch at all times? What were you doing, both going back there together?”

“It was gunfire,” the first state policeman said in exasperation. “Three gunshots, one right after another. They sounded like they
came from a shotgun. Neither one of us wanted to let the other one go on back alone. Who knew what he was going to find?”

“Well,” Vardan said, “what did you find?”

The first officer looked away. “Nothing much,” he admitted.

“Nothing much,” Dale Vardan said.

Gregor stepped forward then. The two state police officers seemed embarrassed to see him, but he had no intention of humiliating them any more than Vardan had already done. It was not a management style he had ever found effective.

Dale Vardan caught sight of him. “Well,” he said. “If it isn't the great Gregor Demarkian, the Hillbilly's Friend. I don't know where you've been this morning. I've been responding to a call about a murder. This murder.”

“Really,” Gregor said. He looked down at the body, but he did not find it immediately recognizable. For one thing, it was lying more or less facedown, although oddly crumpled, almost half in a fetal position. “Who called you?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” Vardan said. “It was an anonymous tip. But it was a good one, don't you think?”

“And did you call the Snow Hill Police Department?” Gregor asked. “I know you didn't call me.”

“I didn't have to call anybody,” Dale Vardan said. “Why should I? You may impress people in Philadelphia, but you don't impress me, and as far as I'm concerned, this investigation has been bungled from the beginning. Right from the beginning. None of these hillbillies know how to investigate a murder that's any more complicated than some stupid redneck getting liquored up and shooting the face off his wife. We should have been called in from the start.”

“Possibly,” Gregor said. He had been staring at the body all this time. Now he looked at the state police officer he had talked to this morning. “When you went around the back, did you do a search, or did you just check it out to make sure somebody wasn't doing God knows what right in front of your faces?”

“The second thing,” the officer said. “We knew we shouldn't be too
long away from the front of the house. We're not idiots. We just went around to check and we didn't see anything and the shooting had stopped, so we came around back. And there she was.”

“This woman,” Gregor said.

“Right,” the officer said.

“And you checked to see if she was breathing,” Gregor said.

“We did,” the officer said, “but it was pretty clear right away that she wasn't. So we were careful, you know. We didn't move her or anything. That's pretty much the way we found her. All sort of twisted up like that.”

“Right,” Gregor said.

“Bunch of assholes,” Dale Vardan said.

Gregor didn't stop to ask which assholes those were. He leaned forward and pulled the body slowly onto its back, holding the left shoulder with his winter-gloved hand to make sure that he would leave no fingerprints. He couldn't imagine that it would matter even if he did.

“She looks familiar, don't you think?” he said. He supposed he was talking to Dale Vardan, or maybe one of the police officers, but he really didn't know.

The body took the last few inches in an undignified plop, and then Gregor realized why it looked so familiar.

It was Shelley Niederman.

 

. . . . our intention is to show that the theory of evolution is not indisputable scientific truth, as many people assume or try to impose on others. On the contrary, there is a glaring contradiction when the theory of evolution is compared to scientific findings in such diverse fields as the origin of life, population genetics, comparative anatomy, paleontology, and biochemistry. In a word, evolution is a theory in “crisis
.”

—Darwinism Refuted
http://www.darwinismrefuted.com

 

1. Evolution is one of the most strongly supported theories in all of science. It is nowhere near a theory in crisis
.

 

2. This claim has been made constantly since even before Darwin. In all that time, the theory of evolution has only gotten stronger. Prior to the development of evolutionary theory, almost 100 percent of relevant scientists were creationists. Now the number is far less than 1 percent. The numbers continue to drop as the body of evidence supporting evolutionary theory continues to build. Thus, claims of scientists abandoning evolution theory for creationism are untrue
.

—Creationist Claims
http://www.talkorigins.com

 

 

 

Gregor took one of the two police officers and walked around to the back of the house. Part of the reason for this was practical. Those gunshots bothered him. There was no gun in this case, and the Hadley house was far too close to town to be a suitable site for hunting. It was the kind of detail that made him think, again, of that first kidnaping case, the kind of detail that made him feel that there was something right in front of him that he wasn't seeing. Part of the reason for this was psychological, however, and Gregor was old enough to admit it. He needed to be away from Dale Vardan. It was ironic; it had been his idea to bring the man in to begin with, and he still thought that they needed a state police presence here in light of what had been happening. Dale Vardan, though, being who he was, provided only one advantage: the long-term cover of showing that they had done the right thing when they knew they were getting in over their heads. Unfortunately, the man tended to make the floodwaters surge higher.

The ambulance would take the body to the hospital. Somebody would autopsy it there. Gregor was not worried about the autopsy. He expected to find that Shelley Niederman had been bludgeoned to
death, just as her friend Judy Cornish had been, just as Annie-Vic Hadley had almost been.

“It's something to do with the house,” he said.

The state police officer, walking beside him, turned. “Did you say something, Mr. Demarkian? I didn't catch it.”

“It's something to do with the house,” Gregor repeated. “Whatever is going on here. There's something in that house, or about it in some way, that's serving as the catalyst for these crimes. Which means that whoever it is didn't get what he or she was looking for yesterday. That is, assuming that what's being looked for is an object that can be taken in or out.”