Living Witness (47 page)

“It's cold,” she said again. “Come back inside. You can pray in a classroom if you want to, just as long as you're quiet.”

“We want to lead a prayer over the intercom,” Tom said. “It doesn't have to be an actual prayer. We could lead a moment of silence.”

“You know you can't do that,” Catherine said. “That's not part of the agreement.”

Behind her, another bus pulled up. She turned instinctively to see which one it was, and it was the number 8. When the bus had gone again, she saw that the kids who had piled out were all wearing little ribbons on their shirts, but instead of being yellow for the troops or pink for breast cancer, they were red, white, and blue. She turned back to Tom and saw that he had one, too. They all did, all the students in the circle.

“What is this?” she asked them. “What's going on here?”

“The agreement isn't acceptable anymore,” Tom said. “We've all been talking about it for months, now, but after yesterday we knew we couldn't go on with it. We should never have made the agreement to begin with. When you remove the Lord from your life, you bring sorrow on your house.”

“Nobody's removing the Lord from your life,” Catherine said. “And the agreement wasn't my idea. It's what the lawyers came up with when they reviewed the case law on religion in public schools. You must know that.”

“The agreement isn't acceptable anymore,” Tom said again. “It's time we took back our school, and took back our town, and took back our lives. And you can't stop us if we don't want to let you.”

He turned around and nodded, and suddenly all the students were on the move, across the asphalt drive, across the sidewalk, and through the big plate-glass doors. That was when Catherine realized there were a lot more of them than she had first thought. There were the students from the circle, and the students from bus number 8, but there were others, maybe sixty or more, all wearing those red, white, and blue ribbons.

“Damn,” she thought.

And then she ran for the doors herself.

 

 

 

The most important thing was to go to the hospital to see Annie-Vic, and to that end Gregor piled the bits and pieces of paper he'd started to write on into a manila file folder, put the folder in a manila envelope, and went looking for Eddie Block. He couldn't remember how long it had been since he'd gone about working like that. Even in his last five or so years at the Bureau, he hadn't resorted to the bits and pieces of paper, and in the years he had, his superiors had generally hated the idea. But then, everything about this case, from the beginning, had been an exercise in déjà vu, and he didn't even believe in déjà vu. Maybe it was his time of life, or maybe the wedding coming up. For whatever reason, he had been living the last several days in a time-traveling cloud, and he didn't much like it.

“It's a mistake,” he told Eddie Block and Gary Albright as they drove out to the hospital, “to think that memory is your friend. We tend to think that way because there's so much we want to remember—friends, people we love, good times we've had. But in reality memory is a trap, and it's especially a trap when you're trying to solve a case.
New cases are not like old cases, no matter how much you think they are. The human element is always different.”

The drive out to the hospital took them through what seemed to Gregor like miles of empty country, empty not only of houses and people but of trees. Who mowed these meadows, stuck in the middle of nowhere, with no houses to watch over them? Somebody must have. If the grass had never been mowed, it would lie much longer in the field, and there would be the beginnings of bushes and trees. The emptiness out here was frightening. Gregor had been in gang-infested neighborhoods in major U.S. cities and had not been as frightened as he was by this. He wondered if he could explain this to Eddie Block or Gary Albright and didn't think he could.

“So what did this case make you think of?” Gary said. “It doesn't make me think of anything. It doesn't make any sense.”

“It made me think of the first kidnapping detail I was ever on,” Gregor said. “We were looking all over for this guy who had kidnaped his daughter, and he turned out to have gone up to the attic of his wife's house and killed himself and the girl up there. We were in the house for days before anybody thought to do a thorough check. It was negligent as Hell.”

“Which is why you made us search Annie-Vic's house after Judy Cornish's body was found,” Eddie said.

“I hope I made you do that because I've learned to follow procedure every single time,” Gregor said. “But that took a long time to learn. And I've let myself be distracted by memory, and then I realized that I had it backward. The murderer wasn't in the attic. The murderer wasn't in the house at all. And that's the point.”

“If that's the point, I'm dead, because I have no idea what it means,” Gary Albright said.

“It doesn't matter,” Gregor said. “I can't prove it yet anyway. I need some more information. I should have that some time this afternoon.”

“And then you'll know who did it?” Gary Albright said.

“I know who did it now,” Gregor said, “but it's like I told you, I can't prove it. And I suppose that, if I'm perfectly honest about it, until I have the information I need, I can only speculate that that information does indeed exist. It's possible that I'll go to my meeting this afternoon and find out that I have it all wrong. That nothing of the kind I'm thinking about ever happened.”

“But you don't think you're wrong,” Gary Albright said. “You think you know who did it.”

“I do indeed.”

“And it isn't one of us?” Gary Albright said. “It isn't somebody trying to get rid of evolution, or anything like that?”

Gregor wanted to chide him for saying “one of us,” as if the parts of Snow Hill that were not Christian did not really belong to him, but that was another discussion. “No,” Gregor said. “It's not somebody trying to get evolution out of the public schools. It's got nothing to do with evolution or Creationism or Intelligent Design. That particular controversy was a gift our murderer had no reason to expect. Because, from what everybody has told me, when Franklin Hale ran for the school board and got his friends to run, he didn't say a single thing about wanting to bring in Intelligent Design.”

“He didn't even say it to me,” Gary said. “I had no idea that that was what he was thinking of. I was floored. He might have told Alice.”

“He might have,” Gregor agreed. “If you're interested to know, we can find out later. But it isn't important to the case. The only thing that is important is the way in which the controversy worked as a blind to let our murderer get away with—well, murder. That, and the fact that the killing of Shelley Niederman was completely gratuitous. I have no way of knowing if she knew what the murderer was afraid she knew, but I do know she didn't know she knew it.”

“How do you know that?” Eddie asked.

“I know because we talked to her, and she didn't tell us anything,” Gregor said. “She was sitting outside the Hadley house in that car, completely distraught, and she couldn't think of a single reason why Judy Cornish would want to go into that house. And I think that if
she had known, she would have said something. She had no reason to shield the murderer, and there was no reason to shield herself, either. She hadn't done anything wrong, and Judy Cornish wasn't doing anything wrong.”

“She could have thought it over and remembered something later,” Gary said.

“She could have,” Gregor agreed. “But that still leaves us in the same place. If she knew something that she knew implicated our murderer, she wouldn't have gone running up to the Hadley house when the murderer called her.”

“
Called
her?” Gary Albright looked stunned. “You mean got her on the phone and asked her—to what exactly?”

“To meet at the Hadley house so that they could talk to the officers on duty,” Gregor said. “Of course, the sensible person to talk to would have been me, but my guess is that the party line was that I couldn't be trusted, because Gary here hired me, and I was obviously on the side of the Creatonists. Because right up to the very end, Shelley Niederman believed that Judy Cornish had been murdered because she didn't want to see Intelligent Design taught in the public schools.”

“Nobody was proposing to teach Intelligent Design in the public schools,” Gary said. “I told you about that, Mr. Demarkian. All that we wanted to do was to put a sticker in every biology textbook that said that not everybody accepts Darwin's theory, and that Intelligent Design is another theory, and that if they want to know more about it they can go to the library and get a book. That was it. And we were going to get the book
Of Pandas and People
and put maybe five of them in the school library for students to check out. Nobody was trying to indoctrinate anybody, except the evolution side is trying just that. They want to force-feed our kids their point of view and ban any other point of view. That's what they want.”

“Exactly,” Eddie Block said.

“The point remains the same,” Gregor said. “Shelley Niederman sincerely believed that she and Judy Cornish and others were being persecuted because they accepted the theory of evolution, and because
they were part of a law suit to forbid the
introduction
of Intelligent Design into the public schools. Is that better?”

“I suppose so,” Gary said. “But you know, Mr. Demarkian, we're not wrong. We didn't want all that much. We weren't asking to actually teach Intelligent Design. We just wanted to acknowledge that there was a different point of view. And they won't even let us have that. Separation of church and state? What is this, anyway, but the establishment of a state church? Their church. The church of evolution, or whatever it is. Dogma decided from on high, and no disagreement allowed or you get burned at the stake for heresy.”

“I don't think anybody is burning anybody at the stake,” Gregor said.

“Look at that,” Eddie Block said. “There's something going on at the hospital.”

 

What was going on at the hospital—or rather, in front of it—was a press conference. Dale Vardan was standing in front of a bank of microphones, the lights from dozens of television cameras pointing straight at his face, and waving a sheaf of paper in the air. Gregor was reminded of old Joe McCarthy, waving his papers and declaring that there were exactly two hundred and fifty-seven card carrying members of the Communist Party in the State Department. Gregor thought Dale Vardan was most likely to be exposing hillbillies, but he got out of the car and tried to listen. He wondered what the hospital was going to do if emergency vehicles started arriving.

“Where is the emergency room, anyway?” Gregor asked Gary. “Isn't he blocking something with all this nonsense?”

“It's around to the side,” Gary said, staring at the microphones. “It's got it's own separate entrance.”

“I am here to announce,” Dale Vardan said, “that we are ready to make an arrest in the murders of Judy Cornish and Shelley Niederman. Earlier this morning, I sent officers to the home of Alice and
Lyman McGuffie, owners of the Snow Hill Diner in Snow Hill, Pennsylvania, where the murders took place. Mrs. McGuffie is a member of the conservative faction of the Snow Hill Board of Education and of the Snow Hill Baptist Church. All of that is public knowledge. What was not known until it was uncovered by our investigation is that Mr. and Mrs. McGuffie are also members of the Sword of God Covenant, a radical religious movement dedicated to bringing the United States of America under the rule of what they call ‘Godly men.' By that they mean members of their own movement. In order to achieve that end, they are also dedicated to destroying any person or persons who oppose them.”

“For God's sake,” Gary said. “What is this idiot talking about?”

“Listen,” Gregor said.

“Mrs. McGuffie was seen both entering and leaving the Hadley house on the day Judy Cornish was killed,” Dale Vardan said. “The house is not far from the Snow Hill Diner, where Mrs. McGuffie was supposed to be at work. Mrs. McGuffie left the diner, walked up a small hill to the Hadley residence, went inside the house and stayed there for some time. Then she came out again and went back to the diner by the same route. We have witnesses to both her going and coming, and witnesses that place her at the house at, or near the time, of the murder.”

“Do you have the murder weapon?” one of the reporters in the crowd called up.

“No,” Dale Vardan said. “We do not have the murder weapon as of yet, but we're confident that we're going to find it. I have men searching the Hadley residence, the McGuffie residence, and the diner. We think the most likely place for it to be is in the Hadley residence, since none of our witnesses saw her carrying it.”

“Hasn't the Hadley residence already been searched?” another reporter asked.

Dale Vardan looked smug. “A cursory search of the premises was done on the day of the murder under the direction of the local police,” he said. “But the search was inadequate, and no useful evidence
was found. I am now personally heading up the investigation into these crimes, and we are making rapid progress.”

“What about Gregor Demarkian?” yet another reporter said.

“I have no information on what, if anything, Mr. Demarkian is doing. He is not assisting me or my men and was not a part of this morning's arrest.”

Up until then, Gregor hadn't been sure that Dale Vardan had spotted him. Now Dale looked directly at him and smiled, and Gregor sighed. The only thing he wanted, absolutely, was to get into that hospital without being swarmed by reporters, and he knew it wasn't going to be possible. Dale Vardan was going to make sure it wasn't possible.