Living Witness(102)

Still, there were times when he wished he could drive instead of be driven, because there were times when being driven meant losing all sense of where things were and how far they were from each other. When Gary Albright went into the police station, Gregor stayed in the small back parking lot and looked around. Then he went out to Main Street and looked at that. Then he took his notebook out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket and looked at that. The problem with small towns was that they were, very often, not really small. When people said “small,” what they really meant was “only lightly populated.” It was the lack of people they noticed, not the physical size of the place. Gregor had been in “small towns” in Kansas and Nebraska whose square footage would overwhelm places like Los Angeles and New York, at least if you stuck strictly to the city limits. That was because of the farms. People had farms out there that felt as large as some small countries, but there were very few people on them.

Gregor didn’t think there were farms of that kind anywhere near Snow Hill. The landscape was wrong, for one thing. For farming on the scale of the American Midwest, you needed a lot of flat, and not much about Snow Hill was flat. Still, he had no idea what the physical size of the town was, or what people thought of as “walking distance.” People seemed to come and go, back and forth, up and down, and Gregor had no sense of what that meant in terms of time, or of effort. It was one thing to go up to Annie-Vic’s house on foot when it was a distance you would walk on any stray day. It was something else to go up there if it took an extra expenditure of effort to make the trip. There was that, and there was the question of cars. It seemed to Gregor, given what people had told him about the things they’d done over the last few weeks, that at least some of the people from “the development” went everywhere in cars. He thought that the people who were really local, deep local, probably did not. It was very hard to work out.

He looked to his left. Nick Frapp’s church was down there, on the end and a little tilted, so that that end of Main Street was almost like a cul de sac. On his right, up about a block and a half, there was the Snow Hill Diner, where the infamous Alice McGuffie held sway on most days. Another block and a half or farther in that direction, the road began to make its way out of town. But Gregor thought, from what he remembered about the drive to Gary’s the night before, there were more houses before “town” ended.

He was thoroughly exasperated with himself. He went to his right, looking back and forth, at the store fronts, at the very few street signs, at the churches. There were churches everywhere, and they were by far the biggest buildings on the street. He checked out the Baptists from across the street. Then he looked through the windows of the Snow Hill Diner. The diner was doing a very good business, probably half full of the people who belonged to the news vans parked up and down the street, still. Gregor was beginning to think of them as fixtures. The diner had those little gingham cafe curtains, on rods that were placed only midway up the glass. Gregor had never understood the attraction of that particular look. He did understand it was supposed to represent something “homey.” Gregor thought of suggesting something to Bennis that took in the idea of homey, and her imagined reaction was so immediate, he almost winced.

He got to the end of Main Street proper, to the end of the stretch where the street was lined with stores on either side. Like the other end, where Nick Frapp’s church was, there was a little slant that made it almost seem as if the street was closed off. It wasn’t, though. It just angled off to the right, and there was a steepish hill. Gregor wondered if it made people claustrophobic to live in a town where the Main Street looked like a closed loop. He imagined that some people found it comforting, as if they were being protected from something.

He stopped where the street angled and looked around. The hill really was steep, but the road beside it had been well plowed and sanded. The only snow was on the bare ground behind the Main Street buildings, and there wasn’t much of it left. He turned around and around and around, trying to place everything in reference to everything else. Then he went back to looking up the hill. The branches on the trees were bare and black, except toward the top of the hill, where there were evergreens. He went a little ways up the angled road and looked to the left. There wasn’t much there, but it wasn’t entirely barren, either. There were houses, older houses mostly. They looked like they might have been built in the twenties, in that last big building boom before the Great Depression. He looked to the right and saw only one house, and that set back from the road.