Living Witness(104)

Henry reminded himself that he was in favor of small, independent outfits of any kind and against their corporate behemoth competitors—at least in principle—and tried to concentrate on what Christine was saying. She had been on at him all morning, and he still couldn’t figure it out. Part of that was the fact that he was more than a little distracted. This murder—this murder. He had a hard time putting it into words in his head. There were events that changed the world. This wasn’t anything so momentous, but it might be. It might be. It might change his world, and for the moment he thought that was enough.

Christine was hovering around his doorway. She looked reluctant to come in, at the same time that she had that mulish expression on her face that said she refused to go out. You work with people for years and you don’t really know them, Henry thought, but he was convinced he knew Christine. The gold cross around the neck. The little gold stud earrings. The Sunday mornings helping out in the Sunday School over at the Baptist Church. The fiancé stashed in the background somewhere, who would learn to keep his hands to himself except on one or two occasions when neither of them could help it, because sexual repression brought sexual explosion, and then she’d end up pregnant five months before the wedding.

At the moment, she wasn’t pregnant. She was just standing there. She had a file in her hand, Henry had no idea what it was for. He was still standing at the window. Maybe Gregor Demarkian had gone in to the diner to grill Alice McGuffie. He wished to Hell he had that one on videotape.

“Mr. Wackford,” Christine said.

“Gregor Demarkian just went into the diner,” Henry Wackford said. “Has he talked to you yet? He’ll be talking to everybody in town. That’s how these people work. Maybe I’ll go over there and see if I can talk to him myself.”

“Mr. Wackford,” Christine said.

Henry forced himself away from the window. God, it was impossible, living in this place. People had no sense of occasion. They had no sense of the immensity of the world outside their little plastic prison. He wished he’d never come back to town to practice. He wished he’d never seen Snow Hill in the first place.

He made himself sit down behind his desk. He put his hands flat against the felt blotter. He looked up. This was the way bosses and secretaries were supposed to interact. Maybe it would allow her to say whatever she needed to and get it over with.

“Well,” he said. “Do I have an appointment, is that it?”

Christine took a deep breath. “You do not have an appointment,” she said. “There are some people who want to see you, from Fox News, I think—”

“Fox?” Henry was interested. “I always said if I ever got the chance, I’d refuse to talk to Fox, but that could be counterproductive. They’ve got the best ratings of all the cable news organizations, and they reach the enemy. And I think I may have talked to them the other day, I don’t remember. But that was off-the-cuff stuff, not a real interview. We could be making history here, Christine. Do you realize that?”

“I don’t want to make history,” Christine said. “I want to do my job every day and go home at night and have nothing on my conscience. And I can’t do that here. I can’t do that when you’re trying to get God out of the United States government and out of the schools and take away the right to free speech from every Christian.”

Henry’s chair was one of those tilting, swivelled ones—not the new kind made for computers—the old kind. It had been made for his father, out of good mahogany wood, and it had arms like the arms of a captain’s chair on a particularly expensive cruise ship.

“God has nothing to do with the United States government,” he said. “If you’d ever believed He did, you should have been disabused of the notion by the administration of George W. Bush.”

“And there’s that,” Christine said. “Why do you have to insult the President of the United States. He’s the President. We’re supposed to respect the President.”

“It would take a tree sloth to respect George W. Bush,” Henry said, “and he’s not the President any more. He’s been out of office for months. Did you really come in here to talk to me about George W. Bush?”

“I came in here to quit,” Christine said. “I’ve been trying to do it for days, but you never let me get a word in edgeways.”

“You mean you’re giving me notice?” Henry was flabbergasted. “How can you do that? There’s a pile of work out there. Somebody has to do it. If you think you’re going to be able to bring a new girl up to speed in two weeks, or even find somebody who can replace you in two weeks—”