Living Witness(106)

She felt a small rivulet of sweat go down the back of her neck, in spite of the fact that the kitchen wasn’t really warm yet. Barbie was staying home from school today. Alice thought that the Cornish children probably were, too. She couldn’t imagine what it was like being the Cornish children. She didn’t believe it when people said they just didn’t believe in God, or the afterlife, or judgment. She was sure they knew, deep down there somewhere, that God was real and that the way they were living meant they would spend eternity in horror. What must it be like to be the Cornish children, knowing all the time that your mother had been condemned to Hell, that she was down there somewhere burning, and that the best you could hope for is that you would never see her again?

By the time Gregor Demarkian came into the diner, Alice had passed through the phase of thinking about Judy Cornish in Hell, and was thinking about the writer of the anonymous letter burning in Hell. It was a wicked thing to write anonymous notes, and it was dangerous, too. She was a good Christian woman. She was just going to sweat about it for a while. Send a note like that to somebody who really was a criminal, though, and you had no idea what you’d get: a knife in the back? An ambush on the way home from work or school? A little drop of poison in your coffee?

Gregor Demarkian was taller than Alice had expected him to be. He had one of those names that usually belonged to small dark people, not black but dark, square little men with hair that looked oiled. Gregor Demarkian’s hair didn’t look oiled, and he was taller than anybody Alice had ever seen except Nick Frapp. She wiped the palms of her hands on her apron. She ought to go home today and rest and look after Barbie. She wasn’t feeling well. If it wasn’t for the fact that that Connie Sutpen hadn’t shown up again, she would just tell Lyman and leave.

Gregor Demarkian sat down at the counter. Alice took a deep breath. Of course he would sit down at the counter. He belonged in a booth, that man did. He wasn’t a trucker, and he wasn’t trying to pretend to be a trucker like these television people. It was the truckers who sat at the counter, or the regulars. Or at least it had been, until all this fuss had started.

Gregor Demarkian was talking to the man next to him. This was one of the television people, not anybody Alice knew, although she’d seen him in here half a dozen times in the past week. She put her hand in her apron pocket and fiddled with the anonymous note. It was odd how things went. You’d think you know everything, absolutely everything, about everyone in town, you’d think you know what their handwriting is like, but she couldn’t make this out at all. Maybe it was one of the television people who had sent it. Maybe it was one of the people from the development. The trouble with that was that they would have no way of knowing that she had a cubby back there, with her name on it. People from outside would have put it in an envelope in her mailbox or something like that.

Alice got the coffee pot and headed over to where Demarkian was sitting.

“My reporter would wet her pants if you let her have an interview,” the television man was saying. “Especially now. Even with a murder, we’ve just been hanging out around here spinning our wheels.”

“No signs of violence by the forces of the religious right?” Gregor Demarkian asked.

“If you ask me, the forces of the religious right mostly want to get on camera and fulminate,” the television man said. “But nobody listens to me. The network wants coverage of the trial; it thinks we have to be here before anything happens, so here we are. We interviewed that Reverend Frapp the other day. It fell absolutely flat. No snake handling, no drinking poison, and a guy who can quote Seneca in Latin.”

The coffee pot was full. All the coffee pots were kept as full as possible at this time of the morning. Alice put her free hand around the side of it. It was hot, but not so hot she was in danger of being burned. She walked over to the two men and reached for Gregor Demarkian’s still-overturned coffee cup. The counter was set with coffee cups turned upside down on saucers, and paper placemats with a picture of the American flag on them, and paper napkins with forks and spoons and knives holding them down.

“Can I get you anything?” Alice said.

Gregor Demarkian looked up at her. She hated his eyes. He had eyes like black marbles.

“Are you Mrs. McGuffie?” he asked.

“Yes, of course I’m Mrs. McGuffie,” she said. She knew she sounded rude, but she really didn’t care. She really didn’t. Who were these people, anyway? They didn’t belong here. They’d be gone as soon as this trial was over. The only difference between Gregor Demarkian and the television people was that he’d probably try to pin that murder on a good Christian just to make the Christians in town look bad.