Living Witness(108)

Annie-Vic made her mind stop. Alice McGuffie. There was something about Alice McGuffie. On the day that this had happened, she had been thinking about it. Now it was gone, lost because of the condition she was in or lost for no other reason than old age. It didn’t matter why. Alice McGuffie was not just proud of being ignorant, she was also furious at people who weren’t. She wasn’t stupid, that wasn’t the point. She was willfully stupid. Annie-Vic wouldn’t have believed, back all those years ago when she had set off for Poughkeepsie and college, that anybody on earth could be willfully stupid.

The other thing Annie-Vic believed was that too much money wasn’t good for people. She knew that these things were cyclical. There was a short, intense period of wealth-building followed by a longer, less intense period of wealth consolidation. She had learned that in economics in 1936, and she’d brushed up on it since. Periods of wealth building were all about money. New people replaced the old families and all the new people had to distinguish themselves was money, so they spent it. They threw it around. They wore the labels on the outside of their clothes. It was only natural. But it wasn’t good for people, Annie-Vic thought. It really wasn’t. Money was like a drug, if you had to much of it. You couldn’t really say it was a religion. Religions provided explanations, and consolation, and hope. When the world got into those times when money was the only thing that mattered, that was ugly, too, almost as ugly as ignorance.

Gregor Demarkian was walking around the room, looking at her things, looking at the equipment the hospital staff had left. There seemed to be a lot of equipment in the room. Annie-Vic had no idea what it was for, or who had put it here. She had an IV in her arm, which was giving her food and water, in a clear stream of glucose or something. She knew what that was for. As for the rest of it, she didn’t seem to need it. She wasn’t on a breathing machine. She wasn’t on a machine to make her heart beat.

Somebody else came into the room. It took Annie-Vic awhile to realize who it was. It was Lisa. This made her feel immediately better. Annie Vic always liked it best when Lisa was in to visit, although it had to be a mortal bore for the poor girl. Annie-Vic tried to remember what Lisa did with her life, but the information wouldn’t come. She was in college, maybe. That sounded about right. The last thing Annie-Vic wanted was to wake up from this thing and go immediately senile.

Mr. Demarkian and Lisa were talking. There was something about papers and something about the dining room.

“I didn’t look through any of it to begin with,” Lisa was saying. “I’m sorry, Mr. Demarkian. I really do want to help. You have no idea how much I want to help. I don’t understand people like the people who did this. I really don’t.”

Mr. Demarkian said something Annie-Vic couldn’t catch. It was so damned frustrating. Her hearing had been going for years, of course, but she could do well enough if she could just look people in the face.

“I went through every piece of paper that was there,” Lisa said. “I looked at all of them. There was a lot of stuff about a new contract for the teachers. Stuff about the teachers’ union  , and about teacher pensions. There was a lot about textbook requisitions. Not just this new one about Intelligent Design—”

Intelligent Design, Annie Vic thought indignantly. More like moronic idiocy.

“But I don’t know what was there to begin with, if you see what I mean.” Lisa sounded close to tears. “It was all such a mess when I got home after that, after that thing. And I can’t stay there now, of course. Cameron can’t, either. It was never just because it was a crime scene, you know, we just can’t stand the idea of it. But it never occurred to me to look through those papers when I first got there, and I never did. So I just don’t know what’s missing.”

More vague, fuzzy noises from Gregor Demarkian. Annie-Vic wanted to hit something. Here she had a Great Detective right in the room with her, right in Snow Hill, and she’d bet the only person in town getting any use out of him was Nick Frapp.

Here was something else Annie-Vic believed. You had to treat human beings like human beings. You couldn’t rope off one whole segment of humanity and declare that they were too addled to know their own minds or too malevolent to be let loose with a printing press. That was what Franklin Hale did to people, and it was what Henry Wackford did to people, too. They were practically Siamese twins, those two. They just had different vocabularies to describe what they were doing. Annie-Vic had lived through the age of totalitarianism. She knew what a totalitarian looked like when she saw one.