“Only that Catholics have no trouble accepting evolution, because they’ve never taken the Bible to be literally true,” Bennis said. “Apparently, that’s a Protestant thing. She gave me some stuff to give you to read and I put it on your night table. Do you want me to send it to you?”
“No, not really, not now,” Gregor said. “I still wish I understood all this, but I’ve got two murders and an attempted murder on my hands at the moment, so I’ll let it wait. I wish I understood people better than I do.”
“You understand people better than most people do,” Bennis said.
“Which doesn’t bode well for the human race,” Gregor told her. “Never mind. I have an early dinner meeting, except it isn’t going to be so early by the time I get there. And what’s worse, there’s only one place in town to eat, it’s owned by a suspect, and she hates me. Of course, she seems to hate practically everybody, so it’s probably nothing personal.”
“Maybe I ought to come out there and keep you company.”
“If you do, Donna and a bunch of Armenian-American women are going to come with you, and I think I’d go crazy. I’ll talk to you later. I’ve got to go eat a greasy hamburger on a cardboard bun. Let me tell you, it’s not true that these little diners are going out of business because McDonald’s is underselling them. It’s because their food tastes like this.”
He flipped the phone shut and put it in his pocket. He was actually standing just outside the Snow Hill Diner. On any other day, he would probably have gone inside to sit down before calling Bennis. On this day he was just tired, and tired of being out in the sticks. He was not a small-town person. He didn’t find such towns friendly, and he didn’t find them comforting. In his experience, the smaller the town, the more likely it was to be a hotbed of intrigue and resentment. And resentment was the word for what was going on at the Snow Hill Diner and in Alice McGuffie’s head.
Gregor looked through the window, past the half curtains and the gold-stenciled lettering. Molly Trask and Evan Zwicker were already sitting in a booth at the back, waiting for him.
Gregor went inside. There was no hostess, as there was at the Ararat back home, and no procedure for seating except to let you seat yourself. There were plastic yellow ribbon magnets reading SUPPORT OUR TROOPS here and there, a few American flag posters, and a big poster of a gigantic bald eagle right over the counter. The bald eagle looked either constipated or angry. It was hard to tell which.
Gregor made his way to the back and sat down across from the two agents-in-place. They both looked thoroughly bored.
“Good evening, Mr. Demarkian,” Evan Zwicker said. “We were just talking about your latest murder.”
“We were talking about whether or not there really was some kind of domestic terrorism going on,” Molly said. “You know, when you brought that up when we first met you, I thought you were being silly.”
“I was guessing, that’s all,” Gregor said, as a girl came over with an order pad. When he looked a second time, he realized she wasn’t a girl. She was a middle-aged woman and she looked exhausted. “I’ll have a cup of coffee to start, and then I’ll look at the menu,” he said.
The woman went away without a word. Gregor wondered what she went back to when she left the diner for the night. Then he wondered which side of the evolution/Intelligent Design debate she was on, or if she even knew there was a debate.
“If it makes you feel any better,” he said. “I’m now close to certain that there’s no domestic terrorism, or any kind of terrorism, happening here. I think what we have is a plain old-fashioned murder, for plain old-fashioned motives.”
“I don’t know,” Evan said. “I was beginning to think things were looking up. At least domestic terrorism would give us something to do. I don’t think we’ve ever been so bored.”
“Well,” Gregor said, “you could always tell Kevin O’Connor that I thought there was a good possibility of domestic terrorism. In fact, I’d appreciate it if you would say that, because I need you to do something for me. This place simply doesn’t have the resources to do the kind of investigation I need. And I don’t have them, either.”
“What do you need?” Molly asked.
Gregor reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and came out with a folded piece of paper. He had written it carefully when he was still in Annie-Vic’s house. He had wanted to make sure to get all the spelling right. He pushed the paper across the table.
“I want you to find out as much as you can about those three things,” he said. “Specifically, I want to know everything I can about how those three things are connected to the Snow Hill Board of Education.”