“Come on,” Gary said, feeling desperate now.
“Just a minute,” Gregor Demarkian said.
Gary still had his hand on Franklin’s arm. He kept it there. He had never seen Franklin be violent, not even with Marcey, but there was always a first time. Gary didn’t like the way Franklin looked. It was almost as if Franklin had a fever.
“Just a minute,” Gregor Demarkian said again. “Just let me ask you a couple of things.”
“Ask away,” Franklin said. “I don’t have anything to hide. I’m not even hiding that my wife is addicted to that Oxycontin stuff. Everybody knows it. That’s the virtue of small towns, Mr. Demarkian. There’s nothing to hide. Everybody knows your business.”
“It’s the accounts,” Gregor Demarkian said. “I’ve got notes on three accounts. The teachers’ union pension fund. The operating budget for the school. And the construction money, the money to put up the new schools complex.”
“That was bullshit,” Franklin said. “New schools complex, like we needed one. That’s all these people can think of. Kids aren’t learning anything in school, throw some money at it, throw all the money in the world at it. Maybe they’re depressed because the don’t have a new school. Maybe the teachers need higher salaries. Let me tell you, we had better teachers than they have now and we didn’t pay them anything to speak of. What’s a teacher, anyway? She’s a babysitter most of the time. What’s Catherine Marbledale but a stuck-up bitch who thinks she’s better than everybody else because she went to college. She didn’t even go to real college. She went to education school. Education school. Isn’t that a crock?”
“So you were going to do what,” Gregor Demarkian said, “stop the construction?”
“Hell, no,” Franklin said. “We would have if we could have, but it would just have been money down the drain, millions of dollars. Do you think a place like Snow Hill has millions of dollars? We don’t, that’s the truth, and just raising taxes isn’t going to get it for us. Although I’d really like it if the town council raised the taxes on those people in the development. God, I hate those people. Coming in here and swanning around like they owned the place. I’m not surprised a couple of them got killed.”
Gary nearly jumped out of his skin. “Franklin,” he said. “You can’t say things like that in the middle of a murder investigation.”
“It’s all right,” Gregor Demarkian said. “I’m just trying to figure this out. You went ahead with the construction?”
“Yeah, we’re going ahead with the construction,” Franklin said. “In the spring, when the weather gets better, we’re going ahead with it. It’s not important, it’s just stupid. I concentrate on the important things. I concentrate on saving our schools, because they have to be saved. They have to be.”
Gary moved his hand to Franklin’s back. This was something he’d seen before, too. “I think I’d better take him home, Mr. Demarkian. He looks—I don’t know exactly—but he’s been this way before.”
“I’m just trying to understand,” Gregor said again. “There’s nothing happening with the construction now? There’s nothing being done on the site?”
“No,” Gary said, because Franklin seemed to have lost interest in the discussion. He was looking around the “office.” He was looking vague, and vaguely lost. “There’s nothing that can be done, with the weather the way it is. If the shell was closed up, maybe, but it isn’t. They’ve been going at it for years and the shell still isn’t closed up. Is that what you wanted to know?”
“Well, there are the other two things, “ Gregor Demarkian said. “The teachers’ contracts and their pension fund, and the school operating expenses.”
“We don’t do anything with the pension fund,” Gary said. “We contribute to a fund the union has, that’s all. And the school operating expenses should be the easiest thing to figure out. We publish a balance sheet in the newspaper every quarter.”
“That’s not what’s important,” Franklin Hale said. “Everybody goes running around worrying about the construction, and the teachers’ contracts, and are we going to have textbooks and are we going to have supplies. None of it matters. We’ve taken God out of the schools, that’s what we’ve done, we’re raising a whole generation of kids who don’t know the Lord. And if we go on this way, Mr. Demarkian, if we go on this way, the Enemy will have won. That’s what the Bible says. We have to watch out for the Enemy because he’s prowling around us like a hungry lion. He’s prowling around us, and if we let down our guard for a minute, he’ll be right here inside the house. Evolution, my ass. Atheism, that’s all it is. They want to turn our kids into atheists. And I won’t let them.”