Living Witness(131)
“You must.”
Gary shook his head. “No, Mr. Demarkian. I didn’t do it because I loved the dog. I did it because I was responsible for the dog. And for the girl, you know, she was just a baby. And nobody had taken any responsibility for her yet. Nobody. It’s the thing you learn in the Marine Corps, except I learned it before then. I learned it from my family. Responsibility is the key. Or have I given you this speech before?”
“I think you might have mentioned it,” Gregor said.
“Yeah, I mention it a lot,” Gary said. “Michael told me it’s become my ‘mantra,’ which is a thing from Hinduism. I don’t understand where we’ve gotten to these days, when they can teach Hinduism in the public schools but they can’t even mention anything to do with Christianity. We can’t even sing Christmas carols at Christmas, and Henry Wackford tried to tell us we should rename Christmas vacation ‘winter break’ in case somebody tried to sue us. Winter break, when practically everybody in town except Henry himself celebrates Christmas. Even some of the Jewish families get Christmas trees and they don’t seem to have any trouble saying ‘Merry Christmas’ when they pass you on the street. But that’s Henry for you. If it was Christians getting killed instead of the evolution people, I’d have said Henry was your best bet for a serial murderer.”
“Do you mean he’s a psychopath?” Gregor asked.
“Nah, I don’t think so,” Gary said. “I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him, mind you, but I don’t think he’s Jack the Ripper. It’s just that he’s seriously pissed. He’s pissed because the board is so obviously Christian. Henry doesn’t like Christianity. He thinks it’s the root of all evil. But he’s pissed because he lost at all, to begin with, and he’s pissed because he’s no longer lawyer for the school board.”
“This is Henry Wackford who used to be the chairman of the school board?” Gregor asked, surprised.
“Right,” Gary said. “And you don’t even have to bring it up. It was an incredible conflict of interest. But Henry was chairman of the school board and the school board had to hire a lawyer and he hired himself and he went on with it for ten years. During which time, by the way, there was nothing for him to do but collect his yearly retainer. Now that there is something for a lawyer to do, we have a firm from up in Harrisburg. We all thought we’d better get somebody who knew how to handle a federal lawsuit.”
“Henry Wackford,” Gregor said.
They were coming around to the front of the building. Gregor looked up the street. The were lights on deep within the offices of Wackford Squeers, Attorneys at Law, but they weren’t just safety lights.
Somebody had to be already in place at Henry Wackford’s office.
FOUR
1
Christine had been gone for less than twenty-four hours, and Henry Wackford’s life was already a mess. Not that he actually needed Christine, meaning Christine herself. In fact, she was one of the most annoying aspects of living in Snow Hill. She had that thing they all had, that thing Henry had gone away to college to get away from. It wasn’t just that she was religious. No. Henry thought he could work up some respect for seriously religious people. Thomas Aquinas, say, or Bonaventure—the Middle Ages were full of religious people who were intelligent and thoughtful and attuned to complexity. Maybe that was only possible before science got seriously into gear and started explaining the universe. Henry didn’t know. He only knew that religion in Snow Hill was straight off a Hallmark card, full of fuzzy feel-good niceness and floating around in a sea of love and angels. Henry would have hired a fellow atheist to be his secretary if he could have, but he hadn’t been able to find one of those. Christine had shown up at the door with her little gold cross on its little gold chain around her neck, and she knew how to operate the computer and had a fair idea of what was supposed to happen with a filing system, and he’d taken her.
Now he looked around the office and there were files everywhere. Either Christine knew better how to handle a filing system, or she had changed the one he had, and Henry was sure it was the latter. He was not an idiot, and he had nothing but contempt for those Hollywood movies about how the secretary moves out and the boss can’t wipe his own ass without her help. He was not an idiot, and in the long three weeks he’d been without a secretary before Christine, he’d managed just fine.
He sat down behind his desk and looked at the stack of folders. He had been through them once. He would go through them twice. The folder he was looking for should be labeled Books to Print, and it belonged in the B cabinet in alphabetical order with everything else that was there. He was now more than sure that that file was not in the filing cabinet. Christine had either misfiled it, or relabeled it and filed it somewhere else, or lost it, or something.