Catherine rubbed her fingers against her forehead. She was getting the kind of headache that was going to last all day.
“I wish,” she said, “that every single one of you went to Nick Frapp’s church.”
“Reverend Frapp is an admirable man,” Tom said seriously, “but I don’t completely agree with him on all points of faith.”
“I don’t agree with him on any,” Catherine said, “but he’s got more sense than to work his people up like this. I take it your pastor has been lecturing you all on Godless evolution at Wednesday night prayer meeting.”
“There were never any murders in Snow Hill before,” Tom said, suddenly eager. “You have to see that, Miss Marbledale. Snow Hill has been here since before the Civil War, and in all that time, I’ll bet there hasn’t been a single other murder like these we’ve got now.”
“People kill each other in Snow Hill,” Catherine said. “They don’t do a lot of it, but they do do it.”
“Not like this,” Tom insisted, and now the rest of the students were out of the circle and crowding around, listening. “People killed each other, sure, but it was mostly stupid stuff. Because they got too drunk or they got really angry and couldn’t control themselves. But this is different. You know it is. This is—this is on purpose.”
“It’s the start of something bad,” another student said.
Catherine looked around and saw that this was Brittany Morse. She was fairly sure that Brittany did not date Tom. She looked around the circle. The faces, except for Barbie McGuffie’s, all belonged to students who did not usually cause trouble, and that made her uneasy.
“It’s cold,” she said again. “Come back inside. You can pray in a classroom if you want to, just as long as you’re quiet.”
“We want to lead a prayer over the intercom,” Tom said. “It doesn’t have to be an actual prayer. We could lead a moment of silence.”
“You know you can’t do that,” Catherine said. “That’s not part of the agreement.”
Behind her, another bus pulled up. She turned instinctively to see which one it was, and it was the number 8. When the bus had gone again, she saw that the kids who had piled out were all wearing little ribbons on their shirts, but instead of being yellow for the troops or pink for breast cancer, they were red, white, and blue. She turned back to Tom and saw that he had one, too. They all did, all the students in the circle.
“What is this?” she asked them. “What’s going on here?”
“The agreement isn’t acceptable anymore,” Tom said. “We’ve all been talking about it for months, now, but after yesterday we knew we couldn’t go on with it. We should never have made the agreement to begin with. When you remove the Lord from your life, you bring sorrow on your house.”
“Nobody’s removing the Lord from your life,” Catherine said. “And the agreement wasn’t my idea. It’s what the lawyers came up with when they reviewed the case law on religion in public schools. You must know that.”
“The agreement isn’t acceptable anymore,” Tom said again. “It’s time we took back our school, and took back our town, and took back our lives. And you can’t stop us if we don’t want to let you.”
He turned around and nodded, and suddenly all the students were on the move, across the asphalt drive, across the sidewalk, and through the big plate-glass doors. That was when Catherine realized there were a lot more of them than she had first thought. There were the students from the circle, and the students from bus number 8, but there were others, maybe sixty or more, all wearing those red, white, and blue ribbons.
“Damn,” she thought.
And then she ran for the doors herself.
FIVE
1
The most important thing was to go to the hospital to see Annie-Vic, and to that end Gregor piled the bits and pieces of paper he’d started to write on into a manila file folder, put the folder in a manila envelope, and went looking for Eddie Block. He couldn’t remember how long it had been since he’d gone about working like that. Even in his last five or so years at the Bureau, he hadn’t resorted to the bits and pieces of paper, and in the years he had, his superiors had generally hated the idea. But then, everything about this case, from the beginning, had been an exercise in déjà vu, and he didn’t even believe in déjà vu. Maybe it was his time of life, or maybe the wedding coming up. For whatever reason, he had been living the last several days in a time-traveling cloud, and he didn’t much like it.