“She could have thought it over and remembered something later,” Gary said.
“She could have,” Gregor agreed. “But that still leaves us in the same place. If she knew something that she knew implicated our murderer, she wouldn’t have gone running up to the Hadley house when the murderer called her.”
“Called her?” Gary Albright looked stunned. “You mean got her on the phone and asked her—to what exactly?”
“To meet at the Hadley house so that they could talk to the officers on duty,” Gregor said. “Of course, the sensible person to talk to would have been me, but my guess is that the party line was that I couldn’t be trusted, because Gary here hired me, and I was obviously on the side of the Creatonists. Because right up to the very end, Shelley Niederman believed that Judy Cornish had been murdered because she didn’t want to see Intelligent Design taught in the public schools.”
“Nobody was proposing to teach Intelligent Design in the public schools,” Gary said. “I told you about that, Mr. Demarkian. All that we wanted to do was to put a sticker in every biology textbook that said that not everybody accepts Darwin’s theory, and that Intelligent Design is another theory, and that if they want to know more about it they can go to the library and get a book. That was it. And we were going to get the book Of Pandas and People and put maybe five of them in the school library for students to check out. Nobody was trying to indoctrinate anybody, except the evolution side is trying just that. They want to force-feed our kids their point of view and ban any other point of view. That’s what they want.”
“Exactly,” Eddie Block said.
“The point remains the same,” Gregor said. “Shelley Niederman sincerely believed that she and Judy Cornish and others were being persecuted because they accepted the theory of evolution, and because they were part of a law suit to forbid the introduction of Intelligent Design into the public schools. Is that better?”
“I suppose so,” Gary said. “But you know, Mr. Demarkian, we’re not wrong. We didn’t want all that much. We weren’t asking to actually teach Intelligent Design. We just wanted to acknowledge that there was a different point of view. And they won’t even let us have that. Separation of church and state? What is this, anyway, but the establishment of a state church? Their church. The church of evolution, or whatever it is. Dogma decided from on high, and no disagreement allowed or you get burned at the stake for heresy.”
“I don’t think anybody is burning anybody at the stake,” Gregor said.
“Look at that,” Eddie Block said. “There’s something going on at the hospital.”
2
What was going on at the hospital—or rather, in front of it—was a press conference. Dale Vardan was standing in front of a bank of microphones, the lights from dozens of television cameras pointing straight at his face, and waving a sheaf of paper in the air. Gregor was reminded of old Joe McCarthy, waving his papers and declaring that there were exactly two hundred and fifty-seven card carrying members of the Communist Party in the State Department. Gregor thought Dale Vardan was most likely to be exposing hillbillies, but he got out of the car and tried to listen. He wondered what the hospital was going to do if emergency vehicles started arriving.
“Where is the emergency room, anyway?” Gregor asked Gary. “Isn’t he blocking something with all this nonsense?”
“It’s around to the side,” Gary said, staring at the microphones. “It’s got it’s own separate entrance.”
“I am here to announce,” Dale Vardan said, “that we are ready to make an arrest in the murders of Judy Cornish and Shelley Niederman. Earlier this morning, I sent officers to the home of Alice and Lyman McGuffie, owners of the Snow Hill Diner in Snow Hill, Pennsylvania, where the murders took place. Mrs. McGuffie is a member of the conservative faction of the Snow Hill Board of Education and of the Snow Hill Baptist Church. All of that is public knowledge. What was not known until it was uncovered by our investigation is that Mr. and Mrs. McGuffie are also members of the Sword of God Covenant, a radical religious movement dedicated to bringing the United States of America under the rule of what they call ‘Godly men.’ By that they mean members of their own movement. In order to achieve that end, they are also dedicated to destroying any person or persons who oppose them.”
“For God’s sake,” Gary said. “What is this idiot talking about?”
“Listen,” Gregor said.
“Mrs. McGuffie was seen both entering and leaving the Hadley house on the day Judy Cornish was killed,” Dale Vardan said. “The house is not far from the Snow Hill Diner, where Mrs. McGuffie was supposed to be at work. Mrs. McGuffie left the diner, walked up a small hill to the Hadley residence, went inside the house and stayed there for some time. Then she came out again and went back to the diner by the same route. We have witnesses to both her going and coming, and witnesses that place her at the house at, or near the time, of the murder.”