When they arrived back in town, the place was insane. The reporters and their mobile news vans had come back from Dale Vardan’s press conference—and why had he held it in front of the hospital, anyway? Even if he wanted to highlight the fact that Annie-Vic was awake, he didn’t have to go all the way out there to do it. The vans were now parked close to the Snow Hill Diner, which had a big closed sign hanging in its window. Gregor could see faces behind the glass nevertheless. They were probably employees, caught short by the news that the McGuffies had been arrested.
Eddie Block parked the car behind the station and Tom Fordman came out, looking harassed.
“It’s like some kind of riot,” he said. “It’s unbelievable.”
“We saw Mr. Vardan’s press conference,” Gregor said.
“I saw it too,” Tom Vardan said. “They carried it live on CNN. Alice and Lyman killed those two women at the development? Is that supposed to make sense to me?”
“When did they arrest them?” Gregor asked.
“It couldn’t have been half an hour ago,” Tom said, “and you should have seen it. They practically sent a SWAT team. Bunch of state police cars pulled up in front of the diner and about twelve guys got out and went in with their guns drawn. It was like a military operation. The next thing you know, they’re hauling Alice and Lyman out in handcuffs and Alice is completely hysterical. She’s screaming and pulling. She’s got her hands cuffed behind her back, so she can’t punch anybody, but she bit an officer—”
“Bit him?” Gregor asked. “How the Hell—”
“It was a her,” Tom Fordman said. “The officer, I mean. And I don’t know how. She wasn’t careful enough and Alice bit her, and then all Hell broke loose. It was like a television show or a movie, maybe. I’m not making much sense myself.”
They all went into the back door of the station together, and as soon as they did Gregor could hear the noise. There were people in the big outer office, lots of them, and most of them sounded angry. Gregor, Gary, Eddie, and Tom came around the corner in the corridor that led to the front of the station and Gregor saw them: some reporters, lots of ordinary people. One of the ordinary people was a pastor of some kind. He was wearing a clerical collar.
“This is outrageous,” the man in the clerical collar was saying. “This is completely unacceptable. Alice and Lyman McGuffie are two of the finest, most God-fearing citizens of this town, and the idea that either one of them ever killed anybody is completely absurd.”
There was a young woman behind the counter, looking embattled, but it wasn’t Tina from a couple of days before. She saw Gregor and Gary and the others come in and rushed over to them, looking frazzled.
“There’s something else that’s just come in,” she said, grabbing Gary’s arm and trying to whisper, but whispering was hard. There was so much noise that real whispering wasn’t going to work, but raising her voice meant risking the possibility that the people on the other side of the counter would hear her, and Gregor thought it was obvious she didn’t want that.
“We’ve got another problem,” she said, leaning as close to Gary’s ear as she could. “I’ve just had a call from Miss Marbledale. There’s trouble up at the school.”
“What kind of trouble?” Gary asked.
“Some kind of sit-in,” she said. She looked confused. “What’s a sitin, exactly? It sounds like a kind of riot, but that doesn’t make any sense. Miss Marbledale says that Tim Radnor and a lot of other students are in the office and they won’t let her or anybody else in and they’re using the intercom. It doesn’t make any sense. I mean, Tim Radnor?”
“I’ll go up there,” Eddie said.
“You’d better take Tom with you,” Gary said. Then he put his head in his hands. “I can’t believe this,” he said. “I really can’t believe this.”
The young woman shook her head. “I really can’t believe it, either,” she said. “But there’s more. There are two people in Mr. Demarkian’s office who say they’re from the FBI and they’ve got an appointment, except it was supposed to be in the diner and now they can’t go there. I’m sorry if I did the wrong thing, but I just couldn’t think of anything else to do with them.”
“It’s all right,” Gregor said. “I’ll let you people work on the sit-in and go talk to them.”
“This is outrageous,” the pastor said again. “This is religious persecution, that’s what this is, and you’re not going to get away with it. We’re going to sue. We’re going to take it all the way to the Supreme Court.”