Living Witness(142)

“And who owns it?” Gregor said, scanning down the page.

Then he saw it. Right there, next to the word ownership, was not one name, but two.

Catherine and Margaret Marbledale.





SIX





1




Somewhere along the way, somebody had put a needle in her arm. That was the last thing Alice McGuffie remembered at all clearly, and it was pickled in emotion. Everything was emotion. Somewhere underneath this haze they had put her in was what she felt, and what she felt was hot and red and angry, where it wasn’t scared to death. She hated that man, that Dale Vardan. She had always hated him, and everybody in town hated him, too. She had been waiting for years for the secular humanists to come for her. All across the nation, the secular humanists were making martyrs out of good Christian people, and they were doing it right here in America, which had been founded as a Christian nation and meant to be a City on a Hill. Alice could not, for the life of her, remember what the phrase “City on a Hill” actually meant. She’d heard it a million times in church over the years, but the truth about church was that she just didn’t pay that much attention to the sermons. It was hard to keep your mind on anything that went on and on like that. The pastor liked to quote from people, too. They were always people Alice knew she was supposed to recognize, but almost never did—Plato, Aristotle. It made no sense to her to bring up people like that in church. They had “never had the chance to hear the Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ.” The pastor said that. The two guest pastors they had had over the past year said the same thing. What good were they, then? For the Christian, Christ was all in all. The pastor said that too. Alice didn’t see why they needed to know about these people who had lived a long time ago and who hadn’t believed in Christ and who had said things that sounded crazy and stupid. Maybe there were secular humanists back there, too. Maybe they roamed the countryside like a lion waiting to devour you. The words were all getting mixed up in her head. She couldn’t make herself concentrate. She had never been able to make herself concentrate. Maybe that was the problem.

She was lying in a cell in the county jail; that much she knew. She did not know what had happened to Barbie. Barbie was back at school when all this had happened. Did Barbie even know this had happened? She must, by now. She must be home alone, or maybe social workers had come and taken her away. Social workers were what Alice McGuffie feared most after secular humanists, but she thought that a lot of social workers were secular humanists as well. It was unbelievable, the way the secular humanists had managed to get themselves into all the nooks and crannies of government. They had managed to get the law on their side. They had managed to get the courts. Maybe the social workers would take Barbie and claim she was being “emotionally abused.” That’s what they called it when a child was being raised in a Christian home. Christianity itself was “abuse,” and if you could claim “abuse” you could kidnap the child and take her way somewhere, where all that Christianity could be trained out of her. Maybe the social workers would claim that Alice could no longer “provide a safe space” for Barbie, because she couldn’t provide a safe space for anybody, because she was in jail. “Provide a safe space” was like “emotional abuse.” It was a phrase that could mean anything or nothing. It existed only as an excuse, to make it possible for the social workers to take the child away. Social workers were dedicated to taking children away from Christian parents because they hated Christianity and they hated parents. They wanted all children to be raised up as secular humanists.

Everything was spinning, and her head hurt. One entire wall of the room she was in was bars. A woman in a police uniform was sitting on a chair just on the other side of that, reading her way through a magazine. Alice wondered what the woman was like. She didn’t understand it: The police in Snow Hill weren’t secular humanists. There was Gary Albright, who went to her very own church, and Eddie Block, who went to the Methodists. Even Tom Fordman went to church, to the Lutheran one, and he was like lot of men, uncomfortable at services and not happy about being asked to show his love for Jesus in public. But they all loved Jesus. Alice was sure of that. Most of the teachers in Snow Hill loved Jesus, too, except for the science ones, and Miss Marbledale. Where did all these people come from, people like this woman on the other side of the bars? Where did they find them?

It was like that movie she had seen once very late at night on television, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It was in black and white. It starred this man Alice recognized because she’d seen him in a million old movies, but whose name she could never remember. She thought of him as “the man with the jaw.” He had a big jaw, but that didn’t matter. What mattered were the pods. There were pods in the basement, and when they popped open people popped out—bodies, not real people—but their bodies looked like the bodies of real people, they looked like people you knew.