Living Witness(144)

“Listen,” Alice said.

“I’ll listen if you want me to,” the woman in uniform said. “But you’ve had a very powerful sedative, you know. You ought to get some rest.”

“Listen,” Alice said again. Then she made one last, great effort. She pushed by the barrier of fuzz that was all around her. She pushed by the flitting ghosts that were really memories, because you couldn’t have ghosts of people who were still alive. They were there all around her. They were waiting for her to fall asleep.

“Listen,” she said for the third time, and then it worked. She was in a place where she could talk. She was in a place where she could think. The ceiling still looked dirty. The walls of the cell looked dirtier. There was a toilet screwed into the back wall, right out in the open, as if they expected her to relieve herself like that where anybody could see her.

“I want,” she said, “to talk to that man. I want to talk to Gregor Demarkian.”

“What?” the woman in uniform said.

“It was a picture of me and I took it,” Alice said, and then she fell back to sleep again.





2




It was the arrest of Alice and Lyman McGuffie that made up Nick Frapp’s mind for him, but he’d been on the verge of making it up on his own for an hour or more before that. He had been thinking about it all night, in fact, and the more he thought about it the more sure he had been that, in the last analysis, it was civilization that mattered.

“Civilization,” his old philosophy professor had said, “is not something we have. It’s something we do.”

Philosophy professor. Dr. Raydock. Dr. Raydock was always in trouble with the university administration because he wasn’t quite Christian enough, he wasn’t quite with the program. It was not the kind of thing Nick had understood before he’d gone to Oklahoma, but it hadn’t taken him long to learn. Civilization is something we do, Nick told himself now, and that was right. It was absolutely right. And if you stopped doing it, you found yourself howling in the wilderness.

He stuck his head into the main office where yet another one of the church women, Marianna Beck, was filling in as church secretary.

“I’m going to go out for a bit,” he said.

Marianne looked up and pulled a drawn face. It didn’t entirely hide the excitement in her eyes. “Isn’t it terrible?” she said. “Alice McGuffie, of all people. I never would have believed it. But then, you never know with people, do you? Especially people like the McGuffies. Kept themselves to themselves. Like my mother always said, you’ve got to watch out for people like that. You always know something is wrong when people are too quiet.”

Nick didn’t think Alice McGuffie had ever been quiet for an hour in her life. He thought she might even talk in her sleep. He let it go and went downstairs and out the door onto Main Street. The town was quieter now than it had been the last time he’d seen it. He’d come out to watch with everybody else when the police cars came and the police raced into the Snow Hill Diner. People were saying it was just like a movie, and they were right, but not in the way they meant it. It was like a movie because it was so completely exaggerated. Men in black uniforms with rifles slung over their backs, to arrest Alice and Lyman McGuffie? It was like taking out a kitten with a bazooka.

Nick went down the street to the police station. He had seen them all come in, Gary and Tom and Eddie and Gregor Demarkian. He went up the front steps and let himself into the building. The woman behind the counter was working at something on a computer. He cleared his throat and waited. She looked up and then looked annoyed.

“Is there something I can do for you?”

“I’d like to talk to Mr. Demarkian, if I can,” Nick said.

“I’ll see what he’s doing,” the woman said. “We’re in the middle of a murder investigation, in case you didn’t know. Do you have information about the murder investigation?”

“Maybe,” Nick said.

The woman looked suspicious, but she got up and went to the back. A second later, Gregor Demarkian emerged, looking rumpled.

“Reverend Frapp,” he said. “Good to see you. Why don’t you come on back?”

Nick gave the woman a smile, but she turned away from him. He followed Gregor “on back,” and found himself in what he was sure was supposed to be a utility closet. The utility closet had a desk and two chairs. Nick sat down in the chair that was not behind the desk.

“This is interesting,” he said.

“It’s adequate, believe it or not,” Gregor Demarkian said. “Although I have to admit, it makes me feel a little claustrophobic. Do you really have information for me, or did you just want to talk?”