Living Witness(145)

“Did you authorize the arrest of Alice and Lyman McGuffie?” Nick asked. “Was that your idea?”

“No,” Gregor said. “We seem to be beset by a state police detective who thinks he knows everything.”

“Ah,” Nick said. “So it was a Dale Vardan special. All right. I didn’t think it was you, but I thought I’d better ask. Have you ever been to Holland?”

“Holland?”

“I went last year,” Nick said. “I don’t travel much. There’s too much work here, with the school and church and everything, but I went last year to a conference. And it’s Holland I think of when I think about all of this. About Alice and Lyman. About the teaching of evolution in the public schools. About the murders. Because that’s what Holland is all about these days, you know. It’s about death.”

“Excuse me?” Gregor Demarkian said.

Nick threw his head back and stared at the ceiling. He wondered if this room would feel so small if it was being occupied by people closer to normal size than either he or Demarkian were.

“They have all these things,” Nick said. “Abortion. And what they call ‘assisted suicide.’ They kill off their children and they kill off their old people and they just don’t see it. They don’t see that they’re sinking into an orgy of death. They think it’s freedom. And in the end, you know, that’s my bottom line. If you wake up one morning and find out you’re collaborating with death, you ought to understand that you’re doing something wrong. In the end, that’s the difference I see between people of faith and people without it. When people of faith collaborate with death, they know they’re doing something wrong. When people without it do, they often don’t even realize they’re collaborating. I don’t really think it matters whether you’re a Protestant or a Catholic or a Hindu, for that matter. I think there are probably many ways to God, but the reason I know God exists is because people who believe in him feel guilty about collaborating with death and people who don’t not only don’t feel guilty, they don’t even realize there’s an issue.”

“And you think that’s true of me?” Gregor said. “That I collaborate with death, and don’t even see the issue?”

“No,” Nick said. “But I think you’re unusual. You’re unusually intelligent. You’re unusually thoughtful. And you’re unusually free of that thing so many people have of needing to prove to themselves how wonderful they are by proving that everybody else is awful. And for unbelievers, that’s usually trying to prove they’re smart by ‘proving’ that anybody who believes must be stupid.”

Gregor Demarkian looked puzzled. “Is this going someplace?” he asked.

Nick nodded. “Just call it the background to what I’m going to say. Four of my parishioners came to me last night to tell me that on or around the time that Shelley Niederman was murdered, they saw Franklin Hale go up to the Hadley house by that path through the woods at the back of Main Street.”

“Did they,” Gregor Demarkian said.

“But I’ve got more than that,” Nick said, “because I saw Alice McGuffie come down that same path just before we heard about Judy Cornish’s murder. But I didn’t just see her go down. I saw her go in.”

“Into the house?”

“Exactly,” Nick said. “If you want to come over to the church later, I’ll show you the view from my office window. When the leaves are on the trees, I can’t see anything, but on days like we’ve been having, with the cold, and the trees bare, I can see anything all the way up there, and I saw Alice go in and not come out again for at least fifteen minutes.”

“That is interesting,” Gregor said.

“Here’s the thing,” Nick said. “I’m not the only person with a view up that hill Several other people have a good line of sight there, all the buildings that line that side of Main—”

“Which doesn’t include either the Snow Hill Diner or Hale ’n’ Hardy.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Nick said. “But consider this. Judy Cornish was up there for no more than a couple of minutes before she was killed. From what I hear in town, Shelley Niedeman was up there for forty-five minutes or so, and she was killed. But Alice wasn’t killed, and it doesn’t look to me like anybody has tried. And nobody has tried with Franklin, either.”

“So what do you make of that?” Gregor asked.

“Well,” Nick said. “I don’t make of it that somebody is killing over plaintiffs in the lawsuit, and I don’t think that’s what you make of it, either.”