Living Witness(29)

“Did Franklin Hale expect her not to break ranks?” Gregor asked.

“It’s hard to know what Franklin expects,” Gary said. “There’s part of me that sometimes wonders if he doesn’t have a drinking problem that he’s hiding pretty well. Maybe he did expect her to go along, at least with the second policy, the one we actually voted in, because when she didn’t he had a fit. And he kept hounding her. He wanted her to resign from the board.”

“And she didn’t?”

“No, she didn’t,” Gary said, “and if you’d known her, you’d have known she wouldn’t. She’s not the kind of person who backs down under pressure. But that left us going into the lawsuit with a member of our own board on the other side, and the closer we got to the court date the more frantic Franklin got, and the more furious Alice McGuffie got, and there was a lot of bad feeling in town.”

“When is the lawsuit due to start?” Gregor asked.

“Next week.”

“It won’t be delayed because one of the plaintiffs is, I think I heard somebody say, in a coma?”

“No,” Gary Albright said. “There are other plaintiffs and she isn’t the chief one. But here’s the thing. On the day the assault happened, any one of us, any of the members of the board that support the policy, could have hit her. We were all right there on Main Street. We all saw her taking her walk that day, same as always. We all went somewhere or the other in the time just after she left Main Street and went back home. And it’s not just us. It’s the pastors of the two churches that supported the policy. They were there, too. And it’s the congregations. A lot of people resented the Hell out of that lawsuit. They still do.”

“And you’re sure that was why she was assaulted?” Gregor asked. “There couldn’t have been a more mundane reason, like robbery, for instance?”

“She was wearing one of those fanny packs,” Gary Albright said, “and it had four hundred dollars in it in tens and twenties. And everybody knew she carried cash when she walked. When she went anywhere, really. But the fanny pack wasn’t touched, and her house wasn’t broken into. She’s got grandnieces and nephews, and living brothers and sisters, I think, but none of them live in town and none of them were anywhere near it at the time of the attack. I checked. So it wasn’t robbery, and it wasn’t her heirs trying to get rich quick. And if you saw what the town was like over this lawsuit, you’d see why I think—why everybody thinks, really—that that’s what’s going on here.”





3




Gary Albright had somewhere else to go in the city of Philadelphia.

“It’s an errand I’ve got to do for my pastor,” he said.

Gregor stayed behind on John Jackman’s new wing chair and waited until the coast was clear. John came back from showing Gary Albright all the way to the outer door and sat down in the other wing chair instead of behind the desk. He looked exhausted.

“That man makes me more nervous than my mother used to when I knew I was about to get in trouble,” he said. “In about the same way, too.”

“Gary Albright makes you feel guilty?

“Something like that,” John said. “I don’t know. You know anything about him? Anything about his story?”

“No,” Gregor said. “I knew he was military as soon as I saw him, of course, and fairly recent military. It’s hard to mistake the bearing.”

“The story about the leg made all the news shows,” John said. “I thought you might have heard about it. It was a couple, three years ago. I don’t remember. He was a regular cop in Snow Hill then. He got called out on a domestic in the middle of the night in the middle of a snowstorm at one of those places, you know, up a dirt road, in the mountains, that kind of thing. Found the couple drunk to the gills and too falling-over-incapacitated to do much of anything, and a baby, couldn’t have been more than seven or eight months old, left wandering around on its own. So, he took the baby and got out of there. He figured it made more sense to make sure the baby was safe than try to bring the couple in given the weather and conditions and that kind of thing.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “I can see that.”

“Yeah,” John said. “So can I. It isn’t the kind of trouble we ever had on any police force I was ever on, but I worked in cities. But, here’s the thing. He had a dog with him. Did I tell you he had a dog?”

“No.”

“He did. Not a police dog, his own dog. Dog he’d had for years. He had the dog in the backseat for company. Most nights he didn’t get called on for anything and he was out wandering around on his own. Where was I? Oh, okay. He took the baby with him, worked up an impromptu car seat for the kid in the back, I guess the parents didn’t have one. The couple. Whoever they were. He took off and headed back to town thinking he’d turn the baby in at the hospital. They’ve got social workers. But the weather was really, really, bad, and the road wasn’t a real road, it was a dirt rut, and he got lost. He ended up down a ditch and into a snow bank. They were out there for a week.”