“You just heard Gary Albright said he checked out the relatives and none of them were near the scene. Or even in the same state, I think.”
“They could always have hired somebody,” Gregor pointed out.
Then he put on his coat and headed out the door.
THREE
1
There were rumors all over town that Gary Albright had gone to Philadelphia to bring in a hired gun to investigate what had happened to Annie-Vic Hadley, and Alice McGuffie just knew that if that was true, Gary had done it because of the television cameras. The television cameras were everywhere these days. There were big mobile production vans all up and down Main Street, right from Nick Frapp’s white trash church down to the courthouse itself, and there were people who were saying that the judge had received death threats. Alice McGuffie wasn’t surprised about that any more than she was surprised about any of the rest of it, but part of her truly wished that she wasn’t making so much money off television people who came to eat in her diner.
“They’re atheists, every last one of them,” she said to Lyman on Thursday morning. The big, open front room was stacked with people she had never seen before, and the men among them ate like horses. It had to be tiring work, carrying that equipment around all day. The men came in and ate the kind of breakfasts Alice had last seen commonly on farmhouse tables: stacks of pancakes with butter sandwiched between the layers; double orders of sausages and hash browns; coffee by the bucket. If Alice drank that much coffee, she’d be on the ceiling for days.
“Just leave them alone,” Lyman said, looking out onto the floor, too. He was exhausted. Alice knew it. If she didn’t also know that this surge in business wouldn’t last a day beyond the end of the trial, she’d suggest taking on somebody to help Lyman with the cooking.
“It’s a shame you can’t even hope they’ll do the right thing,” Alice said. “If they weren’t all secular humanists, maybe they’d see something. See how good this town is. Want to come to God. But you know what secular humanists are like.”
Lyman made a little snort of assent, and then the phone on the kitchen wall rang. The phone on the kitchen wall almost never rang. It was a different line than the one in the office. People only called it when they wanted Alice to put aside something for them to pick up. They’d had a lot of that kind of business since the television people came. It was as if those cameramen had black holes in the middle of their stomachs. They’d eat like crazy in here, and an hour later they’d be calling up for something to take out. Alice had heard a couple of them complaining about her pizza, but she knew what she thought they could do about that.
The phone was still ringing. Lyman was paying no attention to it. Alice looked him over and sighed. Men were men. There wasn’t anything you could do about them. They didn’t notice things the way women did. At least Lyman was a good Godly man, and he had this business. Alice was sure that that was better than anything those television women could say about their husbands, assuming they even had them.
Alice picked up the phone. One of the television women sat alone at one of the tables in the dining room, but she wasn’t eating anything. She was only drinking coffee, black and without sugar. If the men from the television crews ate without ceasing, the women never seemed to eat at all, and they were all so thin they looked ready to snap in half. What Alice really didn’t like, though, was the suits. She never thought a woman looked good in a suit, and women looked just stupid in pants suits. Take Hillary Clinton. The woman looked like—well, Alice didn’t know what she looked like, but the first question that came to Alice’s mind was, who did she think she was? Really. Who did Hillary Clinton think she was? Who did any of those women think they were? What were they trying to prove? They were just women, like any other women.
Alice thought she might have been holding the phone for longer than she should have been. She put it to her ear and said, “Hello?” It wouldn’t matter if they missed one take out order, and they probably wouldn’t miss it anyway. Whoever it was would probably think there was something wrong with the phone and call right back.
“Hello,” somebody said on the other end of the line said. It took Alice a minute to realize she was talking to Catherine Marbledale. Ms. Marbledale. Talk about somebody who ought to get the starch taken out of her panties.
“Snow Hill Diner,” Alice said. This did not bode well. Ms. Marbledale never called up to get something to take out. She never ate at the diner. She bought fruits and vegetables from the fresh produce stands and then did things to them that she found in foreign cookbooks.