Living Witness(35)

“What else can it be?” Shelley asked. “You don’t really think we should let them teach a lot of Creationist stupidity in science classes?”

“No, of course I don’t.” Judy sighed. This was going to be harder than she had thought. When the idea first occurred to her, it had seem to be so obviously the solution that she’d been amazed she hadn’t thought of it before. It surprised her Shelley wasn’t getting it.

“Look,” Judy said, “maybe, instead of just doing the negative stuff, we should do some positive stuff.”

“What positive stuff?”

“Maybe, instead of telling people what we’re against, we should tell them what we’re for. Have you ever heard of the Equal Access Act?”

“No,” Shelley said.

“It’s a law,” Judy said. “It applies to any school district that gets federal money, and Snow Hill gets federal money. Lots of it. So Snow Hill has to abide by the Equal Access Act.”

“What a minute,” Shelley said. “Is this the thing about Bible clubs? Is this the law about letting kids have Bible clubs in public schools?”

“Sort of,” Judy said, “but not exactly. Listen, I’m just on my way to the school. Meet me in the parking lot and I’ll explain the whole thing. Mallory made me think of it, really. And it might work. Anyway, we have to do something. We can’t let these hillbillies take over our children. It’s as if half this town never arrived in the twenty-first century.”





3




Nicodemus Frapp had been hearing the same things everybody else in town had been hearing, but Nick had the best intelligence network in the county, and more people he could trust than Christ had had on the day of the Last Supper. Of course, that last one was sort of ironic—and not the sort of thing he could say in front of his congregation. Oral Roberts might not be Vassar, but it was light-years away from spending your life in these hills, and “sophistication” was part of the problem it left you with. Nick didn’t believe that everything was relative, but he did believe this was. It was a matter of what you were used to. He was used to two different kinds of things. Only one of them was acceptable as the public face of a Holiness Church.

Still, Nick thought, it was a wonderful thing. The idea of Gregor Demarkian himself, right here in Snow Hill, and there hadn’t even been a murder yet. True crime was one of the things Nick loved passionately. Maybe it was the idea that murder happened even among the people who had looked down on him all those years he was growing up, and probably looked down on him still. Maybe it was just that this kind of murder was different than the kind of murder he was used to. People in the hills killed each other all the time. The reality of Appalachia was not the Beverly Hillbillies. Men beat their wives into bloody pulps. Men and women both got so wasted on moonshine that they were damned near brain damaged by the time they picked up the rifle and started shooting holes in the fabric of time. God, Nick knew all about that kind of thing. It wasn’t gone yet, although he’d been trying ever since he got back from Oklahoma to make it stop. The problem was, as crime, it wasn’t interesting. It was hard to get interested in a couple of sky-high idiots laying waste to the landscape and then coming to on a jailhouse floor, wondering what the Hell had happened to them.

Gregor Demarkian did not deal in that kind of crime. He was too expensive, for one thing. Police departments didn’t call him in to “do something” about yet another pair of crackers getting liquored up and violent. Gregor Demarkian was called in when there was a real mystery, when there was a chance that the killer would never be caught by ordinary police work. Or he was called in when the people involved were rich and famous, or “prominent,” or one of those things that made treading softly a good idea. Nick didn’t think he would ever be the kind of person the police would feel they had to “tread softly” with. Even if he expanded this church into the kind of megachurch that had its own services on big infomercial hunks on cable TV, he would still be a hillbilly. It was bred in his bones, and everybody who met him knew it.

Nick was so excited about the prospect of Gregor Demarkian in town, though, he had almost forgotten his position. This was unprecedented. He had made his life on remembering his position, on knowing precisely what it was and acting accordingly. The problem was that it was hard to remember anything when he was looking up Main Street, waiting to see how Demarkian would arrive. Nick didn’t think it would be in a limousine; Demarkian didn’t seem like that kind of person. Nick wondered if this meant that old Annie-Vic was dead, or about to die. Everybody thought she would die. Nick wasn’t so sure. She was a tough old woman. She might come to yet. Then there would be no need for Gregor Demarkian. She’d just sit right up in bed and tell the world who’d tried to do her in.