Living Witness(38)

Literally.

He leaned forward on the desk and sighed. “You know,” he said, “nobody is trying to get Creationism into the Snow Hill public schools.”





FOUR





1




Gregor Demarkian had always had a theory that it was not really possible to get away from places like Cavanaugh Street, but it was a theory he tended to forget about in the press of business. He had certainly forgotten about it on the day he was supposed to leave for Snow Hill, and so he went down to the curb with his briefcase without thinking for a moment that he’d have any trouble along the way. He was carrying a briefcase and not a suitcase because, as John Jackman kept reminding him, Snow Hill “wasn’t very far,” and besides, he wasn’t much interested in spending yet another month or so away from Bennis before the wedding. He didn’t enjoy the preparations for the wedding. He didn’t even like to think about them. Still, he was marrying Bennis because he wanted to spend his time with Bennis. It seemed crazy to him to hole up in motel rooms instead of coming back to his own bed.

The decision would have made more sense if Gregor had been willing to drive, but there it was. He did have a driver’s license, but he almost never used it. He wouldn’t feel comfortable driving himself to Snow Hill, and none of the other drivers on the road would feel comfortable, either. If it hadn’t been for the wedding preparations, Bennis could have driven him, but Bennis was busy, and Donna Moradanyan Donahue had a relatively new small baby to worry about, and the decorations, too. In the end, Gary Albright had decided to do the driving himself.

“Once a day up and back won’t kill me,” he’d said, when they’d tried to make all these arrangements over the phone. “People go longer to commute. And it’s not like I’m doing much work right now.”

Gregor wondered if it was really the case that there was so little police work to do in Snow Hill. The town couldn’t be entirely removed from reality. There had to be drugs, and Gregor knew from what John and Gary had told him that there were cases of domestic violence. Gregor thought back to the beginning of his career. Surely there had always been cases of domestic violence, although those weren’t the kind of cases he would have dealt with when he was at the FBI. He remembered one family on Cavanaugh Street when he was growing up. The husband was an immigrant, just over, and the wife, everybody said, couldn’t have done any better. He supposed they meant she was not very good looking. When Gregor had known her, she had been washed out and mousy and plain, but that might have been the result of all those beatings. The police didn’t come to do anything about them in those days. They would only have been called in if there had been a chance that he was going to kill her, and all they would have done then would have been to try to calm him down. Surely, the new way of doing these things was better. It made no sense to treat women as natural-born punching bags just because they were married to some idiot; making it easier for abused women to get a divorce was definitely an improvement. Still, Gregor couldn’t help thinking that there used to be less of it, and not only because it was more seldom reported. It seemed to him that men and women were more brutal to each other now than they had been in decades.

He reached the street with his briefcase and looked up and down it, but there was no sign of Gary Albright. There was no sign of anybody. It was early morning, but not early enough for people to be out and around on their way to work. The day was clear and cold. Even Bennis had disappeared into the mist, running off to Donna’s to discuss chocolate sculptures. Gregor had no idea what a chocolate sculpture was. It always made him feel very odd to look at Cavanaugh Street, since what it had been was so firmly etched into his memory. When he was growing up, all the buildings had been tenements. People lived in small, cramped apartments with very few windows and only barely adequate heat. The streets were dirty, but the tenement hallways were clean, because the women had come out every morning and scrubbed them down. It was hard to credit the way they had all lived: the clothes that were patched and handed down; the school books that were carefully covered so that the school could not say they had wrecked them and demand to be paid: the old priest from Armenia who smelled of camphor and breath mints and desperately needed a bath. All Gregor had wanted in those days was for his parents to make enough money to move out to the suburbs. It wouldn’t have had to have been the Main Line. He’d thought the best thing in the world would be a house and a yard and a car that his father could polish, the way people did on television.