“No,” Gregor said. “I understand what you’re saying. I also understand that there’s an answer to that particular objection.”
“That’s what she said,” Gary Albright said. “Miss Marbledale, I mean. At the first board meeting we had on the subject, she said that the problem was that we were thinking as if the thing a thing did now was what it always did. But she said that wasn’t the case. Sometimes a thing evolved to do one thing, and then as more evolution happened, the body started using it for something else. So it could have been important to the animal in its first use and that’s why it evolved at all, but then it became important later in its second use when its first use wasn’t needed anymore. I’m not an idiot. I can understand that. I just—”
“What?”
Gary Albright shrugged. “I just don’t buy it, I guess. Not entirely. Because I don’t think this is an argument about animals and how they got their parts. It might be that for Miss Marbledale, but it really wasn’t that for Miss Hadley and it really, really, really isn’t that for the people who are bringing this lawsuit. Henry Wackford, I mean. And the people from the development.”
“Who’s Henry Wackford?”
“He’s the village atheist,” Gary Albright said, making a face. “He’s somebody who likes to make a fuss just to make a fuss. Started a chapter of the American Humanist Association in town a few years ago. Now he’s got half a dozen people or so who meet at his house every month and talk about I don’t know what. And the people from the development, Mrs. Cornish and those people, they come from out of town, they move in to take jobs and then move out again. I don’t think any of them really know anything about Darwin’s theory. I mean, they can’t explain it when you ask them. Miss Marbledale can explain it.”
“If they don’t believe in the theory, why do they want it?” Gregor asked.
“Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it?” Gary said. “It’s not about biology, it’s about religion. It’s about taking people away from religion, taking children away from it. Making religion look stupid. And it’s about morality. If religion is true, it isn’t all right for people to go off doing whatever they feel like—drugs, sex, you name it. But if religion isn’t true there’s no reason why people shouldn’t be doing those things.”
“I know a man,” Gregor said carefully, “a priest in the Armenian church, who would say you were wrong.”
“Wrong about what?” Gary said. He didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s all about how they think we’re all hicks and hillbillies. I mean that’s what it’s all about for the people in the development. And for Henry Wackford, it’s all about how he’s smart and nobody else is. But I know this isn’t an argument about biology, even if Miss Marbledale thinks it is.”
“So you’ve put all these people on the suspect list? Henry Wackford? Mrs. Cornish? I thought you said all the suspects called themselves Christians.”
“All of them except Henry Wackford,” Gary said. “And I don’t really think of him as a suspect. Most people don’t try to kill off their allies. But he was there that morning. They were all there that morning. They were all in and around Main Street. Any one of them could have gone up the hill and got to Miss Hadley. So I’ve tried to be inclusive. But mostly it’s just a mess, and there are reporters. Dozens of them. The trial is due to start at the beginning of the week.”
Gregor looked around. The landscape was getting less and less urban. He thought they might be out by Hardscrabble Road, where the nuns were. He wondered what Sister Beata Maria would think of Intelligent Design, and lawsuits about Darwin. He knew what Tibor thought about it. He wondered again, as he had in John Jackman’s office, if there had ever been a case in which somebody was killed for not being a Creationist, and then he reminded himself, for the thousandth time, that nobody was dead yet.
Gary Albright was looking much happier. “This is better,” he said. “We’re almost out in the country. I hate feeling all cooped up in between the buildings.”
3
In the end, Snow Hill was almost exactly what Gregor had expected it to be. It was not so far north as Holman, the last small town in Pennsylvania that Gregor had spent any time in, and not so high into the mountains. It didn’t feel quite as claustrophobic. It was probably smaller. When Gary parked the truck in front of the modest little storefront that offered a sign saying Snow Hill Police Department, Gregor wondered where all the people were. It was odd to see a town this deserted in the middle of a good weather day.