Living Witness(44)

“Do they still handle snakes?” Gregor asked.

“Not on my watch,” Gary said. “It isn’t legal. And it causes a lot of trouble. I wasn’t on the force when they were still doing that. I didn’t get into police work until I left the Marines, and by then Nick was back from that college in Oklahoma and he’d started this. But I remember it growing up, the sirens, the ambulances out of wherever. We don’t have a full service hospital in Snow Hill. People would die, and the police and the fire department and the ambulances would be tied up for hours, trying to treat these idiots and all the time they’d be shooting at you. But it isn’t a problem anymore. Nick doesn’t put up with it and they all listen to Nick. I think they think he’s God.”

“And is he part of this lawsuit?”

“No,” Gary said. There was a strange note in his voice, one that sounded half-strangled, so that Gregor turned to look him straight in the face. He couldn’t read anything there.

“Nick,” Gary said, “I don’t know how to put this. Nick says he thinks public schools should teach whatever the teachers want, or something like that. It didn’t make any sense to me at the time, and it doesn’t make any sense to me now. You’ve got to pay attention to the things your children learn. If they learn the wrong things, they could—bad things could happen to them. Drugs. Sexual diseases. It’s a nasty world out there.”

“But Nick Frapp doesn’t mind his children learning about it?”

“Nick’s children don’t go to the public schools,” Gary Albright said. “The church has a Christian school. All the kids from there go to that. It costs money, but if you’re a member of the church, there’s a fund to make sure your kids can go there even if you can’t afford it. They take other kids, too, you know, from families that don’t belong to their church. Not that many other kids go.”

“Is that because of religious differences?” Gregor asked.

“It’s because they are what they are,” Gary said. “Hillbillies. The last thing people in Snow Hill want is to be looked at as a bunch of hillbillies. Ignorant, low-rent white trash. At least, that’s what we all thought, when Nick and I was growing up. What I thought. Nick was a hillbilly.”

“I take it you think he isn’t one now,” Gregor said.

Gary Albright shrugged. “Nick is Nick. You’re going to want to talk to him. He was here that day that Annie-Vic got attacked. I think he may have been the last person to talk to her while she was still on Main Street.”

“Really. Did they get along?”

“Nick gets along with everybody,” Gary said. “He’s one of those people. You’ve got to wonder what he would have been like, if things had been different. If he’d have been born to different people.”

Gregor had a thought. “Do you get along with Nick Frapp?” he asked.

Gary Albright stared up the street at the Holiness Church. There it was again, that Marine Corps face, the face you couldn’t read.

“I think Nick Frapp is some kind of genius,” he said finally. “I just wonder sometimes what it is he thinks he’s doing.”





FIVE





1




Franklin Hale saw Gary Albright drive up, and when he did he stood stock still next to the big plate-glass window that served as the front wall of his shop until Gregor Demarkian got out, too. Everything about Demarkian made Franklin Hale’s skin crawl. There was just something about those people—secular humanists, whatever you wanted to call them. They exuded their snobbery the way skunks exuded smell. Or something. Franklin sometimes found it hard to put together, and he never found anything hard to put together. It was as if they were looking down their noses at you, but it was worse than that. It was as if they expected you to do something. Franklin wasn’t sure what. It all got mixed up in his mind. But he knew the signs, he really did. Gregor Demarkian had all the signs. Franklin was willing to bet that Demarkian listened to “classical music” when he thought people could hear him. Franklin was fairly convinced that nobody listened to “classical music” for any other reason.

Of course, there were other people who had all the signs, who weren’t secular humanists. There was Nick Frapp. Just what was going on there, Franklin didn’t know. What was Nick Frapp, anyway, but trumped up hillbilly without the sense God gave a good dog? Franklin remembered Nick’s parents, and Nick, too, back in high school. He’d been able to beat the crap out of any of those kids. They hardly got decent food, and all their mothers drank, and their fathers, too, and then there was the religious stuff, which was just plain weird. The world was not the way it ought to be. Franklin was convinced of this. If the world was the way it ought to be, he wouldn’t be standing here worrying about being arrested for pounding the living shit out of Annie-Vic.