Living Witness(53)

“That was what Franklin was supposed to fix,” Gary Albright said. “Then it turned out that he is as much a lunatic about Creationism as Henry Wackford is about the holistic curriculum—”

“What?” Gregor said.

“The holistic curriculum,” Gary Albright said. “Don’t ask me to explain it. I can’t. It had something to do with integrating something or the other into something or the other, and bringing in speakers from the outside to ‘broaden’ people’s minds. Student minds. That and sex ed, which is supposed to be abstinence-only here, but Henry didn’t like it. It was a mess.”

“Did Miss Hadley have positions on any of these issues?” Gregor asked.

“Not really,” Gary said.

“Well,” Tina said, “she did say once that teaching abstinence-only was like leaving a loaded gun in the middle of a room full of toddlers and telling them not to touch it.”

“It wasn’t a major issue,” Gary said. “But at least she got down to work on the practical stuff, and now it seems as if nobody is going to do that until the trial is over. It’s good of Miss Marbledale to meet with the union   rep, but she can’t actually do anything. It’s the board that has to approve contract terms. We’re just going to sit and burn money while a bunch of people fly in from New York and call us all a bunch of hick-town idiots.”

“Unless somebody shoots the judge,” Tina said. “There’s rumors everywhere that there’s been a death threat on the judge, and the judge called in the FBI to protect him. Wouldn’t that be something? All we’d have to do is kill a judge over this thing, and this town will go down in history as no better than—well, no better than anything.”

“Maybe I’ll sit down and read through the file for a while,” Gregor said. “When I’ve done that, I may know where I need to start.”

“Go right ahead,” Gary said. “Tina will get you anything you need. There’s a diner up the street if you want something to eat. You can take stuff out and eat it here if you don’t want to hassle the place at lunchtime.”

It was a long time before lunch, Gregor was pretty sure. He just shook his head and took himself around the desk to the chair. It really was a very small room.

But it wouldn’t do him any good not to get started.





2




The first thing Gregor did was open the file the department had put together for him, and as soon as he did so he could see it was going to take some weeding out. There were all kinds of things in it. Some of those things were part of standard operating procedure. There were reports from the hospital and from two local doctors. There was a forensics summary that seemed to include not only the scene itself but most of Miss Hadley’s house. There were background notes on a good two dozen people. Gregor hadn’t heard of most of them, and he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to make of them. The longest set of notes concerned the pastor of the big church at the end of Main Street, Nicodemus Frapp. Nicodemus, Gregor thought. That must have been some way to go through high school.

In the end, he put the file away on the other side of the desk and tried to think his way through what he’d heard. He did have a telephone. Somebody had plugged one in to a jack somewhere out in the big room. Gregor could see the thin clear cord snaking away from his phone and through his door. He got out his cell phone anyway, because ever since he’d had it he’d developed complete amnesia about phone numbers. There had been a time when he’d been able to remember a dozen or more. Now, he didn’t even know Bennis’s number, and he probably called Bennis two or three times a day.

He wasn’t going to call Bennis now. He really was not up for another round of wedding preparations. He thought that if the wedding preparations went on much longer, they’d rival the plans for celebrating the year 2000. Hell, they’d rival the conspiracy theories about a worldwide computer meltdown.

He punched around on his keypad for a while—it bothered him how quickly he’d gotten used to that; he’d never used his thumb for so much before Bennis had given him this phone, and now he could practically touch-type phone functions. He got to the address book and scrolled through it a little, trying to make up his mind whether it made more sense to stay local or go straight to Washington. He decided that he’d hated it when people had gone over his head to Washington when he’d been a field agent. Besides, how could the citizens of the United States of America expect the Bureau to operate efficiently with its own field offices if they treated the field offices like—