“Choice as in abortion?”
“I’m not in favor of abortion, either,” Nick said, “but it’s not abortion I’m talking about here. Not directly. It’s the idea that there is no right and wrong, no good and evil, no solidity. Everything is just a choice. And our choices are not very important, because men and women are just animals, like cats. You don’t get angry at cats for killing mice or getting pregnant by five different fathers. Why should you care if people do the same thing? It’s their nature. Christianity says we were all born children of God and we’re all called to perfection, even if we can’t reach it on this earth. And let me tell you, starting with that as your basic assumption, you’ll lead a much better life than you would living it their way.”
“But you didn’t join the lawsuit,” Gregor said.
“No,” Nick said. “We don’t have anything to say about the public schools. And I’m not sure that this approach somebody has sold Franklin on would really work, anyway. Intelligent Design. Do you know what this suit is actually about?”
“Teaching Intelligent Design instead of evolution?” Gregor hazarded.
“No,” Nick said. “If it was, this lawsuit would make a lot more sense. They don’t want to teach it instead of evolution. They don’t even want to teach it alongside evolution. They want to put a sticker in all the biology books that says that some people don’t accept Darwin’s theory, but accept Intelligent Design instead, and that if you want to know about Intelligent Design, there will be a book in the library called Of Pandas and People that you can take out to read about it. That’s it. That’s all they want. They just want to suggest that people might want to take in another view. And that got Henry Wackford and those people in the development to start a federal case—literally a federal case—to stop it. You’ve got to wonder about that, don’t you think? You’ve got to wonder why it’s not supposed even to be mentioned. And what harm they think is going to come to their children if it is mentioned?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said.
“I don’t either,” Nick said. “But you didn’t come here for that, did you? You came because of Miss Hadley. I think I was probably the last person to talk to her before she went on back to her house and got beaten up.”
“What did you talk about?”
Nick shrugged. “The usual. What an idiot Franklin Hale is. How much trouble there was going to be if the school board didn’t do something about the teachers’ contracts and the school construction and the textbook orders. She was all worried about the textbook orders, because if you don’t have them in on time, the books don’t get here when they need to be in September. She just did her little rant thing and then she went on up Main Street and then up the hill to her house. Except I shouldn’t say that. I didn’t really see that. After she left I went back into the church and got some work done.”
“She didn’t seem unusually upset by anything? Or fearful?”
“Annie-Vic was never fearful,” Nick said. “She was just not a fearful woman. But she was always ‘upset,’ sort of. She always had a head full of steam about something. And that day, like I said, it was all the nuts and bolts stuff the board was supposed to do, but mostly the textbooks.”
SEVEN
1
Gary Albright had been very careful to stay away from ordinary policing for most of the long stretch since he had been stuck behind his desk, but today he was restless, and he couldn’t help himself. It was not that he resented having Gregor Demarkian in Snow Hill, or on the case, or any of the rest of it. It had been his idea to ask the man in. He’d had to do something, under the circumstances, and he had a bad feeling that the circumstances were only going to get worse as time went on. It wasn’t that Gregor Demarkian was probably a “secular humanist,” either. Gary wasn’t entirely sure he knew what that meant, anyway. Obviously, a secular humanist was an atheist, but if that was all it was, why not just say they were “atheists”? He had asked his pastor about it once. Pastors were supposed to know that kind of thing. What he’d got as a reply was something along the lines of “Well, they call themselves secular humanists because people don’t like atheists.”
Gary Albright was pretty good at surfing the Internet, although he had to surf it at work, since there were so many parental controls on the machines he had at home that he couldn’t find anything useful on them. He’d toyed with the idea of getting a single machine just for his own use and installing it in the master bedroom, but there was just no way to lock that door. Sarah went in and out of there all day, and Lily and Michael were used to being able to use the room at will as long as nobody was asleep in it. Gary had a half-formed but very stubborn idea that children were natural-born computer hackers. If there was something you didn’t want them to find, and there was any way to get to it, they’d find it.