“Out in the trailers,” Eddie Block said. “They rig up these labs and then they blow themselves sky high. Don’t know what else you would expect of a bunch of people would’ve flunked chemistry in high school if they’d stayed long enough to take it.”
“But there it is,” Tom Fordman said. “We’re mostly quiet around here. Which makes the thing with Annie-Vic so weird. And you said, what? Frontal assault. So somebody came right at her. Must have been somebody she knew.”
“Of course it was somebody she knew,” Eddie Block said. “This is Snow Hill. She knew just about everybody, except the people from the development, and she knew a lot of those. And the people from the development don’t go wandering around town much. What would one of them have been doing out at the Hadley house?”
Gregor flipped through the file again. Small towns always made him nervous. They made him even more nervous when they seemed to be full of people too naive to be real.
He closed the file again. He hadn’t really been looking for anything in it. He’d sit down and read it through tonight, but for the moment it was just a matter of hearing and seeing what he could hear and see.
“Let me ask you a few things,” he said, “if you’ve got a minute. Would you say that Ann-Victoria Hadley was well liked by people here? I mean, I suppose somebody must have liked her, they voted her on to the school board.”
“Well, her election to the school board was practical,” Eddie Block said. “Annie-Vic may be old, but she knows how to do business. She always has. Father left her that house up there and the money had to be divided between all the brothers and sisters, and Annie-Vic put it in the stock market and made a pile. Or so everybody thinks. So people just figure, if she could do that, she could fix some of the financial problems the school district was having, because Henry Wackford didn’t want to do crap when it came to the practical stuff.”
“We’ve got a problem with teachers’ union s you wouldn’t believe,” Tom Fordman said. “I wish I was in a union like the one the teachers have. I could’ve retired when I was forty.”
Tom Fordman didn’t look thirty. Gregor bit his lip. “So what does that mean?” he asked. “That people didn’t like Ann-Victoria Hadley?”
“Well, people liked her and people didn’t,” Eddie Block said. “I guess the general take was that she was a snob, because she was that. Is that. Hard to talk about her lying up there the way she is. But she always was a snob. Came from the richest family in town. Went away to some fancy college in the East.”
“Vassar,” Tom Fordman said. “Jacqueline Kennedy went there. And Jane Fonda. And that blond girl from Friends.”
“Yeah, well,” Eddie Block said. “She went away to this fancy college and she came back and thought she was smarter than everybody. Or maybe she always thought that. That was before I was born. But you see how it is, people resented it, a little. That’s not surprising. That’s not the same thing as saying they hated her.”
“Alice McGuffie hated her,” Tom Fordman said, “but Alice hates everybody, and she’s never done anything about it before. Except bitch, you know. She does that day and night.”
Gregor thought about it for a second. “Alice McGuffie,” he said. “She owns the diner?”
“Alice and her husband, Lyman, yeah,” Eddie Block said. “Own it and run it. That’s Lyman, though, not Alice. Alice couldn’t run a business if her life depended on it.”
“I was just over at the diner,” Gregor said. “She wasn’t there.”
“She takes off a lot during the day,” Tom Fordman said, “unless she’s waiting tables, or the counter or something. Most people around here figure she’s more of a liability to Lyman than an asset. She really does bitch. To everybody. And she isn’t above being rude as Hell, either.”
“Better not let Gary hear you swearing in the office,” Eddie Block said.
“Well, how else would you put it?” Tom Fordman said. “If she doesn’t like you, she’ll tell you so right to your face, even if you’re having lunch in her own place. You should hear her talking to Catherine Marbledale. Except it doesn’t work with Miss Marbledale, because Miss Marbledale does it right back, and she uses really big words. Alice ends up like to pop.”
“Was she ever rude to Ann-Victoria Hadley?” Gregor asked.
“Alice is rude to everybody,” Eddie Block said.
“Could she have killed Ann-Victoria Hadley?” Gregor asked.