“That guy over there” turned out to be Eddie Block. “I suppose I am,” Gregor said. “What can I do for you?”
“It’s about the body,” the paramedic said. “There’s nothing for us to do here, you know, but usually when the patient is dead we take him in to the hospital anyway, you know, to be checked out, or sometimes to go to the morgue. We take him, anyway. Her. Can we take the body now?”
“Not yet,” Gregor said. “There should be some people here from the state police in a little while. They’ll have some things to do. When they’re done, they’ll let you take the body. The procedure is a little different in a murder investigation.”
“Yeah,” the paramedic said. “Who’d’ve thought? I mean, we get murders up here, you know, but not like this. We get the ordinary stuff. Guy gets drunk as Hell and kills his girlfriend. Couple of guys get too happy in a bar and take out the knives. But this. This is brutal.”
“Yes,” Gregor agreed, “it certainly is that.”
“If you ask me, it’s because we’ve taken God out of the schools,” the paramedic said. “Just wait till this investigation is over. It will turn out to be some high school kid looking for a thrill. They don’t have morals anymore, these kids, because they don’t know anything about God. They go to school and their teachers tell them there isn’t any right or wrong, everything is relative, it doesn’t matter what they do. What do you expect? We didn’t used to have murders like this in places like this.”
Gregor thought about Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, with eleven people dead in Nebraska and Wyoming in the early fifties, and Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, leaving the entire Clutter family dead in Kansas in 1959, all years before the U.S. public schools had ended their practice of praying at the start of the school day.
He thought about them, but he didn’t mention them, because there didn’t seem to be any point.
TWO
1
It was the only serious mistake Catherine Marbledale ever made in her career—but it was a very serious mistake, and she should have seen it coming. It wasn’t that she had spent her entire teaching life in this particular small town, or even that she’d grown up in another one just like it. She knew these places, strung out along the rim of Appalachia, scattered across the Midwest, set down in tangles of kudzu and moss throughout the South. It wasn’t true that “news travels fast” in such places. Most news never even got in. Catherine was willing to bet her life that she could stop the first fifteen people she met on Main Street and not one of them would be able to name the prime minister of Great Britain or the president of France. Genocide raged in Darfur, and most of these people never had never heard of it. War broke out in Central Europe, and the only time it made a dent was when somebody’s son, away in the Marines, was deployed. Other kinds of news, though, not only traveled fast, it traveled instantaneously—even before the advent of cell phones.
She knew something was wrong as soon as she pulled into the parking lot in front of the school. She had her special assigned place, marked PRINCIPAL, closer to the building than any others except the handicapped spaces right next to the main doors. Of course, she already knew there was “something wrong,” a lot wrong. She had a cell phone of her own. The office had called her as soon as they had gotten word that Judy Cornish was dead. The Cornish children would need to be told, but their father would do that. He was already on his way out. There were arrangements to be made: Catherine would have to talk to the teachers to make sure the children were not loaded down with homework at a time like this; she had to make sure they knew they could go home or stay at school, whatever made them feel best. There was so much that needed to be figured out.
She got out of her car, thinking that she would have to call a meeting this afternoon. She would have to talk to that Mr. Demarkian who Gary Albright had brought in, and have her teachers talk to him, too. This had something to do with the school, even if she didn’t believe it had anything to do with “Intelligent Design.” They’d all known Judy Cornish. They might have information the police would find valuable. She went in through the big glass double doors. Most of the front wall of the school was glass. The glass had replaced tight but crumbling bricks in a remodeling a few years ago. The remodeling had taken forever, just like everything else the school board was asked to handle.
The foyer at the front of the building was large and open. The left wall was lined with display cases, full of trophies for one thing or another. Every once in a while, Snow Hill fielded decent sports teams. The boys who played on them almost never got athletic scholarships, though, or they only got them for small schools that wouldn’t matter much. Catherine Marbledale could remember a time when every college mattered. Just going to college mattered. The world as it had come to be made no sense to her at all.