Living Witness(80)

He took yet another deep breath. Christine was in the outer office, talking on the phone and crying. He could hear her. She was definitely on the other side, but he hadn’t had a choice about hiring her. She was the best he could get in Snow Hill. He hated the idea of her in the outer office all day, saying little prayers over her lunch and sending up little “messages to God” in the hopes he would have a change of heart. He knew she was doing both, and that she always asked the Baptists to pray for him when there was a call for intentions on Sunday.

He went to his office window and looked out on Main Street. The cable news vans were still standing where they had been all morning. Henry thought they would have moved if anybody had told them about the murder. Nobody would have told them, though, because they were outsiders, and because the yahoos here were intimidated by them. That was something else that came of being stuck in wretched small towns like this day after day and year after year. The big world out there started to intimidate you. It made you feel every one of your inadequacies.

Christine was probably praying for the soul of Judy Cornish. She probably also thought Judy had gone straight to Hell. Henry’s ex-wife had prayed for him a lot, and her family had prayed for him too, because they’d all been convinced that she would “bring him to the Lord” one of these days. The marriage had started to go sour as soon as she realized that that was never going to happen. She would have been happy to live forever in Snow Hill. She’d come from a nearly identical small town in Michigan, and when the marriage was over she’d gone back there.

“I’m not going to be in Snow Hill much longer,” Henry said, to the air. His breath fogged the window in front of him. There were people in the mobile news vans. CNN and Fox. It wouldn’t be hard to pick one over the other.

Henry had never taken off his coat. He’d unbuttoned it, and now he left it unbuttoned. He went through to the outer office. Christine was still on the phone. Tears were running down her face, and her mascara was running as well, making dark rivulets down both her cheeks. She looked like a gargoyle, or one of those whores with the hearts of gold from the old noir detective films. She’d go to seed in another ten years and look like all the other women around here. She’d gain weight and her hair would frowse. He didn’t even know if “frowse” was a word.

“Oh, Mr. Wackford,” Christine said as he walked past. “Isn’t it terrible? Isn’t it the most terrible thing you’ve ever heard? I’ve been praying and praying, but I just don’t understand it.”

Henry was tempted to tell her she would never understand anything by prayer, but he didn’t see the point of it.

“I’m going out,” he said, and then he was out, all the way into the cold air again. Main Street was not deserted now. People seemed to come out of the cracks in the sidewalk when something really awful happened. It was as if they lay in wait, their lives on hold, until there was gossip that was really going somewhere.

Henry crossed Main Street and went up a block and a half, toward the CNN van. The familiar logo calmed him down a little. There it was, the emissary from the outside world, the ambassador from sanity. Of course, nothing in the United States was entirely sane, if it was they wouldn’t have elected the Shrub for a second term—Henry refused to say that the man had been elected for his first—but there were degrees of insanity, and CNN was considerably more sane than Snow Hill.

He went up to the van’s cab and looked inside. It was empty. He went around to the back. It was closed up. He looked up and down the street. They had to be somewhere, these people.

Half a block further, the door to the diner swung open and a young woman came out with a young man. The young woman was dressed in a skirt and sweater and the young man looked like he’d just walked out of a Greenwich Village beat joint from the fifties. Henry took notice.

The young man and the young woman were talking. They were also carrying Styrofoam cups of coffee. As they got closer, Henry could hear the man saying: “Something’s going on. I grew up in a place like this. People don’t get this way unless something’s going on.”

Nobody had told them. Very good. They were practically at the van.

Henry waited. It was still very cold. He wanted to button his coat, but he was afraid he would look like a hick if he did it.

He approached the man and woman as they got to the van. The man said, “Can we help you with something?”

“I thought you might like to know what’s going on,” Henry Wackford said.

The man looked him up and down again. Then he held out his hand. “Mitchell Frasier,” he said, “and this is Charlene Holder.”