Living Witness(84)

Mrs. Niederman looked out across the driveway, at the police and the ambulance and the state evidence van and shuddered. “Come right in. Come in. I want to go home. I want to get out of here. Somebody else is going to get killed. Just you wait.”

Gregor left that alone. Until he knew what was going on here, he had no idea if it was likely or not that somebody else would be killed. He wished he could pinpoint what it was about this case that kept reminding him of that other one, the one where the man had killed himself and his child in the attic playroom of the house he had once shared with his wife. The case had been on his mind all day, and there didn’t seem to be any point of connection to this one. He came around the back of the car, opened the door, slipped into the deep bucket seat, and closed the door behind him.

“I’m going to run the engine for a while,” Mrs. Niederman said. “It’s cold.”

It was, indeed, very cold. Gregor waited while she got the car started and the heater pumping out hot air at the highest possible rate. He thought she would have been a mousy little woman if she hadn’t had an air of self-confidence that made you forget about her looks. The air was there even though tears were streaming down out of her eyes and she was doing nothing to stop them.

“Judy always said somebody was going to get killed,” she said. “And that was before. Before the lawsuit. Judy always said that these people didn’t want us here, and they were going to do something about it. We even had to watch when we went to the grocery store.”

“Excuse me?”

Shelley Niederman wiped tears off one cheek with the palm of her hand. “There are tissues here somewhere. Judy always had tissues. This is Judy’s car, did you know that? I don’t know why I got in behind the wheel after I found her. I just did. I just did. What are Dan and the children going to do without her?”

“You were saying something about the grocery store,” Gregor said gently.

“Oh,” Shelley Niederman said. “Yes. They don’t like us here, you know. The people in town. They never did like us, even before there was all this trouble with evolution. It’s like a movie out here, it’s like Deliverance. Except I never saw Deliverance. You know what I mean. It’s like. Oh, God, I don’t know, they’re hillbillies, even the ones that live in town. They’re just not—I don’t know—they’re just not. And we’d go shopping in this grocery store in town and they’d say things to us. All of them. Even the checkout girls.”

“Say what to you?” Gregor asked.

Shelley Niederman shrugged. “Some of the younger people would call us bitches, but the older ones never use language like that. And maybe it wasn’t that they said things to us, it was that they said things about us. ‘Ooh, look, a Coach bag. Doesn’t she think she’s the Queen of Sheba.’ That’s one I remember. Somebody said it about me. Oh, that woman, Alice McGuffie, she said it about me.”

“I see,” Gregor said.

“And then, later, when the lawsuit was on, they did say things directly to us. We used to go to the supermarket and look around the parking lot to see who was there before we went in. And it was a pain, you know, because the nearest other supermarket is a good half-hour drive away, although it’s a better one, you know, and we went there sometimes, but other times you just want to pick up a few things and you don’t have the time. But we had to be careful, because they’d come up to us, and not just in the supermarket, on Main Street, too, sometimes, they’d come up and say things. ‘I’m going to pray for you,’ one of them said. ‘Because you’re an atheist, and atheists rot in Hell.’ Oh, no, that wasn’t just somebody. That was that McGuffie woman again. But I’m not an atheist. Judy wasn’t either. I don’t know where they get this stuff. And then they said it to the children in school.”

“The women did? Alice McGuffie did?”

“The other children did,” Shelley Niederman said. “The first few times it happened, Mallory was nearly hysterical. Mallory is, was, Judy’s daughter. I don’t know what tense I’m supposed to use. It’s impossible to know what tense I’m supposed to use.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Gregor said. “Would you mind if I asked you a little about today? I’m not really clear about today.”

“She’s dead,” Shelley Niederman said. “What else do you want to know about today.”

“Well, for one thing, I’d like to understand why the two of you came here. From what I’ve been able to figure out, two of Miss Hadley’s relatives are staying here for a short while while she’s in the hospital. Were you looking for them?”