Living Witness(85)

“I don’t know,” Shelley said.

“You don’t know?”

“Judy didn’t say,” Shelley said. “She just—we were talking about the children. At school. You know, the trouble they’d been having, and Judy said—this was before—she said that we were going about it the wrong way. We were always playing defense, and that instead we should learn to play offense. Because they were playing offense. And then she said there was something called the Equal Access Act, and we could use that to make the school allow Mallory and Stacey—Stacey is my daughter, she and Mallory have been best friends since we moved here—Judy said that we could make the school allow Mallory and Stacey and their friends form a Biblical Criticism Club, or something like that, that would talk about the stories in the Bible that weren’t really true and how we knew they weren’t true. It sounded, I don’t know. . . . It was the kind of thing Judy would think up and Mallory would go along with. It was just to cause trouble, you know, and I understood the point and all that but it sounded so serious, if you see what I mean. And then we were driving along and we were passing this place and all of a sudden Judy said there was something she wanted to see about. And then we pulled into the driveway.”

“She didn’t tell you what it was she wanted to see about?”

Shelley Niederman shook her head. “I think, the way she was behaving, I think she might have seen something. Or somebody. Anyway, I said, you know, whatever, and she said she was just going to go up and knock on the door and she went. But you can’t see from here to the front door, not really. There’s that hedge thing in the way and the porch, and it’s so dark. So she just sort of disappeared and I thought somebody must have been home because she was gone so long, and then I got nervous and went up there and the door was open—”

“The front door was open?”

“Wide open. Almost all the way back. And I went in and I called out and nobody answered.”

“Did it feel to you as if somebody were in the house?”

Shelley Niederman shrugged again. “I didn’t think about it. It was very quiet, you know. There wasn’t a television on or anybody talking or anything like that. So I just kept walking forward along this hall, but then there wasn’t anywhere to go except what looked like a private area in the back, you know, a back door, that kind of thing. There wasn’t anywhere in that direction so I backed up a little and went into the living room, and when I got into the living room I saw her legs on the floor. Right there next to the dining room table. Under it. Next to it. I can’t remember. She was just there and there was blood everywhere, blood on the walls, and her head looked like, her head looked like—like sponge. Like sponge.”

Shelley Niederman’s head went up. Then she turned away from Gregor, opened the door next to her, leaned out, and began to vomit onto the ground.

Gregor waited until it was over, and it was not over for a very long time. Beyond the car’s windshield he could see the crime scene investigation still going on, a little more organized now, at least on the surface, men and women with crime scene kits going in and out of the front door. Judy Cornish’s head had looked like a sponge. He had seen it himself. He had seen other heads that looked like sponges.

Shelley Niederman sat up. She closed the door next to her and then twisted around to rummage in the back. She came up with some bottled water and a box of tissues.

“Judy always had everything on hand,” she said. “She was always very organized. I’m not so organized. But I hate these people, do you know that? I’ve never hated anybody else before in my life, but I hate these people. They’re just so petty and crabby and pinched—somehow, I don’t know the words. They’re so small. And they hate you for things, because you went to a good college, or you read books instead of watching American Idol, or whatever and they just . . .they just . . . I don’t know. If this is what religion is like, it’s not surprising that people become atheists. I mean, it isn’t. I can’t imagine not believing in God, but the God I believe in isn’t like this. He isn’t hateful and small. He isn’t—”

Shelley put her forehead down against the steering wheel and closed her eyes.

“It’s all right,” Gregor said, thinking as he said it that he had no idea what he meant. Of course it wasn’t all right. “Just tell me one thing, if you don’t mind. Just tell me if you touched anything, anything at all, when you went into the house.”

Shelley sat up and blinked at him. “Touched anything? Like what? What am I supposed to have touched?”