Living Witness(86)

“I don’t know. The walls. The door. A piece of furniture.”

“Oh, wonderful,” Shelley Niederman said. “Now they’re going to think I did it. I was here, and she was supposed to be my friend, so they’re all going to think I did it. Because none of them could be guilty, could they? I’m a secular humanist. They’re all good Christian people.”





2




Back in the middle of the chaotic yard, Gary Albright was still standing against his police car, as if he had been carved out of wood and left to rot there. Gregor skirted another little clutch of technical people—the state police had always had a lot of technical people, and a few years ago they’d received an enormous grant from the Department of Homeland Security, so that they now had too many technical people—and stopped next to Gary. His face was blank. There was no way to tell what he was thinking.

Gregor looked up at the house, and said, “The relatives should be back soon. They should talk to them. When I was with the FBI, the thing I hated most about investigations was how clueless we were about real conditions on the ground. It’s impossible to come into a small town, or even a large city, to come in cold and know what you need to know to do an effective investigation. That was why I was never the kind of special agent who liked to take over from the local police forces. The local police forces usually knew better than I did what I needed to pay attention to.”

For a moment, Gary Albright didn’t seem to have heard. Gregor watched his face. They taught you to do that in the military, that look of blank openness, as if you were so completely honest and honorable that you had nothing to hide. Most men lost it after they left the service. A few months, sometimes a few years, and dealing with ordinary human beings on an everyday basis made that whole pretense of calm impartiality a liability, and it was more of a liability if it wasn’t a pretense. You learned, Gregor thought. He had learned. He wondered why Gary Albright had not.

Gary finally looked away, and then up, straight into the atmosphere, as if he were trying to see a comet pass by. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to know that you need to know,” he said. “If I did I might not have had to call you in here. I don’t even know what I need to know.”

Gregor gestured toward the Volvo with his head. “I was just talking to that woman, Shelley Niederman. She is, I take it, from ‘the development,’ as everybody here calls it.”

“She surely is that,” Gary Albright said. “They’re all like that, you know. Like Shelley Niederman and Judy Cornish.”

“Everybody out at the development?”

“All the women,” Gary Albright said. “I got around a little, you know. I saw women like that once or twice. But there were never women like that in Snow Hill before the development.”

“Women like what?”

Gary shrugged. “I don’t know how to put it. As if they were channeling some women’s magazine all the time. The words they use. ‘Proactive,’ that was a big one. And they say things like, ‘I had a meeting with Johnny’s teacher so that we could work out strategies to help him succeed.’ I mean, what kind of talk is that? What kind of a way is that to think of school? School is school. If you’ve got a brain in your head and you do your work, your grades are good. If not on either account, they’re not. And that’s not all.”

“I didn’t think it was,” Gregor said.

“It’s like they think they can control everything,” Gary said. “I don’t mean they run around trying to boss people. I mean they define everything as a problem to be solved.”

“They didn’t do that in the Marines?”

“We didn’t do it like that,” Gary said. “We didn’t define people as problems to be solved. No, that’s not what I mean. It’s the way they do it.” Gary looked into the sky again. Then he shook his head. “There was this woman, Miss Marbledale was telling me about it a few weeks ago. She’s got a son, he’s fourteen, and he just won’t do his homework. So she, the woman, not Miss Marbledale, she took this kid to a psychiatrist. They did all this testing to find out if he had attention deficit disorder. They got him a shrink and put him into therapy for his ‘problem,’ but for God’s sake, Mr. Demarkian, what problem? He’s a fourteen-year-old boy who doesn’t want to do his homework. That isn’t a psychiatric disorder, it’s puberty. And they’re like that about everything. It’s never the case that the kid isn’t very bright, he must need medication. It’s never the case that the kid is undisciplined and not much interested in changing that; if he thinks that way he must have psychological problems. They define being human as a psychological problem. Am I making any sense?”