Living Witness(91)

Franklin got up out of the Barcalounger he had been sitting in and went to the bookshelf built right into the paneling of the wall. He’d never liked bookshelves much, but on this one he kept the prizes he’d won for football and track in high school, and there was a loose board on the bottom shelf that could be pried open to reveal an empty space underneath. The empty space was just big enough to fit his bottle of Johnny Walker. That was a good thing. Marcey didn’t drink—it would be easier on all of them if she did; at least they could explain it to their friends—but Franklin thought it was just taking precautions to make sure she couldn’t drink, at least when she was at home. That stuff she took did not work well with alcohol.

Franklin put another slug, a good long one, into his coffee cup. Then he put the bottle back and fixed the shelf again. He could hear Janey’s footsteps coming down the carpet in the hall that led to the foyer. Marcey was quiet now, knocked out not so much by another round of pills as by the sheer exhaustion of a day spent creating one scene after another. She had taken another round of pills, though. Franklin was sure of it. Sometimes he went around the house trying to find her stashes and eliminate them, but it was a losing battle. Marcey knew more places to hide pills than a Jew knew where to hide money. And what good did it do, in the long run? She was going to kill herself one of these days. Franklin understood that. He thought even the children understood that. Marcey was going to end up in the emergency room with an overdose of that Oxycontin and then he wouldn’t have to think about this any more. This was not the way he had expected his life to work out, back when he was at high school. This was not the way he thought it should be working out, now. The world was supposed to be a simple place. You did what you had to do. You met your responsibilities. You followed the rules. There shouldn’t ever be a case where bad things happened to good people, because God was watching over the earth.

Janey came to the door of the rec room and stuck in her head. “It’s Mr. Carr,” she said. “He’s out in the hall and he says he wants to see you.”

Holman Carr. Franklin hadn’t thought much about Holman Carr lately. He was a good man. You could count on him to help out at the church. You could count on him to help out. It was too bad he’d lost the election for school board, and to Annie-Vic, of all people. But Holman was like that. He was so mousy and so quiet, nobody ever noticed him.

“It’s Uncle Mike, too,” Janey said helpfully.

“Well, send them on back,” Franklin said. “I’m not doing anything.”

He looked back at the television. That woman was still on. She was nodding and explaining, still. Franklin shuddered and took a long drink out of his coffee cup. There had still been enough coffee in it when he’d added this latest shot of Scotch that the whole thing tasted funny, but he really didn’t care.

The door opened again, and it was Mike who came in first. Holman would never come in first, not anywhere, and not for any reason. Franklin wondered what he did when there was nobody else with him.

Mike looked at the television set. “What are you doing?” he asked. “What’re you watching Larry King for?”

Franklin waved his cup at the set. “That’s Eugenie Scott,” he said. “That’s a name, isn’t it? Her mother must have thought she was just too perfect. Now she runs something called the National Center for Science Education.”

“Oh,” Holman Carr said. He sounded surprised. Then he blushed. “It’s just—well, she’s on the list. I mean, that organization is on the list. To testify in the trial.”

“On the atheist side, I take it,” Franklin said.

“Let’s not worry about sides,” Mike said. “How can you be watching that now? We’ve got a situation, if you haven’t noticed. We’ve got a problem.”

“And I can solve it?” Franklin said. “I didn’t kill that Cornish woman. It doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“If you’d been watching the local news,” Mike said, “you’d have seen old Henry Wackford, telling anybody who’d listen that it’s us that did it. He says we’re killing off the people who filed the lawsuit, like we think if they’re all gone the suit will go away.”

“That’s cracked,” Franklin said. He took another long drag at his coffee cup. Mike and Holman wouldn’t care if they found out he was drinking. He could just go over to the bookshelves and get himself some more when he was done.

Mike grabbed a chair from next to the coffee table and turned it slightly, so that he could sit down and look Franklin in the face at the same time. “Henry isn’t just making noise this time,” he said. “He’s making accusations. That didn’t make the news. The television stations aren’t crazy. They don’t want to get sued. But he’s talked to a dozen people by now and he’s come right out and said he thinks he knows who did it. Who did them both. Annie-Vic and this one.”