Living Witness(92)

“Who?” Franklin asked.

“Me,” Holman Carr said.

Franklin started to laugh. “Oh, God,” he said.

“It isn’t funny,” Mike said. “That is what Henry’s saying, and you know Henry. Once he starts saying it, he’s going to go on saying it. And it isn’t as if we can shut him up by threatening a lawsuit.”

“Especially not now,” Holman said. “Especially not when nobody knows who did do it.”

“And what is supposed to be Holman’s motive for killing one woman and practically killing another?” Franklin demanded. “Oh, I know. It’s Henry, so it must be evolution. Holman’s running around killing people because it’s the only way to keep evolution out of the Snow Hill public schools. Do you know what a crock that is? Evolution is already in the Snow Hill public schools. Miss Catherine my-shit-don’t-stink Marbledale put it there, and she doesn’t give a crap what the rest of us think. Excuse me. I think I’m going to start drinking for serious. It’s been a very long day.”

“It would help if we had a little more public support,” Mike said. “Part of the problem here is that you didn’t get elected to get evolution out of the public schools, you got elected to fix the mess Henry Wackford and his people left the school district in, and nothing’s been getting done about it. You’ve been so busy worrying about Intelligent Design that there’s still a problem with the new school construction and there’s still a problem with the teachers’ union  s and the contracts and the pension funds and I don’t know what else. So people aren’t disposed, if you see what I mean, to come running to our side to help.”

“You can’t just come out and tell people things,” Franklin said. “You know that. You’ve got the courts to worry about, they’re all in the hands of the secular humanists. Think of that mess a few years ago in Dover. You’ve got to come at it sideways.”

“You’ve also got to do something about the day-to-day,” Mike said.

“Well, Annie-Vic was doing something about the day-to-day,” Franklin said. “She seemed to like it. It’s not my fault that somebody smashed her head in. Which isn’t to say I’m surprised. Somebody should’ve done it long ago.”

“Franklin, for God’s sake,” Mike said.

Franklin got up and went back to the bookshelf. They really would not care. Or they would, but they’d put up with it.

“I can’t help it if somebody is killing off these women,” he said. “I’m sick to death of women, if you want to know the truth. I’m sick of the nagging and I’m sick of the, the thing, whatever you want to call it. I’m going to drink until I don’t give a shit anymore, and then I’m going to get up tomorrow morning and blame my hangover for the mood I’m in. Far as I can see, there isn’t a damn thing else I can do about things.”

“Well,” Mike said. “You could think a little more seriously about what it means that that Gregor Demarkian person is in town, and what it means that Gary Albright brought him here.”





2




Nick Frapp didn’t watch CNN. He didn’t watch MSNBC. He didn’t even watch Fox, which he thought of as the news’s version of professional wrestling, with everybody shouting apocalypse at each other for no apparent reason. When he watched the news at all, instead of getting it from newspapers or the Internet, he watched the “local” channels, which were only local in the sense that they originated somewhere in Pennsylvania. There was no news service that was truly local to Snow Hill, or to any of the even smaller towns south and east of it, and Nick didn’t expect there ever would be. If there was one thing that was eternally true of the fallen and temporal world, it was that the people who inhabited it were only interested in other people who were richer and more privileged than they were.

The “local” news was actually semi-local tonight, though. There was footage from the crime scene up at Annie-Vic’s house, pictures of yellow police tape strung out between trees and cars parked every which way in that long, curved, gravel and rut drive. If Nick had gotten himself up out of his chair and gone to the window, he could probably have seen something of what was happening, if anything still was. The parsonage was attached to the church. It was right there on Main Street, or a little off, in the compound they had built on the land behind.

Nick could remember walking past the Hadley house when he was a boy. It was the great secret of his late childhood and early adolescence. Maybe there was something to Gary Albright’s constant refrain all the years they had gone to school together. Maybe he was a freak. No, Nick thought, he was a freak. He’d known it growing up, and he knew it now. A freak was not necessarily a bad thing to be.