Living Witness(93)

When Nick was growing up, he’d stay behind until all the other kids around him were already on their way to school, or stay behind after when they had already scattered at the end of the day, and work his way around so that he could pass that house. At the time, he’d thought he was looking at the rich people, that it was Annie-Vic’s money that had intrigued him. Whatever it was had certainly seemed to have something to do with money. There was the house itself, large and imposing and almost like a fortress, way back there, with its gate. There were the people who worked inside and on the grounds. Nobody in Snow Hill had full-time servants, of course. That would have been considered putting on airs, and if there was one thing the people of Snow Hill would not tolerate, it was putting on airs. Annie-Vic had women who came in to “do” for her, and she had men who worked in the yard a couple of times a week. But then, Annie-Vic was definitely somebody who put on airs, and Nick was fairly sure, even then, that not having enough money to hire a cleaning woman to come in and do the dusting was not the problem.

The picture on the screen now was of the woman who had died, Judy Cornish. The news anchor called her “Judith Leighton Cornish,” the way he would have done if she’d been a writer or a Supreme Court justice. The details were a little sketchy. The woman had gone up to the house and parked in the drive. She’d left her friend in the car and gone into the house itself. Her friend had waited and waited and waited, and then gone in herself to see if there was something wrong. That was when she found the body. It was simple and straightforward enough, except of course that it made no sense at all. Why had that woman gone to Annie-Vic’s house in the first place, and then why had she gone in when there was nobody home? No, Nick thought, that wouldn’t do. There might have been somebody in the house, and that somebody might have asked her to come inside. That could be the murderer. It still left the question of why Mrs. Cornish had gone up there to begin with, and it was fairly obvious by now that the news reporter didn’t have a clue. There were always people who lamented that the American public wasn’t really interested in news. Television news divisions were being cut back, budgets were being slashed. All of that might be true, but as far as Nick could see, television news had too much time on its hands. There wasn’t really all that much news out there. The reporters went in front of the cameras and said the same things over and over again for hours on end. And this with the murder wasn’t even a particularly bad case. At least there had been a murder. At least there was actually something to worry about. The very worst was in the hour or two before the polls closed on an election day. Then there was no news at all, and the reporters and the anchors just stood there blithering about nothing in particular for minutes on end.

Nick got up and went to the window. He had always liked the fact that he could get a glimpse of Annie-Vic’s house from here. At night, when he was here alone and Annie-Vic was alone herself, he could sometimes see her lights coming through the darkness and the trees. He didn’t know how long it had taken him before he understood what it was she represented for him, or how long after that it had been before he realized that she was not a particularly good specimen. Still, she had been there, it had been there, the faint promise of something else besides the life he’d grown up with, and something else besides the life he saw all around him. It wasn’t true that poor people thought about nothing but the material things they lacked. He’d almost never thought about those. What he’d thought about were books, and the way the librarians sometimes looked at him when he came in to read in the library.

There was a light on in the church’s main floor annex, the place where the offices were. He rubbed the side of his head with his long, thin fingers and wondered what was going on now. He had his Rosetta Stone program open on the computer. The computer was against the wall opposite the television set. It had originally been in the study, but he hadn’t liked it in there. Living alone the way he did, there was too much silence. He’d dragged the computer in here so that he would at least have a little background noise to keep him company. The Rosetta Stone program was for Italian, which he had been working on learning to read for about six months. He really ought to get a dog. Either that, or he ought to bite the bullet and get married. The problem was that he’d never met a dog or a woman that seemed to fit him for more than a week or two.

Unmarried pastors are disasters waiting to happen, he thought. Then he took another look at the light in the annex. There were definitely people down there. That was all right: The annex was used for all kinds of things, and members of the church had the right to be there. But usually if there was going to be something going on, somebody told him about it. If for some reason the police had wanted to search the place, they would have had to come to him with a warrant. He was sure of that. He wasn’t sure why he half-expected the police to want to search the place. But that was how it was in a place like Snow Hill. In the end, the most expedient course of action was to blame the hillbillies.