Living Witness(94)

Nick went out his front door and looked around. It was dark, and Main Street was crammed solid with news trucks. This was going to be bigger than the trial on its own ever could have been. He wondered what Gregor Demarkian was doing right this minute. He wondered how Gregor Demarkian was getting along with the state police. That was what they’d said on the news, that the state police had been called in. Nick had met that idiot from the state police. The man had to be a joy to work with.

It was cold, but the annex was only a few steps away. Nick didn’t see any point in going off to find a coat. He crossed the small courtyard on the cement path and let himself in the annex’s back door. He could hear voices coming from the big room at the front where they sometimes held meetings of the church board. The voices were anxious, and they all had that twanging drawl that meant they belonged to hill people. Nick wondered if there would ever come a time when that particular accent would no longer signify stupidity, and brutishness, and ignorance. These people weren’t stupid or brutish or ignorant at all, but anyone who heard them would assume them to be all three. It was a terrible thing, stereotyping. Or maybe it was just human nature.

The door to the meeting room was open. Nick could see through it as he came up the hall. Harve Griegson was there, and Pete DeMensh, and Susie Cleland’s brother Martin. A few more steps, and Nick could see Susie, too. They none of them seemed to be doing anything. They were just standing around and looking unhappy.

He got to the door and knocked. Pete jumped. Susie cried out. You would have thought they were all in a horror movie.

“It’s just me,” Nick said. “I saw the light.”

“We didn’t mean to bother you,” Harve said. “We were just talking.”

“About what?” Nick asked him.

The four of them looked at one another. Susie looked away first, and then looked at the floor. “I know it’s not a good thing to gossip,” she said, “but this isn’t gossip really. I don’t think it is. And it might be important.”

“What might be important?” Nick asked.

The four of them looked at one another again. By now, Susie was blushing brick red.

“Well, here’s the thing,” she said. “You can’t help but notice it, can you? It isn’t as if she’s quiet about it. She was screaming her head off for nearly an hour this afternoon. Everybody on Main Street must have heard it.”

“She, who?” Nick asked, although he knew. That was the kind of incident where everybody knew.

“Marcey Hale,” Susie said. “She came down to Franklin’s shop and I don’t know what she wanted, but she ended up screaming her head off. And then he had to get her home—it must have been terrible for business—so he took her out the back. And yes, I looked. I couldn’t help myself. I was worried about her. He was throwing her around as if she were a sack of potatoes, he really was. I thought he was going to end up throwing her on the ground. He looked so angry. And he had the truck back there and he shoved her into it and then he slammed the door. He could have taken off her hand.”

Nick looked from one of them to the other. None of them was willing to meet his eyes, and Susie had taken on that defiant attitude people got when they were forced to admit to they thought something was discreditable. Nick cleared his throat.

“I can see how you’d feel better if Franklin were kinder to Marcey, and more careful about the way he handled her, physically,” he said. “And if it were one of you, I’d definitely be counseling more gentleness and delicacy than Franklin tends to show to anybody. But Marcey’s hard to handle when she gets like that. And it can be hard on a man who has to try to deal with it over an extended period. I take it he didn’t break any bones that you could see.”

“It’s not what he did with Marcey that’s got us worried,” Harve said.

“Really?” Nick said. “Then what does?”

“I know I shouldn’t have been looking,” Susie said. “I mean, I should have come on back here to work and let him get on with what he was getting on with. But I was worried, you see what I mean. He shoved her in the car, and he shut the door on her, and then he used that thing he has, the gizmo that lets you lock the doors from the outside.”

“I’m getting one of those the next time I get a car,” Pete said.

“Anyway,” Susie said. “He did that. And then after he did that he left. He walked on around back of us here, right through the Serenity Corner—”

“He came onto our property here?” Nick asked.