Living Witness(96)

“I’ve got them up reading that Bible stories book my aunt Evelyn gave them,” she said. “I’ll let them come down and watch a video while we’re all having supper. They’ve been fed already. I know you like us to eat together as a family, Gary, but it was getting late and I didn’t know when you’d be home.”

“I didn’t know when I’d be home either,” Gary said. He looked at Gregor Demarkian, who was looking around the playroom and the door that led off of it to the spare bedroom. “Why don’t you relax for a minute or two and Sarah can call you for supper? Or you can just come up whenever you’ve settled in.”

“I’ll send Michael down with some coffee if you like,” Sarah said. “We do have some beer in the house if you’d like that, but I don’t let Michael carry it, so—”

“I’m fine,” Gregor Demarkian said. “I really am. I just need to make a couple of phone calls.”

“Of course,” Sarah said.

“Of course,” Gary said.

Then both moved off, a little awkwardly, leaving The Great Detective on his own. That was how Gary thought of Gregor Demarkian, as The Great Detective, but he hadn’t until that moment realized it. He must have been thinking that way about Gregor all along.

They made their way to the upper level in silence. Then Sarah turned and looked down the stairs again.

“Well,” she said. “He doesn’t look all that frightening. In fact, he seems very nice.”

“He is very nice,” Gary said, going over to the dining table and pulling out a chair. Michael and Lily were sitting together on the couch, pouring over a book that had ten times as many pictures as words, which was about right for their age. “We ended up having to call in the cavalry,” he said.

“Oh, Gary,” Sarah said. “But why? I thought that was the reason for calling Gregor Demarkian in. So that we wouldn’t have to deal with Dale Vardan just this once.”

“We only half-have to deal with him,” Gary said. “Demarkian doesn’t seem to like him any more than we do. But we had to do something. This was the second attack—even if it wasn’t the second murder—and you know as well as I do that whoever went at Annie-Vic meant to kill her. I get up every morning wishing she’d open her eyes and just tell us who whacked her, and I don’t even know if she knows. I don’t know if she saw him.”

“Do you think it’s true, the kind of things Henry Wackford keeps saying?” Sarah asked. “Do you think it’s really some religious maniac running around killing people just because they believe in evolution? I mean, things happen, don’t they? Those people who killed the abortion doctors. That kind of thing.”

“Those people who killed the abortion doctors,” Gary said, “were members of a nutcase organization called the Army of God, and there were about six of them. Can you imagine any of our people here doing that kind of thing? Who? Franklin Hale? Alice McGuffie? How about Holman Carr?”

Sarah smiled. “Okay. Holman probably couldn’t kill a spider without that wife of his telling him to. And she wouldn’t tell him to, because she’d be afraid he’d get caught, and then who’d pay her bills? But you know, Gary, it’s not impossible that one of our own people here—well, it has to be one of us, doesn’t it? Somebody is doing these things. And I could see Franklin killing somebody, under the right circumstances.”

“Because that person didn’t want Intelligent Design in the public schools?”

“All right,” Sarah said. “What about Alice?”

Gary took a deep breath, and shrugged. “I can see Alice killing somebody. I can even see her saying she did it for religion. I just can’t see her actually doing it for religion. We were standing out there at the crime scene and I was thinking about Alice. Alice’s Barbie is in the same grade as Mrs. Cornish’s daughter Mallory. Apparently, they don’t like each other much.”

“I’ll bet,” Sarah said.

“Here’s the thing,” Gary said. “Things are changing. Ten years ago, Barbie McGuffie could have been a small-town popular girl with everything that entailed and never had a second thought about it until she was forty-five and fat as a pig and suddenly realized she hadn’t done squat with her life.”

“Gary.”

“But it isn’t ten years ago,” Gary said, ignoring the protest. He was pretty sure the children had not heard him say “squat.” “The kids from the development have a lot more money than our kids do. They have fancier clothes. They’ve got their sights fixed on going to fancy colleges on the coasts. And they don’t care what the Barbie McGuffies of this world think about anything. It changes the dynamic.”