Living Witness (11 page)

“And she didn't?”

“No, she didn't,” Gary said, “and if you'd known her, you'd have known she wouldn't. She's not the kind of person who backs down under pressure. But that left us going into the lawsuit with a member of our own board on the other side, and the closer we got to the court date the more frantic Franklin got, and the more furious Alice McGuffie got, and there was a lot of bad feeling in town.”

“When is the lawsuit due to start?” Gregor asked.

“Next week.”

“It won't be delayed because one of the plaintiffs is, I think I heard somebody say, in a coma?”

“No,” Gary Albright said. “There are other plaintiffs and she isn't the chief one. But here's the thing. On the day the assault happened, any one of us, any of the members of the board that support the policy, could have hit her. We were all right there on Main Street. We all saw her taking her walk that day, same as always. We all went somewhere or the other in the time just after she left Main Street and went back home. And it's not just us. It's the pastors of the two churches that supported the policy. They were there, too. And it's the congregations. A lot of people resented the Hell out of that lawsuit. They still do.”

“And you're sure that was why she was assaulted?” Gregor asked. “There couldn't have been a more mundane reason, like robbery, for instance?”

“She was wearing one of those fanny packs,” Gary Albright said, “and it had four hundred dollars in it in tens and twenties. And everybody knew she carried cash when she walked. When she went anywhere, really. But the fanny pack wasn't touched, and her house wasn't broken into. She's got grandnieces and nephews, and living brothers and sisters, I think, but none of them live in town and none of them were anywhere near it at the time of the attack. I checked. So it wasn't robbery, and it wasn't her heirs trying to get rich quick. And if you saw what the town was like over this lawsuit, you'd see why I think—why everybody thinks, really—that that's what's going on here.”

 

Gary Albright had somewhere else to go in the city of Philadelphia.

“It's an errand I've got to do for my pastor,” he said.

Gregor stayed behind on John Jackman's new wing chair and waited until the coast was clear. John came back from showing Gary Albright all the way to the outer door and sat down in the other wing chair instead of behind the desk. He looked exhausted.

“That man makes me more nervous than my mother used to when I knew I was about to get in trouble,” he said. “In about the same way, too.”

“Gary Albright makes you feel guilty?

“Something like that,” John said. “I don't know. You know anything about him? Anything about his story?”

“No,” Gregor said. “I knew he was military as soon as I saw him, of course, and fairly recent military. It's hard to mistake the bearing.”

“The story about the leg made all the news shows,” John said. “I thought you might have heard about it. It was a couple, three years ago. I don't remember. He was a regular cop in Snow Hill then. He got called out on a domestic in the middle of the night in the middle of a snowstorm at one of those places, you know, up a dirt road, in the mountains, that kind of thing. Found the couple drunk to the gills and too falling-over-incapacitated to do much of anything, and a
baby, couldn't have been more than seven or eight months old, left wandering around on its own. So, he took the baby and got out of there. He figured it made more sense to make sure the baby was safe than try to bring the couple in given the weather and conditions and that kind of thing.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “I can see that.”

“Yeah,” John said. “So can I. It isn't the kind of trouble we ever had on any police force I was ever on, but I worked in cities. But, here's the thing. He had a dog with him. Did I tell you he had a dog?”

“No.”

“He did. Not a police dog, his own dog. Dog he'd had for years. He had the dog in the backseat for company. Most nights he didn't get called on for anything and he was out wandering around on his own. Where was I? Oh, okay. He took the baby with him, worked up an impromptu car seat for the kid in the back, I guess the parents didn't have one. The couple. Whoever they were. He took off and headed back to town thinking he'd turn the baby in at the hospital. They've got social workers. But the weather was really, really, bad, and the road wasn't a real road, it was a dirt rut, and he got lost. He ended up down a ditch and into a snow bank. They were out there for a week.”

“A week?” Gregor sat up.

“Car went down a hill, sort of, and they landed at the bottom of it, no communications working, and he'd cracked his leg, that leg, so he couldn't just stand up and march them all out. And it kept snowing. It stopped and then there was another system that came through. They should all have been dead.”

“And they weren't? He got the baby out alive?”

“He got the baby
and the dog
out alive,” John said, “because when push came to shove, when they had to have something to eat or starve, he used what he'd learned in the Marines and took his leg off. And fed it to the them. The dog and the baby.”

“Dear God,” Gregor said.

“I know,” John said. “You don't know how to respond to it, do you? I don't. Part of me is sickened beyond anything. Part of me thinks
there was something almost impossibly heroic about the whole thing. If he needed something for himself and the baby to eat, he could have killed the dog. I'd have killed the dog.”

“Dear God,” Gregor said again. “That's an interesting person.”

“Oh, I agree,” John said. “His CO was in my platoon in Vietnam. That's how he happened to end up coming to me. I talked to Derek about him and Derek had the same kind of thing to say. You don't know how to take the kid. He's got an almost superhuman sense of responsibility. He's completely reliable. He's very straight in the military sense of the word straight. Not straight as in not gay, but you know—”

“Dudley Do-Right,” Gregor said.

“Yeah, that,” John said, “but not exactly. Dudley Do-Right is a mental defective. I don't think Gary Albright is a mental defective.”

“No, I don't either,” Gregor said. He considered the story again, as far as he was able. It was hard to imagine anybody behaving like that. It was especially hard to imagine anybody behaving like that in order to save a dog. “Do you think Gary Albright was incapable of battering this old woman?” he asked.

John shrugged. “I don't know. It's hard to say what somebody will do when they lose control, and that's what it would have had to be if Gary Albright is guilty of this thing. He'd have had to lose control. But there's a part of me that thinks that if he had done that, he wouldn't have concealed his involvement. He'd have come right forward and confessed.”

“Of course,” Gregor said, “that's the perfect cover, if you think about it. It's so totally unlike you, nobody would suspect, but just to make sure, bring in a hired gun so you can't be confused of a conflict of interest. What's his problem with the state police?”

John Jackman shrugged. “Religion, as far as I can make out. Gary Albright is very religious, the guy he deals with in the staties doesn't like it. Or Gary Albright doesn't like that the statie isn't. Or something like that.”

“Does he know that I'm not very religious?”

“I told him you were an out-and-out atheist,” John said. “I was
trying to spare you the bother, if I could. Aren't you getting married in a few weeks?”

“It depends on whether Bennis and Donna can ever finish making arrangements. Bennis thinks it would be a good idea if I went up and helped out. It would get me out of her hair, and everybody else out of mine.”

“So you're going to go up and do it?”

“I think so,” Gregor said. He stared at the door Gary Albright had left through. “It's not my usual kind of thing, of course, but it may be any minute or two. I don't suppose you have any way of finding out what kind of condition this Ann-Victoria Hadley is in.”

“I've got phone numbers,” John said. “Tell me the truth. It isn't Ann-Victoria Hadley. It's Gary Albright. You can't get your mind off Gary Albright.”

Gregor's coat was on the rack next to John's office door. He got up out of the wing chair and went over to get it.

“Is he married?”

“Gary Albright? I don't think so,” John said.

“What happened to the baby?”

“I don't know,” John said.

“It would be interesting to know, wouldn't it, what went on in that man's head. It would be interesting to know what this case is really about, too.”

“Somebody bashed in an old lady's skull.”

“Because she opposed putting something calling ‘Intelligent Design' in public school science classes?” Gregor said. “Seriously, John, have you ever heard of anything like that happening? We've had monkey trials without measure in this country, and nobody's been killed over one yet. The usual motives are love and money. And Ann-Victoria Hadley has money.”

“You just heard Gary Albright said he checked out the relatives and none of them were near the scene. Or even in the same state, I think.”

“They could always have hired somebody,” Gregor pointed out.

Then he put on his coat and headed out the door.

 

 

 

There were rumors all over town that Gary Albright had gone to Philadelphia to bring in a hired gun to investigate what had happened to Annie-Vic Hadley, and Alice McGuffie just knew that if that was true, Gary had done it because of the television cameras. The television cameras were everywhere these days. There were big mobile production vans all up and down Main Street, right from Nick Frapp's white trash church down to the courthouse itself, and there were people who were saying that the judge had received death threats. Alice McGuffie wasn't surprised about that any more than she was surprised about any of the rest of it, but part of her truly wished that she wasn't making so much money off television people who came to eat in her diner.

“They're atheists, every last one of them,” she said to Lyman on Thursday morning. The big, open front room was stacked with people she had never seen before, and the men among them ate like horses. It had to be tiring work, carrying that equipment around all day. The men came in and ate the kind of breakfasts Alice had last seen commonly on farmhouse tables: stacks of pancakes with butter sandwiched
between the layers; double orders of sausages and hash browns; coffee by the bucket. If Alice drank that much coffee, she'd be on the ceiling for days.

“Just leave them alone,” Lyman said, looking out onto the floor, too. He was exhausted. Alice knew it. If she didn't also know that this surge in business wouldn't last a day beyond the end of the trial, she'd suggest taking on somebody to help Lyman with the cooking.

“It's a shame you can't even hope they'll do the right thing,” Alice said. “If they weren't all secular humanists, maybe they'd see something. See how good this town is. Want to come to God. But you know what secular humanists are like.”

Lyman made a little snort of assent, and then the phone on the kitchen wall rang. The phone on the kitchen wall almost never rang. It was a different line than the one in the office. People only called it when they wanted Alice to put aside something for them to pick up. They'd had a lot of that kind of business since the television people came. It was as if those cameramen had black holes in the middle of their stomachs. They'd eat like crazy in here, and an hour later they'd be calling up for something to take out. Alice had heard a couple of them complaining about her pizza, but she knew what she thought they could do about that.

The phone was still ringing. Lyman was paying no attention to it. Alice looked him over and sighed. Men were men. There wasn't anything you could do about them. They didn't notice things the way women did. At least Lyman was a good Godly man, and he had this business. Alice was sure that that was better than anything those television women could say about
their
husbands, assuming they even had them.

Alice picked up the phone. One of the television women sat alone at one of the tables in the dining room, but she wasn't eating anything. She was only drinking coffee, black and without sugar. If the men from the television crews ate without ceasing, the women never seemed to eat at all, and they were all so thin they looked ready to snap in half. What Alice really didn't like, though, was the suits. She
never thought a woman looked good in a suit, and women looked just stupid in pants suits. Take Hillary Clinton. The woman looked like—well, Alice didn't know what she looked like, but the first question that came to Alice's mind was, who did she think she was? Really. Who did Hillary Clinton think she was? Who did any of those women think they were? What were they trying to prove? They were just women, like any other women.

Alice thought she might have been holding the phone for longer than she should have been. She put it to her ear and said, “Hello?” It wouldn't matter if they missed one take out order, and they probably wouldn't miss it anyway. Whoever it was would probably think there was something wrong with the phone and call right back.

“Hello,” somebody said on the other end of the line said. It took Alice a minute to realize she was talking to Catherine Marbledale.
Ms
. Marbledale. Talk about somebody who ought to get the starch taken out of her panties.

“Snow Hill Diner,” Alice said. This did not bode well.
Ms
. Marbledale never called up to get something to take out. She never ate at the diner. She bought fruits and vegetables from the fresh produce stands and then did things to them that she found in foreign cookbooks.