Living Witness (29 page)

Alice made herself move. Her house looked nice in the sunlight. They painted the inside every other year, because Alice didn't like dirt, and she didn't like dinge, and she didn't like coming home to the smell of futility, either. She just wished sometimes that they could do something with the living room like those houses in the development, the ones with the high ceilings that went up and up and ended in skylights. This house had been in Lyman's family for as long as anybody could remember, at least as long as Annie-Vic's house had been in hers. It was a family heirloom, or something. But it wasn't like Annie-Vic's house, either.

“Mama, please,” Barbie said.

Alice made herself move. To get to the kitchen you had to go through the dining room. The house was only fifteen hundred square feet. In the dining room there was a long table and six chairs, all passed down to her by Lyman's mother, and all made in Grand Rapids, too. Alice remembered when that used to mean something, and when Lyman's family had been so much better off than hers. The time when she was growing up had been better. There was no development then, and there was Annie-Vic only some of the time. She was always off doing something somewhere. Showing us up, Alice thought, and then she pushed that firmly out of her mind. There was no way that somebody like Annie-Vic could show her up. There was nothing on earth that was better or more valuable than good ordinary folks living their lives and minding their own business while those people, people like Annie-Vic, went running around trying to ruin everything.

The living room was long and narrow, but it had a fireplace with a fancy white mantel where they could hang stockings every Christmas. Alice believed in doing Christmas big. She liked to have the house decorated and she liked to have lights on the trees outside. What would happen to this country when the secular humanists had abolished Christmas and everybody had to live through the entire long month of December, in the dark and the cold and the awful weather, with nothing to look forward to?

The couch Barbie was lying on had been bought new at Sears five
years ago. It needed to be reupholstered. Alice hadn't noticed that before. Barbie had a cast up to her knee, a big thick one. The leg with the cast was up on the arm of the couch, because she was supposed to keep it elevated.

“Mama,” she said, when Alice came in.

“I was just going to call your father and have him come out and get this prescription,” Alice said. “He can run out and get it and then run back into town and give it in at the pharmacy, and then Mr. Carr can send it over. I don't like the idea of leaving you here alone.”

“I didn't bother her,” Barbie said. “I really didn't bother her, Mama. I knew her mother was murdered. Everybody knew it. I was just walking along minding my own business and going to class and then she was just there. And she slapped me.”

“Well,” Alice said, trying very hard to be fair. “Her mother had just died. She probably wasn't thinking straight.”

“She said some things,” Barbie said. “She said there wasn't any God. She said that all that happened after you died was that your body went into the ground and worms came out of it.”

“She's afraid her mother is going to go to Hell, that's all that was,” Alice said. “Having your body rot in the ground is a lot better than going to Hell. If you rot in the ground you can't really feel anything. If you go to Hell, all you feel is pain and it's the worst pain in the world and it goes on for eternity. It never stops for even one instant.”

“Do you think Mrs. Cornish went to Hell?” Barbie asked.

“We can never tell who goes to Hell and who doesn't,” Alice said, because that was the right thing to say. She'd heard about it in church. No matter how bad you thought a person was, no matter what awful things she'd done, you couldn't read her heart. Only God could read her heart. Only God could know for sure.

“I think Mrs. Cornish is in Hell,” Barbie said. “I think she's there right now, screaming for somebody to help her, and nobody will. I think Mallory Cornish is going to Hell one of these days, too. I hate them, did you know that, Mama? I hate all those people from the development. I even hate the way they talk.”

“You shouldn't hate,” Alice said, still being conscientious. She could sympathize with Barbie. You shouldn't hate, the Bible said so, but then it said you were supposed to hate the sin and not the sinner. But that didn't make much sense, either. How could you do that?

“I know I shouldn't hate,” Barbie said, looking as if she were about to drift off to sleep. “I know that. But she said you were a murderer. She said you killed her mother.”

“What?”

“She said you were a murderer,” Barbie repeated. “Right there in front of the office at school. She said you'd killed her mother and you were going to go to the death chamber and have a lethal injection and then your body was going to rot in the ground and worms were going to come out of it. She said it over and over again.”

“She probably wasn't thinking straight,” Alice said. It was something she'd said already, but she couldn't think of any new words.

“I knew she was talking trash,” Barbie said. “I knew it. But there's that man here, the one not from here, helping the police, and I thought he might not know she was talking trash, and she might get you in trouble. Are you going to get in trouble, Mama?”

“No, no, of course not,” Alice said. “You should try taking a nap now. I should go call your father and get something done about this prescription.”

“She's probably in Hell right this minute,” Barbie said. “She's probably burning up in the flames and wailing for mercy, but you don't get any mercy in Hell, do you, Mama?”

“No,” Alice said.

“Well,” Barbie said. “That's good then. That makes me feel better.”

 

 

 

Gregor Demarkian didn't spend much time at crime scenes anymore. One of the better aspects of being a consultant, instead of part of a regular force, was that he didn't have to. The crime scenes were often ancient history by the time he showed up. On the other hand, one of the better aspects of being a consultant instead of a private detective was that he was allowed onto crime scenes when they happened in front of his face, and he only wished he could learn to stand the boredom and the confusion they inevitably entailed. This crime scene was mostly confusion, with nobody really in charge. Gary Albright had not left, but he was leaning back against his police car, being careful not to contaminate anything. Tom Fordman and Eddie Block were trying, but it was obvious that they had little experience. Gregor had no idea what the procedures were in this department, except in a sort of vague and general way. It gave him a great sense of relief when the crime scene technicians from the state police arrived, although it seemed to make everybody else nervous.

“He'll be along in a bit,” Gary told Gregor, meaning, Gregor presumed,
this man named Dale Vardan, but there was no sign of him yet, and Gary Albright wasn't talking.

Gregor looked over at the Volvo sitting in the drive. There were police cars all around it now, but the woman inside it didn't seem to have moved for hours. She had her head against the steering wheel and her arms wrapped around it. Gregor looked back at the big, old house, thinking how odd it really was that there was a time when houses like this had been in vogue, and then walked out to the Volvo and the woman there. Niederman, he remembered, feeling a little relieved. It was Mrs. Niederman.

Gregor knocked against the driver's-side window. Mrs. Niederman put her head up and looked out. It was colder than she was expecting it to be. She pulled her coat more closely around her chest.

“Hello,” she said.

“I'm Gregor Demarkian,” he said. “We did meet, a little while ago—”

“I know who you are,” she said. She looked up and around. “It's cold. I want to put the window up.”

“Could I come around and sit in the car with you?” Gregor asked. “I just wanted to ask you a few questions.”

Mrs. Niederman looked out across the driveway, at the police and the ambulance and the state evidence van and shuddered. “Come right in. Come in. I want to go home. I want to get out of here. Somebody else is going to get killed. Just you wait.”

Gregor left that alone. Until he knew what was going on here, he had no idea if it was likely or not that somebody else would be killed. He wished he could pinpoint what it was about this case that kept reminding him of that other one, the one where the man had killed himself and his child in the attic playroom of the house he had once shared with his wife. The case had been on his mind all day, and there didn't seem to be any point of connection to this one. He came around the back of the car, opened the door, slipped into the deep bucket seat, and closed the door behind him.

“I'm going to run the engine for a while,” Mrs. Niederman said. “It's cold.”

It was, indeed, very cold. Gregor waited while she got the car started and the heater pumping out hot air at the highest possible rate. He thought she would have been a mousy little woman if she hadn't had an air of self-confidence that made you forget about her looks. The air was there even though tears were streaming down out of her eyes and she was doing nothing to stop them.

“Judy always said somebody was going to get killed,” she said. “And that was before. Before the lawsuit. Judy always said that these people didn't want us here, and they were going to do something about it. We even had to watch when we went to the grocery store.”

“Excuse me?”

Shelley Niederman wiped tears off one cheek with the palm of her hand. “There are tissues here somewhere. Judy always had tissues. This is Judy's car, did you know that? I don't know why I got in behind the wheel after I found her. I just did. I just did. What are Dan and the children going to do without her?”

“You were saying something about the grocery store,” Gregor said gently.

“Oh,” Shelley Niederman said. “Yes. They don't like us here, you know. The people in town. They never did like us, even before there was all this trouble with evolution. It's like a movie out here, it's like
Deliverance
. Except I never saw
Deliverance
. You know what I mean. It's like. Oh, God, I don't know, they're hillbillies, even the ones that live in town. They're just not—I don't know—they're just not. And we'd go shopping in this grocery store in town and they'd
say
things to us. All of them. Even the checkout girls.”

“Say what to you?” Gregor asked.

Shelley Niederman shrugged. “Some of the younger people would call us bitches, but the older ones never use language like that. And maybe it wasn't that they said things to us, it was that they said things about us. ‘Ooh, look, a Coach bag. Doesn't she think she's the Queen
of Sheba.' That's one I remember. Somebody said it about me. Oh, that woman, Alice McGuffie, she said it about me.”

“I see,” Gregor said.

“And then, later, when the lawsuit was on, they did say things directly to us. We used to go to the supermarket and look around the parking lot to see who was there before we went in. And it was a pain, you know, because the nearest other supermarket is a good half-hour drive away, although it's a better one, you know, and we went there sometimes, but other times you just want to pick up a few things and you don't have the time. But we had to be careful, because they'd come up to us, and not just in the supermarket, on Main Street, too, sometimes, they'd come up and say things. ‘I'm going to pray for you,' one of them said. ‘Because you're an atheist, and atheists rot in Hell.' Oh, no, that wasn't just somebody. That was that McGuffie woman again. But I'm not an atheist. Judy wasn't either. I don't know where they get this stuff. And then they said it to the children in school.”

“The women did? Alice McGuffie did?”

“The other children did,” Shelley Niederman said. “The first few times it happened, Mallory was nearly hysterical. Mallory is, was, Judy's daughter. I don't know what tense I'm supposed to use. It's impossible to know what tense I'm supposed to use.”

“Don't worry about it,” Gregor said. “Would you mind if I asked you a little about today? I'm not really clear about today.”

“She's dead,” Shelley Niederman said. “What else do you want to know about today.”

“Well, for one thing, I'd like to understand why the two of you came here. From what I've been able to figure out, two of Miss Hadley's relatives are staying here for a short while while she's in the hospital. Were you looking for them?”

“I don't know,” Shelley said.

“You don't know?”

“Judy didn't say,” Shelley said. “She just—we were talking about the children. At school. You know, the trouble they'd been having, and Judy said—this was before—she said that we were going about it
the wrong way. We were always playing defense, and that instead we should learn to play offense. Because they were playing offense. And then she said there was something called the Equal Access Act, and we could use that to make the school allow Mallory and Stacey—Stacey is my daughter, she and Mallory have been best friends since we moved here—Judy said that we could make the school allow Mallory and Stacey and their friends form a Biblical Criticism Club, or something like that, that would talk about the stories in the Bible that weren't really true and how we knew they weren't true. It sounded, I don't know. . . . It was the kind of thing Judy would think up and Mallory would go along with. It was just to cause trouble, you know, and I understood the point and all that but it sounded so serious, if you see what I mean. And then we were driving along and we were passing this place and all of a sudden Judy said there was something she wanted to see about. And then we pulled into the driveway.”