Gregor Demarkian worked, most of the time, as a consultant to police departments. Police departments, being government entities, didn’t like to spend money when they didn’t have to, mostly because they could be sure there would be editorials in the papers about how many of the taxpayers’ dollars they were wasting even if they did have to. But because of this, and because he was expensive to hire, Gregor was used to having the media’s attention on the case he was working on. After all, it took something special to justify calling him in; and if he got involved otherwise, it was usually because he’d volunteered. What he was supposed to do about a situation like the present one, where the press was coming out of everybody’s ears, but why none of the reporters seemed the least bit interested in an attempted murder, he didn’t know.
Main Street had gotten far less deserted in the few minutes Gregor had spent on it. By the time he and Gary Albright went into the police station, there were several people from the town popping out onto the sidewalks to see what there were doing, and men and women burdened by camera and sound equipment were everywhere. Gregor took a quick look at them and then let Gary lead him into the building. It was the kind of place that might have served as a sheriff’s office in Mayberry, except that it was a separate building instead of part of the courthouse. Gregor found himself wondering where the courthouse was. It had to be close, but he didn’t think he’d seen it right on Main.
Most of the first floor of the police station was open. There was a counter for the public to stand at when they wanted something. Gregor guessed that most of the people here had known Gary Albright since childhood, which meant they weren’t likely to be all that patient about standing at a counter to talk to him, or to his officers, either, who were likely to have been in town forever, too. There were three desks on the other side of the counter, only one of which was occupied. That one was serving as a computer station to a woman with wispy hair and too many metal things holding it back. She looked up when Gregor and Gary came in and Gary nodded to her.
“Tina,” he said. “Mr. Demarkian. This is Tina Clay.”
Tina Clay waved. She was the kind of woman who would wave indoors. The longer he looked at her, the longer Gregor was sure she was almost excruciatingly self-conscious.
“Tom and Eddie out?” Gary asked her.
Tina nodded and then tried a smile. It didn’t quite come off.
“Tom and Eddie are our officers,” Gary said, heading toward the back where there were two more doors leading, Gregor supposed, to regular offices. “We don’t usually need more than that in Snow Hill. We wouldn’t need that if it wasn’t for the drugs. People don’t spend a lot of time killing each other here.”
“There are robberies,” Tina said helpfully. “Breaking and entering, you know.”
“Mostly, there are domestics,” Gary said. “I can’t say I’m all that fond of the new approach to policing domestics. I don’t have anything against arresting a guy even if the wife doesn’t want to press charges. That’s sensible enough. It’s all this treatment that gets me.”
“Gary isn’t very fond of treatment,” Tina said. The delivery was completely deadpan. Gregor had no idea if she had meant to be funny or not.
“I’d be fond of it if I thought it worked,” Gary said. “But it doesn’t work, does it? These guys go in and they take anger management classes and get signed up for AA, and it’s all fine as long as they’re locked up because as long as they’re locked up there are guys who can make them do all that. Then they get out and what happens? They head straight for the liquor store, if we’re lucky. If we’re not, they head for some of Nick Frapp’s less respectable church members and the next thing you know it they’re pounding the Hell out of somebody and there’s blood on the walls. There we are again.” Gary gave Gregor a look. “Are you one of those guys who are really impressed with treatment?”
“No,” Gregor said. “In my opinion, the common house cat knows more about human nature than most of the psychologists I’ve met.”
“Exactly.” Gary looked very satisfied. He was also standing next to the door to Gregor’s left. The door to Gregor’s right contained an office of the usual configuration. There was a desk, covered with work, but not messily covered with work. Gregor got the impression, once again, that Gary Albright was more organized than any human being had a right to be.
Gary opened the other door and stepped back. “We fixed this up as an office for you,” he said. “It’s not completely adequate. It isn’t supposed to be an office.”
“It’s supposed to be a closet,” Tina said. “But it’s got a window, and it’s got heat, so we thought it might do.”
It also had a desk, a chair, and a computer and had been thoroughly cleaned out. Gregor stepped inside and immediately felt more than a little claustrophobic. It was very small. He would have to keep the door open. There was a thick manila folder on the desk. He picked it up and looked at it.
“That’s everything we know so far,” Gary Albright said. “We thought we’d put it on a hard copy and you could take it home with you if you wanted to. But it’s on the computer, too, and you can send the files to yourself, or Tina can send them. That way you can look at them off site, too. We weren’t sure what you would need.”
Gregor wasn’t sure what he needed either. “I take it Miss Hadley is still alive?”
“Alive and in a coma,” Tina said. “The hospital has orders to call here if there’s any change. I went up to see her myself the other day. It’s very sad. She just lies there. She doesn’t have the, I don’t know, whatever it is she had when I used to see her.”
“General cussedness,” Gary suggested.
“Oh, really,” Tina said. “She wasn’t like that at all, Mr. Demarkian. Not like some of them, if you know what I mean. Some of the Darwinists, I guess. She wasn’t like Henry Wackford, or those awful people in that organization he started. Mad at us, mad at themselves, mad at the world. She wasn’t like that at all.”
Darwinists, Gregor thought. He let it go. “Was she on the old school board, too?” he asked. “The one that mostly got thrown out by this new bunch?”
“No,” Gary said. “The old board had been in place for years, but they had a gap—Edna Milton had to resign last year because she had some medical thing—”
“Drying out, if you ask me,” Tina said.
“Some medical thing,” Gary said firmly. “Anyway, for some reason she had to drop out, so Henry asked Annie-Vic to run in her place. We were all a little surprised that she said yes. She doesn’t have a lot of use for Henry.”
“She doesn’t have a lot of use for anybody who speechifies all the time,” Tina said, “which I think is entirely to her credit. Anyway, I have to admit, it was a good thing she got on, even if it did mean we ended up in this lawsuit—”
“Annie-Vic isn’t the reason we ended up in this lawsuit,” Gary said, “no matter what anybody says. Even if the board had been unanimous, somebody would have sued. That was inevitable.”
“Well, the people in the development,” Tina started.
Gary shook his head. “It’s not the people in the development, not entirely, and you know it. You and I both know people who’ve been in town forever who are on that side of things. And not just Henry Wackford and his people. If you ask me, I don’t think they should teach anything at all about evolution or creation in the public schools. There’s no consensus. It doesn’t matter which side a school board takes. There’s always trouble. I don’t understand why they can’t leave all that to the colleges and let the school districts alone.”
“The way I understand it,” Gregor said, “evolution is the foundation of modern biology, so if you don’t teach evolution, you don’t teach modern biology.”
Gary waved this away. “We didn’t learn about evolution in high school here when I was a student, and we still learned lots about biology. Cells. Animals. Plants. Personally, I don’t see why evolution is necessary to any of that, but even if it is, my point stands. There’s no consensus. You can’t even discuss the subject without everything going to pieces. We’ve got people in this town who’ve known each other since they were in diapers, whose grandparents knew each other since they were in diapers, who aren’t talking to each other over this thing, and it’s not going to get better when the judge hands down the ruling. People have said things they’re not going to be able to take back. They’ve said things they won’t forget. And that’s a damn shame.”
“And it also means that nothing’s getting done, again,” Tina said. “In case you were wondering, Mr. Demarkian, the town didn’t elect the new school board to do something about evolution. They elected it because nothing was getting done. And I do mean nothing. I talked to Catherine Marbledale just this morning and she was tearing her hair out because some guy from the teachers’ union was coming in today. The school board is supposed to deal with the teachers’ union, but it isn’t. It’s doing this, so still nothing is getting done, and the union is threatening to take the teachers’ out on strike if there isn’t some kind of movement on contract terms this week.”
“That was what Franklin was supposed to fix,” Gary Albright said. “Then it turned out that he is as much a lunatic about Creationism as Henry Wackford is about the holistic curriculum—”
“What?” Gregor said.
“The holistic curriculum,” Gary Albright said. “Don’t ask me to explain it. I can’t. It had something to do with integrating something or the other into something or the other, and bringing in speakers from the outside to ‘broaden’ people’s minds. Student minds. That and sex ed, which is supposed to be abstinence-only here, but Henry didn’t like it. It was a mess.”
“Did Miss Hadley have positions on any of these issues?” Gregor asked.
“Not really,” Gary said.
“Well,” Tina said, “she did say once that teaching abstinence-only was like leaving a loaded gun in the middle of a room full of toddlers and telling them not to touch it.”
“It wasn’t a major issue,” Gary said. “But at least she got down to work on the practical stuff, and now it seems as if nobody is going to do that until the trial is over. It’s good of Miss Marbledale to meet with the union rep, but she can’t actually do anything. It’s the board that has to approve contract terms. We’re just going to sit and burn money while a bunch of people fly in from New York and call us all a bunch of hick-town idiots.”
“Unless somebody shoots the judge,” Tina said. “There’s rumors everywhere that there’s been a death threat on the judge, and the judge called in the FBI to protect him. Wouldn’t that be something? All we’d have to do is kill a judge over this thing, and this town will go down in history as no better than—well, no better than anything.”
“Maybe I’ll sit down and read through the file for a while,” Gregor said. “When I’ve done that, I may know where I need to start.”
“Go right ahead,” Gary said. “Tina will get you anything you need. There’s a diner up the street if you want something to eat. You can take stuff out and eat it here if you don’t want to hassle the place at lunchtime.”
It was a long time before lunch, Gregor was pretty sure. He just shook his head and took himself around the desk to the chair. It really was a very small room.
But it wouldn’t do him any good not to get started.
The first thing Gregor did was open the file the department had put together for him, and as soon as he did so he could see it was going to take some weeding out. There were all kinds of things in it. Some of those things were part of standard operating procedure. There were reports from the hospital and from two local doctors. There was a forensics summary that seemed to include not only the scene itself but most of Miss Hadley’s house. There were background notes on a good two dozen people. Gregor hadn’t heard of most of them, and he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to make of them. The longest set of notes concerned the pastor of the big church at the end of Main Street, Nicodemus Frapp. Nicodemus, Gregor thought. That must have been some way to go through high school.
In the end, he put the file away on the other side of the desk and tried to think his way through what he’d heard. He did have a telephone. Somebody had plugged one in to a jack somewhere out in the big room. Gregor could see the thin clear cord snaking away from his phone and through his door. He got out his cell phone anyway, because ever since he’d had it he’d developed complete amnesia about phone numbers. There had been a time when he’d been able to remember a dozen or more. Now, he didn’t even know Bennis’s number, and he probably called Bennis two or three times a day.
He wasn’t going to call Bennis now. He really was not up for another round of wedding preparations. He thought that if the wedding preparations went on much longer, they’d rival the plans for celebrating the year 2000. Hell, they’d rival the conspiracy theories about a worldwide computer meltdown.
He punched around on his keypad for a while—it bothered him how quickly he’d gotten used to that; he’d never used his thumb for so much before Bennis had given him this phone, and now he could practically touch-type phone functions. He got to the address book and scrolled through it a little, trying to make up his mind whether it made more sense to stay local or go straight to Washington. He decided that he’d hated it when people had gone over his head to Washington when he’d been a field agent. Besides, how could the citizens of the United States of America expect the Bureau to operate efficiently with its own field offices if they treated the field offices like—
Gregor didn’t know like what. Lackeys? Nobody used the word “lackeys” any more. He found his number and pressed the little green circle. You didn’t have to dial anything anymore. The phone dialed for you.
This was not the time to indulge in morbid nostalgia for a technology-free universe. The phone had been picked up on the other end, and a woman’s voice was saying, “Federal Bureau of Investigation, Harrisburg Office. Office of the Director.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “Hello. My name is Gregor Demarkian. I was wondering if I could talk to Kevin O’Connor for a moment.”
“I’ll see if Mr. O’Connor is available,” the woman said. “Could I ask what you’re calling in regards to?”
Well, there was something that hadn’t changed since Gregor’s retirement. He’d sometimes thought that the Bureau had to hire these women and then train them to be as ungrammatical as they got on the phone.
“I was Mr. O’Connor’s field training officer back in—well, it was a long time ago.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. “If you could spell your name,” the woman said.
Gregor didn’t blame her for being wary. He spelled his name and waited. The FBI probably got more crank calls than any other agency in the United States government, or in the state governments, either. When Gregor was with the Behavioral Sciences Unit, they got four or five people a month who called in to confess to serial murders they couldn’t have been anywhere near, and they were sane next to the people who called to say they thought the Bureau had implanted microchips in their brains.
There was a click on the other end of the line. Kevin’s voice came bouncing down the wire, sounding happy. “Gregor! What are you doing? I read about you in the papers all the time! It gives me hope, you know what I mean? It’s possible to do this job for twenty years without becoming a basket case.”
Gregor liked Kevin O’Connor. He just wished the man wasn’t so enthusiastic about everything.
“You got a promotion,” he said. “I thought you said you’d never take a desk job.”
“Yeah, well. Five years sitting on my ass in freezing weather staking out kidnap suspects and I got tired of it. But what about you? Are you just in town or do you have something I need? It’s really incredible to hear from you.”
Gregor was sure Kevin found it incredible to hear from him. Kevin found it incredible to hear from anybody.
“At the moment,” Gregor said, “I’m sitting in the police department of a place called Snow Hill, Pennsylvania.”
“Oh, the monkey trial place,” Kevin said. “Yeah. We’ve got a couple of people out there, just as a precaution, you know. What are you doing out there? Has somebody been killed?”
“Not yet,” Gregor said. “Somebody’s been attacked. A woman named Ann-Victoria Hadley.”
“Annie-Vic! Yeah, I did hear about that. Wasn’t that some kind of mugging. It’s a damned shame, really, she’s an incredible old bat. Did you know she was on Nixon’s enemies list?”
“Was she? For what?”
“Oh, I don’t remember. She ran some organization for a while, I think, some anti–Vietnam War organization. Like I said, she’s an incredible old bat. Isn’t it kind of overkill bringing you in on a mugging?”
“The chief of police here seems to think it may be more than a mugging. He’s of the opinion that somebody tried to kill her because she was the only member of the school board that wouldn’t sign on to the new policy of Intelligent Design.”
There was a long pause. “That’s not too likely, is it?” Kevin said. “I mean, there are certainly lots of nut cases out there. You can’t deny that. But I don’t remember there ever being any violence over teaching evolution. Just a lot of, you know, hot air and screaming.”
“That’s what I thought,” Gregor said. “The chief of police seems to think otherwise, though, and he’s the friend of a friend. So here I am. I take it that you’ve got nothing on the order of militia activity or that kind of thing going on around this.”
“The militias are pretty much over,” Kevin said. “Not that they ever amounted to much, anyway. What’s that line from the Blues Brothers movie? A bunch of sad, sorry sons of bitches who’re just jerking off, or something like that.”
“And no chatter saying that there’s somebody out there looking to pick off the opposition, piece by piece?”
“Gregor, please. Do you know what these things are like? They’re a bunch of middle-class, middle-aged people striking attitudes. On both sides, if you ask me. They’re not looking for bloodshed. They’re looking for time on the evening news. I think the only people who care about the science is the scientists they bring in. Everybody else is starring in their own movie.”
“I’ve just been told that there’s been a death threat against the judge who’s supposed to sit on this case.”
“A death threat on Hamilton Folger?” Kevin said. “No. If there had been, I’d have heard about it.”
“Everybody here has heard about it.”
“No, Gregor. Everybody there has heard somebody say they heard about it. If there had been a real death threat, if somebody had actually threatened Folger—I mean, for God’s sake, Gregor, you remember Hamilton Folger. He’s got a stick so far up his ass it comes up out of his head and he uses it for a flagpole. He was appointed by W. He takes himself more seriously than God.”
Gregor thought about it. He did remember Hamilton Folger. “Prosecutor in Chicago?” he said finally. “That weird case of the woman who’d—I don’t remember—something about she got caught with cocaine—”
“She got caught with a lot of cocaine,” Kevin said, “but she’d just lost both her daughters in some kind of freak accident. So she went down to the nearest slum neighborhood she could find and bought enough of the stuff to kill herself with and everybody knew that was what she was trying to do, but he went after her for dealing, anyway. I mean, seriously, Gregor, the man makes conservatives look like bleeding hearts. If he’d had a death threat, I’d know about it, the national office would know about it, CBS News would know about it, and so would you.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “But the rumors are here, and rumors like that are dangerous. You say you have some agents in place?”
“Molly Trask and Evan Zwicker, yeah. They’re both about twelve years old. I’ll give them a call and ask them to accommodate you if you want. They’re competent enough.”
“That would be excellent,” Gregor said. “I’m just trying to be cautious here. You’re sure you’ve never heard of one of these trials where there’s been any violence?”
“Absolutely sure,” Kevin said. “The violence tends to be limited to what the school kids do to each other, and they’re nasty. Nasty, but not Columbine. They call each other names. They bully each other. Some kid goes home in tears because somebody told her on the playground that she’s going to burn in Hell. That sort of thing. I’ve got the numbers. You have a pen to write these down?”
Gregor had a pen. He took the numbers down as Kevin reeled them off—both were cell phone numbers. He put his pen down on the desk and stretched a little.
“I wish I understood these things,” he said. “Everybody seems to get angry for no reason. Or no reason that makes sense to me.”
“That’s the trouble with the world, Gregor. Everybody is angry with no reason, or at least they’re not angry for the reasons they say they are. Never mind. You’re getting married in a few weeks, aren’t you? Congratulations!”
In the world Gregor came from, protocol mattered almost more than anything. Who did what when, who had jurisdiction over which or whom was the first question any sane man asked about any action he was about to take. In the universe of Snow Hill law enforcement, there seemed to be no protocol, and not many personnel, either. He left his closet office for the larger room and looked around. Only the woman named Tina was there. There was no sign of any other person. Even Gary Albright had disappeared.
“I’m going to take a walk,” Gregor said.
Tina looked up at him and blinked. “All right,” she said. “Diner’s down the block to your right, if you’re looking for coffee.”
Gregor made a noncommittal noise, then went out through the front door to Main Street. There were more people there now. The mobile news vans had visible staff. People were walking along the street. Gregor stopped and listened for a while, but that odd high-pitched wail he’d heard for a few moments earlier had ceased. He wondered what it was. He’d thought a car was about to explode.
He looked to his right, in the direction of the diner. People were going in and out of it, quite a few of them carrying Styrofoam cups of what he presumed to be coffee. He looked to his left. There at the end of the street was that big, white modern church and the little cluster of buildings behind it. Now that he had a chance to study it, he didn’t think the building was modern by nature. It had been remodeled, somehow. The skeleton of it was venerable, but all the ornamentation was new.
He turned in that direction and walked slowly down past the storefronts. He had no idea what he was expecting to see. The stores and other buildings were what you would expect in a small town like this. A lot of them were churches of one kind or the other, the very biggest was the Baptist one, but it seemed to Gregor to be much less impressive than Nick Frapp’s semi-modern. There was a tire store—could something be called Hale ’n’ Hardy?—and a place for greeting cards and gifts. That one had a Hallmark sign, which meant somebody must have gotten lucky. The nearest mall must not be so near after all. There was a feed store, proof that people around here raised cattle or horses. There was a “package store,” which was how liquor stores liked to disguise themselves when they had opened up in nice neighborhoods.
He got to the big semi-modern church and stopped. There was a lot of activity here, if you looked for it, although not in the church itself. The buildings behind the church seemed to house some kind of school. There were a couple of dozen children shivering on a playground, not quite motivated by the adult who was trying to spur them into action. Gregor smiled. He remembered that. Why was it so many adults were so convinced that fresh air was good for children, no matter what the temperature of the air.
He heard somebody cough low in the throat and looked up to see that tallest, thinnest man he had ever encountered standing just outside the church’s front doors. He was more than tall and thin, though, this man. He was straight out of central casting. He could have starred in a remake of Elmer Gantry tomorrow, and been more convincing than Burt Lancaster ever was.
The tall, thin man had his hands in the pockets of the pants to a very good, but not spectacular, wool suit. He held out his hand.
“It’s Gregor Demarkian,” he said. “I’ve seen you on television. I’m Nick Frapp.”
It wasn’t just the look. It was the voice. Okies had that kind of voice. Hillbillies had that kind of voice. Gregor reached out and took the man’s hand.
“How do you do,” he said.
“You ought to come inside,” Nick Frapp said. “It’s freezing out here, and there’s going to be another one of those reporters any minute.”
“Another one?”
“They hear about us and all they want to talk about is snakes,” Nick Frapp said.
Gregor followed him through the open door of the church. It was not particularly unusual for a church: it had a big wide open vestibule with racks for pamphlets and a big box with a sign that designated it a collection for the poor. Nick Frapp saw him look at the sign and shrugged.
“We get maybe a couple of dollars every week in that,” he said. “It’s not a bad idea. I don’t find it as useful as organizing something concrete, though.”
“Do you organize a lot that’s concrete?”
“Sure,” Nick said. “In a way, this whole place is an organization of something concrete. We’ve got half a dozen outreach programs running. We go up to the prison in Allentown. We have a halfway house for those of our people who get out on parole, or anybody else who wants to use it. We’ve got a mothers and children drive, which is important, because the social workers won’t go up into the hills anymore. And of course, we’ve got the school.”
They had been moving as they spoke, and now they were in a long hall lined with photographs of people who were posing too self-consciously to look natural. Gregor tried to catch the nature of those poses but couldn’t. Nick was up ahead, holding a door for him.
“Susie Cleland is around here somewhere, but I don’t know where she’s got to,” he said.
“Susie Cleland?”
“Our volunteer secretary for today,” Nick said. “We can’t really afford to hire too much in the way of full-time staff, and I’d rather spend money hiring teachers for the school than getting myself a fancy church secretary, so some of the women volunteer. They’re very good. Can I get you a cup of coffee? We’ve got coffee all over the place. Susie really likes to make coffee.”
“Thanks,” Gregor said. “I’d like that.”
He was standing in Nick Frapp’s office now, and the first thing that hit him was the books. There were literally hundreds of books. Every single available space on all four walls of the room was a bookshelf. Nick Frapp didn’t restrict himself to whatever the Christian presses were publishing, either. He had Aristotle and Kant. He even had Spinoza. Gregor looked from shelf to shelf. Thomas Aquinas. Hobbes and Lock. John Stuart Mill. Saint Irenaeus.
“I know somebody else who reads like this,” Gregor said. “I don’t suppose you sneak Judith Krantz novels on the side.”
“True crime.” Nick was coming back with coffee. He handed Gregor a cup and gestured across the room. “Cream and sugar and that over there,” he said.
“But you’ve obviously read these,” Gregor said. “Or somebody has. They’re not here for show. Where did you go to college?”
“Oral Roberts University.”
“Are they this good with the Western Canon? I didn’t think anybody was this good with the Western Canon anymore, except that place in Maryland, you know, that does the great books.”
“They’re all right,” Nick said. “I was reading this stuff before I went there, though. And I still read it. I’m looking for something I know I’ll find, eventually, except probably not until after I’m dead.”
“What?”
“The face of God,” Nick said. “That’s what all these people were looking for, really, even the ones who didn’t think they believed in God. It’s what we’re all looking for. Man cannot rest until he rests in Him.”
“If you’re quoting, it’s going to be wasted on me,” Gregor said. “Maybe what I’m trying to say is that I don’t understand it. What are you doing here? If you do this sort of thing, if this is the way you think, you could have gone off to graduate school and ended up at a university. Instead of—”
“Instead of ending up in a backwater small town where most of my neighbors can’t pronounce Liebniz, never mind read him?”
“Something like that.”
Nick sat down behind his desk. It was a big desk, which was good, because he needed big furniture to accommodate him.
“How come you came to me first?” he asked. “Did Gary Albright point me out as a prime suspect?”
“No, not at all. He did say a few things. None of which I understood.”
“Gary and I went to high school together,” Nick said. “Hell, we went all through school together. And I’ve got to admit it up front that Gary’s a remarkable man. He had a record of courage in the Marine Corps. And there was that thing with the leg. Not many men could do what he did, and even fewer would do it to save a dog.”
“But,” Gregor said.
“But,” Nick agreed. “In the end, Gary can’t help being who and what he is. He was the football hero. I was the trash. We were all trash to the people in town, all of us who came from up in the hills. We’d come down here to town for school and we might as well not have bothered, because the teachers all assumed we were mentally retarded and they treated us that way. You don’t know how many of the boys I grew up with ended up in prison before they were twenty. Real prison, not juvenile hall. And dead of drugs and alcohol. And all the rest of it. Year after year, decade after decade, going back generations. Because there’s no point in trying to educate the retards.”
“You got educated,” Gregor said.
“I did indeed,” Nick said. “But that was Miss Marbledale, combined with the fact that I have an unusual amount of drive. When I finished college and came back here, I looked around and I saw that it was still going on. They were still treating the hill kids like retards. So I went back up into the hills and I started preaching, and after a while we managed to buy this place. And after that we managed to start the school. We don’t have it all done yet. I mean to have a full high school by the time we’re finished. But we do the first eight grades now. And, lo and behold, our hill kids do better on every standardized test than anybody from town.”
“It makes me wonder,” Gregor said. “I’d think they’d like you for that. Gary Albright seems mad at you.”
“Yes, I suppose he is. We didn’t join the lawsuit. Although, you know, I’m not sure just what old Franklin Hale wanted us to do. Our kids don’t go to the public school. We aren’t interested parties. But he wanted us to do something. Stand up in solidarity, or something. I’d say he wanted us to file an amicus brief, but I don’t think Franklin knows what that is.”
“Why didn’t you file an amicus brief?” Gregor asked. “Are you teaching Darwin here on top of everything else?”
“Our eighth graders are asked to read parts of The Origin of Species in their world history class. But no, since that’s what you’re asking, our biology classes don’t teach evolution here. Or rather, they do, but they concentrate on the problems with the theory. Yes, and I do know that there aren’t any problems the scientists think they can’t answer, but then we’re not worried about the science when it comes to evolution. Nobody is. Did you know that?”
“Gary Albright said as much,” Gregor said. “It’s a little beyond me. Evolution is a scientific theory. If you aren’t worried about the science, what are you worried about?”
“The culture,” Nick said firmly. “There’s a lawsuit going on in this town and it has nothing to do with the science. Franklin Hale wouldn’t know science if it bit him in the ass and left a note. It’s the culture that matters, the culture that says that people who believe in God are ignorant idiots, that there is no grounded morality of any kind, that it doesn’t matter what you do with yourself or your life, it’s all just—choices, I suppose. You have no idea how I hate that entire ideology of choice.”
“Choice as in abortion?”
“I’m not in favor of abortion, either,” Nick said, “but it’s not abortion I’m talking about here. Not directly. It’s the idea that there is no right and wrong, no good and evil, no solidity. Everything is just a choice. And our choices are not very important, because men and women are just animals, like cats. You don’t get angry at cats for killing mice or getting pregnant by five different fathers. Why should you care if people do the same thing? It’s their nature. Christianity says we were all born children of God and we’re all called to perfection, even if we can’t reach it on this earth. And let me tell you, starting with that as your basic assumption, you’ll lead a much better life than you would living it their way.”
“But you didn’t join the lawsuit,” Gregor said.
“No,” Nick said. “We don’t have anything to say about the public schools. And I’m not sure that this approach somebody has sold Franklin on would really work, anyway. Intelligent Design. Do you know what this suit is actually about?”
“Teaching Intelligent Design instead of evolution?” Gregor hazarded.
“No,” Nick said. “If it was, this lawsuit would make a lot more sense. They don’t want to teach it instead of evolution. They don’t even want to teach it alongside evolution. They want to put a sticker in all the biology books that says that some people don’t accept Darwin’s theory, but accept Intelligent Design instead, and that if you want to know about Intelligent Design, there will be a book in the library called Of Pandas and People that you can take out to read about it. That’s it. That’s all they want. They just want to suggest that people might want to take in another view. And that got Henry Wackford and those people in the development to start a federal case—literally a federal case—to stop it. You’ve got to wonder about that, don’t you think? You’ve got to wonder why it’s not supposed even to be mentioned. And what harm they think is going to come to their children if it is mentioned?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said.
“I don’t either,” Nick said. “But you didn’t come here for that, did you? You came because of Miss Hadley. I think I was probably the last person to talk to her before she went on back to her house and got beaten up.”
“What did you talk about?”
Nick shrugged. “The usual. What an idiot Franklin Hale is. How much trouble there was going to be if the school board didn’t do something about the teachers’ contracts and the school construction and the textbook orders. She was all worried about the textbook orders, because if you don’t have them in on time, the books don’t get here when they need to be in September. She just did her little rant thing and then she went on up Main Street and then up the hill to her house. Except I shouldn’t say that. I didn’t really see that. After she left I went back into the church and got some work done.”
“She didn’t seem unusually upset by anything? Or fearful?”
“Annie-Vic was never fearful,” Nick said. “She was just not a fearful woman. But she was always ‘upset,’ sort of. She always had a head full of steam about something. And that day, like I said, it was all the nuts and bolts stuff the board was supposed to do, but mostly the textbooks.”