Living Witness (49 page)

She was lying in a cell in the county jail; that much she knew. She did not know what had happened to Barbie. Barbie was back at school when all this had happened. Did Barbie even know this had happened? She must, by now. She must be home alone, or maybe social workers had come and taken her away. Social workers were what Alice McGuffie feared most after secular humanists, but she thought that a lot of social workers were secular humanists as well. It was unbelievable, the way the secular humanists had managed to get themselves into all the nooks and crannies of government. They had managed to get the law on their side. They had managed to get the courts. Maybe the social workers would take Barbie and claim she was being “emotionally abused.” That's what they called it when a child was being raised in a Christian home. Christianity itself was “abuse,” and if you could claim “abuse” you could kidnap the child and take her way somewhere, where all that Christianity could be trained out of her. Maybe the social workers would claim that Alice could no longer “provide a safe space” for Barbie, because she couldn't provide a safe space for anybody, because she was in jail. “Provide a safe space” was like “emotional abuse.” It was a phrase that could mean anything or nothing. It existed only as an excuse, to make it possible for the social workers to take the child away. Social workers were dedicated to taking children away from Christian parents because they hated Christianity
and they hated parents. They wanted all children to be raised up as secular humanists.

Everything was spinning, and her head hurt. One entire wall of the room she was in was bars. A woman in a police uniform was sitting on a chair just on the other side of that, reading her way through a magazine. Alice wondered what the woman was like. She didn't understand it: The police in Snow Hill weren't secular humanists. There was Gary Albright, who went to her very own church, and Eddie Block, who went to the Methodists. Even Tom Fordman went to church, to the Lutheran one, and he was like lot of men, uncomfortable at services and not happy about being asked to show his love for Jesus in public. But they all loved Jesus. Alice was sure of that. Most of the teachers in Snow Hill loved Jesus, too, except for the science ones, and Miss Marbledale. Where did all these people come from, people like this woman on the other side of the bars? Where did they find them?

It was like that movie she had seen once very late at night on television,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
. It was in black and white. It starred this man Alice recognized because she'd seen him in a million old movies, but whose name she could never remember. She thought of him as “the man with the jaw.” He had a big jaw, but that didn't matter. What mattered were the pods. There were pods in the basement, and when they popped open people popped out—bodies, not real people—but their bodies looked like the bodies of real people, they looked like people you knew.

She was really very dizzy. She was so dizzy she didn't think she could stand up. She hadn't tried to stand up, though, so she didn't know. She didn't want to try to stand up, because then she would have to look at it all: the bars, the woman in the uniform, the corridor where the other cells were. She was alone in this cell. She didn't know why. From the noise she could hear, the other cells seemed to have lots of people in them. She was glad she wasn't with lots of other people. She didn't want to see people. She didn't want to talk to people. She had no idea what she would say.

“Hello. I'm Alice McGuffie. I'm being persecuted by secular humanists.”

It was the kind of joke they would make on those late-night television shows. Alice hated those late-night television shows—David Letterman, Conan O'Brien. Who were those people? Why did they think they knew so much? She didn't understand half the things they said. They were always talking about things that made no sense and then everybody was laughing. Alice couldn't see what there was to laugh at. Lyman couldn't see it, either. Maybe there was nothing to laugh at and they were tricking people—people who were too embarrassed to admit they didn't understand what was going on. That was what happened with the Emperor's new clothes. Nobody wanted to say the Emperor was naked because they thought everybody else could see his clothes. They didn't want people to think they were stupid. Alice had spent her entire life trying to keep people from thinking she was stupid. They thought it anyway. It was like she had a brand on her forehead. It was all Catherine Marbledale's fault, and the fault of people like Annie-Vic, and the fault of secular humanists. There were secular humanists under the bed. There were secular humanists in the refrigerator. There was no refrigerator. What was she thinking of?

She was lying on a very narrow cot that was shoved right up against the wall. Alice thought it might be bolted into the wall. She didn't want to look. She had a blanket on top of her that felt like horse hair. It was rough, and the few times she had opened her eyes she had seen it was gray. There was a sheet under her, but no sheet on top of her. She always had a sheet on top of her at home. Maybe this was what they did to you in prison. Maybe they took away all your sheets. Maybe they would execute her, and first she would have to lie on a gurney somewhere and sing at the top of her lungs to keep from being afraid. She was afraid, though. She was so afraid all her muscles had gone rigid, so that none of her joints had been able to bend. Then they had given her that shot, and everything had melted. It was melted now.

She opened her eyes and stared straight up at the ceiling. The
ceiling was filthy. It was as if nobody had ever cleaned it, not in all the years it had been up there. How long ago had this jail been built? Alice didn't know. She didn't pay much attention to the news, except for things going on locally, and nothing much ever went on locally. This would be something going on locally. Everybody in town would watch it on television. They would buy newspapers and read about it. Maybe it would be in a magazine somewhere. Look at the crazy Christians. Watch them kill everybody. Her head hurt. The pain was far away, on the other side of a barrier of fuzz. Her mouth was dry.

“There was a picture of me on the dining room table,” she said. The words came out as clear as the sound of her television. There was no fuzz at all.

Over on the other side of the bars, the woman in uniform stood up and turned toward Alice. Alice could feel her looking.

“What did you say?” the woman said.

“There was a picture of me on the dining room table,” Alice said again. “So I took it. I brought it home and I put it in my sewing table.”

The words were not crisp anymore. They were going in and out of blur. She was very tired. She wanted to go back to sleep again.

“I don't think you should be worrying about your sewing table now,” the woman in uniform said. “There are other things to think about now.”

If she didn't force herself to speak, she would fall asleep again. The woman in the uniform was making a note. She would probably pass it along to other people in uniform. Alice watched all the cop shows. She liked cop shows. She liked thinking that there were people out there who lived in terrible places full of crime, while she was safe and happy right there in Snow Hill.

If she didn't concentrate, she would forget. If she didn't concentrate, she would drift back into space and the secular humanists would be there, they would be there, they were always there, they were all around us. They were that devouring lion. That's what they were.

“Listen,” Alice said.

“I'll listen if you want me to,” the woman in uniform said. “But
you've had a very powerful sedative, you know. You ought to get some rest.”

“Listen,” Alice said again. Then she made one last, great effort. She pushed by the barrier of fuzz that was all around her. She pushed by the flitting ghosts that were really memories, because you couldn't have ghosts of people who were still alive. They were there all around her. They were waiting for her to fall asleep.

“Listen,” she said for the third time, and then it worked. She was in a place where she could talk. She was in a place where she could think. The ceiling still looked dirty. The walls of the cell looked dirtier. There was a toilet screwed into the back wall, right out in the open, as if they expected her to relieve herself like that where anybody could see her.

“I want,” she said, “to talk to that man. I want to talk to Gregor Demarkian.”

“What?” the woman in uniform said.

“It was a picture of me and I took it,” Alice said, and then she fell back to sleep again.

 

It was the arrest of Alice and Lyman McGuffie that made up Nick Frapp's mind for him, but he'd been on the verge of making it up on his own for an hour or more before that. He had been thinking about it all night, in fact, and the more he thought about it the more sure he had been that, in the last analysis, it was civilization that mattered.

“Civilization,” his old philosophy professor had said, “is not something we have. It's something we do.”

Philosophy professor. Dr. Raydock. Dr. Raydock was always in trouble with the university administration because he wasn't quite Christian enough, he wasn't quite with the program. It was not the kind of thing Nick had understood before he'd gone to Oklahoma, but it hadn't taken him long to learn. Civilization is something we do, Nick told himself now, and that was right. It was absolutely right.
And if you stopped doing it, you found yourself howling in the wilderness.

He stuck his head into the main office where yet another one of the church women, Marianna Beck, was filling in as church secretary.

“I'm going to go out for a bit,” he said.

Marianne looked up and pulled a drawn face. It didn't entirely hide the excitement in her eyes. “Isn't it terrible?” she said. “Alice McGuffie, of all people. I never would have believed it. But then, you never know with people, do you? Especially people like the McGuffies. Kept themselves to themselves. Like my mother always said, you've got to watch out for people like that. You always know something is wrong when people are too quiet.”

Nick didn't think Alice McGuffie had ever been quiet for an hour in her life. He thought she might even talk in her sleep. He let it go and went downstairs and out the door onto Main Street. The town was quieter now than it had been the last time he'd seen it. He'd come out to watch with everybody else when the police cars came and the police raced into the Snow Hill Diner. People were saying it was just like a movie, and they were right, but not in the way they meant it. It was like a movie because it was so completely exaggerated. Men in black uniforms with rifles slung over their backs, to arrest Alice and Lyman McGuffie? It was like taking out a kitten with a bazooka.

Nick went down the street to the police station. He had seen them all come in, Gary and Tom and Eddie and Gregor Demarkian. He went up the front steps and let himself into the building. The woman behind the counter was working at something on a computer. He cleared his throat and waited. She looked up and then looked annoyed.

“Is there something I can do for you?”

“I'd like to talk to Mr. Demarkian, if I can,” Nick said.

“I'll see what he's doing,” the woman said. “We're in the middle of a murder investigation, in case you didn't know. Do you have information about the murder investigation?”

“Maybe,” Nick said.

The woman looked suspicious, but she got up and went to the back. A second later, Gregor Demarkian emerged, looking rumpled.

“Reverend Frapp,” he said. “Good to see you. Why don't you come on back?”

Nick gave the woman a smile, but she turned away from him. He followed Gregor “on back,” and found himself in what he was sure was supposed to be a utility closet. The utility closet had a desk and two chairs. Nick sat down in the chair that was not behind the desk.

“This is interesting,” he said.

“It's adequate, believe it or not,” Gregor Demarkian said. “Although I have to admit, it makes me feel a little claustrophobic. Do you really have information for me, or did you just want to talk?”

“Did you authorize the arrest of Alice and Lyman McGuffie?” Nick asked. “Was that your idea?”

“No,” Gregor said. “We seem to be beset by a state police detective who thinks he knows everything.”

“Ah,” Nick said. “So it was a Dale Vardan special. All right. I didn't think it was you, but I thought I'd better ask. Have you ever been to Holland?”

“Holland?”

“I went last year,” Nick said. “I don't travel much. There's too much work here, with the school and church and everything, but I went last year to a conference. And it's Holland I think of when I think about all of this. About Alice and Lyman. About the teaching of evolution in the public schools. About the murders. Because that's what Holland is all about these days, you know. It's about death.”

“Excuse me?” Gregor Demarkian said.

Nick threw his head back and stared at the ceiling. He wondered if this room would feel so small if it was being occupied by people closer to normal size than either he or Demarkian were.

“They have all these things,” Nick said. “Abortion. And what they call ‘assisted suicide.' They kill off their children and they kill off their old people and they just don't see it. They don't see that they're sinking into an orgy of death. They think it's freedom. And in the
end, you know, that's my bottom line. If you wake up one morning and find out you're collaborating with death, you ought to understand that you're doing something wrong. In the end, that's the difference I see between people of faith and people without it. When people of faith collaborate with death, they know they're doing something wrong. When people without it do, they often don't even realize they're collaborating. I don't really think it matters whether you're a Protestant or a Catholic or a Hindu, for that matter. I think there are probably many ways to God, but the reason I know God exists is because people who believe in him feel guilty about collaborating with death and people who don't not only don't feel guilty, they don't even realize there's an issue.”