Bellows Falls Read online

  Sammie went strictly according to procedure, everybody covering someone else, flashlights either directed forward or extinguished altogether, to avoid night blindness and giving the opposition a better target. No corner was rounded without first being checked with a hand-held mirror. Sammie herself operated a night vision monocular and scanned continually back and forth, watching for any surreptitious movements.

  The few tunnels Ben Coven had mentioned were trickier, being too tight for more than a single, small, crawling individual. The safest bet would have been to use gas canisters and flush out whoever might be down there, but given the kind of facility we were in, that wasn’t an option. What we did, therefore, harkened back to Vietnam, and the tunnel-rats of Chu-Chi. One by one, again starting with mirrors, the smallest members of the team dropped down into the holes without backup and made their way to a dead end in every case.

  By the time we reached the sealed bulkhead at the far end, we were drenched in sweat, our eyes were aching, and we’d built up enough nervous energy to run a generator. It was with obvious relief that Sammie announced the “all clear.”

  Only in the following relaxed silence did we all distinctly hear the distant, muffled sound of something in motion.

  “Cover,” Sammie yelled, causing us to flatten onto the ground in a circle, facing out. In the total darkness, Sammie made a slow, careful pan of our surroundings with the night scope.

  “What do you think it was?” she asked, finding nothing.

  “It sounded far away,” I answered, “like an echo.”

  Ward Washburn, one of the team, muttered, “There is no far away, for crying out loud.”

  Instinctively, we all returned to total silence, straining to hear it again. Working from memory, I crawled to a spot left of the bulkhead, and to a small, jagged hole in the crumbling concrete floor. My fingers wrapped around some rebar covering the top of a caved-in drainage pipe—a barrier we’d pulled on earlier to no effect.

  This time, I pushed it down instead, and the heavy mesh gave way like a swinging trapdoor. “Sammie, come here.”

  They all joined me to stare at the tiny opening. “You’re kidding,” Washburn said softly. Sammie dropped to her stomach and put her head into the pipe, the night scope in her eye. “It’s open as far as I can see toward Linden Street.”

  The sound came again, clearer this time—something metallic dropping into place. It floated out of the twenty-inch-wide drain as from an ancient loudspeaker.

  “Must be something else,” a voice spoke up behind me.

  Sammie looked up. “You going to make that assumption?”

  “No one can fit in there.”

  “I can,” she countered.

  I spoke into the radio. “This is Gunther. Somebody escort Ben Coven back here on the double.”

  The plant manager was by our side in under three minutes.

  “You know where this connects?” I asked him.

  He spread out his papers doubtfully, already shaking his head. “I’d be amazed if we have it. Looks too old and too small for us to mess with.”

  A moment later, he straightened up. “Nope. No sign of it.”

  “I’m going in,” Sammie announced. “I’m the only one as small as Morgan.”

  I laid a hand on her shoulder but looked at Coven. “Sammie thinks this runs toward Linden Street. What might it hook up with?”

  Coven consulted his plans again. “Utility tunnel maybe?”

  I glanced over at the old bulkhead. “That wouldn’t make sense. It looks more like a drainage culvert, to take away any water that might leak in through that thing.”

  Coven tapped a spot with his finger. “Then this is probably your best bet. It’s a collection pipe for most of the drainage in this area. It’s good-sized, and accessible by manhole, so you could backtrack along it and see if this connects to it.”

  I looked up at Sammie. “I like that idea a lot better.”

  Coven unlocked the bulkhead and led us into the comparative coolness of the night air. We walked along a paved service road to a manhole cover some two hundred feet to the west. He swung his arm like a pendulum, bisecting the road. “Runs in this direction, about ten feet down, angling toward the Meadows.”

  Two of the team members had already pried open the cover and were cautiously shining their lights down. Sammie stepped up to the hole’s edge.

  I poked Washburn in the side and pointed at his helmet, addressing Sammie. “I’m coming with you.” Washburn handed me the helmet and I followed Sammie underground.

  The cement tube at the bottom of a steel ladder was straight, clean, odorless, and big enough to walk in, stooped over.

  And utterly silent.

  We went up the slight incline, pacing the distance until we reached the approximate axis of the drainage pipe from the basement we’d just left. To my satisfaction, we found a rough opening, eroded by decades of runoff and rot. The tiny garden of brittle, crystalline growth that had taken root on its ragged edge had been partially scraped clean by the recent passage of something large and heavy.

  I showed the traces to Sammie. “I think this just turned into a ‘good-news-bad news’ story.” I pointed down slope. “And I bet the bad news is out there.”

  We retraced our steps past the manhole, to where the pipe emptied into the Retreat Meadows. There, in a narrow strip of muddy ground, right at water’s edge, a fresh set of sneaker tracks headed off toward the northwest.

  I used the radio to expand the cordon we’d set around the campus, asked for additional backup and some tracking dogs, and issued a statewide Be-On-the-Alert for Jasper Morgan, but I wasn’t optimistic. If he’d been motivated enough to get this far, he wasn’t going to be picked up in an hour downing beers at some local dive.

  In any case, his escape was no longer what truly concerned me. It was the effort he’d made—and the reasons behind it.

  Chapter 2

  FOUR WEEKS LATER, Jasper Morgan had all but slipped from my mind. The BOL had yielded nothing, the grapevine had remained silent, and Jasper, along with Pierre Lavoie’s gun, had been put on the back burner, “pending new developments.”

  The spike in activity we get every spring—when the rowdier natives emerge from hibernation to wreak havoc—had subsided weeks ago, and life had returned to a predictable normalcy. As had my domestic life with Gail Zigman, my companion of many years, who had finally landed a cherished job as deputy to our local State’s Attorney.

  In contrast to my schedule, Gail’s was awash in work, she being the lowest on the totem pole and the one with the most to learn. On the other hand, after countless months of juggling a clerkship, a correspondence course, cramming for the bar exam, and applying for jobs, even she was feeling comparatively sane. We still didn’t have enough time to ourselves, but we were at last enjoying what little we could get.

  I was therefore in an unguarded mood when Chief Tony Brandt appeared in my office doorway and inquired, “You have much on your plate right now? Or anyone you can spare?”

  I waved a hand at the paperwork before me. “My head’s above water. I don’t know about the others. Why?”

  He entered and sat in my guest chair, wedged between the door and a filing cabinet. “I just got a call from Emile Latour. He needs a little digging done on one of his officers.”

  Latour was Tony’s counterpart in Bellows Falls, a small industrial-era town a half-hour’s drive north of Brattleboro, just inside the northern reaches of Windham County. “Who’s the officer?”

  “Brian Padget. Two-year man, good record, well liked. It’s a sexual harassment claim filed by some woman’s husband. Emile was wondering if we could lend him someone to conduct a quick internal on it.”

  I made a face. The request was not unusual. If a grievance was filed against a department or one of its officers, and the outfit was too small to have its own Internal Affairs division, it was routine to ask another agency to supply an investigator. The task was usually mundane—often going through the
motions to make everyone feel better. The majority were crank cases resulting in the officer involved being cleared, a happy circumstance that never helped the guy conducting the investigation—that poor bastard was always stamped a Judas before he even reached town.

  I hedged my response. “I take it you’d like us to accept.”

  “Latour’s a decent guy. It helps to be friendly.”

  “Have they even looked into it? Sexual harassment’s a bit of a catchall. Maybe they could handle it themselves.”

  Brandt shrugged. “I didn’t ask. Could be they’re just playing it safe.”

  “You give him a deadline on how many days we can spend on it?”

  “Not in so many words, but I’m guessing a couple.”

  I flipped the pencil I was holding onto my desk. “All right, but I won’t saddle anyone else with it. I’ll do it myself.”

  · · ·

  Bellows Falls is a troubled community. A village swallowed whole by a cantankerous township, developmentally stalled since the Great Depression, and, reduced to being the bedroom to almost every other town within a half-hour’s commute, it has a dour and pessimistic self-image out of all proportion to its size.

  It is not big. The village covers a single square mile. It is also strikingly photogenic, as much for its glut of statuesque nineteenth century mansions as for its glumly quaint, abandoned factories. Seen from the air, Bellows Falls protrudes like a pregnant stomach into the Connecticut River, forming a tight half-circle, at the apex of which is the dramatic, rocky cascade that gives the town its name. It owes its existence to that water’s energy, which in the early years gave the upstart, industrially minded settlers an advantage over their more staid agrarian neighbors. For a succession of grist mills, rag-paper plants, and pulp mills, the ceaseless water became literal life blood, supplying power, spawning river, rail and road transportation, and creating other tangential manufacturing. Now, as if personifying the village’s current impotence, the Connecticut’s flow is controlled by a dam sluicing water down the remains of an old canal to feed the turbines of a local utility company.

  Its picture postcard prettiness may in fact best represent Bellows Falls’ most paradoxical irony—that while most other places proudly point to a few older buildings as standard-bearers of an earlier time, the past is about all this town has left to brag about. It is a pantheon of long-vanished industrial might. Ancient red brick shells can find but a few new tenants, a once thriving railroad junction has been reduced to a single platform, and the elaborate mansions have mostly been diced up into apartments by out-of-state landlords who care little about upkeep and less about their welfare tenants.

  Periodically, the village erupts with face-saving activity. Meetings are held and committees formed to identify and solve the place’s underlying problems. But whether it’s half-heartedness from within, or the sheer magnitude of the task, these groups never seem to last long and sink below the surface with little flotsam left behind: a few new benches on the square, a coat of paint on an old wall, a scattering of shrubs to eventually die of neglect or abuse. Another movement was afoot right now, in fact, dedicated to the usual renaissance. It seemed better organized than its predecessors, but no one I knew was placing any bets. A museum of glories past, the name Bellows Falls had become a statewide joke, solely equated with failure.

  The police station, my intended first stop, was located north of the village in a modern building it shared with the fire department, and which local wags had dubbed the House of the Seven Gables for its tortured profile. But I took the southernmost of the two interstate exits servicing Bellows Falls so I could drive through downtown. I was one of those who genuinely liked the town, despite its pratfalls and ill fortune. Its mere existence spoke of the same perseverance that drove Vermont farmers to till soil that was more rock than dirt—and to dismiss it as merely “bony.”

  The southern approach to the village, no enhancement to its self-image, features a nondescript cluster of filling stations, pizza joints, video arcades and one porno store; and the first building beyond the official historical marker is a bar. But the old village center, when it appears around a gentle corner, comes as a refreshing reward. A Y-shaped “square,” with the Y opening toward the north, it is defined by the weathered red brick that once symbolized New England as an industrial powerhouse. Among the bas-reliefs and the odd crenellation or granite molding, the clock tower of the town hall looks startlingly like a miniature version of the same structure in Florence, Italy.

  There are gaps in this facade—empty asphalt lots or tiny bench-equipped parks—which testify to Bellows Falls’ most biblical of afflictions. Through the decades, with the regularity of mythic rite, fire has eaten at the village. Factories, retail buildings, homes, and a few bars have gone up in smoke, all from unrelated causes. Over time, bikers, dopers, and train-delivered New York misfits had all had their turns at stamping the town with their identities. The ceaseless fires, therefore, played in some people’s minds as an eerie form of divine retribution—a viewpoint that both irritated the hard-core village boosters and occasionally left them wondering.

  Currently that reputation was less lurid, sadder, and looked much tougher to cure. Bellows Falls, during the go-go eighties, had been the place to live cheaply if you worked in Springfield, Brattleboro, Walpole, or Keene. The mansions of onetime magnates went for twenty thousand dollars and rentals were plentiful and affordable. But times had changed. Values climbed, taxes kept pace, and absentee landlords carved their holdings into ever smaller and shabbier tenements. Businesses increasingly moved out or shut down, and Bellows Falls became a welfare town, rife with domestic disputes, drinking and drug use, larceny, theft, and vandalism, and a pervading undercurrent of teenage parenthood and sexual abuse. At twenty percent, the school system had a higher percentage of “special ed” kids than any other in the state.

  For a small, low-key police department, it sometimes became quite a handful.

  I’d met the BFPD’s chief twice, both times only long enough to exchange greetings. Emile Latour had been described to me as a homegrown product who’d joined the force after impatiently treading water as a security guard for three years following high school. Now in his late fifties, he’d been chief for some fifteen years and was locally touted as an Eisenhower-era neighborhood cop—avuncular, available, compliant with his bosses, and maybe not the sharpest tool in the shed. Unlike most of the rest of us in Vermont law enforcement, Latour kept to himself, shunning the regional meetings and conferences we increasingly used to keep in touch, and staying outside the networking loop that had developed as a byproduct. There are only eleven hundred full-time cops in Vermont, servicing a population that barely tops half a million. Yet to the few who’d heard of him, Emile Latour, despite a lifetime in the business, had managed to remain little more than a name on his department’s letterhead.

  The impression was only enhanced by his appearance. As I swung out of my car in the police department parking lot and paused to enjoy the view of the broad Connecticut River across the road, a short, burly, round-bellied man with thinning white hair, a flushed complexion, and a shy smile, walked out of the building to greet me. His regulation blues fit him as comfortably as a pair of pajamas. He was a vision from a forty-year-old recruitment poster.

  “Joe Gunther? Good to see you again. I’m Chief Latour. Thanks for coming up so fast.”

  I shook his hand, noting its blunt, dry, dormant strength, reminiscent of my long-dead father’s. A farmer’s hand. Despite the uniform, I instantly envisioned him on his knees in a large garden, enjoying the silky dampness of earth between his fingers.

  “My pleasure,” I answered. “Hope I can be useful.”

  He touched my elbow and gestured toward the building’s front door. “Oh, that won’t be a problem. I don’t think this’ll lead to anything.”

  From the outside, the House of the Seven Gables was weighted toward the fire department’s needs, with a row of open bay doors revealing
several gleaming trucks. Once over the threshold, I became all but convinced that the police department’s tenancy had been an afterthought at best. They had a nice if compact radio dispatch room, with windows facing both the parking lot and the lobby, but beyond the inner blue door, we were faced with a cramped, ill-fitting string of narrow, short hallways, tiny rooms, and a twisting staircase. Latour’s office on the second floor was tucked under the eaves, with two skylights angled so close to the one small conference table that I had to watch my head as I pulled out a chair to sit. Legend was that the building had been the first municipal project of a young architect fresh out of school, who had among other things omitted putting heat in the basement because, as he’d explained it patiently to his challengers, “Heat sinks.”

  Chief Latour, shorter and more used to the precarious proximity of his ceiling, grabbed the chair facing me without concern. “Did Tony Brandt fill you in at all?” he asked.

  “He said it was a sexual harassment case.”

  The chief shook his head. “It’s got to be a bum rap. The officer’s name is Brian Padget. He’s been with us two years. He’s well liked, respected, a hard worker—probably end up going to the State Police, with my luck. The complaint is he’s been pestering a married woman.”

  “And the husband brought the complaint?”

  Latour quickly glanced at my face. I sensed that locking eyes with other people made him uncomfortable. “Right. Norman Bouch. Not one of our model citizens. That’s one reason I think this whole thing is bullshit.”

  “He have a grudge against Padget?”

  He paused while the room filled with the reverberating roar of an unseen passing truck. “I don’t know that they’ve ever met,” he said eventually.

  “What makes Bouch not a model citizen?”

  “Nothing we could ever prove. He pretends he’s an excavation contractor. He’s got a backhoe he digs holes with around town, but everybody knows he sells dope for most of his income.”

  I was a little uneasy with the assumptions. “He lives beyond his apparent means?”