Bellows Falls

by Mayor, Archer

  There were five children all told, of whom only two were actually Jan’s, and this was the first time I’d actually been introduced to them. During my visits to the house—aside from the boy with the deflated ball—they’d either been peripheral bodies in blurred motion, or not there. They ranged in age from three to about seven, and were as dissimilar from one another as a pack of street urchins.

  Gail, Susan, and I sat next to each other on the floor of a small room, a hollow-eyed TV set in the corner, with the children grouped around us.

  Gail started off. “My name is Gail. This is Joe.”

  “I seen him,” said one of the older boys.

  “Where?”

  “At my house.”

  “I remember you,” I said. “You were almost tall enough to grab a doughnut out of your mom’s hand, even though it was over her head.”

  He smiled with pride. “I got it, too,” he lied, “two of ’em.”

  “You did not,” the ball player said, punching him in the arm. “You got ’em after Dad threw ’em out the door, just like we all did.”

  Gail interrupted by pretending to glance around. “Speaking of your mom, where is she? I had something I wanted to ask her.”

  “She’s gone,” a little girl said.

  The older boy cuffed the back of her head. “She’ll be back.”

  Gail looked disappointed. “That’s too bad. Where do you think she went?”

  “Home,” said one.

  “To see the fireworks, I bet,” said another.

  “The fireworks?” I blurted.

  “Yeah,” the oldest answered, looking at me like I was brain dead. “It’s Old Home Days tonight.”

  He didn’t need to elaborate. The Rockingham Old Home Days fireworks display was the largest in the state, running for forty minutes and drawing over ten thousand people to Bellows Falls from all over Vermont. They lined the river and jammed the bridges and railroad yard, since the rockets were fired from the riverbank north of town.

  “Did she tell you that?” I asked.

  The boy didn’t answer, having obviously supplanted his own desires with Jan’s.

  “Why did you say, ‘home’?” Gail asked the small girl who’d spoken first.

  “She told me, just before she climbed out the window.”

  I could feel Susan stiffen beside me, no doubt wondering, as I was, why Jan had suddenly chosen to leave. Phone calls were screened here, but I suspected Norm had found a way to lure her out. He had been manipulating her for years, forcing her to do things she wouldn’t normally willingly do. It took no great stretch to imagine he’d used her guilt at betraying him to force her across a suicidal line.

  Having seen the results of Norm’s ruthlessness, I had no doubts he was going to repay Jan for her transgressions as he had Jasper Morgan, young Billy, and who knows how many others. But where those others might have come under Norm’s concept of business expenses, Jan and his relationship was far more convoluted. She had climbed out that window as a martyr might journey to self-sacrifice, and he, rather than fleeing to parts unknown, had put domination above survival. They were like two halves of a pair of scissors about to snap shut.

  I leaned forward slightly, my eyes on a level with that of the small child. “What exactly did she say?”

  “She said, ‘Don’t worry, honey. Everything’ll be fine. I just have to go home for a while.’ ”

  “She didn’t go home,” the other small girl said, speaking for the first time. “That’s not what she meant. She told me she was going to her thinking place.”

  At last, I thought. “And where’s the thinking place?”

  “The old milk plant. She took me there once. It’s neat.”

  · · ·

  It was almost dusk, shortly before the fireworks were to begin. From all over the area, sheriff’s deputies, State Police, and the Bellows Falls and Walpole police were converging either on Bellows Falls or the old creamery itself. This was not, I had stressed to everyone, to be a high-profile approach. Assuming a small child’s guess was right, I didn’t want people spooked, least of all Norm Bouch.

  But even if I’d asked for the National Guard, it wasn’t going to be an easy location to surround, much less contain. The plant, as I knew from Greg Davis’s tour of the town days earlier, was at the bend of the river, between the two bridges leading to New Hampshire, just above where the falls turned from neck-breaking rapids into a precipitous drop. That much was actually a tactical advantage—normally. The so-called Island had an unbreachable boundary on three sides, limited access, and was covered mostly with abandoned factories, warehouses, and the open railroad yard. Tonight alone, however, this no-man’s land became Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Fully half the expected crowd of ten to twelve thousand people would be standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the Island, lining the river just above the milk plant. A dozen more would be illegally camped on its roof.

  Gail, Jonathon, and I were in my car, heading toward Bellows Falls from the south, using blue lights only to quietly warn of our approach. Well shy of the town line, however, we hit heavy traffic, and from there on, I edged along at a steady five miles an hour. It stayed that way through downtown and onto the Island, where I finally gave up, pulled over, and killed the engine.

  “Let’s go on foot. Gail, I’ll leave the radio on channel two so you can hear what’s going on. If the need comes up, I might ask you to use the cell phone, so keep an ear out, okay?”

  She slipped in behind the wheel, kissing me through the open window. “No heroics, please.”

  I gave her a thumbs-up and went to the trunk of the car, where I extracted two armored vests and a couple of flashlights. I handed one of the vests to Jonathon. “Better put this on under your shirt.”

  We jogged down the narrow dirt trail that followed the riverbank to the empty milk plant, looking, I hoped, like two latecomers heading for the show.

  I keyed my portable radio. “This is Gunther, approaching from the south, along the river. Who’s in place and in command?”

  To my surprise, Latour’s voice came back. “It’s Emile, Joe. The cordon’s still pretty thin. No one’s gone in yet.”

  “Any signs of anything?”

  “Nothing so far. I’m just ahead of you on the dirt road.”

  We reached him a few minutes later. Aside from several genuine spectators circling the building to gain access to the railroad yards, we were largely alone.

  Emile explained the layout. “The north side’s as crowded as this is empty, and there’re people on the roof and at some of the upper windows, like every year. So far, I’ve got four people positioned at all corners of the building, a couple more along the north wall, pretending they’re on crowd control, and Greg Davis and Emily Doyle standing by to go inside. I might be getting five or six more, but with the roads and bridges either closed or jammed with people, travel times’re going to be lousy. Do you want to take over command?”

  I did, but I kept it to myself. Latour was finally in movement, showing he knew what to do. If this was redemption in the making, I wasn’t about to impede it. “No.”

  He gave me a surprised, appreciative look. “Thanks. Then if you don’t mind the suggestion, I think we should just contain the building, wait till the crowd disperses after the show, and go at this nice and peaceful. The only problem is the people already inside—all potential hostages.” He hesitated and then added, “How good is your information that Bouch or his wife are actually in there?”

  That wasn’t something I wanted to discuss. “Good enough. I also don’t think we can wait, as reasonable as that sounds. If we do, all we’re likely to find is Jan Bouch’s body. We may anyhow… But I agree with you about the potential hostages.”

  Latour shook his head unhappily, and I immediately began reconsidering my decision to leave him in command. But he didn’t disappoint. “All right. How ’bout you and Jonathon go in with Greg and Emily, and I’ll send uniforms to cover the areas you clear as I get them.”<
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  “And if we find spectators, we’ll herd them into secure rooms and post someone on the door,” I added. “It’ll be safer than escorting them through the building.”

  “Okay.” He pointed to a far corner. “The entrance is around there. Davis and Doyle are already waiting. Good luck.”

  We found them pacing nervously before the front door, both wearing civilian clothes. I told them of Latour’s plan.

  Emily looked incredulous. “Jesus Christ. That place is huge. The four of us could be in there all week checking it out.”

  I ignored her complaint. “That’s if we approached it conventionally, which we can’t do. Jan’s kid told us her hangout was a room on the top floor, facing the river. Jonathon and I will head there first, while you two and as many others that show up work the problem from below. Emile’ll give us what he can when he can.”

  Greg Davis squatted down, picked up a thin stick, and drew an outline of the building’s interior in the dust. “Three floors, more or less.” He pointed at the double doors facing us. “The ground floor’s a mess. Lots of rooms, junk, storage vats, equipment, hallways—a ton of places for someone to hide. The good news is it’ll be totally empty—no windows facing the fireworks. There’s a central corridor right down the middle, with a staircase at the far end. Get there without being ambushed, and it’s almost home free.”

  He shifted slightly to sketch a second plan. “Next floor is the creamery proper. Wide-open, high ceilings, lots of windows, none of them facing where the fireworks’ll be. The best viewing areas,” he added a rectangle to the north of the square he’d just drawn, “are in three big rooms separated from the main floor by three doors. That’s also where people are on the roof. Those rooms only have ten-foot ceilings, so from the outside, that whole part of the building’s kind of stepped-down from the rest. Access to the roof is by fire escape on the north wall. The third floor is more like a mezzanine or catwalk. It’s where the executive offices used to be, right over the factory floor, high against the ceiling. The corridor feeding the offices is only equipped with a railing, so from below, it’s like the bridge of a ship, overlooking the deck. All the offices are on the side facing the river, away from the show.”

  I glanced at Jonathon. “That must be where we’re headed.”

  Searches like this are always tense. No matter how many people you have keeping you company, the feeling is always one of total isolation. You become convinced that behind every door, lurking in every shadow, is the guy with the gun who’s about to take you out. For a moment only, all three of us gazed at the enormous building before us, no doubt sharing those very thoughts.

  “Okay,” I finally murmured. “Let’s get it over with.”

  Jon and I entered first, walking virtually back-to-back, a flashlight in one hand, a gun in the other, and our radios muted by earpieces. We walked slowly and quietly, pausing occasionally to listen and get our bearings. Greg’s directions had been schematically accurate, but they hadn’t prepared us for the mood of the place. Dark, cool, and crowded with industrial paraphernalia, to us it became a lethal house of horrors.

  It was with considerable relief that we reached the stairs, gave our position on the radio, and headed up.

  The next floor was in stark contrast to the threatening muddle of shadows below. As described, it was an enormous room, high-ceilinged, lined with ten-foot-tall windows, cluttered with old, dust-covered equipment clustered into regularly spaced workstations. Bundles of pipes and conduits shot up from each of these to the ceiling and spread out to all four corners like huge metal straws, crushed over against the inside cover of a too-small box. Bathed in the remnants of the departed day, and tinged by the glow of the town all around, the room looked like an abandoned movie set of some abstract, industrialist nightmare.

  I immediately noticed the far wall with the three doors, behind which, even from where we stood, we could hear people talking and laughing, gathered together in excited anticipation.

  Jon looked at me and pointed at the doors quizzically. I shook my head and indicated the gallery tucked up against the ceiling and running the length of one wall—the executive aerie Greg had likened to a ship’s bridge.

  Jon nodded and followed me silently up the metal staircase attached to the far end.

  Flashlights now off, we paused at the top landing, taking in the catwalk ahead, a railing on one side, offices on the other. Aside from the muffled sounds from below, we couldn’t hear a thing. The dull light seeping through the huge windows across the chasm made me feel I was in a tunnel instead of twenty feet in the air, and gave the whole setting a claustrophobic feeling.

  We crept to the first office and found the door open. Normally, I would have had a long-handled mirror to safely check the room from around the corner. But circumstances were far from normal. Harking back to the old days, I stuck my head out into the doorway and instantly withdrew it, listening and waiting for any response. There was none. I repeated the gesture—more slowly this time—with similar results and finally did it again with my flashlight on. The room was bare—and empty.

  Throughout this exercise, Jonathon stood back slightly, prepared for attack from either direction.

  Room by room, we progressed in this stealthy manner, sometimes switching roles, but finding nothing until we reached our first closed door, three-quarters of the way down.

  My back against the wall, I tried the doorknob gently. The door soundlessly loosened against the jamb. Switching on my light, I nodded to Jon opposite, who followed my example and prepared to enter low and fast. On a soundless count of three, I threw open the door. Jon barreled past me and rolled to the right, I half fell in after him and cut to the left. The halos from our lights dashed around the small room, desperately searching for a body in motion.

  They found one who would move no longer. Confident the room was otherwise empty, Jonathon stepped back into the doorway to stand guard.

  “That her?” he asked over his shoulder.

  I was surprised he didn’t know and then realized they’d never met. “Yeah. Jan Bouch.”

  She was lying sprawled on the floor, her torso propped against the wall under the window. Her eyes were half open, seemingly lost in a daydream, her face, so tense in life, was slack and hopeless in death. As I approached her, there was a sudden, frightening explosion from outside, and the room filled with violent, shimmering color. I glanced out the window and saw blazing streamers falling from the sky like stars, plunging toward the ghostly froth of the river below. The colors played dimly on Jan’s skin and hair as I turned my light away.

  “Her son said she’d come here to watch the fireworks.”

  Jonathon took a quick look in my direction. “What’s her status?” he asked, not having heard me.

  I felt for a carotid. Her skin was soft and warm, but in memory only. “She’s dead.”

  Jon updated the others.

  I played the light on her again. She was disheveled, her lips cut and swollen, one eye puffy. I saw a small hole in the front of her blouse and unbuttoned it enough to confirm the dark puncture in the skin beneath. There was no blood.

  I thought back to all I’d learned about this couple, and all the warning signs I’d heeded but could do nothing about.

  Latour’s voice came over my earpiece. “Joe, do you advise changing tactics, now that she’s dead?”

  “Hang on a sec,” I answered him. “Let’s finish checking this top section. She hasn’t been dead long, so if he is in the building, I don’t want to rush him. We still have a potential hostage situation here.”

  Jon and I searched the rest of the gallery, room by room, the earlier quiet now replaced with raucous cracks, bangs, and strung-out screams from high overhead. The darkened, haunted corners flickered with garish rainbow colors.

  When we returned to the top of the stairs, I radioed, “Top floor clear. Heading down.”

  Extending beneath us, the vast plant floor glimmered eerily in the dying colors, each one of which b
rought muted outbursts of appreciation from behind the doors at the room’s north end, where the trespassers could see the fireworks we were missing.

  “Emile?” I continued, “how many can you give us up here? We’re on the main floor.”

  There was a pause. “How ’bout five?”

  “That’s good. He probably made it out, but I want to corral the spectators before we call it quits.”

  We descended the staircase and met Emily, another Bellows Falls officer, two state troopers, and, to my surprise, Emile himself.

  I gave him a smile. “Couldn’t stay out of the action, huh?”

  He looked slightly embarrassed. “Greg runs things better than I can anyway,” he muttered. “Besides, I won’t be able to do this too much longer.”

  I glanced over his shoulder and saw Emily roll her eyes, forever unforgiving.

  “Here’s the layout,” I said. “This room looks empty, but we haven’t checked around each of the workstations. There are seven of us, so let’s break into teams of two, and work in a row, walking from here to the far wall. That,” and I played my light on the distant doors, “is where our trespassers are enjoying the show.”

  We set out like grouse hunters in a twilight landscape, our movements punctuated by the jittery beams from our lights. We proceeded quietly, the sound of our progress supplanted by the noise outside. The cavernous room around us shifted alternately from one garish color to another.

  At the far end, I turned to Emily and Latour. “Is there any difference between one room and the next in terms of size or layout?” They both shook their heads. “Then we might as well use whichever one has the most people to hold them all.”

  Using the same three teams, we entered the separate rooms without fanfare or noise, slipping inside like latecomers to a movie, our flashlights extinguished.

  In my room, the center one, I could see the outline of almost ten people standing before a wide bank of multi-paned windows, gesturing and calling out excitedly with each new explosion. Occasionally, several of them would lift an arm and suck on what appeared to be a beer can.