“Did she talk about herself much?”
“Not at first. We have a form we’re supposed to fill out for every newcomer, and all I could get out of her was her name and age. Afterward, when I showed her to her room, she began to open up. We didn’t have much business that night, so I stayed with her, listening, for almost three hours.”
My mind returned to Susan Lucey, and to how she, too, had triggered Shawna’s need to share her burdens. “What did she talk about?”
Mary took a deep breath, almost a sob. “Her mother, her school, where she’d grown up. She’d had a very hard life for someone so young. She’d suffered badly at the hands of others.”
I paused for a moment, looking at the woman before me, and suddenly realized that I hadn’t seen or heard from her in a long time, not since her predictable but unsuccessful attempt to derail the convention center project on the Putney Road a half-year ago… And not since the time of Shawna’s disappearance—a coincidental piece of timing I hadn’t noticed until now.
I ventured a guess. “You must have found much in common with her.”
She’d been staring into space and now raised her eyes to meet mine. “Yes. That’s quite true.”
The kettle began whistling, and Sammie went about making tea.
“What were her plans when you met?” I asked.
Mary wiped her cheeks with one hand—a gesture of returning self-control that made me think I should have taken Sammie’s cue and pushed her harder early on. “She had the name of somebody in town—I forget who—a friend of a friend—where she could stay. But I don’t think she had any plans exactly. She just wanted to get away from home.”
“Was she fearful her mother might come after her?”
“Yes, although I told her that being eighteen, she was legally immune. But that’s not what worried her—the legal threat. She was running from her mother’s influence, and there was really no hiding from that.”
“You offered to put her up, didn’t you?”
Her wan, pale face relaxed into a small smile. “Yes—totally against the house rules and good judgment. Gert would have been furious. But Shawna wasn’t interested in any case. She didn’t want another mother figure. I wouldn’t have either, in her shoes.”
Sammie placed the teacup before her. “You want any milk or sugar?”
Mary shook her head. “No, thank you.”
Sammie took advantage of the opening to press on. “But she came back in the long run—about a month later—didn’t she?”
Mary lifted the cup to her lips and took a sip, watching us closely over the brim. She then replaced the cup and shrugged my coat from her shoulders, draping it over the chair next to her. “She came to visit once, to say thank you. It was the last time I saw her. She said she was going away… ”
Her chin began to quiver suddenly, and she dropped her head. “Poor, poor girl… ”
“The day she was here,” Sammie said, almost harshly, “she was carrying a thousand dollars of someone else’s money. She tell you about that?”
I gave Sammie a cautionary glance as Mary straightened and fixed us both with a startled expression. “What?”
“Shawna stole a thousand dollars from the man she was staying with,” I explained. “That’s why we think she was heading out of town.”
Mary’s eyebrows knit slightly. “I wondered why she was so excited.” Her voice then hardened, becoming more businesslike. “So you think that man may have killed her?”
“We were hoping you might give us some insight on that,” I said.
She took another delicate sip of tea. “She was very vague about her recent past.”
“Why would she stop here?” Sammie asked. “Hot money in her pocket—you and she had only talked for a few hours a month before. Seems kind of crazy.”
Mary looked at her coolly, now clearly holding something back. “I don’t know.”
“And she didn’t say where she was headed?”
“No.”
Sammie scowled openly but remained silent.
“Mary,” I asked, “why didn’t you give us a call when you read about Shawna?”
A bit of her old combative self rose to the surface. “It’s not my job to help you, Joe. I had the answer. I knew that a young girl I’d become very attached to—whom I’d last seen full of hope—hadn’t even made it out of town before being killed—a town, I might add, that you are supposed to be making safe.” She shot a baleful look at Sammie, whose tight, mistrustful expression hadn’t changed. “But I know nothing that can help you identify her killer. What good was a call from me going to be? What good has this conversation been, in fact, except to stir up painful memories?”
She stood, skittering her chair across the floor, her eyes narrow with an anger I could feel was being willfully stoked. “Not only that, but you’ve been insinuating I know something I haven’t told you, that somehow I’m tied up in something underhanded. Well, I resent the hell out of that. I resent you barging in on my grief—on my memories of a sweet, neglected, murdered girl—so that you can throw insults at me while you soften me up with tea. That is the height of hypocrisy, and not something I will stand for. My God—what is it Gail sees in you? I think you’re a simple bastard, and I want you out of my house. Now.” She pointed with a trembling flourish toward the door.
Sammie and I sat quietly in the car for a while with the heater running, looking at Mary Wallis’s peaceful, nondescript house.
“Quite a performance,” I finally said.
“You think it’s all bullshit?”
“Parts of it. Hard to tell which ones.”
“You think she killed her?” Sammie tried again.
I mulled that over for a moment. “I doubt it.”
I put the car into gear and pulled away from the curb. “But I do think she knows a lot more about all this than she’s letting on.”
10
I MOVED A PILE OF BOOKS from one of the chairs in Gail’s study and took their place. She was sitting in her armchair again, with her laptop computer, taking notes from the man on the videotape. But this time, despite it being eleven o’clock at night, she wasn’t dozing off.
She looked at me warily. “What’s up?”
Taking the hint, I skipped the preliminaries. “What do you know about Mary Wallis?”
“Why?”
“Because as far as we can tell right now, she was the last person to see Shawna Davis alive.”
Gail shifted the computer off her lap and tucked her legs up under her, hitting the pause button on the VCR remote, her veiled irritation becoming concern.
“A mailman saw Shawna standing on her front lawn last spring,” I continued. “Mary confirmed this evening that she met the girl at Mother Gert’s, and that Shawna came by to say good-bye on her way out of town a few weeks later.”
“You think she had anything to do with her death?”
“I don’t have any proof of it, but she’s not being straight with us. She was crying when she answered the door. She claimed she had just heard about Shawna’s death. But by the time she threw us out fifteen minutes later, she was all bluster and fury and being very careful about what she told us. She also referred to the death as a murder, with no prompting from us.”
Gail cradled her chin in her hand and looked thoughtfully at the floor. “I’m not surprised she struck up a friendship with the girl. From what you’ve told me, they have a lot in common.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear more about,” I murmured.
“Mary’s originally from Pennsylvania—a single child. Her father was a drinker—very rough on her mother and her. I don’t know if he sexually abused her, but all the hallmarks are there.”
Gail hesitated, obviously uncomfortable. “I normally wouldn’t tell you this, but you’ll find it out anyway. She killed her father. He was beating her mother, and Mary slammed him on the back of the head with an iron skillet. He was dead before he hit the floor. She was fifteen.”
“She
do any time for it?” I asked.
Gail shook her head. “No. The mother was in the hospital for a month. The neighbors all knew what was happening. The DA didn’t even indict. Everyone figured her father got what he deserved… Except Mary, of course. She had to live with it, and she didn’t know how.”
“The mother was no help?”
“No more than before. One of life’s born victims. She married again—same type of guy—and this time I know Mary was sexually abused. She left home almost as soon as the new husband moved in.
“She wandered to New York City, began drinking, doing drugs, God knows what else. She pretty much hit bottom. And then she became pregnant.”
I listened with growing fascination, reminded of how much we assume we know of other people’s lives. I never would have guessed at such a background to the Mary Wallis I thought I knew.
“The baby died a week after birth. Mary was convinced she’d poisoned it with her own drug abuse and malnutrition, and I wouldn’t argue the point. But it was the second death she’d played a part in, and she thought she’d better put an end to a dangerous habit.”
“By committing suicide,” I suggested, familiar with the pattern.
“You got it.”
“How?” I asked.
Gail looked at me quizzically. “I’m not sure… Sleeping pills, I think. Yeah, because she checked into a shelter and somehow or other got into the dispensary and stole the stuff. She almost pulled it off. She was in a coma for a week or more. That, typically, is what eventually saved her. People finally took notice. A women’s crisis organization was called in and helped turn her around. She began to fight back. She’s been fighting ever since.”
“What brought her up here?”
“Her mother’s been in a vegetative state for years. Mary heard about the Retreat’s geriatric care unit and moved both of them up here about a decade ago. She visits her twice a day. Her mother’s the only person I know who gets that much of Mary’s attention, even though she hasn’t said a word to anyone in all that time.”
“Jesus,” I said. There was a long silence while I thought about how to phrase my next question. “Her mother, in a way, is permanently asleep. And when Mary tried to kill herself, she took sleeping pills—”
“And Shawna’s hair,” Gail finished for me, “was full of phenobarbital. Does make you wonder.”
I’d expected some reproach for my suggestion and was surprised at Gail’s seemingly detached response. “You think it’s possible?”
She didn’t smile as she said, “I’ve come to think everything’s possible.”
There was a telling pause as we both reflected on the toll of her own recent trauma.
“Shawna was about Mary’s age when she attempted suicide,” Gail mused. “They met in a shelter, and for all we know, Shawna might’ve been pregnant when she came to see Mary the second time. She might’ve killed the girl, except you’d expect some noticeable psychological change—some behavior modification.”
I returned to a thought I’d had earlier that evening. “But she did change. Remember how hard she fought the convention center? Tooth and nail up to last spring. Then, all of a sudden, she dropped out of sight. The suit she’d threatened never materialized, and the opposition she’d almost singlehandedly organized collapsed.”
Gail frowned. “I was so buried in my own problems, I never paid any attention to that, but I guess you’re right. And she also missed a golden opportunity to sink the project last month, when Gene Lacaille ran into financial trouble, and the bank ended up holding the bag.”
I glanced at the morning newspaper, lying by the wastepaper basket, its headline still mocking my efforts to make Shawna the day’s number one item. “Interesting,” I murmured and rose to my feet.
Gail looked up at me. “What’re you going to do?”
“For starts,” I answered, “I’m going to put Mary Wallis under a microscope.”
· · ·
The new day’s first business, however, involved none of what Gail and I had discussed. By dawn’s gray light, I was standing in the McDonald’s on the Putney Road, ordering enough coffee and food to feed a large horse.
In a car steaming with an aroma no doubt carefully conceived in some sterilized Midwestern laboratory, I then drove north to just shy of the Dummerston town line and took a right onto Old Ferry Road, past UPS, the dump, and the corporate offices of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, to the trailer yard of Ferguson Trucking—where George Capullo had told me Danny Soffit and Phil Duke were camping out.
They were there by permission, more or less. Roger Ferguson had once kept his trailers under lock and key, protected, he hoped, behind a tall chain-link fence. But the attraction of all those huge, empty, romanticized eighteen-wheeler bodies had proved overwhelming. Nightly, people had climbed that fence—bums looking for a place to sleep, teenagers hot to smoke dope or play doctor, and graffiti artists in search of more canvas. There’d been accidents, a couple of small fires, one boy had died of an alcohol overdose. Years ago, Ferguson had finally given up, thrown open the gates, and left them that way ever since. The boxes, when being readied for use, still had to be cleaned out of bottles, cans, and condoms, but the strategy—such as it was—had worked. No longer on the list of forbidden places to go, the yard had lost its appeal. Now the bums alone still considered it prime real estate, and Ferguson’s people were under orders to leave them alone.
George had told me which trailer Phil and Danny were camped in, so I drove slowly over the frozen, rutted yard until I’d drawn abreast of a box with both rear doors all but completely shut.
I killed the engine, got out and paused a moment to listen. Everything appeared utterly still. To the loud moaning of cold-stiffened hinges, I swung one of the doors back and peered inside.
The box was almost empty, its cavernous interior stark and resonant. Far to the back, however, jammed into one of the corners, was a rounded pile of rags, blankets, and cardboard—reminiscent, in a crude fashion, of an oversized cocoon.
“Phil. Danny,” I called out. “It’s Joe Gunther. Bratt PD. I got breakfast for you.”
The vapor from my breath hung motionless before me, glistening in the pale light of the new sun. These people were not early risers, unless they were living in some building’s furnace room and trying to avoid detection, so I wasn’t surprised that all I got for my effort was a slight shifting from deep inside the bundle.
Encouraged, I returned to my car, retrieved the cardboard trays I’d just purchased, and slid them onto the edge of the trailer floor before struggling up to join them. Once inside, I carried the food halfway down the box and sat down, my back against the wall.
“Okay, guys, open your nostrils if nothing else. This stuff won’t stay hot for long.”
Slowly, the cocoon lost definition, coming apart in odd ways—a chrysalis of dubious origin yielding inhabitants not known for their glory. Shaggy heads topped by dirt-flecked wool hats emerged, blinking and bewildered in the intensifying sunlight.
“Who the fuck is that?”
“Joe Gunther,” I repeated. “Bratt PD.”
Some recognizable forms began to appear—an arm, an outthrust leg, a gloved hand working out the cramps instilled by a night spent in near-hibernation. One of them rose unsteadily, leaning for support against the wall.
“Joe Gunther?”
It had been a while since I’d last seen either one of them, and right now they were not at their best. I ventured a guess at the more alert of the two. “Hey, Phil. Tough night?”
“Had worse,” he said suspiciously, only his eyes visible between a scarf and a pulled-down watch cap.
“Well, you can refuel with some of this if you want.”
The homeless inhabitants of Brattleboro, especially those we called the “regulars,” were a pretty predictable tribe. Mostly men in their mid-thirties or older, they kept to themselves, were respectful of us, and largely sought to be ignored. A few of them panhandled, a few—when t
hey had the money—went for a rare meal at a restaurant, much to everyone else’s distress, but most of them merely existed on the town’s periphery. They ate out of Dumpsters, slept out of sight, and lived off what was either given them through charity, or from the money they redeemed for the beer cans they emptied in copious amounts. Regardless of their other sanitary shortcomings, they rarely left a can or a bottle lying around—they were among the best recyclers in town.
They were also remarkably law-abiding. They did their drinking in private, kept their disagreements off the street, and had even been known, now and then, to help us out with some information. Generally, when investigating a burglary, even in the town’s poorer neighborhoods, we didn’t bother with the bums—however isolated and despairing it might be, theirs was not a life of crime.
All of that, however, also made them wary, and having a cop arrive on their doorstep with a hot catered meal was not something they took easily in stride.
Phil’s voice changed to that of a mildly affronted homeowner being disturbed too early in the day. “Excuse me, sir, but what do you want?”
“First, I want you to eat this stuff before it turns to ice. Then I want to talk to you about Milo. George Capullo told me where to find you.”
Danny Soffit, the slower of the two, had by now also emerged, but he stayed, splayed out and dazed, on the floor.
“Milo’s dead.” Phil straightened his neck out, as if to gain a better view of my offerings. The smell of the hot food had already filled the trailer.
“I know that. I guess it was just his time. I went down to the funeral home to pay my respects. Milo and I were friends—at least we were friendly.”
“So what do you want?”
“I need to know how he died.” I waved my hand at the food. “It’s a straight swap—breakfast for a little conversation. No strings attached.”
Phil crossed back over to where Danny was still staring at us and kicked him in the leg. “Move your butt. Food’s on.”
Danny swiveled around and began approaching me like a shambling bear, on hands and knees. Phil shook his head in gentle embarrassment and walked over to sit opposite me. “He’s not too good this early.”
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