Smugglers Notch

by Joseph Koenig

  Annie shook her head. “That’s the last thing he wants.”

  “Leave everything to me. I know what he needs, what it will take to restore his spirits.” He glanced inside the curtain again. “I’ll be seeing you soon, Lieutenant, when you’re feeling more yourself. In the meantime, keep your chin up.”

  On the way out, Beausoleil bumped into Marlow leaning against the windowsill. “That’s a fine boy you have here, Sheriff,” he said. “A real go-getter. Count on me to make sure there isn’t a citizen of this state who doesn’t find out exactly what he’s done.”

  On a cold, wet morning forty rookies from the state police academy assembled on the walks around St. Ignatius’s Roman Catholic Church at the eastern end of Main Street, between the public library and the firehouse. Others milled about the adjacent schoolyard where workmen had mounted loudspeakers on the backboards and now were setting up rows of folding chairs, trying to keep up with a crowd that already was spilling over into the street. Inside the sanctuary, the governor, county commissioners, and brass from police departments throughout the state filled the cramped pews while family and friends of Wally Jeffcoat stood beneath stained-glass windows showing the stations of the cross. St. Germain and Marlow sat stiffly in the front row in their dress uniforms. Across the aisle a slender woman entirely in black, her small features puffy with tears, clung to two toddlers who were too excited to keep still.

  Annie couldn’t take her eyes off them. “Nobody told me Wally was married.”

  “Me either,” St. Germain said through clenched teeth.

  “She’s very pretty.”

  “Her name’s Lenore,” Marlow said. “From Vergennes, originally. They would have been together five years next month.”

  “And I certainly didn’t hear anything about children.”

  “Those were his brother’s kids,” Marlow said. “Wally adopted them after the parents were killed in a car crash in Pittsburgh.”

  “God,” St. Germain whispered, “he had a whole life I wasn’t even aware of.”

  At the altar the priest stared out over the flag-draped coffin. “Deputy Jeffcoat was someone special among a company of men whose profession marks them as unique because of the dedication of their lives in the service of us all.”

  Annie pulled a tissue from her pocketbook and dabbed at her eyes. Someone coughed in back, and then Art Gray was moving toward the altar. He adjusted the microphone, tapped it and blew into it. He said, “Wally was a cop’s cop. To him, being a policeman was more than just a job.” Gray cleared his throat. “He always cared about the guys and everybody loved Wally.”

  “Hearing it,” Marlow said under his breath, “you’d almost think Art had been civil to Wally when he was alive.”

  “Why did you have him deliver the eulogy?” Annie asked.

  “The widow wanted Larry to represent the men. She didn’t know he can hardly talk. When we get to Precious Blood, though, it’ll be Larry who gives her the flag from the coffin.”

  St. Germain’s head snapped toward Marlow. “I don’t want … I can’t do that, John.”

  “You will, though, won’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t feel right about it. I hardly knew him.”

  “You knew him as well as anyone,” Marlow said. “You were there when he died.”

  Marlow and St. Germain followed pallbearers from eight law enforcement agencies who brought the casket past a uniformed honor guard and placed it inside the hearse. Then a half-mile procession of motorcycles and cruisers led the way to La Cimitiére du Sang Précieux.

  “The priest will say a short prayer at the grave and you’ll fold the flag and present it to the widow,” Marlow said. “I’m going to give her the department’s medal of valor.”

  “I can’t. Don’t ask me.”

  “You’re putting your foot down on this?”

  St. Germain nodded vigorously.

  “I’ll get Dick Vann,” Marlow said. “But I’d sure like to know what’s gotten into you.”

  After the ceremony Marlow walked to the crowd of mourners where St. Germain was holding hands with Annie. “I almost forgot,” he said. “In light of what happened, the county’s giving you an expenses-paid vacation to Florida. You can go to the Keys like you planned and take all the time you want to get back your health. Everything’s on us. How does that sound?”

  “We’re very grateful,” Annie said.

  “We’ll stay here.” St. Germain looked as if he had taken a body blow. “… Use up the time I’ve got coming and … it’s all I need.”

  7

  ST. GERMAIN TOSSED THE newspaper into Annie’s lap and shut off the TV. “Think I’ll get lost for a few hours.”

  Annie looked at the front page, said nothing.

  “Did you hear?”

  “Yes, I heard. I’ve heard it every afternoon at four for the last two weeks. Care to tell me where you’re going?”

  “Out.”

  “Oh.” Not real angry, not pleased either. “Now I see.”

  St. Germain went to the door. He put on a green Goretex parka, down mittens, and the fur-lined uniform cap from which he had removed his shield so that the outline stood out darkly against the faded cloth.

  “Damn it, Larry, why are you being so mysterious?”

  “Just be gone a short while,” he said, and kissed her lightly.

  “What do you want for supper? Can you at least tell me that?”

  St. Germain touched his fingers to his jaw, grimaced. “Cream of mushroom.”

  She watched him go to the car. December had come with hip-deep snow, and he waded between the drifts with high steps that were almost dainty, as if nothing could be worse than cold feet. Nothing except for him to look awkward or uncertain, anything less than the perfect physical specimen in control of whatever came his way. And which, because he came close to pulling it off, was what made him so maddeningly attractive and, most of the time, impossible to live with. He took her Subaru, the four-wheel-drive job, plowed out of the yard, and was gone. Annie went back to the TV and watched the tail end of the soap opera she had been drowsing through. Maybe it wasn’t a bad idea for him to have someplace to go each day, before his mind started to turn flabby, like hers. …

  She busied herself with the carpet sweeper, lugging it clumsily over the floor. No, she would be the first to admit, she wasn’t the world’s greatest housekeeper. But maid service hadn’t been part of the deal when she had agreed to come back. For three years they’d been married—it hadn’t been part of the deal then either—and then one day they weren’t. Why, she still wasn’t sure. There had been a few casual affairs, one with Dick Vann that Larry didn’t know about and never would. But those were symptoms, hardly the cause of their breakup. Most of it she blamed on police work—Larry so wrapped up in the department that living with him was like rooming with a large pet unable to express itself except to demand affection (though not often enough) and food. When she had moved back eight months after the divorce was final, her mother had wanted to know how she could live with a man she wasn’t married to, a stranger. She had no answer for that. Larry had promised to change, of course, but she’d known better than to believe he could. More likely, she simply had missed him, missed his playfullness and the rock-hard body and the way he’d force himself on her when she didn’t even know she wanted him—so that she had come to believe he understood her better than she did herself and was keeping her most intimate secrets from her for perverse reasons of his own. And for a while Larry had seemed to be opening up, to be there for her. But then Wally Jeffcoat had gone down and with him the lines of communication between her and Larry, and now when she asked him what was troubling him, he would point to his jaw and shake his head. The words came easily enough when it suited him, though, the time she smacked up the Subaru, or when the house looked like it was starting to fall apart from the inside out. She wondered where he went each afternoon, if he was with another woman. Okay—if that was what it took to bring him out of his funk, to m
ake him happier than she knew how—but that didn’t mean she had to like it.

  She dropped the sweeper, slipped into her coat, and ran out to the yard. Larry had left the keys in the turbocharger with the usual warning that she wasn’t to go near it except in the most extreme emergency. She slid onto the seat, brushing aside the touring skis they had taken into the country after the last blizzard. She twisted the key and shifted carefully into drive. The engine growled, but the car scarcely budged. Damn you, Larry, she thought, and then remembered to release the emergency brake.

  She steered away from the house, following the Subaru’s narrow tread. When she came to the highway, she looked both ways, and seeing no sign of him went to the interstate. She turned west automatically and shaded her eyes against the remaining sun. She kept the turbocharger at an even sixty, hoping none of John’s deputies spotted her, so she wouldn’t have to hand them an improbable story that would get back to Larry before he was even home.

  A woman in a blue Ford gawked at her from the fast lane and she hunched over the wheel. Up ahead she thought she made out the snubbed silhouette of the Subaru, but as she came up she saw that it was a Mazda, 50,000 miles too new and the wrong color, and she pushed the turbocharger to seventy and moved away from traffic. Where the interstate started its climb into the mountains, she spotted another foreign compact, and this time there was no mistaking its battered rear end. She came off the gas with a prayer that Larry wasn’t looking in the mirror, not letting herself relax until the sun dipped below the distant Adirondacks.

  The Subaru was headed for Burlington. If Larry had a lady there, he’d kept the secret well; it was news to her if he knew anyone in the city. The boy who had shot Wally was supposed to live somewhere nearby. But what would bring Larry all the way out here now that the boy was locked up in jail?

  They bypassed Burlington for a broken road toward the lake. She dropped back until she nearly lost sight of the Subaru, then picked out its high beams playing against the maples at the edge of the blacktop. She braked and killed her lights, straining against the gloom as Larry stepped out. He opened the trunk, dropped something she couldn’t see in the snow and crouched down. When he stood up again he began walking in the woods with his legs wide apart, swinging them out from his hips as if he’d wet his pants.

  Snowshoes … Larry was going for a hike in his old, warped Bearpaws. But why all the secrecy and why here, when there was more snow than anyone could want behind the cabin? Watching him disappear behind a tumbledown stone fence, she slid her skis out of the cruiser. Her boots were in the back seat along with cans of the blue wax and the red. What was the color of the day, she wondered, for spying on your ex-husband? She carried the gear through a gap in the stones and fastened the bindings.

  The snow was soft and dry, untracked save for the faint Crosshatch of the Bearpaws. With calves still aching from Sunday’s trek, she moved cumbersomely. She forced herself to pole harder, trying to work out the soreness, but had to slow down when she came up on Larry. Head down, he was taking short, choppy strides, in too much of a hurry to enjoy himself. What had brought him to these black and lonely fields? Hardly the exercise, she thought. He hadn’t been home from the hospital ten days when he’d thrown away his sling and begun pedaling to California and back on the stationary bicycle in the living room. Whatever it was, he was searching in the wrong place. For she saw it hiding in the brooding silence that made him a greater mystery to himself than she ever had been, and whose rare breaches bound them more closely together even as they forced his awful secrets deeper inside.

  She glided through a dying sugar bush, avoiding the twisted roots that protruded like trip wires through the snow. When she looked for Larry again, he was gone. The Bearpaws had left a trail even she could follow, but the trees stood too close together to ski between and she plodded into brush that snagged her clothes, tore a pocket. In the first light of the moon through sparse clouds, she spotted him at a pile of brush. He examined the debris and then kicked at it, falling as the Bearpaw caught in the twigs. Without dusting himself off, he adjusted the strap around his shoe and went deeper into the woods.

  Where the pines were rooted farther apart, Annie got back into her skis. She found him in a field of corn stubble, tilting his head as if he were reading the wind. He whirled around without warning and she froze against a tree. His face was a blur that she would have emptied her wallet for a good look at. He turned and trudged out of the field, and when she dared follow he was almost at the lake. Conceding him another fifty yards, she stopped to pull off a mitten and wipe her nose with the back of her hand.

  A shield of ice pressed down on the water, the deep snow on top so inviting that she gladly would have trailed him to the far shore. Instead, he kept to the beach where there was barely enough cover to keep from damaging the Bearpaws. For no reason she could see, he picked up the pace, so that it seemed he was running away. Not from her, though—no way he suspected she was there. She dug her poles faster, struggling to keep up.

  The beach ended in a rocky wall from which frozen groundwater hung in yellowish veils. Standing in its shadow, Annie watched him move confidently over the ice, then stop to glance over his shoulder, stop and look back again. She waited till he was at the mouth of the cove, then tugged her knit hat down over her ears and poled onto the lake. She enjoyed the chase, this game of Fox and Hounds with Larry—or would have if his pain weren’t so obvious.

  A wooded outcrop wandered away from the land and she lost him again on the other side. The temptation was to let him play by himself while she explored the bay from shore to shore. But a knot tightening in her stomach was a reminder that they weren’t playing, and she pistoned her arms in time with her legs, her heels rising and falling mechanically, until she came around the promontory and stopped as suddenly as if all her strength had been drained.

  Ice fishing shanties, more than she ever had seen in one place before, were clustered on the lake like a boomtown thrown up overnight. Weak light seeped from narrow windows and came back brighter from pickup trucks circled inward like an idling wagon train. She scented woodsmoke and kerosene that was palpable in sooty curls trapped beneath the clouds. Why, she wanted to know, did Larry come to Lake Champlain when his own neat shack was waiting so close to the cabin? And why hadn’t he told her where he went? And why the long hike instead of parking on the ice like everyone else? And why, come to think of it, had he never brought home any fish?

  She was about to call out to him when he skirted the lights, making for another beach where a lone shanty listed despondently on broken runners. He leaned the Bearpaws against a wall and entered where the door should have been. When he came out a moment later, she knew better than to come near. He was reaching for the stovepipe, sweeping his hands against rough boards. In the other she made out the sullen glint of his new gun, a heavy .44 John had let him have while his service revolver lay tagged in an evidence locker. He hauled himself onto the roof and lay flat, fingering the strange gun as he pondered its capabilities. Then his face was illuminated in a flash from the muzzle and she saw him drop to the snow. A man dressed all in army surplus came out of the shack closest to her with a bucket of silvery fish. “It’s five-thirty, you can set your watch by it,” he said in her direction. “The nut’s by the old shanty, shooting again.”

  She began poling to the shore. Her face was damp with nervous sweat, her clothes cold against her skin with the sweeter perspiration of physical exertion. “Larry?”

  He cringed, then walked away as if he had heard nothing.

  “Larry St. Germain, stop right there.”

  To her surprise, he did, jamming the gun in his parka. “How’d you know I was here?” His face was still a blur.

  She stepped onto the beach, dropped her poles as she came up to him.

  “You followed me.” He held his jaw rigid, moving his lips like a second-rate ventriloquist. “Why?”

  “Did it ever occur to you I might be worried by the way you’ve been a
cting, disappearing for hours every afternoon, not breathing a word what you were up to?”

  “You shouldn’t’ve come here.”

  Annie showed the back of her hand, fluttered it as if she was brushing away crumbs. “This is where the boy chased you that night, isn’t it, the night he killed Wally Jeffcoat?”

  “Let’s go back to the car.”

  “Larry, answer me.”

  She blocked the way with her body, put a ski tip over the Bearpaws. “Are you going to tell me what you’re doing?”

  “Please,” he said, “you have to trust me on this. I need you to … to …”

  “To what?”

  “To understand.”

  “But I don’t understand. How can I when you won’t tell me—”

  “I was looking for something,” he said.

  “For something you lost that night?”

  St. Germain nodded.

  “In the dark? Did you think you’d find it in that pile of brush in the woods?”

  “You saw me there?”

  “I saw everything,” she said. “Well, did you?”

  “Part of it. I lost bits and pieces everywhere.”

  “Can’t you just say what it was?” Letting the exasperation show, letting it work for her.

  “My honor,” he said. She moved her ski away and he backed off. “Wally’d be alive today, none of this would’ve happened if I hadn’t let it.”

  “Nonsense. John told me everything, and there’s no way anybody would have acted differently. You can’t blame yourself.”

  “John wasn’t there. If I hadn’t waved Wally into the yard, if I’d’ve been thinking of something besides saving my own skin …” His face was drenched in sweat, wetter than hers. “The only reason Wally’s dead is I’m gutless. That’s the God’s honest truth.”

  “You shouldn’t say things like—”

  “I’d never been in a spot like that, didn’t know I could react so bad.” The words rushed out as if they had broken through the wires that had kept them welled up. “Soon as Conklin had my gun, I knew I was a dead man, knew it, Ann, just like I knew there was nothing I could do about it. All that mattered was to keep breathing a second longer and then the second after that.”