Death Across the Lake

by Lyle Hightower

  CONTENTS

  Death Across the Lake

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Death Across the Lake

  By

  Lyle Hightower

  Copyright © 2020 by Lyle Hightower

  All Rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic of mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without express written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “It’s almost as if you want us to die. I won’t stand for it,” Nora Cartwright said, almost yelling, her arms crossed, her lips trembling.

  “What are you implying?” the small, nervous man said, standing up and pounding on the table with his fist. “We’re out there every day, growing the food you all need to live,” he continued. “We’re exposed, out in the open, and you have the gall to say something like this? Minutemen patrols saunter through our fields, harass us, threaten our families, search our houses. Just last week my neighbour had his heifer stolen. That was what his family was going to eat this winter. We deserve to be protected.”

  This was Irving Peck, and he was the President of the Farmers’ Union of Chittenden County. He and his delegation represented the country folk who grew most of the food we ate in town.

  Nora, for her part, was head of the Burlington Merchant’s Association, and she got up again and was about to speak before Irving cut her off.

  “And don’t you think the first thing the Minutemen will try to do if they lay siege to the town would be to cut off the food supply? You don’t stand a chance if you give up on your lifeline before the fight’s even started. They’ll just wait it out until you’re all starving, and we’re all dead. The old order is collapsing. The Minutemen used to keep us safe, but they’re out of control and we need to provide for our own defence now, all of us. If we abandon the countryside to them, all we’ll have will be a rump state, a constellation of isolated, starving little towns. We’ll have already lost before we even begin.”

  The yelling from all sides of the table started up again and the mayor, there to moderate the meeting, slammed her gavel against the table. Everyone was at it now; the farmers and merchants; my boss, the chief of police; the weaver’s association, and the Freebies, the Federation of Freelance Farm Labourers. But Nora and Irving were the lightning rods, the clearest embodiment of the enmity that was brewing between town and country.

  It had been six months since yours truly, Benny Bailey, detective with the Burlington P.D., had uncovered a plot, a coordinated effort by the Minutemen and the Empire State Militia to smuggle arms into the state, across the lake, with the intention of solidifying the Minutemen’s grip on the Republic of the Green Mountains. Since then things had only gotten worse. The Minutemen were flexing their muscle in the countryside, and in the towns, the state forces, the local police and the State Troopers were scrambling to coordinate a defence. And then there was the wildcard, the Rangers, who’d hosted me against my will out in the woods, and explained to me their grand plans for the state. For a while there it looked like they might be on our side, or at least they stood against the Minutemen, a kind of “an enemy of my enemy is my friend” arrangement, but they’d disappeared, and no one had heard from them in months. Either way we were undersupplied and underprepared, and it was understood that any defence was going to have to rely on volunteer forces, and that’s why I was here, on a Saturday night, babysitting a bunch of angry farmers and shopkeepers in an abandoned bingo hall, while they argued over where to build some trenches. I was getting wet too, from the rain was coming in through holes in the roof that had been there, since the twenties at least, that no one had bothered to fix in the intervening forty years.

  “We’d be spread too thin to mount a defence on the county line,” Nora said, repeating the argument she’d been making for over an hour. “We can’t do it. We produce enough food in town and have enough in storage that we can make it through a three month siege before we start to run out. Everyone who lives out in the county can fall back to the city. You’ll be safe here.”

  “And where will we live? In tents?” Irving asked. “We need to be honest, and realistic about what’s possible. I can’t ask my people to abandon their homes.” A younger man, an assistant of some sort, was sitting next Irving, his arms crossed, nodding at everything Irving was saying.

  In the middle of all this, a representative from the Freebies, a young woman in threadbare clothes, stood up and began to speak. The din in the room quieted momentarily.

  “Can we recruit more volunteers from the surrounding countryside to man the trenches? Would that make it feasible to dig them further out from the town? It seems to me that just having people out on the perimeter would be enough to challenge the Minutemen’s strength in the countryside. Am I wrong in thinking a lot of their strength is imaginary? That if we could just put up any resistance at all, they might rethink their whole plan?”

  “But their strength isn’t imaginary, is it?” Nora Cartwright said. “We know about the arms coming in over the lake from New York, and advisors from the Empire State Militia. We can’t hold up if we’re dispersed, no matter how many of us there are. We don’t have the guns. The Minutemen have de facto control of the countryside already.”

  “Running patrols every hour along the highways outside of town doesn’t count as control. It wouldn’t take that much to disrupt them. Just some planning,” Irving said. “In any case, if an attack comes and somehow bypasses a set of fortifications outside of town, they’ll be laying siege to the town with their backs exposed. We can hit them from two directions at once. It makes more sense to stake out our ground where we stand.”

  This set off another round of yelling. By the entrance to the hall someone yelled “you people are going to get us all killed,” and there was a loud crack. Two men were fighting; one had hit the other over the head with an ancient, rusted folding chair, just like in an olde-tyme wrestling match. The one who’d been struck lurched forward, blood running down his bald pate. The other looked on in horror as he realized what he’d done. There was a sudden rush towards them, and two dozen farmers and shopkeepers went at it. Peck and Cartwright called after their cohorts, the mayor banged her gavel, but no one stopped, and the brawl only grew. Chief pulled out a small blackjack, and gave me a nod. It was going to be a long night.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It took a good half hour to get everything settled. Chief radioed for a couple of beat cops, and they showed up a
bout fifteen minutes in to the brawl, and with their help we were eventually able to get things under control.

  “How many injuries we got,” I asked Molly McHale, one of the uniforms, after it was over and most of the meeting’s attendees had left or been forcibly ejected from the bingo hall. A farmer was having some stitches put in by a nurse, without any anesthetic, because she had run out. The stuff was hard to come by sometimes. Served him right for brawling. The guy who’d been beaned by the folding chair needed stitches too. That was Marty Hansen, who owned a butcher shop up on Pearl Street out near the old university. Made a good living selling rabbit and venison, as well as salt pork and sometimes beef to the rich people up on the hill. He has a mouth on him, let me tell you, so I wasn’t surprised it was him who got hit.

  Chief walked up to us. “We’re gonna have a private meeting, the mayor, myself, Cartwright and Peck. I’ll need you there too Bailey. Maybe we can talk some sense into these two if they understand how bad the situation actually is. McHale, you’re in charge here. We’re going back to the station house. Tell Velasquez to keep an eye on the entrance, make sure none of these clowns start fighting once they’re outside. When nurse says she’s done treating these people, everyone out.”

  We left, the five of us, and walked the ten minutes to the police station, mostly in silence. Peck and Cartwright stayed mum the whole way, but they still seemed peeved at each other, and stood on either side of myself, the mayor, and Chief. It was still raining, and the mayor broke out her umbrella, an antique thing made of metal and plastic that was held together with equally old duct tape and some twine. Eighty years old, she swayed unsteadily as she walked and nearly poked Chief in the eye several times as we made our way south along Elmwood Avenue towards Church Street, where the police department and City Hall were.

  We walked into the police department, past McMurtry, the duty officer, and Chief had me set everyone up around a table in the mess room, making sure the mayor was comfortable. She may be in her ninth decade, but she’s got some life in her yet, and she sure does complain when she feels like her needs aren’t being attended to. She’s real popular in town too, won re-election seven times over, so she can just about get away with it. I got her a cup of coffee, which she accepted with a smile. Everyone else was going to have to settle for water.

  Chief went into his office to retrieve a map, and came back and laid it out on the table. It was a map of the Free Republic and surrounding areas, with Lake Champlain and New York State on one side, Quebec to the north, and Massachusetts to the south. The New Hampshire wastes were a big blank space. No one lived out there. There were a few villages on the other side of the Connecticut River, a trading post at Keene, but other than that there was nothing until the Maine coast, where fisherman lived in tiny outports, surviving on what they could pull from the sea, living in fear of pirate raiders from Nova Scotia.

  “This is us, right here,” Chief said, pointing at Burlington on the map. “I want the two of you to understand what kind of situation we’re in. Not what you think it is, what it actually is. We have information you don’t, that isn’t fit for general consumption, if you get my drift.”

  Nora and Irving nodded.

  “This is the Shelburne Road,” he said, pointing to the small highway that led out of the city to the south. “To the southeast, I-89 goes out to Montpelier. Both of these roads are under Minutemen control, up to Shelburne in the south and Williston in the east. That’s a five mile perimeter they’ve established to the south and east. They’ve got patrols off-road as well, meaning that anyone trying to get in and out of town in either of these directions is liable to get stopped. That leaves this road here,” he said, pointing to the I-89 as it passed through St. Albans to the north on the way to the Canadian border. “That means if we’re attacked, this road is the only way out of town. In the event of a successful siege, the B.P.D., the mayor, and most likely the librarian and the volunteer fire department are going to have to make a run for the border and try to get back into the state further east to reconnect with other state forces, but in that circumstance, anyone in town who doesn’t wanna play ball with the Minutemen is going to have to chance an escape up that road as well.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” the mayor said. “You think I’m walking up I-89 at my age?”

  “Yes, well, we’ll have to see about that,” Chief said.

  “If you’ll pardon me chief, none of this is news,” Irving said. “We’ve known this since the town defence committee was first assembled.”

  Nora, her arms crossed, was looking increasingly impatient.

  “Then there’s this,” chief said, pointing to a spot in the middle of Lake Champlain. “Grand Isle.”

  “There’s nothing but derelict farms and deranged hermits living on Grand Isle,” Nora said.

  “We have intelligence that says otherwise. We think there’s a detachment of as many as two hundred Minutemen stationed there, ready to cross over to the mainland by the Roosevelt causeway as soon as any state forces move north.”

  Irving and Nora looked nonplussed. This was news to me too, if I’m honest, but I wasn’t surprised. Since peace in the state had started to fall apart, it seemed like there was news every day of some new skirmish in the woods, or some small town in the Northeast Kingdom or Rutland County burned to the ground for defying Minutemen thugs. Then there were even wilder tales of fighting between Ranger guerrillas and the Minutemen in the far south and east of the state, but these were only rumours. In the midst of this chaos most towns in the Republic were just like Burlington; they had a half dozen police, and that was it for defence. It was only the risk of popular uprising that stopped the Minutemen from walking into town and setting up shop.

  “Are you sure? What’s your source?” Nora said, looking skeptical. Irving was rubbing his jaw, trying to figure out what this meant.

  “Let’s just say we know what we know, and leave it at that,” Chief said.

  “This changes nothing,” Peck said. “A forward position would help us keep the road clear. I’ve got dozens of able bodied men and women I can call up between here and St. Albans. Fighting from a fortified position, we could tangle with two hundred minutemen. Those people are madder ’n heck at the bastards, they’re eager to kick some Minuteman hide.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Irving. Do you think a few farm hands can hold up against trained soldiers?” Nora said. She fidgeted nervously with the antique mechanical pencil on a chain she always wore around her neck. “If you believe that, you’re crazier than I thought.”

  “Shut up the both of ya,” the mayor yelled. “If the two of you can’t agree on a plan, we’re going to have to force the issue. Chief, can you tell us what you had in mind?”

  Chief stood up again and leaned over the map.

  “Around here,” he said, pointing to the south end of town, “There’s no point in setting up forward positions. If we set up our defences close in, right up where the city proper starts, we can cover the ways into town with gunfire from multiple positions. The apartment blocks around Pine and Adams Streets, and the buildings of the old university campus would provide excellent defensive cover. It could take a Minutemen force weeks to clear them out. We just need the volunteers, and we need you people, you especially Irving, to get people to volunteer. ”

  Irving looked displeased. “Now now Chief, I really do need to object–”

  “Hold your horses, Irving. They wouldn’t even necessarily be called up. We just don’t know if the Minutemen are planning to lay siege to the town. But we need to be prepared, and I’m sure they’d be happy if they saw us bickering like this. But there’s more to this. In the north end, we set up a forward position, just like you’re saying, and at the first sign of trouble, we blow up the Roosevelt causeway, cutting off the minutemen force stationed on Grande Isle.”

  Nora looked horrified. “We need everyone downtown. If we don’t protect the merchants, the people of Burlington are going to lose hope. This is
ridiculous.”

  Chief’s plan made sense to me, and I could see the mayor agreed to it. Irving looked like he was starting to see the sense of it, but Nora had daggers in her eyes for all of us.

  “Well I can see the way this is going to go. Edwina,” she said, looking at the mayor, “you’re going to regret this.” She turned to Peck. “Do what you want, but you are all going to regret this.”

  And with that, she walked out into the night.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Velazquez was breathless when he arrived at the police station. “It’s Irving Peck,” he said. “He’s dead.”

  I was trying to clean my gun when he burst into the office. I hadn’t used the thing in six months, and looking for something to do that morning, I’d settled on making sure it was in working order.

  “What do you mean dead? Dead how? Where?” I asked.

  “In his hotel room. There’s a pen sticking out of his neck. A lot of blood.”

  He looked genuinely upset. Velasquez had joined the force as a volunteer, one of a few we got in the last few months as things had started to heat up in the state. He was an eager kid from the countryside, and good enough that Chief was able to put him on a small stipend and gave him a place to live, a small old utility building down by the water that the city owned that had been subdivided into small apartments. His room was windowless, but warm, and on sunny or windy days it had power.

  Peck had been staying at the Smith House, an old 20th century hotel around the corner from the station house and City Hall, perfectly located for someone staying in town on business.

  “Who’s at the scene now?”

  “Just the hotel manager. I had him lock the room.”

  “You should have stayed, and sent the hotel manager.”

  Velasquez looked crestfallen.