Three Can Keep a Secret

by Mayor, Archer

  Joe broke the silence first. “Okay, let’s start with the basics. Les, you and I can travel to Waterbury and check out where she was last seen and what possible routes she took. Sam and Willy, why don’t you two hold the fort, find out what you can about her background, and if you have time, start looking into who was supposed to be in that coffin?”

  * * *

  Joe’s choice of Lester to accompany him to Waterbury had not been arbitrary. During his tour of Windham County early that morning, he’d learned that the damage had exceeded the visible. Along with the roads and bridges and houses, the floodwaters had also stirred up petroleum deposits, sewage treatment plants, farm manure storage facilities, and carried them far and wide. One of his co-travelers had commented that he’d heard of a Vermont-stamped propane tank found floating in the Hudson River, and another had told of a virulent computer image making the rounds of a mobile home surrounded by a bright red pond of spilled fuel. More directly, when they’d stopped to examine Brattleboro’s Flat Street—in part, so named for its proximity to the Whetstone Brook—they’d found it under several feet of dark brown water, shimmering with an oily sheen from untold hundreds of polluted sources.

  Joe knew that Waterbury would be similar, and that Sam was still breast-feeding her daughter, Emma. He had no kids himself, and Lester’s were both teenagers. So, his choice of companion was at once protective and practical. Not that he bothered explaining it to anyone.

  It became an expedition traveling the normally two-hour journey. I-91 and I-89 were in fact largely open, but given that they’d been told they wouldn’t be allowed into the tunnels until the next day, Joe and Lester agreed that the drive should double as an exploration. The two therefore switched from dirt roads to highways to occasionally the interstate, sometimes backtracking, often using the phone—assuming there was coverage—to get and give road-closure updates as they went. All along, they found people outside, sometimes forlornly poking through belongings spread out in the sun, but for the most part working hard to address the damage. On the radio, they heard about the governor commandeering one of the few National Guard helicopters for an overview of the damage, and about FEMA, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and others setting up command centers and shelters to help the dispossessed, the homeless, and the simply stunned.

  But what they saw as they crisscrossed toward Waterbury was less organized relief efforts, and more individual evidence of that older, less official, rural New England code that tended to respond to catastrophe stoically. Things were what they were, such a philosophy dictated. And then you got on with it.

  It was close to the end of day when they reached their destination, and Joe was happy that he’d called ahead instead of relying on serendipity to supply them with room and board for the night. On the map, the town’s main street was ruler straight for over a mile, with the Winooski River hanging like a droopy clothesline from each end, outlining a half-oval parcel containing the office complex, a large field, and one perpendicular street with its bridge at the bottom. By and large, that whole section of land, roughly seven thousand feet long by two thousand at its widest, had been plunged underwater.

  Waterbury had received the proverbial shellacking.

  “Damn,” Spinney said as they crested the hill heading down into the floodplain at the center of it all. “I’m impressed they’re only missing one person.”

  Traces of recovery were plentiful, as they had been all the way here, along with defiant hand-lettered signs adorning mud-clogged front yards and semi-destroyed homes, but the brutality of what had occurred lingered in the faces they saw as they drove by. This was a community funeral of sorts, and there was no amount of thumbs-up or spirit-rousing rallying that could alter it.

  The man Joe had phoned was Bill Allard, the director of the VBI, who—along with the squad that handled this portion of the state—had been evacuated from the public safety building while inspectors checked it out. This made Allard at once a busy guy, making sure that his other units were up and running smoothly—by whatever means they could muster—and someone with time on his hands. He’d been the one to ask Joe to handle this missing person case.

  Bill lived on Winooski Street—located within that flood-prone bulge between Main Street and the river. Fortunately for him, his address was near Main, and thus on higher ground. Those closer to its far end had run the gamut from getting their basements flooded to having their homes washed away. Turning right to reach Allard’s house, Joe was again reminded of his family’s good fortune. A second call to Thetford had recently revealed that Leo and their mom had suffered nothing beyond being cooped up indoors on a terrifically rainy day.

  As Joe and Lester emerged stretching from their vehicle in the driveway at last, a square-built, muscular man approached from the adjacent Greek Revival home.

  “Rough trip?” he asked, extending a hand in greeting. “I didn’t have a clue when you’d get here.”

  “Would’ve been sooner,” Joe told him. “We rubbernecked some on the way. Wanted to check out the damage.”

  Bill shook his head sorrowfully. “I wish I’d had to do that to see worse than what we got here. But this was about as bad as it gets. They’re saying over two hundred homes have been either badly hit or totally destroyed.” He waved a hand down the street, adding, “Including a couple almost within sight of here. My own backyard was flooded. It stopped just shy of the place.” He indicated his home. “It feels so random, you know? Fluky. I’ve been watching the news. They’ve got footage of a streamside house that looks so good, even the garden’s okay, but the next-door neighbor—not a hundred yards away—is off his foundation and sitting in a field of mud. Makes me feel guilty, almost. You got more bags?”

  The three of them entered Allard’s home and settled in the kitchen as he prepared them something hot to drink. His wife came down to meet them and offered to cook dinner, which they gratefully accepted. Bill therefore shifted them to his office off the living room to give her space.

  Joe glanced around at the signs of upheaval—piles of folders and files and scattered paperwork, covering every flat surface. “All the conveniences of your real office?” he asked with a sympathetic smile.

  Bill was clearing seating space and groaned. “Yeah—right. I have no idea how people work at home.” He then looked up and added, “Thank God, we run a pretty autonomous outfit with the VBI. Can you imagine if we were more traditionally top-down? Other agencies are in a real pickle right now.”

  They settled down with their coffee, making themselves comfortable.

  “How is the public safety building?” Joe asked.

  “It would’ve been fine, except for the damned tunnels,” Allard explained. “The water never reached the walls, pretty much like this house. But no one thought to rig the tunnels with watertight doors, so that’s how it got in. So stupid,” he added. “It’s always the things you don’t think of.”

  “Those the same tunnels that Carolyn Barber used?” Lester asked. “They sound like a rabbit warren, going everywhere.”

  “Pretty much,” Bill agreed.

  “I take it there’s still no news about her?” Joe asked.

  Their host shook his head once more. “Nope. Vanished into thin air.”

  “Or drowned,” Lester added glumly. “From the looks of downtown, she may be fifty feet from the hospital, caught in a flooded passageway. When will we be able to get in there to check? I had no idea the whole campus was still six feet under.” He looked at Joe for confirmation. “We thought search and rescue had already gone through the tunnels.”

  “They did what they could,” Bill hedged. “Not an easy job.” He raised a finger for emphasis as he answered Lester’s question. “If the estimates are correct, you might get in tomorrow. The water’s draining fast. It’ll be a mess, but it should be accessible.”

  “You have hazmat suits for us?” Joe asked. “I could smell the pollutants as soon as we hit town.”

  Lester shot him another glance, cl
early not having considered the issue.

  “Yeah,” Allard said airily. “We’ve got you covered. You’re not only facing all the crap you can guess, but there’s asbestos, too, from the leftover underground pipes and conduits, dating back to the bad ol’ days. It should be a real blast, poking around down there.”

  “Great,” Lester murmured.

  “Not to worry,” Allard reassured them. “You’ll have people with you who know their stuff. I’m not sending you in there alone.”

  Lester did his best to fake a pleasantly surprised smile. “Ah,” he said. “That makes all the difference.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “How’re you holding up?” she asked.

  “Better than most,” Joe admitted. “I can think of ten other professions right now that’ve been working harder than us from the start. The uniformed cops are mostly making sure people don’t get into trouble, and we fancy guys in suits are being called on to do even less.”

  She laughed knowledgeably. “Unless they’re Willy Kunkle, diving into the floodwaters to save the brain-dead.”

  He was impressed. “You heard about that?”

  “I’m the governor, Joe. I have people.”

  He smiled at the phone in his hand. She was, and she did. And Gail Zigman also made it her business to be better informed than most of her recent predecessors. Her early years as a selectman and prosecutor had sensitized her to the old rule that all politics are local. Among the backroom organizations that she’d created before her first day at work was a team of phone and e-mail workers whose sole duty was to keep in touch with handpicked human listening posts all across the state. These were mostly people whom Gail had wooed and won during her years of ascension, ranging from small-town politicos to fire chiefs, town clerks, church leaders, and almost anyone else who was engaged, informed, and/or just plain nosy. It had served her more than once in sensing an upswelling before it became a tidal wave.

  “How’re your people serving you in the middle of this mess?” he asked.

  “Pretty well, up to now,” she said confidently. “But we’re so early into it, I wouldn’t even call it the end of the beginning. I’m just happy we have only three dead, so far. States below us did much worse in that department. On the flip side, our infrastructure got hammered—thousands of road breaks, hundreds of miles of pavement, rail, and power lines lost. God knows how many houses and businesses damaged and destroyed and people ruined. It staggers the mind.”

  It could have been a political pitch, of course—a sympathetic sound bite—except that it was near midnight, they were alone, if in different parts of the state, and they knew each other with the intimacy of an old married couple. They had once been virtually that, a few years ago, before her ambitions and the risky nature of his job had pulled them apart. And they’d been that couple for well over a decade—albeit living in separate houses, pursuing divergent careers, and keeping different friends. The physical part may have passed, he understood, but what they’d forged afterwards had struck him as a dependable, valuable, and cherished friendship, nurtured by a trust he’d once thought unlikely.

  He had been sensing a change in her, however. She’d been ambitious and hardworking when they first met. But, born wealthy and urban, and having escaped to the allures of communal living in Vermont, she’d settled for a selection of pursuits—hippie, Realtor, small-town leader. A brutal rape had changed all that, creating a crucible from which she’d emerged shaken, hungry, and in need of a higher purpose—striving to build something in a life that he’d previously felt she’d mostly toyed with. Sadly, it had also made her a bit reckless with the people she once held dear. In truth, there were times toward the end when Joe, for all his sympathy for and understanding of her demons, had wished they’d call it quits.

  Lately, though, now that Gail had been governor for half a year, he’d begun to notice small indications of her earlier, gentler yearnings. He sensed in her an element of loneliness, perhaps, or maybe something subtler, akin to regret, if not so definable. But whatever its nature, it had resulted in a series of phone calls and a visit or two, in which she appeared to be reaching out to him. That having been said, he’d undergone his own emotional journey to get to where he was, and he wasn’t entirely sure that he wanted or needed any new developments.

  “What have you been seeing out there?” she asked him practically, if in a tone of personal concern.

  “Stamina,” he answered. “Stubbornness. Also frustration with high-visibility targets like FEMA and anyone in a jumpsuit carrying a clipboard. Probably to be expected. I’m just hoping word gets out for everyone to cut each other a little slack.”

  “I think they will,” she stated. “I’m getting good vibes from most legislators right now. They’ll run out of Kool-Aid eventually, but I’ll do what I can to stretch them out as long as possible.”

  “You’re kind of a student of Vermont politics,” Joe said suddenly, his own duties for tomorrow looming in his mind. “You ever hear of Carolyn Barber?”

  There was a pause. “In what context?”

  Joe shifted the phone from one ear to the other and adjusted how he was sitting. He was in an upstairs guest room of Bill Allard’s house, using an armchair he’d placed by the room’s one window. The scene outside, normally overlooking a quiet, partially darkened rural town, was instead pulsing with the lights of stationary fire trucks, police cars, and yellow highway signs telling of dangers ahead. It felt as if the entire community had been transformed into a hospital ICU.

  “I’m working a case in Waterbury,” he explained. “A woman who went missing from the state hospital. They nicknamed her the Governor because she claimed she’d been one a long time ago. They thought it was a delusion, but I remembered she really was governor, for a single day back in the ’60s, as part of some PR thing. Her name rang a bell.”

  “Not with me,” Gail admitted. He could hear her moving about, presumably searching for a pad or a pen. He imagined her in her pajamas. The image wasn’t a stretch—he’d seen her dozens of times, having turned her bed into an office.

  “How do you spell her name?” she asked him. “I’ll look into it. The whole thing sounds weird, having a governor nobody knows confined to the state hospital? It’s got to be something else.”

  Joe slowly pegged on what she was implying, and felt a little slow for not having considered it earlier. Governors—even sham ones—were not regular folks from off the sidewalk. Along with creating a gimmick like Governor-for-a-Day, consideration had to have been given to the individual chosen. It wouldn’t have been a random selection. That would have been too politically risky.

  Carolyn Barber’s status was abruptly bumped up the ladder in his mind.

  “Thanks, Gail,” he told her. “I appreciate it.”

  “How many people know about this?” she asked.

  An interesting, slightly paranoid question, he thought, probably typical of any politician. “Only a few,” he reassured her. “We want to find out what we’ve got first. The tunnels they think she used should be accessible tomorrow. For all I know, we’ll find her drowned right there, and that’ll be the end of it.”

  “It’s never that easy, Joe,” Gail said with a conviction born of knowledge.

  He didn’t doubt the truth of that. But the source of the prophecy was interesting. Did Gail suspect something she wasn’t admitting to? Or was she simply being watchful?

  “Let me know as soon as you get anything, okay?” he asked. “It might really help me in locating her.”

  * * *

  Their point of departure was a large, unmarked white truck, parked just outside the former admissions entrance to the state hospital. As Joe, Lester, and the two HazMat technicians they’d been assigned clumsily emerged from the back and stepped cautiously onto the slippery mud coating the parking lot, Joe couldn’t help thinking of so many postapocalyptic movies, where the irradiated remnants of buildings, streets, and playgrounds lay abandoned and eerily silent. All around him,
he could see only a wet and soiled urban wilderness, bereft of movement or sound.

  He flexed and moved his limbs, adjusting to the bulky Tyvek outfit, rubber boots and gloves, and mostly, the tight-fitting respirator and confining helmet.

  “Comfy?” the senior tech asked in a muffled voice, a man named Kevin Teater.

  “I feel like I’m inside a body bag.”

  Teater’s laughter sounded odd, unaccompanied by any visual clues beyond a slight crinkling around his eyes. “You’ll get used to it fast,” he reassured the two cops. “It’s the same for all of us.”

  They proceeded toward the building’s front door in a shambling herd, churning up the slime beneath their treaded feet and feeling the weight of it clinging to their boots.

  “You can see how high it got,” Teater pointed out with one gloved hand, waving at a distinct waterline some seven feet off the ground. “The whole first floor was wiped out.”

  Knowing of the devastation and seeing the dampness still glistening attractively in the morning sun, however, Joe was struck by how normal everything looked.

  It didn’t last. As they filed deeper inside, even the respirator couldn’t block the smell of dampness, chemicals, and something more primordial—something hinting at the earth’s very fundament.

  The walls were stained and smeared, the furniture moved helter-skelter, and the whole littered with a madcap tossing of files, papers, documents, and books, along with dozens of less recognizable items, making it look like the soggy remains of a tornado’s passage.

  Kevin Teater slowly led them down a dark hallway, the sun outside having little influence in this grottolike environment.

  “The entrance to the tunnels is this way—at least the one we’re thinking she used.” He twisted around stiffly to address them directly. “You hear what happened to the doors’ electronics?”

  The cops nodded, not bothering to shout against their shrouds.

  However, at the door in question, separating the facility’s inner core from access to the underground passages, Joe asked in a loud voice, “Why is this even available to people in this building?”