by C I Dennis
We were in the parking lot of the Johnson Woolen Mill factory store. I had been pondering whether to go inside and buy anything for my Florida friends, but I didn’t think that a red and black checked bomber hat with pull-down earflaps would be an essential fashion accessory anywhere south of Johnson, Vermont. Chan growled from the back seat just as a white Hummer sped past us, and I caught a brief glimpse of the tags: they were the “Choose Life” version of vanity plates that the state of Florida offered. That had to be Clement Goody. I gunned the rental car’s tiny engine and wobbled out of the lot. We followed the big white car through the village and a couple of miles east to Hog Back Road. I knew exactly where we were headed because I’d gone this same way earlier in the morning: the West Eden Bible Camp.
I pushed the little sedan as hard as I could until we were a couple of car lengths behind the SUV; I knew that the driver would notice me now if he hadn’t already. We swerved together into the camp’s driveway, and I had to drive through the Hummer’s dust from the gravel road’s loose surface. The SUV pulled up to the gate at the bottom of the drive that led to Goody’s house, and I waited, expecting the gate to open and let the Hummer enter. I would try to scoot in behind before it closed. None of this could be called subtle, but neither was taking a whack on the head in the middle of the woods. Somebody had to answer for that.
The gate stayed shut, and the driver’s door opened. I was expecting a grey-haired man with a ponytail, but instead I got a smile from a blonde woman in black yoga tights and a yellow fleece jacket. Chan sat up in the back and let out a nervous whine.
“Are you lost?” She was walking toward my open window, and she got better looking with every step: medium height, with the shoulders-back, tits-out posture of a beauty contestant. My defenses went up: females who are that attractive bring out the testosterone-cursed cretin in me, and I didn’t need that right now. I have built something of a wall around my love life since the divorce.
“I’m looking for Mr. Goody,” I said, smiling back. “That’s your car?”
“No, it’s Clement’s. He’s not here. You’re a policeman?”
“Private investigator,” I said. “Were the police here already?”
“He went to Morrisville to meet with them. You heard about Donald Lussen?”
“You knew Lussen?”
“I worked with him,” she said. The smile was gone. “I’m Karen Charbonneau. I’m the chair of his department. We’re all in shock.”
Uh-oh. Attractive, and smart too. “And you know Clement Goody.”
“I live here,” she said. “He’s away a lot. Cindy and I take care of the house.”
The passenger door of the Hummer opened and another woman got out, dressed in a jean jacket and brown Carhartt dungarees. She wore no makeup that I could tell, but it was obvious that the passenger was the driver’s sister—in fact, they appeared to be identical twins: one Miss Vermont and one dressed-down Miss Podunk.
“Come on, Karen!” the other one yelled.
“What do you want with Clement?” Karen asked through my open window.
“I’m looking for a student named Grace Hebert. She’s the granddaughter of a friend.”
The woman considered this information for a moment. “Pull your car over there and you can ride with us,” she said. “Clement doesn’t like the dog.”
I parked the car under a tree, opened the windows a few inches, and patted Chan on the head. “Back in a while.”
The animal glowered at me. Tell him I don’t like him either.
*
The Charbonneau twins ushered me into the foyer of what had once been a cozy brick Cape-style house, typical of the ones that dotted the Vermont landscape, and that had either enjoyed—or suffered—a recent addition the size of an airplane hangar. I took a seat in a soft leather chair that reclined so far back I was almost horizontal. Karen Charbonneau had left me with a cold can of ginger ale and a pile of magazines, and then disappeared. They hadn’t said when my host might show up, but I had a feeling that I’d made the right move. All I had to do was wait. Clement Goody would be here eventually, and I would grill him, and would find out who had assaulted me, and find out where Grace Hebert was. I might even kick some butt in the process.
There was only one problem.
Ever since I’d gotten in the back seat of the Hummer and had taken the ride up the hill to Goody’s place, I had been fighting off a whiteout. The light at the hilltop had become harsh and opaque, and I had barely been able to take in my surroundings when I’d arrived. This episode felt like I was surfing the outer curl of a glassy, soon-to-be-suffocating wave. It was different, and it was also sobering, because it dawned on me that one of these things might kill me. It could be some kind of ministroke, and it might get a lot worse unless I leveled with my neurosurgeon. I had already cheated death once, and just like death doesn’t discriminate, it doesn’t like to be fooled.
I flipped through the magazines, hoping that by distracting myself the unbalanced sensation would pass. At the bottom of the pile was a heavy one, printed on the kind of thick stock that was reserved for high-end real estate or art auctions. But this publication had nothing to do with real estate, or the art world. It was porn.
The photographic content was carefully crafted, and no expense had been spared on the production. This wasn’t a skin mag that you might see at the local barbershop. This was the top-shelf stuff, although as perfectly lit, staged, and composed as the pictures were, they were also completely depraved. I turned some of the pages thinking: do people actually do that? The answer is yes. There’s a thin line between the erotic and the unthinkable, but my position with these things is to take the veteran cop’s approach: let them have their fun as long as nobody gets hurt.
I thumbed through the magazine, hoping that my mother wasn’t going to burst through the door flanked by a group of angry nuns. I no longer go to Mass, but growing up Catholic, one’s sense of guilt is as indelible as a birthmark. On the twenty-third page I stopped browsing, and it wasn’t because it was getting boring. It was because the model—a young woman with dark hair and full lips, shown in a variety of poses and accompanied by men whose equipment would have shamed a sex-shop dildo—was Grace Hebert.
The photographers had edited out the moles, the skin blotches, and the red marks, but they hadn’t been able to do anything about her eyes. It was a look that I’d seen many times before: Grace had the vacant stare of a junkie, and I realized that even if I did find her, she might still be lost.
*
“Mr. Tanzi?” Clement Goody was standing above my reclined chair. He had tapped me on the shoulder and roused me. The light from the foyer’s window was fading. I’d suffered a whiteout, and I had no idea how long I’d been here.
“What time is it?”
“We got back a while ago, and then went out on our bikes. You feeling all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said, although I wasn’t so sure about that. I’d come here to grill the guy and had passed out in his lobby.
“Welcome to my house. This is Lila Morton.” He gestured to a middle-aged woman who had taken a chair across a glass coffee table from where I was seated. Both of them wore friendly smiles and looked as if they were thrilled that I had decided to drop in.
I pushed a button to make the chair sit up. Goody stood about six feet even and had a neatly pointed goatee that set off his blue eyes. He was dressed in black tights and a multi-colored bicycling shirt that clung to his fit physique. Lila Morton wore an identical outfit and wasn’t quite as pretty as the Charbonneau twins, but the Breast Fairy had definitely stopped at her house. I turned my attention back to Goody before I got caught staring.
“I have some questions,” I said. “Your caretakers let me in. I’m looking for Grace Hebert.”
“No cause to rush things,” Clement Goody said. He had a strong, Southern-tinged voice that would easily carry over a large congregation. “Lila and I need to shower, and then we’ll have drinks. We worked
up a sweat.” He wore the same frozen smile that I’d seen on Donald Lussen. It might have been an effort to put me at ease, but it was having the opposite effect.
“Just a couple of quick questions,” I said. “It won’t take more than a minute.”
“After we clean up,” the preacher said. “If we’re going to discuss Grace it will take more than a minute. Come on, Lila.”
He took her elbow, and she turned to me and gave me a sly wink. “Join us?”
I smiled just enough to be polite. It was a joke, right? I would have believed that, but she waited a little too long for my answer before disappearing down the hall.
*
I decided to look around. I gave myself a tour of the first floor, starting with the original section. It had a dining room, a parlor, and several other small rooms that looked unused but were tastefully furnished with oriental rugs and antiques. The newer wing consisted of the foyer, multiple bathrooms, side rooms, and closets that I would have examined more closely if I’d had more time. The newer section was dominated by what builders call a Great Room. This one measured about sixty by thirty feet and contained a living area, a kitchen with barstools along a long counter, and a grand piano along one wall. At the far end was a stone fireplace with a fire already set. I stood next to it, trying to shed a chill that had come over me.
It must have been a whiteout. If it was, it was a different kind from the ones before, because although I remembered getting light-headed at the top of the hill, I’d been escorted by the Charbonneau twins to the chair in the foyer, I’d drunk from the ginger ale can, and I’d checked out the high-end porn that Clement Goody left out for visitors. I remembered nothing after that, but according to Goody, I’d been out cold.
I killed half an hour in front of the fire worrying about my situation. I’d come up here ready to punch out someone’s lights, and instead I had passed out. Maybe I couldn’t pull this off anymore, and my return to the investigating business was a bad idea. Someone else would have to find Grace Hebert. I would slink back to Florida, take care of Royal, and try to live on my pension from the Sheriff’s department. Dr. Jaffe would have my driver’s license taken away, and I would be washed up for good. How would I transport Royal anywhere? Hell, I’d have to hitchhike to the Market Basket for groceries. I had worked myself into a multi-episode miniseries of misery when Lila Morton finally emerged into the Great Room and gave me a radiant smile.
Whoa, I almost said aloud.
She wore a black dress that reached to her knees and revealed just enough cleavage to promise a vast world of fun. Her gray-blonde hair was pulled back with a clip, exposing her neck, with gold hoops on her ears and a matching necklace. I pegged her at mid-forties, but with a body that had escaped gravity. Was there some sort of rule against normal-looking women living here?
“Clement’s making phone calls,” she said. “Gin and tonic? We make our own.”
“You make your own gin?”
“No, we make the tonic. The store-bought kind is full of corn syrup,” she said. She walked over to the kitchen area and took out several bottles from the bar. “This is much better for you. Cane sugar and real quinine. It’s a lot of work to make it, but Clement insists.”
“He’s a gin drinker?”
“He’s a teetotaler,” she said. “But he likes his guests to be happy.” She handed me a hand-blown goblet of the gently bubbling beverage, topped with a wedge of lime. I took a sip—whoa, again. Maybe this would be the cure for the whiteouts.
“Do you know where Grace Hebert is?”
Lila Morton finished mixing her own drink. She came over to the barstool where I was sitting, and put her hand on my arm. “We’ll get to that later,” she said. “Let’s talk about you.”
“About me?” Hold on. I had a few questions that I wanted answered, and then I would be on my way.
“Yes, you,” she said. “You haven’t been very lucky in love, have you? I’m curious why not.”
“Ms. Morton—”
“Lila.”
“You know nothing about me,” I said.
“Your first died, and your second wife left you. What was that old song? If it wasn’t for bad luck?”
“I wouldn’t have no luck at all,” I said. “How do you know about my marriages?”
“Clement had Cindy research you. She likes to have the background on people. And she’s not too good with men. She’s straight, but sometimes I think she’d rather beat them up than take them to bed.”
“So it was Cindy who assaulted me? Yesterday, on Prospect Rock?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Someone parked your car—the Hummer—at the trailhead, and snuck up on me. They hit me in the back of the neck, and I passed out. Another hiker saw the car. Middle of the afternoon.”
“We were in Burlington,” Lila said. “Clement likes to shop at Costco. Karen was at the college, and the rest of us weren’t back until after dark.”
“In the Hummer?”
“No, we had Cindy’s van,” she said. “The Hummer was here. Nobody had access to it. The only one here was—”
“Was who?”
“I—can’t say. You’ll have to wait for Clement.”
*
The three women were making dinner while we waited for the master of the house to get off the phone. Cindy and Karen had also put on dresses, and I was feeling more and more like a homeless person who had stumbled through the back door of an exclusive disco. The women were almost too pretty, like a doll collection. I was nursing my drink, and I passed the time talking with Karen, who dodged any inquiries about Grace or Donald Lussen. When I brought up his death she shuddered, but she seemed determined to keep up the small talk. She was apparently under orders to not discuss anything important. I tried various approaches, but she would say: you’ll have to ask Clement. He had her well trained, and I wondered how that had happened, because she didn’t seem the type to be taking orders from anyone.
“How much longer is he going to be?” I asked Karen. “I need to feed my dog.”
“He’s still on the phone,” she said. “I’ll feed him for you. Please stay.”
I got up from my chair. “Be right back.”
“Please,” Karen said. “Don’t leave the house. Clement won’t like it.”
“That’s a problem?”
None of the three women spoke. What exactly was the deal here?
“I’ll be right back,” I said.
Chan was not pleased to see me after my long absence. I poured him a bowl of kibble, and he took a few bites and then looked up. He sniffed at my pant leg.
She’s there.
“You know this somehow?”
Yes. Dogs know.
I realized that I was standing out in the starry Vermont night talking out loud to a dog, which was batshit. I wasn’t under the illusion that this was a two-way conversation—I was simply using the animal to work things out in my own mind. I’m no crazier than the next person, although sometimes you have to wonder about the value of that endorsement.
“I have a dinner invitation with Pastor Goody and his girlfriends,” I said as Chan finished off his meal, “and then I’m going to get some answers.”
Make good choices, Vince.
No, the dog didn’t say that—I did. My life has included some questionable choices, and there was no room for that now.
*
It took Clement Goody another half hour to show up in the Great Room where the rest of us waited. By that time I had finished off a bowl of peanuts, half of a summer sausage, a wheel of Brie, and everything else in sight that was edible. I was about to start gnawing on a chair leg when Goody finally appeared, beaming a huge, glassy grin like he’d just taken off the nitrous oxide mask. I took one look at his outfit and thought: uh-oh.
He wore an open black leather vest on the top half, and that was it—no shirt, just his surprisingly muscled bare arms and tufts of grey hair on his chest. His pants were canary-yellow leather, tight
at the crotch, Jim Morrison-style, and on his feet were black suede boots that folded over at the top, Santa Claus-style. It was one of the more bizarre outfits that I’d seen on a man, and I’ve been to South Beach. I might have cleared out right then, questions or not, but Cindy Charbonneau was serving osso buco, a meal for which I would gladly crawl across broken glass, or even dress up in a biker vest and canary-yellow nut-huggers.
We served ourselves and took seats at a long wooden table on the other side of the kitchen area. Lila had lit at least a dozen candles and placed them around the room, and Goody took a chair at the head of the table and played with a remote control until he had tuned the stereo to a smooth jazz station. All very nice. The Sultan of West Eden, enjoying a meal with his female consorts and me. Too bad I had to spoil the mood with a reality check.
“Grace Hebert,” I said. “I know she’s here.”
“Yes, and she can’t join us for the meal, unfortunately,” Goody said, wiping his lips after a sip of his sparkling water. “How do you know this? Donald told you?”
“Donald Lussen? No.”
“He was the only person outside of this group who knew where Grace was,” Goody said. “We’re careful about these things. I know you’re an investigator. Please tell me how you found out.”
