The Company She Kept

by Archer Mayor

  “Political influence might still be the force they claim it is,” Les was saying. “The crime lab has come back in record time with a slew of stuff tied to Susan’s death.”

  Joe kept studying the view, admiring how an overnight dusting of snow had made the buildings before him look like a sentimentalized rendering of a New England long gone—at least the New England where he spent his time.

  Lester continued, used to his boss’s habit of staring into space when he was thinking. “In no particular order, we’ve got results on the rope found at the scene, the tire and shoe tracks in the snow, trace from her clothing, scrapings from under her fingernails, more trace collected from her steering wheel, brake and accelerator pedals, and off her car bumpers.” He paused, leafing through paperwork. “I’ve got stomach contents, blood, urine, vitreous, anal, oral, and vaginal analyses. I also have the contents of two phones and various computers. That’s the majority of the scientific junk. We’re still conducting interviews with friends, family, and colleagues—both Susan Raffner’s and Nathan Fellows’s.”

  Joe finally turned to face them, sitting on the window ledge. He addressed Tetreault and Whallon, the first of whom was the bureau’s sole transfer from Fish and Wildlife; the second yet another investigator poached from the state police. “Obviously, that’s all going to take more people and more time to digest. For our immediate purposes, do we have anything connecting her to Fellows?”

  Tetreault cleared her throat nervously. “None of it,” she announced in a small voice. “If he’d just stood his ground and talked to us, it probably would’ve ended as another dead-end lead.”

  Joe looked at her silently, waiting.

  She explained. “We compared his truck’s tire treads to the wheel tracks, any rope we found to the one around her neck, all his tools for blood evidence. There wasn’t a single match.”

  “We also found no fingerprints on the letter,” Whallon said. “The one Parker and Perry found with Nate’s return address. None at all, including Raffner’s, which struck me as unusual, given how torn up and manhandled they both were. And the same was true for the DNA test they did on the envelope flap. It was an old-fashioned lick-and-stick, but there was still nuthin—like he used a sponge or something. Who does that anymore? Oh, and for what it’s worth, we also compared samples of spelling and penmanship we found in the house to the note Nate supposedly wrote. Not the same. The differences were subtle but consistent. The lab suggested off the record that it looked like someone trying to copy Nate’s illiterate style. Whoever did it most likely didn’t even actually mail the thing, since the stamp corner was conspicuously missing—they might’ve just planted it in the recycle box to mislead us.”

  “Fellows also carried a Buck knife at all times,” Tetreault picked back up, “according to his coworkers and what we found on his body. So you’d’ve thought he’d’ve used that on her chest, but again, there was nothing on the blade. He had lists at his house—hit or hate lists, if you want, although there’s nothing labeling them that. Raffner’s name appears on one of them, but only once and along with most of the legislature.” She paused before adding, “The governor gets more attention from him than Raffner does.”

  “How so?” Joe wanted to know.

  “Just that her name crops up more often and in more places.”

  “Of course,” Whallon contributed again, “what really puts the kibosh on Nate being our doer is that we found out he has an alibi for when we think she was whacked. He was in Boston, at some kind of convention for like-minded losers. The local PD’re saying that from what they found, there’s no way Fellows could’ve slipped out on his buddies and come up here to do the nasty. Times just don’t line up.”

  “So why did he shoot it out with us?” Joe asked.

  Tetreault answered, “I interviewed some of the people he hung with in Newport. They said he was pretty crazy. Talked nonstop about several of the more famous school shooters, and the guy who shot the congresswoman in Arizona. We found a sort of celebrity scrapbook at his place. His preference seemed to be the ones who died in a hail of bullets. He admired guys who didn’t make it out alive.”

  Joe gazed at the wooden floor, weighing the implications of what he’d just learned.

  “We got the wrong man,” Whallon suggested during the silence.

  Joe looked up. “I agree. And considering that the letter had no prints, the envelope no DNA, the handwriting was faked, and that he seems to have had a death wish, it’s looking more likely Nate Fellows was set up.”

  * * *

  Gail sat with her hands in her lap, dressed somberly, looking like the other dignitaries on stage—serious but not grim, engaged but appropriately reserved. The kind of coaching she’d received from her staff echoed in her head as she suspected it did inside most of the others slated to speak.

  This was the second such event held in Susan’s honor, but in Gail’s view, it was the big one—the Brattleboro tribute to the fallen hometown girl. Its predecessor, in Montpelier the day before, had gone without a hitch. More than a half-dozen people had addressed the crowd, including her, the lieutenant governor, the speaker of the House, the president pro tem of the Senate, and the party leaders. They’d droned on, made all the appropriate comments, slipping in the occasional note of levity at the right times, and escaped without causing a single ripple.

  Including her. Gail had spoken last—of her friendship, of Susan’s energy and commitment, of her wisdom and political smarts. As Gail’s eyes had moved from script to audience and only rarely to her staff offstage, she’d seen universal approval among the latter, happy that her earlier admissions of love and true sexual identity had been relegated to the closet.

  This, however, was Brattleboro, which, unlike other towns such as Bennington, Rutland, St. J, or even the metropolis Burlington, had an identity unique unto itself and distinct from its sisters. It had similar blue-collar, Industrial Era roots, but had deviated from the rest in the sixties and seventies—many thought because of the arrival of the interstate and the related influx of ex-urbanite hippies—and acquired a reputation for independence, daring, and outspoken liberalism.

  The crowd gathered today wasn’t decorously arrayed within the ornate drapings of the capitol building’s House chamber; they were instead jammed together inside the local high school’s largest auditorium—big, bland, and proletarian.

  More important to Gail, Brattleboro was where she and Susan had met up and formed an alliance, political and personal, and where they had learned to speak their minds and act on their beliefs.

  This—more than any place on earth at the moment—was home. Where Gail’s heart was, and where she’d learned to be a woman with self-respect.

  As a result, when her turn finally came to speak—and having heard not a word of the preceding eulogies—she put aside her written speech, crossed to the podium, looked out onto the blur of upturned faces, and spoke from the heart, unheeding of the tension she could feel like a growing heat from her onlooking political handlers.

  She began by introducing herself in local terms, as an ex-Realtor, selectboard member, and deputy state’s attorney. She spoke of having been raped, and then taking to the street to protest the depersonalizing anonymity imposed on victims of sexual violence. She described her struggle to re-create herself in the aftermath of trauma, of her growing realization that she’d had it easy before, and of her need to live a different, more proactive life. And throughout it all, she invoked how Susan Raffner had been there to be relied upon—regardless of risk or consequence.

  She then segued over to concentrate on Susan’s characteristics—some peerless, others petty—and how she and Susan had combined strengths. But where her staff had advised her to speak of defeating Tropical Storm Irene, of making the state more business-friendly while protecting its precious natural resources, and of how to otherwise turn this event into her first reelection speech, she did none of it.

  Instead, she spoke of sex. Of its centrality in
American politics, its use to skewer presidents, its hold on everything from self-image to how power can be exerted. She spoke of how it lurked beneath debates about why some leaders were unmarried, or others stayed married. She spoke of the sudden upsurge of same-sex marriage laws, of the slow lessening of sexual prejudice, and of the fact that more and more people—from professional athletes to prominent politicians—were identifying themselves sexually.

  And always, throughout—her voice occasionally trembling—she spoke of Susan. Susan was proud to be a lesbian, Gail told her silent audience, but not prideful about its attributes. She saw the need for honesty and to advocate for social and cultural parity, but had no desire to claim that her choice was better than anyone else’s.

  Finally, her tears flowing freely at last, Gail moved to her companion’s influence on her, as a friend, a politician, and as someone finally at peace with her own sexuality. Abandoning her earlier pledge to Rob Perkins not to drop any bombshells—but carefully phrasing it along the lines of being black, or a woman, or a vegetarian—Gail declared herself to be a lesbian.

  Perkins, for his part, had been braced from the start, knowing of his boss’s propensity for veering off course—and surviving, even thriving, nevertheless. And once more, in the hushed silence that followed Gail back to her seat, he did the political math, aided by a subsequent delayed ripple of applause that quickly swelled into a cheering, foot-stomping, standing ovation.

  She’d done well. She had couched her revelation in humanitarian terms, making future negative reactions seem small-minded and vindictive. She’d also used her murdered, martyred friend as an example of why such issues as sexual orientation had by now become as antique and horrifying as lynching or witch burning—and why a disclosure like hers should have by now become as irrelevant as right- or left-handedness.

  It had been, Perkins grudgingly admitted, a masterful political performance. And—he knew by the same token—the beginning of another roller-coaster ride.

  * * *

  Willy Kunkle wasn’t surprised when he heard of the lack of evidence against Nate Fellows. He hadn’t needed an Agatha Christie list of missing clues to doubt whether Fellows was Raffner’s killer. For Willy, it had been instinctual. There’d been no logic to the chain of events from the start—Susan’s disappearance in the night; her ghoulish reappearance, but minus any fanfare claiming credit; her conveniently available murderer found at work, as if completely clueless; and now, whatever evidence that had led to Nate’s doorstep coming abruptly to a halt. It struck Willy as it had Joe earlier: a collection of feints hiding something as yet undecipherable.

  Part of their problem had been the speed with which they’d been delivered the case. From the flashy hanging to the political pressure and media attention, it had come at them too fast to allow them to simply study its component parts, as Willy was doing now.

  Typically, of course, he was not at the office in this pursuit. He was again lying flat on his back in his daughter’s bedroom, in the middle of the night, pacing his thoughts to her gentle breathing just above.

  As Sam had discovered, this had lately become a habit, born of a developing shift in Kunkle’s view of the world and his place within it. For decades he’d trained himself to see love, charity, kindness, generosity, and the like as human weaknesses—and had coated his armor against their corrosion through alcohol, anger, violence, and cynicism. He’d also chosen two careers, the military and law enforcement, to reinforce his dark convictions about humanity’s baser instincts—earning the wasted arm as a visceral reminder.

  Therein, however, had also lurked the crucial flaw in his strategy. As irony would have it, the more he found his outlook rewarded, the more he’d had to admit that a parallel human decency must exist for it to be true. As proof, instead of the forecast grim reward at the end of a hopeless tunnel, he’d found instead Gunther, Sammie, and—most poignantly—Emma.

  This had presented him with a true dilemma. The promise these people represented should have made him feel relieved, especially since it suggested that he’d been receptive to salvation all along. But he’d struggled for too long, had accumulated too much emotional and physical scar tissue, and was experiencing the kind of exhaustion that doesn’t see the adage, “There’s light at the end,” with anything approaching joy.

  Nevertheless, with all his resistance, he was becoming aware that the good things in his life might not have been random, might have been as much his due as the unhappiness preceding it, and might just possibly continue to happen.

  The latest evidence of this had been drawing him to this room ever more frequently.

  He shut his eyes briefly and listened to Emma sleep, allowing her universe of warmth, comfort, peace, and love to soak in a little.

  So—he now considered from this unusual viewpoint—what of the world of Susan Raffner?

  An active, restless, independent woman; impatient, demanding, intolerant of resistant ignorance; and as prejudiced against the prejudiced as the most partisan among them. Willy had seen Raffner in action for as long as he’d lived in Brattleboro, which by now went back decades. She’d forever been at the forefront of protests, marches down Main Street, and demonstrations of civil disobedience. She’d regularly attended selectboard meetings as a citizen, had been a town meeting representative for years before joining the board, and had monitored even the most obscure subcommittees over time. Long before he’d learned her name and categorized her in his mind, he’d come to recognize her grim expression in the crowd, floating among the front rows of angry-faced protesters against which he’d stood alongside his fellow cops.

  But what in addition, he asked himself, thinking of his recent tour of her now-abandoned home? What had been going on behind that attention-getting façade?

  He ruled out the sexual orientation with which she’d literally been stamped. To his thinking, it was an arguable distraction. He would consider that later. Instead, he opted for the path he and Lester had physically taken through her Chestnut Hill house, and which had only ended in her bedroom. The overflow of magazines and newspapers had come first, using that approach. That and the computer printouts. There had been piles of them, everywhere, and filing cabinets jammed full. Not many books, though—just the opposite of Joe Gunther’s place, Willy thought.

  So, articles—articles of staggering number and variety, covering current events, political debates, differing viewpoints, and researched analyses. The environment, poverty, racism, sexism, immigration, pollution, privacy, labor, education, domestic violence, slavery, genital mutilation, agricultural industrialization, gender bias, and even the fate of the panda had featured among the stacks and bulletin boards and heaps of folders that had transformed most of Susan’s supposedly conventional home into an activist’s library.

  The sole exception had been the kitchen and that bedroom, Willy conceded. Could it be, he considered—now that Nate had been discarded as a decoy—that the next red herring was to be hidden within the mass of causes with which Susan was associated?

  Putting that aside for a moment, and sticking to his own orderly procedure, he considered the kitchen—another reflection of Raffner’s all-inclusive personality. Her kitchen had been stuffed with a surfeit of whole grains, local products, organic fools, and, as Spinney had pointed out, vegetarianism. It had displayed a whirlwind brio similar to what they’d seen in her filing system. Willy didn’t doubt that Susan’s political correctness as a consumer was as hallowed as the Pope’s faith; he also suspected that her actual consumption of those products was more haphazard than it was healthily balanced. Her good intentions, he imagined, were probably matched by the amount of mold growing in the back of her refrigerator.

  He paused again to weigh what he’d pondered so far—and what among it might have stimulated a homicide.

  Along those lines, he returned to her activism. The irony, he was beginning to think, was that she’d been so all-inclusive with her criticisms and protests that she’d reduced herself to more
of a predictable, general nuisance than a threat deserving of retaliation. By being everywhere, she’d lessened her value as a target.

  Of course, he admitted, that was an ex-sniper’s viewpoint.

  Emma shifted in her crib, sighing peacefully, making Willy smile. He thought of what he knew of Susan personally. He’d never liked her. That wasn’t a shock. She was perhaps as driven and intense as he, but without a glimmer of humor, as far as he’d ever seen. The woman had been all indignation and simmering fury.

  Which told him what? He slipped his good hand behind his head as a cushion and gazed down his body toward his socks. Sometimes, he knew too well, people were killed simply because they drove others to murder them—they didn’t know when to quit.

  Intrigued by that notion, he moved forward in his mental tour and proceeded upstairs to Susan’s sanctum sanctorum: her bedroom.

  The love nest of Lesbos, Spinney had called it.

  Willy pushed out his lower lip thoughtfully. That became interesting, put in this particular context. If Susan had been a humorless harridan of obsessively left-wing causes—as he’d just painted her—what had she been in that bedroom?

  What was interesting to him was less the sexual orientation they’d discovered there and more the room’s pure sensuality. While lesbianism and eroticism had become a porn industry standard, Willy had found that most gays of his acquaintance—male and female—placed sex on roughly the same platform as did straight people. It was a gender preference, not one based on uncontrollable appetite.

  Which told him that Susan’s bedroom, rather than being an extension of her public lifestyle, in fact represented a personal contradiction. In Willy’s experience, Raffner had been about as sensual as Susan B. Anthony or Ralph Nader. The fact that a select few only had enjoyed her charms within a seductive den of tantalizing offerings suggested that she’d both needed such an outlet, and had kept it confidential for some reason.