The Second Mouse (5 page)

Nancy killed the engine, put her hands between her thighs, and let out a deep breath, staring straight out the windshield.

“Fuck.”

He laughed softly. “Right.”

“What do you think?”

“Probably a bad idea.”

She made a face but didn’t turn her head. “Yeah.” It was a sigh, tired and sad, and it touched him in the middle of his chest.

“It’s not for lack of interest.”

She looked at him. “You mean that?”

He caught her meaning. “Ever since me and Mel both met you in that bar, way back when.”

She twisted in her seat, her face bright with a surprised smile. “You’re shitting me.”

“Nope. From the start. That can’t be news. Every guy I know thinks of you like that.”

She waved her hand dismissively, looking disappointed. “Oh, that stuff. I thought you meant something else.”

But they both knew he did. He confirmed it a long pause later by admitting, “I was the unhappiest man there at your wedding.”

She reached out and touched his hand briefly. “That’s really sweet, Ellis. I don’t guess I was too happy, either.”

“You’re just saying that now,” he told her. “You were in seventh heaven.”

She gazed down at her hands. He barely heard her say, “Yeah. I was.”

There was silence as they thought back across the intervening years from different perspectives—Ellis reflecting how the lusty joy between new husband and wife had eroded to where Mel regularly dismissed it by word and deed, picking up women at bars almost every weekend; and Nancy ruing the death of her dream of kids, a house, and a life of security, paradoxically and illogically hinged on the wild man who’d won her heart.

Each was left wondering at the implications of such thoughts.

“You want to ask me in anyway?” she finally asked. “If only for a cup of coffee?”

He nodded and got out of the truck, digging for his front door keys as he approached one half of a gray, slightly worn building that represented his small part of a ninety-unit affordable-housing complex—a scattering of two-story wooden boxes.

He opened the door and stood back to let her in. In the few years that he’d lived here, after moving out of the trailer to make room for her, he’d never asked her in.

Glancing about in the twilight afforded by the drawn curtains, he was now embarrassed that he had.

“I’m sorry,” he said as she entered. “It’s a mess.”

He closed the door and turned to find her not surveying the shabby view, but standing in the miniature entry hall, staring at him.

There, without another word, they moved into each other’s arms.

The frenzy of an hour ago was gone, its explosiveness replaced by a deeper appreciation for what they’d enjoyed in one another for years but had never openly acknowledged—his tenderness and quiet consideration, her openness and honesty.

This time their hands moved slowly, their earlier eagerness for pure inventory yielding to the pleasure of time and temporary safety.

Stumbling slightly, they moved from the foyer to the small living room and then to the couch facing the blank-faced television, their clothes dropping along the way. By the time he helped her fall back naked against the cushions and nestled between her legs, he felt all his burdens slip free and believed himself to be the luckiest man he knew.

Chapter 5

J
oe Gunther left Brattleboro with Sammie Martens by his side around midmorning, heading west on Route 9 over the southern tail of the Green Mountains, toward Bennington. By map it didn’t come to much, maybe forty miles, but it did bridge the state from border to border and included some of Vermont’s least heralded yet most tumultuous scenery, including a cluster of eleven wind turbines stabbed onto the top of Searsburg Mountain like a sampling of supersize whirligigs.

“This is near where your undetermined turned up, isn’t it?” Sam asked, reflecting on a passing road sign near Wilmington, the journey’s midpoint.

“Five miles down that road,” he agreed.

Route 9’s geography had long been of interest to Joe. It marked the upper east-west edge of a roughly ten-mile-wide corridor whose lower line of demarcation was the border with Massachusetts. Just north of them, deep in the Greens, were the ski resorts of Haystack and Mount Snow, and a string of tourist-centric towns sporting an often frail veneer of seductive, economy-impervious Vermont quaintness.

To the south, however, throughout that far less traveled swath where Michelle Fisher had lived, the area had a more curious and telling identity. Mountainous, weather whipped, thickly forested, and crisscrossed with twisting paths, trails, and roads—many unmarked—this dramatic and secluded section of the state kept aloof from its neighbors. Thinly populated and not easy to access, it was a hunter’s heaven, a Realtor’s dread, and a cop’s nightmare. Emergency responses to the region took forever, to the point where routine law enforcement fell largely to a few marginally trained, locally elected constables.

Sam was evidently thinking along similar lines as they skirted the region’s boundary. “God, I’m glad we didn’t have to cover all this when we worked for the PD. I never envied the troopers this territory.”

It was a salient point. She, Willy, and Joe had all once worked for the Brattleboro police, and half their turf had extended in this direction and had involved some remote stretches, although thankfully not quite this far.

The region resembled Vermont’s famously quirky and isolationist Northeast Kingdom, in the corner where Canada meets New Hampshire. Unlike that area, however, it had no title or identity, no picturesque, flinty reputation. Aside from the Harriman Reservoir, attractive to fishermen and boaters, for the most part it remained a large and unknown place to contemplate from a moving car.

And therein was the telling symbolism that had triggered Gunther’s musings to begin with. Given their target destination, it was less this particular countryside that he was considering, and more how it served as a no-man’s-land between the rest of the state and that much overlooked town.

“You go to Bennington much?” he asked her, almost as a test.

She shook her head. “Never have much reason to. I don’t know anyone who does,” she added after a moment’s reflection.

He smiled and nodded as if in confirmation. “Right.”

Bennington was in Vermont’s southwest pocket, shoved up against New York and Massachusetts, and while it did connect to its mother state via the Route 7 umbilicus heading north to Manchester and Rutland and finally Burlington far away—as well as Route 9 going east—it was, and always had been, isolated by the very Green Mountains that Joe was presently enjoying. It had forever been Bennington’s burden to be considered, geographically and thus psychologically, more a part of its neighbors than of Vermont.

From the air, this became even clearer. Bennington’s sprawl didn’t loom into view until the last of the Greens gave way to the relatively flat farmlands of New York beyond. Only the token Mount Anthony in the town’s southwest quadrant presented one last upheaval, and it remained largely undeveloped. By contrast, Brattleboro was so scattered across hilly ground that it could barely lay claim to a single flat acre.

Those weren’t the only important differences between Vermont’s two southern corner towns. Unintentionally, Sam had revealed an instinctive and time-honored common prejudice that had favored her home over Bennington for hundreds of years.

Brattleboro, after all, had the interstate and the Connecticut River—commercial conduits, new and old, that had all but guaranteed its label as the Gateway to Vermont—along with a solidly anchored middle-class population, while Bennington remained merely another ex-mill town to the west, host to several small industrial plants and a large medical center, forever regretting the erosion of its own middle class and the fates that had spurned it when Interstate 91 had been drawn elsewhere on the map in the 1950s.

Bennington County regarded itself as Vermont’s black hole, and its populace instinctively looked inward to solve most of its own problems. This was an area of practical-minded, largely working-class people who didn’t pay much heed to what was going on in a state they figured didn’t have much time for them in the first place.

Sam suddenly laughed. “I heard somewhere that in the old days the Indians wouldn’t bury their dead in Bennington because of the ill winds. Guess the place has always kind of sucked hind tit.”

His mind having wandered already, Joe reacted only halfheartedly. “I like it. It stands on its own two feet.”

She snorted. “Stands more in Mass and New York, from what I hear. And what’s the deal with that weird bypass? Their politicians live and die by whether they support an interstate traffic circle that’s supposed to go completely around the town? That is really bizarre.”

Joe glanced at her. He wasn’t about to argue the point one way or the other. For years almost uncountable, Bennington had, in fact, had a huge bypass on the books that would ease the pressure from the all-important intersection of Routes 9 and 7 in the heart of downtown. One side of the debate called it financial suicide; the other touted it as economic salvation. Only one leg of it had been completed thus far—a beautiful quarter circle running from New York State to Route 7 due north of Bennington, complete with sweeping panoramas of the valley and bordering mountains. But since it didn’t accomplish the overall goal, most outsiders—and a few locals—were still hard pressed to figure out what it foretold.

Joe only knew, as apparently did Sam, that unless you held an opinion on the matter, you were clearly overlooking one of the area’s touchstone topics.

Without comment, he returned his attention to the road, although he found his thoughts focusing neither on the scenery nor on the condition of Bennington’s battered self-image.

It didn’t take long for Sam to notice the change. “You all right, boss?” she eventually asked him. “You’re kinda quiet.”

He turned briefly to glance at her. “Sorry. A little distracted. Something about this case has gotten under my skin. Don’t know why.”

“She didn’t seem old enough to die of natural causes,” Sam ventured.

Joe burst out laughing. Sam was the youngest of his squad, and an interesting clash of boldness and hesitation, ambition and self-doubt, experience and naïveté, which her taste in men helped exemplify. Currently, and for the past couple of years, she’d been discreetly but determinedly involved with Willy Kunkle, a hookup that boggled Joe’s mind, although he tried to show his support.

“Very diplomatically put, Sam. Nicely done,” he finally said.

Sam was looking flustered. “I didn’t mean
you
were at death’s door . . .”

He waved her off. “I know, I know. I’m just pulling your leg—an old man’s prerogative. That is part of it, actually—she
was
young in my book—so you’re right. But there’s a whole element of pathos around this, plus a hint of something darker.”

“Newell Morgan?” she asked, having already read the file.

Joe pursed his lips before responding. “The ME sees nothing wrong, Matthews is happy to move on, and nothing jumped out at me at the scene, so I’m hardly planting a flag in the ground here. But Morgan is definitely a man I want to look at eye to eye.”

Gunther began the miles-long curving descent off the western slope of the mountains, his softly playing car radio losing contact with all signals to the east and picking up instead the latest news from around Albany. They passed through a couple of vague hamlets, mostly made of nondescript one-story homes and winterized trailers, before he finally made one last gentle turn—down on the flats at last—and abruptly entered Bennington’s Main Street.

“You got that address?”

True to form, Sam didn’t need to check. She rattled it off without hesitation.

Newell Morgan lived nearby, off Gage Street, somewhere shy of the historic red-brick downtown—a street referenced by local politicians when invoking the area’s blue-collar bulwark. Joe, who knew Bennington well, took the first available right in pursuit of Gage.

It was an unremarkable neighborhood, neither old nor new, and not given to any style beyond functional. For all that, it was pleasantly shaded by trees, and each house seemed reasonably cared for. It was the sort of street that Gunther, long ago in his patrol beat days in Brattleboro, had traveled only to get from one part of town to another.

Not that everyone living in such a neighborhood was necessarily squeaky clean—such as, perhaps, Mr. Morgan. Unfortunately, the emphasis right now was on the “perhaps,” since Joe’s digging hadn’t revealed much about the man.

Armed with a name and a birth date, most cops in Vermont could search a single widely shared database called Spillman and find out if the individual sought had been even peripherally involved in any shenanigans. It was an advantage most other states lacked, since the majority of departments nationwide, although computerized, worked with closed systems. There were so-called national data banks, like the famous NCIC, but your information had to qualify in order to be inserted, and Newell Morgan didn’t reach that standard.

Which was the bad news, in terms of research—in Vermont, Morgan had surfaced in connection only with a few traffic stops, a check fraud case, and two neighbor disputes. He’d also been the complainant a half-dozen times in situations ranging from someone not cleaning up after their dog to a neighborhood teenager playing the radio too loudly. A pain in the ass, in other words, but not a Dillinger. As to what he might have done outside the state, nobody knew—and nobody would unless they could build a bigger case against him.

Gunther pulled up opposite the address Sam had recited, and waited while she radioed their arrival to dispatch. Over the few short years of the Bureau’s existence, niceties such as office space, basic equipment, and communications had been slow and cumbersome in coming, if they came at all. A smoothly working radio system had been a recent arrival only, obviating the need to rely on either the state police or a cell phone system that both Vermont’s topography and its cranky antitower regulations made spotty at best.

Not that Joe minded the deprivations as much as some. He got a perverse kick out of being considered among the profession’s elite while simultaneously being underfunded and ignored. There was a puritanical element lurking there that helped him feel he could keep pridefulness at a safe arm’s length.

“You want company?” Sam asked as he unlatched his door.

“Oh, you bet,” he said, smiling to himself at her predictable politesse. “That’s why you’re here.”

He had wanted her along as a witness and a possible sounding board later, but as their feet touched the lawn, he thought the additional role of backup might also come in handy. They hadn’t advanced two yards before the house’s front door banged open and a large man in a bulging T-shirt stepped out onto the porch with a querulous expression on his face.

“Who’re you?” he asked.

Not for the first time in such situations, Joe was instantly grateful he hadn’t asked Willy along. He pulled out his identification as he continued toward the porch steps.

“Joe Gunther. Vermont Bureau of Investigation. This is Agent Martens.”

The man sneered. “Big surprise. You guys all drive the same cars.”

Joe paused with his hand on the railing. “You Newell Morgan?”

“Yeah. What d’you want?”

“Talk about Michelle Fisher a bit.”

“She’s dead.”

It was Joe’s turn to smile. “Yeah.” He dragged out the word tellingly, allowing the ensuing silence between them to speak for him.

Morgan got the point. He scowled. “Oh, for Christ sake. Fucking woman’ll never let me go.” He turned on his heel and added wearily, “Come on in.”

Joe climbed the steps and opened the screen door that Morgan had let slam behind him. He and Sam entered a freezing air-conditioned living room clearly decorated by a woman. Only a single La-Z-Boy planted before a flat-screen TV set of Olympian proportions and brilliant clarity had escaped her touch. Running soundlessly across its surface, pumping the air with one fist, was an overweight baseball player trailing a mane of greasy hair. The TV and chair made the scene appear farcically lopsided, the former’s robotic sleekness and size making the room’s array of 1950s china figurines crowding every flat surface look like refugees seeking a way out.

That wasn’t the only contrast. The chair and the rug immediately surrounding it, unlike the rest of the truly pristine room, were borderline disgusting, stained and soiled by its occupant’s haphazard eating habits. It seemed clear that a truce of sorts had been made in this house—she could rule, and clean, the roost, in exchange for his living like an old dog in one restricted corner.

Morgan half fell into his reclining throne and reached down to retrieve an opened beer can placed on the embattled rug, spilling part of its contents in the process. He stared at the muted screen without expression and took a noisy gulp from the can. He did not offer either of them a seat.

“I guess you two didn’t get along,” Joe suggested as Sam began walking slowly around the room, quietly taking inventory.

The fat man swiveled his head to look at him. “Fucking right we didn’t. That little whore may’ve turned my idiot son’s head, but she didn’t fool me.”

“How so?” Joe asked when nothing further was added.

“She was a leech. A freeloader. She saw him as a soft touch, and she milked him till he died.”