Framed (9 page)

The storm followed close on the heels of an earlier storm that produced ten inches at the weather station atop Pack Monadnock. Police reported numerous minor accidents in all the towns, with one major accident that left a driver hospitalized and closed the highway over Temple Mountain. (Story, page 3.)

Sue scrolled on and found the story on page three. There was no picture of the accident, but Yaneque’s business photo was featured.

Local Businesswoman Seriously Injured

Yaneque Duprey, owner of RunAround, a courier service, suffered serious injuries when she lost control of her vehicle at the pass on Temple Mountain during the snowstorm Monday. Police report a logging truck jackknifed on the eastern slope of the pass, just below the old ski resort. Duprey was not able to stop in time to avoid hitting logs that had spilled off the truck. She was taken by ambulance to a hospital in Nashua, where she is recovering from head injuries. The driver of the logging truck was not injured.

State police report Duprey was the last car permitted over the pass before they closed the road. “All the rain was turning to sleet and snow,” said Trooper Dan Thompson. “The road iced up real quick, and the snow was falling on top of it. It was getting pretty hard to see, too, so we made the decision to close.”

Duprey’s vehicle overturned and was completely destroyed.

The Temple Mountain Pass is often closed in bad weather. Because of its altitude and its location across a long ridge, precipitation there changes to ice or snow before it does in lower areas, leading to the decision several years ago to maintain plowing and sanding units on both approaches to the pass. The eastern unit was able to reach the site of the accident first and provided sanding for the Douglass ambulance.

“Well, that was not very informative.” It didn’t add much to what she already knew. But then, she hadn’t expected much information. What interested her most happened after Christmas. She scrolled on, past the holiday ads, stories about charitable funds, and the usual New Year’s Resolutions editorials. Nothing much changed from year to year, it seemed.

Until she reached the January 12 edition of the
Crier
. It was a shock to come across Jerry Berger’s photo, the same as on the website, plastered on the front page. This time the headline screamed at her in large print.

Local Artist, Model, Found Dead by Hunters

Two hunters came upon a grisly scene in Harpersville last weekend when they were out tracking a wounded deer. Fresh snow partly covered the remains of a man and woman.

One of the hunters, Alan Jones, remained at the scene while the other, Charles Currier, hiked back to their car and called for help. Currier then guided the police to the scene.

“They’d been there a few days,” Jones said. “Long enough for coyotes to get at them.”

There was no identification with the bodies, but they have since been identified through dental records as that of Jerry Berger, a well-known local artist, and Abby Bingham of Mill Falls, who sometimes posed for him.

They had been reported missing last month after the December 6 snowstorm. Foul play was suspected when Bingham’s car was discovered in Keene. Berger’s car has not been found.

Abby Bingham was the wife of Michael Bingham, an alderman in Mill Falls. He was arrested last month on charges of threatening an employee at Brush & Bevel, an art gallery in Westford.

The bodies were discovered behind a stone wall in the trees uphill from Justa Road. It is a popular hunting area, but is not visible from the road.

Because of the deep snow, police had to use snowmobiles to reach the site and to remove the bodies. They worked at the scene most of Saturday and part of Sunday to recover body parts.

“I have seen a lot of bodies coyotes have chewed on,” said Currier. “But it’s different when it’s people. It was awful.”

Cause of death has not been determined. “They were out there at least three weeks,” said medical examiner Cheryl Stetson. “Wild animals had pulled body parts a distance away. It will be some time before we can say what killed them.”

“The state police major crimes unit was called to the scene and transported the bodies to Concord,” Stetson said. The state attorney general’s office was also consulted.

It is not known why Berger and Bingham were in Harpersville, or how they arrived in the woods where they were found. Only indoor clothing was found in the vicinity.

Mrs. Bingham was well known in Mill Falls for her community activities, including her support for better schools and her charitable organizing. Berger had gained regional and some national attention for his artwork, particularly the series of paintings called “One Year.”

Funeral arrangements will be announced.

“Well, that was pretty gruesome,” Sue told herself. Even sanitized for the weekly paper, there was no avoiding the image of dismembered, half-eaten bodies in the snow. There was even the discreet hint of illicit goings-on between the two victims, and the righteous anger of the wronged husband. Or was she reading too much into it?

Sue got to her feet and went upstairs for a drink of water. Jim was nowhere to be seen, but she didn’t expect to find him. She wondered if any of the current reporters had been with the paper ten years ago, and if they would talk to her about the story. Caution overtook her; if she asked about Berger, they would want to know why, and she certainly couldn’t tell them about the painting. Not yet. Besides, Ginny would want to control the announcement of a rediscovered painting by Jerry Berger.

On she scrolled, making weeks pass in seconds. If only she could do that when she was sick or the weather was bad! She found the obituaries and the funeral announcements, and the brief related story about Mike Bingham stepping down from his position as alderman while he served his probation. Well into the next fiche, buried on page nine of a mid-April issue, she came across the story that reported the police determination.

Deaths Were Murder/Suicide

State police have completed their investigation into the deaths of Abby Bingham and Jerry Berger, whose bodies were discovered in January in the snow in Harpersville. Both were shot in an apparent murder/suicide. “The condition of the bodies made it difficult to determine the circumstances of the deaths,” reported Anna Fitzgerald, of the NH State Police. “However, we believe Mrs. Bingham was killed by Mr. Berger, who then killed himself.”

Asked if a suicide note had been found, Fitzgerald said only that the investigation was continuing. She had no explanation for why the bodies were discovered in indoor clothing during the winter.

Berger’s brother Howard said he did not believe his brother committed suicide. “Jerry was a happy guy. His career as an artist was blossoming, and no one who knew him saw any hints of unhappiness. As for his killing Abby (Bingham), that’s completely ridiculous. He wouldn’t harm a fly.”

Mike Bingham, husband of Abby Bingham, did not respond to requests for an interview. A spokesman for his office read a statement, “Mr. Bingham still mourns the loss of his wife. He is satisfied with the result of the police investigation and wishes to commend them for their hard work. Nonetheless, the fact remains his wife is dead. She is and will be greatly missed.”

A retrospective of Berger’s work is planned for next month at Brush & Bevel in Westford.

And that seemed to be the end of it. Sue put the fiches into their envelopes and started to put them back in the drawer before she remembered Jim’s warning about the intern. She set them on the table, and then peeked into the drawer again, wondering if the next fiche would have any more information. She’d already spent most of the morning here, and her stomach reminded her it was time to eat lunch. She should go home and enjoy the rest of the spring day.

But her finger was still in the drawer where the fiche belonged. She glanced at the next envelope. It was clearly out of order, almost a year later. Curious, she put it into the viewer and scrolled through, keeping a casual eye open for any of the names in the stories she’d been reading.

All she found, however, was an ongoing investigation into certain tax irregularities in Mill Falls, which, according to what she read, were threatening to cause problems for the town of Douglass. She didn’t bother to read the whole story—it was long in the past and it didn’t concern her hometown—but it had something to do with auto registrations assigned to the wrong town.

She replaced the fiche in its envelope, closed down the reader, and went upstairs.

Jim had already gone out to interview people on the street for their views on the proposed land conservation project, so Sue left a note of thanks for him. She included a wry mention that she supported the project, but her vote didn’t count since she lived two towns over.

It was still early enough, she thought, to get a bike ride in during the afternoon. She could always do the laundry another time. As she headed home, she realized she would pass the place where Yaneque had run into the logging truck. On a whim she decided to stop and poke around.

The old ski resort had been deserted for a number of years, and new growth blurred the once-smooth slopes. The T-bars and the chairlifts had long since been sold or vandalized. Rugosa roses and blackberry brambles covered the old parking areas.

Sue parked off the edge of the road, near the trailhead that led north and south along the ridge. She liked that trail, but had never completed its twenty-seven-mile length at one go. She had enjoyed several short hikes along the trail, often marked with weird cairns and opening onto magnificent views of Mount Monadnock. Someday she would manage the whole trip.

Though she poked up and down the roadside for quite a distance, she never found any signs of that long-ago accident. She wondered if Yaneque had ever done the same thing.

What would it be like to lose a part of your life like that? To have a hole in your memory? There were plenty of things Sue couldn’t recall at will, but that was simple forgetting. To know you left home one morning and woke up in the hospital two days later, with absolutely no memory of the time in between—very unsettling.

There was a lot of litter on the side of the road, most of it food wrappers and drink bottles. People were slobs. What would it cost them to take their trash home and dispose of it as they should?

Sue bent to examine a chunk of rusted metal that caught her eye. It looked like a brake caliper. She fantasized that it had something to do with RunAround. Not likely, of course; the Rotary Club cleaned up the road along here twice a year. After ten years, would even a caliper endure? She dropped it back to the ground, brushed off her hands, and went home.

Chapter Thirteen

The next Tuesday was the one day every week when Ginny and her two employees were all at work. The rest of the time they split up the schedule, with some combination of two of them taking care of business most days. They looked forward to being together each week. It was a chance to consult with each other on difficult framing projects, plans for promotions and advertising, and other bits of information to keep Brush & Bevel up-to-date and moving forward. Often enough they indulged in personal chat, too, keeping each other posted on what was happening in their lives.

“How did Mac do yesterday?” Ginny asked Elsie.

“Oh, he wasn’t bad. We flushed a grouse, and then he got all excited and ran after it. We got a little lost, but we found our way back to the car all right. He just needs more work.”

“Did he find a lot of frogs?”

Elsie laughed. “Yeah, he’s a real frog dog. There was a big puddle with a bunch of frog eggs in it, and he went splashing through there like a herd of buffalo. Those egg masses are so sticky! He was filthy when we got home. It took me an hour to clean him up.”

The other two women sympathized. They both had grown sons, and remembered all too well the messes that adolescent boys of any species could get into. For a while their talk drifted to the vagaries of the young, then they returned to business.

They reviewed several work orders that had minor variations from the norm—a V-groove here, a double opening there, the need to deckle the edge of a watercolor—as well as some tricky mounting for a silk scarf. Ginny preferred to mount textiles as close to square as possible, while Sue argued for the natural flow and drape of silk. As usual, they ended up with a compromise. Sue would mount the scarf square at the top but allow it to hang a bit loose along the edges and bottom, tacked down just enough to keep it from blousing out and touching the glass.

Elsie and Ginny discussed the difficulties of mounting a thick section of newspaper in such a way that sometime in the future it could be taken from the frame to read the inside pages. Elsie suggested she could build up a “nest” around the section before putting the mat over the front page. Ginny thought it was a good solution, and they agreed to cut a sample mat before ordering the frame.

“This needlepoint,” Sue began, holding up what was supposed to become a pillow top.

“Ugh, that’s so skewed!” Elsie shook her head. “It’ll take forever to block.”

“That’s Trina Murphy’s, and she wants it by next week,” Ginny added.

Sue groaned. “No way. She should know by now that it takes time to get her things straightened out. Two weeks minimum, plus another week if she decides to frame it instead.”

Ginny frowned but accepted the inevitable before going on to the next problem. “Do you think you can work on the Berger piece today?” she asked Sue.

“It’s on my list. Did you find out any more about where it came from?”

With a rueful shake of her head, Ginny expressed her regret. “Only a little. Jenna Rudolph gave me the number of the auction house, and through them I got in touch with the man who sold the bar where it used to hang. But when he bought the bar it was already hanging there, and he had no idea where it came from.”

“Dead end?” Sue winced at the inadvertent pun.

Ginny didn’t seem to notice. “He gave me the name of the owner before him, but the phone number he gave me seems to be out of date. I’ll try again. I have some contacts on the Cape; maybe somebody knows where he is.”