The Ragman's Memory (22 page)

Willette’s enthusiasm grew as his suspicions found support. “Right, right, and Rob Garfield, the ZBA head, used that upbeat tone to sell the granting of the variances. That hit us, too, although not hard enough to qualify as a red light. It seemed pretty handy that Garfield was right there being so supportive, especially given his relationship with Knox.”

“I agree,” Gail said. “The two of them have never gotten along. I even asked Eddy once how he could work with a ZBA head he didn’t like. He told me he needed the job, and that as long as he kept his reports straight and narrow, Garfield would never have the ammunition to get him fired. Unfortunately for your theory, Garfield was gung-ho for the project from the start, so he didn’t need to be bought off.”

“Okay,” Willette continued, his spirit undampened. “Now the ball ends up in the planning commission’s lap.” Once again, he shuffled some papers, bringing the relevant ones to the top. “By this time, months have passed, and Mary Wallis has organized her opposition, generating letters to the editor, disrupting commission meetings, circulating leaflets and holding rallies, and getting other groups interested. A couple of selectmen begin to wobble in public statements, and the commission is feeling the heat. On the other hand, Tom Chambers, Lou Adelman, Harold Matson of the B of B, and most of the business community are screaming about jobs and commercial vitality and how the convention center will help put the town on the map.”

He paused briefly. “That’s when the fight over landscaping hit the fan, exposing the commission’s famous quirkiness with a vengeance. Despite the ZBA having granted all the necessary variances, including how much landscaping Gene Lacaille had to supply—to the exact number and type of trees and shrubs—the commission, using its own mandated criterion on landscaping, began talking about the ‘feel’ of the project—how it looked from the interstate, how the color might jar with the fall foliage, how the architecture looked harsh against the skyline.”

Willette riffled through a thick wad of minutes. “Back and forth it went, with Gene trying to come up with affordable compromises, and the commission seeming to change its mind with every shift in the political wind.”

He extracted a single stapled sheaf. “Until this meeting, where Ned Fallows, who’d been all but invisible from the start, suddenly stepped to center stage and came down hard on Gene’s side. Given Ned’s influence on the commission, that did the trick. Even with Mary Wallis screaming from the sidelines, the project was okayed. It went to the selectmen, who quickly passed it three to two, and then Lacaille delivered it to the Act 250 district coordinator, who reviewed it in record time. The final approval was given by the Act 250 board a year and a half after the idea was first proposed to the town planner.”

Gail was looking confused. “Who is it you’re worried about here? Ned Fallows or the district coordinator?”

Willette was momentarily silent, knowing of Gail’s deep affection for Fallows. It was Ron who spoke, for the first time since we’d entered the room. “I’m afraid we think it’s Ned. Tracking the arguments on the aesthetics angle, there’s no explanation why he suddenly backed this project so hard. The minutes of this meeting show him almost browbeating the other members. And his influence didn’t just sway the commission—the selectmen mentioned it as well, when they took their vote later on. Ned made the difference.”

There was a stillness in the room as the three of us watched Gail, who sat rigidly still, staring sightlessly at the clutter of documents before her.

When she moved at last, it was to stare directly at me, her eyes narrowed and her face flushed. “
I
was the swing vote on the select board. 
I
backed Gene because of Ned… You better be damn sure about this, Joe. Don’t… Fuck it up.”

She stood stiffly and took in the others. “Are we done?”

Following his flamboyant presentation, Willette looked suddenly pale and stunned at its startling outcome. “Yes… Of course. Thank you.”

Gail turned and left the room.

“I didn’t realize… I mean, I knew they were friends—” Willette began.

“Ned Fallows was the main reason Gail entered politics,” I explained. “He was like a godfather to her—the person who taught her to think beyond her own self-interest. If we find he was dirty, it’s going to take a terrible toll on her.”

Willette began mournfully gathering his paperwork together. “I should have stressed there might be nothing to all this. These are just things that caught my eye—peculiarities. They may not mean anything.”

“She knows that,” I soothed him. “People have a bad day, it can influence their vote. The system doesn’t work like a machine.”

But the words hung in the air like off notes. We all knew what I’d said was only superficially true—integrity was supposed to iron out one’s daily mood swings, and usually did.

Gail was not at her desk as I escorted the others out of the SA’s office. She returned ten minutes later, her hair brushed and her face fresh from having cold water splashed over it. She glanced at me sitting on the windowsill of the reception area, waiting, but went directly to her chair. Luckily, the secretary was temporarily out, allowing us some privacy.

“We’ll treat him with kid gloves, Gail. He’s my friend, too. And Justin wanted you to know that what they found might mean nothing at all.”

Her voice was tightly under control. “I’m not an idiot.”

“You’ve already jumped to a conclusion.”

She looked at me, furious. “Don’t preach. I’m not in the mood. We both know goddamn well something’s wrong. I should’ve known it back then—it’s not like those meetings were behind closed doors. It’s just that the suddenness of Ned’s decision got lost in the shuffle. So much was going on… ”

It was mere weeks after Gene Lacaille’s project met final approval that Gail had been raped, her world transformed by pain, guilt, and anger. Ned Fallows had resigned his seat on the planning commission at around the same time and had left town immediately afterward. Gail hadn’t been in contact with him since. It was remorse, I knew, as much as his possible corruption, that was tearing at her now—that in his time of need, she hadn’t been available.

And there was resentment, too, aimed at a potentially fallen idol. In a time when she was rebuilding herself from the ground up, driving herself through eighteen-hour days, denying the costs of an unbearable workload, she didn’t need to discover that one of her heroes might have clay feet—or that the man she lived with was about to investigate him.

I crossed the room and took her hand. She didn’t look up to meet my eyes. “Gail, I know this hurts. I’ll handle it myself—go up and see him today. We’ve got to hope for the best.”

Her only response was to squeeze my fingers slightly. I kissed her forehead and left.

NED FALLOWS HAD SETTLED NEAR
Lunenburg, Vermont, almost three hours by car from Brattleboro. It was a tiny town east of St. Johnsbury, just shy of the New Hampshire border, about as remote a community as anything the state had to offer. Hanging off the bottom of a 550-square-mile timberland wilderness in the eastern reaches of the state’s Northeast Kingdom—so named for its nordic, barren beauty—the hamlet of Lunenburg is a spare collection of simple, elegant, buildings, sitting in an environment as hilly and wooded as any described by James Fenimore Cooper.

Standing in its midst, late at night, when all the lights have been extinguished, it feels little different from how it must have been two hundred years earlier. Ironically, this is not as soothing as it sounds. The mountain lions, marauding raiders, and disgruntled Indians of old may have faded from the scene, but the wild vastness that once contained them remains, and with it an eerie sense of threat.

The setting matched my mood, which had been significantly darkened by the day’s work. I ruefully recalled how the morning’s twin headlines about Satanism and rabies had struck a humorous chord, when the convention center project had still been a minor, albeit interesting detail. Now, following the meeting with NeverTom in Brandt’s office, with its threatening implications, and the looming possibility that the project just purchased by his brother may have been tainted at birth, I was longing for some glint of humor. Given my own friendship with Ned Fallows, and his close ties to Gail, the chance that he’d been corrupted threatened my professional detachment—and I worried that when NeverTom caught wind of where this investigation was heading, that aloofness would be sorely needed.

Although not very late, it was dark when I rolled through town on Route 2. Ned didn’t live in Lunenburg proper, but two miles east, on the banks of Turner Brook, off a dirt road that only he kept plowed in the winter. It was an isolated, dark, and lonely spot, which I’d visited just once before, shortly after he’d moved there. I’d wondered then about his explanation that as he’d gotten older, he’d been longing for a little privacy. Now, despite my assurances to Gail, I was frankly skeptical.

He lived in a log cabin he’d built himself with a local crew. It was snug and solid and very small. Its size made it manageable—and clear that any guests, family or not, would be underfoot from the moment they crossed the threshold.

In true Northeast Kingdom style, I hit the horn briefly as I came to a stop beside his pickup, and paused before getting out. It was a courtesy one learned quickly up here, where occasionally armed loners and their dogs took a dim view of surprises.

There was no response, however, although the lights inside cast a yellow veil on the deep snow by the roadside. I got out stiffly, stretched, and shivered in the raw night air. The Kingdom is more thrust up against the sky than the rest of Vermont and suffers more accordingly from its excesses. Winter starts early, digs in deep, and lasts far into early summer. The region’s record cold of minus fifty degrees was logged in Colebrook, New Hampshire, just twenty-five miles farther north.

I stepped carefully through the snow, stamped my feet loudly on the narrow porch laden with cordwood, and knocked on the front door. On the other side I could hear the knee-high snuffling of a dog rubbing its nose anxiously against the thin barrier between us. Ned had a Rottweiler—huge, handsome, and silent.

Eventually I heard footsteps approach and the quiet soothings of a man’s voice. The door opened to reveal a tall, white-haired, heavyset septuagenarian, his face still and harshly lined, his pale blue eyes almost lost in deeply shadowed sockets—a ghostly apparition, emphasized by the light behind him.

“Joe,” he said evenly, as if I was dropping by for a nightly card game, and then, to the dog, “Back, Hardy.”

The dog amiably put his nose to the back of my proffered hand, but the gentle command was a reminder that for all his peaceful manner, Hardy was trained to attack, without sound or warning.

Ned Fallows stepped away from the door. “Come in—it’s cold.”

I crossed into the cabin’s warm, glowing embrace. The lighting came from an open iron stove and several oil lamps, Ned having forgone electricity. The atmosphere enhanced the impression made by the nearby village and left me feeling all the more awkward about introducing the vagaries of the twentieth century, especially to a man so bent on letting them be.

It was not a concern I had to consider for long, however. “I figured you might be coming by,” he said.

“Oh? Why’s that?”

He pointed with his chin toward an easy chair by the stove. Draped over its arm was a copy of the
Brattleboro Reformer
.

“I thought you’d moved up here to get away from all that.”

“Old habits die hard—along with a lot of other things. You want something to eat? I got stew ready.”

“I’d appreciate that—drove up without stopping for supper.”

He indicated a single chair at the small, one-man dining table. “Sit.”

I smiled, expecting Hardy to comply along with me, but the dog was already curled up before the stove. I sat. “You been keeping up on our latest mysteries? Satan worshippers and a plague of rabies?”

He laughed gently, ladling stew from a large pot into a bowl.

I considered slowly circling the reason I’d come, but I sensed he already knew. Besides, Gail’s anxiety was pulling at me still, and I wanted to get to the point. “Why were you expecting me, Ned?”

He placed the bowl before me, along with a thick slice of dark bread, and settled onto a low bookcase opposite, leaning his back against the rough wooden wall. “I have my reasons. Why are you here?”

His coyness was like the confirmation I didn’t want to hear.

“Because there’s a lot the paper knows nothing about, some of which goes back to your time on the planning commission. Why did you leave, Ned? Gail and I both know it wasn’t because you were burned out.”

The small smile returned. “How is she?”

I let a little of my disappointment show. “You should find out for yourself. She’s tired and overworked and grimly determined to reinvent herself. She’s also heartbroken over what we both think you did.”

He shifted his gaze to the tips of his work boots but didn’t speak.

“We’ve been examining how Gene Lacaille got the permits for the convention center. One day, after weeks of waffling, you came down like a ton of bricks on his side—”

“Is something wrong with the project?” he interrupted, his face for the first time creased with concern.

“How do you mean?” I asked, startled.

“Are you investigating something about the project that might be wrong—dangerous?”

I considered my options. Instinctively, as a friend, I would have tried to set him at ease. But I was no longer sure where he stood in that light, and his attitude so far had only heightened my concerns. “You trying to soothe a guilty conscience?”

His eyebrows knitted together in a scowl. “Don’t.”

I rose from my seat angrily, Hardy’s eyes watching me carefully. “Don’t what, Ned? Don’t try to find out what happened, so you can martyr yourself in splendid isolation?” I stared at him. “Jesus Christ. Would you come clean if people were in danger? Is that the message? What if I told you your project was tied to murder?”