There were the usual fast-food joints, convenience stores, and gas stations, but the outskirts of the White Mountains were becoming visible, as the time passed, and I thought of the particular bravery or drive or insanity that had caused simple farmers and shopkeepers to leave their quiet villages in Europe and try to make a living here. I have a healthy respect for the mountains and how cold and treacherous it can get up here in the winter, and I think if I had landed on these shores hundreds of years ago, I would have stuck close by the water.
About two hours had passed when I went through Albany, and then the traffic started backing up as I made it into Conway, a charming little Village that is unfortunately right on the outer boundary of several miles of roadway and strip malls that look like they had been airlifted from southern California and dropped into this valley. From Conway I kept on Route 16, and soon enough the traffic slowed to a crawl as I got into North Conway, the two-lane road now boasting a center turning lane, and the sides of the road had outlet shops of everything from the Gap to Polo to L.L. Bean, and the impressive mountains were barely visible past the signs and motels and restaurants.
I checked the time, saw that if I was lucky and could find a parking place, I just might make my appointment on schedule. I guess luck was with me, for when I got into the center of North Conway, there was an open space by a park, and I got into it before a gentleman driving a Lincoln Town Car with New York plates coming at it from the other direction. The New York gentleman congratulated me on my driving prowess with a honk of the horn and a cheerful one-finger wave, but I did my best to ignore him as I walked across the busy street to a restaurant, to meet with an old man who had been Jon Ericson's predecessor.
The restaurant was called Horsefeathers, and it was cozy and crowded, with a low ceiling and lots of exposed brass and woodwork. A man dressed in blue jeans, a red flannel shirt, and a tan down vest stood up from a rear table and motioned me over. I went over and shrugged off my coat, doing my best to keep my holstered Beretta from popping out from underneath a buttoned-down sweater. He held out a hand and said, "Lewis Cole, am I right?"
"And you must be Brian Mulligan."
"The same. Have a seat."
Which I did. He seemed to be some years older than Jon, with thin white and gray hair slicked back on his skull, and a prominent nose that made me think that he was like an old greyhound, tired from so many years of fruitlessly chasing a mechanical rabbit around a track. He took off his vest, hung it over the back of his chair, and passed over a menu. "Okay, since you said you're writing a story about Jon and his life, I imagine this is going to be a business dinner, right?"
"Sounds fine to me."
He grinned. "Good. Then I can count on you to pick up the tab."
I opened the menu and said, "Sure. That sounds fair, considering you took the time to see me so quickly."
"Hah," he said. "Got plenty of time to do with what I please, and if you want to talk about that silly guy, then that's fine."
I think he noticed the expression on my face when he then said, "I take it you were fond of him."
"You could say that."
"Look, I'm sorry to hear he got killed and all, but I don't think you know everything you need to know about Jon and his life."
"Maybe so."
"Hunh. Well, did he ever tell you the story about how he became curator of the museum, and how I got replaced?"
"No, he never did talk about that."
Brian flipped through the menu. "Then that's Jon for you. He'd talk for hours about artifacts and where was the exact spot where the Reverend Bonus Tyler settled on Tyler Beach in 1623, but he wouldn't give you five minutes on how he took great delight in stabbing you in the back."
A waiter came by and Brian looked over at me and ordered one of the more expensive items on the menu, a lobster pie, and I looked right back at him, matched his lobster pie, and raised it by a bottle of merlot. As the waiter left, I looked around the place and saw a good mix of locals and tourists up here to look at the last of the foliage and drop a few hundred dollars at the local outlets. Right by my elbow was another table, and a guy with an outdoors type of face, full head of hair, talking about a real estate deal over a cell phone, while his attractive blond wife was talking low to her son, a boy of about eleven or so with a blond crew cut who wore a CRANMORE SKI TEAM sweatshirt.
When the waiter left, I said, "All right, I gather there was bad blood between you."
"An understatement."
I took out my reporter's notebook, flipped it open to a clean page. "Then tell me about it."
Brian looked astonished. "You mean you'll put that in your magazine, what really happened to the two of us?"
Time to put on my poker face, such as it is. "I mean I'll write it up, and my editor will then decide what happens to it. But even then, I want to know the background of Jon and his time at the museum."
Brian seemed to ponder that for a moment, and then shrugged.
"Oh, what the hell. It's been years and the poor guy's dead, and most everyone else involved is dead, too. Look. It's a real simple story, okay? Back in the sixties, I had this little firm, out in the Tyler Business Complex, near the Interstate. Extruding plastic into specialized forms. Pretty boring, hunh? But I found a way of doing it faster and cheaper, and by the time I was forty-two, I had a major plastics company buy me out. So there I was, Single and practically middle-aged, and with lots of money, lots of money that I could do with it whatever I wanted to do. Some of my buddies at the chamber of commerce, they said I should pack up and go to Florida or Tahiti and just get drunk and play golf the rest of my life, but no, my parents didn't raise me to be a drone like that. So I got involved in the town, that's what I did."
I made a point of writing a few notes, which seemed to please him, for Brian kept on talking. "Started off simple. Got on the zoning board, then the planning board. Thought for a while about becoming a selectman, decided it was too much work, too much political crap, too much ass kissing. Then we had the national bicentennial come through, and I decided to see what I could do with my energy and my money to help Tyler celebrate its history. And what I found horrified me, Mr. Cole. Care to guess why?"
"Sure. Here's my guess. Things were in disarray."
"My God," he said. "Disarray. Now there's a word. We had parchment documents from the late l600s, rolled up and kept together by rubber bands, on wooden shelves in the town hall basement. The Boston Post cane, to be given to the oldest resident in the town, was in the town clerk's office, in an umbrella stand. And town reports from the 1700s and 1800s were dumped in a pile in the attic, right below a leaky roof. I tell you, Mr. Cole, it was a damn crime, it was."
I looked over and saw our waiter approach, carrying a tray, but he was delayed for a moment, talking to a guy I took to be the owner, a tall fellow with a white goatee, who laughed and slapped him on the shoulder after a moment. The fellow with the goatee went by the entranceway and talked to a tall slim woman with auburn hair, who had her arms around a young boy and a young girl. The boy was trying to squirm away from his mother's attention, but the daughter seemed comforted by having her mother's arm around her.
"And let me give another guess," I said, as the waiter started laying down the dishes and the bottle of merlot. "You decided to do something about it."
"Damn straight," he said. "The town had an old building that was being used for storage of landscaping equipment, by the town common. I started a fund-raising campaign to change that place into a museum for the town. Nothing fancy, nothing that would draw lots of tourists or get written up in the
Globe
or
Yankee
magazine or even your magazine. It was just going to be a place to preserve history, to show later generations what it took to build Tyler and keep it whole. That's all."
I took a spoon, dug into the lobster pie, which was in a bread shell and was made with lots of sherry and lobster meat. It was delicious, even considering that we were more than a hundred miles from the ocean. We ate in silence for a few minutes, and then I looked to my notebook and said, "How did the fund-raising campaign go?"
He wiped at his chin with a blue cloth napkin. "The truth?"
"Sure. That'll do."
"Truth is, it went lousy. People can be funny, and it was during a recession when I was trying to do this. Lots of screaming about taxes and such. Most people in town were concerned that if the damn thing got built, then the town would be responsible for its upkeep and for any staff, which would mean added expenses and increased taxes. Pretty soon, as a year went by, the only way the proposal had enough money was because of a last-minute, anonymous donor with a hefty checkbook. "
I eyed him. "Your middle name wouldn't be anonymous, would it?"
He smiled, dug into his lobster pie again. "It sure was, that month. Okay, enough of that ancient story. Let's just say that it was a good feeling, seeing it all come together, seeing the building get redone, seeing some of the townspeople get caught up in the spirit of the place. First year it was open, we would have people in there every weekend, bringing in something from their attic or their basement that they thought belonged in the museum. Ah, it was great."
I scribbled in my notebook. “When did Jon show up?"
"Oh, he had been there all along, doing his part, helping catalog and store the artifacts. He was a history buff, just like me. Hell, in some ways, he was my assistant in getting the museum off the ground. But once the place was finished, was practically running itself, he started going weird on me."
"Define going weird."
Brian put his spoon down. "Okay. Here's weird. We have a perfectly respectable and interesting history of the town of Tyler, all in one building. It tells the story of how a community that was founded by Church of England dissidents became a farming and fishing town, and then evolved into a place that has a hi-tech industrial park in one end of town and a popular beach resort in the other. My God, I could have filled a building alone with all the artifacts we had about fishing, boatbuilding, and the shipwrecks and rescues that occurred off Tyler Beach. But that wasn't enough for Jon. No, he wanted to go out into unknown mystery land."
"Vikings," I said.
"Yeah, his damn mysterious Norsemen. Look, I didn't have any problem with storing Thorvald’s gravestone in the backyard of the museum. It was a hoot. It was something funny to point out how gullible some people were, and how --- even almost a hundred years earlier --- people in town were trying to figure out ways to bring in tourists and investors. A piece of history. A strange one, but still a piece of history."
"But Jon didn't want to just rely on the Thorvald stone, did he."
Brian shook his head. "No, he didn't. He had this... oh, Christ, I don't know. It was like he was on this holy mission to prove that Vikings had camped out in the woods of Tyler a thousand years ago, and by God, he was going to try to prove it. I guess when he was a kid he thought he found a Viking coin on the beach, and that he never got over the fact that he had sold the coin. So he wanted to come up with a plan to attract more tourists, more attention to the town by setting up a display that was a lot of what-ifs. You know, what if the Vikings from Newfoundland came down the coast, what if they stayed here, what if maybe the Thorvald rock isn't a hoax after all."
I dropped the pen, picked up a spoon, stirred my lobster pie some. "And you probably said something to the effect that you wanted to stick with the real history of the town, and not flights of fancy."
He wiped his hands on the napkin. "God, I guess you are a writer after all. Flights of fancy. Like that phrase. Yeah. By then the museum belonged to the town and there were five directors on the board overseeing things, and Jon didn't like the fact that I dumped all over his idea. Though I didn't say flight of fancy. I think I said something like crazy bulls hit, and Jon didn't like that at all. So he went before the board of directors with this plan to highlight the Vikings, bring attention to the Thorvald rock, and maybe bring more tourists to the town. Jesus."
"And what did you do?" I asked.
'When it was my turn --- and it was during the same meeting --- I said any sane person looking at the traffic coming in and out of Tyler most weekends definitely wouldn't want more tourists coming in. And if they were going to come to this museum, by God, it would be a real museum. Not some circus freak sideshow. I told the board of directors that if they wanted to do that happy crap, they'd have to get a new curator. Which is what happened. Bing, bang, boom. I was out, Jon was in, and as far as I was concerned, the museum lost all of its credibility that day."
Something didn't seem right, and I thought about it while the two of us finished our dinner, and when we went into dessert, some sort of toffee thing that was so sweet it made my teeth ache. When the check arrived I finally figured it out.
"But it didn't happen."
"Excuse me?"
"The Viking displays, the emphasis on the Thorvald rock. It didn't happen."
Another wipe of the napkin on Brian's face, but not quick enough to hide a smile. "Yeah. Funny about that, hunh?"
I took out my credit card. "What did you do?"