Three Can Keep a Secret (4 page)

The drive north was made in darkness, the Humvee's roof, spot, and headlights all ablaze and, Joe thought, working as much against them as for them, the way the white light bounced off the prisms of a million falling raindrops. He imagined that from the air, they must have looked like a grounded cloud of fireflies, winding through the woods.

It was slow going. They avoided the pavement, since it was prone to caving in. They also had to double back a couple of times, their information being dated by a critical few hours. Conversation was minimal; a few actually dozed off. It was cramped, uncomfortable, damp, and clammy because of the partially open windows. Nevertheless, they made headway.

Where they ended up, hours after what would have been a twenty-minute drive
—
and after dropping off most of the other passengers along the way
—
was a cemetery tucked in amid a copse of ancient trees. It was high on a hill above a narrow, sylvan valley and normally solely populated by a small scattering of headstones.

But not tonight.

Joe and Willy eased themselves out of the vehicle and stretched in the fading rain, which was at long last reducing to a steady drizzle. A young man dressed in a yellow coat labeled
EMS
approached them, looking wet, unshaven, grim, and beyond haggard.

"You the police?" he asked hoarsely.

They merely nodded, perhaps sensing the inanity of displaying their shields in a place and time like this.

"I'm Joe," Gunther thought to say. "He's Willy."

The man didn't introduce himself, turning on his heel instead and leading them across the small cemetery's uneven surface. Usually, trees are planted in such a setting to add grace and peacefulness. Here, the graves had come later, dug among the trees so that the huge trunks and gnarled roots appeared to have grudgingly made room.

"It's over here," their host said, speaking straight ahead in a loud voice, no doubt finding it less taxing than turning his head. Around them, small clusters of men and women, mostly dressed in fire department gear, watched them walk toward the very edge of the burial ground.

"There's no river or creek to speak of up here," the EMT was saying. "But once Irene let loose this morning, pretty much everything that could run water did." His right arm flapped out to his side as he added, "And we have about two hundred feet of elevation above us here, so a lot of water ended up coming along this western boundary."

He stopped near a roaring generator attached to three lights that his team had hung from an assortment of nearby branches.

Now he was shouting over the engine to be heard, and Joe and Willy leaned in close. "This is a small local cemetery. I don't even know its name, and I've lived here all my life. But it's still used, if not much. Anyhow, people take care of it and watch out for the stones, and mow it in the summer. It was the caretaker who got worried about what the runoff might be doing, and came up to see what was happening."

He took a few steps toward where the light was focused, and his two guests finally saw the custodian's source for concern
—
the water had indeed sliced alongside the lot, and created what looked like a six-foot-deep archeological trench, exposing the sides of several coffins in the process. There remained a trickle along the bottom, but the evidence spoke of a far more destructive cataract earlier.

"That's dust to dust with a vengeance," Joe heard Willy say softly to himself, adding, "Or mud to mud."

The young man jumped down into the ditch and pointed at the row of more or less exposed boxes. He looked up at them, still shouting. "Pretty much speaks for itself, and no big deal when you get down to it. Not like anybody was actually carried away. That would really suck."

Joe nodded to show his agreement, although he was beginning to question why they'd been called here.

Their host beckoned tiredly. "I'm real sorry, but you're gonna have to come down here. I guess it's not the first time you've gotten wet today, though."

That having been said, they complied, slithering down the side of the ditch and joining him as he squatted down and played his flashlight along the side panel of the
centermost
coffin.

"Don't know if it was a cheap box, or the passage of time, or maybe both, combined with the force of water, but you can see right here how the side caved in."

Joe shifted around so that his sight line followed the light, dreading the macabre nature of what he was about to see.

"First time I saw it," the EMT explained, "I thought it was just rubble that had piled up against the damn thing. But it's not."

He moved, handing the flashlight over. Joe lowered himself to his knees, feeling the water curl around his thighs. He pointed the shaft of light into the gash of splintered wood as Willy slid in next to him.

"Far out," Willy said. "We got ourselves a mystery, boss."

The stones and rocks weren't piled against the coffin. They were spilling out. There was no body within.

It was a beautiful day the next morning
—
sunny, cloudless, pleasant. From the tree-tops, and above, the scene was what brought poets and artists to New England in droves. But below that lay the weather's onslaught and the disjointed distribution of its destruction. Across the entire region, riverbeds were gouged and scoured as by passing glaciers, and left shimmering in the sun, bone white and raw, looking like the castaway skeletons of a geological rampage. They were strewn with rocks and boulders that had blended in harmony with the interstitial soil and vegetation for generations, to the delight of fishermen, boaters, and mere lovers of nature
—
soil that was now gone, wide and deep, and with it the substance that had made the rivers whole and vibrant.

What remained were hundreds of miles of hard, broken, shattered water channels, bereft of life and looking like smashed concrete. The vegetation had been stripped from the banks, the fish and frogs swept away, and the rest made to seem poor and exhausted and humiliated in the falsely cheerful sunlight.

The soil had not simply vanished, of course. It had been removed, as if by scientific process, down to its smallest granules and redistributed by the water across fields, lawns, streets, and into cellars
—
water that had then retreated almost as quickly as it had arrived.

Homes and garages were full of the resulting muck, cars were axle-deep in it, inventories from bookstores to machine shops to groceries were cemented in place by it. And artifacts like furniture, clothing, toys, and kitchen appliances had been scattered far and wide, later to be found as half-buried, crooked talismans
—
like pseudo Easter Island totems
—
stamped with logos reading GE and Frigidaire.

Joe Gunther toured his southern Vermont world in the company of a survey team composed of variously initialed agencies, and saw mile after mile of crumpled homes shifted from their foundations, roads returned to their dirt origins, and bridges caved in or missing altogether.

And yet, people resembling Bedouins in a desert, incongruously alive and active against a desolate backdrop, were at work everywhere they went. Farmers, equipment operators, National Guardsmen, common citizens with pickup trucks
—
some sanctioned by FEMA and its state-based counterparts, others in defiance of such organizations and the regulations they tried to impose
—
all were reclaiming their homes, their roads, their bridges, and their other infrastructure, sometimes using the very same, rock-clotted streambeds as sources of raw material.

It wasn't pretty or easy. In the fine language of the law, it often wasn't legal. But within hours of that ironically cheerful sun's first appearance, it was already beginning to make a difference. By the end of Joe's limited tour, done to show support and to satisfy his own curiosity, he couldn't shake the conviction that
—
the extent of damage notwithstanding
—
the worst of it would be dealt with quickly and practically.

Just as clearly, the same was not going to be true for some of the problems that his VBI had picked up overnight. Phones were down, cell towers damaged, electricity was out, e-mail was affected
—
not all of it universally, some of it not even badly
—
but simply getting around was already a problem. Statewide, thirteen entire communities had been effectively sealed off from the surrounding world, with all roads and bridges cut. And some, like Wilmington, Waterbury, Halifax, Killington, Rochester, and others, had suffered devastating damage to the hearts of their downtowns.

For the short term, at least, pursuing police work was going to be a challenge. Standard operations were about to be made "flexible," in the words of one memo.

For example, while the Vermont Bureau of Investigation was designed to operate with five interlinked squads
—
one in each of the four corners, and a headquarters unit at the Department of Public Safety in Waterbury
—
for a while, that neatly diagrammed command structure had been abruptly rendered more free-flowing.

As the residents of the state hospital had discovered overnight, that entire campus, housing some fifteen hundred state workers
—
including the VBI administration
—
had abruptly become an abandoned, soggy ghost town. Fortunately, the DPS building had suffered the least, and was likely to be
reoccupied
soon, but that lay in the future. In the meantime, the VBI office there was empty, and they'd all just received news
—

very quietly delivered
—
that one of the hospital's patients had gone missing.

As Joe found out upon returning from his field trip.

"Did he just wander off into the rain?" he asked Lester after hearing of it, sitting at his desk and struggling to replace his rubber boots with a pair of shoes.

"She," Lester corrected. "And yeah, in a sense. Found a way into the tunnels and basically evaporated. Search and rescue did their thing, but no luck so far."

"So far?" Joe looked up. "That mean they've kicked it to us, or are they still looking?"

Lester gave him a crooked smile. "Little of each, I guess. I don't think we're in the world of hard-and-fast right now."

Joe tied his second shoe and straightened. "Great. So, now we've got two missing persons cases."

Willy was sitting at his corner desk, his feet, as usual, propped up on its surface. "Better'n a couple of dumb floaters," he said.

"You got another?" Lester asked, not having been updated on Joe and Willy's nighttime escapade.

Willy shrugged with his right shoulder. "Coffin filled with rocks. Might mean somebody faked his own death; might mean something more complicated."

Sammie laughed as she filled her coffee cup at the side counter they used as a kitchenette. "You'd love that, wouldn't you?"

"Totally," he agreed, unconsciously touching the Band-Aid over his eye, happy to have survived his impromptu swim in the river, and her accompanying wrath.

"Well, brace yourselves," Joe told them all. "We may get more MIAs as people sort out who's where and who's not, but for us, and for the time being, there's no doubt that a live, roaming mental patient takes priority over a coffin filled with rocks." He looked at Spinney. "Give us what you got."

Lester consulted his notes. "Carolyn Barber. One of the few longtimers. Right now, with all the computers down, the building evacuated, and the staff scattered, it's a little tough getting particulars, but I was told she'd been there for decades, which is super rare, and that she was a peaceful soul, kept to herself, never caused trouble. That was one of the things that surprised them when she went missing. They get some over-the-top funny farm candidates there, and they watch those like hawks, but not Barber. The guy I spoke with said she was like a shadow, just drifting around. Kinda poetic."

"Great," Willy snorted. "We'll lure her out playing sitar music on a loudspeaker."

"If she was so laid back," Sammie asked, "then why wasn't she put into a halfway house or something? I thought that's what they did nowadays."

"They do," Les agreed. "But she was a special case. My source didn't know why. Maybe it was money or connections. He said he didn't think she had any family
—
hadn't had a visitor as far back as he could remember."

"How old?" Joe asked.

"Seventies," Lester continued. "They nicknamed her the Governor. I guess she was delusional or something. Claimed she'd actually been governor once."

"Huh," Joe let out, tapping his forehead. "She was."

"The Governor?" Lester asked him. "Really? I asked this guy. He said they checked, just so they wouldn't get a nasty surprise someday. There was no record of Carolyn Barber being head of state."

"It wasn't official," Joe explained. "I don't remember the date, or any of the circumstances, but it was either a publicity stunt or a political slap in the face, or who knows what
—
maybe half a century ago. At the time, they made it out to be a show of democracy in action
—
to take an ordinary citizen and make her Governor-for-a-Day. Who knows what they were thinking? But the shit hit the fan as a result
—
some people saying the real guy should take the hint; others saying it was a sham and an outrage. Nobody thought it was a good idea, and it was never done again. Those were times of big transition
—
when the state was shifting from being one of the most conservative in the country to what it is today, so all sorts of fur was flying back then. Even so, this stood out in my mind. It was pretty crazy when you think of it." He paused and smiled, adding, "She was pretty cute, too. I remember seeing a picture. That probably added to it being all the rage around the dinner table."

"Our dinner table conversation was all sports, all the time," Spinney commented.

"Mine was dead silence," Sammie said reactively, before looking around as if wishing she'd kept quiet.

Willy wasn't sharing. He asked, "Who was she? The governor's secretary or something?"

Joe shook his head. "I don't think so. I'm drawing a blank. Maybe an additional point was that she had no affiliation. Anyhow, the punch line here is that she's not totally nuts, claiming to have been the governor."

"Well," said Lester, bringing them back on track, "she's a missing person now."

A generalized pause greeted that comment, as they all reflected on the difficulties of a run-of-the-mill missing person case
—
never easy at the best of times
—
now superimposed onto a state infrastructure in serious disrepair.

Joe broke the silence first. "Okay, let's start with the basics. Les, you and I can travel to Waterbury and check out where she was last seen and what possible routes she took. Sam and Willy, why don't you two hold the fort, find out what you can about her background, and if you have time, start looking into who was supposed to be in that coffin?"

Joe's choice of Lester to accompany him to Waterbury had not been arbitrary. During his tour of Windham County early that morning, he'd learned that the damage had exceeded the visible. Along with the roads and bridges and houses, the floodwaters had also stirred up petroleum deposits, sewage treatment plants, farm manure storage facilities, and carried them far and wide.

One of his co-travelers had commented that he'd heard of a Vermont-stamped propane tank found floating in the Hudson River, and another had told of a virulent computer image making the rounds of a mobile home surrounded by a bright red pond of spilled fuel. More directly, when they'd stopped to examine Brattleboro's Flat Street
—
in part, so named for its proximity to the Whetstone Brook
—
they'd found it under several feet of dark brown water, shimmering with an oily sheen from untold hundreds of polluted sources.

Joe knew that Waterbury would be similar, and that Sam was still breast-feeding her daughter, Emma. He had no kids himself, and Lester's were both teenagers. So, his choice of companion was at once protective and practical. Not that he bothered explaining it to anyone.

It became an expedition traveling the normally two-hour journey.
I-9
1 and
I
-89 were in fact largely open, but given that they'd been told they wouldn't be allowed into the tunnels until the next day, Joe and Lester agreed that the drive should double as an exploration. The two therefore switched from dirt roads to highways to occasionally the interstate, sometimes backtracking, often using the phone
—
assuming there was coverage
—
to get and give road-closure updates as they went. All along, they found people outside, sometimes forlornly poking through belongings spread out in the sun, but for the most part working hard to address the damage. On the radio, they heard about the governor commandeering one of the few National Guard helicopters for an overview of the damage, and about FEMA, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and others setting up command centers and shelters to help the dispossessed, the homeless, and the simply stunned.

But what they saw as they crisscrossed toward Waterbury was less organized relief efforts, and more individual evidence of that older, less official, rural New England code that tended to respond to catastrophe stoically. Things were what they were, such a philosophy dictated. And then you got on with it.

It was close to the end of day when they reached their destination, and Joe was happy that he'd called ahead instead of relying on serendipity to supply them with room and board for the night. On the map, the town's main street was ruler straight for over a mile, with the Winooski River hanging like a droopy clothesline from each end, outlining a half-oval parcel containing the office complex, a large field, and one perpendicular street with its bridge at the bottom. By and large, that whole section of land, roughly seven thousand feet long by two thousand at its widest, had been plunged underwater.

Waterbury had received the proverbial shellacking.

"Damn," Spinney said as they crested the hill heading down into the floodplain at the center of it all. "I'm impressed they're only missing one person."

Traces of recovery were plentiful, as they had been all the way here, along with defiant hand-lettered signs adorning mud-clogged front yards and semi-destroyed homes, but the brutality of what had occurred lingered in the faces they saw as they drove by. This was a community funeral of sorts, and there was no amount of thumbs-up or spirit-rousing rallying that could alter it.

The man Joe had phoned was Bill Allard, the director of the VBI, who
—
along with the squad that handled this portion of the state
—
had been evacuated from the public safety building while inspectors checked it out. This made Allard at once a busy guy, making sure that his other units were up and running smoothly
—
by whatever means they could muster
—
and someone with time on his hands. He'd been the one to ask Joe to handle this missing person case.

Bill lived on Winooski Street
—
located within that flood-prone bulge between Main Street and the river. Fortunately for him, his address was near Main, and thus on higher ground. Those closer to its far end had run the gamut from getting their basements flooded to having their homes washed away. Turning right to reach Allard's house, Joe was again reminded of his family's good fortune. A second call to Thetford had recently revealed that Leo and their mom had suffered nothing beyond being cooped up indoors on a terrifically rainy day.

As Joe and Lester emerged stretching from their vehicle in the driveway at last, a square-built, muscular man approached from the adjacent Greek Revival home.

"Rough trip?" he asked, extending a hand in greeting. "I didn't have a clue when you'd get here."

"Would've been sooner," Joe told him. "We rubbernecked some on the way. Wanted to check out the damage."

Bill shook his head sorrowfully. "I wish I'd had to do that to see worse than what we got here. But this was about as bad as it gets. They're saying over two hundred homes have been either badly hit or totally destroyed." He waved a hand down the street, adding, "Including a couple almost within sight of here. My own backyard was flooded. It stopped just shy of the place." He indicated his home. "It feels so random, you know? Fluky. I've been watching the news. They've got footage of a streamside house that looks so good, even the garden's okay, but the next-door neighbor
—
not a hundred yards away
—
is off his foundation and sitting in a field of mud. Makes me feel guilty, almost. You got more bags?"

The three of them entered Allard's home and settled in the kitchen as he prepared them something hot to drink. His wife came down to meet them and offered to cook dinner, which they gratefully accepted. Bill therefore shifted them to his office off the living room to give her space.

Joe glanced around at the signs of upheaval
—
piles of folders and files and scattered paperwork, covering every flat surface. "All the conveniences of your real office?" he asked with a sympathetic smile.

Bill was clearing seating space and groaned. "Yeah
—
right. I have no idea how people work at home." He then looked up and added, "Thank God, we run a pretty autonomous outfit with the VBI. Can you imagine if we were more traditionally top-down? Other agencies are in a real pickle right now."

They settled down with their coffee, making themselves comfortable.

"How is the public safety building?" Joe asked.

"It would've been fine, except for the damned tunnels," Allard explained. "The water never reached the walls, pretty much like this house. But no one thought to rig the tunnels with watertight doors, so that's how it got in. So stupid," he added. "It's always the things you don't think of."

"Those the same tunnels that Carolyn Barber used?" Lester asked. "They sound like a rabbit warren, going everywhere."

"Pretty much," Bill agreed.

"I take it there's still no news about her?" Joe asked.

Their host shook his head once more. "Nope. Vanished into thin air."

"Or drowned," Lester added glumly. "From the looks of downtown, she may be fifty feet from the hospital, caught in a flooded passageway. When will we be able to get in there to check? I had no idea the whole campus was still six feet under." He looked at Joe for confirmation. "We thought search and rescue had already gone through the tunnels."

"They did what they could," Bill hedged. "Not an easy job." He raised a finger for emphasis as he answered Lester's question. "If the estimates are correct, you might get in tomorrow. The water's draining fast. It'll be a mess, but it should be accessible."

"You have hazmat suits for us?" Joe asked. "I could smell the pollutants as soon as we hit town."

Lester shot him another glance, clearly not having considered the issue.

"Yeah," Allard said airily. "We've got you covered. You're not only facing all the crap you can guess, but there's asbestos, too, from the leftover underground pipes and conduits, dating back to the bad ol' days. It should be a real blast, poking around down there."

"Great," Lester murmured.

"Not to worry," Allard reassured them. "You'll have people with you who know their stuff. I'm not sending you in there alone."

Lester did his best to fake a pleasantly surprised smile. "Ah," he said. "That makes all the difference."