Three Can Keep a Secret (5 page)

"How're you holding up?" she asked.

"Better than most," Joe admitted. "I can think of ten other professions right now that've been working harder than us from the start. The uniformed cops are mostly making sure people don't get into trouble, and we fancy guys in suits are being called on to do even less."

She laughed knowledgeably. "Unless they're Willy Kunkle, diving into the floodwaters to save the brain-dead."

He was impressed. "You heard about that?"

"I'm the governor, Joe. I have
people."

He smiled at the phone in his hand. She was, and she did. And Gail Zigman also made it her business to be better informed than most of her recent predecessors. Her early years as a selectman and prosecutor had sensitized her to the old rule that all politics are local. Among the backroom organizations that she'd created before her first day at work was a team of phone and e-mail workers whose sole duty was to keep in touch with handpicked human listening posts all across the state. These were mostly people whom Gail had wooed and won during her years of ascension, ranging from small-town politicos to fire chiefs, town clerks, church leaders, and almost anyone else who was engaged, informed, and/or just plain nosy. It had served her more than once in sensing an upswelling before it became a tidal wave.

"How're your people serving you in the middle of this mess?" he asked.

"Pretty well, up to now," she said confidently. "But we're so early into it, I wouldn't even call it the end of the beginning. I'm just happy we have only three dead, so far. States below us did much worse in that department. On the flip side, our infrastructure got hammered
—
thousands of road breaks, hundreds of miles of pavement, rail, and power lines lost. God knows how many houses and businesses damaged and destroyed and people ruined. It staggers the mind."

It could have been a political pitch, of course
—
a sympathetic sound bite
—
except that it was near midnight, they were alone, if in different parts of the state, and they knew each other with the intimacy of an old married couple. They had once been virtually that, a few years ago, before her ambitions and the risky nature of his job had pulled them apart. And they'd been that couple for well over a decade
—
albeit living in separate houses, pursuing divergent careers, and keeping different friends. The physical part may have passed, he understood, but what they'd forged afterwards had struck him as a dependable, valuable, and cherished friendship, nurtured by a trust he'd once thought unlikely.

He had been sensing a change in her, however. She'd been ambitious and hardworking when they first met. But, born wealthy and urban, and having escaped to the allures of communal living in Vermont, she'd settled for a selection of pursuits
—
hippie, Realtor, small-town leader. A brutal rape had changed all that, creating a crucible from which she'd emerged shaken, hungry, and in need of a higher purpose
—
striving to build something in a life that he'd previously felt she'd mostly toyed with. Sadly, it had also made her a bit reckless with the people she once held dear. In truth, there were times toward the end when Joe, for all his sympathy for and understanding of her demons, had wished they'd call it quits.

Lately, though, now that Gail had been governor for half a year, he'd begun to notice small indications of her earlier, gentler yearnings. He sensed in her an element of loneliness, perhaps, or maybe something subtler, akin to regret, if not so definable. But whatever its nature, it had resulted in a series of phone calls and a visit or two, in which she appeared to be reaching out to him. That having been said, he'd undergone his own emotional journey to get to where he was, and he wasn't entirely sure that he wanted or needed any new developments.

"What have you been seeing out there?" she asked him practically, if in a tone of personal concern.

"Stamina," he answered. "Stubbornness. Also frustration with high-visibility targets like FEMA and anyone in a jumpsuit carrying a clipboard. Probably to be expected. I'm just hoping word gets out for everyone to cut each other a little slack."

"I think they will," she stated. "I'm getting good vibes from most legislators right now. They'll run out of Kool-Aid eventually, but I'll do what I can to stretch them out as long as possible."

"You're kind of a student of Vermont politics," Joe said suddenly, his own duties for tomorrow looming in his mind. "You ever hear of Carolyn Barber?"

There was a pause. "In what context?"

Joe shifted the phone from one ear to the other and adjusted how he was sitting. He was in an upstairs guest room of Bill Allard's house, using an armchair he'd placed by the room's one window. The scene outside, normally overlooking a quiet, partially darkened rural town, was instead pulsing with the lights of stationary fire trucks, police cars, and yellow highway signs telling of dangers ahead. It felt as if the entire community had been transformed into a hospital ICU.

"I'm working a case in Waterbury," he explained. "A woman who went missing from the state hospital. They nicknamed her the Governor because she claimed she'd been one a long time ago. They thought it was a delusion, but I remembered she really was governor, for a single day back in the '60s, as part of some PR thing. Her name rang a bell."

"Not with me," Gail admitted. He could hear her moving about, presumably searching for a pad or a pen. He imagined her in her pajamas. The image wasn't a stretch—he'd seen her dozens of times, having turned her bed into an office.

"How do you spell her name?" she asked him. "I'll look into it. The whole thing sounds weird, having a governor nobody knows confined to the state hospital? It's got to be something else."

Joe slowly pegged on what she was implying, and felt a little slow for not having considered it earlier. Governors
—
even sham ones
—
were not regular folks from off the sidewalk. Along with creating a gimmick like Governor-for-a-Day, consideration had to have been given to the individual chosen. It wouldn't have been a random selection. That would have been too politically risky.

Carolyn Barber's status was abruptly bumped up the ladder in his mind.

"Thanks, Gail," he told her. "I appreciate it."

"How many people know about this?" she asked.

An interesting, slightly paranoid question, he thought, probably typical of any politician. "Only a few," he reassured her. "We want to find out what we've got first. The tunnels they think she used should be accessible tomorrow. For all I know, we'll find her drowned right there, and that'll be the end of it."

"It's never that easy, Joe," Gail said with a conviction born of knowledge.

He didn't doubt the truth of that. But the source of the prophecy was interesting. Did Gail suspect something she wasn't admitting to? Or was she simply being watchful?

"Let me know as soon as you get anything, okay?" he asked. "It might really help me in locating her."

Their point of departure was a large, unmarked white truck, parked just outside the former admissions entrance to the state hospital. As Joe, Lester, and the two HazMat technicians they'd been assigned clumsily emerged from the back and stepped cautiously onto the slippery mud coating the parking lot, Joe couldn't help thinking of so many postapocalyptic movies, where the irradiated remnants of buildings, streets, and playgrounds lay abandoned and eerily silent. All around him, he could see only a wet and soiled urban wilderness, bereft of movement or sound.

He flexed and moved his limbs, adjusting to the bulky Tyvek outfit, rubber boots and gloves, and mostly, the tight-fitting respirator and confining helmet.

"Comfy?" the senior tech asked in a muffled voice, a man named Kevin Teater.

"I feel like I'm inside a body bag."

Teater's laughter sounded odd, unaccompanied by any visual clues beyond a slight crinkling around his eyes. "You'll get used to it fast," he reassured the two cops. "It's the same for all of us."

They proceeded toward the building's front door in a shambling herd, churning up the slime beneath their treaded feet and feeling the weight of it clinging to their boots.

"You can see how high it got," Teater pointed out with one gloved hand, waving at a distinct waterline some seven feet off the ground. "The whole first floor was wiped out."

Knowing of the devastation and seeing the dampness still glistening attractively in the morning sun, however, Joe was struck by how normal everything looked.

It didn't last. As they filed deeper inside, even the respirator couldn't block the smell of dampness, chemicals, and something more primordial
—
something hinting at the earth's very fundament.

The walls were stained and smeared, the furniture moved helter-skelter, and the whole littered with a madcap tossing of files, papers, documents, and books, along with dozens of less recognizable items, making it look like the soggy remains of a tornado's passage.

Kevin Teater slowly led them down a dark hallway, the sun outside having little influence in this grottolike environment.

"The entrance to the tunnels is this way
—
at least the one we're thinking she used." He twisted around stiffly to address them directly. "You hear what happened to the doors' electronics?"

The cops nodded, not bothering to shout against their shrouds.

However, at the door in question, separating the facility's inner core from access to the underground passages, Joe asked in a loud voice, "Why is this even available to people in this building?"

"Convenience, laziness, habit. You name it. The tunnels went in when the complex was built. They've ended up serving every purpose you can name, from supplying overflow office space to giving people a shortcut to the cafeteria in winter. Not to mention plumbing, electricity, the Internet, heating pipes, and whatever else. To a certain extent, I don't think anyone's ever thought about the security aspects." He pushed open the unlocked door and ushered them through. "And I never heard of anyone ever escaping this way, either, until now."

Joe understood that the power was out and the place trashed by recent events, but even so, he found what lay ahead to be dark and threatening, and could only imagine that someone whose paranoia or mental illness was already in high gear wouldn't want to venture too far down these earthbound corridors.

Teater switched on the lamp attached to his hard hat, prompting them all to do likewise. The sudden darting of lights suggested a mixture of fanciful images: a mud-floored, buried passageway to some long-forgotten burial chamber; a battlefield-blasted building interior, redecorated with the detritus of a full-fledged firefight. The reality amounted to a dank, stagnant, gluey obstacle course, blocked by office furniture and the same stationer's fodder they'd encountered in the lobby.

"This should be fun," Lester said with false cheer. "Like a boot camp obstacle course for astronauts."

Already, Teater was setting the pace, scrambling over the tangle with the ease of years of practice. Joe followed next, feeling clumsy and amateurish, aware of Lester and the utterly silent fourth member of their party standing patiently in line.
It was during situations like this that Joe felt his age the most, and was reminded of the decades that he'd spent in this physically challenging job, at first as enthralled by the challenges as were his three younger colleagues right now.
He rued the toll it had all taken on his body.

Still, as Teater had promised, it didn't take long to get used to the awkward suit and forget its restrictions, in the face of simply trying to keep moving.

The piled barriers weren't the only challenge. They had a double mission here: to find Carolyn Barber's dead body, and if not that, any evidence that might tell of her fate. The first demanded the shifting of heavy objects and mucking through any slime deep enough to hide a body. The second called for an opposite set of skills
—
more delicate and interpretive, less disruptive. Here, Joe or Les would briefly stop one of the techs from tackling a desk or file cabinet, in order to quickly read the scene before them.

Like a single blue slipper, shaped for a small left foot, found about an hour into their expedition.

Joe held it up before Teater's lamplight. "You're familiar with the hospital's workings," he said. "This look like something the patients wear?"

"Sure does," was the answer. "Standard issue."

Joe reached into the kit he had slung over his shoulder and extracted an evidence bag into which he placed his discovery.

To their frustration, that single slipper marked their only success for another three hours, during which they covered about half the campus, often traveling down routes that either ended at sealed doors or simply dwindled in diameter to make further progress impossible. More than once, Joe made a point of thanking Teater for his guidance
—
without which he became convinced that he and Spinney would have gone missing as well.

Finally, mirroring the topography overhead, they began seeing signs of the ground ramping up and the water having leveled off, to the point where the damage became reduced to a thin sloshing underfoot.

It was there, at a Y-shaped juncture
—
with one shaft leading upstairs
—
that Lester made their second and final discovery. A single bare left footprint was clearly stamped in drying mud, matching the slipper in size, two steps above the high-water mark. Then, nothing.

"Didn't Robinson Crusoe find something like this?" Lester asked, readying his camera. They worked together to light their finding properly, placing a ruler beside it as reference, before straightening and looking up the steps, as if anticipating the appearance of a celebrity.

"Where's that lead to?" Joe asked.

"Out," Teater said simply. "That's the bad news, I'm afraid. Above us is one of the least occupied and most open buildings in the whole complex. Anyone can just come and go."

They headed up, their eyes on the treads before them, hoping to catch another telltale sign, but Teater's implication was well taken. Assuming that Barber's feet had dried quickly upon leaving the water, and that she'd met no opposition from either locked door or human being, there remained nothing to pursue. When the four of them stepped into the fresh air, outside a door a few feet from the staircase's apex, they found themselves in a huge, flat expanse
—
not far from Main Street
—
with unlimited access in any direction.

Kevin Teater removed his helmet and peeled off his mask before radioing their location to the command truck. He then rubbed his face with his open palm and raised his eyebrows at Joe. "What d'ya think?" he asked.

"I think it would be a stretch to say that footprint didn't belong to Carolyn Barber," Joe answered indirectly.

"Which brings us," Lester suggested, "from Robinson Crusoe to Cinderella."

"Or the Hunting of the Snark," Teater suggested.

His three companions each gave him a blank look.