The living room doubled as kitchen, with a small fridge, sink, and counter set into an alcove. Opposite me were two open doors, one leading into a tiny bathroom, the other into a bedroom of barely greater dimensions.
I looked around the living room first, mostly getting a feel for Paula Atwater’s lifestyle. Her music collection ran to heavy metal, the stereo and TV were inexpensive and well used, the food was sparse, prepackaged, and unhealthy.
The bathroom was unremarkable: the usual cabinet supplies, with toothbrush, paste, and blow dryer missing; a hamper with dirty underwear; a couple of mildew-rich towels; tissues, sanitary napkins, Q-Tips, and Clearasil; the empty box of a one-shot pregnancy test. It was hard to tell from these leftovers how long their owner planned to be gone.
The bedroom looked like any unsupervised teenager’s: cyclone-ravaged, dirty, smelling of used clothes, and, in this case, stale sex. The unmade sheets were stained in the right place, the wastebasket under the nightstand had wads of crusty tissues, and crumpled up on the floor was a black, sheer, lacy garment of a type I’d once seen featured in a Victoria’s Secret catalog. In the closet, alongside a limited collection of severe-looking skirts, dresses, and blouses, was a mass of colorful, abbreviated, leather-and-metal-adorned clothing, suitable for the average aspiring punker. It made me wonder with a smile how many other presumably demure people we saw in banks and lawyers’ offices were equally rebellious on their own time.
I sat gingerly on the edge of the water bed and began to go through the waist-high chest of drawers. Working from the bottom up, I found mostly clothing, costume jewelry, and a single spare blanket. The top two drawers, however, held some old bank statements, a small fistful of bills, a photo album, and some letters and postcards, all mixed in with several pieces of old candy, a broken comb, an unopened box of condoms, some spare change, a few colored feathers, an obscene bumper sticker, and a tube of fluorescent lipstick.
I looked through the correspondence. The letters were signed by her mother, and the postcards were addressed to “Pebbles” from “Kenny.” The postmarks on the latter were all from Hartford, Connecticut, scenes of which graced the fronts, and were dated over a one-week period eight months earlier. Despite the fact that the postcards were open to casual scrutiny, their contents were intimate to the point of pornography, detailing Kenny’s longing for his Pebbles’s specific body parts. Passing references were also made to the “banking conference” being “a total drag.” Assumptions are a dangerous habit in police work, but I had few doubts this Kenny was the same one Sammie was hunting across town.
The letters detailed Paula’s mother’s daily activities in a chatty, over-the-back-fence style. It took some reading, however, to figure out her locale. There was no letterhead, and no attached envelopes, and it was only through references to the new Union Hall clock, the deli department at Morse’s Store, and the fund-raising efforts of the NewBrook Fire Department that I finally figured out that mom must live in Newfane, twelve miles up Route 30 from Brattleboro. That discovery also helped explain the Leland and Gray pennant in the living room: located in Townshend, it was Newfane’s designated high school.
The photo album confirmed my guess, providing me with graduation group shots showing Paula and several family members in front of the Windham County Courthouse. From the date on the senior class banner in the background of one of these, I figured Paula Atwater couldn’t be more than nineteen years old. From her photos, she looked friendly and outgoing, neither chubby nor thin, with a tangled mop of curly brown hair and a mild case of acne. In several of the non-graduation pictures, she and several friends or family members were clowning around on the front lawn of a one-story brown house with a bay window to the left of the front door.
I reached out to the phone on the floor by the side of the bed and dialed the Windham County Sheriff’s Department, headquartered in Newfane. I asked for Lieutenant Norman Powell.
“Hey, Joe, long time no see. What’s up?” Powell and I were old friends, but primarily on a professional basis. Whenever we talked, it was usually business that brought us together.
“I’m looking for someone down here, and I think she flew the coop into your neck of the woods. I have a few pictures with a house in the background. If I drove up there right now, could you take a shot at identifying the building and maybe the family?”
‘What’s the name?”
“Paula Atwater, about nineteen, Leland and Gray graduate.”
There was a short pause. “Doesn’t ring a bell offhand. Sure, come on up. I’ll see what I can do.”
I hung up, pulled some sheets of paper from my small notebook, constructed a couple of quasi-legal forms, and left the apartment with the photo album under my arm. Shirley Barrows’s door opened before I’d knocked on it twice.
She instantly spotted the album. “Oh, hey. You got something.”
“Yeah. I was wondering if you could do me a big favor and sign these two documents. One states that you voluntarily invited me into Paula’s apartment, since you now believe she’s left for good and the property’s yours again, and the other is your acknowledgment that I have removed one item, a photo album, from that apartment.”
She signed both pieces of paper eagerly, her sweaty hand leaving a damp patch at the bottom of each. “This is great. Wait’ll I tell the girls. Just like the movies. Do you think I’ll get my name in the papers?”
Route 30, heading northwest toward Newfane, parallels the Upper Dummerston Road, which I’d traveled earlier that day to visit Tucker Wentworth. But where the latter is a narrow, winding, country road, blocked in by trees and homes on either side, the former is a legitimate highway: broad, flat, smooth, and built for speed. It is also one of the prettiest roads in the county, running along the bottom of the West River valley, matching the water’s serpentine bends, a paved mirror image of the broad, sparkling, rock-strewn waterway so attractive to dozens of weekend tubefloaters and sunbathers during Vermont’s brief summers. The valley walls, steep, verdant, punctuated by occasional cliffs and feeder streams, embraced and soothed me despite the hot breeze that lashed at my face through the open window.
The sheriff’s department and the county courthouse face one another across the enormous Newfane village green. However, as if by design, any suggested fraternity between the two has been tempered by Route 30, severe and barren, which lies as a no-man’s land, slicing the common in two. It’s a sad and occasionally traffic-choked modern intrusion, upsetting a near-perfect mix of historic architecture and manicured nature.
I swung right, around the edge of the grass and toward the old jailhouse, marveling at the play of light on the grass and the shimmering white of the one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old buildings.
Norman Powell stepped out onto the concrete porch of the old jail as I stopped my car before it. Gray-haired, tall, and lean, he was an ex-Army sergeant who’d joined the department after he’d found retirement at forty not all it was cracked up to be. He nodded at me, his hands on his waist, vaguely reminiscent of some uniformed Texas Ranger squinting into the sun. “Hey, Joe.”
I brought the album out of my car and laid it on the hood. He came off the porch and stood next to me as I flipped through to the shots of the family on the lawn. “Know where that is?”
“Yup. If it weren’t for the buildings in between, you could see it from here. Mrs. Adams’s house. That’s not the name you gave me.”
“Paula Atwater?”
He scratched the gray stubble at the back of his neck. “Right. Could be same family, different last names. Glenda Adams was married once before, a long time ago; that might explain it. I’d forgotten about that.” He extended his hand to point down Route 30, the way I’d come. “Glenda lives in Rolling Meadows, behind WW. I’ll show you.”