We continued through town to the junction with the Westminster West Road, took it for a mile, and then veered left again onto West Hill Road, heading back toward Dummerston, between Putney and Brattleboro. We were starting to make a big circle. I began to reconsider Levasseur’s ignorance of our presence.
“Sol? She given any sign she knows you’re there?”
“I don’t know if she has yet, but she’s bound to soon. These roads are getting narrower and narrower, and we’re about all the traffic that’s left.”
“When she takes another turn, pass by and double back. I’ll pick her up and you can follow me for a while.”
“10-4.”
The opportunity for this maneuver occurred ten minutes later, when the Explorer turned right onto the Putney Mountain Road-a one-lane dirt trail leading to the crest of a string of steep hills separating Putney from Brookline to the west. In the summertime this road went all the way through, giving both communities a significant shortcut to the thirty-minute run-around through Dummerston. But at this time of the year, it was a virtual dead end. Brookline did not plow its side of the mountain.
Coming abreast of a house, I put on my turn signal, as if pulling into the driveway, and let the car ahead disappear into the veil of falling snow.
“What’s up?” Sol immediately radioed.
“I don’t want her to feel crowded. She’s got nowhere to go, and I can see her tracks in the snow. We can just follow them.” I raised Dispatch again and suggested that any additional units should approach from the Putney side.
I moved slowly from then on, focusing on the twin furrows her tires had left behind, my only concern now that we would come upon them too fast and lose our element of surprise.
I keyed the mike again. “M-80 from O-3. Does either subject own any known property on Putney Mountain?”
I drove on for a quarter hour before Dispatch came back. “Negative.”
The Putney Mountain Road is long, twisting, and steep, with deep ditches on both sides. It is also thinly populated and buried in the woods. The oddness of the situation, the growing sense of isolation, and the awareness of the tightly packed trees pressing in from either side of the car began to heighten my anxiety. Something was going wrong-slowly but surely. In a snail-paced parody of some careening, madcap chase, I could sense we were losing the advantage we’d been counting on. The farther I drove, the more convinced I became that instead of following some unaware suspect, we were in fact heading for a destination solely designed for our benefit.
Higher and higher we climbed, past most of the houses here, past Banning Road, the last feeder trail shy of the mountain’s top, and almost to where I knew the road was supposed to be blocked by a season’s worth of accumulated snow.
That very thought jogged my memory, and I spoke into the radio. “Sol, doesn’t Hennessy’s truck have a snowplow on-”
It was all I got out. Directly ahead of me, looming large and fast like the red-eyed monster from a nightmare, the rear end of the Explorer came barreling down upon me, its backup lights blazing. I had time only to throw my arms across my face before the hood of my car crumpled like an accordion and smashed the windshield, letting in a swirling white torrent of snow and shattered glass.
23
Gail stood at the foot of the emergency room bed, shaking her head. “My God, Joe, you are the most accident-prone man I know. What were you doing running around the mountains in a blizzard?”
I gave her a lopsided smile, tilting my head so the nurse could finish taping a dressing to my temple. “Hennessy took off, his girlfriend took off after him, and we took off after her. I didn’t realize till too late that he might’ve figured we’d follow her.”
She came up alongside the bed and kissed me on the cheek. “How is he?” she asked the nurse.
“Hard-headed. He has a bruise and a cut where he should have a concussion.” She finished her handiwork. “I’ll get some painkillers. Be right back.”
Gail watched her leave and then examined me again, her concern more apparent now. “Joe, you’ve got to stop getting banged up like this. You’re not built for it anymore.”
I saw the fear in her eyes, and recognized its source. We’d been through a lot in the last couple of years, traumatically and emotionally, and had survived it only by letting go of the independence we’d long thought was the strongest link between us. But the trade-off was what I saw in her now, and felt within myself-a more mindful acknowledgment of life’s transience, and a growing dread that what we’d built together, despite the effort, could be forever destroyed by mere chance.
She retreated to the safer ground of the here and now, leaving to time the task of calming her anxiety. “So what did happen?”
“After Hennessy shook off Sol, he beat it to Brookline through Newfane, put chains on his tires, and plowed his way to the top of Putney Mountain. Guessing we might’ve tumbled to his connection with Ginny, he called her on his mobile phone and told her to meet him using the Putney approach. That way, we’d think she was heading for a dead end, and tell whatever backup we had to come in from the east, which is exactly what happened. Hennessy’s plan was to ram the first car that came along with the Explorer, block the road, and make a clean getaway in his truck. It almost worked.”
She gingerly touched my bandaged head. “Doesn’t look like almost.”
“Ginny got nervous waiting in the truck, and got out just before he rammed me with her car. When he ran back to the truck, they missed each other in the storm. Neither one knew where the other one was, Sol was coming up on foot from behind my car, and Hennessy realized it had all been for nothing. It was either leave Ginny behind or be caught. Sol found her on her knees in the snow, crying.”
The nurse returned with a small white envelope. “The doctor says to take one of these every six hours, or as needed for pain, but don’t exceed the dose-they’re pretty powerful.”
I slid off the bed and put the pills into my pocket.
“I don’t suppose you’re going home to bed,” Gail said, not bothering to phrase it as a question.
I kissed her cheek. “Nope. Too much is starting to come together. We still haven’t nailed down our killer, or located Mary Wallis, but things are beginning to unfold. It can’t be too much longer. How did you get on with Bernie, by the way?”
She helped me with my coat and escorted me out the ER’s front door. “I like him. I can’t say we had any real conversation, but he talks a mile a minute, and he loved the cat. I borrowed it from Susan Raffner-it’s so old, it’s barely breathing, but it did the trick. His face lit up as soon as I showed it to him. He called it Ginger, which I guess was once a cat he owned.”
“So you won’t mind doing it again when the shrink calls?” I asked, heading toward a waiting patrol car.
“No.” She grabbed my arm and stopped me in the middle of the parking lot, the falling snow dusting her hair. “Joe, I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do, but will you at least try to be careful? Take the pills if your head starts to hurt, or a nap if you get tired.”
I wrapped my arms around her and gave her a hug. “I’m stubborn, Gail, but I’ll try not to be stupid. I love you.”
She smiled through her own distress. “I love you, too.”
As I’d requested, Ruth Hennessy, Paul’s wife, was waiting for me in my office with Sammie when I returned from the hospital. She was pale-faced and nervous, sitting straight in her chair, and had to shift a wadded-up handkerchief from one hand to the other in order to shake mine in an absentminded greeting.