Chapter 16
It was a full day before Joe got to Townshend and Hannah Shriver's small house in the woods above the village. Willy had recruited Lester Spinney to help him out and, in his own manic fashion, had been driving them both relentlessly since getting the call to check the place out.
By the time Joe arrived, he was greeted by Lester at the front door of the mudroom and given the look of a man fresh from the desert eyeing his first glass of water.
Joe smiled at his expression. "Been having fun?"
Usually ready with an upbeat response, Lester could only say, out of Willy's earshot, "Been having fun seeing a man prove he's a total head case, is more like it. Can I go home and catch some shut-eye?"
Joe let him go and wandered deeper into the house. It was a log cabin, old and bruised, probably uncomfortably cool in the winter, with a rusty woodstove at its heart, a sleeping loft over half the diminutive living room, and a bathroom and kitchen to one side. In many ways, not much different from what a similar home would have looked like two hundred years earlier, apart from the plumbing and electricity.
Joe glanced up toward the loft at the sound of someone moving around out of sight.
"That you, Willy?"
"Jesus, save me," came the muffled sarcastic reply. "It must be Sherlock Holmes."
Gunther sighed and climbed the sturdy ladder. As his head cleared the level of the floor, he saw Willy on his hands and knees, half buried in a three-foot-tall storage closet cut into the knee wall abutting the sharply angled roofline. He resisted further comment and merely finished his ascent, settling on the edge of a mattress lying directly on the floor.
Waiting for Willy to finish up, he looked around, getting his bearings, much as he had in Pete Shea's room in Gloucester.
It was a threadbare home, filled only with the necessities, most of those either secondhand or with so many miles on them, he guessed they'd come through several generations. But it wasn't a hovel. The sofa below him was tastefully covered with shawls and blankets to hide the rips and worn spots. Odd pieces of discarded junk-a rusty saw, a few old bottles, some plates-hung on the wooden walls as decoration. The few pictures of sunsets and tropical islands alongside them, clearly cut from calendars or magazines, were carefully framed and mounted behind glass, and there were plants and dried flowers on the windowsills and on the rickety table that Gunther guessed had been used as a place to dine. There was no TV set, only a radio by the sofa.
Joe had been in some isolated houses before, running the gamut from trailers in need of a bulldozer to rustic mansions of millionaires wanting to "get away from it all." More often, however, they'd been places like this one: modest, well-cared-for homes, lived in by people whose indepen-dence meant more to them than the ease of modern conveniences.
There was something odd about this one, however. The more Gunther studied it, the more it looked almost imperceptibly disheveled, as if everything, from the wall hangings to the pillows, to the one rug in the center of the floor, had been recently moved and not quite replaced to its original position. It was as subtle an anomaly as someone wearing a hairpiece. Willy and Lester had been both thorough and tidy.
"Thinking of buying it?" Willy asked, having emerged from the closet, flashlight in hand.
"You could do worse."
"Place is a substitute rubber room-be like putting a rat in a box and watching it go bananas."
"That what she did?"
Kunkle made an equivocal expression. "From what I've dug up so far, I don't think she was certifiable, but I figure she had a few fuses blown, living in a dump like this. It's a half mile from the closest neighbor, for Christ sake."
"Lot of people live that way in this state."
Kunkle snorted. "I rest my case. Fuckin' crackers."
Despite the years he'd lived up here, Willy was a born New Yorker. Joe moved on.
"You find anything interesting?"
Kunkle sat in a rocking chair in the corner, the only other piece of furniture in the loft besides a small chest of drawers and the mattress on the floor. His response was unusually philosophical. "Interesting in terms of her death? Not off the bat. Interesting in terms of a life lived on the margins, making ends meet, and maintaining some dignity at the same time? Yeah."
Joe smiled at him. "You like her."
Willy frowned. "I understand her. She did what she had to do, or so it seems."
"Which was…?"
Willy sat back. "Well, it's not like she had her life cataloged and waiting for us, but from what I found, she tried her hand at teaching, bookkeeping, secretarial work, housecleaning, dispatching for a trucking company, and even did a stint as a court secretary or whatever it is where you use those goofy-looking typewriters you see in Perry Mason movies."
"Court reporter," Joe said, his interest sharpened. "They're called steno machines. When did she do that?"
"Beats me," Willy answered. "All that's here is the machine and a bunch of the paper rolls that come out the far end of it, all bundled up. Looks like Sanskrit."
"What about family, husbands, boyfriends, anything like that?"
"A few pictures, some letters. Nothing recent, though. No diary I could find. No address book." He paused and then added, "Off the top of my head? I get the feeling of somebody whose batteries were running low. She kept the place up, did her laundry, washed the dishes, made sure the bathroom was clean, but that's about it-maintenance-level stuff. That's the dignity I was talking about. But three years from now, I wouldn't have been surprised to hear a 911 call for a suicide here."
"A life of quiet desperation?" Joe asked, gazing about, struck by his colleague's insight-the very thing that kept Joe playing interference for the man.
Willy covered with a dismissive laugh, probably worried that he'd revealed too much sensitivity. "Shit, no. That's me. This broad was just going crazy."
Joe nodded quietly, allowing Willy his pretense. "Well, if you think you're done, let's collect what we'll need and move it to where we can work on it. I better beg the PD for their basement room-set up a data center. I get the feeling that before we're done, this'll just be the tip of the iceberg."
Willy stood up and stretched his one good arm, looking oddly like a man hailing a cab. "Sounds like a pain in the ass to me."
He then paused and fixed his boss with a pleased expression Gunther had grown to expect. "There is something else."
"Ah-I was wondering."
Kunkle's smile broadened. "The place was tossed before we got here-very carefully."
Gunther stared at him. "I thought that was the two of you. I was going to compliment you on being so neat and tidy."
Willy was clearly insulted. "Neat and tidy? Shit, if I'm left on my own, I guarantee you'll never know I was there. These guys weren't that good. If you did notice something-assuming you're not bullshitting me-it was the people who came before us."
"You think they found what they were after?"
Willy was back to looking superior. "What did I say? No diary, no address book."
Gunther waited for the standard premeeting chatter to peter out. They were in a windowless room in the basement of Brattleboro's municipal center, designed to serve as an emergency command post when needed, and thus equipped with phones, copiers, computer hook-ups, and the rest. It was used only sparingly, and mostly during drills or serious storms. For the VBI, with its one office upstairs, it had come in handy more than once as a conference or training room.
Joe watched as the stragglers got their coffee and doughnuts at a table lining one wall and searched out an empty chair. In attendance were his three squad members, Paul Spraiger and two more from up north, several BCI officers from the state police, and a couple of Brattleboro's finest, Ron Klesczewski and J. P. Tyler, both of whom had worked for Gunther when he was chief of detectives.