The tears were flowing freely as she added, "Once she was only the dreams and hopes of a young and happy childless couple. Now she's now a patchwork of memories to an old, tired, and childless woman. How fair is that?"
"It's not," Joe could only agree. But he added, hoping it might help, "Is there any chance you could spend some time with a relative, even for a few days?"
She took a deep breath. "They're all gone. There weren't many of us to begin with, and longevity is not our strong suit. I envy them," she concluded after a pause.
Sensing there was nothing he could say or do to lessen her pain, Joe rose helplessly and murmured, "I'm sorry I've put you through this, Mrs. Shriver. It was not my intention."
Her eyes met his one last time. "Don't apologize. It actually felt good, getting it out. I've become such a closed box of all I've known. Without someone to share it with, what good is it finally?"
He nodded and moved toward the door, ready to take his leave, when he suddenly turned and asked her, "Would it be all right for me to visit you again?"
She'd produced a handkerchief from her sleeve and was wiping her eyes. She stopped and gave him a surprised look. "To ask about Hannah? I don't know how much more-"
He interrupted her with an upheld hand. "No, no. Just to visit."
She paused to consider the offer before smiling slightly and saying, "Thank you."
"Okay," he told her. "I'll see you later, then."
The offices of the Brattleboro Reformer occupied a flat, bland, modern building adjacent to the interstate at the far north end of town. This was a shame, in Joe's opinion. He remembered when they used to be on Main Street, on the first floor of one of the cluttered, ancient redbrick behemoths that made of the town's heart an architectural museum of a bygone era. Before the move, it seemed to him, there was more of a sense of the reporters and editors belonging to the town's social fabric. It was understandable that cramped quarters, lousy parking, and occasionally iffy electricity had proved too much to bear, but ever since the paper's relocation to Brattleboro's outer fringe, Joe felt that a vital though intangible connection had been severed.
It had become a hard-luck place, too. Changes of ownership had taken a toll, and staff turnover was so routine, he'd all but given up remembering who worked there. Also, arching over all, money was such a continual grind that it had become a more frequent topic between him and the paper's editor, Stanley Katz, than the crime rate, politics, and the state of law enforcement combined.
That hadn't always been so. Katz had been the courts-and-cops reporter when Joe had run the PD's detective squad, and as such, he'd only been contemptuous of the paper's own management issues. His sole mission in life then, it had seemed to Gunther, had been to pester the PD like a cold sore. Katz had always had integrity, though, had never been spiteful, and, now that he was finally inhabiting the editor's chair, had even mellowed in his dotage.
Of course, it also didn't hurt that Joe had left the police department behind. Nowadays he rarely had cause to deal with the Reformer except as just another Vermont press outlet.
Not this time, however. As he pulled into the paper's large parking lot off the Black Mountain Road, he had a very specific idea in mind, which definitely played to the Reformer's strength.
He opened the building's front door, passed through the glass-enclosed antechamber-reminiscent of an air lock-and stepped into a large, open room full of desks and filing cabinets and service counters, a room vast enough to make the ceiling look low and oppressive. He glanced around, briefly thinking of how many times he'd been here over the years, usually on the brink of some sparring session with Katz or his ilk, before he set off for the corner office of the man himself.
Looking older and more worn than Joe remembered, Stanley was sitting, elbows on his desk, staring through half glasses at a pile of financial reports. He looked up wearily as Joe tapped gently on the doorframe.
He removed the glasses and smiled. "Joe Gunther. My God."
He rose and circled around to shake hands, escorting his guest to a chair and then choosing one next to it. Joe had never been so warmly greeted before.
"How the hell are you? It's been a dog's age."
"I'm doing well, Stan. You keeping out of trouble?"
Katz laughed. "Don't I wish. I never thought I'd actually look forward to retirement, but there are days… and I have years to go before qualifying. Goddamned depressing."
He took a breath and added, "Pretty exciting about Gail, huh? Finally going for the big leagues-relatively speaking."
Not being as glib with such comments, loaded as they were with double meanings in his own mind, Joe merely stammered, "Yeah. Well, we're all keeping our fingers crossed."
Katz looked at him for a moment, pretending to be caught off guard. "Come on. She's got a decent chance. If she totally nails Marlboro, Newfane, Putney, and Brattleboro, and works overtime to paint Parker as Bander's lapdog, she could pull it off. It also wouldn't hurt if every Republican in the county came down with the flu on election day, but still, if I were her, I'd make room for some champagne in the fridge. Hey," he added with the cynical lift of an eyebrow, "she's got our endorsement, after all."
He waited for a response and got only a half smile in return, followed by "Nice try, Stanley."
Katz shook his head. "Such a hard-ass. Well, you've never been so desperate you came here just to shoot the shit. What're you hoping to squeeze out of me this time? Or am I about to hear some spin on a screwup we don't even know about yet?"
Gunther let out a moan and held his forehead. "Jesus, Stan, do you practice that in the shower? The lowly press as Christian martyr, suffering for the public good?"
"Not with my last name, I don't," the newsman hedged. "I do think we fulfill a service, though."
Joe held up his hand. "All right, all right. Let's not go there, especially since I am about to ask a favor."
"That old case you're working on?" Katz guessed.
Joe nodded. "Very good. The showoff gets lucky. You know the details?"
"No thanks to you people. Old man Oberfeldt, a thousand years ago, took six months to die from an assault and left a cold case with a vengeance. There was blood, a bullet hole, and the mechanism of death was a pistol-whipping. You had your suspicions, but nothing ever came of them. That much," he added with an upraised forefinger, "is what you gave my predecessors. I doubt things were any different then than they are now, so I'm assuming you kept as much or more to yourselves."
"The gun disappeared at the time," Gunther admitted, "and now it's resurfaced. That's what got me going again."
Katz was clearly interested. "When? How?"
"The hostage negotiation that went bad. Same gun. It'd been hidden under some floorboards all this time, discovered by accident, and put on the secondhand market. That's how Matt Purvis got hold of it. It still had some blood on it. We got lucky-the ballistics matched."
"You do a DNA match as well?" Stanley asked, all management woes behind him now.
"We ran a profile, but no hit."
"So, you're stuck again?"
"Maybe, but I'd like to try a long shot."
Katz smiled broadly. "Which is why you just fed me all that. I better be able to use it."
Joe nodded. "Oh, yeah, and I'll follow it up with some more, within reason, but for the moment, what I'd like to do is have a picture run in the paper of a woman who may have been connected to it all."
"Who?"
Joe figured that the name alone would be enough. "Hannah Shriver."
Katz whistled. "No shit? The Tunbridge woman?"
"We don't know how or why-to be honest, we don't even know if-but I'm thinking she played a part in the Oberfeldt case, although maybe just a small one. If we could find out what that was, it might open things up."