“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.