* * *
Willy pulled over opposite the same address he’d visited earlier, in Burlington’s North End.
“You good?” he asked his passenger.
Nate Rozanski didn’t answer. He remained slumped in his seat, his hands in his lap, his eyes fixed straight ahead.
“Nate,” Willy spoke to him sharply.
He slowly turned his head.
Willy gestured to the warehouse across the street. “The brother you killed is in there. He’s alive if not well. He’s got a mangled arm like mine. He’s alone and cut off and heading nowhere fast, all because of you.”
Nate’s mouth tightened, and his eyes dropped to the console between them.
Willy smacked him in the chest with the back of his right hand, causing Nate to look up, startled and with a flicker of anger.
“Pissed you off a little there, didn’t I?” Willy challenged him. “Good. Fine. Well, turn some of that on yourself, for once. Instead of wallowing in guilt, get mad at yourself; get mad at your loser father; get mad at what you did and start fixing it. How many people have a chance to put things right? For years, you’ve been holed up with your self-pity for company. Well, guess what, you sorry woodchuck, you didn’t do it. You fucked up, but you didn’t kill him.”
He reached out suddenly and cupped Nate by the back of the neck, forcing their faces to be inches apart. “Get your ass in there, Nate. Fix this,” he said.
Nate kept the gaze, absorbing the message, and then slowly nodded. “Who are you?” he asked wonderingly.
Willy felt a surge of emotion overtake him, welling up and prickling the backs of his eyes, born of a lifetime of asking himself the same question.
But he wasn’t going to let this idiot have the satisfaction.
“I’m the guy who’s gonna kill you if you don’t get out of my car.”
Nate gave him a small smile, and did as he’d been told.
* * *
Joe parked before a building that, from the outside, looked like a custom-made incubator for worker dysfunction. It was old, single-story, windowless, and located in a commercial no-man’s-land between Montpelier and Barre. It reminded him of a huge grave marker, lying flat on the ground.
He found the front door, looking lost and hopeless against the blank slab of the wall surrounding it, and entered to discover a receptionist behind a thick, scratched, cloudy Plexiglas partition with a large hole in its middle-through which, Joe thought disjointedly, anyone could have extended a hand holding a gun.
“Joe Gunther to see Jodi Hamer,” he announced.
Shortly, a smiling, upbeat woman with a strong handshake greeted him at the lobby’s inner door.
“Mr. Gunther? Delighted to meet you. I just got the faxed release document we discussed on the phone. Thank you for doing that. So many other police officers have a tough time understanding our need to cover our butts.”
Joe followed her into the building’s embrace and down a long, well-lighted corridor. Belying the place’s exterior, its residents had worked hard and successfully to brighten up its inner spaces. “Believe me,” he told her supportively, “I have been in your shoes. I want to thank you for being clear about what you needed. Did you find what I’m after?”
“Yes,” she said happily. “It took a little digging. Right now, because of Irene, we’ve never been busier in here, duplicating as many records as we can. Our priority, as you can imagine, is to re-create everything lost in the basement of the public safety headquarters-fingerprint files, arrest records, et cetera. State hospital admissions from decades ago were a pretty low priority.”
She looked back at him and smiled broadly, adding, “In a way, it’s a huge kick for me personally-selfishly speaking. All this justifies the requests we’ve made for years to back up hard records with digital copies. I can tell you, it’s been like pulling teeth sometimes, and the process has been far from perfect, but we’ve made inroads, and if there’s one good thing that’ll come of this disaster, I bet it’ll be better funding.”
She led him through a door and down a claustrophobically narrow aisle of opposing shelves. “Okay, here we are. Hospital admissions around the time you’re interested in.” She pointed at a nearby table crowned with a mechanical version of a resting pterodactyl. “That’s a microfiche reader. Know how it works?”
Joe smiled at her. “That’s very sweet. I’m guessing you know damned well I’m probably more comfortable with one of those than with any computer.”
She laughed. “Well, I wasn’t going to mention it. I’ll leave you to it, then. Happy hunting.”
It was onerous work. The cardboard boxes containing Hamer’s cherished microfiches reflected the era before mental health patients were dumped on to the community, often with the rationalization that they’d become assets to society. What he was poring over was the legacy of the “old days,” when people were committed for being eccentric, or offending influential family members-or getting in the way of prominent politicians. There were thousands of entries, loosely organized, haphazardly filed, and all but unreadable without resorting to the cranky, eye-straining reader by Joe’s side. Even then, most of the forms were handwritten, and frequently tough to decipher.
Nevertheless, after several hours, he located what he was after-Carolyn Barber’s official commitment papers. And with them, something he hadn’t been expecting: the name of the person who’d signed them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“That it?” Lester asked.
Sam checked her notepad. “Yeah. Not much to it.”
In fact, Dolores Oetjen’s realty office looked like a private residence with a shingle hanging out front. “Nice place, though,” Sam added, almost as an apology.
They got out of the car and looked up and down the street, properly called West County Road. There wasn’t much to see, Calais being not much of a metropolis.
“What’s with the town’s name?” she asked, knowing of Lester’s penchant for local history. “I always wondered.”
“Rhymes with palace,” he said. “After the French port city. It’s a Revolutionary War thing-everybody was crazy about the French back then. You know, Lafayette and all that. There are several villages within the township. The biggest hoot is that one of them was called Sodom for like a hundred years, ’cause it didn’t have a church. Friendly, huh? Love thy neighbor.”
Sam looked across the roof of the car at him in surprise. “Still?” she asked.
“Nah. It’s Adamant, now. They claim that’s because of the stone quarries, but I bet it’s because of their thick skin.”
In fact, they were in another of those small villages-this one named Maple Corner-which prompted Sam to ask, “Wasn’t this where those guys posed nude for a calendar?”
He smiled. “Yup. The Men of Maple Corner. Half a million bucks raised for the community center.” He indicated with his thumb. “Down there. ’Bout ten years ago. Started a rage of imitators. Crazy like a fox.”
They walked up to the modest house and followed instructions to PLEASE COME ON IN.
They found a young woman typing on her computer, seated at an antique desk in a front room arranged to look like an office.
The woman sprang to her feet at their entrance. “Hi,” she said cheerily, rounding the corner of the desk and ushering them in. “Welcome. I’m Dolores Oetjen. Glad to meet you.”
Sam almost felt sorry for having ignited so much enthusiasm. “Hi, Dolores,” she said, shaking hands. “Don’t get your hopes up. We’re cops, not buyers.”
Nice, Lester thought. Too much Willy time.
Dolores’s face fell. “Police? What happened?”
Les spoke up. “Absolutely nothing, Ms. Oetjen. We’re here for a huge favor, is all. Sorry to have alarmed you. Can we all sit down?”
Put to ease but still confused, Oetjen waved at the chairs facing her desk. “Sure,” she said. “How can I help?”
“We’re on sort of a hunting expedition,” Sam explained, fitting her tone to Lester’s. “Much of what we do is chase down leads, just like you see on TV, and one of those leads brought us here.”