Archer Mayor - Bellows Falls

“How long do you think she’s been gone?” I asked Susan.

“It could be a couple of hours. We check on them periodically, but they aren’t under lock and key.”

“And you have no idea where she might’ve gone?”

Susan shook her head.

“Could she have been grabbed?” Jonathon asked.

“No,” Susan said emphatically. “Not being incarcerated doesn’t mean they wander around at will, and people don’t come on these grounds without being noticed. Every door is monitored around the clock. She had to have actually snuck off, taking pains not to be seen.”

“Are the kids still here?” I asked. “Maybe they can tell us something.”

Probably embarrassed by the turn of events, Raffner didn’t argue but urged that the interviewers be limited to Gail and me.

There were five children all told, of whom only two were actually Jan’s, and this was the first time I’d actually been introduced to them. During my visits to the house-aside from the boy with the deflated ball-they’d either been peripheral bodies in blurred motion, or not there. They ranged in age from three to about seven, and were as dissimilar from one another as a pack of street urchins.

Gail, Susan, and I sat next to each other on the floor of a small room, a hollow-eyed TV set in the corner, with the children grouped around us.

Gail started off. “My name is Gail. This is Joe.”

“I seen him,” said one of the older boys.

“Where?”

“At my house.”

“I remember you,” I said. “You were almost tall enough to grab a doughnut out of your mom’s hand, even though it was over her head.”

He smiled with pride. “I got it, too,” he lied, “two of ’em.”

“You did not,” the ball player said, punching him in the arm. “You got ’em after Dad threw ’em out the door, just like we all did.”

Gail interrupted by pretending to glance around. “Speaking of your mom, where is she? I had something I wanted to ask her.”

“She’s gone,” a little girl said.

The older boy cuffed the back of her head. “She’ll be back.”

Gail looked disappointed. “That’s too bad. Where do you think she went?”

“Home,” said one.

“To see the fireworks, I bet,” said another.

“The fireworks?” I blurted.

“Yeah,” the oldest answered, looking at me like I was brain dead. “It’s Old Home Days tonight.”

He didn’t need to elaborate. The Rockingham Old Home Days fireworks display was the largest in the state, running for forty minutes and drawing over ten thousand people to Bellows Falls from all over Vermont. They lined the river and jammed the bridges and railroad yard, since the rockets were fired from the riverbank north of town.

“Did she tell you that?” I asked.

The boy didn’t answer, having obviously supplanted his own desires with Jan’s.

“Why did you say, ‘home’?” Gail asked the small girl who’d spoken first.

“She told me, just before she climbed out the window.”

I could feel Susan stiffen beside me, no doubt wondering, as I was, why Jan had suddenly chosen to leave. Phone calls were screened here, but I suspected Norm had found a way to lure her out. He had been manipulating her for years, forcing her to do things she wouldn’t normally willingly do. It took no great stretch to imagine he’d used her guilt at betraying him to force her across a suicidal line.

Having seen the results of Norm’s ruthlessness, I had no doubts he was going to repay Jan for her transgressions as he had Jasper Morgan, young Billy, and who knows how many others. But where those others might have come under Norm’s concept of business expenses, Jan and his relationship was far more convoluted. She had climbed out that window as a martyr might journey to self-sacrifice, and he, rather than fleeing to parts unknown, had put domination above survival. They were like two halves of a pair of scissors about to snap shut.

I leaned forward slightly, my eyes on a level with that of the small child. “What exactly did she say?”

“She said, ‘Don’t worry, honey. Everything’ll be fine. I just have to go home for a while.’ ”

“She didn’t go home,” the other small girl said, speaking for the first time. “That’s not what she meant. She told me she was going to her thinking place.”

At last, I thought. “And where’s the thinking place?”

“The old milk plant. She took me there once. It’s neat.”

It was almost dusk, shortly before the fireworks were to begin. From all over the area, sheriff’s deputies, State Police, and the Bellows Falls and Walpole police were converging either on Bellows Falls or the old creamery itself. This was not, I had stressed to everyone, to be a high-profile approach. Assuming a small child’s guess was right, I didn’t want people spooked, least of all Norm Bouch.

But even if I’d asked for the National Guard, it wasn’t going to be an easy location to surround, much less contain. The plant, as I knew from Greg Davis’s tour of the town days earlier, was at the bend of the river, between the two bridges leading to New Hampshire, just above where the falls turned from neck-breaking rapids into a precipitous drop. That much was actually a tactical advantage-normally. The so-called Island had an unbreachable boundary on three sides, limited access, and was covered mostly with abandoned factories, warehouses, and the open railroad yard. Tonight alone, however, this no-man’s land became Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Fully half the expected crowd of ten to twelve thousand people would be standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the Island, lining the river just above the milk plant. A dozen more would be illegally camped on its roof.

Gail, Jonathon, and I were in my car, heading toward Bellows Falls from the south, using blue lights only to quietly warn of our approach. Well shy of the town line, however, we hit heavy traffic, and from there on, I edged along at a steady five miles an hour. It stayed that way through downtown and onto the Island, where I finally gave up, pulled over, and killed the engine.

“Let’s go on foot. Gail, I’ll leave the radio on channel two so you can hear what’s going on. If the need comes up, I might ask you to use the cell phone, so keep an ear out, okay?”

She slipped in behind the wheel, kissing me through the open window. “No heroics, please.”

I gave her a thumbs-up and went to the trunk of the car, where I extracted two armored vests and a couple of flashlights. I handed one of the vests to Jonathon. “Better put this on under your shirt.”

We jogged down the narrow dirt trail that followed the riverbank to the empty milk plant, looking, I hoped, like two latecomers heading for the show.

I keyed my portable radio. “This is Gunther, approaching from the south, along the river. Who’s in place and in command?”

To my surprise, Latour’s voice came back. “It’s Emile, Joe. The cordon’s still pretty thin. No one’s gone in yet.”

“Any signs of anything?”

“Nothing so far. I’m just ahead of you on the dirt road.”

We reached him a few minutes later. Aside from several genuine spectators circling the building to gain access to the railroad yards, we were largely alone.

Emile explained the layout. “The north side’s as crowded as this is empty, and there’re people on the roof and at some of the upper windows, like every year. So far, I’ve got four people positioned at all corners of the building, a couple more along the north wall, pretending they’re on crowd control, and Greg Davis and Emily Doyle standing by to go inside. I might be getting five or six more, but with the roads and bridges either closed or jammed with people, travel times’re going to be lousy. Do you want to take over command?”