Archer Mayor - Bellows Falls

“I think Latour joined the PD ’cause he thought he could help turn things around, and over time it’s just ground him down. And he’s especially bitter now, seeing Bouch do a number on Brian, and Brian having been dumb in the first place.”

I was impressed at the depth of the analysis, and at its probable accuracy. It bolstered my opinion of Davis, but it also begged an obvious question. “Why’ve you hung on so long?”

He laughed and pulled into a parking lot facing the canal and the back of the Windham Hotel. “I like it here. It’s not the cheeriest place in the world, but if you’re into what makes people tick-or at least chew on each other-this is like a science lab. I know several twenty-eight-year-old grandmothers. I can trace family trees of people who intermarry and remarry and breed with their own kin. Any day of the week, I deal with manias, phobias, and flat-out craziness. People steal from each other, fight with each other, sleep with each other. They shift alliances, trade partners, bring up each others’ babies. This is like a ghetto-a parking place for the down-and-out.”

“But,” he continued with a shake of the head, “at the same time it’s beautiful. The river, the old buildings, the mountain, just the feeling of some kind of huge missed potential… I really sympathize with the town boosters who’re always trying to fix the place up. Maybe I even believe they’ll finally make it. I guess the answer for me-crazy as it sounds-is that in the middle of all the crime and poverty, I can’t shake the feeling that there’s hope in the air. It’s like a family to me-too big and dysfunctional-but something I’m used to.”

Davis paused and sighed. “Maybe the chief and I aren’t all that different. He’s just got twenty years on me… Think that qualifies me for the rubber room?”

“I wish I had you on my squad back home.” The cement-bordered slab of water moved by us without a ripple, a smooth runway of solid slate. As discursive as it had been, Davis’s portrait had allowed me to form a context for whatever might come next in this investigation. And the more I heard about the cast of characters, and their unusual interactions, the more background I felt was needed. History was showing through here-dark and complicated-and I wanted to be privy to as much of it as I could get.

“Okay, let’s go back to Norm and Jan Bouch. What’s the skinny on them?”

Davis sighed. “He’s a flatlander. She’s local. He’s about thirty-three. She’s eighteen. He came from Massachusetts in the eighties, when the housing here was cheap and the market was going crazy. He was a renter at first, like most everybody in town, and we didn’t have him on our radarscope for the first couple of years. Then his name started showing up-stuff like, ‘I was at a party at Norm’s,’ ‘I was doin’ some work for Norm,’ ‘Norm can vouch for me… ’ Bouch was making friends, hanging out in the right places with the right people, and for all the wrong reasons. He started to bloom socially, too, dating lots of girls, getting a couple of them pregnant. You been by his house yet? See all those kids?”

I nodded.

“They’re his, by maybe three or four different women. Jan’s the latest, and the only one he married. Two of the kids are hers. That’s how we know him officially-for fighting with those women. We’d get a noise complaint and go charging over. Sometimes you couldn’t tell who’d started it or even who’d won, but nobody would ever file. We’d read ’em the riot act, maybe toss him in the drunk tank, and retreat till the next time.”

“When did the drug business kick in?” I asked.

“Hard to say. You know how Vermonters do business-little bit of this, little bit of that. Things get done without real money changing hands. People on welfare all of a sudden have a used car when they couldn’t buy food the week before. If there was a crime involved, it’s almost impossible to find, much less prove. Somehow or other, Norm started climbing up in the world-a pickup, an odd-job business, the backhoe you saw, finally he bought the house. The man’s a hustler, I’ll give him that. He doesn’t sit around on the couch waiting for favors to roll in. He’s a body in motion, all the time.”

Davis put the car back into gear and eased out of the parking lot, driving past the railroad station toward the Island’s outer shore, where the Connecticut had spent centuries carving a fifty-foot gorge, the steepest along the river’s entire length from Canada to the Atlantic coast.

“Also,” Davis continued, “he’s smarter than your average bad guy. He takes his time, plans ahead, learns about the opposition.” He laughed suddenly. “ ’Course we say he’s smart ’cause we haven’t caught him yet. Anyhow, he’s definitely gotten to know the movers and shakers in town-lawyers, landlords, even the cops-but he’s just as comfortable with the Genesee beer crowd.”

He reflected on this last comment for a moment and then added, “He’s a bit of a chameleon, showing different shades of himself to different people. Women find him seductive, kids think he’s cool. I smell a lot of anger behind all that-and a wicked need to control.”

We were driving on a narrow dirt road, sandwiched between the steep, rocky riverbank and an old, abandoned, curved-wall factory of impressive proportions. Davis saw me craning my neck out the window to take the building in.

“That’s the old creamery. Used to fill up fourteen railroad cars of milk a day before the bulk-shipping laws changed and gutted the business. I guess the times changed, too… Anyway, we got wind of Norm’s dabbling in drugs through the usual grapevine-some guy would get busted in Burlington or down in your town, and talk about how Norm was part of a drug highway. Or we’d bust a local kid who’d then try to cop a plea by squealing on Norm, ’cept he didn’t have anything we could work with. Stuff like that-lots of noise in the woods but no clear shot.”

We came to a stop at Bridge Street, which crossed the river from the Island into New Hampshire on a massive, double-arched concrete span whose central column was buried in an immense granite outcropping. Davis waited for the traffic to pass and then nosed the cruiser into an overgrown dirt track on the other side. He parked it some fifty feet farther on.

“Ever see the petroglyphs?” he asked, swinging out of the car.

I joined him at a gap in the shrubbery and followed him down a well-worn steep embankment to the top of the rock cliff lining the river’s edge like a huge sluiceway. Far below us the water coursed by peacefully, wending its way around countless jagged boulders and swirling over smooth, kettle-shaped holes carved by thousands of years of turbulence. The view, coming as it did after being hidden by the bushes, was abrupt and dizzying. I felt pulled forward by the void before me and was acutely aware of the steep angle at my feet.

“They’re over here,” Davis said lightly, traveling across the smooth rock face like a billy goat. He paused by a shelf and pointed. At his feet was a cluster of round carvings in the stone, each looking exactly like a surprised smiley face, with its smile replaced by an O . Some of the heads were adorned with antennae, and all were grotesquely outlined in modern yellow paint, apparently so they could be seen from a distance.

“Weird, huh? Nobody knows where they came from or how old they are. They look like they’re from outer space.”

I glanced above and over my shoulder to where we’d started out. “I take it this isn’t always so peaceful.”

Davis began heading back. “That’s no lie. Right now, the water’s being diverted down the canal to the power station. If we get a good rain up north, though, or during the spring thaw, they open the dam’s Tainter gates and this place looks like a tidal wave hit it. Anything falls in then, it’s good-bye Charlie.”