Archer Mayor - Three Can Keep a Secret

“They did what they could,” Bill hedged. “Not an easy job.” He raised a finger for emphasis as he answered Lester’s question. “If the estimates are correct, you might get in tomorrow. The water’s draining fast. It’ll be a mess, but it should be accessible.”

“You have hazmat suits for us?” Joe asked. “I could smell the pollutants as soon as we hit town.”

Lester shot him another glance, clearly not having considered the issue.

“Yeah,” Allard said airily. “We’ve got you covered. You’re not only facing all the crap you can guess, but there’s asbestos, too, from the leftover underground pipes and conduits, dating back to the bad ol’ days. It should be a real blast, poking around down there.”

“Great,” Lester murmured.

“Not to worry,” Allard reassured them. “You’ll have people with you who know their stuff. I’m not sending you in there alone.”

Lester did his best to fake a pleasantly surprised smile. “Ah,” he said. “That makes all the difference.”

“How’re you holding up?” she asked.

“Better than most,” Joe admitted. “I can think of ten other professions right now that’ve been working harder than us from the start. The uniformed cops are mostly making sure people don’t get into trouble, and we fancy guys in suits are being called on to do even less.”

She laughed knowledgeably. “Unless they’re Willy Kunkle, diving into the floodwaters to save the brain-dead.”

He was impressed. “You heard about that?”

“I’m the governor, Joe. I have people .”

He smiled at the phone in his hand. She was, and she did. And Gail Zigman also made it her business to be better informed than most of her recent predecessors. Her early years as a selectman and prosecutor had sensitized her to the old rule that all politics are local. Among the backroom organizations that she’d created before her first day at work was a team of phone and e-mail workers whose sole duty was to keep in touch with handpicked human listening posts all across the state. These were mostly people whom Gail had wooed and won during her years of ascension, ranging from small-town politicos to fire chiefs, town clerks, church leaders, and almost anyone else who was engaged, informed, and/or just plain nosy. It had served her more than once in sensing an upswelling before it became a tidal wave.

“How’re your people serving you in the middle of this mess?” he asked.

“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.”