Archer Mayor - Three Can Keep a Secret

“I can dig into it, if you want,” Susan volunteered. “You are the governor, after all.”

Gail laughed. “Right-like you have nothing better to do. I wouldn’t even put my own staff on this.”

They chatted about other matters for a few minutes, mostly the flooding and its impact and implications. There was little else being discussed anywhere in the state, and probably wouldn’t be for some time.

Nevertheless, once the call ended, Gail remained thoughtful about what had stimulated it. She still wanted to know how a governor-even a bogus one-could have ended up in a mental facility, and then gone missing.

As for Susan Raffner, she wasn’t the least misled by her friend’s dismissal of Carolyn Barber’s importance. As she pocketed her phone and set out for her next meeting, she made a mental note to dig into Barber’s moment of fame-and why the chief executive had thought it worthy of special inquiry.

* * *

Willy negotiated the washed-out road gingerly, pausing occasionally to figure out where to point the SUV next, sometimes opting for the field alongside.

“Might be faster if we walk,” Sammie suggested, clinging to the handhold by the doorframe.

“Might be,” Willy agreed, to her surprise, “but I like having the radio nearby.”

She raised her eyebrows at him. “You expecting trouble?”

“I’m expecting a half-wit Li’l Abner,” he countered. “We don’t show up in some official-looking vehicle, he’ll shoot our asses off for sure. Probably will anyhow.”

Willy had been born and bred in New York City-a place that he’d clearly left only in body. “It’s a rural state,” she instructed him defensively. “Not a backward one.”

He laughed and jutted his chin straight ahead to indicate the road. “Right-clearly.”

“That’s the flood, you moron,” she remonstrated.

“It is now, ” he suggested. “You ask me, it was no better before.”

The large vehicle gave a lurch and there was a grinding, scraping sound from underneath that made them both wince. They’d borrowed it from the Brattleboro police, and while Willy clearly didn’t care about its condition later, Sammie was less sure about how they’d gotten hold of it in the first place.

“You sure you got the chief to sign this over?” she asked, settling herself more securely after the jostling.

“It’s gotta be over the next hill,” Willy avoided answering, adding unexpectedly, “You call Louise?”

Sam cut him a look. “You know I did.”

“Emma okay?”

A sarcastic comeback offered itself, but not about this. Emma was sacred ground for them, if for divergent reasons. While each was a wounded survivor of childhood, their own child represented a different type of hope. To Sammie, Emma was a reward to be cherished and protected; to Willy, she was more like the cross between a miracle and a mirage-the latter image being one that could wake him up in a cold sweat and make him visit her bedroom just to confirm her existence.

Instead, therefore, Sam merely said, “She’s great,” and changed the subject. “What’s the name again? Rozanski?”

“That’s what’s on the headstone,” he told her. “Herbert Rozanski. But this woodchuck empire belongs to somebody named Jeff MacQuarrie-Jeffrey, according to the records; Jeff on the phone. He’s supposedly a relative.”

“You talked to him?” she asked, startled.

“Kind of. I didn’t really say who I was, and he didn’t do much more than grunt. You know…”

She did. When you went to interview someone who might have something interesting to say, you didn’t want to show more cards than you had to.

“What did you say?” she asked.

“Just that we’d found the grave exposed and needed to know about next of kin for legal reasons. I told him I had a form to fill out-made it sound boring as hell.”

“He’s related how?”

Willy gave a shrug as they edged over the top of the rise and finally saw a farmhouse ahead, nestled against the forest behind it like a newborn tucked up against its mother.

“Beats me,” he said. “That’s why we’re here.”

The road was slightly better on the other side, so they closed in on the house in a couple of minutes. Nevertheless, they paused in the dooryard with the engine running, respecting the rural protocol of giving homeowners time to take notice-and to call in any near-feral dogs that might be prowling about.

But it didn’t apply here. The peeling front door to the battered house yawned open, and a large bearded man stepped out and waved to them.

“Gee,” Sammie muttered as she slid out of the SUV. “Not a blood-dripping sickle in sight. Bummer.”

“Next time,” Willy assured her.

They approached, still watching the terrain before them, if this time for chunks of wood, randomly scattered tools and farm equipment, and assorted other lumps and clumps that had acquired a thin skin of earth and weeds over the years.

“You Jeff?” Willy asked, drawing near.

The man nodded. “Yup.”

He stepped free of the threshold, leaving the door open, took two steps forward, and waited for them, the sun to his back. There was no shaking of hands or other formalities. Jeff simply waited, his hands hanging loosely, for his guests to speak their piece.

“Jeffrey MacQuarrie?” Willy repeated. “Just for the record.”

MacQuarrie acknowledged with a single, silent tuck of his chin, his eyes steadily on Willy’s.

“We’re from the Vermont Bureau of Investigation,” Sam announced, showing her credentials, which MacQuarrie ignored, his gaze unshifting. “We’re here about the grave of Herbert Rozanski,” she finished.

“So I heard,” was MacQuarrie’s response.

“From me?” Willy asked, who’d neither introduced himself nor shown his badge. “Or someone else?”

“Both.”

“What did they tell you?”

“The water opened up the grave.” MacQuarrie’s voice was deep and friendly in tone, although his body language remained neutral.

“That all?”

“Pretty much.”

“They tell you what they found inside?” Sammie asked bluntly.

“Yup.”

“What do you make of that?”

The hint of a smile lurked within the heavy beard, and MacQuarrie’s eyes narrowed with humor. “The grave was missing something?”

Sam laughed while Willy grunted, “Very funny.”

MacQuarrie tilted his head to one side. “You gotta admit.”

“Okay, okay,” Willy conceded. He looked around at the disheveled front yard. A rusty pickup was parked nearby, and he walked over to it to sit on the lowered tailgate, using the trailing edge of the truck bed as a backrest. The move also allowed him to shift from where the sun had been hitting him in the face-a position he wasn’t convinced that MacQuarrie, presumably a seasoned hunter, hadn’t calculated.

“Now that we got the country hick bullshit out of the way,” he told their host, “you want to tell us how you connect to Herb Rozanski?”

“You found me,” MacQuarrie told him. “Don’t you know?”

Willy just stared at him.

“Cousins,” MacQuarrie yielded as Sam crossed over to join Willy, at the opposite end of the tailgate. MacQuarrie followed suit by settling onto a large, leveled-off tree stump whose scars attested to its use as a wood-splitting station.

“My mother was Herb’s father’s sister,” he explained.

“Herb’s father being Bud Rozanski,” Willy suggested.

“And his mom being Dreama. They died, so I got the place.”

“Just like that?” Willy asked. “They didn’t have other kids?”

“A couple more,” Jeff said.

Willy chuckled and shook his head. “You must really like us.”

In the silence following, Jeff shifted his attention from one to the other of them. “Pardon?”