Archer Mayor - Three Can Keep a Secret

Joe had also known them for a very long time-certainly Sam and Willy, who’d been his detectives when he headed the Brattleboro squad. Lester came from the state police, whose erstwhile investigators populated most of the VBI’s ranks nowadays. But with Lester, too, Joe had undergone an arc of experiences that few other coworkers got to share with their colleagues. This was a team forged by fire, who’d literally worked to save each other’s lives on occasion. Sam and Willy even lived together, and she’d recently given birth to a baby girl-a miracle to most who knew them, if only because so few could believe that any woman would get that close to Willy Kunkle.

“We’re not gonna drown any less if we stand around here,” Willy commented now, pushing against the door’s handle. “Might as well get it over.”

He preceded them into the rain as the others adjusted their raincoats. Willy, typically, hadn’t bothered donning one, knowing that there was no true protection in these conditions, and not wanting to add another layer of wet clothing to his burden.

Joe realized he was right, of course; he was about so many practical matters. Once a sniper in the military, Willy had learned to live with discomfort, and as a recovering alcoholic with a crippled left arm and an attitude problem, he’d also learned to cope with adversity-if not hypocrisy, dishonesty, or laziness. The man had the zealotry of a convert there, and cut nobody slack-especially himself.

They sloshed over to the SUV parked fifteen feet away, the weight of the water heavy on their shoulders. Spinney, true to his generally upbeat demeanor, began laughing-his head back like Joe earlier-standing tall and frighteningly skinny. “Geez Louise, why not just wear swimsuits? This is crazy.”

He had a point. By the time they slammed the doors from the inside, the windows were fogged with their own humidity. Joe fired up the engine and adjusted the air-conditioning to improve their visibility.

Slowly, they left the parking lot, entered Grove Street, and began driving toward West Brattleboro, beyond Interstate 91.

“Tell me we’re not heading for a cat up a tree,” Willy said sourly, sitting in the front seat and staring beyond the ineffective windshield wipers, the vehicle feeling more like a boat than a car.

Joe took Sammie in with a quick look over his shoulder. “You didn’t tell him?”

“Oh, great,” Willy muttered as Sam conceded, “I said we had police work.” She addressed her companion: “You were having that much fun answering phones?”

“Convince me I wasn’t,” he said without twisting around.

“Report of a break-in at one of the West B trailer homes,” Joe updated him.

Lester laughed again, having been just as ignorant as Willy about their outing. “You’re kidding. Who cares if it’s thieves or the flood that takes your junk? It’s all going downstream anyhow.”

Surprisingly, Willy countered, “That ‘junk’ matters if it’s yours. Just ’cause they’re trailers doesn’t mean they’re not homes.”

There was an embarrassed silence before Willy himself changed course by addressing Sam unexpectedly. “Did you call about Emma?”

She nodded. “High and dry. I even had Louise look out her window and describe what things looked like.”

“How long ago?”

“Fifteen minutes.”

He pressed his lips together, clearly not satisfied. “Things could change in two. You know that.”

“I know that we discussed it,” she said patiently. “And that we agreed I’d keep calling throughout to check on her.”

The other two in the car kept silent, knowing of Willy’s twin obsessions about his daughter’s welfare and every possible misfortune awaiting her. She was currently in the care of the aforementioned Louise, whom they’d all had to meet as part of Willy’s vetting process, and who must have felt afterwards worthy of national security clearance.

Joe reached the interstate overpass, and Sammie redirected the conversation by pointing out her side window. “Oh, God. I hate that. Look at those stupid kids.”

They watched as two teenaged boys in bathing trunks rode a large inner tube down the middle of the grassy median strip between I-91’s two lanes, which at the moment was a roaring, whitewater brook.

“They’re gonna love the drop-off between the bridges around the corner,” Willy said. He reached into his pocket with his one good hand and pulled out a cell phone. “I’ll tell the state police to either pick ’em up or scrape ’em off Williams Street below.”

Joe kept driving, knowing that Willy was right. In the time it would take him to swing around and access the interstate, the two boys would have either had the ride of their thoughtless lives, or been mangled at the bottom of where I-91’s twin bridges leaped over Williams.

Assuming that Williams hadn’t become a torrent itself, he continued thinking as they passed a couple of shuttered gas stations and entered West Brattleboro-a row of stores, restaurants, a church, a service station, and a post office, all paralleling the racing Whetstone Brook. Here the water was making a shallow river of Route 9. They all knew what this meant, even before they got there: Farther west, the topography flattened, spread out, and became more level with the brook, meaning that what was a passable sheet of water here was most likely a cascade beyond.

As Willy talked into his phone, Joe said to the rest of them, “Take your seat belts off, people. If we need to move fast, you don’t want them in your way.”

All became silent in the car, aside from the deep-throated thrumming on the roof.

* * *

The mood in the car carrying Caspar Luard had worsened. Tom, his driver, had committed a fundamental blunder. Somewhere between Rockingham and Springfield, on Route 5, he’d rounded a corner, calculated the dimensions of the lake swamping the road ahead, and despite Al’s growing apprehension, white-knuckled the wheel and gunned the engine.

“Holy Jesus.” Al yelled out in fear as the car plowed into the water, twin plumes sprouting like wings to both sides. For an instant, they were fine. Tom felt the bite of the road beneath him, and thought he glimpsed its emergence beyond.

But it didn’t last. There was a lurch from underneath, the engine suddenly roared as the tires left the road, and the entire vehicle sloughed and twisted on its axis as it was transformed from car into raft.

“Damn,” Tom almost whispered as the cruiser began listing, first slowly, and then with increasing speed, as it found a downward embankment and slid into deeper water.

“It’s coming in.” Luard shouted, kicking at the seat before him, fighting against the chain around his waist. “Hey, you assholes, it’s coming in through the doors. Come on, guys. Come on. Make it stop.”

But there was no stopping anything now, Tom knew, his hands glued to the wheel while they slid like a newly christened ship into the middle of a bounding, curling, mad rush of earth-brown water. Now it was just a matter of finding out where they’d end up.

Until Al changed the dynamics by opening his door.

“I’m getting out.” he yelled, oblivious of the idiocy of both gesture and statement.

Tom stared at him in astonishment as Al put his weight against the door and was instantly sucked from the car, the current having reacted to the sudden appearance of what amounted to a large oar by snapping them around like a leaf in a torrent.

There was no time to respond. The cruiser flipped, Caspar’s screaming from the back was overwhelmed by the symphonic blending of rushing water, the tearing of metal as the door vanished altogether, and-most ominously to Tom, who heard it all in distinct detail-the deep, throaty rumbling of thousands of unseen boulders tumbling in the heart of the river into which they’d been delivered.