Archer Mayor - Three Can Keep a Secret

Joe Gunther toured his southern Vermont world in the company of a survey team composed of variously initialed agencies, and saw mile after mile of crumpled homes shifted from their foundations, roads returned to their dirt origins, and bridges caved in or missing altogether.

And yet, people resembling Bedouins in a desert, incongruously alive and active against a desolate backdrop, were at work everywhere they went. Farmers, equipment operators, National Guardsmen, common citizens with pickup trucks-some sanctioned by FEMA and its state-based counterparts, others in defiance of such organizations and the regulations they tried to impose-all were reclaiming their homes, their roads, their bridges, and their other infrastructure, sometimes using the very same, rock-clotted streambeds as sources of raw material.

It wasn’t pretty or easy. In the fine language of the law, it often wasn’t legal. But within hours of that ironically cheerful sun’s first appearance, it was already beginning to make a difference. By the end of Joe’s limited tour, done to show support and to satisfy his own curiosity, he couldn’t shake the conviction that-the extent of damage notwithstanding-the worst of it would be dealt with quickly and practically.

Just as clearly, the same was not going to be true for some of the problems that his VBI had picked up overnight. Phones were down, cell towers damaged, electricity was out, e-mail was affected-not all of it universally, some of it not even badly-but simply getting around was already a problem. Statewide, thirteen entire communities had been effectively sealed off from the surrounding world, with all roads and bridges cut. And some, like Wilmington, Waterbury, Halifax, Killington, Rochester, and others, had suffered devastating damage to the hearts of their downtowns.

For the short term, at least, pursuing police work was going to be a challenge. Standard operations were about to be made “flexible,” in the words of one memo.

For example, while the Vermont Bureau of Investigation was designed to operate with five interlinked squads-one in each of the four corners, and a headquarters unit at the Department of Public Safety in Waterbury-for a while, that neatly diagrammed command structure had been abruptly rendered more free-flowing.

As the residents of the state hospital had discovered overnight, that entire campus, housing some fifteen hundred state workers-including the VBI administration-had abruptly become an abandoned, soggy ghost town. Fortunately, the DPS building had suffered the least, and was likely to be reoccupied soon, but that lay in the future. In the meantime, the VBI office there was empty, and they’d all just received news-very quietly delivered-that one of the hospital’s patients had gone missing.

As Joe found out upon returning from his field trip.

“Did he just wander off into the rain?” he asked Lester after hearing of it, sitting at his desk and struggling to replace his rubber boots with a pair of shoes.

“She,” Lester corrected. “And yeah, in a sense. Found a way into the tunnels and basically evaporated. Search and rescue did their thing, but no luck so far.”

“So far?” Joe looked up. “That mean they’ve kicked it to us, or are they still looking?”

Lester gave him a crooked smile. “Little of each, I guess. I don’t think we’re in the world of hard-and-fast right now.”

Joe tied his second shoe and straightened. “Great. So, now we’ve got two missing persons cases.”

Willy was sitting at his corner desk, his feet, as usual, propped up on its surface. “Better’n a couple of dumb floaters,” he said.

“You got another?” Lester asked, not having been updated on Joe and Willy’s nighttime escapade.

Willy shrugged with his right shoulder. “Coffin filled with rocks. Might mean somebody faked his own death; might mean something more complicated.”

Sammie laughed as she filled her coffee cup at the side counter they used as a kitchenette. “You’d love that, wouldn’t you?”

“Totally,” he agreed, unconsciously touching the Band-Aid over his eye, happy to have survived his impromptu swim in the river, and her accompanying wrath.

“Well, brace yourselves,” Joe told them all. “We may get more MIAs as people sort out who’s where and who’s not, but for us, and for the time being, there’s no doubt that a live, roaming mental patient takes priority over a coffin filled with rocks.” He looked at Spinney. “Give us what you got.”

Lester consulted his notes. “Carolyn Barber. One of the few long-timers. Right now, with all the computers down, the building evacuated, and the staff scattered, it’s a little tough getting particulars, but I was told she’d been there for decades, which is super rare, and that she was a peaceful soul, kept to herself, never caused trouble. That was one of the things that surprised them when she went missing. They get some over-the-top funny farm candidates there, and they watch those like hawks, but not Barber. The guy I spoke with said she was like a shadow, just drifting around. Kinda poetic.”

“Great,” Willy snorted. “We’ll lure her out playing sitar music on a loudspeaker.”

“If she was so laid back,” Sammie asked, “then why wasn’t she put into a halfway house or something? I thought that’s what they did nowadays.”

“They do,” Les agreed. “But she was a special case. My source didn’t know why. Maybe it was money or connections. He said he didn’t think she had any family-hadn’t had a visitor as far back as he could remember.”

“How old?” Joe asked.

“Seventies,” Lester continued. “They nicknamed her the Governor. I guess she was delusional or something. Claimed she’d actually been governor once.”

“Huh,” Joe let out, tapping his forehead. “She was.”

“The Governor?” Lester asked him. “Really? I asked this guy. He said they checked, just so they wouldn’t get a nasty surprise someday. There was no record of Carolyn Barber being head of state.”

“It wasn’t official,” Joe explained. “I don’t remember the date, or any of the circumstances, but it was either a publicity stunt or a political slap in the face, or who knows what-maybe half a century ago. At the time, they made it out to be a show of democracy in action-to take an ordinary citizen and make her Governor-for-a-Day. Who knows what they were thinking? But the shit hit the fan as a result-some people saying the real guy should take the hint; others saying it was a sham and an outrage. Nobody thought it was a good idea, and it was never done again. Those were times of big transition-when the state was shifting from being one of the most conservative in the country to what it is today, so all sorts of fur was flying back then. Even so, this stood out in my mind. It was pretty crazy when you think of it.” He paused and smiled, adding, “She was pretty cute, too. I remember seeing a picture. That probably added to it being all the rage around the dinner table.”

“Our dinner table conversation was all sports, all the time,” Spinney commented.

“Mine was dead silence,” Sammie said reactively, before looking around as if wishing she’d kept quiet.

Willy wasn’t sharing. He asked, “Who was she? The governor’s secretary or something?”

Joe shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’m drawing a blank. Maybe an additional point was that she had no affiliation. Anyhow, the punch line here is that she’s not totally nuts, claiming to have been the governor.”

“Well,” said Lester, bringing them back on track, “she’s a missing person now.”

A generalized pause greeted that comment, as they all reflected on the difficulties of a run-of-the-mill missing person case-never easy at the best of times-now superimposed onto a state infrastructure in serious disrepair.