Archer Mayor - Three Can Keep a Secret

Leo Gunther gingerly closed the squeaky door of his beloved and battered Ford Mustang and glanced up at the low-hanging sky. He was a butcher by trade, a collector of vintage cars from the ’60s, who still lived with his mother on the family homestead. But while also the second son of a lifelong Vermont farmer, now long passed on, he wasn’t any more connected to the soil or dependent upon the weather than the average bank teller. Even as a kid, he’d mostly only accompanied his taciturn father back and forth along the dry dirt runnels of the family’s cornfields. But traditions remained, and his weather eye was always on the lookout, as were so many others, across this mountainous, rural, ancient New England state.

Especially today.

Leo crossed the parking lot, pulled open the door to Mitchell’s Dry Goods, and exchanged the charged, gunmetal outdoors for the dimly lighted embrace of a cluttered, tight-fitting country store, jammed with cans and boxes lining bowed wooden shelves, and crowded with square-built men holding Styrofoam cups in blunt-fingered hands. Mitchell’s was where local loggers, farmers, heavy equipment operators, and the town road crew met every dawn to authoritatively trade information about everything, anything, and everyone within their combined realm of knowledge.

Except that on this Sunday, no one was headed to work, and it was already long past dawn.

“Leo,” one of the men called out over the noise of the TV set mounted in the corner, near the stained ceiling. “What d’ya think?”

Leo shrugged as he crossed to the magnum-sized coffeemaker and poured himself a cup. There was only one topic of conversation that morning. “I think Irene is a lousy name for a hurricane.”

“Tropical storm,” corrected someone, to an underswell of mutterings.

“Whatever,” a third intoned, “I think it’ll be a rainy day-that’s it. These weather guys’re just looking for better ratings.”

A heavy, bearded man laughed as Leo turned to look at the TV screen. “That’s no rainy day, Jesse. That reporter’s in Jersey, and he looks like he’s drowning.”

“They said wind. There’s no wind out there.”

Leo quietly nursed his coffee. Mitchell, of the name above the door, had been running this store for forty years, handing out free coffee to all of them-although readily accepting donations, which were surprisingly forthcoming-and acting like both the town’s radio station and newspaper, since the greater Thetford township hosted neither amenity. Located near high-profile Hanover, New Hampshire-just across the Connecticut River-Thetford had been all but eclipsed by its neighbor’s ritzier reputation.

In truth, Leo’s own butcher shop across the street bragged of the proximity in its advertisements, which worked to lure meat lovers from thirty miles away. It had helped propel him from homegrown boy to businessman of renown, featured in glossy travel and food magazines, and even the occasional television piece out of Boston.

“The governor made it sound pretty bad,” he said softly, recalling the recently declared state of emergency.

“What the hell does she know?” someone said darkly. “Goddamn hippie New Yorker.”

Leo smiled. Their chief executive had been that, first appearing in Vermont decades earlier at a commune outside Brattleboro. He knew her well. His brother, Joe, had dated her for years. But she would forever be a flatlander with this crowd. No getting around it. That was just the way it was in Vermont.

Which hadn’t stopped her being elected governor. Probably helped, in fact.

Leo pointed with his chin at the screen. “I’m with Mitch-she knows enough to look at those satellite pictures. Irene’s a big girl. I think we’re gonna get the brunt of her.”

“The National Guard’s been put on alert,” a voice added somberly.

“I heard the power company’s doubled its crews.”

“It’s the wind,” Mitch said from behind his counter. “That’s the killer, every time.”

“It’s not the wind; it’s the flooding,” someone countered. “Always has been; always will.”

“There is no wind,” the same voice repeated from earlier.

That had struck Leo as well. He drifted over to a window overlooking the dirt parking lot, foreseeing its dull silver surface becoming pockmarked by raindrops. He’d heard that Irene had produced winds of 110 miles per hour at her peak, a few days ago, down south. Even Governor Zigman had mentioned strong winds. Winds were attentiongetters. Mitch was right there. Cars, houses, power lines. The whole state could look like a pile of pick-up sticks if Irene got pissed off. Leo was old enough to have seen similar damage from tornadoes and ice storms.

But water was worse, as proven by those wet reporters. Water could make wind look like a minor irritation. Vermont was called the Green Mountain State for good reason. It was a dented, twisted, punched-out washboard from overhead, with barely a flat acre across its surface. And it featured a dinosaur-aged spinal column of mountain peaks down its middle, which forced the roads to parallel a spidery maze of waterways lining the bottoms of countless valleys, ravines, and vales. There were dams here and there, put up during the Depression after a couple of killer floods, but Vermont had grown since then, with more people, more pavement, and more communities. As far as Leo was concerned, Gail Zigman was right-they were in for something big. The water would come guttering down the slopes, accumulating in mass and strength until it became its own uncontainable force, capable of feats beyond imagining.

Leo knew that much from personal experience. He had been in and around water all his life. Fishing, swimming, canoeing, hiking along its edge. He’d come to see it as a noncompressible, shape-changing solid-heavy, forceful, and relentless. As a member of his local fire department, he’d helped extract more bodies than he could recall from one watery embrace or another, and they’d all looked the same: pale blue, limp and pruney, smeared with silt and often bruised and battered-drained of vitality in a way peculiar to drownings, as if the water had sucked the heart out of them.

He looked through the window again into the thick, laden, featureless sky, the coffee mug-ironically, to his way of thinking-warm and comforting near his chest.

He didn’t feel good about any of this.

Time to head back home.

* * *

Willy Kunkle stopped in his tracks, forcing Joe to come up short behind him. “You gotta be shitting me.”

Kunkle squatted down in the dim light behind the gas station. “This guy doesn’t need jail time. He needs therapy.”

Joe Gunther crouched beside his colleague to see what had caught his attention. It was a wet, banded wad of dollar bills, still startlingly crisp, even in the rain.

“He dropped it?” he asked rhetorically.

“More like it fell out of his stupid bag.” Willy looked over his shoulder and gestured for Ron Klesczewski, head of Brattleboro’s detective squad.

Joe stood back up, as much to ease his knees as to minimize the amount of water soaking his pants. It had been raining for several hours by now, from well before sunup, and was slated to get worse. He stepped out of the way to let Ron in. They were working a gas station robbery together-the PD and Joe’s own Brattleboro-based Vermont Bureau of Investigation squad. Normally, the locals would have handled it on their own, but Ron was alone this morning, his small team having worked late into the night, trying to coax people away from the trailers and affordable housing units that were located-as they were commonly across the country-among the lower-cost floodplains.