In the Evil Day Read online

  John admired the men who came back to the North Country from World War II. They were youngsters who had gone from these shops and mills and hill farms directly into the pages of the New York Times and the terrible history being written there. “They had seen the worst that human beings could do, and came out of it determined to accomplish the best they could do,” John wrote in another column. “So they wanted three things out of the rest of their lives: raise their kids as well as they could, build strong and safe communities, and have a hell of a good time doing it.”

  It made for a personality type, he thought, long on zest and conviviality, short on sanctimony or cynicism—a guy like Bunny, for example: a hell of a fisherman, always good company out on the water, and of course someone who nearly became John’s father-in-law. John was still single—his marriage to Belinda, his college sweetheart, broke up a few years after Katie was born—and more and more John liked to think that he and Vickie weren’t quite done with each other. Bunny might yet become his father-in-law, and Vickie might yet be waking up with him each morning on South Hill. It was something to think about.

  In either event, John and the old man would go fishing that day. John planned to finish the Times, digest his coffee, make a quick stop at the Sentinel Building, have a little more coffee at the Wilderness while needling his fellow Kiwanians just enough to keep sanctimony at bay, and then be back at the Sentinel by eight. That would be about when Dennis and Susan and the rest of the staff would start showing up, along with Vickie, who ran her law practice out of the office once occupied by Fred Harrigan.

  Then John would answer his mail, write the editorial for this week’s issue, and help on a consulting basis with the proofing and pasteup of everything else. He figured he’d have done enough of that by 2:00 p.m. and be at the opposite end of a canoe from Bunny soon thereafter. They might go to Fish Pond, which was still full of trout in August, despite being so close to town. He thought Bunny and Irene were going out to their cabin on that pond anyway. But they’d settle that at the Wilderness.

  John went out at six, pleased to be in just his shirtsleeves. It would take only a few minutes to drive three and a half miles into town, but first he had to check on the livestock: a dozen sheep and three goats. He needed to make sure none had disappeared in the night, that the fences were sound, that the herd had enough water. Then he had to walk the rest of the grounds as well, just to see that things were in order, that nothing had gone amiss while stuff was moving around in the dark. The sheep and goats were all in the pasture across the road, near enough for him to hear the sheep bleating as he walked down his driveway. The air was cool and clean. It felt like aftershave on his skin. Kane came up behind him and walked like a small pony at his side.

  John halted for a moment at the road, which dropped down toward town between guardian trunks of sugar maples, just to drink it all in. This was the best vista for what he describes as his “thirty-five mile view, the point from which I can gaze over the sovereign ground of one state—New Hampshire—and two foreign countries—Canada and Vermont.”

  The foreign countries unrolled before him, one blending into the other in a dew-laden quilt of cow pastures and second-growth forest. To the southwest, just across the Connecticut River, the forested bulk of Monadnock Mountain was turning a jade green in the early light.

  This was going to be a fine day, John thought—not good enough for the news to go on holiday, probably, but good enough to go fishing.

  Twenty-six years before John Harrigan woke that morning, one night in the summer of 1971, a small doe was killed on the Columbia stretch of Route 3. A young New Hampshire Fish & Game conservation officer named Eric Stohl got a call at home from his troop dispatcher in Colebrook. “The driver wants the meat,” the dispatcher said. “Can you go handle that?”

  In New Hampshire, motorists can claim the carcasses of deer or moose they happen to kill so long as they are state residents and they notify Fish & Game. The officer’s job is to ascertain no obvious intent to kill on the part of the motorist, record the sex of the animal, and issue a possession/transportation tag. Stohl got into his uniform and drove his cruiser to the intersection of Route 3—which follows the banks of the Connecticut River and is the main artery through the valley—and Columbia Bridge Road, which angles off Route 3 to cross a covered bridge into Lemington, Vermont.

  Stohl arrived a little before 8:00 p.m. at a spot on Route 3 where it rounds a bend and drops down a mild slope. A rampart of rock and brush, the rock scrawled with graffiti, rose sharply from the east side of the road. To the west, just across the New Hampshire Central’s railroad tracks, a field of half-grown corn stretched to the river. A late ’60s-model Ford station wagon, pale yellow with faux wood siding and New Hampshire plates, was on the shoulder with its emergency lights flashing. A man got out of the driver’s seat as Stohl pulled up behind the Ford and turned on his light rack. The man was six feet, a few inches over, lean and wiry through the chest and shoulders. “Good evening,” Stohl said.

  “Hi there.”

  In the pulse of the Ford’s blinkers, Stohl could see the carcass lying in a heap of fur and splayed legs on the traffic side of the road shoulder and several feet behind the station wagon. The man’s face was hard to see in the failing light. Then it was lit up in the headlights of a south-bound truck: a broad forehead, like a billboard, with high eyebrows and deep-set eyes, high cheekbones, the lips hewed thin across a strong, assertive chin. Both eyebrows had a pointed arch, like a couple of cats faced off for a fight. It was a skeptical sort of face, with nothing written on the billboard. Stohl guessed the man was in the neighborhood of forty.

  “Looks like you had a little run-in tonight,” Stohl said.

  The man stared back at Stohl. “Looks like I did.”

  “We got your call. So you live nearby?”

  “Well, there’s a house just up the other side of that bend. I called from there. They let me use the phone.”

  The voice was quiet, with a resonance that made it sound deeper than it really was. Stohl waited a moment for the account of the accident that usually follows unprompted at this point. Finally he said, “Deer jump in front of you, did it?”

  The man nodded. “Just like it was waiting for me. Banged up my fender, scared living hell out of my wife.”

  Stohl saw that there was a passenger in the car. “From which side of the road?”

  “This side. The cornfield.”

  Stohl walked to the front of the station wagon with the driver following. He squatted in front of the grille. “That right fender. Right there,” the driver said. “Where the hell did it think it was going? Nothing but rock on the other side.”

  Stohl could see that this was where the deer had struck, but couldn’t see much damage: a ragged crimp, feathered in clumps of fine brown fur, on one side of the headlight frame, the paint still intact. He went back to examine the deer, which might have been sleeping, except that its legs stretched for something they couldn’t quite reach and its fixed black eye looked more mineral than animal in the yellow pulse of the blinkers, the blue strobe of the cruiser’s light rack. A chorus of crickets, singing in the cornfield, swelled in the wake of a car heading north to Colebrook.

  “She’s a doe,” Stohl said. “Not a big one. Maybe 125 pounds. I’d say she got hit in the head. Could have been a lot worse.”

  “Could’ve left us alone too. My wife’s still in there beside herself.”

  “Are you a hunter?” The man shrugged, then nodded. “Looks like you got your deer early this year.”

  “Well, we’ll get something out of this, at least.”

  “Your wife like venison?”

  The man finally volunteered a smile. “Not so much, I guess, but I like the way she cooks it.”

  Stohl smiled as well. “All right if I see your license, sir?” He didn’t mean to make this sound like a traffic stop, but he was struck by how swiftly the man’s smile vanished. “Just to confirm you’re a state resident.”
/>   The man shrugged again, finally, and reached for his wallet. Eric went back to his cruiser to log the incident into his duty journal and fill out the tag. The name on the license was “Carl Drega.” He noticed that the street address was in Bow, a little town about the size of Columbia and just south of Concord, in the central part of the state. Drega had gone to sit with his wife. He got out again when Stohl walked back to the deer.

  “So you live in Bow,” Stohl said.

  “That’s right.”

  “I was stationed down there for five years. But we lived on the other side of town from you. What kind of work do you do?”

  “Millwright mostly. Or carpenter.”

  Stohl mentioned the names of men he knew in the building industry around Bow. Drega said he didn’t know them, that he often traveled to his jobs.

  “Did you grow up there?”

  “No—I’m from Connecticut.”

  “So you’re up here on vacation.”

  “No, Rita’s from around here—Groveton. We bought some land on the river in Columbia. Just last year.”

  Stohl nodded and smiled. “Little getaway place?”

  “No, we’re gonna move up here for good—someday. Kick back, watch the river go by.” He turned to look at the covered bridge, left open to the wind on its north side, and then swept his eyes over the railroad tracks, the stalks of corn, and the crowns of the hardwoods rising from the riverbank. They came to rest, finally, on the woman in the car, who sat in the front seat with her head bowed, her face obscured. “I suppose you could call it a getaway place.”

  Stohl knelt to fasten the tag to one of the doe’s sticklike legs. “This is just in case anybody asks you how you got this.”

  “Huh—what business would it be of theirs?”

  “I’m thinking of another game officer, for example, or a policeman.”

  “Oh—I get you.”

  Stohl straightened. A sedan came fast around the bend, braking to a near skid at the sight of Stohl’s cruiser. Then its taillights dwindled slowly toward Groveton as the crickets kept fiddling in the corn.

  “Thanks,” Drega said. “I appreciate your coming out here so fast.”

  “Glad to do it. You need help lifting this into the wagon?”

  “That’s all right. I can manage.”

  “Okay, then—enjoy your steaks.”

  Stohl sat in his cruiser and finished filling out his duty journal, ready to help in case there was trouble handling the doe. But Drega stayed with his wife in the car for as long as it took Stohl to finish his journal. At last Stohl turned off his light rack, swung his cruiser into Columbia Bridge Road, backed onto Route 3, and headed home. The couple from Bow remained in the Ford, its blinkers still flashing and getting brighter in the dark, the doe stiffening in a stunned heap on the pavement beneath its bumper.

  By 1997 Eric Stohl was the lieutenant in charge of Fish & Game’s Region 1 district, which is to say, the North Country—that portion of New Hampshire, about a third of the state but containing less than 5 percent of its population, above the White Mountains. He was a member of Colebrook’s Congregational church, a fishing companion of Bunny Bunnell, and would become a representative in the state legislature—Coös County District 1, the same seat once occupied by his grandfather.

  His career in law enforcement, however, had introduced him to some people quite different from those he and his wife, Lois, knew at the Congregational church, and at some point he began sleeping with a loaded handgun, a Smith & Wesson .38 Chief Special, near his bed. This calls to mind something Vickie Bunnell—from her own experience in law enforcement—once told her father: “If you knew who lived in some of these places in the back woods, you wouldn’t sleep at night.”

  The Stohls lived in the Bungy Loop—meaning Bungy Road and its offshoots, that backwoods web of dirt roads off Routes 3 and 26, a lattice straddling the Colebrook and Columbia town lines, angling past Fish Pond and the little cabin Sliver Bunnell built in the summer before Pearl Harbor. Vickie lived on the Loop as well, in a house she rented from a family that spent most of each year in Bermuda. That house was on the slope of Blue Mountain, about a quarter mile from the Stohls as the crow flies, or else a five-minute drive down Bungy and up Stoddard Road.

  And one night in February 1997, on her way home from work, Vickie knocked on the Stohls’ front door. Then, calmly, she asked Eric if she might borrow his Smith & Wesson for just a bit.

  In fact Stohl had offered to loan her the weapon before. He knew she had a gun in her house, a 20-gauge double-barreled Parker shotgun that she used for hunting grouse with her English setter, Tallak. But circumstances had become such—Stohl thought—that she needed something she could conceal on her person and use in tight quarters. At first Vickie dismissed the whole idea. Then something happened to change her mind, and she ordered a handgun through Ducret’s Sporting Goods in Colebrook, almost next door to the newspaper building where she worked. But that piece hadn’t arrived yet, and now something else had happened. Vickie wouldn’t say what—only that she’d sleep better if she had a gun under her pillow that night.

  Stohl fetched the .38, but then he had to show her how to use it. For a moment she just stared at the revolver as it lay on the kitchen table: a balled-up fist of stainless steel, its heft cut cunningly with chambers and slots and levers, with a pretty walnut grip that looked warm to the touch. Vickie had grown up with the rifles and shotguns that her father kept for hunting, and had learned from Sliver and Bunny how to use them. But this was different. This was something stamped with that uncanny beauty miniatures possess, and built for no other purpose than to kill or maim another person at close range.

  Stohl wasn’t sure what sort of gun Vickie had ordered. He thought it might have been a .25, something people in law enforcement call a woman’s gun—lighter and even easier to hide, a good belly gun that could in fact kill you, but only after a while. This Chief Special was more expeditiously lethal.

  He broke out the cylinder and sent its five blunt-nosed bullets clattering across the table. He showed Vickie how she could fire by cocking the hammer with her thumb or else allowing the trigger to pull the hammer back. She did some dry firing and got used to pulling the trigger. It took only moderate pressure for the hammer to move, to rise and snap down with a crisp metallic snick.

  Stohl advised her not to shoot with her arm extended, but with her elbows tucked into her ribs, both hands around the grip. Even in plain sight, even in Vickie’s small hands, the gun seemed nearly to disappear, to nest as easily in her palm as a set of brass knuckles. Stohl noted approvingly that there was no wiggle to its barrel, no shake to her hands.

  “And once you start shooting, you should keep shooting until the cylinder is empty,” he added. “Five shots are generally enough to take care of the situation. If they’re not, well—you won’t have time to reload.”

  Finally she slipped the .38, reloaded, into her purse. Then Stohl suggested she wait there while he went alone to check her house. Vickie said no, that wasn’t necessary, but finally she was persuaded that it was. “Anybody can find out where you live,” Stohl said.

  Lois served some tea and sat with Vickie at the kitchen table. Lois wondered what you talk about with a woman who goes home from work every day with just her dog to an isolated rental, who contemplates shooting another person in self-defense, has just acquired the means to do so, and thinks she might be spending her five rounds that very night. Lois guessed you don’t say anything about that, and they talked about her day at work. In fact her day at work was part of the problem, but Vickie could linger with an old friend and talk around it, her hands easy on the teacup, the .38 in her purse, and Eric prowling about her house. She smiled and chatted, summoning a laugh now and then, as if she had come to borrow an egg.

  But she couldn’t stay long—being Vickie, and least of all because someone told her to. Meanwhile Stohl, packing his service revolver in a holster at his waist, had found the driveway untracked. He parked and went ar
ound the house, a two-story Cape, where the glancing beam of his flashlight showed that the snow lay undisturbed. He made a wider circle, extending into the woods, slogging his way through the drifts, and then a wider one beyond that. He was just returning to the house when he saw a pair of headlights knife down the driveway. “Who the hell is this?” he wondered. He wasn’t surprised, really, to see Vickie’s Jeep pull up next to his truck. “I thought I told you to stay put,” he said.

  Vickie patted her purse. “Thought maybe I should rescue you if you were pinned down.”

  And since he was there anyway, Vickie wondered if Stohl might go with her into the house. They went through the porch and into the living room. Stohl poked about in the other rooms. Nothing seemed amiss, and Tallak was calm. He told her again, as he had several times that night, to call him any time she needed help.

  “Sure. Thank you, Eric—really.” Then she gave him a hug at the door of his pickup.

  He pulled out of the driveway mildly astonished. Vickie wasn’t usually a hugger—as friendly as a day in spring, but not a hugger. As he turned onto Bungy Road’s smooth white macadam of snow and sand and ice, not far from Marshall Hill, Stohl remembered that Marshall Hill Road used to be notorious in mud season, rougher than a cob each spring. But the summer before last, the town of Columbia widened the road, paved it, and put in culverts. That was just after Vickie had completed the second of her two terms as a Columbia selectman, from 1988 to 1995, and at the last town meeting Vickie rose as a private citizen to complain that the highway department had wasted money on that project. Then she made a motion to cut the department’s budget in half.