In the Evil Day Read online

  The moderator wondered if anyone else wished to comment. “I would have to disagree with my learned colleague,” Stohl offered. He explained that in his view the department had done an excellent job on a road that needed improvement, and he saw no reason to reduce its budget.

  The question was put to a vote. “All those in favor of the motion, please stand.” Stohl was nonplussed when Lois, in the seat next to his, rose to stand with Vickie. He was more so when the votes were tallied in Vickie’s favor.

  Stohl granted himself a rueful smile. Bottom line, Vickie just didn’t want anything like civilization—or its conveniences or its improvements—back there in the woods where she lived. And most anyone who drove up Marshall Hill had four-wheel drive anyway. She was right—the hot-top wasn’t needed, and now the road was ridge-backed all winter with frost heaves.

  But these woods could feel a little too wild when it was just you, and you were afraid. Stohl remembered how small Vickie had looked in his rearview mirror as she and Tallak had watched him pull away. He still had no idea what had happened that day, but he could guess it involved his old friend—a phrase Stohl used with all due irony—Carl Drega. And he knew Vickie wouldn’t forgive him if he mentioned this to Bunny or Irene, or her brother, Earl, or any of her friends. “You and the state police know what’s going on,” she said. “That’s enough.”

  He didn’t hear from Vickie again that night, and he checked to make sure she showed up at the office the next morning. When the handgun she had ordered arrived a week or two later, Vickie returned the .38 to Eric with all five rounds.

  One of the odd circumstances of the events of August 19, 1997—among many—was the fact that the nineteenth was a Tuesday, press day at the News and Sentinel. Since then the usual milepost anniversaries have been marked: the first, the fifth, the tenth, and so on, more so by outside media than people in Colebrook, who choose to observe the date in their own way. But the first authentic anniversary occurred only when the days of the week allied with the moon as they had in 1997, and the nineteenth fell once again on a Tuesday.

  It was 2008, and on the Monday evening before, a thunderhead settled over Monadnock. Travelers coming up through Franconia Notch and along Route 3 saw heat lightning to the north. It came in sheets of light that burst soundlessly from the mountain and the clouds, as though the sky were an empty warehouse whose banks of fluorescent lights were being flicked on and off. Later, threads of fire dropped in spooky silence to the earth. At eight o’clock the thunderhead burst in volleys of wind, rain, and artillery fire. It was the soundtrack, perhaps, of that display over Titus Hill.

  Up on South Hill, John Harrigan began to reach for his phone. He and Vickie had shared a love of thunderstorms, and John got in the habit of calling her when one arrived. They would bet dinner on whether the storm would go up the Mohawk Valley and over to the Bungy Loop where she was or else veer northeast over South Hill. That night he felt no more than the impulse and then, once more, gave it up. He called out to his wife, Nancee, to make sure that the windows were closed as the storm rolled over the hill. A few minutes later the lights went dark in Colebrook and in towns across the river.

  Bunny and Eric Stohl were out fishing at Perley-Terrill Pond, off Indian Stream Road, north of Colebrook. They had enjoyed a meal of venison burgers cooked over a gas grill, had caught seven brook trout, and were paddling back to shore when the storm broke. Bunny sat in the truck, enjoying one of the privileges of age (eighty-two) as Stohl hurried to disassemble the fly rods in the drenching rain. Then Eric came dripping into the cab, and they waited for a lull in the rain to go out and load the canoe. The one-lane dirt road was turning to mud beneath them as they left the pond, as Stohl swerved to avoid a spruce that had blown down partly across the road. They got back to Bunny’s house in Canaan, on the Vermont side of the river, just as the lights flickered back on at eight thirty.

  Irene brewed tea and told Stohl that the angels had been bowling in heaven. “That’s what we’d tell the two kids whenever there was thunder,” she said. The angels bowled a while longer as Bunny cleaned the fish and Irene served the tea. Bunny sat down and added a dollop of whiskey—“a little oh-be-joyful,” he said—to Stohl’s cup and his own.

  In the morning Irene was up early, as she always was, and so was Bunny, who usually slept in. Another privilege of age, accruing only to longtime Kiwanis Club members, was the freedom to attend club meetings, or not, as they chose. Bunny had had trouble sleeping and had not so chosen in some time. But the Moose Festival, an annual three-day event mounted in Colebrook and several neighboring communities, was scheduled for next weekend. The Kiwanians had some fund-raisers planned on behalf of their scholarships and other philanthropies—a barbecued chicken dinner, a bluegrass concert, a few raffles—and Bunny’s sense of duty brought him stiff and blinking into the morning light, which drenched his bean stalks and tomato plants and flower gardens outside, then poured in a freshet through the living room’s picture window.

  Monadnock rose nearly out of the Bunnells’ backyard. The Connecticut River was in front, on the other side of Route 102. Bunny and Irene had come to live in Vermont more by happenstance than design: Irene was pregnant with Vickie in 1952, and houses were cheaper on that side of the river. They found it to be a good place to raise kids, and Bunny served on the Canaan school board for a while. “But we only sleep here,” Bunny always said to those who asked. “We’ve lived our whole lives in New Hampshire.”

  Nonetheless, Bunny was treated like an illegal alien on his way into the Wilderness Restaurant at 7:00 a.m. “Haven’t seen you in a while,” one man said on the sidewalk outside. “So they let you across the bridge, did they?”

  Assuming the role assigned to him, Bunny said, “I’m just here as part of my missionary pact.”

  Another man observed that the border must be open this morning. “They do a body cavity search?”

  “Yes, and now they’re sorrier than I am,” said Bunny.

  The Wilderness was an old-fashioned meat-and-potatoes place, and the meeting took place in a narrow room off its dining section, a space that also served as a bar. A row of six circular tables stretched like a dotted line between, on one side, the pool table, the marble-top bar and its stools, and the mirrors and beer spigots and squadrons of liquor bottles and, on the other, the two American flags, the four blue-and-gold Kiwanis banners tacked to the wall, and the rectangular folding table at which sat the club’s officers. Some thirty people, mostly men middle-aged or older, in baseball caps and jeans or chinos, milled about and settled in.

  John Harrigan was among those seated at the table beneath the Bud Light clock. Bunny made his way to a middle table and was ribbed from all directions about his state of origin these past fifty-six years, his Vermont-style left-leaning politics, his recent spotty attendance. Bunny gave as good as he got. The man seated next to him shook his head. “Not many compliments available here,” he said.

  There were no compliments even for Brad Brooks, given an award last spring (Bunny providing the certificate and handshake) as the club’s Lay Person of the Year. That day it was the task of this trim, bespectacled man—a retired car dealer and utility company executive—to lead the singing that followed the opening prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. After the pledge, a few dozen dog-eared songbooks were passed around. Still standing, the membership joined a cappella in melodically approximate versions of “We Are Kiwanis” and “America the Beautiful.” After the second song, Brad glanced around the room. “Did everybody get a book?” he asked.

  “I propose a fine,” shouted a man at the table next to Bunny’s.

  “What for?” asked club president Judy Houghton, a social worker, from behind a microphone at the officers’ table. One chair at this table was empty, had been routinely left so for the past eleven years.

  “Brad asked too late about the books. Obviously he should have asked before we started singing. What’s the point now?”

  “All in favor?” said Judy.
“Opposed?” The ayes overwhelmed the nays by volume, narrowly. “The ayes carry. Fine imposed.” A man with a piggy bank materialized almost instantly beside Brooks, who sheepishly dug into his pants pocket for a quarter and never found out if everyone had a book.

  Other twenty-five-cent fines followed, all proposed from the ranks: for talking during the Key Club report by a student from the high school; for being late getting raffle tickets ready for the Fourth of July events; for not addressing officers by their proper titles. One officer, Vice President John Falconer, was fined “for being John Falconer.” The ayes carried.

  Some members volunteered to contribute the larger deposits known as “Happy Dollars.” One man stood to say that his niece had married a fine young gentleman last weekend, and stuffed a dollar bill into the bank. Judy Houghton chipped in, saying that she had now gone seven years without cigarettes.

  John Harrigan, dollar in hand, rose to say that he had some good news as well. “My first grandson, John Peter Harrigan,” he said, “has finally reached the age where he actually looks like a person instead of a Frank Perdue oven-stuffer chicken. Now I’m just trying not to have him called Johnny, which you all know is a hospital gown.”

  “As opposed to John,” cried a voice from another table, “which is a toilet.”

  Amid the laughter, Bunny tried to recall if Vickie had a Happy Dollar to contribute on this day eleven years ago. In fact he remembered nothing of that Kiwanis meeting, though he knew that Vickie did have a favorable event to report. Later that day in 1997, after lunch, Bunny went into Colebrook again to get the mail, but only after picking a bouquet of flowers from his garden—day lilies, petunias, hollyhock, and blue delphiniums. Then he drove across the river and up Bridge Street to Vickie’s office in the News and Sentinel Building.

  Dennis Joos and Susan Zizza and the rest of the newspaper staff were there, all working hard, but not John Harrigan, who had been called unexpectedly to the Democrat down in Lancaster. Bunny stopped at the front desk and left a message with Jana Riley (advertising) for John to call him, though Bunny couldn’t say now in respect to what.

  Then he carried his flowers past the desk of Chandra Coviello (advertising design) and into the office once occupied by Fred Harrigan, the office to which Bunny had delivered mail every day while he worked at the post office, after Sliver had died and the barbershop had closed. Vickie, with her tousled hair, brown with red highlights, and her snapping brown eyes, sat at her desk. Tallak asleep on the couch. Those eyes lit up when she saw her father and the bouquet, which had been put into one of Irene’s vases. “No special reason,” he told her. “Just passing through.”

  He set the vase on her desk and went back out, stopping at the door, near the coat rack from which hung her judge’s robe. “She was happier than a clam in a mud bank,” Bunny remembered. “All her clients were taken care of, and she was going to close the office at the end of the week. Then she was off to the Mediterranean for a one-week cruise with Warren and Ann Brown. They had a sailboat there.”

  The Browns, known locally as the Browns of Bermuda, were the people from whom Vickie rented her house and were more friends and admirers than landlords. They had decided to extend their cruise from one to six weeks, and Vickie had just heard that she was welcome for the whole time. But she was saving that news as a surprise for her parents. Bunny would learn that she had intended to tell them just before she left the next week. Even the one-week version of her vacation, though, would have sufficed for a Happy Dollar at the Kiwanis Club.

  Bunny reminded her about dinner later at the cabin on Fish Pond, and then he saw a day lily with a crooked stalk leaning clear on one side of the bouquet. “Look at that one,” he said to Vickie. “It’s peeking around the corner at you.”

  Vickie laughed and peeked back at it as her father disappeared around the corner and into the balance of his life.

  2

  “THE SWEET SMELL OF NEWSPRINT”

  WHILE JOHN HARRIGAN WAS CHECKING his livestock that morning in 1997, Julie Roy was at the cash register of J.R.’s Minimart in Pittsburg, population about nine hundred, some twenty miles north of Colebrook and the last town before the Canadian border. Julie and her husband combined management and labor at this convenience store and deli. They offered glossy magazines and locally tied fishing flies, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and homemade muffins, Snapple soft drinks and quarts of strong coffee. They sold to the hunters and fishermen from away in the summer, to the snowmobilers in the winter, but survived on the loyalty of their Pittsburg regulars.

  One such was a state trooper who lived in Pittsburg. Les Lord—some called him Les, others used his boyhood nickname, Lucky—came in at 6:30 a.m., as was his custom when he was on duty at 7:00. If he was late, he’d call Troop F down in Twin Mountain to clock in while still paying for his coffee and doughnut. But he wasn’t late that day, and it only seemed like the laugh arrived before he did, that rumbling chortle that always rolled ahead of him like a tidal swell. For Julie and the regulars—that morning it was Sonny, Howard, Ray, and Dennis—that laugh was another kind of caffeine, a different version of the lights coming on. At the counter Lord spooned sugar into his coffee, put on his chipmunk grin, and traded gossip and repartee with the boys.

  Most of that day’s commentary had to do with age, Viagra, senility, and the privilege of growing old—“which beats the alternative,” observed Lord. At forty-five, he was eighteen months from the date he had set for retiring from the state police, and Julie knew he wasn’t just counting the days—he was tallying up the hours, marking off the minutes.

  Lord was out the door at 6:40. “Hey, Lucky,” someone called after him. “How about a ride in that shiny new cruiser they gave you?”

  “Any day now,” Lord promised. “We just need a little more evidence.”

  Lord nearly collided with his wife, Beverly, at the door. Bev laughed, shook her head, ordered coffee and a Danish. Julie remembered her own supply of coffee at home was getting low. She wondered if her friend Kim Richards might be going shopping at LaPerle’s IGA. If so, she’d see if Kim wanted company once she got out of the Minimart at noon. She rang up a pack of gum and a Union Leader for another customer as Lord waved good-bye to Bev and eased that shiny new cruiser into the southbound traffic on Route 3.

  John Harrigan wasn’t born with an antipathy to journalism. Rather it had been taught to him by his parents.

  “They both had an affinity for the written and spoken word, and the News and Sentinel became their orphan child,” he said of Fred and Esther. “They were devoted to that paper. It permeated their whole lives, and I got to hate the whole thing. So once it became apparent that I wasn’t well suited for living in town, they sent me to live up at Rudy’s hunting and fishing camps when I was twelve or thirteen, except for when Rudy and Joan shut down in the winter. There were no hard feelings.”

  Rudy Shatney would become a second father to John, but by way of the first, John’s roots stretched back to a farm near Franconia Notch, where his grandfather Carl Harrigan had grown up, and then Lisbon, a town halfway between the Notch and the Connecticut River. Carl worked there forty-seven years as a gandy dancer—that is, a laborer—and a track section foreman on the Boston and Maine Railroad. In those days seven steam-powered trains a day ran through Lisbon, with three of them continuing up to Colebrook.

  Carl’s son Fred grew up with an affinity for words and a photographic memory as well. Fred went to Harvard on a scholarship, graduated magna cum laude in 1942, and enlisted in the navy in the hope of becoming a pilot. Instead he spent the war four stories underground in Washington, D.C., where he labored with other powerful minds at penetrating Japanese and German military codes.

  Esther was from Littleton, a bigger town northeast of Lisbon. She and Fred met at a high school dance before the war, and she had gone on to Bates College. They were married in 1944, and a year later Fred entered Georgetown University Law School on the G.I. Bill. John said it was one of “life’s little accid
ents” that the Harrigans ended up in Colebrook after law school. Fred was offered a job at a law firm in the southern New Hampshire city of Nashua, but Fred and Esther wanted to raise their children in a place more like Lisbon. A friend suggested Colebrook. “Where the hell is that?” Fred asked.

  “It’s up near Canada,” he was told. “It’s peaceful. All they do is swap wives and husbands, try cow cases and timber overcuts—and the only attorney in town is retiring.”

  Once, around the turn of the century, Colebrook had been, per capita, the wealthiest town in New Hampshire. Millions of board feet of lumber went down the Connecticut each spring, and its farms produced a hundred thousand bushels of potatoes each year. At the south end of town stood a bustling luxury hotel, the Monadnock House, and a second would have been built had it not been for an 1893 storm that destroyed its frame. By the 1940s, however, the log drives had ceased, the soil was exhausted, the Monadnock House had become a Catholic school, and the paper industry was moving south, where pine trees reached pulpwood size in only twenty years. Colebrook had indeed become peaceful and a good deal like the out-of-the-way town Fred had grown up in.

  The four Harrigan kids—Susan, John, and Peter, all born between 1945 and 1948, and finally Mary Jay in 1960—were raised in a sort of time warp. They lived on Park Street, on the eastern edge of town, where some of the houses still had iceboxes. John remembers watching Roland Jondro snag chunks of ice from the back of his refrigerated truck with tongs and then lug the heavy, gleaming blocks against his leather apron through neighbor Belle Frizzell’s front door.