In the Evil Day

  Inside, Donna went in search of Robert Pike, Tommy vanished into the children’s section, and Charlie passed the time with a volume of Matthew Brady’s Civil War photographs. Sure enough, he found himself stunned all over again by Brady’s images of the results of this industrial warfare, with its new killing machines—scores of fallen soldiers bloated and ballooning out of their uniforms, the corpses strewn haphazardly behind breastworks or in a shot-apart cornfield. It was death without glory or dignity, and America’s first wholesale glimpse of such loss. The images were cruel but necessary, Charlie thought. People needed to be shown what slaughter was really like—though even this hadn’t stopped them.

  He turned several pages and paused at the crack of rifle fire. He blinked and shook his head. A daydream wrought by force of these photos? Then women’s voices, a shout, the distinctive ping of a bullet ricocheting off stone or steel. Julie Colby, the librarian, heard it too.

  “Well, what’s that, do you think?” she said.

  Charlie went to a window facing Main. The sounds were coming from behind Ducret’s or else from Bridge Street. Charlie couldn’t see anything of Bridge beyond Collins Video and Photo, on the corner opposite the old gas station. A Forest Service cruiser flashed past on Main, its siren wailing, heading north, unconcerned with whatever might be happening on Bridge. Then Charlie saw Sylvia Collins, who worked at the state liquor store next to the library, out on the sidewalk and craning her neck in the direction of Bridge.

  Outside, Charlie learned from Sylvia that two people had been shot at the IGA. He sprinted back into the library to tell Donna and Tommy to get down on the floor, Julie to lock the doors. He himself went out the back door, still in a sprint, hastening through the parking areas that backed the buildings on Main, to Hicks Hardware and his mother’s Plymouth—where he had left his camera.

  Ad manager Jana Riley was the first to see cruiser 608 at the News and Sentinel. Some of the staffers were around the police scanner, but others, still listening, had gone back to their desks. Susan Zizza was staring at the pasteup board, wondering what to pull off the front page to make room for the story Claire would come back with. Dennis Joos was proofing his piece about the Jordans and the 45th parallel sign, while Vickie Bunnell and Susie Sambito had gone back into their offices.

  Jana was at the front desk again, but making circuits back and forth to the east-facing window next to the scanner. There she’d lift the blinds and peer at the emergency traffic speeding north. She had already seen Dan Couture hurtle out of Bridge and go drag racing up Main in his little Cavalier.

  A little before 3:00 p.m., Jana was startled to see a cruiser going the opposite way, heading south—and more startled to see it make a leisurely turn onto Bridge with all its windows down. She had a queer intuition, immediately confirmed, that the cruiser was coming here. But why not the police department? She felt herself shiver.

  Three seconds later, Jana overheard Vickie saying, “Okay, what’s Scottie Phillips doing here?”

  Inside Lazerworks, Beno Lamontagne’s wife, Karen, had called Beno out of the back of the store to help an elderly man with VCR hookup problems. Beno came out in time to see a state police cruiser work its way into a parallel parking space in front of the newspaper building.

  The bearded man who got out of the cruiser—carrying an assault rifle military style, at port arms, across his chest—wasn’t in police uniform. A young woman, climbing out of the car that the cruiser had parked in front of, did a double take as the man walked with that gun between their two vehicles. She crossed Bridge Street not in a run, exactly, but in a hurry.

  For his part, Beno was flashing back to the spring of 1984, the day state police detective Chuck Jellison, now the commander of Troop F, nearly died at the Getty station in a hand-to-hand struggle with a fugitive killer. The like-it-was-yesterday memory of that event and all the sirens going off got Beno thinking some sort of SWAT team exercise was in progress around that haunted spot.

  There was something odd in the peculiarly methodical way the bearded man had exited the cruiser, and the slow, even paces he took with that rifle propped across his chest. It was how a priest moved about the altar, Beno thought. But it had to be official business of some kind.

  The young woman came into the store looking back over her shoulder. Beno was looking that way too, watching in gathering wonder as the bearded man halted at the Sentinel’s front door, rattled its handle, glanced to his right, to his left, and then marched around the building’s left corner with the rifle now jabbed straight up in the air.

  Bunny was disappointed not to be casting flies with John Harrigan on Fish Pond that afternoon, but he still looked forward to a good meat loaf dinner with the kids, Vickie and Earl, and Earl’s wife, Pam.

  At two o’clock that afternoon, Irene filled up a shopping bag with ground beef, eggs, tomato sauce, and spices, and they drove in their Buick Skylark to Sliver’s old cabin: across the Connecticut to Bridge Street, where Earl and Pam had their house just a few hundred yards from the Sentinel Building and where Bunny waved in the direction of Vickie’s office; and then right on Main and south out of town until that left turn into Bungy Loop at the wide lawns of the Shrine of Our Lady of Grace—which looked that day like the set for an old Hollywood musical, its grass was so rich and the sky lifting above it so blue and fair.

  The cabin sat above a swale of its own thick grass just off the public access road into the pond. Sliver and Henrietta used to live there from May to October, moving back to their apartment in town for the winter. Sliver rented boats back in the time when seventy-five to eighty vessels would crowd into the twenty-three-acre pond on opening day, and parked cars would choke the launch area. Sliver also sold parking space on his land for fifty cents. Bunny remembers a fisherman who objected to that, a flatlander who wouldn’t pay to park because he was sure all this land belonged to the state. Sliver told him to look it up in Concord. In fact he did, once he’d parked and fished and gone home, and he ended up mailing Sliver the fifty cents. “Dad just mailed it back,” Bunny said. “He told him they’d start over the next time.”

  By the 1990s the pond was silting up and weeding over, but Eric Stohl and other Fish & Game COs still stocked it with trout each spring, and it was still good fishing right on Bunny’s doorstep. The cabin was expensive, though, with its upkeep and the property tax. Bunny knew that some things that needed doing probably wouldn’t get done during his lifetime. He stood on the grass next to a hydrangea in bloom and looked up at some mealy cedar shingles on the roof. “Brother’s going to have to replace those when this belongs to him,” he said, referring to Earl just as Vickie did. Then he went to turn on the water pump while Irene fiddled with the padlock on the door.

  Inside there was a woodstove, a bedroom, a couple more beds in the loft, an upright piano in the living room, and moments of family history on every wall and flat surface: a dapper black-and-white portrait of Sliver, square-jawed and smoking a pipe, like an Oxford don, and another of him on a sled with his best team of Irish setters; Bunny and Irene’s wedding portrait, with Irene in a trailing gown and gold ringlets, Bunny in a tux and sporting the natty mustache he still wore; a sampling of the trophies Bunny had won bowling or in sharpshooting contests; a snapshot of Vickie and Brother, maybe aged ten and seven respectively, Earl in a candy-striped blazer and bow tie, Vickie wearing a mischievous glance and a jumper with a puff-sleeved blouse. They looked like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland.

  On a shelf opposite the piano stood a piggy bank in the shape of an owl in cap and gown, a lighthearted gift to Vickie on her graduation from Plymouth State; also a coffee mug she bought for herself on passing the bar. It had “LAWYER” on one side, “JUSTICE FOR ALL” on the other.

  Bunny chose a chair on the porch while Irene lit the stove, tidied up the kitchen, and prepared the meat loaf. A breeze sweetened with the scent of pond lilies blew in off the water. The quiet rose up to the sky and sifted like mist into the clouds—until a squall of sirens ro
se up from town. Bunny guessed that it was some fire he’d read about in the paper the next day. He hoped no one was hurt. He also knew Harrigan well enough to chuckle at how annoyed John must be by a big fire on press day.

  At three thirty or so a car turned off Fish Pond Road and came to rest in front of the cabin. Bunny knew the car—it belonged to Paul Nugent, who had gone to Sunday school with Vickie, who was now a near neighbor to Brother and Pam. Paul got out on the driver’s side, and Bunny was surprised to see Pam get out on the other, since ordinarily she’d be at work at the First Colebrook Bank. Bunny presumed that she or Brother had invited Paul to dinner, which was fine. There should be plenty. “What are you kids doing here so early?” he asked.

  Susan Zizza knows her Bible well, and she would find later that her own story and those of other witnesses were like gospel accounts—each true enough from its own perspective, each limited by that perspective and the tricks of grief and memory, all essential to the apprehension of an event that changed everything. She would find that portions of her own memory, her own gospel account, had been erased or rewritten as early as the next morning.

  None of the gospels agree on the exact words of Vickie’s shouted warning. Susan remembers a terse, “He’s here—everybody get out!” The closest thing to an authorized version appeared in the News and Sentinel’s August 27 issue: “My God, he’s got a gun! Everybody run!” All accounts agree that Vickie’s voice was strident, authoritative, not panicked.

  So it began with the clarion call of that shout. Then—after Vickie had called to Tallak and pushed Susie Sambito ahead of her through the door in the hallway near Chandra Coviello’s desk—Susan remembers Vickie pausing for an instant in the hallway with her hand on her office door handle.

  “I won’t forget that look on her face,” Susan said later. “There wasn’t any panic in it. It was more like a heightened sense of awareness. She just suddenly seemed aware of everything, while my own sense of awareness was already shutting down.”

  There’s no saying what Vickie thought about as she paused outside her door. About going back for Tallak, perhaps, who had scrambled under the couch? Or retrieving the pistol hidden in her filing cabinet? Vickie had a .38, not the .25 that Eric Stohl thought she had bought. But she never liked the idea of a gun in the office, and the weapon wasn’t loaded. Or was she simply steeling herself, as she had once before climbing birches with John?

  So far as Vickie knew, Drega was coming in through the front door. Jana Riley had cried out almost at the same instant as Vickie, and then the retreat was on through the rear exit. Susan remembers running in eerie, muffled silence. Other accounts described yells and screams, and surely there was the commotion of furniture being shoved aside, shoes scuffling, the back door banging open after someone managed that tricky latch. Susan heard—or remembers—none of that, only the running.

  Either Jana or Leith Jones was the first to get outside—probably Jana, who remembers fumbling with the hasp. In the parking lot, Jana literally ran out of her dress shoes and sprinted barefoot for the nearest open door, the back entrance to Ducret’s. Leith ran for his car at the far end of the parking lot.

  Susie Sambito wasn’t so sure about leaving the building. “Is this safe?” she called out to Vickie.

  “Probably not,” said Vickie. “Go to Ducret’s.”

  Dennis Joos had been talking with Susan about tearing up the front page. He heard the shouts from the front, but not the words exactly, and then saw the stampede through the hallway between Chandra’s desk and Vickie’s office. “What the hell’s going on?” he said.

  Susan found herself outside in a world as weirdly silent as the building had been. Had she turned around, she would have seen she was within arm’s length of the gunman, who was already at that corner of the building. Susan ran for her car, past two empty parking spaces, and then Dennis’s pickup, and then a second vehicle, an SUV. She reckoned that if the man with the gun was coming, he had to be there by then. She dropped to the hardtop and crawled on her stomach under the SUV.

  The rest who had gone out the door—Jana, Chandra, Susie, and finally Vickie—struck a beeline past the apartment building to the store, about forty yards distant. There were no parked cars in their way—no was there any cover. Drega shouldered his rifle and took aim at the fleeing women. At the sound of gunfire, Vivien Towle, who had been back by the scanner, stopped in her tracks at the screen door—as did Dennis.

  The shots atomized the silence that had wrapped itself around Susan. “And why didn’t I get out from under that car?” she would ask herself later, and then ask again—seven times seventy. Her friends were dying around her, and she would accuse herself of St. Peter’s cowardice. At the same time she concedes that she never really had a choice. Everything happened so fast that she was never really there—her body just went about its motions on autopilot as it sought to remain the sort of breathing husk to which a blanched soul could eventually return.

  She would recall each shot like a storm’s only thunderclap—or would until the next day. She would feel angry, even violently angry, reading and hearing about the differing numbers of shots reported by some witnesses, in some gospel accounts. Leith Jones would tell the police there were two, Jana Riley four or five, Richard Paquette (a clerk inside Ducret’s) a hailstorm of at least thirty.

  Susan would be angry until she realized that her own exact sum had melted away, that she no longer had any idea how many shots were fired. A freeze-frame image of Vickie crumpling and falling to the pavement—described that same day in her police statement—would also have disappeared. But she still remembers thinking at first, because they were dressed similarly, in white blouses and long print skirts, that it was Vivien Towle who was falling. She doesn’t remember when she knew instead that it was Vickie.

  Jana Riley looked back over her shoulder at the first crack of the rifle. She saw Vickie’s face, saw the light being snuffed out of it even as she fell. Chandra Coviello screamed at the splintering pop of several rounds into the frame of Ducret’s back door, which still seemed miles away. Susie Sambito, with the scent of gunpowder in her nostrils, kept following Chandra and Jana toward that door.

  Inside the Sentinel Building, Vivien Towle saw Vickie fall, and turned around, back to the shelter of a storage room inside. Dennis Joos showed no such prudence. Instead the former seminarian launched himself through the door and at the gunman.

  Jeannette Ellingwood was behind Dennis, and she watched it begin. She saw the gunman pivot with Dennis wrapped around his back and shoulders. Drega’s GMC baseball cap fell to the ground as the two men tipped together onto the hood of Jeannette’s car. Then they were on their feet again, lurching out of Jeannette’s sight to the grass of Monument Lot.

  Susan Zizza’s world had shrunk to the same narrow tunnel described by Steve Breton and Dan Couture at the IGA. Through that tunnel and from under that SUV, she saw the gunman shake Dennis off like a house cat. They stood face to face, each with his hands on the rifle, but Dennis’s were on the barrel, which was as hot as a branding iron.

  Three times he lost his grip, and each time Drega squeezed off a shot. The first went through Dennis’s ear, ricocheted against the building, and was heard by Charlie Jordan. The second buried itself in his arm. Dennis still kept grappling until the third, square to the midsection. He staggered backward, then fell forward like a cut tree.

  Susan wanted to turn away. Instead, awestruck, she watched, turning about under the SUV, as the gunman walked to where Vickie lay motionless on the pavement and then back to Dennis. By this time Beno Lamontagne was out in the street, shouting at the gunman, telling him to stop.

  Drega instead stood over Dennis as he had Scott Phillips. “You should’ve minded your own fucking business,” he said. Holding the rifle as if it were a pistol, he drilled, in rapid succession, four bullets into Dennis’s back. Then he changed the ammo clip on his rifle in motions that struck Susan as “very controlled, well practiced.”

  At some
point Susan scrambled out from under the SUV—without ever deciding to, exactly—and then she was next to Dennis, but still deep inside that tunnel. She remembers a series of faces, one after the other, glimpsed as though from the bottom of a well: Charlie Jordan, and then Karen Lamontagne, and then Yvette Collins, the wife of the pastor of the Baptist church across the street.

  Susan was the first to reach Dennis, at his side before Drega had left the area, and she doesn’t remember what she said to him, but it’s there in other gospel accounts and the newspapers: “Don’t go, Dennis. We love you. Please don’t leave us.”

  Karen Lamontagne had been trying to reel her husband back into the store. She had no success until the gunman had attached that fresh clip and taken a step in Beno’s direction. She and Beno locked the doors and got down on the floor with their two customers. But Karen kept an eye above the windowsill, watching the movements of a man she recognized as a previous customer, someone who had come in a few weeks before, who refused to believe that Lazerworks didn’t carry any of the early satellite television dishes just starting to appear in the North Country. He more or less accused her of lying. At last Beno had to come out of the back to get rid of him.

  Karen noted the unruly beard, the blue jeans tucked into his boots, the plaid shirt that was unbuttoned and flapped as he walked, the blue denim shirt he wore beneath it. “He moved gracefully,” she said later. “His face was calm and alert. I thought there might be a trace of a smile on his lips.”

  The inventory of Ducret’s Sporting Goods is devoted almost entirely to the North Country’s two most popular sports, hunting and fishing, with target shooting not far behind. Its pegboard aisles were hung with lures and reels, vests and ammo belts, backed by glass cases of handguns and deer rifles. The store only rarely sells an assault rifle. Owner Phil Ducret had taken charge of the store in 1985 from his dad, who started the business and who used to shoot with Bunny on Colebrook’s pistol team in contests against other towns.