In the Evil Day

by Richard Adams Carey

  In a hallway outside the emergency room, he found Steve Breton sitting butt-end on the floor, his back against the wall, feet splayed out in front of him, face bleached of color. Breton had gone into the ER with Saunders and had helped cut off his clothes. “Those are new boots,” Saunders had said. “Don’t cut those.”

  Once the blouse was gone, Breton had seen what looked like a constellation of wounds to the chest and left arm, a chunk of bloody gristle right over his heart.

  And no, Couture couldn’t see Saunders just then. “He’s in critical condition,” a nurse told him, adding that Wayne was being prepared for medevac transport to an operating room at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital in Lebanon.

  COLEBROOK DISPATCH, 3:55 P.M.

  Dispatch: Emergency.

  Caller 28: Yes, is this the Concord barracks, or—?

  Dispatch: No, no—this is Colebrook.

  Caller 28: Oh, this is Colebrook.

  Dispatch: Yeah.

  Caller 28: Oh, hi. This is Anne Defresne at Channel 5 in Boston. I know you guys are very, very busy.

  Dispatch: We’re out straight—yes, ma’am.

  Caller 28: Do you have any information whatsoever?

  Dispatch: We have a multiple shooting—five people anyway.

  Caller 28: Five people?

  Dispatch: Yeah.

  Caller 28: Two troopers, one district judge, one civilian.

  Dispatch: At least, yes, and a conservation officer.

  Caller 28: A conservation officer?

  Dispatch: Yep. That’s all I can give you right now.

  Caller 28: Was this at District Court?

  Dispatch: No—within the street.

  Caller 28: It was on the street? On Main Street, or—?

  Dispatch: No, on—well, it was all over the place. I’m sorry. You’ll have to call me again.

  Caller 28: Is the person in custody?

  Dispatch: No, he’s not.

  Caller 28: He’s not.

  Vermont game warden Paul Fink, fifty-five, had just gone off duty at 3:00 p.m.—and was in New Hampshire, buying some drywall screws at Columbia Home & Building Supply—when the clerk at that store stopped in mid-transaction and went to listen to a police scanner in a side office.

  He got to the IGA knowing only that there had been a shooting. He rolled slowly along Route 3 in his Chevy pickup cruiser, past lines of people on the road shoulder gazing into the parking lot. He saw Bert von Dohrmann’s red Forest Service cruiser in the lot and von Dohrmann himself talking on the supermarket’s outside pay phone. Fink continued north to West Stewartstown, hearing from his dispatcher that two New Hampshire troopers had been shot, and a cruiser—719, she said—stolen. He knew that felons on one side of the river liked to flee to the other, and he crossed into Canaan at West Stewartstown, turning south on 102 on BOL status—Be on the lookout.

  By the time Fink reached Bloomfield, he had stopped to report a house fire on the Columbia side of the river, been passed the other way by a Jeep Cherokee with its hazard lights going, and been told by his dispatcher about shots fired at DeBanville’s General Store. When he rolled past the store with his blues flashing, he decided the dispatcher must have been mistaken—he saw no one outside, no emergency vehicles in front. He went on below the underpass, would have kept going had not Dispatch added that an officer had been wounded in front of the store.

  Fink turned around, and this time, as he pulled into the store parking lot, Sharlyn Jordan came out the door. “Paul, some guy shot a game warden,” she cried. “The warden’s truck is over there.”

  Only then did Fink look in the opposite direction and see the stranded, bullet-ridden New Hampshire Fish & Game cruiser. He recognized it as belonging to Wayne Saunders, the friendly new guy in the Colebrook patrol area. Several people stood around its grille, headlights raised to the sky as if in sorrow, and one said her husband had taken Saunders in their own vehicle to the hospital in Colebrook. Fink looked at the Blazer’s windshield, was amazed that Saunders was alive enough to be taken anywhere. He didn’t think much of his chances.

  George Nugent—Fink knew him as Bloomfield’s fire marshal—said that a plainclothes New Hampshire cop was in the store on the telephone, that the cop had charged him with keeping people away from the cruiser. But the Blazer’s motor was still running, and Nugent was worried about a fire if the gas tank was leaking. Fink told him to shut it off just as a Vermont state trooper in an unmarked car stopped in front of the store.

  Sergeant Tom Roberts knew less than Fink did. “He bombarded me with questions I had no answer for,” Fink said later. Behind them the disabled cruiser groaned and shifted as Nugent climbed into it. The fire marshal bailed out, landing safely, as a birch trunk gave way and the Blazer—its engine stopped—slid and settled another two feet down the bank.

  By then Fink was on the radio to Dispatch: he and Roberts were heading down 102, and New Hampshire Fish & Game needed to find someone to secure this cruiser. The game warden led, and the trooper followed: under the trestle, across a small iron bridge spanning the Nulhegan River, over the Bloomfield line into New Brunswick, past dairy farms and fields of high corn. Their lights were flashing, their sirens mute. Two vehicles came and went the other way: people on errands as routine as buying drywall screws, Fink thought.

  “Soon we entered the long straightaway on VT RT102,” he wrote in his report. “We picked up speed. At the end of the stretch, the highway bends to the left, and halfway through this curve, I came onto a marked New Hampshire State Police cruiser burning its tires as the operator attempted to execute a U-turn and go back south. . . . I increased speed to cut the distance between my vehicle and the one in front. As I did so, I craned forward and tried to read the plate number to ascertain if it read ‘719’ while my body began to tense in preparation for a high-speed chase.”

  12

  BY THE GRACE OF GOD AND VALHALLA

  THE AUGUST 20 EDITION of the Coös County Democrat was just about wrapped up. The reporters had gone home. Editor Gene Ehlert and some production staff were still in the building. John Harrigan still had more pasteup to do, but they were all on the downhill slope of a good Tuesday afternoon. People were giddy, jokes were flying back and forth—no different from the News and Sentinel on a good press day. Laughter reigned until the police scanner went wild with scrambled information about shootings in Colebrook.

  John went to the phone and called the Sentinel, expecting a sober to-the-best-of-our-knowledge journalist’s enlargement on what had happened and where. Vivien Towle answered and was nearly hysterical. “Vickie’s been shot,” she cried. “Dennis has been shot.” Then she hung up.

  John stood with the dial tone buzzing in his ear and five people in the newsroom looking at him. When he spoke, it was in a whisper to himself, but it came out louder than he meant. “It’s that bastard Drega.”

  By then Ehlert was at John’s side. “Who’s Drega? What happened?”

  There was too much to explain and no time to do it. “I’m going up north,” John said. “You’re all done. Just put the paper to bed and get out of here.”

  “Well, no,” Ehlert said. “If there’s been a shooting in Colebrook, we’re not all done. We’re starting over.”

  John was at the wheel of his father’s Lincoln within a minute, steering it like a mad Zamboni through a slalom course of Lancaster traffic. Once he hit North Main—the last place he could get a signal between there and Groveton—he devoted one hand to dodging other vehicles while he dialed the Sentinel on his car phone with the other. Gil Short answered and told John all that had happened. “It doesn’t look good for Dennis,” Gil said. “Vickie, well . . .”

  John careened past the courthouse on North Main, then veered right with Route 3 past the fairgrounds, where heavy traffic into the fair gridlocked the Lincoln for a few frantic moments. The road opened up north of the fairgrounds, and John slammed the Lincoln into the first straightaway. Its big V-8 drove him like a nail head into the springs of the spl
it-bench seat. With sirens keening in the distance and the speedometer yearning to the right, he steered with nearly a death wish through the road’s riverbank bends, around the station wagons and pickups of people who had no idea yet that everything had changed.

  It’s thirty-six miles from Lancaster to Colebrook, but just five to the village of Northumberland, with its convenience store and post office and bridge over the Connecticut into the Vermont town of Guildhall. John was there within a few deep breaths. There were sure to be roadblocks on Route 3, and there was always less traffic on the Vermont side anyway. He decided to cross the river, go up 102, and come into Colebrook from the Lemington side.

  The Lincoln fishtailed onto the bridge, swung right on 102, and then stretched out again, accelerating to nearly a hundred miles per hour through road-hugging ranks of pine and hemlock, their trunks and branches blurring into finger paints. The first mile clicked off in seconds, but only that mile, since suddenly John had to brake—hard enough to set his tires smoking. He fought to rein in the Lincoln before it slid across the spike mat that a group of New Hampshire and Vermont troopers had spread across the width of the road.

  Les Lord’s friend Frank Prue—the Park Ranger among that trio of animated characters—had met Gerry Marcou for lunch that day in Groveton. Prue had gone off duty that afternoon and was pulling into his driveway when Code 1000 broke on his radio. He hadn’t been able to get through to Troop F for a full situation report and knew only that a stolen New Hampshire cruiser was traveling south on 102. With a felony in progress, Prue had jurisdiction in Vermont, and he crossed to 102 from Lancaster while John was just hanging up the phone at the Democrat. At a little more than a mile past Guildhall, Prue met Corporal Mike Doucette of Troop F coming the other way.

  Doucette had no more information than Prue about what else had happened. Nor did the pair of Vermont troopers who came down 102 on Doucette’s heels, but their rendezvous seemed like a good spot to set up a checkpoint and watch for a suspect who could be driving a different vehicle by then. Doucette took a spike mat out of his trunk, but before they had stretched it across the road, a New Hampshire Fish & Game cruiser sped past. They waved to the two men inside. A civilian pickup followed on the heels of the cruiser, and this they flagged to a stop.

  Its operator was in civvies, but he was a Fish & Game CO from southern New Hampshire, John Wimsatt. Wimsatt explained that he and partner Jim Kneeland had stopped at Kevin Jordan’s house in Groveton. This was Kneeland’s truck, but since Wimsatt had packed his duty belt and a .40 Sig Sauer pistol, he had taken the wheel of the truck, while Kneeland—with weapons borrowed from Jordan—had jumped with Jordan into the cruiser that had just whipped by.

  Wimsatt was still there when a black boat of a car from the ’80s slid to a hairpin stop in front of the spike mat. The vehicle was coming from the south, the less suspicious direction, but nonetheless nobody liked the look of a car traveling that fast without emergency lights.

  They relaxed when they saw who the driver was. Prue used to be a beat cop in Lancaster, and he and John had become friendly then. Doucette and Wimsatt both recognized Harrigan from the photo on the banner of his columns in the newspapers.

  Prue smiled as he scolded John for speeding. Then, “I’m sorry we can’t let you through. You’re going to have to turn around, and then take it easy, okay? We’re trying to catch up with a bad boy who’s borrowed one of our cruisers.”

  “A borrowed cruiser?” John said. “That’s what you’re worried about?”

  Prue blinked in surprise. “Well, that does get our attention.”

  “People are dead in Colebrook, at least one of them at my own place of business,” John said, “and you’re chasing a lost cruiser?”

  “People are dead?” Prue said. “In Colebrook? Wait a minute—what the hell are you talking about?”

  For a sanctified instant, with all these cops gathered around his window, John thought, okay, Vickie is alive, Dennis unhurt. The stuff on the scanner had been piped in from some other universe, was else a bad joke, a colossal misunderstanding of some sort. And sure, no sooner had Vivien hung up than John had questioned the possibility of something like this really happening—in Colebrook, of all places. No sooner had he grasped that straw, though, than he let it nearly fall. He remembered the fizz of terror in Vivien’s voice, the anguish choking Gil’s. John told the cops what he had heard in Lancaster.

  “You say two troopers were murdered?” Prue asked.

  “Yeah, that’s what I heard. That’s what he told me.”

  “Like who? Did you get the names?”

  One of the reasons Frank Prue took the role of bad cop when he worked with either of the other two Musketeers was that he so readily looked the part, with his nicked-up prizefighter demeanor and plough-horse shoulders. He looked like a tough guy, and if he had to be, he was. But the first syllable that John pronounced hit him like a blow to the kidneys, and at the sound of “Lord,” he staggered backward.

  The other cops were skeptical, and Doucette was angry, telling John he shouldn’t be joking about shit like that. “You think I’m kidding?” John said.

  “I don’t know,” Doucette said. “But we haven’t heard anything. So it’s a rumor—and let me tell you, this isn’t a good place to repeat that sort of rumor.”

  John was furious himself by then. “Jesus Christ, people are dead or dying, and they were killed by that nut Drega, and you guys knew something like this would happen, and you never did anything about it. Now you just want your fucking cruiser back.”

  Doucette stood firm. “We don’t have a report on any shootings.”

  Then John Wimsatt spoke up. “We heard on the Fish and Game channel that Wayne Saunders got shot—in Bloomfield. That’s just up the road from here, right?”

  Doucette stared at Wimsatt and fell silent. Prue had stepped away from the group, out into the middle of the road, and as Wimsatt’s words hung in the air, John witnessed in that sheet-metal version of a man the most explosive onslaught of grief he had ever seen. It was like watching a building hung with dynamite collapse in on itself. And as Prue shrieked, beating his skull with his fists, John abandoned the last thread of hope he had in his heart for Vickie, the last fond thought that he might yet wake up from this.

  He nearly went biblical himself before turning around for Guildhall and flying back to the bridge and Route 3.

  Susan Zizza described herself later as “a wild woman” at the Upper Connecticut Valley Hospital. After trying several times to telephone Polly Joos from the Sentinel Building—and getting no answer—she had wept and leaned on her horn, frightening children and other cars out of her way, as she drove to the hospital.

  She was told that Dennis had already been taken into intensive care. At that point nurse Julie Riffon took the wild woman in hand and settled her in a waiting room. Someone at the hospital had contacted the ministers of all the churches in town, and several were there already, including Charles Collins of the Community Baptist and Bud Hulse of St. Stephen’s Episcopal—but not Peter Dyer of the Monadnock Congregational. The Bunnells were members of that church, and Dyer was at Earl and Pam’s house on Bridge Street, where Bunny and Irene had been taken. Each of the ministers at the hospital took a turn trying to calm Susan, but none succeeded. “I heeded them not,” she said later.

  No one at the hospital could say with certainty that Polly knew what had happened. Susan found a telephone and rang her again—still no answer. Well, there wouldn’t be if Polly were outside in her garden, as no doubt she would be on a day like this. Susan did manage to reach her husband, Mark, at work. “Has this guy been caught yet?” Mark asked.

  “No, he hasn’t,” Susan said. “I haven’t heard that he has.”

  “Wait there. I’ll be right over.”

  But she couldn’t wait. She got off the phone and told Julie Riffon she was driving up to Dennis and Polly’s house in Stewartstown. “Oh, no, girl, you’re not,” Julie insisted. “Not in the condition you’r
e in—you’re not driving anywhere.”

  Circumstances conspired. Bill Bromage, the bank president who had come to the hospital in the ambulance with Dennis, had been paged to a house fire in Columbia, but he didn’t have any way to get there. Susan offered him the keys to her car once Julie agreed to drive Susan to Stewartstown in hers. Someone else then volunteered to give Bromage a ride to the fire, but Julie stuck to her offer.

  The two women went up Route 145, then up South Hill Road, over the hill, and across the line into Stewartstown. They cut east on Chet Noyes Road, higher into the hills and away from the sirens, into country still nearly as wild and empty as it had been two decades ago when Dennis and Polly had found a raw parcel of land on which to build their stone house, grow their gardens, raise a child, and live, as the Nearings had urged, in a “decent, simple, kindly way.”

  Up there the summer was already in eclipse, the tamaracks and red maples starting to turn. Susan imagined that Polly’s lettuce and beans must have gone by, that the first kissing frost would dispatch her cukes. But after Julie turned into the long hidden driveway that led through wild shrubbery to the house, they saw that Polly’s flower gardens were still riotous with late-season blooms whose allegiance was all to the summer: chrysanthemums, black-eyed Susans, showy asters, and beauties that Susan couldn’t name.

  Polly had always preferred her flowers to the vegetables, and they found her on her hands and knees in the midst of what Susan always thought the Garden of Eden must have looked like. Polly glanced up with a look of concern at the arrival of a car she didn’t know, but she smiled and waved and struggled to her feet once Susan got out.