In the Evil Day

  15

  “THIS IS WHAT WE DO”

  JOHN HARRIGAN STOOD IN THE NEWSROOM of the News and Sentinel with the crowded pasteboards reared up behind him. “This is what we do.”

  It was somewhere around 4:30 p.m. Charlie Jordan and Leith Jones were in the darkroom watching—hardly able to breathe as they did so—the prints of Charlie’s black-and-white photos rise like fever dreams out of their chemical baths.

  Kenn Stransky had been posted to the front door to answer the phones and keep the out-of-town reporters from bursting in. Chandra Coviello had fled straight home after escaping from Ducret’s. Claire Lynch said she had gotten a phone call from the missing Jana Riley, who had run out of her shoes on her way to Ducret’s. Jana was safe with some friends at a shop on Main Street, Claire said, but she wasn’t coming back. And Susan Zizza had left for the hospital.

  The rest, for whatever reason, had not left, and were still here—now ranged around John in chairs at the press table or in front of the desks that lined the room: Claire, shivering as she recalled the forebodings that had haunted her that morning; compositor Jeannette Ellingwood, an exuberant woman in her seventies who had no truck with forebodings, who had been blindsided like the rest; the gentle typesetter Vivien Towle, who was being held up, almost literally, by her boyfriend Monty Montplaiser, an off-duty U.S. Customs officer; and the courtly bookkeeper Gil Short, who had no bookkeeping to do but who couldn’t find it in himself to walk out the door just then.

  No one sat in the empty chair before Dennis’s desk. “We’ve lost him,” John had said a moment before. He had learned as much in a phone call to Julie Riffon, the nurse who had driven Susan Zizza to Dennis and Polly’s house, where Susan had elected to stay for the time being. Kenn Stransky also knew as much and by then had whispered the news to Claire and Gil. The announcement struck the rest like one more lash of a whip.

  John sighed and groped for the right words in getting around to what he really wanted to say. Eventually he found phrases to the effect that state troopers and municipal cops, emergency room doctors and EMTs all had something in common with journalists—they had to be there, sometimes, at the worst moments in people’s lives. And sometimes those suffering people—especially in a small town—were colleagues, near neighbors, family members: “People you know, people you love.”

  A muttered curse—or was it a moan?—came from the darkroom. Claire couldn’t tell if it was Leith or Charlie. John looked down at the floor, rubbed his eyes. “But, you know, they keep doing their jobs,” he said. “They’re dying inside, but they keep at it. And today it’s been our turn for something like that. And reporting—yeah, this is what we do.”

  Thoughts were scratching around like mice in John’s head. He knew that every daily in the Northeast had someone out on Bridge Street, or on their way there. He knew that down at the Coös County Democrat, Gene Ehlert, with his bigger staff, was dispatching reporters to the IGA, to Bloomfield, to Drega’s house, to wherever else the story had gone—as John would want him to. In an industry where the reporting done by weekly newspapers was often discounted, even held in contempt, at least one of John’s weeklies would have a good accounting of a story that involved the gunshot murder of a weekly’s editor. This paper, though, the one robbed of that editor, was uniquely positioned, an industry analyst might say, to tell the story. Or was it just the grief that John wanted to scream aloud?

  Claire remembered the man who was always exasperated when a big story broke on Tuesday afternoon, on press day. Well, there are big stories, and then there are nuclear bombs. Jeannette was biting her lower lip, trying to keep from breaking into pieces in her seat.

  “I don’t know—it’s like a meteor dropped on us from outer space,” John said. “But some of us are still standing, crawling out of the crater—to tell the story, to say what happened and write down who these people, these friends of ours, were. Well, okay—that’s all I’ve got. What do you think?”

  “You know how to do pasteup?” Jeannette Ellingwood was speaking to Charlie Jordan as if she had just learned he could speak Aramaic.

  “I do,” Charlie said. “So where exactly are you in the process here?”

  Jeannette and most of the other staffers didn’t know Charlie. They had assumed he was one of the old Uglies who happened to pass by and have a camera handy. Now he’d been deputized as the newspaper’s acting editor while John locked himself away to write the feature story and a new editorial.

  “Just give me an hour,” John had told him. “When you tear up the front page, leave a couple of Claire’s stories there, about a third of the page—I don’t want the whole front page to be about this. And you can rip all the sports stories. We’ll need that space for jump pages for the feature.”

  Jeannette took Charlie through the finished content in the newsroom, the stories printed in two-inch columns and cut into long strips by Jeannette’s scissors or X-Acto knife, then run through the roller of the hot-wax machine, then pressed with a burnishing roller onto the pasteboards. Now it would be Charlie’s task to cut all this into pieces and puzzle the stories and graphics onto sticky art boards, each of which would be one page of the newspaper. Twenty-four art boards made a complete issue, what was called a mechanical. That and photo negatives taken by Leith Jones of each board would go this very night to John’s Coös Junction Press in Lancaster, where the image of each page would be etched into an aluminum roller and printed.

  Charlie saw that the original content of the issue had been nearing completion: features, the editorial, letters to the editor, the “Locals,” obituaries, sports. He noticed the headline piece among the features, that story by Dennis about the town manager’s resignation. Big news until this afternoon, Charlie thought. He’d keep it, but he’d have to move it back to page 3 or 5. Page 4 would be staked out as usual for John’s new editorial and readers’ letters.

  Also among the features was Dennis’s piece about the 45th parallel sign: “It’s nice to be in the middle of things, and Clarksville is once again taking note of its place in the center of the northern hemisphere. Last week Charlie and Donna Jordan erected an original 45th parallel sign on Route 145 near the old Clarksville School.”

  Charlie and Donna had lived in that school building for years, had made a good house out of it. Charlie remembered the day Dennis knocked on its door in 1975. Dennis had just written a profile of J. C. Kenneth Poore, a ninety-year-old hill farmer who had also done some newspaper work. Poore was of the opinion that any young writer should go meet Charlie, who was publishing pieces in Yankee Magazine then. Two decades later, Dennis had loved the feel-good quirkiness of this 45th parallel story. Now Charlie had to finish it for him.

  The Colebrook police log, assembled by Claire, had a sweet poignancy to it: a car off the road on Vermont 102 after it swerved for a deer, for example, or the theft of a picnic table from the Route 3 rest area. That was what we had to worry about yesterday.

  Charlie saw in the obituaries that a joint memorial service for Dr. Herbert Gifford and Dr. Marjorie Parsons—Doc Gifford and Parsie—was planned for Saturday afternoon in the Colebrook Village Cemetery. Most likely the family would want to postpone that. Charlie would have to check. Many of the ads in the newspaper had to do with sales, offers, or events connected to the Moose Festival next week. What the hell was the town going to do about that?

  And what about the photos to accompany John’s lead story? Leith was still in the darkroom, hanging wet prints on clothesline strung from the ceiling. Charlie would have to talk to John about which ones to use. That would be a tough call.

  Claire had run out the door to learn what else had happened. Jeannette and Vivien—with pitch-in help from Leith, Gil, and Monty—were proofing, printing, and waxing whatever hadn’t made it to the pasteboards yet. Charlie went back to where the features were posted, to what would have been the front page. He stood where people had run for their lives two hours before and went to work, pulling columns of text off the boards.


  Kenn Stransky never saw the Sentinel’s newsroom that night because the three separate telephone lines at Jana Riley’s desk were lit up constantly. “When reporters called, I tried to keep my statements down to thirty seconds,” he said later. “I told them as much as I knew was true from what people at the Sentinel had told me, what Claire was finding out on her trips back and forth between us and town hall and the police department, and what was coming over the scanner.”

  One call came from a TV station in Texas. The voice on the line said, “Hold on just a minute while I get somebody to talk to you.”

  “Sorry, I don’t have even a minute,” Kenn said. “If you want any information, it’s now or never.”

  Kenn wasn’t surprised that the calls were coming from all over the country, given that in this event “all three points of the triangle,” he said, were represented in terms of people civil societies most need to protect: cops, judges, and journalists. Of course a lot of the calls were local. Many thought the Sentinel editor who’d been killed was John Harrigan. Some wanted to talk to John, but that wasn’t possible.

  John was in and out of his office, but not taking calls. Twice he went to see Bunny and Irene at Earl and Pam’s house, and both times he paused to talk to the reporters outside the building, all of whom were barred from entering while John’s staff was at work. Otherwise the reporters made do with Kenn’s periodic updates. John went back to the newsroom once to see how production was going and disappeared once into the darkroom with Charlie Jordan. But his instructions to Kenn were explicit—no calls unless there was one from his daughter Karen.

  That meant even the Union Leader, the state’s biggest daily. “The publisher down there called,” Kenn said. “He was not polite, and he demanded to speak to John. I said, ‘You’re obviously not his daughter’ and hung up on him. He called right back, reamed me out, and I hung up again.”

  The Union Leader was granted favors, though. There were those photos that Charlie Jordan had agreed to share. Then the Union Leader’s North Country correspondent, and only she, was allowed into the building to take some shots of Charlie doing pasteup, to ask a few questions.

  She didn’t see John, though, and neither did Attorney General Philip McLaughlin when he visited at six o’clock with Mike Ramsdell, Dick Flynn, Sergeant John Pickering of the Major Crime Unit, and Colebrook’s Chief Sielicki. They came in through the rear door, lingered for five minutes, and left through the back again. They paused in the parking lot where Vickie still lay. Kenn didn’t see them until they were on their way across Bridge Street to Town Hall.

  For the most part, John’s improvised staff was disturbed only by the lingering presence of Vickie beneath that blanket. “It was sad—and unsettling,” Kenn said. “We’re all saying that they’ve got to do something with that body, but somebody told me that there were a lot of crime scenes, a lot of bodies, and that it was just going to take time before the crime lab people could get here from Concord and take care of all the stuff like that. We tried not to think about it, but that was hard too.”

  Kenn had to correct many callers in regard to the body count, at least as far as he knew—their numbers tended to be higher, sometimes a lot higher. And yes, the alleged perpetrator was still at large.

  Calls came from householders around the region, from people who said they were watching this on TV, and Kenn realized that things were different from when he moved to the North Country from New York in 1993, when on a clear day he might pull in one network channel on his aerial antenna, when he had to ask his parents in Kansas to tape and mail him episodes of Melrose Place. “Now, via CNN and WMUR and all these satellite dishes,” Kenn said, “this terror was being beamed into every home out there, or a good number of them.”

  Kenn had been a corporate executive in New York, the national director of sales and marketing for a multinational food manufacturer. Then he quit that at the age of thirty-seven when he inherited a farmhouse in Norton, Vermont. One day a couple of ragged hunters, lost for days, came stumbling out of the woods fringing the house. Kenn called the News and Sentinel, and Dennis suggested he write the story himself.

  So he became a reporter, and especially a courthouse reporter in Essex County. A court reporter often writes about matters that some people—relatives of the accused, for example—don’t like to see in the newspaper. When Kenn received threats in the aftermath of one or two of his stories he had, on Vickie’s advice, gone undercover, adopting a pen name and an unlisted phone number. When he got home late that August evening, though, he had messages on his answering machine, albeit sympathetic ones, from some people who shouldn’t have known his number.

  “So I knew someone had been giving that number out, and of course I’d been on TV that night under my real name as the face of that story, and so was recognized wherever I went,” Kenn said. “Everybody knew me, offered good wishes, and that was wonderful, but it continued, and I wanted to put this behind me. So for several reasons, it was time to get out.”

  Eventually he would shift into adult education, helping people earn their GED diplomas. That night, though, while he was still a reporter, he wept with other reporters. “I was outside at one point, talking to the press, and I saw an AP reporter from Concord with tears running down her face, and that’s when I lost it as well,” he says. “It was one of those weird moments, when suddenly it smacks you in the head that we’re all in this together. It happened again the next morning. I was being interviewed by Fredricka Whitfield of CNN—I’d watched her for years on TV in New York—and she was crying, and again I felt this, I don’t know, blood-brother connection to other people in the media, and through Fredricka to people all over the country.”

  In the clearing at Brunswick Springs, Sam Sprague, Steve Brooks, and Dave Perry joined Steve Hersom and Kevin Jordan as they stood around the body.

  They stared at the ruins of a man who looked like he had shot himself in the face. The jaw was curled in—“like he was sucking his lip and making a fish face,” Sprague said—and the skin had already assumed its death pallor. There wasn’t so much blood around the facial wound, but a lot of blood and what must have been brain matter lay in a spattered streak up the hill, sat pooled behind the head. The eyes were closed, keeping their secrets.

  Perry saw that the dead man’s black ballistics vest had come partly undone. What seemed a bloodless hole in the center of the chest was actually a peculiar, thumb-sized indentation.

  Brooks noticed the blood spattered on the brim of Scottie’s hat, the scope mounted on the AR-15 lying in a bed of moss just up the hill. He considered how a scope was actually a disadvantage in close woods like these, making every sapling look like a redwood, and was glad his M14 wasn’t scope-mounted. He also saw that Drega had cut down the barrel of his rifle, and that was why it had looked like he was shooting tracers—there was still powder burning on his rounds as they exited the gun’s muzzle.

  Sprague and Jordan began a conversation about what should be done with the body. “I’m not picking the bastard up,” Jordan spat. “Leave him here for coyote bait.”

  It didn’t matter. Into the clearing trooped the first several members of a New Hampshire SWAT team, in their helmets and face shields and bulging body armor. This was like the army arriving after the National Guard had already settled things, but the army was in charge. When Sprague stooped to collect an empty ammunition clip from his own sidearm, he was scolded into letting it lie—“This is a crime scene, buddy.” Jordan, who had picked up Scottie’s Stetson to give to Christine, had to put the hat back on the ground.

  They went back up the tote road, where other men were gathered around the vehicles near the bridge. Jordan lit up a cigarette, and Sprague stopped to ask for one. “You don’t smoke,” Jordan said.

  “Do those things settle you down?” Sprague asked.

  “Well, they do until they kill you.”

  “Gimme one.”

  Jordan’s hands shook so much that it took several matches to get Sprague’s
cigarette lit. Then Sprague could barely maneuver it into his mouth between deep, sucking drafts and peals of coughing.

  Chuck West had gone back for a brief look at the body and had then returned to the bridge, to his unmarked Cougar. In his statement later, Steve Brooks would praise West for “conspicuous calm and inspiring self-possession under fire.” West knew Jellison would want his shotgun, and he had sent someone else to deliver it. Now, alone by the Cougar, he had to hold onto its roof with both hands as he felt terror careening like a wrecking ball around his gut.

  John Harrigan and Charlie Jordan had wrestled with this before when they worked together at the Democrat: how to choose photographs—of a motor vehicle accident, say—that honestly told a shocking story without being in and of themselves shocking. It was always hard, but never so hard as this.

  In the green, ashen light of the darkroom, John—who had already rejected a dozen images—stared at a photo of Dennis, whose face was obscured, strapped into a gurney and being wheeled by several people to the curb of Bridge Street as a pair of EMTs bent over him. In the background were the hanging sign for the News and Sentinel, a parked car on the street, Collins’s camera shop on the corner of Main, and a motorcyclist heading unperturbed for the intersection. The life-or-death episode in the foreground seemed to unfold against a museum diorama. “Well, okay, we’ll use this one,” John said.

  “You think it’s okay?” Charlie asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know—I think so.”

  “So just one photo on the front page?”

  John shook his head. “I don’t know about that either. That would suggest Dennis was the only victim—or the more important victim.”