In the Evil Day

by Richard Adams Carey

  She came back that evening only at the firm insistence of the state police. She spoke to a detective she didn’t know about events she still didn’t understand while the newsroom buzzed around her. John Harrigan stopped to put a hand on her shoulder, but Jana would have none of it. “I quit, John—I quit,” she said. “I can’t come in here again.”

  By then John had given his lead story and editorial to Vivien Towle for typesetting and then had gone outside—yes, through the back door—to be with Vickie one last time.

  It was past eleven o’clock. Charlie Jordan was on foot and worried that someone might take a potshot at him. He moved as quietly as possible, but the dogs knew he was there.

  It wasn’t until nearly eleven when the newspaper was finally done, when the complete mechanicals were put in a box for Monty Montplaiser, who had volunteered to drive them down to Lancaster, where John Harrigan had pressmen standing by. Monty also promised to deliver photos to the Democrat and to a plane standing by in Whitefield for the Union Leader.

  There was nothing ceremonial or celebratory about the moment—nor was there any sense of relief, really, given that now people had to go home and be alone with their thoughts. They sifted out the front door in ones or twos, with the lights still on at the town hall and big lights like quasars flooding the parking lot, where a single trooper from below the notches stood sentry, having relieved Scott Champagne of that duty only moments before. No one had anything to say to the few lingering reporters that hadn’t already been said. Those whose cars were still confined to the parking lot got rides.

  Charlie’s mother’s Plymouth Duster was all by itself in the darkness behind Hicks Hardware. Donna and Tommy had gotten a ride home that afternoon. The night had turned cold, and Charlie hadn’t brought a jacket. The Duster started reluctantly, but nothing odd about that. Charlie turned out of the parking lot onto Pleasant Street and then north on Main. He switched on the radio and found it full of reports on the shootings.

  Charlie was opposite J. C. Kenneth Poore’s old farm, about two miles from the 45th parallel and home, when the Duster simply stopped running and coasted to a silent stop in front of the house and barn abandoned since the old man’s death some fifteen years before. The car couldn’t be coaxed into starting again, and Charlie had this clammy feeling that Poore, or his ghost, was in the passenger seat beside him. “Are you having a bad day, Charlie?” Poore asked him. “Can it get any worse?”

  It could, Charlie thought, as he trudged up Route 145. There weren’t a lot of houses on that stretch of road, but each had its lights on and a dog to raise the alarm. Behind each locked and bolted front door, Charlie imagined, was a family listening to the news and keeping a loaded gun at hand. Someone could easily choose to fire before being fired upon.

  It was a clear night, and the stars wheeled overhead around a three-quarters moon. When at last he reached his own place, the old Clarksville schoolhouse, whose front door they rarely locked, Charlie wasn’t surprised to find it locked tonight.

  He knocked—a knock without the usual precedent of headlights or engine noise. Donna’s voice was webbed in fear when she said from the other side, “Who is it?”

  At midnight, the fifth of bourbon on Bunny’s kitchen table between him and John Harrigan was more empty than full. And yet neither of them was feeling the effects of the alcohol—which was too bad, John thought.

  After Monty had left with the mechanicals, the Harrigans had all gone home to the house on South Hill, John and Karen in the Lincoln, Mike in his car. But John wasn’t ready to sit at home just yet. He went back out to his ’88 Ford pickup, stashed a bottle of Jim Beam’s behind the seat, and drove up to West Stewartstown, to where Dennis and Polly lived—or where Dennis had lived.

  Susan Zizza had gotten a ride home by then. But Sue Wright, who owned the printing business Dennis had worked at for a while, was there. Polly said their son, Aaron, an engineer, was on his way home, that he had been doing surveying work for an oil company in Alaska. He was just about to leave for a lengthy job in the bush somewhere when he had been found by Alaska state police. “That was lucky,” John said.

  John had forgotten how beautiful this house was, what good carpenters and stone masons the Jooses had become, and to what wholesome uses they had put their local spruce, cedar, and granite. He said as much, which got him around to saying what he had come to say—“I’m so sorry, Polly. I’m sorry he’s gone.”

  Polly yielded a smile and shook her head. “He’s not gone,” she said, glancing around at the plank floor, the cathedral ceiling, the little indoor pool, the fulsome hearth and chimney. “He’s all around me here.”

  When John left Polly and Sue, he drove to Bunny and Irene’s house in Canaan, on the other side of the river, with its American flag in the front yard hanging limp against the moon and the inky bulk of Monadnock to the west. Irene bade goodnight to John and went to bed. Bunny had nodded his assent when John broke out the bourbon. “Might as well,” he said.

  In a couple more hours, John would drive back to the Sentinel Building. He wanted to make sure everybody had left, and Trooper Brett Beausoleil, in his crime scene log, would note John entering through the front door. The rooms were empty, and John listened to the sound of his own footsteps shuffling among the empty pasteup boards and vacant desks. He looked into Vickie’s office, and maybe he only imagined a trace of her scent, her perfume and its tinctures of grass and sky. The lights were still on, and John would choose to leave them that way.

  “HARRIGAN’S daughter also arrived on foot,” Beausoleil would write in his log, “and spoke briefly to her father prior to both leaving.” Karen was worried, was looking for John, had parked some distance from the building because of other vehicles still lining Bridge and Main. John can’t remember what he and Karen talked about. “I think I might have asked her if the back door was locked,” he said. “Or maybe about my idea to throw the front door open the next morning, let the media in.”

  For now, John was at rest at Bunny’s kitchen table, in the house where Vickie had grown up. Bunny said that he believed—believed all the more so now—that there was something eternal in every human being. He remembered a verse from Romans: “Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.” But he spoke from the bottom of that chasm into which Job was flung.

  John’s body and soul were bleeding into each other. He wondered what might have been different. He wondered where you have to go, what number you call, what incantation you chant, to sell your soul for a second chance at life—even if you couldn’t change a thing. Just to be there again. “We get to thinking we’re going to live forever,” he said. “Don’t we?”

  If John had gone past the wood-burning stove, out the kitchen, and around the corner, he could have climbed the stairs to Vickie’s old bedroom. Irene had left it just as it was when Vickie moved out: her old clothes in the closet and dresser, her college texts in the bookshelves, her diplomas on the wall, along with her DAR Citizenship Award and a photo of her and her French horn in the Plymouth State orchestra.

  Tucked into one corner was her first keyboard instrument, a General Electric Youth Electric Organ. The device was mostly plastic, dusty and unplugged, but resting on its console was an American songbook thrown open to this page:

  On top of Old Smokey, all covered in snow,

  I lost my true lover, come a-courting too slow . . .

  PART THREE

  17

  THE ARMOR OF GOD

  FROM THE REPORT of Sergeant Edward J. Ledo of the Vermont State Police: “On Tuesday 08-19-97, at approximately 1630 hours, this officer was assigned to provide security at the Drega death scene. Upon arrival at the scene I met with Det./Sgt. Tim Chagnon, who advised that security at the crime scene was needed due to the approaching darkness.”

  Ledo walked with another Vermont trooper, Sean Selby, down the road along Black Creek until, at the clearing, he met the trailer-truck bulk of the Vermont Mobile Crime Lab. Beyond that, a number of dete
ctives were taking notes, marking shell casings, examining the trees and ground litter. They showed Ledo and Selby the body, still lying faceup on the hillside with the Colt AR-15 nearby, and pointed out the New Hampshire trooper’s Stetson at the bottom of the slope.

  Eventually Ledo and Selby were left alone in the blackening woods. Two other troopers guarded the road entrance on Route 102. At eleven o’clock, a pair of headlights came knifing down the tote road. These belonged to a hearse from the Sayles Funeral Home in St. Johnsbury. The hearse worked its way carefully around the lab truck, its tires digging into the berm where the K-9 detail had taken cover. Then Ledo and Selby helped put the body into a bag, which they secured with evidence tape and pushed into the back of the hearse. The vehicle’s receding taillights glowed like will-o’-the-wisps in the woods.

  At the funeral home, attendants would find that Carl Drega had not committed suicide, as it had appeared to Kevin Jordan and some others. Instead he had been hit simultaneously by two different projectiles: an M14 bullet that had cut a tunnel through his jaw and out the back of his head and a shotgun slug that had struck the center of his bulletproof vest with enough concussive power to stop his heart. The body also displayed a bullet wound in the right shoulder, and there had been three other solid hits to Drega’s vest.

  The Vermont State Police had Drega’s wallet, which was found to contain, among other items, identification cards answering to both his birth years, 1930 and 1935; a State of Connecticut birth certificate with the year of birth scratched out; a valid New Hampshire pistol/revolver license, which allowed him to carry a concealed weapon; the business cards of several lawyers and a Bushmaster Firearms sales representative; an expired registration certificate for his ’74 Dodge pickup; Rita Drega’s Social Security card; and a dog-eared wallet photo of Rita.

  Mrs. Drega had been pretty, and indeed looked Native American with her high cheekbones, broad white smile, and coppery skin tone. The photo had been taken with a flash at some social occasion, perhaps. She wore what looked like a zebra-print dress with a cravat-like bow at the neck. Relax, everything will be fine, she seemed to say.

  Ledo and Selby checked the scene at random intervals each hour throughout the night. The discarded Stetson, tipped between its crown and brim, looked like a beached seashell in the flicking beam of a flashlight. The hemlocks murmured like ship masts in a light breeze, and the stars were buoy lights winking between their crowns.

  On Tuesday night—well, Wednesday morning—the Pappas family’s Italian restaurant in Brookline, Massachusetts, closed as it usually did at 1:00 a.m. An hour later, Mark Pappas and several friends were aboard a twenty-six-foot powerboat heading out of Scituate Harbor and into Massachusetts Bay. Pappas intended to have a few beers and get a little sleep before they all baited hooks for striped bass at 4:00 a.m.

  “So somebody switched on the TV and said, ‘Hey, it’s working,’ which was exciting for us, because there weren’t a lot of things working on that boat,” he recalled. “We fiddled with the knobs and got three channels out of Boston. We left it on—I don’t know, NBC Nightly News?—and there was something going on up in New Hampshire. I was watching the screen, but not paying much attention. Suddenly this guy’s face came up, a driver’s license headshot. I sat bolt upright and told everybody to shut up. ‘Turn it up!’ I yelled, and I’m grabbing the shoulder of the guy next to me. ‘That’s the guy I sold my rifle to!’”

  “The guy that shot all those people?” somebody said. “You sold him a gun?”

  “At a gun show last winter—I remember that guy.”

  “What are you selling to that fucking idiot for?”

  “Hey, excuse me, how do I know what he’s going to do? It was legal—a legal sale, right?—and he seemed okay, seemed friendly. He looked like somebody’s grandfather, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I gotta tell you, he didn’t look so friendly.”

  “Well, he looked different there, but—”

  “So maybe that’s not the guy.”

  “No, that’s him—I remember. I remember those eyebrows. That was the guy. Oh, shit.”

  The group fell silent amid the slap of the waves, the ionized glow of the TV, the inky void outside the cabin windows. “So you sold him that Colt semi, right?” somebody else said.

  “Yeah.” Pappas felt like he’d been wrestled down and shot with a syringe full of something he didn’t know about. Its effects were complicated. Fear was one of them. Helplessness too. Confusion. Guilt? Should he feel guilty?

  “You think that was your gun he used?”

  “I don’t know.” He shivered and shook his head. Guys like this, he thought, they usually have a lot of guns. “Probably not.” But he couldn’t banish all those feelings.

  Pappas was due back at the restaurant the next evening, and he didn’t get any sleep that night. At dawn they caught stripers and a small shark, until a school of bluefish moved in.

  Early Thursday morning an FBI agent would appear on Pappas’s doorstep to claim the bill of sale for the rifle Drega had used.

  Susan Zizza would say later that it looked like the Martians had landed, with all the TV studio trucks—and their arrays of antennae, radar dishes, and transmission towers—parked up and down Bridge and Main on Wednesday morning. John Harrigan was the first to thread his way through them at 5:30 a.m.

  Then came Jana Riley, who hadn’t quit the newspaper business after all. “Well, I couldn’t leave John even more short-handed,” she explained. As was usual on a Wednesday morning, Jeannette Ellingwood arrived to help Jana sort and bundle for delivery the five thousand copies of the News and Sentinel that a trucker from Lancaster had left inside the front door. Chandra Coviello was absent, but Karen and Mike Harrigan pitched in, in her place.

  At 8:00 a.m., other staffers arrived, as usual. Charlie Jordan, still working on a volunteer basis, got a ride in with Donna in the family’s other car, and then Donna stayed to help as well. Charlie surveyed with a perfectionist’s eye the new issue of the Sentinel, with its black headline and stark photos, and was shamed by the several mistakes in layout he had made, out of either haste or unfamiliarity with the Sentinel’s practices: the wrong headings for the “Locals” columns, some crooked headings elsewhere, some off-kilter font sizes. Nonetheless, he took a copy outside, where he stood in front of the reporters already starting to assemble, many from big East Coast dailies, and raised the issue over his head. Cheers broke out. Camera shutters clicked.

  Of course, with its front-page split between homicide and an Old Home Day parade, this was a newspaper unlike any of those dailies, which was exactly the point to John: mass murder, God help us, but don’t forget the Kiwanis Club’s Layperson of the Year award (Stephanie Lyons, a business education teacher at Canaan High, church volunteer, Sunday school teacher, and officer in the Order of the Eastern Star), or the teenage volunteers who spent a week cleaning up the Kenneth Poore farm, or the restoration of the first settlers’ gravestones in Canaan. Don’t forget the stories Fred Harrigan might have passed on: the camp runaways, the vandalism at the post office. All these pieces, sun and cloud, combined into a weather system that made the issue’s lead story all the more bald and perplexing, like a moon astronomers couldn’t explain.

  John didn’t expect to see Susan Zizza, especially since editors usually took a day of rest after press day. He called her early that morning, though, just to make sure she was all right, and she insisted that she was, that she’d be in later. But she didn’t sound all right.

  By 8:15, John had everybody in the building gathered once more around the center table in the newsroom. Bouquets of flowers crowded Dennis’s desk—Vickie’s as well, dwarfing like sequoias the little arrangement Bunny had laid there the previous afternoon.

  John said he had made a promise yesterday to all the news people outside the building. “I told them today would be, well, we’ll call it ‘Media Day,’ he said. “I promised they could come inside and ask questions, but only to those of you who are willing
and able. I’ll try to handle as much of that as I can by myself. If a reporter approaches you, though, I encourage you to help—if you can. If you can’t or don’t want to, no problem. Just say so, and if any of them hassle you about it, let me know.”

  More than a few weren’t so sure about this, would prefer just to work, to not be pressed for decisions one way or the other in regard to talking about it. But it was too late for John to go back on his promise. “We’ll make it work,” he said.

  Rumors that John Pfeifer had died would prove unfounded, though his life hung in the balance at a hospital in Burlington, Vermont. Rumors on this day that Wayne Saunders had died were also unfounded, these springing from the fact that Saunders’s head had been covered when he was loaded off the medevac helicopter at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital in Lebanon. “They put that hood on me so reporters couldn’t tell who it was,” Saunders explained. “Some cop was there and he thought I had died en route.”

  Saunders remembered hearing from Steve Breton that Scottie and Les had been shot by the same guy who had shot him. At the Colebrook hospital he had asked several times about how they were doing—nobody seemed to hear. Then he spent the night floating in and out of consciousness. He woke in the morning possessed by a full-body ache and the feeling that his chest and left arm had been mauled by a bear.

  He would learn that he had been in surgery not only for the repair of vascular damage in that arm but also for the removal of his Fish & Game badge—driven through cloth and into flesh as though by a stamp press—from his sternum. The first of Drega’s bullets, surgeons found, had miraculously struck that aluminum wafer at just the right angle. Just as in the cowboy movies, the badge had deflected the bullet away from the CO’s heart, then up into his shoulder.