In the Evil Day

  In the morning he was tangled in tubes and his head was wreathed in fog, but he felt aware enough to click on the TV above his hospital bed, catch up on the news. It took only a few minutes for him to feel like he had been kicked in the chest again, for tears to run unstanched down his cheeks.

  By 7:30 a.m., every copy of the News and Sentinel had been cleaned out of the building and grabbed off the newsstands. John had to call down to the Coös Junction Press to rush a second printing.

  At the same time he conducted what amounted to a running, all-day news conference, from one end of the building to the other, as more flowers and then donated trays of food came in through the door. In his answers to all the questions, he began to find themes that he would return to as the questions were repeated, repeated again. So how is Colebrook different today than it was just yesterday? “The Shangri-La factor,” he said. “It’s been lost. It seemed like something like this couldn’t happen here.”

  John remembered all the reporters—though not nearly as many as now—who had come to Colebrook in 1984, after Christopher Wilder had been killed, and it struck him that no one then had been asked to explain that event in terms of what sort of town Colebrook was, other than its being a border town patrolled by a tough cop named Jellison. That had been a random event—of all the towns along the Canadian border, or the Mexican, for that matter, Wilder happened to head for this one. John proposed much the same view of this incident when reporters asked him to explain what had just happened, to offer some rationale for why it happened here. It made no difference whether the killer was a fugitive from Florida, he said, or a North Country native, or someone in between. “This guy was just a piece of space junk who happened to get us,” he told the New York Times. “It was our turn.”

  Elsewhere in the building, the city reporters moved as though inside a church, speaking in whispers and approaching John’s staffers circumspectly. Nonetheless, people were edgy as they started work on next Wednesday’s issue. Karen Harrigan had been filmed that morning as she helped bundle newspapers. She had felt odd about that and decided not to take interview requests. Claire Lynch had dressed up in a sleek dress and high heels for the day, but she ended up fleeing the building, glad of the excuse to pass out sidewalk flyers announcing Scott’s and Les’s calling hours. There, however, a film crew found her and prevailed upon her to walk up the town hall steps for them. They held a microphone down low to catch the clicking of her heels as she flushed in embarrassment.

  Around midmorning, Karen took a call from a woman in Portsmouth, down in the Seacoast Region, at the other end of the state. “Yes—I ordered a classified ad for this week’s issue,” the woman said with brittle politeness. “And I paid with a credit card, but the ad’s not in there. I can’t find it.”

  “Ma’am, did you read any of that issue?” Karen said. “Or have you watched any news on TV?”

  “No, I went straight to the classifieds, but—”

  “Uh-huh. We’ve had a little incident here.”

  “Oh—really? What . . .” Karen heard a newspaper rustling in the background. “Oh, my.”

  “Yeah—we’ll credit your account.”

  A few moments later, Jana Riley took a call from someone hoping to be reassured that Fred and Esther Harrigan were all right. Jana explained that no, actually they weren’t, and provided the years of their deaths.

  In the afternoon, as rain began to fall, Jana admitted to herself that there was another reason she needed to come to work today—her resolve not to let someone like this Carl Drega change her life or who she was. But as the afternoon wore on, she felt herself getting wound up tight, a little bit anxious. She didn’t like it that she had never seen the killer’s corpse, that she had to take it on faith that Drega had died in the woods last night. She didn’t know any more than the rest of the world why all hell had broken loose yesterday. She wondered if Vickie was just unlucky, if she or Jeannette or anyone else might have just as easily been a target, and if the story about Drega’s death might be one of those facts that newspapers get wrong sometimes, if instead he might still be on the prowl. In years to come, she would wake at night crazed by the same nightmare—being chased by a man in camouflage pants and wielding a rifle, but with no face, just a yawning fleshy whiteness.

  That day she reached a breaking point when another strange reporter asked her, yet again, how she and her colleagues were feeling today. “Well, how do you expect us to feel?” she snapped. She stomped into John’s office, ready to quit again, until John promised she’d be left alone.

  At the end of the day, in a drizzling rain, Jana and others were allowed to reclaim their vehicles from the parking lot. But Jana felt faint when she found spatters of dried blood, it must be Dennis’s, on her car’s hood and right fender.

  She wheeled out of the lot with her wipers snapping and her hands almost jumping off the wheel. At home she fetched soap and water and a stiff brush and ran out again into the rain.

  Veteran state troopers John McMaster and Jack Meaney were among those summoned Wednesday morning to search the Drega property, where it looked like Drega had tried to burn the barn as well as the house.

  In 1972 McMaster and Meaney were founding members of the state police’s first bomb squad, a unit formed on the fly when anti–Vietnam War activists planted explosives in Manchester’s police and fire stations. On that day, McMaster had held a bomb in his bare hands while a trooper with military ordinance experience set about dismantling it. A young, square-jawed Chuck Jellison was also a member of that squad.

  On Wednesday, McMaster was the sergeant in command of the search detail. He stood with Meaney before the barn’s middle bay door and pointed out the sort of burn mark that results from a quick splash of a flammable liquid and a tossed match. A five-gallon plastic gas can, half full, rested nearby. If he wanted to burn his barn, Meaney thought, it was a half-assed effort. It looked more to him like Drega was trying to lure someone through that particular door and not the others.

  They entered through one of the other bay doors and climbed stairs to the building’s second level. There they saw a shiny Kubota lawn tractor, workbenches, and, on a table near an outside door, a pile of fireworks—snaking coils of rope fuse salutes—and a bucket of granulated, or “prilled,” ammonium nitrate. A good chemical fertilizer, ammonium nitrate was also a prime ingredient, combined with diesel fuel, of the bomb Timothy McVeigh had used in Oklahoma City two years before.

  Meaney found three books scattered on the cowling of the Kubota: “one on homemade survival techniques and devices,” he would write in his report, “one on homemade C-4 explosives, and one on homemade grenade launchers.” In the first book, Ragnar’s Action Encyclopedia of Practical Knowledge and Proven Techniques, Meaney found a bookmark providing quick reference to a chapter on booby trapping stairs with explosives. Meaney saw that McMaster was halfway up a flight of stairs to the barn’s top level. “John, you better get your ass down from there,” Meaney said—loudly.

  Twenty minutes later, McMaster was at the Colebrook Police Department and on the phone with state attorney general Mike Ramsdell. “No, we’re not losing any more men to this bastard,” Ramsdell said. “The barn’s a public hazard. That’s what it looks like to me. So finish what he started. Just burn it—and we’ll see what’s left.”

  That afternoon, Dan Ouimette was called to the property by agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Ouimette knew he was lucky, that his life had been saved by the job he had in Vermont when Drega pulled into his empty shop on Tuesday. The ATF wanted to know about any tunnels or hidden trenches on the grounds, and Ouimette said he wasn’t aware of any. Later he stood in the rain in front of the barn with McMaster and Meaney. The sergeant said the barn would be burned that night, rain or no rain.

  “That’s a nice Kubota he’s got in there,” Meaney said. “It’s a shame.”

  The ATF agents also thought it was a shame. Booby traps or not, they wanted to comb the barn for evide
nce of links between Drega and organized groups, militia or otherwise. But Ramsdell wouldn’t budge.

  Ouimette looked up at the barn, which had towered like a pyramid over the cabin, and admired its unblemished siding, its proud palladium window, its square-cornered workmanship. It occurred to him that Carl would no more have been taken alive than he would have used a mismeasured board.

  The rain stopped early that evening. At 10:00 p.m., the barn was set afire via remote ignition. “Within a few minutes the building was fully involved,” Meaney wrote. The flames rose to a hundred feet, and then higher. They licked at the clouds and cast a jack-o’-lantern glow up and down the river.

  “That’s the last of his woodpile,” said state fire marshall Donald Bliss. A few minutes more, and the first in a series of explosions was heard.

  Gerry Upton and his Case 450 bulldozer had just been hired by the Town of Hardwick to help repair a washed-out road. Upton told the FBI agent on the phone that he had to be at work at seven on Thursday morning. “Okay, we’ll be there at five,” the agent said.

  “So you want to talk for two hours?”

  “It may not take that long, but we have a number of questions about Mr. Drega, sir—thank you.”

  There were two men—Special Agents John Hersh and Daniel Rachek, wearing the sort of sharp suits and crisp ties that aren’t seen much around Hardwick—at Gerry and Margaret’s door the next morning. The Uptons and the agents sat in the living room while the rising sun gilded the pond outside the back windows. Hersh’s synopsis of the interview would cover eleven typed pages, single-spaced, starting with Gerry Upton’s life history and then his twenty years of friendship with Carl Drega.

  Upton said that a New Hampshire Fish & Game officer had given Carl “a hard time over a river improvement project” that he and Carl worked on together, that Carl filed a lawsuit against the officer, and then Carl got “ticked off” at the judge in the case, whom the agents and the Uptons presumed—incorrectly—to have been Vickie Bunnell. Upton mentioned bailing Carl out of jail once after he had “touched off a round of ammunition in the ground or the air” that had frightened a tax assessor. “UPTON then described DREGA,” Hersh wrote, “as the type of individual who did not like authority.”

  Upton remembered an autumn visit to Carl’s house in Columbia the year before. In the solarium he noticed a thick book “dealing with survival tactics.” This was probably Ragnar’s Action Encyclopedia, the book that Jack Meaney had found on the tractor. It provided instructions on, among other things, protecting your privacy and property, changing your identity, stocking and defending a retreat, building weapons and explosives, and avoiding “the costly mistakes of others when standing up to big government and nosy do-gooders.” Also in the solarium, Upton remembered, was “a pamphlet detailing a militia-type activity.” Upton said that Carl had been present while he browsed through these items but that Carl never spoke to him about them or about anything related to their subject matter. Nor did Carl ever voice any intent to harm another person.

  Upton had last seen Carl at Christmas, had last spoken to him five weeks ago when Carl needed that nuclear plant job reference. No, there were no tunnels or bunkers on his property, just a root cellar extending from his barn into a hillside. Both Margaret and Gerry described their incredulity when they heard the news on Tuesday and their unsuccessful flight to the Hardwick police station.

  Upton shared photos of him and Carl working on the barn they had built together elsewhere in Hardwick. He mentioned their plan to canoe the Allagash River. “At this point in the interview,” Hersh wrote, “it was noted that UPTON became upset emotionally as he related the fact that he would not be able to take that canoe trip with his good friend, CARL DREGA.”

  Two hours flew by, and they were still talking. At 7:20 a.m. Upton said, “I’m sorry, but I’m already late—I’ve got to get to that job.”

  On the road, Upton was in such a hurry that—towing the Case 450 behind him—he passed a truck on a straightaway. Hersh and Rachek, meanwhile, reviewed their notes and decided that things still didn’t add up between Gerry Upton’s gentle, considerate friend and this killer in Colebrook. They pursued Upton to his job site.

  “Brief contact with UPTON was had at the construction site,” Hersh wrote, “where he reiterated the fact that he could not think of further information which would have been in his possession concerning DREGA which had not already been discussed with the FBI.”

  Susan Zizza came in at 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday. She entered through the front door, had to stop and steady herself when the first thing she saw on the counter in front of Jana’s desk was a stack of Charlie’s photos from the day before. Then she walked back to the newsroom, sat at her desk, found herself subject to interview requests, and went home.

  On Thursday she arrived before eight. She parked in the rear lot, where none of the city reporters—back on lockout status—recognized her. As she went in through the back, she had to shield her eyes from that spot where Vickie had fallen. She said hello to ad designer Chandra Coviello, who had also returned to work that day—Wow, she looks even worse than I feel, Susan thought—and continued past Chandra’s desk to John’s office. The publisher’s door was open, and John was there with a producer and cameraman from New Hampshire Public Television.

  If Dennis had been here, Susan would be meeting with him that morning to plan the next issue’s news stories and make assignments. Instead that meeting would take place with John, Susan learned, with New Hampshire Public Television filming it for a documentary they had in the works. Something inside Susan rebelled—not just at the camera but at the publisher as part of the editorial process. She remembered John and Dennis disagreeing once on a story of some kind, and John wouldn’t back down until Dennis said, “You want to be editor? You can have the job.”

  With Dennis gone, Susan felt that the stories and assignments should be all up to her. But then again, she had been absent, and John had had to pick up the slack. So she submitted to that meeting, filmed around the table in the newsroom. She and John talked about filling in the holes in the story published yesterday—interviewing witnesses and surveying the killer’s history, trying to make sense of it all, this for a more comprehensive account to appear next week. But they were short on labor. Susan wondered about Karen, and John said she had an okay from the Union Leader to stay for a week. So could she do some reporting? John hesitated. Susan pressed and John agreed to ask her.

  Then there were the obituaries for next week’s issue. John insisted on writing Vickie’s. For an illustration he would use a favorite photo taken by Susan, one of Vickie in a sweater at her desk. The books of Fred Harrigan’s old law library fill the shelves behind her, and a contented Tallak—already adopted by friends of Vickie’s—rests her forepaws on Vickie’s lap while she scratches the dog’s neck. It’s not the usual sort of photo for a lawyer and judge, but Vickie liked it. Her smile is direct and inviting. Maybe you want to talk to her about a property deed. Better yet, you might just want to play cribbage.

  Susan would make the assignments on the other obituaries and stories. There would be no obituary for Carl Drega, but Karen, if she were willing, would go down to the charred ruins of Drega’s house and barn to see what the police might have found there.

  Susan had arrived this morning determined to hit the ground running, to show John that she could do this. She repeated to herself certain passages from Psalms that had helped her get up in the morning. There was Psalm 30:5, King James: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” And Psalm 125:5–6, New World: “Those sowing seeds with tears will reap even with a joyful cry. The one that without fail goes forth, even weeping, carrying along a bagful of seed, will without fail come in with a joyful cry, carrying along his sheaves.”

  So far, so good, though this was a sowing harder than she thought it would be. She was better off than Chandra, though—thirty years old, but seemingly younger than that. Susan looked down the corridor to se
e the girl weeping into the blotter on her desk.

  Chandra lived right there on Bridge Street, a few houses down from the police station. After lunch, Susan said, “Chandra, come on—I’m going to walk you home.”

  There Susan used Chandra’s telephone to call the girl’s mother, who lived in Stewartstown. Chandra’s not coming back any time soon, Susan thought, and in fact she would never return to the Sentinel—which left the newspaper without an ad designer. Later that afternoon, Susan went to see Bill Bromage in his office at the First Colebrook Bank. She said, “Bill, I need someone who can do ad design, just for a few days at least.”

  “When?” he asked.

  “Well, right now. This afternoon.”

  They both knew that one of Bill’s tellers, Cindy Faucher, used to design ads for the Sentinel before she went to work for Bromage. Chandra, in fact, had been hired to take her place. “Well, let’s go talk to Cindy,” Bill said.

  A few moments later, Cindy was racing to keep up with Susan as they crossed Main Street and ducked past the satellite trucks into the front door of the newspaper building. Only in a small town, Susan thought.

  That week the population of that small town nearly tripled. About 4,200 people—policemen, customs agents, conservation officers, firefighters, government officials, reporters, relatives, and friends—came for the Friday calling hours and Saturday funeral ceremonies for Scott Phillips and Les Lord. Men in uniform arrived from twenty-one states, as far as Nevada and Alaska, and two Canadian provinces. At the Northern Comfort Motel, officers were packed four or five to a room. Others were on couches in private homes, in sleeping bags on classroom floors.