In the Evil Day

  Meanwhile, talk in the restaurants and bars—and newspapers—soon got around to what might have been done differently once the shooting started. And given the tensions that already existed between the town and the police department, given then the toe-to-toe battle fought at Brunswick Springs, with (so far) no loss of life, it was hard for a lot of people not to view the parking lot of LaPerle’s IGA as the site of an ignominious defeat. One day in the kitchen of his home in Phippsburg, Dan Couture folded his hands around his coffee mug, offered the thinnest of smiles, and said, “Oh, sure, the infamous dumpster.”

  This was the version of that episode that went from ear to ear around Colebrook in the days following: a couple of the town’s finest cowering behind a dumpster while state police were being slaughtered a hundred yards away. Then one of the cops had a clear shot at a man on his way to murder several more people, but the cop didn’t have the nerve to take it. “All we heard was how great the state police were that day—and the Border Patrol, Fish & Game—and how the local police sucked,” Couture said. “The worst thing was that there were other guys in those agencies who bought into that.” Couture was grateful at least that they did not include his buddy Wayne Saunders.

  Nor did everybody in town buy into that. “The only complaint I ever had about the Colebrook police,” said Julie Roy, who had seen the first shots fired at the IGA, “was about getting stopped for a little hole in my exhaust, or a crack in the windshield, while that orange pickup was being driven all around town just a little faster than it was falling apart.”

  She went on. “One of the things I do is tend bar, and I listened to it for years, to what people were saying. I wouldn’t let them know I was there at the IGA—I didn’t want to get into it. But I have to commend those cops. The smartest thing they did that day was not to fire a shot. A lot more people could have died.”

  Couture says that Sielicki was great, that he stood up for him and Breton, but of course the chief was disqualified from the debate on conflict-of-interest grounds. Rumors circulated during the following weeks that Sielicki had been suspended, that Breton and/or Couture had been fired, that they and several other officers were resigning.

  The September 4 issue of the News and Sentinel took the unusual step of reprinting an article from the New Hampshire Sunday News, one that dispelled those rumors. It contained a statement from Jules Kennett, who was both a town selectman and a part-time patrolman. Without naming Steve Breton, Kennett pointed out that this was a cop who had arrived at a crime scene unaware of the situation and who fell immediately under rifle fire. “I don’t know about you, but if I’m getting shot at, I’m going to take cover,” Kennett said. “If this was a dead Colebrook officer, would that have made things better? I think he responded properly. I’m glad he’s still with us.”

  That issue also contained an editorial by Susan Zizza. “There is no rewind button,” it read in part. “The horrible events of Tuesday, August 19, cannot be played over again or rewritten. This man brought irrevocable change and damage into the lives of all of us in the North Country. But we do have some control over how far the damage will extend. We can continue to let him harm and hurt us from the grave by letting him pull apart our community, divide us with recriminations before the facts are all in, or we can save our breath for words of comfort, our energy for strengthening each other to get through this time of trial. . . . Let’s rejoice that others are still alive, that we can see their familiar faces on our streets and grasp their hands in friendship. Let this man’s hate and bitterness die with him. Let it stop here, with us.”

  But the recriminations against local police never did quite stop. Couture kept waiting for them to die off, but they wouldn’t, such were people’s anger and grief. Nor was there counseling available to Couture or his peers of the sort offered to officers of other agencies. In the end, he left Colebrook not because of the money but because of the heartache and blame—as did Steve Breton.

  Within two years, every other member of that department, full or part time, including Mike Sielicki, had left as well. Steve Breton is in Rhode Island, working as a sales executive in the food industry and coaching Nicholas’s youth soccer team. Mike Sielicki is the well-regarded chief of a twelve-man department in Rindge, New Hampshire. In the end, the rumors about resignations would prove true. “But you can see it was a fantastic department,” Couture said. “Every one of those guys has gone on to success elsewhere.”

  Couture himself regards moving to Maine as the best thing he ever did. “There are always other cops around, you never have to go into situations alone, and you’re respected—it’s nice to be part of that.”

  A long way back on rewind lies that other thing he might have done. In the Hollywood version of August 19, he would have spun on his one good heel, swung his 9 mm Ruger in an arc like a man shooting skeet, opened up just enough of a lead ahead of the perpetrator, and taken him out with one clean shot to the head. In that version, Phillips’s cruiser would have come to rest harmlessly in a ditch. Scott and Les would have been avenged that quickly. Vickie and Dennis would still be alive. Couture could have lived out his days in Colebrook a hero.

  “Sure, I would’ve taken that chance if I’d known what else was about to happen,” he said. “So I wasn’t a hero that day, and I’d trade everything in the world if I could have been, and prevented those deaths. The guys who were heroes—their information was different. They knew what was going on, what had already happened. Me? I made a decision. It had unfortunate consequences, as it turned out, but on the basis of what I knew then, I can at least say it wasn’t the wrong decision. I think things happen for a reason. I used to relive those events, that moment, every single day in my head. I’m not like that anymore. I’m all through with it. I can sleep.”

  Except for Carl Drega, all the men who went into the woods at Brunswick Springs came back—even John Pfeifer. He remembers tottering on the edge of consciousness at the hospital in Lancaster and hearing the radiologist say, “Oh, shit, he’s got a bullet in the heart.” Then he lapsed into a long sleep, and it was only later he learned that the doctor was looking at an x-ray taken before they had torn off his ballistics vest. After cutting a swath through Pfeifer’s lung, the bullet had lodged in the back of the vest and so fooled the radiologist.

  The men came back, but they were different. Even Major, the Vermont K-9 that had saved six lives by barking out a warning just in advance of the trap snapping shut, was different. On the night of August 19, the German shepherd forced his way into bed with handler Russ Robinson and his wife. “Russ said the dog had never done anything like that before,” Steve Brooks recalled.

  Three days later, Kevin Jordan did something he had never done before. A neighbor fired a shot at a woodchuck in his garden, and in a panic Kevin dove for cover under his kitchen counter.

  Then Jordan was among several—Brooks, Rob Haase, some others—who at various times felt compelled to revisit the site. They found Vermont detectives still scouring the litter and hanging color-coded tags on tree trunks and branches—red, blue, yellow, green, white—to distinguish the impacts of bullets of various calibers, shotgun slugs. Brooks was amazed by how big the place seemed, how radically the tunnel vision of a man under fire had shrunk its margins. Jordan was stunned by the surreal fun-house look of all those colored tags. He also went to see Wayne Saunders’s strafed cruiser and took at least a step toward forgiving himself for not riding with Wayne when he saw a bullet hole punched square through the passenger-seat headrest.

  Fellow CO Sam Sprague took a few days off following the shoot-out. He threw his uniform in a pile on the floor and finally took it to a dry cleaner. When he picked it up a week later, he found a note fixed to the shirt: “Sorry, unable to fix the tear in the epaulet.” Only then, with his knees going watery beneath him, did he realize that the epaulet had been sheared by a bullet.

  State trooper Jeff Caulder, on the other hand, couldn’t help enjoying the startle response—the quick intake of breath,
the whispered “Oh”—he elicited from Governor Shaheen when she visited his bedside and asked where he was hit. He attended the funerals with a packet of gauze in place of the lost testicle and was back on his feet without a cane within three weeks. He was puzzled, though, when Chuck Jellison told him that he wasn’t wanted back at work until he had gotten a deer that fall.

  Among family and friends, Caulder is famous for needing only one shot each season to bag a deer. “But that fall I missed three bucks,” he said. “I wondered what the hell was going on.”

  Finally he realized that he was rushing his shots, pulling the trigger as soon as he had a patch of brown in his scope, as if he needed to fire before the deer fired back. Once that fourth buck was dressed out and in his freezer, Jellison welcomed him back.

  When Caulder returned to Brunswick Springs the next spring, he found the colored tags shredded but still fluttering in the trees. He also found a snapping turtle laboring across the tote road, probably a female who had just laid eggs. Very carefully he helped it across and left it near the creek. “That was enough,” he said. “I don’t need to go there again.”

  On August 19, 1998, Jeff Fair—erstwhile member of John Harrigan’s Gang of Uglies, a wildlife biologist who had moved to Alaska in 1995 and who had watched reports on the shootings on a TV in an Anchorage hotel room—got lost up around First Connecticut Lake. It wasn’t that he didn’t remember the roads around there. Rather the directions he had been given to the lodge where John had holed up under an assumed name weren’t working out. And since John had sworn him to secrecy about this whole event, Fair was reluctant to ask directions—if he could even find anybody to ask.

  Finally he came to a turnoff in the woods marked by a hand-lettered sign on a stake. The sign was enigmatic, reading, “¢-nel.” This took a moment, but Fair puzzled it out. “Sentinel,” he said to himself, and turned down that road.

  John was content to spend that day and night, on the first anniversary of what had come to be known as “the Colebrook incident,” with a select few friends, invitation-only and keep your mouth shut. Fair had come back East anyway to do some fieldwork on loons for the State of Maine. John was delighted that this old buddy would be able to join him at the lodge. The trick was not to have any reporters.

  Even John Harrigan, great champion of the media and its right to know, had grown tired of it all. At his own newspaper, the one in Colebrook, things had improved from bad to tolerable. Charlie Jordan was updating and professionalizing the look and content of the Sentinel. Susan Zizza was back at work and feeling a little better. Karen Harrigan had quit at the Union Leader, moved back to her hometown, and joined the staff as a full-time reporter. Her husband, Russ, had caught on as a chef at the Balsams.

  But absenteeism remained a problem, and in all the other newspapers the story wouldn’t die. From the New York Times in October: “It had been scarcely six weeks since Earl and Irene Bunnell’s only daughter, Vickie Bunnell, a 45-year-old lawyer and part-time judge, was gunned down, one of four leading townspeople murdered by a local recluse nursing a twisted grudge over his property rights. And yet here the Bunnells were at LaPerle’s IGA supermarket the other afternoon, buying a chicken to roast for the family of Harold Sheltry, 75, who had died the day before after a sudden illness. The Bunnells’ son, Earl, Jr., serves in the Colebrook volunteer fire department with Mr. Sheltry’s son Brad.

  “‘Other people have their sorrows too,’ said Mr. Bunnell, a 72-year-old retired postal clerk, clasping his wife’s hand as they wheeled their cart past the poultry section at the IGA.”

  Bunny and Irene had kept on doing their shopping at the IGA during the fall, and their appearances there played no small part in luring other people back to the supermarket. Of course reporter Sara Rimer had caught them at a moment—buying food to comfort another family—that was perfectly expressive of who they were.

  Still, in phrases like “a 45-year-old lawyer” or “a 72-year-old retired postal clerk,” Rimer was doing the necessary work of introducing people to strangers, and that was just the problem. In short-form journalism, her characters could be nothing other than reduced and flattened, shorn of all that Vickie was, for example, besides being a “45-year-old lawyer” and murder victim. The truths of who people are—the breadth of their identities, the ways their lives fold into the lives of others—become shrunken and compressed. Multiply that through many newspaper stories, through many spot descriptions, and a composite portrait of Colebrook emerges that not only collapses short of reality but is weirdly skewed by the gravity of one day in its history.

  People who live in Colebrook and are journalists themselves are perhaps bothered most by this. In 2010 Karen Harrigan Ladd—after her divorce and remarriage—would write an editorial in the News and Sentinel that mentions this: “I once stood in a Manchester hotel lobby, feeling as if I’d been punched in the stomach, after a clerk cavalierly threw out, ‘Oh, Colebrook—isn’t that where all those people got shot?’”

  After the New York Times update, there were stories in the dailies about the heartache of Thanksgiving in Colebrook, the sorrow of Christmas in Colebrook, and then the solemnity of Memorial Day, when a black granite slab, etched with ghostly portraits of the four victims, was dedicated on Monument Lot near the spot where Dennis had been shot. The microphones and cameras were sure to be back in force on this first anniversary, and John, unable to talk about it anymore, had gone to ground on a lake he used to fish with Vickie, and still fished with Bunny from time to time.

  He chose a silence and anonymity that probably wouldn’t have been available to him if he were a Pulitzer Prize winner, as he nearly was. Last February, John had been astonished when an Associated Press reporter called asking for a comment about his nomination for a 1998 Pulitzer in journalism, in the category of Breaking News Reporting. His staff at the Sentinel was no less surprised, and pleased—recognition like this, for a small-town weekly—though some couldn’t help wondering why the whole newspaper and its staff had not been nominated, as was the case with all the competition in that category. Why had just the publisher been singled out?

  Susan Zizza, in her shame, had a theory. She wondered if it was because the newspaper staff, before they returned to work, had run away, had turned “to live a coward’s life” as Drega approached; if it was because only Dennis, who had fought and died, and John, who had been absent, were felt to be clean of that stain.

  That wouldn’t have been it, certainly. John couldn’t explain it himself, but he understood the nomination’s injustice. “If I won, I was going to make it right at the podium,” he said. “I was going to emphasize that it was a team effort, that everybody pitched in, that I was accepting only on behalf of the whole newspaper.”

  But it didn’t make any difference. In April, the Pulitzer was awarded to the Los Angeles Times for its coverage of a botched bank robbery and police shoot-out in North Hollywood. “Congratulations,” John told his staff the next morning. “You lost to a newspaper with a hundred people in the news room.’”

  At the lodge, once he’d found it, Jeff Fair met John Lanier and several other former Uglies. John Harrigan was there with a woman he’d been dating, a pretty and warmhearted soul who had already guessed, Fair thought, that John was looking for a way to end the relationship. There was a big table, plenty of food, lots to drink.

  John was his usual hail-fellow self, a little tipsy, and pleased that security had held thus far. At the same time there was something opaque and distant in his manner. Lanier took note, shot a worried glance to Fair. That afternoon, John started a blaze in the lodge’s fireplace, or tried to, but the smoke from the smoldering flame kept stalling at the flue and puffing into the room. “I’ll fix it,” John said, but nothing he did seemed to help.

  Fair took over, saying, “Jesus, John, this is the first time in your life you don’t know how to light a fire.”

  With a slight adjustment in architecture, the fire was burning cleanly. Fair is a widely published nature w
riter as well, as good at literature as he is woodcraft, and he was reminded of a line of poetry from Delmore Schwartz: “Time is the fire in which we burn.”

  19

  FOND BLUE HOPE

  TEN YEARS GO BY, and Monadnock Mountain is bitten away a few fractions of an inch. In 2008, August 19 once again falls on a Tuesday, which begins with a Kiwanis Club meeting at the Wilderness Restaurant, where a chair is left vacant for Vickie Bunnell, where John Harrigan chips in a Happy Dollar in honor of his first grandson, by way of his son, Mike, now married and working as an editor at a publishing house in New York City. The Moose Festival was canceled in 1997. It’s been held every year since, and this year it begins on Friday the twenty-second, as it would have that long ago.

  Friday is another day of spun gold in the North Country: sunny, clear, low 80s. The clouds above the cliffs in Franconia Notch, as travelers drive up I-93, are like spilled milk. Mr. Moose himself—someone in a moose suit with horns as wide as an SUV—waves from the shoulder of the Scott Phillips Highway section of Route 3 as it dips into downtown Colebrook (the Les Lord Highway runs up to Pittsburg).

  Main Street has been blocked off to traffic from Parsons Street down to Bridge. The boulevard is filled instead with booths and tables devoted to handmade baskets, custom T-shirts, homemade soy candles, goat’s milk soaps and lotions, several varieties of fudge, a half dozen church raffles and bake sales, much more. People in shorts and sandals crowd the road and move in murmuring, high-spending clusters from cash box to cash box.