In the Evil Day

by Richard Adams Carey

  John Harrigan owns a cherry red 1947 Willys Jeep that he brings out of the barn for working on his fence lines or else for parades and auto shows like the one scheduled for later this afternoon. Today the Jeep is parked across from the entrance to Bridge Street, in front of the old Walker House, now First-Run Home Entertainment. Each fender of the Jeep is spiked with a crisp American flag, and the vehicle sparkles in the sun like something you might put a nickel into for a ride. John is on the sidewalk, chatting with some friends. Despite the heat, he sports a winter hat with earflaps and a floppy rack of moose horns.

  Someone asks if Bunny and Irene are around. “You must have walked right past them,” John says. “They’re up there on a sidewalk somewhere selling tickets for the Kiwanis raffle. I went to see them a few days ago—on the nineteenth, you know, just to give them a hug—but they were gone. I guess Bunny had a doctor’s appointment in Littleton.”

  Bunny is eighty-two and feeling his age. Since a heart bypass in 1996, he’s had a colectomy and been diagnosed with diabetes. “I can’t be a Playgirl model anymore,” he’ll lament, blaming the needle bruises across his midsection from the insulin injections. Last May he was hospitalized with another heart attack. But John’s friend is referring to that anniversary of the nineteenth when he asks how they’re both doing.

  “Pretty well,” John says. “I think it gets a little better for them each year.”

  “How about you?”

  “Not me. It’s still fresh.”

  That previous October, Bunny went with a friend out to Clarksville Pond for an afternoon’s fishing. It was the last day of the season. Around Colebrook, gardens were being put to bed, firewood split and stacked. Flocks of crows had stripped the kernels out of the last of the summer’s standing corn, and John Harrigan was hosting his annual cider-pressing party at the South Hill farmhouse.

  The pond is up in the hills of Stewartstown, and there Bunny rented a rowboat—it had grown hard for him to get in and out of a canoe—from Rudy Shatney’s daughter Kathleen. Kathleen and her husband now run Rudy’s Cabins and Campground, the business her father started on that pond after World War II.

  “Rudy was quite a fellow—a commando during the war, one of those folks who went up the cliffs at Normandy ahead of everybody else,” Bunny said, once he had settled himself into the bow of the rowboat. “Earned two Purple Hearts and a Silver Star. Then he married Joan, his English war bride, came back here, and became the greatest woodsman I ever saw. One time I was fishing here and called out for a net. Rudy brought it out to me humping a canoe. You ever see anyone do that? He was jumping up and down on the gunnels, and got that canoe moving like a speedboat. One of their two girls was the son Rudy never had—she was quite a deer guide herself.”

  That would have been Jeannette Shatney, who could hump a canoe as well as her father could and who was also the first girl John Harrigan loved. During the summers that he lived with the Shatneys, he and Jeannette hunted and fished together as he would later do with Vickie. While still in her teens, she became the second woman in state history to qualify as a registered deer guide. But then she was dead at twenty, shot and killed while guiding a hunter who was a friend of Rudy’s.

  “The fellow mistook her arm-brush of a fir tree for the push of a deer,” Bunny said. “That was the start of Rudy’s downfall. He was never the same after that.”

  The two men rowed out into a stiff breeze, the water riffled like corrugated tin. The clouds were a threadbare gray, with gauzy patches of light. “Might not catch our limit today,” Bunny said. “Trout don’t like to feed on a choppy surface. The wind stirs the silt up too, and the fish stay down.”

  Out on the lake, they tried Hornbergs—downy, tufted compounds of feather and fur that work well as both dry and wet flies, floating a long moment on the surface, then sinking beneath for trolling. Bunny cast in classic four-count rhythm, the tip of the pole arcing neatly between ten o’clock and two. His line and its leader scrawled voluptuous curves against the clouds, the fly settling into a distant patch of water like a dandelion seed.

  Once the Hornberg sank, Bunny let it troll for a while. He mentioned that it was actually here, and not Fish Pond, where his father Sliver had first taught him to fly-fish. Then he said he was thinking of putting the cabin on Fish Pond up for sale. “Ma and I have never spent a night there since Vickie died,” he said. “Save ourselves the taxes. Brother doesn’t need it. He and Pam have their own camp on Bungy Loop.”

  The rowboat drifted into a part of the lake away from the cabins where the shoreline was an unbroken parapet of bare limbs and dry, rustling leaves. Above that, the sky was slowly draining itself of light. “Look at that,” Bunny said. “Isn’t that beautiful? It looks like a dinosaur could raise its head right over those trees.”

  Bunny thrills to any pond, stretch of river, or corridor of woods that looks this wild, and of course so did Vickie. Now a great swath of the North Country is protected in her name. In 2000, three years after the Champion International lumber company put the Bungy-Cranberry Bog area up for sale—18,540 acres of woods in Stratford and Columbia, where John and Vickie used to hunt and hike—the property was bought by the Nature Conservancy, with fund-raising help from John and other friends, and christened the Vickie Bunnell Preserve. The tallest mountain in that tract, 3,700-foot Blue Mountain, was renamed Bunnell Mountain in 2003. Susan Zizza took a photo at the 2001 dedication of the preserve: Bunny and Irene, Earl, Jr., and Pam, arranged around the rough-hewn sign marking it. The smiles are all genuine. You’d think Vickie was there, lurking modestly off-camera.

  “She was supposed to go flying that afternoon, you know, with Rob—Rob Roy,” Bunny said out of the blue, stripping his line in preparation for another cast. “He had no idea she had almost earned her pilot’s license herself. She was saving that for a surprise. But Rob got held up, and—and she was at the office instead.”

  Bunny had mentioned this before. His mind keeps circling back to this and other circumstances of the day, small events that might have made a big difference had they gone another way. He doesn’t include among these Scott Phillips’s traffic stop of Carl Drega. “No, no matter—something would have set him off,” he said. “I don’t know if I ever even saw the man. I wouldn’t have known him on the street.”

  Bunny sent the fly on a tailing arc toward a nesting box raised above the water for wood ducks. The fly dropped right beneath the box, and Bunny said, “He was one of those SOBs it’s awful hard to love.”

  Bunny and Irene have held up so well, really, and have loved so well that some suspect they move in a state of grace beyond the corrosion of grief. Their closest friends know better. Once, at the kitchen table in South Canaan, with one such friend, amid bowls of homemade beef-and-barley soup, Bunny opened a scrapbook he had made of all the newspaper clippings. There was no telling if it was one particular clipping or an accumulation of them. Suddenly he turned his head, then choked and broke open like a cask, leaning over the table and pouring tears onto the clippings. Irene said nothing, just bowed her head and allowed him his turn. Hers would come around again soon enough.

  But neither Bunny nor Irene is like Rudy Shatney. They refuse to lock horns with the grief. Sometimes they lower their heads and butt against it for a while, but then they slip loose and get back to the living. In his eighties, Bunny has reached the age of being solicited for summary statements. “It’s been fun,” he’ll always say, looking back over the decades. “A lot more good days than bad.”

  After an hour without a nibble on the Hornbergs, Bunny switched to a wooly worm, a good imitation of a bite-sized caterpillar, and a wet fly as well, heavy enough to sink right away. On his third cast, Bunny felt a little something and set his hook. The fish rose like a glowing ember out of the gray water, and then Bunny had it in his hands and was working the hook free of its lip. “Pretty little fellow,” he said.

  The rainbow, with its flicked-paintbrush spatterings of pink and rose, was indeed small, probably a littl
e more than three pounds. But it was legal, and big enough for breakfast the next morning.

  An hour later, with nothing more than that in his basket, Bunny said, “Well, that’ll have to do for this season.” They drove home with the sun shining beneath the cloud cover. Every leaf was like a lamp, lit from within, until they came into the shade of Monadnock. It had been one of the good days.

  At the Moose Festival, on a grassy field opposite Howard’s Restaurant and the South Hill Road intersection, the Kiwanis Club has set up tents and is selling meals of barbecued chicken and all the fixings, as well as watermelon, which John Harrigan is helping to slice and serve.

  A man in a Patriots baseball cap comes up to greet John, grinning and extending his right hand. John hesitates, but the man grabs John’s gloved hand and pumps it anyway. “I don’t mind a little watermelon juice,” he says.

  After he leaves, John whispers, “The guy didn’t understand—that sort of defeats the purpose of the gloves.”

  This calls to mind another handshake. John says that several weeks after the shootings, someone hosted a party far out of Colebrook—in the town of Franconia, way down around the Notch—for anybody who was there that day and needed to blow off some steam. A number of the law enforcement people came, and John made a beeline for Steve Brooks.

  “I told him, ‘I want to shake the hand of the man who killed that bastard,’” John said. “And Steve looked at me just like he’d been pole-axed. That was still confidential information then, about him and Chuck West. But somebody told me, I can’t remember who. And Steve was a little, let’s say, nonplussed to hear that his cover had been blown to a newspaper guy. Of course we never printed that.”

  Kevin Jordan—in the summer of 2008, Lieutenant Jordan, in charge of Fish & Game’s District 5, in southwest New Hampshire—suspected Carl Drega may have meant to come here after setting his house on fire.

  He stood with a friend in a meadow spangled with the last of the asters and black-eyed Susans and bordering Route 102 in Vermont. From there they could look across the Connecticut River into a property that had been for sale for some years, with no takers yet. A couple of sheds still stood, leaning now, and a few dry, black timbers from where the cabin and barn once stood.

  “He would have had an easy time of it from here,” Jordan said. “That AR-15 is good for 300 yards, and I guess we’re about 150. And it’s a very flat-shooting weapon, accurate at long distances. From here he could have picked firefighters off at his leisure. If you ask me, that’s the reason he torched his house. But then Wayne got on his tail, and then we went Code 3, lights and sirens everywhere. He had to change plans.”

  No one will ever know if Drega planned that ambush in Brunswick Springs or if it was something he improvised. Of course Jordan never fired a shot, but he was there in the woods with little knowledge of where the killer lurked, was certain he would die when friendly fire screamed overhead. Later he was among many given medals for their service that day. Deservedly so, one thinks, but some had a different opinion—Les Lord’s pal Gerry Marcou, for example, who left the state police in 2001 when they wanted him to quit highway work altogether and go full time on patrol. Now he’s the sheriff of Coös County.

  “Dennis Joos, now he’s a hero, though he shouldn’t have done what he did,” Marcou said. “A cop, if you get shot and killed, yeah, there ought to be a plaque. Yes, we should remember. But that doesn’t make you a hero. When you put on the uniform, it’s your job to take a bullet. Cops and firemen, you should never hear about us. Put me in charge of the hero awards—there wouldn’t be many.”

  Jordan wouldn’t quibble. His teenage son, Kevin, Jr., always wondered why his dad’s medals weren’t on display somewhere, why instead they were hidden away in a drawer. Then the boy went into the army, served a tour of duty in Iraq, and earned a unit citation and medal for courage under fire. Jordan remembers waiting for him to get off the bus when he came home and how much he looked forward to seeing that hardware pinned to his son’s chest. After they had hugged, these two warriors, the father asked the son, “Where’s your medal?” The younger Kevin smiled, saying he understood now about medals.

  He understood the shameful things your body does in the midst of a firefight and the fright you don’t think proper to a hero. Then there are the dreams and flashbacks and the way the dead accuse you—or at least you think they do—of not having done enough.

  A dispirited Steve Hersom, who would have been Scott’s backup that day but for a traffic accident elsewhere, left the state police for work as a security officer at Plymouth State College. “I visit both graves once each year, Scottie’s and Les’s, and I leave stuff—patches, name tags, flowers, a flag, maybe a hat,” he said. “And I apologize, even though I know it’s stupid. Sometimes the stuff is gone the next year, sometimes not.”

  Back then, it took a week for John Pfeifer to come out of his coma. Eventually he returned to work and has since risen through the ranks of the Border Patrol. He went back to Texas, where he was deputy chief of the Rio Grande Sector, and would return to Vermont in 2010 to take charge of the Swanton Sector, from Maine to Ogdensburg, New York. But first, when he woke from that sleep, he found himself under assault from infection and with radial nerve damage in his left arm. Subsequently he contracted diabetes, which still afflicts him. “I was a thirty-three-year-old healthy male with no chronic illnesses,” he said. “I worked out, I ran, and there’s no history of diabetes in my family. But I lost thirty to forty pounds after I got out of the hospital, and suddenly my blood sugar is off the map. You can’t tell me it’s not connected.”

  But he’s alive, and he knows why. When Steve Brooks retired from the Border Patrol in the summer of 2007, a letter from Pfeifer was read aloud on the occasion. “Not a day goes by that I don’t remember August 19, 1997,” Pfeifer wrote from Texas. “We heard that an officer was down, and we all responded. When I went down myself, and was calling out, I knew help would come. You were among those who came, and for that I’m forever grateful.”

  Wayne Saunders might have left Fish & Game, or at least the North Country, had not Kevin Jordan helped out in altering Saunders’s patrol so that it didn’t include Colebrook. It was a year before Saunders could resume full-time duty, after months of physical therapy and then more surgery to clean out remaining bullet fragments. When he did start work, he wore his ballistics vest all day and carried eight thousand rounds of ammunition in his cruiser. Once, during a domestic violence call, he was told that Drega didn’t do a good enough job on him. “I didn’t want to ruin my career slugging a guy for something like that,” Saunders said.

  He kept his temper, and in 2002 he married a local girl, a waitress he knew previously from the Green Mountain Rest Stop, near the IGA. They moved into an out-of-the-way log cabin near a sparkling river in Stark. In 2013—by which time Kevin Jordan had risen to the rank of major, second in command of state Fish & Game—Saunders was named the lieutenant in charge of District 1. He was still angry that he’d never had a chance to return fire at his assailant, still remembered to approach each day as if it were his last. But the ballistics vest? “No, I don’t wear it all the time anymore,” Saunders laughed. “It started getting tight around the waist.”

  From that meadow by the Connecticut, Jordan took his companion down Route 102 to the tote road into Brunswick Springs. There a pine log laid across the entry to the stretch along Black Creek had become redundant. Mother Nature had dropped thick trunks of pine and hemlock, studded with spears of broken-off branches, every ten or twenty yards along the road. Tire traffic was impossible, and the men saw no sign of foot traffic as they clambered over each barrier.

  The ridges closed in on both sides of the road, and they felt some part of that ancestral unease that had troubled John Pfeifer. Then the woods gave way, and the road flared into that grassy clearing, a parklike space still clean and inviting, still grand for a picnic perhaps. The surrounding conifers rose like pillars in a cathedral. The bull hemlock that Drega
once hid behind had been riddled with ordinance, but its bark was smooth and whole again.

  Jordan betrayed no emotion as he went to where he had found the body on the hillside. “Me, I’m still mad he wore Scottie’s hat,” he said. In the leaf litter and still fixed to some branches, he found a few colored scraps of the ribbons used afterward to mark the bullet impacts.

  Jordan mentioned that Jeff Caulder was doing well. When Caulder eats at Howard’s or the Wilderness Restaurant, he meets townspeople who know who he is and remember that he was there. He’s the father of two daughters, the second conceived after he was carried out on a stretcher with a testicle shot off. This allows him to laugh at the gifts of spare aluminum nuts he still receives from his buddies or the custom T-shirt his wife once gave him: three glum squirrels on a tree limb, looking down, captioned, “It’s all fun until someone loses a nut.”

  Once Chuck Jellison let him come back to work, Caulder’s first SWAT team call was to a hostage incident in Raymond—a teenager with an AK-47 threatening to kill his father. Caulder made the arrest in an armed, face-to-face, finger-twitching standoff. “I firmly believe I’m a shit magnet,” he said.

  By August 1997, Chuck Jellison had already announced he would retire in a few months, but then stayed on the job for more than a year beyond that. “That was for our sake, for Troop F,” Steve Hersom said. “He still ran things like he always did, and joked around with us, but it was never the same. Troop F had the youngest personnel in the state police when he took charge, and we’d all grown up with him. He was the best commanding officer I ever served with, and I would’ve traded places with Scott Phillips if it meant not hurting Chuck. When he finally did retire, that family-style cohesion we had kind of fell apart.”

  The journey back to the gap-boarded bridge and then back to 102, where a tractor-trailer rumbled past, was like coming out of a rabbit hole. The men drove south, past Dean Hook’s neat corn-stubble fields and back into New Hampshire at Guildhall. They went north on Route 3 to the little Northumberland Cemetery, just across the road from the house where Jordan and his family lived, where Wayne Saunders had stopped to chat that afternoon. Jordan parked in the cemetery’s northwest corner, near a row of white pines that stood in a palisade overlooking the Connecticut River.