Keeping the Peace

by Linda Cunningham

  “I love you,” he whispered.

  In answer, she nuzzled into his neck, resting her head in the curve of his shoulder. He felt her relax over the next few minutes as her breathing slowed. Soon, she was asleep.

  Sleep did not come so easily for John. He lay awake, continuing to cradle his wife even after his arm fell asleep. He thought about Melanie. They had been a pair since she was fifteen and had persevered in the face of disapproval from their parents, gossip from the community, and a poorly thought-out elopement. He wondered why he sometimes feared she would leave him. She had never once been anything but a faithful, loving, and strong life partner. She made him feel young, as though twenty-five years had not passed, as though he had not gained twenty pounds, as though his face hadn’t grown swarthy and care-worn.

  She had the same effect on him as she had on every other man, and he wondered what it was that caused such reaction. He stroked her silky skin. Was it because when she smiled at a man, he immediately was under the impression that he was the only man in the room whom she cared anything about? Was it because of her smile itself, open and inviting? Was it her small stature, round and firm and fit even after three children, that made a man feel more virile somehow? There was a passion to her that fanned his own desires into flame. It was a mystery to him, and it scared him sometimes. What if she were to find somebody else? What if somebody found her and swept her off her feet? Somebody with more passion than he had? What if this stranger in his own house tonight, this rock star, was that somebody?

  John sighed as he gently extricated his arm from under her. There was no point in worrying about unfounded fears. He closed his eyes and drifted into sleep. He woke with a start, feeling strangely apprehensive. He opened his eyes and looked out the windows. It was as he had thought: the sky had cleared. Moonlight reflected off the newly fallen snow, spilling its silver watercolor wash into the bedroom. The electricity was still off. The face of the digital clock next to the bed was dark, but the old clock in the bookcase was wound by a key. He squinted to make out the position of the hands. Three o’clock. He was unsettled and wished it were closer to four in the morning, closer to First Cock Crow.

  John’s grandmother had told him about First Cock Crow. He thought he was probably one of the only people left who knew, or cared, what that meant. First Cock Crow occurred at approximately four o’clock every morning. You could find references to it in Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Jethro Tull—not the rock band—if you cared to, Grandmother had explained. John could see her sitting on the edge of his bed, soothing him after he had wakened from a frightening nightmare. “Listen,” she had said. “It is First Cock Crow, the time when the rooster first crows. It is still dark, but he wakes, stretches, and calls to the sun and the light. It is a call to new beginnings and a warning to all who mean harm. With the cock’s first crow, all the demons, worries, anxieties, and fears of the night are exposed for what they are: cruel and cowardly. They are like all bullies; they scare easily. The rooster crows, and they run away. At four in the morning, the sound of my roosters is the most comforting sound in the world.” It usually lasted about fifteen minutes, and then the roosters would be silent again. He could turn over and sleep peacefully. Second Cock Crow came between six thirty and seven. It was a different sound, like reveille, an invigorating call to action. Time to get up and get going. In vain, he listened for Melanie’s roosters to banish his anxiety, but he knew it was too early. They were still asleep.

  “Are you all right?” He had not moved, but like all people who have slept together for years, she knew he was awake.

  “I’m fine,” he whispered, kissing her hair. “Go back to sleep.”

  “You were right,” she said. “It’s cleared. Look at the moonlight.”

  “Hmm. It’s bright.”

  “The power’s not come on yet.”

  It was then that his cell phone, on the bedside table, rang. His stomach leaped a little as he reached for it. Instinctively, he was on guard. “John Giamo,” he said. It was the state police dispatcher.

  “Emergency call from The Inn On The Green, Chief,” said the state police dispatcher.

  “Any details?”

  “Yes. Bill Noyes at The Inn On The Green reported the shooting of a Gabriel Strand, a celebrity musician staying there.”

  John stopped breathing for a moment, trying to rise above his confusion and sort out what he knew.

  The dispatcher said, “State Trooper Bernard is going to the scene. He’s not death certified.”

  “I am,” said John. In Vermont, a death of suspicious nature had to be inspected by a person who was referred to as “death certified.” There were only a handful of them in the state, but John was one of them. “I’ll get down there now. Let Bernard know.” He terminated the call and got out of bed, crossing the room to where he had laid his clothes over the chair the night before.

  Melanie was sitting up in bed. “John?”

  “Did Gabriel Strand leave this house? Did you hear anything?”

  “Why, no. John, what is it?”

  “Dispatch says Gabriel Strand is shot dead at the inn.”

  “Oh, John, no! No!” She scrambled out of bed, rushing down the stairs in her black nightgown.

  John hurriedly stuffed his shirt into his pants, pulling them around his waist and buckling his belt. He heard her footsteps rushing across the kitchen into the far end of the house. He grabbed up his sweater and rushed after her.

  By the time he caught up to her, Melanie had burst through the door of the guest room, which stood open, the beam of her flashlight the only illumination.

  “Ugh! Oh! What the fuck!” He heard the voice of Gabriel Strand.

  John entered the room as Strand sat upright in his bed.

  Melanie said, “Gabriel, come into the kitchen with me. Something has happened.”

  He was suddenly conscious of, and uncomfortable with, his wife’s dishabille. It wasn’t as if the robe was transparent, but he knew the other man would be aware of his wife’s nakedness underneath. He put the petty thought aside and stalked back to the kitchen while Strand crawled out of bed.

  “What? What happened?” John could hear the musician’s confusion as he followed Melanie into the room. “Is it my mother? What is it?”

  For a man who moved slowly and deliberately, John was deadly efficient when it came to his job. He stood in the kitchen, in full uniform, pulling on his overcoat. “I just got a call from Dispatch. They told me you were shot dead in your room at the inn. Obviously, it’s not you, but some guy’s dead, and he’s in your room. Can you get dressed, please, and come with me?”

  “Oh, oh, okay,” stammered Strand. “I don’t understand. Who’d be in my room?”

  “Hurry,” said John.

  Ten minutes later, John was hastening out the door, a cup of coffee in hand, followed by Strand, still looking upset and confused. Conditioned by years of practice, John opened the garage door, backed the Suburban out into the driveway, and started down the road, all one-handed, without spilling a drop of his coffee.

  The police chief glanced over at his passenger. “Coffee?” He offered his cup.

  Strand shook his head, staring blankly into the night. “Thanks anyway,” he said, “but this is the time when I’m used to going to bed when I’m on the road. I usually don’t have coffee until three in the afternoon.”

  “Any idea who might want to break into your room?”

  “No.” The musician shook his head slowly.

  John looked at him out of the corner of his eye. Gabriel Strand wasn’t very old and looked younger than his years. Now, he looked positively childlike. John felt sorry for him, hunched over against the cold, in a strange place surrounded by strange people, with a dead person in his room.

  “You okay?”

  “I guess so. What the fuck! Just seems surreal, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” John agreed, “it does. I can’t remember the last time there was a suspicious death in Clark’s Corner. I
’ve investigated murders in other places, but here, on my home turf, no, never.”

  “That must be grim,” Gabriel said.

  “Pretty grim. Some are worse than others.”

  “Look, I don’t know what to do. What should I do? I can call my promoter. Maybe they tried to break into his room, too. It’s just down the hall from mine.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Strand punched some numbers into the keypad of his cell phone, then waited. Finally, he said, “He didn’t answer. He probably turned it off. Maybe he got somewhere with that girl he was getting drunk with.”

  “We’ll find out soon enough,” muttered John as he maneuvered the Suburban onto the town common.

  The buildings around the small town green were all dark, their windows appearing opaque, like blind eyes. A tiny feeble light shined from inside the inn. John thought it was probably the emergency lights illuminating the exits. Joe Bernard was already there. The blue flashers of his cruiser refracted eerily off the unlit windows onto the snow. John could see him standing on the porch, flashlight in hand. He was glad to see Joe. The man was a responsible, no-nonsense officer and a clear thinker, despite his young age. Crap, thought John as he climbed out of the vehicle, everybody’s younger than me. Joe was hurrying to meet him.

  “The crime scene is sealed off, sir. All the guests are downstairs in front of the fireplace, except the girl who found the body. Most of them were down there anyway, trying to keep warm after the power went out,” reported Bernard. In Vermont, jurisdiction for the investigation of a suspicious death lay with the police chief of the specific township. Bernard had followed procedure properly, waiting for the Clark’s Corner chief to take over.

  “What girl?” John asked.

  “She’s a waitress, Chief,” answered the officer. “I understand she was with the deceased earlier in the evening.”

  “Thanks, Joe,” John said.

  The two men strode through the snow back to the inn. John had almost forgotten Gabriel until he turned to see the musician struggling along in their wake. As they climbed the steps to the inn’s porch, John turned to Bernard and said, “This is Gabriel Strand. Strand, this is Officer Joe Bernard of the Vermont State Police.”

  Bernard shook Gabriel’s hand slowly. “Then who’s lying up there dead?”

  “Don’t know,” John said.

  He heard another vehicle approaching and turned to see that it was a town police cruiser. It pulled up beside Bernard’s car, and Steve Bruno and Tim Cully got out. John waited on the porch for the men to catch up. Bruno looked professional and alert, despite the fact that he couldn’t have had much sleep that day. Cully was beside himself, twitching with excitement. John reasoned that he’d have to keep Cully busy with the rudiments of the investigation just to keep him out of everyone’s hair. As always, Cully spoke first. As always, it was irrelevant.

  “You’re alive,” he said when he saw Gabriel.

  The young man nodded.

  “Yeah, but somebody’s dead up there,” John said. “Cully, you get on the radio and get the Waterbury team down here. We’re going to need them.” The state crime scene investigation unit was located in Waterbury, near the capitol. They had a mobile lab. “Then call the state coroner’s office and tell the medical examiner we got a body that’s coming her way. Suspicious death.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Cully, and he ran back to the cruiser.

  John heaved his sharp sigh and opened the front door of the inn. With his officers and Gabriel close behind him, he stepped into the lobby.

  Chapter Nine

  JOHN HAD NEVER LIKED THE INN. Although it had always been the primary go-to place in the area for weddings, meetings, prom night dinners, and every other function public, private, or municipal, the one-hundred-fifty-year-old ramshackle structure had always struck him as creepy. Melanie claimed it was because the place had always been an inn, cobbled on to every decade or so to accommodate a constantly evolving clientele. First, it had been a stagecoach stop, a small pub with a few rooms upstairs and a stable in the back where tired travelers and horses alike could rest and eat. More rooms were added when the railroad came through, and still more when people began to take automobile vacations to the Green Mountains. Finally, the last and biggest addition was in response to the blossoming post-war ski industry. Melanie maintained that she was sensitive to buildings, and because the inn had always housed a temporary population, it had never had the chance to develop a solid and established air about it. This transient population kept the building in a state of insidious and permanent disruption, she explained.

  Consciously, John did not share her existential interpretation, but the fairy tales and ghost stories his grandmother told him were still there and not as deeply buried in his subconscious as he would like them to be. The building was huge, dark, and drafty. It seemed to John to be hiding something, and just being inside the place made him jumpy. Maybe it was as Melanie said: the old inn carried the mark of every owner it’d had since it was built. Every part of the inn except the original tavern had been built rather hastily and never properly cared for. For reasons most likely rooted in finances, each innkeeper down the years had maintained this tradition of neglect. Throughout the decades, only the most visible wounds had been dressed. A coat of paint would be slapped across the front, but not on the back. The original slate shingles had been sold off years ago and subsequent leaks in the roof were patched on an as-needed basis until the whole roof was a mosaic of mismatched asphalt. The rattley old windows were caulked here and there around the edges rather than replaced. Except for the chimney block, the whole building was wooden. John shuddered to think about the dry rot that must be prevalent in the sills and load-bearing beams. Sprinkler system or no, he thought, one mislaid match and the whole place would burn like tissue paper, taking most of the middle of town with it. Either that or an above-average snow load would prove to be too much for the rafters over the dining room that John had suspected for years housed a bustling metropolis of carpenter ants. He imagined the entire ceiling over the dining room, the only part of the inn with no attic, crashing down and squishing all the out-of-state skiers as they sat eating their prime rib and shrimp scampi. Still, the inn enjoyed widespread popularity. It was convenient for locals and quaintly country for urban tourists, who, on approach, only saw the wide front porch and the garden off the breakfast room and never got around to the back of the building.

  So it was with his usual trepidation that he stood here now, surveying the huge, chilly room that was the lobby. The twenty-five or so guests, driven from their rooms by the cold, were huddled in a clump on the far wall in front of the fireplace. They were mostly dressed in pajamas, wrapped in the quilts off their beds, robes, or their ski parkas. Three or four children were curled up under blankets on the big, overstuffed pink and green floral couches. An elderly man sat in a wing chair. As one, they eyed John and his entourage suspiciously, but nobody spoke. The fire was the only sound. It spit and hissed anemically, not throwing much heat. Randomly, John reckoned that innkeeper Bill Noyes, cheap as he was, had probably purchased green wood.

  John looked up as Noyes approached him, crossing the room from the innkeeper’s desk in the opposite corner. The floor creaked under his step.

  “This isn’t good, John,” the small, skinny man whispered. He shook his head rapidly back and forth, and his hands clenched and unclenched. “This isn’t good at all. You gotta get that body out of my inn.”

  “Did anyone see anything? Do they even know what happened?” asked John.

  Noyes had been married to John’s cousin Susan for twenty-two years now, and although he was basically a decent sort, John still found him annoying.

  Bill Noyes continued to shake his head as he spoke. “No. Most everybody had already drifted down here because of the power outage. Oh, they know someone died, but they don’t know it was murder. No one heard the gunshot. Except Tiffany.”

  “Tiffany?” John raised his eyebrows.


  This time, it was Joe Bernard who spoke. “Tiffany Carroll, sir. She was, ah, with the deceased. She’s sitting in the back room with Mrs. Noyes.”

  “Hmm,” said John. “Is she the girlfriend?”

  “She’s a waitress, sir. She works here.”

  Gabriel broke from where he had been standing beside Steve Bruno. He strode across the room and ducked under the “Police Line” tape that stretched across the stairwell.

  John called out sternly, “Strand! Stop where you are!”

  Gabriel was taking the stairs two at a time. John moved after him, followed by Joe. Steve held his ground, not taking his eyes off the guests, who formed a tighter knot around the fireplace like a flock of startled sheep.

  On the landing, John was able to reach out and catch Gabriel by the arm.

  “I said stop,” he said quietly.

  The musician caught his breath in a dry sob. He looked directly at John. “I think it’s Bruce Blake,” he said.

  “Bruce Blake?”

  “The promoter.”

  John looked back over his shoulder. “Where’s the body?” he asked Joe.

  “On the floor of the bedroom, just inside the door. He was shot from behind as he was entering the room from the hall. At least, that’s what it looks like to me.”

  “Okay, let’s see.” He tightened his grip on Gabriel’s arm. “I’m sorry if this is one of your friends, but this is a crime scene under my jurisdiction and a violent crime besides, so you stay right behind me and do exactly as I tell you to do. And don’t touch anything, not even something you don’t think is important. You could ruin crucial evidence. Am I clear?”