“So you’re telling me that by some miracle Peck left the hotel exactly when you were having one of your pee breaks, and you didn’t hear the doors.”
“It’s totally possible.”
“Anything’s possible,” I said. “But believable? That’s something else.”
Garibaldi walked back in with a rag and a basin full of hot water, which I asked him to place on the table. I moved my chair closer to Reinhold, and started wiping the blood off his face. Garibaldi made to leave, but I stopped him, just as I was dabbing at a gash on Reinhold’s cheek.
“Willy, see this guy?” I said, pointing to Garibaldi. “He’s an old timer. When did you start on the force Garibaldi?”
“Must have been Spring 2036, around then.”
“Things were bad back then, weren’t they?”
“For sure, Benny. Every day was a fight. No electricity, no food. Real cold in the Winter. We live like gods these days.”
“How many men you beat to death in your time, you know, in the line of duty?”
“A few. Things used to be more dangerous. You did what you had to to survive.”
“You hear that, Willy? Garibaldi might look old, but he knows how to swing a nightstick. If you don’t tell me what happened, I’m going to leave you guys alone in here to work it out.”
“You can’t do this,” he said.
“No one gives two shits about you, Reinhold. If Garibaldi here goes a little too far, no one is going to miss you. You can be sure of that.”
He looked at the table, sullen, angry.
“I’m going to freshen up my water,” I said, and with that I got up to leave.
I was only out of the room a minute when I heard the first cries, each one preceded by a dry sound like a cabbage being smacked with a cane.
There was only so much I could take. It sounded like it really hurt. I held out as long as I could and I went back in. Garibaldi was in mid swing, but he pulled his punch when he saw me.
“You can leave us alone,” I said, and he left the room.
“You people are monsters,” Reinhold said.
“Really, you want to tell me about right and wrong? Right now I’ve got you for accessory to murder. So don’t talk to me about right and wrong, alright kid? Now tell me, what happened.”
Reinhold leaned forward on the table, resting his head on his one free hand. I don’t think Garibaldi had hurt him that bad, but he was breathing heavily, and scared half to death.
“He left at midnight. He was alone. A man with curly blond hair, in an old army surplus jacket told me to lie about it, gave me four New York dollars. That’s like a month’s wages. I couldn’t afford to say no. I don’t know who he was or why he wanted me to lie.”
“Blond, curly hair?” I asked.
“Yeah, tight blond curls, almost white. Looked like a weird baby, in a way.”
This sounded strange to me. He could have just told me that he’d left his post in the middle of a shift. He could have had a girl, or a drug problem, but he seemed all too willing to give up the whole thing. I played along.
“I understand. Times are tough. But you can’t lie to the police. Garibaldi could have killed you. Over what? Rent? It’s not worth it, kid.”
He nodded, and started crying.
“Where did this man approach you?”
“At the desk. It was ten minutes after Peck left. He walked in the front door. There was no one with me in the lobby. He just said, ‘take this money, and don’t tell anyone you saw Peck leave, or about me.’”
“When did Peck come back?”
“He didn’t.”
“Are you sure,” I said, leaning forward suggestively. He took my meaning.
“I swear, I never saw him again.”
“I’m going to have to move you to a cell downstairs. I’m sorry, but you lied to police. We can’t just let that slide. But thank you for telling the truth, finally.”
He looked upset, but also relieved.
“Do I get a lawyer?” he asked.
“We haven’t laid charges yet, so no. I mean aside from that rape charge, but somehow I think that’ll be forgotten.”
“So when will you lay charges?”
“You in a hurry?”
He looked at me with despair on his face. I walked him downstairs and put him in a cell, at the far end of the room from where Nora was sitting, staring at the floor of her cell.
I didn’t think the boy was in too deep. He struck me as a regular townie: he did what he had to to survive, and if that meant taking some money to lie to police, what was the harm in it? He probably didn’t think he’d done anything too bad, and he probably hadn’t. But something weird was happening, and someone wanted Nora Cartwright out of the picture. Any number of individuals in her own organization could have wanted her out. But enough to sacrifice Irving Peck as well? The petty concerns of these people paled in comparison to the problems they were facing now, with the collapse of the peace. It just didn’t make sense.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Librarians in the Free Republic of the Green Mountains are a funny breed. You’d think we wouldn’t have much use for books these days. But after the troubles, when it became clear that most people would have to go back to working the land, and that even those of us lucky enough to be able to live in town would have to tend to our own plots–when my parents’ generation had to learn how to maintain a house’s wiring, install solar panels, fix a broken windmill, repair old clothes and make new ones–well that’s when books became useful. Librarians in Vermont, all of them state employees trained at Middlebury College, the only surviving university in the region, became the essential bearers of the knowledge needed for survival. In the bad old days before the rebuilding, people my grandparents’ age would have survived on the meagre rations dispensed by the last remnants of the Federal Government of the Old United States of America, before it shattered into the hundreds of tiny republics, fiefdoms and failed states that it is now, and used the seed packets provided by the itinerant representatives of the now-defunct Department of Agriculture, the modern day Johnny Appleseeds who kept us alive in those years.
But with the rebuilding, librarians became the purveyors of expertise, understanding how to retrieve knowledge, from books, pamphlets, user manuals, and what was left of the old internet. They gained a kind of revered status for this reason. To not have a librarian meant your weren’t a town, but a hamlet, and that you were doomed to a life of limited scope, of rural idiocy. Farming was the state’s primary industry, but it was as common for farmers to ride into town to look up some piece of information about how to deal with pests as it was for them to be bringing in their crops.
But what most people didn’t know, and I, as a police detective was only just beginning to understand, was that librarians were also a key aspect of state security. They relayed messages electronically between municipal authorities and police forces, the only forces run and paid for by the state, and the government in the capital, Montpelier. They gathered intelligence, and many were secretly members of the State Troopers, that ancient fighting force, and the only equivalent to a standing army that the state had, a tiny corps of highly specialized soldiers and operatives.
Our librarian, Irene McGill, was one of these secret operatives. I knew this, the mayor knew it, and so did Chief. And as the holder of secret knowledge, I thought she might have some insights into the events of the last twenty-four hours, and this was how I found myself sitting on a couch in the library’s large reading room, waiting while she made suggestions to one of her younger clients, a girl who couldn’t have been more than eight years old, and by the looks of her tattered overalls and dirty hair was the child of day labourers, maybe from Winooski or further afield.
“This one might be a bit difficult for you. Can I suggest this one?” she said, pulling a copy of Mrs. Dalloway off the shelf. The girl looked nonplussed.
“I’ve already read that one, I want this one,” she said, clutching a copy of To the
Lighthouse. Irene sighed, and then relented.
“I forgot, I’m sorry. If you have any difficulty with this one, do let me know. Maybe I can find a synopsis somewhere that might help.”
The girl didn’t look interested. “No, I’ll be fine.”
And with that she skipped out of the room and out the front doors, clutching the book with a gleeful look on her face.
“They are getting precocious, these kids. They read at a higher level than I did, even when I was a teenager.”
“There isn’t much else to do, is there?” I said. “If I was a kid these days, I’d rather play outside, but if the weather were bad, what else would you do?”
“It does make me feel hopeful, but some of these children are preternaturally gifted. It almost scares me. But I’m sure you didn’t come here to talk about children. What can I help you with?”
“What have you heard about the Peck case?”
“Other than he was found dead this morning? Not much,” she said. She sat down in a leather chair across from me.
“He was murdered,” I said. She nodded, not registering any surprise. “The way he was murdered is interesting. It was done in such a way that one might think it was a crime of passion, and the most likely suspect is Nora Cartwright.”
“The head of the Merchant’s Association?”
“The same. But I don’t think she did it. I think it’s a frame up, but I can’t figure out why.”
“I understand the defence negotiations were going badly.”
“How would you know that?” I asked.
“It’s my job to know these things, but there’s nothing mysterious about it. The mayor has been briefing me.”
“So she trusts you know?” The mayor didn’t like that Irene had spent a month in the forests with the rebel Green Mountain Rangers, even if it had been in an official capacity as a liaison with the State Troopers, an attempt to reign them in, and probably to spy on them too. “What good are local constabularies if they can’t defend the Republic without the assistance of half-crazed forest bandits,” the mayor had said to me and Chief. I’d thought she had a point, but I’d seen what the Rangers were capable of, as a fighting force, and there was a logic to getting them onside if we were to beat the Minutemen. The mayor also knew I had a soft spot for Irene, and didn’t like that either. Said it meant I couldn’t be objective. Fair enough, said I.
“She trusts me as far as she can throw me, which as you know is probably not very far, but probably farther than we think, if that makes any sense,” Irene said, smiling.
“The negotiations weren’t going very well, and now the leadership of the two largest citizens’ groups in the region are now either dead or in the city jail.”
She was silent, her hands in her lap. She started, as though she were about to stand up.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I’m just thinking. If I were trying to disrupt relations between the two factions, what better way to do it?” she said.
“Fair enough, but why bother if they were never going to agree anyways,” I said.
“What if they were going to agree?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“What if it was all a bargaining position, and one of the sides had every intention of reaching an agreement…”
“And then someone wanted to stop it from happening,” I said. She nodded.
“They’d have to be inside.”
“Is a spy, a provocateur, such an unbelievable thing?” she asked.
“From the Minutemen? I don’t suppose it’s so unlikely, but it does add a wrinkle.”
She looked pensive a moment, and then asked me to follow her to her office. It was down the hall, and, unlocking the door, she motioned for me to enter and asked me to sit down. She went behind her desk, and unlocked a cabinet. From there she took a key, and used it, along with a keyed passcode, to open a safe that was built into the floor. She pulled out some papers.
“I got this last week from Trooper headquarters in Waterbury. A councilman in Bennington was stripped of his office and arrested after it was discovered he was taking payments from a local Minutemen commander in exchange for information about council decisions, personal information about other councillors and local police, that kind of thing.”
“He was lucky to just have been fired. Around here he would have been run out of town on a rail.”
“It’s different in the south. It’s wilder. Right near the Massachusetts border too, so people are skittish, eager to preserve the status quo, even if it’s to their disadvantage.”
“But does this mean that the Minutemen have adopted a new strategy? Infiltration and interference?”
“If it is, we’re going to need a new strategy,” she said. “I’m going to send a communiqué to headquarters, if it’s alright with you. If this kind of thing starts happening all over the state, they’ll be the ones to put it all together.”
“Sure, if you think it’ll help.”
She added: “If the Minutemen are in town, they probably aren’t the only ones.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Rangers. They’ll be sure to have eyes on the street.”
“Have you heard anything from them lately? Your bosses were eager to pursue a relationship, if I understood the situation correctly.”
There had been a time, recently, when I thought the Green Mountain Rangers might actually help save the Republic. But in the six months since I’d last encountered them, not a peep. It was as if they didn’t exist, and I was starting to think I’d imagined them, made them up whole cloth.
“Nothing from them for months. I’m as much in the dark as you are”
“I’m surprised you haven’t had any contact with them,” I said. I knew she wouldn’t tell me if they had reached out.
“They don’t talk to me unless they have a reason to. A Trooper patrol was sent out to find them at one of their larger camps, but the camp was gone. Vanished. Several other sites where we thought we might find them were empty as well. We don’t know why, and we have no confirmed reports of any Ranger activity in the entire state for at least three months.”
This struck me as bizarre. Just at the moment when it seemed that they most needed to mobilize, they’d disappeared into the primeval forests.
“It’s a mystery,” she said. “And it’s got State worried.”
There were thousands of skilled fighters out in the woods somewhere, sworn to protect the Republic, or at least, their version of the Republic, and now they were gone.
“Keep your eyes open, Bailey. I feel like something bad is going to happen. I’d hate for you to walk into a trap.”
I thanked her for the chat, and left. I walked down Church Street towards the water. I needed to see an old friend about a blond man with tight curls.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Bernie Ouellete and I went back a long way, though he wouldn’t have wanted anyone to know that. I can’t say we liked each other, but almost half the farm equipment, seed stock, and workman’s clothing that came in across the lake from New York or the Confederation of the Finger Lakes went through Quarterstaff Outfitters, Bernie’s warehouse and storefront operation down by the lake, and it wouldn’t have been smart to make an enemy of the police, given the amount of contraband that inevitably passed through the place. Similarly, I had to maintain at least civil relations with him to be able to get a handle on the goings-on down by the water. We let some of Bernie’s cargo escape customs inspection, in exchange for an understanding that if anything really dangerous was coming across the lake, and he got wind of it, he’d find a way to let us know. Located as he was, by the water, and in the bad part of town where a surprising number of interesting things–things that I needed to know about–happened, he had what you might call a unique perspective. With a little arm twisting he was usually willing to share it with me.
“No, no, no, get out Bailey. I don’t know anything about this,” he said to me when I came to see him tha
t afternoon. He seemed angry, or scared, and he started in on me as soon as I walked in the door. The place was empty, so he didn’t worry about making a scene. He just stood there behind the counter, yelling, pleading with me, his hands thrown up in the air in a gesture of complete exasperation.
“What are you talking about Bernie? I haven’t even asked you a question yet.”
“I’m not sticking my nose in any farmer-slash-shopkeeper business. I’m a member of no professional associations, and I’m not about to get involved now.”
“They way you’re talking, it sounds like you might know something I don’t.”
“Well that’s just the thing, Detective,” he said, saying my title with more than a little derision in his voice, “I don’t know anything about it.”
I thought about this for a minute.
“No signs of any Minutemen skulking around?” I asked.
“Skulking?” he said. “I don’t know what skulking means, but no, I haven’t seen anyone who struck me as Minutemen. But they don’t always wear their uniforms. Especially when they don’t want people like you to know that they’re around. Did that ever occur to you?” He started laughing.
“What about a man, tall, blond hair, almost white, in tight curls.”
He stopped laughing.
“Ahh, there, you see. And here you thought you didn’t know anything. I tell you Bernie, you see more than even you realize you see. That’s why I always look forward to our chats.” I’d intended this to sound sarcastic, but it had come out surprisingly earnest.
“So who is this guy, what’s his deal?” Bernie asked, warily.
“I don’t think he’s either a farmer or a shopkeeper. Or a day-laborer or a blacksmith or a doctor or a librarian. So I think you can tell me where you saw him and none of the guilds need to know, nor would they care.”
He shook his head at me, like he knew he was about to give up. I gave a little nudge, just to be sure.
“How many saddles did you bring in last month. Those light brown things with the tassels, the ones that were taxed at full rate. It was thirty, right? You must have taken a hit on those with the customs duty we charged you.”
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