The Lost Constitution

by William Martin

  “A metaphor.” Orson sat there certainly in his gray slacks and blue blazer and turtleneck, looking utterly cool and completely out of place in the office of a construction firm. But Orson never acted out of place, no matter where he was. That was one of the reasons Peter had modeled himself after Orson.

  “What if it’s not a metaphor?” said Peter. “What if he really did ‘secrete it behind some fireplace bricks,’ just like those people who hid the log of the Mayflower?”

  “I suppose that you have to find out.” Orson recrossed his legs. “And it may give you the chance to draw Evangeline’s captors out into the open.”

  “That’s what I want to do,” said Peter, “once I know where this ski slope is.”

  “I think I know.” Antoine tapped in a Web site on the computer. NELSAP: New England’s Lost Ski Area Project. With a few more clicks, he navigated right to the hillside in question.

  “The Internet,” said Orson. “Like the library at Alexandria or Shakespeare’s brain. An endlessly fascinating universe.”

  There was a brief history of the Amory Cabins at Mount Morton: “After the death of Gilbert and Mary in a blizzard, the ski slope was sold by its creditor, the Bishop Company, but subsequent owners could not make it work. It went out of business in the early seventies. Now the slopes are grown over with grasses and scruffy apple trees, some hemlock, a few other firs, and hardwood saplings sprout everywhere. Only a few rusted wheels remain of the chair lift and T-bar. The cottages and the little lodge stand open to the weather as stark reminders of nature’s power to reclaim what is taken from it.”

  There was an overhead photograph, showing small cottages flanking a big house at the base of the slope.

  “Is there a zoom feature?” asked Peter.

  Antoine tapped out a few more keys and the house enlarged.

  “That’s where we’re going.” Peter pointed to the house. “That’s where it is. We find it, tell the Maine militia to bring Evangeline down, and we make the switch.”

  “If we find it,” said Antoine.

  “Whether we find it or not,” said Peter. “We’ll give them an empty map case if we have to.”

  “And then we’ll all be shot,” said Orson.

  “Maybe,” said Peter. “But I’m not leaving Vermont tomorrow without her.”

  A ROUND NINE O’CLOCK that night, Danny Fallon’s minivan pulled into the driveway in front of Morgan’s Antiques and Firearms. The girls were back from Rhode Island, and they were waiting. They had a refrigerator loaded with beers and burgers ready to cook on the grill.

  Peter was worried that he had brought along a bit too much muscle. He liked to work alone. But Danny and Bobby had Vermont hunting licenses, and it was duck season in that part of the state, so they could both carry shotguns. Antoine was too smart to leave behind. Orson was the voice of experience.

  So there they were, piling out of the van in the crisp air beneath the shimmering Milky Way, a high-country wonder to city folk who seldom saw it.

  “Howdy, boys.” Kate came out first, looking pretty relaxed for a woman who had survived a plane crash that morning. Of course, thought Peter, once you’ve survived a plane crash, there can’t be much to make you nervous.

  Then another shadow came out. “Hello, boys.”

  “That voice.” Danny peered toward the house. “I know that voice.”

  “Do you listen to the radio?” asked Kelly.

  Peter said, “I didn’t tell you their names. I thought I’d surprise you.”

  “My God,” said Orson. “That’s Kelly Cutter’s voice.”

  Danny stepped into the light and looked at her face. “You’re as beautiful as I hoped you’d be. It’s an honor to meet you.”

  Antoine said to Danny, “You actually listen to her?”

  “Beautiful on the outside,” said Orson Lunt. “Bilious on the inside.”

  She turned to Orson. “So we have a conservative and a liberal.”

  “Working together,” said Peter. “Like good Americans.”

  Kelly offered a hand to Orson. “I have a picture in the attic. It shows the real me, all covered in bile.”

  “I have one like that, too,” Orson said. “It puts another wrinkle on my forehead every time I say something bad about someone. I’m about thirty years older than you are, but I’d bet that our pictures make us look the same age.”

  “Orson, be good,” said Peter. “The girls are helping. Kate has a reputation with these militia types. And Kelly is their voice. The antique barn will be neutral ground. Once we have the draft, we’ll come back here and make the swap.”

  “I’ll go along with this,” said Kelly, “even though I think the draft you’re looking for has already been found.”

  “An opinion I don’t share,” said Peter.

  “Me neither,” said Kate. “Not after this morning.”

  “Clinton Jarvis did not send someone to kill us,” said Kelly.

  Kate looked at Peter. “We’ve been arguing.”

  Maybe they weren’t as relaxed as they appeared.

  Kelly said, “Clinton Jarvis has too much money tied up in me to kill me. Just because he believes that the separation of church and state has been misinterpreted all these years, and he has the Constitution to prove it—”

  “Church and state?” said Danny. “I thought this was about guns.”

  “It all goes together,” said Peter. “How about those burgers?”

  THEY DROVE OUT in the autumn dawn, bound for a little hillside where a man once dreamed. The girls knew where it was, so they led the way in their Volvo, south across Peacham Creek. They picked up Route 302 in Groton, an old mill town built along the gentle Wells River.

  The Boston boys followed. They took Peter’s BMW because the heater was broken in the van. Danny drove. Peter sipped coffee. The others sat in the back, Antoine and Bobby quietly, Orson chattering away about the sights passing by.

  Peter told Orson to pay more attention to what was behind them. “If you see a black Chrysler Sebring, or any other car, or even a bicycle that looks like it’s following us, sing out.”

  “Don’t tell him to sing,” said Bobby. “It’s too early for Cole Porter.”

  They turned west toward Barre, and the road began to rise in a series of sine curves that grew ever steeper. This was not the Vermont of postcards. It was a land of small houses and double-wides sitting on lots hacked from the woods. The unifying features were dish antennas and metalbestos chimneys puffing wood smoke in the chill morning. Some were neatly kept; others looked like they were competing for the most-junkers-on-blocks-in-the-front-yard award.

  After about half an hour the girls turned up a dirt driveway. There was no billboard announcing the turn, no sign, no pavement, just a break in the wall of scrawny trees along the road. It dumped them into an old parking lot decorated with a one-way DO NOT ENTER sign and a rusting old snowcat sprouting weeds.

  Whatever had gone on here, time had passed it by.

  The Volvo bounced ahead of them up the rutted driveway, past a big sign: NO TRESPASSING, NO HUNTING, NO TRAPPING, into a sloping meadow that once had been the lawn of the little resort. Now apple trees dropped leaves and deformed fruit across the meadow, because the last business had been an orchard. An old sign directed all traffic to the right, up the gentle hill, to the large house at the apex of the circular drive: the one that Peter had pointed out on the NELSAP Web site.

  Little one-bedroom cottages followed the curve of the drive, flanking the big house like schoolchildren around the teacher, aged schoolchildren—porches collapsing, chimneys collapsed, windows broken, weeds and saplings rising and twining and poking.

  They pulled up in front of the big house. It was built in the same style as the cottages, New England vernacular, which meant nothing special, just a two-and-a-half-story woodframe house with a peaked roof and dormers on either side. But there had been additions. Every new owner had brought a new dream: an office wing here, a breakfast room there, a ski sho
p with floor-to-ceiling windows, all shattered now and boarded up.

  The shadows were long and cool. The autumn dew covered the ground. The deep silence of the place swallowed up the slamming of the car doors and the low sound of conversation.

  “Welcome to Bates Motel East.” Orson was the last to climb out.

  “Let’s hope we don’t meet Mom,” said Antoine.

  “She’s not home,” said Kelly. “No one is home.”

  “No one home since 1975,” said Kate.

  Danny went around to the back of the BMW and pulled out two shotguns.

  “No guns,” said Peter. “We don’t need guns.”

  “So what the hell did you drag us all the way up here for?” asked Danny.

  “Moral support. Advice.”

  “Who did you say owned this place?” asked Orson.

  “Last owner was some New York firm,” said Kate. “They thought they could revive the old ski area. But, there’s not enough of a mountain here, even if they tore everything down and started over.”

  “Seems a waste,” said Orson.

  “You’d be surprised how many places there are like this,” said Kelly. “Dreams that never came true. Last I heard, the state had repossessed it for nonpayment of taxes.”

  “So,” said Orson, “if we find the Constitution here, we’ll have the state of Vermont on our backs, too.”

  Antoine said, “Do you really think it’s here?”

  “We didn’t find it at Livermore,” said Peter, “which was the last place we could trace it. Now there’s documentary evidence that it was here, so we have to look.”

  They sent Bobby down to the trees near the road to watch the driveway.

  Then the bucket of tools was out, and the Fallon brothers took pinch bars to the plywood nailed across the entrance to the house. A dozen shrieks of metal and wood, the sheeting came off, and a wave of cold air hit them in the face.

  Danny peered in, then looked at his brother. “You first.”

  Peter had a big flashlight. He aimed it inside. Cracking plaster, broken glass, rags on the floor, a chair in a corner with the stuffing torn out.

  He took a breath and stepped inside. The clamminess grabbed him by the neck. The air smelled of small animals living in leaf and chair-stuffing nests, a mulchy, funky smell, the definition of “entropy.” Everything wanted to get back to its simplest state. This old house was well on the way.

  Peter turned to his brother. “Maybe you better get the shotgun after all.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” said Antoine, who was right behind Danny.

  “I’ll get it.” Kelly took the opportunity to go running back to the car.

  Kate and Antoine stepped in and swept their flashlights around.

  There was a registration desk straight ahead, a big living room to the left with a fireplace, an entrance to a large, pine-paneled breakfast room on the right.

  Kelly was back with the shotgun. She handed it to Danny but said that she’d keep watch out front. Orson said he’d go around and watch the back.

  “Sissies,” said Kate, then she headed for the stairs.

  As soon as she stepped on the first tread, something skittered across a floor upstairs.

  Danny let fly into the ceiling. Boom!

  Peter jumped. “Jesus Christ, Dan. That was just a squirrel or something.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Danny, “it’s a dead fuckin’ squirrel.”

  Kelly was peering in from the porch. “Is everything all right?”

  “Yeah. Fine.” Peter shook his head two or three times to stop the ringing in his ears. “One guy is trigger happy, one girl is frightened.”

  “One boy, too,” said Antoine.

  “This is why I work alone,” said Peter. “Now, here’s what we do. We find the family apartment. Probably in the back. We test every floorboard. We go over every bit of exposed brick. We cut into the wall and check the brickwork around the flue.”

  “Why?” said Danny. “In the flue, you have one course of brick, then a tile liner. There’s no room for a map case in a chimney, for Chrissakes.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “We inspect the fireplaces. That’s where they might have bricked something in. We go down in the cellar and see if the floor joists are boxed in. If they are, we tear ’em out. We go upstairs and stomp around, listen for changes in the subflooring.”

  “If we don’t find it?” asked Kate. “What do we do when the militia boys show up?”

  “We have another plan,” said Peter. “I brought an 1887 repro of the Constitution in a map case, with some scrawling on it. It might work.”

  In a few minutes, the whole house was vibrating with the sound of stamping, hammering, pinch-barring, and shouting.

  Raccoons climbed out of the main chimney. Squirrels came skittering from under the eaves on the second floor. Terrified mice braved the daylight to escape.

  Danny and Antoine worked together on the fireboxes with hammers and chisels.

  Kate suggested to Peter that they split up—Peter in the cellar, Kate on the second floor.

  But Peter said, “If we work together and find something, we’ll have another opinion nearby.” He still didn’t trust her. He trusted Kelly less. Kate could be on the side of the Maine militia. Kelly still trusted that Clinton Jarvis a bit too much. If Kate came across the document before Peter saw her, she might hide it for herself.

  None of that.

  So they worked quickly through the cellar. They found no evidence of boxed floor joists, nor any sign of a wall safe built into the granite foundation.

  They went up the back stairs, to the bedrooms in the rear, the separate apartment, the owner’s residence. This would be the most likely place for a man to hide something beneath floorboards.

  They pounded and banged, and the whole house shook. When Peter stomped his foot under a window that had been leaking for years, he put it through the oak flooring, through the subflooring, and through the ceiling plaster in the kitchen below.

  “Excellent,” said Kate. “Now we can rip out the whole kitchen ceiling.”

  Good idea, thought Peter.

  Back in the kitchen, they went to work with the pinch bar. One or two pulls and the ceiling fell down. But the plaster was so wet that there was barely any dust.

  Peter shot the flashlight up into the spaces between the newly exposed lathes and joists. “Nothing. What about you, Dan? Anything?”

  “Nothing. The fireplace in the front room is fieldstone, and the mortar was never tampered with. The one in the back is brick. Falling apart. And no sign of anything.”

  “Nothing in the floors either,” said Kate.

  Peter looked around at the mess they had made. “It was a long shot anyway.”

  “What next?” asked Kate.

  “Time to improvise.” Peter shouted through the broken back window at Orson, who was sitting in the sun on an overturned barrel, staring up at the slope, keeping watch.

  Orson turned to speak and suddenly he was jumping into the air, and the barrel was rolling over.

  “Did you hear that?” said Peter to the others.

  “What?” asked Kate.

  “A gunshot.”

  Orson looked around. Puzzled? Shocked? Then another shot rang out, more a bup than a blast, a silenced sniper’s rifle. The barrel jumped again. So did Orson.

  “Good Christ!” Orson ran around to the front of the house.

  Peter and the others were out already. “Get into the cars!” shouted Peter. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “What about Bobby?” cried Danny.

  “We’ll pick him up on the way out.”

  “Bup. Bup. Two more shots. The first lifted a rusted beer can off the driveway. The second hit it again while it was in the air.

  “Wow!” said Kate. “Nice shooting.”

  Two more shots whizzed. And a tire on the BMW blew out.

  They could see the shooter now. He was at the top of what looked like the o
ld bunny slope. Hiding behind the big rusted bull wheel.

  Danny raised his shotgun and Peter pulled it out of his hands, because he heard the growl of ATVs coming down the hill and up from the parking lot.

  Before the ATVs had stopped, Danny was shouting, “Where is my son?”

  Jack Batter got off one of the ATVs. “He’s fine. He’s down there, tied to a tree.”

  “We were supposed to meet at Morgan’s Antiques and Firearms,” said Peter.

  “Never follow the other guy’s plan.” Batter flipped Bobby’s shotgun to Danny. “That’s rule number one of fighting a good guerrilla war.”

  “Where’s Evangeline?” demanded Peter.

  Batter pointed up the ski slope, up to the bull wheel, up where the shooter was. She was there, too, wearing the same clothes she had put on two days before. Mercer was beside her, holding an AR-15. She waved.

  “She’s all right,” said Batter.

  Peter turned and began to walk toward the hill.

  “Not so fast,” said Batter. “Don’t you have something for me?”

  “How did you know we’d be here?” asked Peter.

  “We’re smart. Now, where is it?”

  “It’s back at Kelly’s house.” Peter gestured to Kelly Cutter, whose eyes were wide with shock after a dose of real life and gunfire.

  Batter didn’t seem to recognize Kelly. He snapped at her, “If it’s at your house, what are you all doing here?”

  Kelly looked at Peter. “I think he just busted you, Peter.”

  “Oh, thanks, Kelly,” said Peter.

  She took a few steps toward Batter, who turned his head, as if the scar on the left side of his face afflicted his eyesight.

  He looked through his right eye so that he could see better. “Kelly … I know that voice.”

  Kelly smiled. “A lot of people know the voice. I’m a friend of Peter Fallon and his Boston crew.”

  “Boston crew.” Batter looked around at Danny in his camos, Antoine in his Red Sox hoody. Then his eyes fell on Orson. “Did you like the ride on the barrel, old man?”

  Orson twitched his mustache. “If you’re going to call me old, call me old boy. And no, I didn’t like it. If I didn’t have a balky prostate, I would have wet myself.”