Three Can Keep a Secret

by Mayor, Archer

They shook their heads as a group.

  “Where were they taken?” he then asked.

  “To Burlington for autopsies,” the cop said.

  Joe glanced across at the remains of the house. “How was this called in?”

  “One of the neighbors. It was real sudden, according to her. One minute, everything was fine; the next, it’s like a firebomb.”

  “That’s why I’m thinking gas,” the first man said confidently.

  * * *

  “It was gas,” Jonathon Michael said flatly.

  It was a few hours later. Joe had set up quarters in the corner of a normally closed Shelburne coffee shop that had kept a side door unlocked and a couple of lights on, just for the personnel who were still stuck at the fire scene one block over. The shop’s owner lived upstairs, had once been a volunteer firefighter, and was predisposed to lending a hand.

  “Accident or arson?” Joe asked.

  The two of them were nursing mugs of coffee. Michael had also located a sandwich that he was largely ignoring. They’d known each other for more years than either could recall, and had developed a trust that they now took for granted. Michael was with the Vermont State Police, as he had been for his entire career. He was now chief of their arson division, but still regularly came out on assignment to keep his hand in.

  “Hard to tell,” he said, then taking a bite of the sandwich. He continued speaking as he chewed. “If it was arson, it was well done. The house was old and cheaply built, central heating and cooking were supplied by the propane tanks to the left of the bulkhead door.”

  Jonathon swallowed before resuming. “What happens is, there’s a leak, usually at a juncture. If it’s somewhere like in a kitchen or bathroom, people usually smell it before it becomes explosive. But most of those lines run where you can’t see them. From what I could piece together, this one was in the basement, not far from the water pump. If someone suggested that the cellar filled with gas just before the pump went on, creating a small spark, I wouldn’t call them a liar.”

  “Is that what you’re saying?” Joe asked pointedly.

  “Not in so many words,” Jonathon replied. “I’m leaning toward ‘Undetermined—Accidental,’ since I don’t have anything telling me otherwise. It did originate in the basement, and I’m pretty comfortable with the water pump scenario.”

  “But,” Joe suggested leadingly.

  “Two things,” Jonathon explained. “First is that it actually takes a lot of gas to blow up a building like what witnesses described. That tells me that the whole place should have smelled of the stuff, which begs the question of why the occupants—or at least Friel—didn’t react somehow. The second thing, which might tie in to the first, is that we found the bulkhead door unlocked. Could somebody have slipped downstairs from the outside and caused the leak—and just let dumb luck and circumstance supply the rest? Sure. The woman never left the house, from what I was told, and except for maybe groceries or post office runs, her son was pretty much a hermit. If I’d wanted them dead, I would’ve been happy to bide my time. The fewer alterations a bad guy makes to a scene, the harder it’ll be for someone like me to discover them later. Of course, that still doesn’t explain why Mr. Friel didn’t react to the odor.

  “Keep in mind,” Jonathon added, “there was another bedroom set up down there. It’s hard to tell if that’s where Friel slept or if it was just a guest room, but it suggests the possibility that something might’ve been done to keep him from sounding the alert.”

  “Was that where his body was found?”

  “Nope,” he said. “I’m just saying that someone apparently lived in the basement, at least some of the time. I have nothing telling me that a linkage exists between that—or any of my ideas—and what actually happened.”

  Joe pushed at his mug with his finger, thinking back. “We went into one bedroom, on the first floor, that clearly belonged to his mom, and there was at least one other. But I have no idea where he slept. I didn’t have any reason to look.”

  Jonathon remained silent.

  “Are you totally done with your investigation?” Joe asked him.

  “With the physical stuff, yup. I’ve got the usual odds and ends to deliver to the crime lab. But assuming they either come up blank or deliver their own version of ‘Undetermined,’ then I will be done unless you tell me otherwise.” He took a swig of coffee and eyed Joe carefully. “Are you telling me otherwise?”

  Joe sighed, thinking of how similar this conversation was to the one he’d just had with Hillstrom. “No,” he said sadly.

  * * *

  It was almost midnight by the time Joe got back behind his steering wheel and did a U-turn in a now dark and deserted Hillside Terrace. He was therefore surprised and touched with a sense of foreboding when his phone began vibrating. He pulled over by the curb once more and held it up to his ear.

  “Gunther.”

  He recognized the soft laughter on the other end. “My, you are official sounding. How was your fire?”

  Joe matched her tone. “You ought to know, Beverly. The two victims should be in your cooler by now.”

  “Oh, they are,” Hillstrom said. “Dispatch informed me a couple of hours ago. I spoke to my investigator at the scene. You two must have just missed each other.”

  “Yeah,” Joe told her. “I got there right afterwards. You talk to him?”

  “He didn’t have much to tell,” she told him. “The police were saying at that point that there was nothing particularly suspicious about it. Did you find otherwise?”

  “Not by talking to the arson investigator, I didn’t,” Joe said. “But I don’t like this any more than I liked Gorden Marshall’s death.” He asked suddenly, “Not to get off topic, but what’re you still doing up, and how did you know to call me now? I just got in my car.”

  She laughed. “Part calculation, part dumb luck. I knew where you were, and I knew the duration of the average arson investigation, having attended a few in my time. After that, I just guessed.”

  “Well, you did well. I’m just pulling onto Route 7. I figured I’d grab a room somewhere and maybe drop by your office again tomorrow morning, assuming these two will be on your to-do list.”

  There was a moment before she said, “I live just north of Shelburne, Joe, and I have more guest beds than I know what to do with. Have you had anything to eat yet?”

  “No,” he admitted before adding, “But I don’t want to impose, Beverly. It’s awfully late.”

  “Which is why I make the offer,” she said. “I’ll have a bowl of soup ready for you.” She gave him directions.

  * * *

  It was a large house, and an expensive one, balanced right on the shore of Lake Champlain. Hillstrom was married to an A-list lawyer and had two grown daughters. The home spoke of the reasonable rewards that two hardworking, successful people could expect after several decades of concentrated labor.

  Of course, Joe was a hard worker, too, and had been pretty successful by most people’s standards, but he lived in a rental attached to the back of a Victorian pile on a busy street in Brattleboro.

  By contrast, this place was a mansion.

  He killed the engine in the turnaround before the three-car garage and stepped out into the cool night air. The stars stood out with electrical fierceness, horizon to horizon, their complete and mesmerizing silence offset by the sound of the soft lapping of waves upon the nearby shoreline, just out of sight.

  “Soothing, isn’t it?” Beverly’s voice said from behind him.

  He turned to see her coming across the lawn from around the corner of the building, where it fronted a view of the lake’s expanse of light-absorbing blackness. The distant glow of Burlington’s cityscape marked the lower edge of the sky’s stippled sheet of stars.

  She was wearing a form-flattering, full-length dressing robe, drawn in at the waist with a soft, thick belt. Her hair was loose around her shoulders and she looked, even in the near dark, comfortable and relaxed. Instinctively, with
out thought, Joe stepped over to her and gave her a hug, which she returned with a kiss to his cheek.

  “You must be bushed,” she said, slipping her arm around his waist and escorting him across the grass, from whence she’d appeared.

  They rounded the corner to a wooden deck, one foot up from the lawn and running the length of a row of French doors, all facing the water.

  He stopped on the deck and faced the view, his arm now draped across her shoulders. “How did you hold up against Irene?” he asked. “It doesn’t look bad, but then again, it’s the middle of the night.”

  She laughed. “That would help, but there’s actually nothing to disguise. You folks got the worst of it, in the south. Of course, we’re also a good twenty feet above the waterline, which has proved a godsend more than once. Quite a few people closer to the city were inundated, from what I heard.” She paused, reflecting, “Terrible storm. Such a shame.”

  He couldn’t argue the point, but it did make him ponder aloud, “Quirky, too, in some ways.”

  She looked up at him. “Oh?”

  “Yeah. I heard how you sent a bunch of your people to Rochester, where the river had eroded the edge of the cemetery and swept a few dozen gravesites downriver.”

  “That poor town,” she said. “As if the flooding wasn’t bad enough, they had to contend with that. We’re doing our best to help out, but it’ll take weeks and weeks … and even then, who knows if we’ll be able to find everybody.”

  “I had a similar thing happen in my neck of the woods,” Joe told her, “in style if not substance, at least, since it only involved one grave. But the coffin was filled with rocks. There was no body.”

  She pulled away slightly to face him, her eyes wide. “You’re joking.”

  “No. That’s what I meant by quirky. If it hadn’t been for the same kind of mishap that devastated Rochester, we never would’ve known that somebody’d pulled a fast one years back.”

  She stepped over to one of the French doors, opening it and ushering him into the house. “That’s incredible. I hadn’t heard a peep in the news. We better get some soup into you. I set it up in the kitchen.”

  He followed her as she walked through the living room and dining area without turning on any lights, the stars through the bank of windows bright enough to guide them. “I’m impressed the media missed it,” he said. “Guess they have enough to keep them busy.”

  The kitchen, which they reached through a swinging door, was softly lighted, lined in dark wood, and had an island in its midst, adorned with a single place setting, facing a back-equipped barstool.

  Hillstrom patted the stool and ordered, “Sit,” before crossing to a yacht-sized stove and removing a simmering pot from the burner. “Nothing fancy,” she warned him. “I hope you like chicken noodle.”

  “My favorite as a kid,” he said, settling in. “That and a glass of milk, if you’ve got some.”

  She brought him a steaming bowl and a piece of bread, and poured him some milk before sitting catty-corner to him at the counter.

  “You’re not having anything?” he asked.

  She smiled and got back to her feet. “You talked me into it. A glass of wine.”

  She crossed to the gleaming fridge and extracted an open bottle, from which she poured two inches into a glass before rejoining him.

  “Don’t overdo it,” he kidded her.

  “I rarely do,” she said, and took a small sip.

  He, too, sampled his soup, instantly recognizing it as being far from the canned variety he was used to at home. “Delicious.”

  “Leftovers,” she said. “You got lucky. One of my daughters was home over the weekend, so I actually cooked. I like putting them into shock every once in a while.”

  “Daniel’s not a cook?” he asked.

  She watched him spoon another mouthful before answering, almost shyly, “Daniel’s not anything anymore. We were divorced last year.”

  “Oh,” he said neutrally.

  She smiled sadly at the response. “Yes. Awkward, isn’t it? Do you say you’re sorry? Happy? Nice weather we’re having?”

  He reached out and laid a hand on hers, knowing very well that she and Daniel had been having their struggles, largely due to his philandering. “Well, I hope in the end that it’s good news, but it is too bad, what with the kids and all. There’s that sense of a broken dream.”

  She nodded. “Too true. I guess I knew it was inevitable, what with his wandering eye. I thought it was over between us back when you and I spent the night together. He’d even moved out. But he seemed so contrite, so eager to set things right. And he succeeded for a time. I’ll give him that.” She lapsed into a brief silence before concluding, “But it just wasn’t in the cards. Too many available temptations for a man of his disposition.”

  She squeezed his hand back and then reached for his empty bowl. “More?”

  “No, thanks. I’m all set. That was perfect.”

  She left the bowl alone and cupped her chin in her hand, watching him. “How about you, Joe? Did you ever find anyone after Lyn died?”

  “No. My latest theory is that all that pretty much threw a switch in my head. I lost my wife, Ellen, to cancer, years ago. Gail and I broke up after God knows how many years; then Lyn. I’m not getting any younger, and to be honest, the idea of finding someone and starting that nonsense all over again is kind of exhausting.”

  She laughed. “I hear my younger colleagues going on about their love lives, and I couldn’t be happier not to have anything to do with any of it.”

  She rose and cleared his place. He helped, and they stood side-by-side at the sink, rinsing everything off and putting it into the washer.

  “Still,” she commented, bumping him with her shoulder. “It’s hard to completely deny some of the fringe benefits.”

  It was his turn to laugh. “I do get your point,” he agreed.

  She rinsed out the sink and stepped back, drying her hands on a towel. “Okay, you look done in. Follow me upstairs and I’ll show you where you’ll probably catch all of four hours of sleep, knowing you.”

  She led the way out of the kitchen and preceded him up a broad set of stairs. He couldn’t—and didn’t—deny himself the attractive view of her taking the steps ahead of him, thinking back to their last conversation. He had liked this woman from the first day they met, which was saying something, since he’d thoroughly irritated her at the time. And he’d certainly held stirring memories of their one night together ever since.

  She took him down a hallway to a door near the end, and introduced him to a spacious guest room with its own private bath, showed him the towels and where the light switches and alarm clock were, and made it clear that she’d completely understand if he wanted to leave early the next day—and to just use the same door they’d entered by.

  After the tour, they came to the room’s door, and she easily and comfortably put her arms around him and gave him a hug. He moved his hands across her back, enjoying the discovery that she was naked under her robe.

  Nevertheless, she pulled away with one last smile and another kiss on the cheek, and bade him good night.

  He watched her retreat down the hall to her own room, before closing his door reluctantly, mildly rebuking himself for not having at least made an effort to act on his desire. He suspected that she’d been open to encouragement, and he found himself as disappointed in letting her down as in not having benefited himself.

  But he was tired, which he finally acknowledged after stripping off his clothes and slipping between her fresh, clean-smelling sheets, enjoying the caress of them on his skin as he snapped off the light and watched the glimmering from the stars slowly take over the darkened room.

  It was by this twilight that he then saw his door reopen, and Beverly, still in her robe, enter like a ghost.

  He slid up onto his pillow and watched her approach. Standing by his bedside, she smiled down and said in a near whisper. “I don’t want this night to end like that. It’s
not why I called you.”

  She undid her belt and dropped the robe from her shoulders.

  He peeled back his bedcovers and held out his hand in welcome.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Gail Zigman looked up as Robert Perkins, her Chief-of-Staff, entered her office. “Shut the door, Rob.”

  Surprised, he did so, before settling into a chair facing her desk. The governor made a big deal about her “door never being closed,” and worked to make the cliché a fact.

  “You have a cell phone on you?” she asked, quickly signing a document she’d been reading as he entered.

  He pulled it out of his pocket. “Sure.” Of course he had it, he thought. For him, it was like oxygen for a man with emphysema. He was constantly kidded for his dependence on the thing.

  “Turn it off. The whole device; not just the ringer.”

  “Off?” he asked, the phone in midair. “Like off-off?”

  She put down her pen and narrowed her eyes slightly as she focused on him. She didn’t speak.

  Embarrassed, he turned the phone off and dropped it back into his pocket.

  “It’s a potential listening device,” she explained, “if you believe the latest paranoia, which in this case, I’m inclined to do.”

  “Okay,” he said cautiously.

  She leaned forward and pressed the intercom button on her phone and said, “Julie? No calls till I buzz you back, okay? And I mean it. No knocks on the door. Nothing.”

  “Yes, Governor,” came the disembodied reply.

  Gail fixed her attention on Perkins. “I’m about to tell you something that cannot leave this room. It can’t even be whispered to your pet parakeet. Is that very clear?”

  “Very,” he said, his brain working hard by now. The entire office had been laboring around the clock, trying to keep ahead of the post-Irene demands and complaints—mostly aimed at bureaucratic red tape and slow action in general—but there’d been nothing demanding of such CIA-style twitchiness.

  “Do you know of Harold LeMieur?”

  “Sure,” he said immediately, caught unaware twice over. “Catamount Industrial. Lots of money. Likes to play kingmaker with people we don’t like.”