Three Can Keep a Secret

CHAPTER TWO

“Leo? It’s me.”

Leo heard the tension in his older brother’s voice, and immediately tried putting him at ease. “It’s all good up here, Joey. Just rain. No bullshit. You wanna talk to Ma?”

He handed the phone to his wheelchair-bound mother, who was already reaching for it, a slight frown on her face because of his language. Not just the one crude word, he knew. Funnily, she had less of a problem with that than with his use of poor grammar.

“Joe,” she said in place of a greeting. “Leo’s correct. We are absolutely fine, up here on our little hill. Even the electricity’s still on.”

“And I checked the generator.” Leo shouted. “A-OK.”

“How are you faring down there?” Joe’s mother asked him.

“Personally? Fine,” he reassured her. “The house is out of harm’s way, and I’ve been keeping myself busy and mostly dry. That may be about to change, though.”

“Flooding?” she asked.

“Yeah. It started with a few basements a couple of hours ago. Now we’re getting whole neighborhoods underwater that haven’t seen that in half a century. West Brattleboro is getting really creamed-all those low-lying housing developments. The Whetstone has turned into the Colorado, and quite a few residents have refused to move.”

“That’s terrible,” she said with feeling. “Will you be able to help?”

“I think so,” he told her honestly. “There are swiftwater rescue teams here from as far away as Colchester. They never even got to staging-just went straight to their first assignments. So far, no deaths have been reported. But it’s early yet,” he added grimly, “and we’re hearing that, closer to the Green Mountains, towards Wilmington, Wardsboro, and places like that, they’re getting hit much harder. Route 9 is cut in a couple of spots. Roads and bridges are going out all over. What are you hearing from around you?”

“Much the same,” she answered. “Mostly, it’s been just wait-and-see-or listen, in our case.”

“Leo’s store is okay?”

“As far as we know.”

She heard some noise on Joe’s end, in the distance, and he said in a slightly more rushed tone of voice, “Gotta go, Mom. Take care of each other and I’ll try to call later.”

“Don’t worry about us, Joe. Be careful out there.”

“Love you,” he said, a fraction of a second before the line went dead.

She merely smiled sadly and pushed the DISCONNECT button.

* * *

Caspar Luard looked glumly out the window of the cruiser’s backseat, uncaring of the watery sheets greatly limiting visibility. He was too lost in his own misery to give a damn about some rain. Rained too goddamn much in this state anyhow. That was one of the reasons he’d tried to rob that gas station-to get the hell out of Vermont. Assuming he’d had enough left over after buying himself a little peace of mind. That’s what he liked to call the various substances he put into his system to distract himself: peace of mind.

He glanced at his lap and squirmed a little, trying to get comfortable on the hard plastic seat. They could’ve put him in a regular car, or even the van they normally used for prisoner transports. It’s not like he was going to throw up. He’d never done that in a cop car yet. He adjusted the chain that ran around his waist and interconnected with his handcuffs. At least they hadn’t locked his hands behind his back. That hurt like hell.

In the front seat, beyond the plastic and metal mesh divider, the two transport deputies weren’t so distracted. Nor were they ignoring the weather.

“You wanna tell me why we’re out here?” said the passenger, a deputy sheriff for five months by now.

“Give it a rest, Al,” said the driver, not receptive to casual chatter. The windshield wipers were on their highest setting, and yet at split-second intervals, he lost sight of the end of the car’s hood, along with the road ahead. On average, it wasn’t as bad as that, but they had a good half hour to go before they reached the prison in Springfield-their customer’s home away from home. And then they’d have to go back out into this mess, probably to guard some washed-out bridge.

“I’d like to,” Al continued complaining, waving his hands around, “except here we are, right? Why couldn’t they’ve just put this jerk in holding overnight? Answer me that.”

“Don’t know, Al.”

“The PD just didn’t want to be bothered. That’s why. All hands on deck; can’t spare the manpower; special circumstances. Like the Sheriff’s Department’s not busy, too? We got guys all over the county, right in the middle of this shit storm, drowning right where they’re standing, and the great Bratt PD can’t house a single loser in their nice, dry basement? Please.”

The driver didn’t answer. The wheel between his hands was growing mushy, as the puddles they hydroplaned through grew in depth and number. He slowed down further. He was already taking back roads, instead of the interstate, from Brattleboro to Springfield, in the hopes that visibility would improve and the chances of skidding decline. Now he was beginning to doubt that any choice would have made a difference.

“Al,” he said shortly. “I need you to shut up.”

Al looked at what was going on through the windshield as if for the first time, and then stared at his colleague. “Jesus, Tom. Are we gonna make it?”

* * *

Bonnie Swift stood at the halfway point on the stairs, speaking gently and clearly to each passing patient. “It’s okay. Just a bit of water. The second floor is fine. Turn right at the top. Stay calm. Stay calm.”

One of her favorites came into view, Carolyn Barber, nicknamed “the Governor” by her own preference. She was, as usual, looking stunned and wide-eyed, as if having just been startled awake.

“Hi, Governor. Everything’s okay. Just take a right at the top, keep with the others.”

But Barber stopped and studied her closely, from about four inches too close for comfort-a habit Bonnie was used to. “It’s wet down there.”

“Yes, it is,” Bonnie said quietly, taking her elbow and steering her toward the next step up. “It’s raining very hard and some of the water is getting inside. Nothing to worry about. That’s why we’re going upstairs.”

Carolyn Barber paused a bit longer, watching her, before finally nodding. “It’s wet,” she repeated, but allowed herself to be directed.

One of Bonnie’s colleagues appeared from below after five more patients filed past.

“Everyone out?” Bonnie asked.

“All the patients are,” the other woman confirmed. “Maintenance is wrestling with the utility panels and computer servers. They said the automatic door locks might short out, so we should keep an eye open. They said Richardson better distribute some keys and man the doors so we can override the system if necessary. Also, we should start distributing flashlights.”

Bonnie made a face. “Good luck with the keys. He may not even know where they are. It’s been years.”

The two of them walked up the rest of the stairs and followed the patients down the hallway. The lights flickered, switching to the eerie backup units placed along the ceiling, and suddenly the fire alarms all went off, accompanied by a woman’s gentle and deliberate voice intoning, “Code Red. Code Red. Please proceed to the nearest emergency exit,” again and again, in an endless loop.

“Damn,” Bonnie muttered, covering her ringing ears. “This’ll make things better.”

Ahead, the line had stopped at one of the electronic doors. She sidled along the wall to get to it quickly and keep the group moving, but when she reached it, she found that it had automatically locked after allowing several patients through, separating them from their handlers.

“Shit,” she whispered to herself, her head beginning to pound from the bells and horns. She quickly slid her pass card through the lock.

Nothing happened.

She looked back and called out. “Jenn. Did the maintenance guys say they’d be fooling with the locks?”

“No. Like I said, just that there might be glitches,” Jenn shouted over the noise from the rear.

“That was really rude, what you said,” a woman nearby told her severely.

Bonnie ignored her and tried the lock again, to no avail. She peered through the mesh-wired glass door into the hall’s extension. Amid the pulsing red lights, she could just make out three people wandering away, including the Governor.

She pounded on the door to get their attention, wondering where the staffers were at that end of the building. Two of the three patients turned around, and she gestured to them to return. However, Carolyn Barber only stiffened slightly, as if caught in the midst of some mischief, before cutting left and vanishing through a doorway.

It was the back staircase.

Bonnie yelled back at Jenn. “Punch in the alarm. One of them’s in the stairwell.”

It wasn’t an actual alarm-which wouldn’t have been heard in any case-but a series of red phones located throughout the facility, programmed to trigger a complete lockdown, just in case one of the patients made a break for it.

Bonnie expected to hear the sound of the alarm-a mechanical clicking, echoing throughout the building like oversized dominoes striking each other in turn.

But there was only silence from the door beside her.

“You do it?” she asked in a loud voice. The line between them was becoming restive with people covering their ears, shouting, and beginning to react to the wall-to-wall wailing. Bonnie didn’t like how things were developing.

“It won’t take the code,” Jenn announced. “It’s dead.”

Bonnie hit the intercom button on the box beside the frozen door-a backup system to connect her to security.

There, too, nothing happened.

She looked back at Jenn and put up her hands, trying to keep her expression mildly bemused for everyone’s sake.

But she was closer to panic than that. Controlling a bunch of patients in a locked corridor was not a great challenge. But they’d just abandoned a rapidly flooding basement-which was where she suspected Carolyn Barber was now headed, no doubt seeking the familiarity of her room amid the confusion. And the people down there had no idea who she was or what to do with her. There was any amount of trouble she could get into, including finding a way outside through the suddenly compromised security system.

Bonnie began struggling to get back from where she’d come, hoping the other stairwell was still open.

* * *

“You’re up, Joe,” Harry told him as Joe hung up the phone on Leo and his mother.

“What’ve we got?” Joe asked, relieved to be put to use at last. Almost everyone else had been chest-deep in this mess for hours by now-handling washouts, accidents, calls for heavy equipment, stranded people, failed wires, fallen trees, and more. He and the rest of his team had been all but sitting on their hands, at most helping with computers, manning the phones, or keeping the coffee coming.

Benoit was still holding a phone at his ear. “West Bratt. Report of looters breaking into an abandoned trailer.” He handed Joe a slip of paper with the address.

Joe took the slip, looked over at Sammie Martens, who merely said, “I’ll get Les and Willy,” and headed toward the door.

“Meet you at the parking lot entrance,” he told her.

Two minutes later, the four of them paused at the glass doors, watching a deluge so complete that it seemed to be pouring from a battery of fire hoses.

“Damn,” Lester Spinney said quietly. “That’s really coming down.”

“That the best you can do?” Willy groused.

“I think it’s cool,” Sammie said wondrously.

Joe glanced back at them. It was rare that they all four set out on a job together. They were an independent bunch, paid to be so, divvying up the workload to get it done efficiently and thoroughly. They were veteran specialists and considered among the best in the state.

Joe had also known them for a very long time-certainly Sam and Willy, who’d been his detectives when he headed the Brattleboro squad. Lester came from the state police, whose erstwhile investigators populated most of the VBI’s ranks nowadays. But with Lester, too, Joe had undergone an arc of experiences that few other coworkers got to share with their colleagues. This was a team forged by fire, who’d literally worked to save each other’s lives on occasion. Sam and Willy even lived together, and she’d recently given birth to a baby girl-a miracle to most who knew them, if only because so few could believe that any woman would get that close to Willy Kunkle.

“We’re not gonna drown any less if we stand around here,” Willy commented now, pushing against the door’s handle. “Might as well get it over.”

He preceded them into the rain as the others adjusted their raincoats. Willy, typically, hadn’t bothered donning one, knowing that there was no true protection in these conditions, and not wanting to add another layer of wet clothing to his burden.

Joe realized he was right, of course; he was about so many practical matters. Once a sniper in the military, Willy had learned to live with discomfort, and as a recovering alcoholic with a crippled left arm and an attitude problem, he’d also learned to cope with adversity-if not hypocrisy, dishonesty, or laziness. The man had the zealotry of a convert there, and cut nobody slack-especially himself.

They sloshed over to the SUV parked fifteen feet away, the weight of the water heavy on their shoulders. Spinney, true to his generally upbeat demeanor, began laughing-his head back like Joe earlier-standing tall and frighteningly skinny. “Geez Louise, why not just wear swimsuits? This is crazy.”

He had a point. By the time they slammed the doors from the inside, the windows were fogged with their own humidity. Joe fired up the engine and adjusted the air-conditioning to improve their visibility.

Slowly, they left the parking lot, entered Grove Street, and began driving toward West Brattleboro, beyond Interstate 91.

“Tell me we’re not heading for a cat up a tree,” Willy said sourly, sitting in the front seat and staring beyond the ineffective windshield wipers, the vehicle feeling more like a boat than a car.

Joe took Sammie in with a quick look over his shoulder. “You didn’t tell him?”

“Oh, great,” Willy muttered as Sam conceded, “I said we had police work.” She addressed her companion: “You were having that much fun answering phones?”

“Convince me I wasn’t,” he said without twisting around.

“Report of a break-in at one of the West B trailer homes,” Joe updated him.

Lester laughed again, having been just as ignorant as Willy about their outing. “You’re kidding. Who cares if it’s thieves or the flood that takes your junk? It’s all going downstream anyhow.”

Surprisingly, Willy countered, “That ‘junk’ matters if it’s yours. Just ’cause they’re trailers doesn’t mean they’re not homes.”

There was an embarrassed silence before Willy himself changed course by addressing Sam unexpectedly. “Did you call about Emma?”

She nodded. “High and dry. I even had Louise look out her window and describe what things looked like.”

“How long ago?”

“Fifteen minutes.”

He pressed his lips together, clearly not satisfied. “Things could change in two. You know that.”

“I know that we discussed it,” she said patiently. “And that we agreed I’d keep calling throughout to check on her.”

The other two in the car kept silent, knowing of Willy’s twin obsessions about his daughter’s welfare and every possible misfortune awaiting her. She was currently in the care of the aforementioned Louise, whom they’d all had to meet as part of Willy’s vetting process, and who must have felt afterwards worthy of national security clearance.

Joe reached the interstate overpass, and Sammie redirected the conversation by pointing out her side window. “Oh, God. I hate that. Look at those stupid kids.”

They watched as two teenaged boys in bathing trunks rode a large inner tube down the middle of the grassy median strip between I-91’s two lanes, which at the moment was a roaring, whitewater brook.

“They’re gonna love the drop-off between the bridges around the corner,” Willy said. He reached into his pocket with his one good hand and pulled out a cell phone. “I’ll tell the state police to either pick ’em up or scrape ’em off Williams Street below.”

Joe kept driving, knowing that Willy was right. In the time it would take him to swing around and access the interstate, the two boys would have either had the ride of their thoughtless lives, or been mangled at the bottom of where I-91’s twin bridges leaped over Williams.

Assuming that Williams hadn’t become a torrent itself, he continued thinking as they passed a couple of shuttered gas stations and entered West Brattleboro-a row of stores, restaurants, a church, a service station, and a post office, all paralleling the racing Whetstone Brook. Here the water was making a shallow river of Route 9. They all knew what this meant, even before they got there: Farther west, the topography flattened, spread out, and became more level with the brook, meaning that what was a passable sheet of water here was most likely a cascade beyond.

As Willy talked into his phone, Joe said to the rest of them, “Take your seat belts off, people. If we need to move fast, you don’t want them in your way.”

All became silent in the car, aside from the deep-throated thrumming on the roof.

* * *

The mood in the car carrying Caspar Luard had worsened. Tom, his driver, had committed a fundamental blunder. Somewhere between Rockingham and Springfield, on Route 5, he’d rounded a corner, calculated the dimensions of the lake swamping the road ahead, and despite Al’s growing apprehension, white-knuckled the wheel and gunned the engine.

“Holy Jesus.” Al yelled out in fear as the car plowed into the water, twin plumes sprouting like wings to both sides. For an instant, they were fine. Tom felt the bite of the road beneath him, and thought he glimpsed its emergence beyond.

But it didn’t last. There was a lurch from underneath, the engine suddenly roared as the tires left the road, and the entire vehicle sloughed and twisted on its axis as it was transformed from car into raft.

“Damn,” Tom almost whispered as the cruiser began listing, first slowly, and then with increasing speed, as it found a downward embankment and slid into deeper water.

“It’s coming in.” Luard shouted, kicking at the seat before him, fighting against the chain around his waist. “Hey, you assholes, it’s coming in through the doors. Come on, guys. Come on. Make it stop.”

But there was no stopping anything now, Tom knew, his hands glued to the wheel while they slid like a newly christened ship into the middle of a bounding, curling, mad rush of earth-brown water. Now it was just a matter of finding out where they’d end up.

Until Al changed the dynamics by opening his door.

“I’m getting out.” he yelled, oblivious of the idiocy of both gesture and statement.

Tom stared at him in astonishment as Al put his weight against the door and was instantly sucked from the car, the current having reacted to the sudden appearance of what amounted to a large oar by snapping them around like a leaf in a torrent.

There was no time to respond. The cruiser flipped, Caspar’s screaming from the back was overwhelmed by the symphonic blending of rushing water, the tearing of metal as the door vanished altogether, and-most ominously to Tom, who heard it all in distinct detail-the deep, throaty rumbling of thousands of unseen boulders tumbling in the heart of the river into which they’d been delivered.

It was that primordial growl, above all else, that caught his attention, as dreadful to him as watching footage of lava flows and eruptions of molten rock-a childhood terror he’d never been able to handle.

“Hang on.” he shouted to his hysterical passenger, finding himself gripped by a cold and calculating understanding of their situation, their odds, and their options.

Hearing the engine still roaring, he seized upon what he assumed were the car’s death throes to reach out and hit the automatic door locks, lower the windows, put the transmission into park, and unhook his seat belt. The last gesture popped him free of his seat and pressed him up against the steering wheel, since right then, the car was riding the river nose down, its engine acting as an anchor.

Caspar looked around in panic as the water poured in through both windows and shot through the partition like a geyser. “Holy fuck, man. You’re killin’ us.”

Tom didn’t answer. The surrounding water had a smothering menace to it-opaque with mud and filled with grit. It entered from all sides, weighing him down and lunging for his throat. He spat out a mouthful and took a deep breath before sliding through the gaping door opening like a porpoise as the car caught on a boulder and twisted, driver’s side down. His prisoner’s screaming was swallowed by the roar and tumult around them.

Tom hooked onto the door post between front and back and reached into the window to grab Caspar’s seat belt, following it underwater to the buckle, doing his best to avoid the other man’s thrashing upper body as he fought his restraints in a burst of fading energy.

The car shuddered again, almost throwing Tom free, but not before he’d slipped the buckle loose and grabbed Caspar’s shirt, pulling him halfway out of the window to where he could breathe.

Caspar coughed and spat and threw his head back, gasping for air, as Tom continued extracting him from the tossing car.

“Oh, my God. Thanks, man. Holy Mother of Mary.”

The two of them were finally thrown free in one final, explosive encounter with a boulder, Tom clinging to his prisoner as to a long-sought-after lover.

Now separated from the vehicle, but weighed down by his gun belt and his manacled companion, Tom slipped an arm around Caspar’s chest in a lifeguard’s grip and struck out in a clumsy stroke for a passing tree, catching one of its limbs like the baton at a relay race.

In itself, it was no solution, but the tree caught something along the edge of the bounding river, and swung them around into a small island of more vegetation, bobbing within the relative calm of a temporary eddy.

Tom clawed them farther into the tangle, away from the water’s grasping embrace, dragging Caspar Luard as if he were a duffle bag filled with rocks. He cursed all the way, as Luard’s clothing and chains got caught in the branches, or as Tom’s feet slipped through holes on the shifting matting beneath them.

“Who’re you yelling at?” Caspar complained. “You got us into this.”

“Shut up,” Tom ordered him. “Or I’ll throw you back. Use your feet.”

Slowly, they worked their way to the top of what appeared to be a makeshift hummock of debris, perhaps crowning firm ground but surrounded by the fast-snaking tendrils of the caramel-colored river they’d just left.

At the far end of it was Al, Tom saw, stretched out like a beached whale, bleeding and torn, but alive enough to offer a feeble wave. Too tired to resent his abandonment of them earlier, Tom merely returned the gesture.

“Hey, Chief?” Caspar’s plaintive voice brought him back.

“What?” he asked almost peevishly.

Caspar jangled his chains. “Do I still have to wear these?”