Affliction

Epilogue

ALL THAT I HAVE DESCRIBED is supported by physical evidence: Wade’s footprints in the snow leading from the road down into the woods, ending thirty feet from where Jack’s body was found, then returning straightway to the road again; Pop’s truck parked there by the road and Jack’s truck gone but turning up three days later in a shopping mall parking lot in Toronto; and, of course, the utter disappearance of Wade himself. His very absence is evidence.

Was he headed for Alaska, where his friend the plumber Bob Grant had gone, run out of money for gas and food in Toronto, abandoned the truck and merged with the migrant population of the city? We do not know; we speculate in solitude; we do not speak of his disappearance to one another.

Maybe we want to believe that Wade died, died that same November, froze to death in his thin sport coat under newspapers on a bench in Harbour Front Park — unknown, unclaimed. But he could just as well have hitched a ride on a train or a truck headed west: Toronto is where the Canadian West begins, where it is very easy to become a nameless wanderer. Maybe tonight, years later, he huddles under a Trans-Canada Highway overpass in a suburb of Winnipeg.

Of course, he could have turned himself into another person altogether, a potter living under an assumed name in a commune in Vancouver. Or, more likely, somewhere along the line he drifted south at a rural border crossing into Minnesota or North Dakota and found a job pumping gas at an all-night truck stop, one of those men with long hair going gray, face masked by a full beard, gaze deflected whenever someone looks hard at them.

But all that is speculation now. We do know that he shot Jack Hewitt — as surely as we know that Jack Hewitt did not shoot Evan Twombley. And we also know that Wade killed his own father—our father. My father. That snowy afternoon, after the fire in the barn was put out, a child-sized pile of char was discovered in the blackened rubble, and a forensic specialist from Hanover easily identified it as the remains of a Caucasian male, aged 65–70, five feet nine, 135–145 pounds. Who else but my father?

It had been assumed at first that the old man’s death was accidental: he was a drunk and probably set the fire himself, smoking, maybe, while fooling with a kerosene lantern. But then came scientific evidence that my father’s death was caused not by fire but by a skull-crushing blow to the head, which must have been inflicted by the last person seen with the old man — seen, less than an hour before the fire started, by Margie Fogg, Wade’s fiancée (for she was still that), and by his daughter, who was also the victim’s granddaughter. And again, there was the incriminating fact that the last person seen with the old man had fled. The evidence, all of it, was incontrovertible. What was not scientific was logical; and what was not logical was scientific.

Just as the evidence that Jack Hewitt did not shoot Evan Twombley, not even by accident, is now seen by everyone as incontrovertible. Even by me. There was no motive, and Jack left no secret bank account, no stash of hundred-dollar bills: the links between Jack and Twombley, LaRiviere and Mel Gordon, existed only in Wade’s wild imaginings — and briefly, I admit, in mine as well.

LaRiviere and Mel Gordon were indeed in business, buying up as much high-country real estate as they could, but there was nothing illegal about it, although it probably was not proper for Mel Gordon to finance the operation with union funds when he was a director and major shareholder in the company receiving the funds. It was a legitimate investment, however, one that has paid off handsomely — for the union membership, for Mel Gordon and Gordon LaRiviere, and for almost everyone else in town too. The Northcountry Development Corporation has brought enormous changes to the region: Parker Mountain Ski Resort is advertised all over the northeast, full-page ads in the Sunday travel section of the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and so on. Fifteen lifts, seventeen miles of trails from beginners’ to advanced, with several fancy lodges, over a hundred chaletlike condominiums installed along the old Parker Mountain Road in a development called Saddleback Ridge, a half-dozen après-ski lounges, restaurants and bars, including Toby’s Inn, now called the Skimeister’s Hearthside Lodge. The White-house place out on Parker Mountain Road is still in Wade’s name, along with mine and Lena’s, and I keep paying the taxes on it, which keeps it out of LaRiviere’s hands. The house remains empty and looks the way the barn did before the fire. Now and then I drive out and sit in my car and look at the wreck of a house and wonder why not let it go, why not let LaRiviere buy it and tear down the house and build the condominiums he wants there?

For it sometimes seems that there is no one in Lawford, except for me, whose life, seen from a certain angle, has not been changed more by the Northcountry Development Corporation than by Wade’s awful crimes. Hettie Rodgers, called a hostess, is a salesperson for time-share units in a huge pool-and-pavilion complex under construction on the south slope. Jimmy Dame, tossed out of work for a while when LaRiviere closed down the well-drilling operation to devote all his energies to Northcountry Development, tends bar nights at the main lodge on Lake Minuit, where the trailer park used to be, and he seems content. Nick Wickham has sold his restaurant to Burger King — they wanted the in-town lot — and Nick is talking about opening a video game arcade at Northcountry’s minimall at the new Route 29 cloverleaf. Frankie LaCoy started dealing cocaine and got nabbed in a sting operation in Nashua. Chub Merritt has opened a snowmobile and recreational vehicle dealership. Alma Pittman has announced that, because she does not want to move her office into the new brick municipal building going up on the site of the old town hall, she will not run for town clerk again; the truth is that she has no chance of beating the woman running against her, a bright young CPA, until recently a Dartmouth development officer, married to a geology professor and pregnant with her first child. The community, as such, no longer exists; Lawford is a thriving economic zone between Littleton and Catamount.

The lives of those who were closest to Wade have been altered in different ways, and I believe that, unlike the others, they are still stunned, perhaps permanently so, by the events of those few weeks and thus, having told their stories to me, wish now to remain essentially silent on the subject. I have not seen or talked to my sister Lena in recent months, not since she and her husband and children left Massachusetts for a religious community in West Virginia; when I did talk with her, she was unwilling to speak of our brother or of the death of our father. She would not speak even of the death of our mother. It was as if all three lives were inextricably wound together and, like a disease to which she was immune, excluded her. I let her alone and gathered my information for this account from other sources. Lillian and Jill and Bob Horner moved to Seattle, where Bob has a new position with Allstate Insurance, Lillian is studying for her real estate license and Jill, who has been legally adopted by her stepfather, is about to enter high school. Margie Fogg moved to Littleton, to be nearer her mother and tend to her dying father. She works at the women’s health center there, and when I last saw her, she seemed more interested in talking about her plans to adopt a baby from Central America than about Wade, so our meeting was brief.

Which leaves me. I carefully unfold and read again the tattered news clipping from the Boston Globe, and begin anew, knowing that you have read the same kind of story numerous times in your own newspaper: a man in a small town evidently went berserk and murdered a few people thought to be close to him, murdered them apparently without motive or warning.

TWO SLAIN IN NH

Local Man Sought for Questioning

Lawford, N.H., Nov. 15. In a related series of events over the weekend, two men were killed in this peaceful upstate town of 750. The body of Glenn Whitehouse, 67, a retired millworker, was pulled from the ashes of his barn, which burned to the ground Saturday in a fire of suspicious origin. Whitehouse had been killed by a blow to the head, authorities said.

The body of the second man, John Hewitt, 22, the town police officer, was found by State Police Captain Asa Brown in the woods of nearby Parker Mountain, where Hewitt was deer hunting. According to police, he was shot once by a high-powered rifle. Hewitt was the hunting companion of Massachusetts union leader Evan Twombley, whose accidental death here was widely reported two weeks ago.

Police are searching for Wade Whitehouse, 41, the son of the first victim. Hewitt had recently replaced the younger Whitehouse as town police officer. Brown said, “We have plenty of evidence. The man didn’t even try to hide his tracks.”

Townspeople are shocked by the twin killing, the first murder in Clinton County in more than a decade. The suspect is believed to have left the state in a burgundy Ford pickup owned by Hewitt. A nationwide manhunt, with Canadian authorities cooperating, is under way.

You read the account and move quickly on to news about the Middle East or a flash flood and train wreck north of Mexico City or a huge drug bust in Miami, and unless you are from the town of Lawford or in some other way knew one of the victims or the man suspected of killing them, you forget all about it. You forget it, because you do not understand it: you cannot understand how a man, a normal man, a man like you and me, could do such a terrible thing. He must not be like you and me. It is easier by far to understand diplomatic maneuvers in Jordan, natural calamities in the third world and the economics of addictive drugs than an isolated explosion of homicidal rage in a small American town.

And unless the police in some other small American town happen to arrest a vagrant who turns out to be Wade White-house — or maybe he won’t be a vagrant; maybe he will have turned himself into one of those faceless fellows we see working behind the counter at our local video rental store, or the gray-faced man who shoves circles of frozen dough into an oven at the Mr. Pizza at the mall and lives in a town-house apartment at the edge of town until his mailman recognizes him from the picture at the post office — unless that happens, and Wade Whitehouse finally receives justice, there will be no more mention in the newspapers of him and his friend Jack Hewitt and our father. No more mention of them anywhere. The story will be over. Except that I continue.