Night Watch

FORTY-NINE

“I’m Patti Kenner,” the woman said. She was standing inside the gated entrance to her property, dressed in riding clothes. A tall chestnut mare from which she’d dismounted was beside her.

“This is Alex Cooper. I’m Mike Chapman.” He displayed his shield to Kenner. “Thanks for coming out to talk to us.”

“Happy to do it. The town police chief said your partner had called.”

“Your place is hard to find.”

“That’s the idea, Detective.”

Kenner appeared to be in her late forties. She had beautiful curly black hair with touches of gray around her face and looked especially pretty when her features relaxed into a smile.

“Not even a sign on the road?”

“You’d have to understand my great-uncle to appreciate why. Do you want to come in?”

“I’ll be back for the long version. We’re on our way to Stallion Ridge. The chief told us how to get there,” Mike said. “About three-quarters of the way past your white silo, on the other side of the road. Also an unmarked driveway.”

Kenner pursed her lips and her brow wrinkled automatically.

“This won’t get back to you, Ms. Kenner,” I said. “We can promise you that.”

“Yes, that’s one of the entrances. There’s also a back way in, but it’s a lot harder to find-and impossible to ride on after a rough winter. It’s completely rutted most of the time.”

“We’ve tried to get a description of what’s on the property there, but nobody seems to know. Can you help us out?”

“Sure.” Patti Kenner took off her riding gloves and leaned against the gate. Mike got out of the car and came around to my side to listen to her.

“My great-uncle bought the piece we’re standing on in the 1940s. He’d been very fortunate with his investments and wanted to get into the business of breeding thoroughbred horses. Land in this part of the world was incredibly cheap then, so he picked up twenty acres to begin with and, over the next decade, kept adding property on both sides of the road.”

I looked around the countryside, which was lush after so much spring rain, with rolling green hills in all directions.

“He wasn’t always so crazed with security. Kenner Stables contributed handsomely to the local economy over the years, employing a lot of the townspeople. Everybody knew where to find us back then.”

“What happened?” Mike asked.

“It was long before I was born, in the late fifties. A ring of arsonists set fire to several of the barns one night,” Kenner said, pausing for a moment.

“I can’t think of anything worse,” I said, looking at the magnificent animal pawing the ground behind her.

“Fortunately, because there were so many farmhands on the property, not a single horse was injured. But in all the confusion of getting the animals out of their stalls and to safety, the arsonists-who were actually horse thieves-were able to steal six thoroughbreds that night. My uncle never saw those horses again.”

“So down came the signs,” Mike said. “And that’s why you love the volunteer firefighters.”

She laughed and told Mike he was right on both counts.

“Is there really a bomb shelter here?” he asked.

“That’s on the part of the land that I sold off,” she said.

“Tell us about it.”

“After the time of the fire, as you might understand, my uncle was more than a bit obsessed about security. Not just the animals, but a bit paranoid about his own life, too. In 1962, a consortium of his bankers and insurance brokers were based in Hartford,” Kenner said. “They got him all fired up about a Soviet ICBM attack. They convinced him that he’d need a safe place to store all his papers-which I don’t really think was its purpose-and to protect them and their families at the same time.”

“So he built one?” I asked.

“Oh yes.”

“How big?”

“It’s a twelve-thousand-square-foot underground bunker, behind a blast wall-”

“What’s a blast wall?”

Mike answered. “Reinforced concrete that can withstand a bomb blast going off anywhere near it.”

“That’s right. So there’s a blast wall and a twelve-ton steel bank vault door. If you get past that, the rest of the interior has walls that are eighteen inches thick.”

“Well stocked?” Mike asked.

“At the time we sold it, fifty years after it was built, the food rations and water cans were all still intact. There were even gas masks ready to go.”

“Do you know anything about the people you sold it to?” I asked.

“They must have more of my great-uncle’s DNA than I do,” Kenner said. “They’re so secretive they make him look like P. T. Barnum.”

“The wine cellar idea, do you know where that came from?”

“I was ready to sell off a lot of this land. And my son-who was getting his MBA at Columbia-actually brainstormed the proposal for some kind of entrepreneurial planning course he took.”

“A plan to convert the bomb shelter into an upscale wine storage facility?” Mike asked.

“Yup,” Kenner said, her dark eyes coming to life. “He won a prize for it at his graduation. I promised him a nice bonus if his vintage protection plan helped increase the price of the property.”

“I’m sure it did,” I said.

“Quite nicely.”

“Do you know the buyers?” I asked.

Patti Kenner patted the top of the white wooden gate. “Good horse fences make good neighbors,” she said. “I’ve never met them, and I don’t think they’re very keen on having me come by for a cup of sugar.”

“Haven’t you been curious to see the wine cellar?”

“Actually, Ms. Cooper, I’ve never wanted to go near the shelter since the first time I went inside there as a kid. An underground bunker with a thick steel door that’s the only way in-and the only way out? I even got my son to put in a separate entrance when he redesigned the space. But it’s still far too spooky a place for me.”