Occam's razor

30

Marcia Wilkin lived in Bristol, Vermont, a small town northeast of Middlebury, tucked into a steep-sided narrow gap between the Hogback and South mountains, and hard up against some of the most dramatic, rugged areas the Green Mountains have to offer-Camel’s Hump, Sugarbush, and Mad River Glen among them. Driving out of the Champlain valley toward the axelike incision splitting this solid wall-under a flat, gray skillet of ominous, snow-laden clouds-I felt I was about to be swallowed alive by a dark and looming menace so vast and intractable that no one would bother looking for me once news of my disappearance leaked out.

It was now late November, closing in on a year since we’d discovered Phil Resnick across the railroad tracks in the middle of the night. A year in which law enforcement in Vermont had been threatened with total overhaul and undergone a major readjustment, in which a bright political star had clashed with one of the state’s Democratic standard bearers-and begun a battle they were waging even now-and in which a stack of dead bodies had been attributed to ambition, paranoia, and greed, but whose final rationale had yet to be explained.

And which had stimulated this trip.

According to our research, Marcia Wilkin had not only known both Danny and Mark Mullen as young men, but-we strongly suspected-maintained powerful and secret ties to them to this day.

Unfortunately, that still didn’t give us much. Danny Mullen, in jail awaiting trial for murder, hadn’t said a word since the day he’d been cuffed. It was only wishful thinking on my part, therefore, that Marcia Wilkin had the answers Danny was refusing to divulge. But by now-weeks of interviews, computer searches, and brainstorms later-it was all I had left to go on.

It had been a generally riotous fall. The September primary hadn’t followed anyone’s forecast. Most people I knew had entered the polls confident Mark Mullen would carry the day-despite all the bad publicity-only to discover the next morning that Jim Reynolds had won. Saint Sebastian, riddled with the arrows of his opponent’s devious ways, had pulled off his message of principle over politics.

But whether convinced that Reynolds was no paragon of either purity or innocence-a suspicion I shared-or merely yielding to his own thwarted ambition, Mark Mullen had thrown over the applecart of convention, declared himself an independent candidate, and stormed undeterred toward the November general elections, to the outrage and consternation of his party.

The chaos attending this move had revived national interest. Once again, articles, news reports, and TV shows were featured daily about the man-who-would-be-governor-come hell or high water-and whose brother was suspected of murdering on his behalf, turning the whole political contest into a carnival.

Little did we all realize that we were only two-thirds into a three-act play. With the same quirkiness that had once stimulated the state’s voters to elect a Democrat, a Republican, and an ex-Socialist each to Congress, they once again befuddled the pundits by splitting the vote four ways in November. The Republican, given no real chance to begin, limped across the line in third place, just ahead of a Liberty Union candidate, who, by miraculously winning fifteen percent of a disgusted electorate, further inhibited either Reynolds or Mullen from capturing a majority, although Reynolds did end up with the higher popular count.

But the rules were clear. According to the state’s constitution, a winner had to collect more than fifty percent of the vote. Shy of that, a legislative joint assembly got to choose from between the two top candidates. Mullen and Reynolds were to face off one last time in early January.

And convinced as I was that Mark Mullen had more than passively benefited from his brother’s scheming, I also had to admit that he’d survived so far not just because of the average Vermonter’s love of the absurd, but because, at long last, he’d stepped out from behind the machine of his own making and identified himself to the people as one of their own-born poor, proud, and willing to fight against the odds. As questionable as his integrity and his goals were, Mark Mullen on the stump came across as the genuine article, as homespun and honest as Reynolds appeared lofty, rich, and arrogant.

Not that I had any doubts that when it came time for the two men to lobby their erstwhile fellow legislators prior to the January vote, Mullen would come out on top. Not only was he a better back-room manipulator than Reynolds, but he’d just finished being the titular leader of one hundred and fifty House members. Reynolds had merely been one of thirty Senators, even if an important committee chair. It reminded me that while Saint Sebastian survived those arrows, his enemies had his head in the long run.

To pay him his due, I had liked Mark Mullen from the moment we’d met, and I suspected he actually hadn’t played any part in Resnick’s death. Most likely, his knowledge of Danny’s malfeasance was limited to financial chicanery, and Danny-stimulated either by frustration or who knew what quirk of allegiance-had stepped over the line on his own. Many a politician had sprung from a contaminated source. Who was I to say Mark Mullen might not similarly defy convention?

As I climbed the last gentle hill into Bristol, however, I knew it to be a fatuous debate, as easily argued from one side as from the other. The bottom line depended on what evidence I might or might not uncover, and on the vagaries of one hundred and eighty assembled legislators. Gut reactions and/or logic no longer had a place.

Marcia Wilkin’s home was a pleasant, well-maintained Cape with an immaculate yard and a new car in the driveway.

The first thing I heard upon ringing the bell was an urgent but feeble scratching on the other side of the door, followed by footsteps and a woman’s voice saying, “Watch out, Stan-door coming at you.”

I was met by a short, comfortably round woman, whom I knew to be in her forties, accompanied by a cat sitting by her feet like a statue.

“Hello,” she said. I held out my hand. “Hi. My name’s Joe Gunther. I’m from the-”

She lost her smile and ignored the hand. “I know who you are, Lieutenant. What do you want?”

“To come inside if I could. It would spare you some heating oil.”

She stepped back silently and I walked around the cat, who sniffed my leg as I passed. On impulse, I crouched and extended the backs of my fingers for him to sniff.

“He doesn’t like strangers,” she said.

The cat hesitated, came forward, and butted his head against my knuckles, purring loudly. I turned my hand and cupped his cheek, scratching him under the chin.

Marcia Wilkin relented slightly. “He doesn’t usually do that. Do you have a cat?”

“No, but I was raised on a farm. I like animals.” I brought my other hand into action, rubbing his back and really winning him over. “You called him Stan?”

“That’s right-Stan the Cat.”

I looked up at her. “The only other Stan I know is a newspaper editor. A real pain in the neck.”

She laughed despite herself. “So’s this one when he wants to be. You’ll find out if you keep doing that. He won’t leave you alone.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” I said, straightening up. Facing the front door, hanging on the wall, was a three-foot long, elaborately carved wooden sign reading, “The Ellis Hastings House.” Beneath it was a small table with an open Bible resting on a cushion.

I indicated the sign. “That’s nice work. It mean anything?” I waved a hand around me. “All this is too new to be historical, isn’t it?”

She gave me an odd smile. “Doesn’t have to be ancient to have history. I like a house with a name.”

“Hey,” I said, looking down. Stan had reared up to rest his forepaws against my leg, seeking more attention.

“I warned you.”

I bent over to ruffle his ears. He closed his eyes contentedly. “I’m sorry my showing up has made you unhappy, Ms. Wilkin.”

It might’ve been the cat acting as ambassador, but she finally relented. “I shouldn’t have been so rude. Let me take your coat.”

I shucked it off and handed it to her. She hung it on a peg on the way to the living room and gestured to me to sit in one of two facing sofas. The room was large, neat, and furnished-it looked to me-straight out of an expensive Ethan Allen catalog.

As soon as I sat down, Stan jumped into my lap, drilling his forehead amorously against my chest.

“If he starts bothering you, I’ll put him in the other room,” she offered, sitting opposite me.

“No, that’s fine. I enjoy the company.”

“That sounds a little lonely.”

I looked up at her. She was composed and serene in a matronly manner, but with careful, intelligent eyes. I was surprised by her insight and her ease in airing it-first impressions had slighted an obvious depth of character. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. Your job is partly to blame. I bet people talk to you a lot like I did.”

I went back to tending to Stan, pondering how to proceed. Obviously unintimidated, Marcia Wilkin was either trying to keep me off balance or merely displaying the habits of a self-confident woman who felt she had nothing to fear.

I decided to push her a bit. “I suppose you know why I’m here.”

She ignored the bait. “Not really.”

“You knew who I was.”

“I know what you’ve done to Danny Mullen, and that you’re part of a conspiracy to keep Mark from being governor.” It was said matter-of-factly, without passion.

I studied her a moment, my hands resting on the cat, who’d settled down in my lap to doze off. “I did help put Danny in jail. That’s my job. As for Mark, I guess I’m damned whatever I say. For what it’s worth, driving into town, I was thinking how much I genuinely liked him. I really do hope I can give him a clean bill of health-but I’m stuck till I get all the facts.”

She frowned, as if holding a private debate. “Maybe you should tell me why you’re here.”

“You know the Mullens well?”

“We grew up together.”

“But it was more than that, wasn’t it? I’d heard you and Mark had once been a couple.”

She smiled thinly. “You hear all sorts of things. We were friends.”

I let that go, despite what my research had told me. “It doesn’t really matter. None of my business. I just wondered what they were like when they were younger. I mean, would you have guessed back then that Danny could’ve done what he did?”

“He hasn’t gone to trial yet, has he?” she asked pointedly.

“No, but regardless of what the jury’s allowed to hear and finally decides, I know the case against him. He did kill that man.”

“So you say.”

“I’d like to hear why, though. We’re not supposed to worry about that-we catch ’em red-handed, that’s pretty much it. But given how close Danny is to Mark, the question begs asking.”

She half opened her mouth to say something and then shut it again, seemingly angry with herself. “Then you better ask them.”

“You seem like you’re wrestling with something, Ms. Wilkin.”

She inhaled a deep breath and let it our slowly. “Maybe I’m just having a hard time staying polite.”

I doubted that and so took a chance. “Would you like me to leave?”

That caught her off guard. “No, I’m sorry.”

I tried a different approach. “Look, let me be honest with you. I know you don’t like my being here, I know your ties with the Mullens run deeper than just friendship, and I know a private detective named Win Johnston’s been bugging you about all this. We don’t live in a world where too many secrets survive anymore. We’ve been taking apart the Mullens’ life for months now, trying to separate what Danny did from what Mark may have known. You’ve popped up as having deep, long-lasting financial ties to them-for well over twenty years. We know they’ve been supporting you all that time.”

Her face had hardened during this, so I quickly added, “I don’t want to make anything of that. I’m here as a guest only, to ask for your help-not to harass or threaten or anything else. I just wanted you to understand I wasn’t being coy or playing games.”

That wasn’t entirely true, of course. Of all of the people we’d connected to the brothers, only Marcia Wilkin had stood out for her very lack of clarity. Born in their hometown and a classmate of Mark’s all through school, reportedly ending up as his lover, she hadn’t had any known ties to either one of them since-and yet had been living all this time without a job or any obvious source of income. What I’d just rattled off had been pure speculation.

And yet she still didn’t throw me out.

Instead, she said, “Go on.”

“As I see it, Ms. Wilkin, my only job here is to make sure the right thing’s done. Your loyalty to Danny notwithstanding, I think you know he’s not innocent. We all make mistakes, sometimes pretty big ones, and sometimes we make them out of misguided affection. That’s what I think happened to Danny. He got carried away-things escalated. Before he knew it, he was in over his head. He didn’t kill that man because he’s evil. He killed him because right then, at that moment, he’d convinced himself it was the right thing to do-that he was acting for the one person in his life who means everything to him.

“What I need to figure out is where Mark fits into it, regardless of what the prosecutor does, or of what I think of Mark personally, or even whether he gets to be governor. Because until I can get that settled in my head, I’m going to have to keep digging. It’s the way I am.”

She smiled slightly. “Just for yourself? I doubt that. One thing leads to another, Lieutenant. I won’t help you be Mark’s jailer.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to. Maybe you could just help be his conscience.”

I was about to continue, but the look on her face made me stop. She seemed suddenly drawn into herself, as if the inner debate I’d suspected she’d been having all along had finally taken her over.

The silence dragged on, the cat continued sleeping peacefully, and I slowly became aware of every small sound in the house. Finally, she raised her eyes to mine, smiled ever so slightly, and said quietly, “I think I would like you to leave now.”

I placed Stan on the pillow next to me, brushed myself free of cat hair, removed my coat from the peg by the door, and let myself out.

On the face of it, I was leaving as empty-handed as when I’d arrived. On a deeper level, however, I felt oddly as if I’d accomplished something substantial, the meaning of which for now eluded me.

I returned to Brattleboro from Bristol along the scenic route, enjoying the fading day and the emergence of the stars. I’d seen my conversation with Marcia Wilkin as the last turn of a wheel before it comes to a final stop. If anything had been accomplished there, it was now going to be played out elsewhere by someone else. After ten months of digging, I felt-perhaps disingenuously-that I’d reached daylight, or at least enough of it to deserve a sense of peace. As I drove for hours along smooth blacktop, the trees, farms, and villages becoming an endless blur to either side, I reviewed the year’s events meditatively and tried to convince myself that while little had worked out the way I’d imagined, the final results were mostly acceptable.

I stopped to have dinner in a small café in Poultney. Eating at a table by the window, I watched the traffic go by as if from a fish tank, trying not to feel remote and ineffectual. Occasionally pedestrians turned toward me in passing, drawn by the neon sign flashing above my head, their faces alternating from pale gray to tepid pink, emphasizing my lack of success.

Gail had left for her job in Montpelier, driven to the next stage in her life as by a migratory urge, dissolving a pattern I’d been adjusting to since we’d moved in together. And despite my encouraging her, and having occasionally longed for a return to the “old days,” I was now having to deal with only a subtle imitation of the past-and at an age when such evolutions were made slowly and with doubt.

With Gail’s practiced help, I’d found a place to live on Green Street, just a block away from my old apartment. It was a radically different setup-a two-story carriage house out back of a large building that was home to a family of four. The carriage house had a garden, huge windows, a brick wall with a chimney, lots of exposed wooden beams. It was a place that felt like home.

Gail had joined me the first night I moved in. We’d made love in the bedroom upstairs, and on the rug in front of the open wood stove. I’d made her spaghetti out of a box, with sauce from a jar-my kind of vegetarianism. We’d watched an old movie on TV, huddled under a shared blanket on the couch. And after she’d left, and I’d cleaned the place up to some music on the radio, I’d felt better than I thought I would. Just as she’d reached a point where she could recollect her strength and set out to achieve new goals, so I began to think I might find comfort in surroundings all my own again.

In the end, I’d come to believe our undocumented marriage had been a pleasant, worthwhile, and honorable failure, doomed less by incompatibilities and more by the simple fact that we each needed privacy as much as we needed one another. In a suitable paradox, our separation had finally brought us closer together. Once again situated as we’d been years earlier, we’d been relieved of the question of what life might be like if we moved in together-and burdened by knowing what that knowledge had cost.

Arriving in a dark and quiet Brattleboro much later, I parked at the back of the shared driveway off Green Street and entered my new home, still enjoying the novelty of its unfamiliar odors. Seeing by the light filtering in through the windows, I crossed the downstairs to a door leading to a small attached barn and entered what I was hoping would become a source of rejuvenating comfort. One of the things that had attracted me most to this place had been the opportunity-for the first time since I’d left the family farm-to have a fully functional woodworking shop.

Aside from reading, which I did as much as possible, I had no real hobbies. Work had consumed most of my waking hours, later yielding occasionally to spending time with Gail, especially lately. But that was now over, and I had hopes of reaching back to my past to revive a pleasure I hadn’t visited in too long. As a boy and a teenager, I’d worked, first under my father’s guidance and then, after he’d died, by myself in a cow shed on the Thetford farm where Leo and our mother still lived, running ancient cast-iron saws, lathes, and drills, turning out everything from uninhabitable birdhouses early on to some pretty sophisticated furniture later. But since leaving home, I’d never tried it again.

With typically nurturing invasiveness, Leo had encouraged my yearnings. He’d taken time off from his butcher shop, and from caring for Mom, to help me move in, arriving with a truck full of the same equipment I’d used all those years ago-refurbished and overhauled and gleaming like new. It had taken a whole day just to set up the shop, but the results had been akin to receiving a transfusion.

Now the machinery sat strategically placed around the open floor of this small, warm, renovated barn, waiting to carve out a whole new line of creations. I was pretty sure I’d make a mess of things early on, but the comfort I felt merely watching these tools under a row of bright lights-silent, shiny black, and resolute-more than compensated for any lingering apprehension.

There was a gentle knock on one of the windows. I crossed over to the sliding door that led to the driveway and opened it enough to see Sammie Martens standing in the cold.

“Come on in.”

She slipped inside and leaned her back against the wall, taking in the scene before her. “Wow. You weren’t kidding about this.”

I slid the door closed again. “Nope. And it’s all my old stuff. My brother brought it down so I could take another stab at it.”

She took a few steps forward and laid a hand tentatively against the cold, hard flank of a band saw. “It’s beautiful-like out of a museum.”

“It’s old enough to be. All cast-iron, solid as rock. It’s the kind of equipment they used to have in lumber mills. My father picked it up over the years, sometimes bartering, sometimes buying it secondhand.”

I realized she was now looking at me, a small smile on her face. “You sound like a proud father yourself.”

I laughed and motioned her over to the door leading back to the living room. “Yeah-well-old dog, old tricks. You want something hot to drink? I just got back from upstate. I was thinking of fixing some hot chocolate.”

“Hot chocolate?” She hesitated as she passed before me. “Sure. Why not? I haven’t had any of that since I was a kid.”

I turned on a few lights as I walked toward the kitchen, which was separated from the rest of the room by a long, low counter.

“How was your trip?” she asked, perching on a stool and watching me work.

“Pretty much a dead end. I’m all but positive Marcia Wilkin’s holding back, but nothing I said would budge her. Unless something pops up we can use as leverage, I don’t see what else we can do. We’ll just have to wait till Mark gets elected governor, and then see what that draws out of the woodwork-if anything.”

“Well,” she said philosophically, “it’s not like we have a case building against him, anyhow. Just a bunch of suspicions. The really bad guys are all behind bars.”

I was shifting things about, preparing the kettle, getting the cups out. “Yeah. Would’ve been nice to tie up that one loose thread, though.”

Sammie didn’t respond, and after a few moments of silence, I turned to look at her. She was staring off into space, her face small, pale, and sad.

I reached out and touched her shoulder. “You okay?”

She smiled wanly and laid her hand on mine, giving it a squeeze. “I should ask you the same thing.”

“I think so,” I answered. “I’ve been debating with myself all night. Maybe that’s why I was in the woodshop-sort of getting myself re-anchored to something. I know we’ve just gone back to the way things were-even with her working up in Montpelier-but I miss what we had.”

“Tell me about it,” she said wistfully.

“You still think about him a lot?” I asked.

“Not him-it,” she answered. “I know now he wouldn’t have worked out, for a whole bunch of reasons, but I really liked that closeness with someone.”

The kettle began to whistle. I spooned out the chocolate, poured in the water, added a little half-and-half, and set the end results in front of her. “I have whipped cream.”

Her face brightened. “No kidding?”

I got the canister out of the fridge and shot a small iceberg into her mug. She took a careful sip, putting a dollop of cream on her nose, which she wiped off with the back of her hand, laughing.

I thought of how we represented far sides of the same spectrum-she at the start of adult life, and I much closer to the end. “You looking for someone else?” I asked after a while.

Her mood had lightened, her tone become jauntier. “Shit, no. I’m still walking wounded. I think I will in the long run, though. I can see what people are talking about now.”

“This won’t be the last time you get hammered,” I cautioned.

“Oh, I know. That’s what made me think it was such a crock. I used to watch my parents duke it out and think, no way I was going to fall into the same trap. But I’ll give Andy that much-for all his bullshit, he showed me what it could be like. And you and Gail showed me, too.”

I looked at her, surprised, hardly thinking we set an example for anyone. “You’re kidding. We live in separate towns, for Christ’s sake.”

“But you love each other, even so.”

I sipped my drink silently, reflecting on how simple she made it sound-and on how she might be right.

After a moment, I resurfaced from my thoughts. “I never asked-why did you drop by tonight?”

She held up her mug and smiled. “For this.”