St. Albans Fire

Chapter 24

Joe found Gail in a small meeting room floor on the third floor of the Department of Public Safety headquarters building in Waterbury. She was sitting at a fake-wood table in front of a cardboard cup of tepid coffee, surrounded by blackboards, motivational posters, and a rickety metal stand supporting a TV and a VCR.

She stood as he entered, but didn’t circle the table to greet him. He went to her instead, putting his arms around her shoulders.

“I am so sorry, Gail,” he told her again. “When I heard this guy might be in the neighborhood, I couldn’t not warn you.”

Gently, she placed her hands on his chest and pushed him back enough to see his face. “That was not a warning, Joe. With my history, that was a threat. Telling me not to drive my car or step out of the house? Who is this man?”

Joe pulled two seats around so they could face each other and indicated she should sit. She did so, but cautiously, as if preparing to run at any moment. It was anyone’s guess what panic she’d been struggling with-an army of ghosts he could only imagine.

“His name is Gino Famolare,” he explained. “He’s an arsonist, Newark-born, Mob-connected, and he was hired to burn a few barns around St. Albans.”

“And now he’s after me?” she asked incredulously.

“Maybe. Like I said, I’m only being careful there. He was overheard saying he’d do to me like I’d done to him, or something like that, before he disappeared a few days ago.”

“And you did what to him?”

“It’s what he thinks I did. Would you like a refresher on that coffee?”

Gail gave him a flat look. “No.”

“Sorry. We-the Newark cops and we-were putting pressure on him indirectly. Talking to his wife, his girlfriend, staking his place out, and in the midst of it, the girlfriend bolted, we don’t know why. We chased after her, but she crashed her car and died. Apparently, Famolare made it personal.”

Joe didn’t mention how easily he understood Gino’s motivation, and how thoroughly, in two brief encounters, he, too, had fallen under Peggy’s spell. Gino’s vow to do unto Joe as Joe had done unto him carried more emotional weight than Joe felt comfortable sharing.

Gail blinked a couple of times, still staring at him. “Do you have a picture of him?”

He reached into his breast pocket. “I thought you might ask.”

He laid a mug shot on the table beside them. As with all such photographs, it was debatable whether the subject’s own mother would recognize him, but it was all Joe had.

Gail picked it up and studied it. “A wife and girlfriend both.”

“Yeah, the girlfriend was young enough to be his daughter. Beautiful, very much in love with him.”

“You spoke with her?”

“Yes. Tried to get her to give him up. He had her stashed in a town house in the safest part of town. Quite the love pad.”

“And the wife?”

Joe had no idea where these questions were going, or what had stimulated them, but he didn’t feel he could quibble. “More like an urban suburb, the way Newark and its surroundings are set up.”

She frowned, dropped the mug shot onto the table, and sat back for the first time. “I meant, did you meet her, too?”

“Oh, yeah. Slightly dirty pool. We wanted to know what she knew, and we used the girlfriend as leverage.”

“You told her?” It was asked without inflection.

For the first time, a small alarm went off in his head. “He did kill a kid. Burned him alive.”

“I read the papers, Joe. Every day.”

He pressed his lips together, silenced by the ice in her voice.

“How did the wife take it?” she asked.

“Not well, and it still didn’t get us anything. As far as we could tell, he kept her and their daughters in the dark about his activities.”

Gail slid forward in her chair and began to stand. Joe reached out to take her hands, but she quickly moved them away and stood on her own. He stayed put, looking up at her.

“Are you okay?” he asked lamely.

She walked to the far end of the small room, putting the table between them again. “That’s not a serious question, right?”

About the only time he had ever seen her so on edge was during the days and weeks following the rape.

“No. Of course not. I’m just hoping to put things right.”

Her face darkened. “So far, it doesn’t sound like you’ve done too well. Besides helping to get a girl killed, destroying a man’s otherwise clueless family, and then siccing the same wacko on me, have you gotten any closer to making the world a safer place?”

He was stunned into silence. Never before had she spoken to him with such contempt.

He rose, too, and moved to the door. “I’m going to put you up at a motel, at least for the rest of the night,” he said. “You have any preferences?”

“I want to go home. That’s where I feel safest.”

Joe hesitated.

“Do you have the slightest shred of evidence this man is even in the state, much less watching my house?” she asked him.

“No. But we don’t know he isn’t, either. He’s very upset, Gail, and-”

“I know the feeling,” she interrupted.

He took a breath. “And very determined. The threat he made against you is like a blood oath. We-I-have no reason to think he won’t act on it. I can’t let that happen. I love you too much.”

There was a prolonged stillness between them, punctuated only by the slight humming of the fluorescent lighting overhead.

She scowled suddenly and touched her forehead with her fingertips, as if acknowledging a headache. “I didn’t mean to snap at you.”

“It’s all right.”

“I’m tired, is all.”

“I know. That’s why I suggested a motel.”

“Not that way,” she explained, her eyes sorrowful. “I’m tired of this kind of stress-I’ve got enough of my own. I’m running out of reserves.”

He took a step toward her, gripped by her implication and the fear it ignited within him-one that had grown over the last couple of years. “We will get him, Gail.”

She sighed deeply. “That’s not what I mean.”

He knew what she meant, but he didn’t press her-didn’t want the words out in the open.

“I tell you what,” he said instead. “Let me put you in a safe place for the rest of tonight and tomorrow, while my guys check your place from top to bottom. After that, you can go home. But it’s got to be with twenty-four-hour-a-day protection, both there and at work. Discreet, if you want, but around-the-clock.”

He’d expected resistance, but when it came to personal safety, he should have known better. Both her house in Brattleboro and her Montpelier condo were minifortresses, rigged with locks, lights, and alarms.

“Okay,” was all she said.

Gino didn’t linger for long, but he did take the time to gloat a little, at least. He watched as several unmarked cars drove up the street and parked at various locations along the block. A group of casual-appearing men and women, some carrying oversize briefcases, convened on the sidewalk before Gail’s address, hovering like disorganized guests looking for a leader, until one of them worked the front-door combination and let them all in.

With a satisfied backward glance at the small pile of cameras that he’d just removed from the same premises, Gino started his engine and gently pulled away from the curb.

Joe pulled into the Cutts farm dooryard and got out of his car, feeling the soft give of black soil beneath his shoes. It was officially mud season by now, when a half year’s worth of subsurface ice finally yields to warmer temperatures and turns all of New England into a soggy sponge for a few weeks. People who think nothing of ice and snow view mud season with loathing for what it does to roads, lawns, and the rugs of front parlors.

“Did you catch who killed my son?”

The voice was loud, sharp, and querulous, as always, but where he’d previously thought of it as an incoming mortar round, Joe was now disposed to consider its complexity. Given what he’d learned since that first snowy day, his presumptions about this family, and certainly about this one member of it, had undergone serious revision.

“How are you, Marie?” he asked, approaching.

“How do you think? You not going to answer the question?”

He put one foot up on the porch and stood looking at her. “We’re a lot closer than we were.”

“What’s that mean?”

“We have a better idea what happened, for one thing.”

She pointed at the remnants of the barn, stark and foreboding. “That doesn’t tell you what happened? It sure as hell tells me.”

He didn’t argue the point. “You see it for what it did. I wonder what brought it about.”

She frowned. “What are you doing here?”

“Did you know a man named John Samuel Gregory?”

“No.” The answer was immediate.

“You get the paper or listen to the news?”

“Why?”

“Because he was found killed in his condo in St. Albans Bay. Murdered.”

Marie’s scowl deepened. “Why would I care about that?”

“He was here, at least once.”

“The hell you say.”

Joe came onto the porch. “Could I come inside for a second? I want to show you something.”

“Inside? What?” she asked, startled.

“It’s something in the kitchen.”

Almost despite herself, Marie stepped back to let him in. He crossed the front room to the kitchen and walked over to the corkboard covered with drawings, postcards, business cards, and whatnot. He scanned the board’s entire surface in vain.

“His business card was stuck here. I saw it last time.”

“So what?”

Joe reached into his pocket and pulled out a card of Gregory’s that he’d gotten from Jonathon earlier. He handed it to Marie. “It looked like this one. Gregory was a young guy, longish hair, fancy dresser, drove a Porsche.”

Marie returned the card. “Stupid car for up here. I remember him. Not the name. I didn’t like him-too stuck on himself.”

“What did he want?”

She turned on her heel disgustedly and crossed to the sink. “If I didn’t dislike you so much, I’d feel some pity for you. You married? I’ll send your wife a get-well card. You want coffee?”

Joe played along. “Sure. Thanks.”

“He was a Realtor. What do you think he wanted?”

“Did he float a price?”

She was busying herself at the stove, having filled a pot with water. “Not to me, he didn’t. I passed him off to Linda.”

“How did that go?”

She turned to glare at him. “What the hell does this have to do with anything? They talked awhile and he left, and that was that. It was a no-sale.”

“How much did he say it was worth?”

Her face closed down, and she returned to the sink, removing two mugs from a row of cup hooks above the window. “I don’t know.”

Joe addressed the back of her head. “Linda didn’t report the conversation?”

“Maybe, I don’t remember.”

“Maybe?”

Her shoulders slumped. “It was three times what the place is worth.”

“That’s quite a figure.”

Slowly, not wanting to turn around, she spooned instant coffee into each mug. “Not really. It’s what the flatlanders are paying nowadays.”

“And you weren’t interested?”

“Nope.”

He didn’t speak for a few moments, watching her ready the coffee, load up a tray, and bring it over to the large, catchall dinner table, which was presently hosting a pile of Lego bricks at its far end.

“No one in the family was interested?” Joe asked as she continued to avoid eye contact.

“You want milk or sugar?”

“No.” Gunther didn’t move to take the coffee, letting his question float in the air.

“We talked about it,” she finally conceded, sitting at the table in front of her mug, which she didn’t touch.

He sat opposite her. “What was the gist of that?”

Marie shrugged. “You’re the detective. Look around.”

“It was never discussed further?”

“Nope.”

“About when did all this happen?”

She picked up her mug, but didn’t drink from it. “Maybe half a year ago. Before the snow. More’n half a year ago, I suppose. I don’t remember exactly.”

“And you never saw Gregory again?”

“No.”

“Did Linda?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Who else was around when he came by?”

Marie rolled her eyes. “Who cares? Why do you always do this? Since the day you showed up, it’s been one damn fool question after another. How the hell did you get your job?”

“John Gregory hired the man who killed your son.”

She stared at him, her mouth open, her eyes wide, as if he’d punched her in the stomach, which he supposed he had, in a fashion.

“What?” she finally managed in a whisper.

“That’s why I’m asking these questions.”

Her eyes welled up. “You bastard.”

He stood and leaned forward, propping his hands on the table, looming over her. “How else does anyone get through to you, Marie? We’ve got God knows how many people working on this, trying to find out exactly what you want us to find out, and all you dish out is abuse. Answer the question-please: Who else was around when Gregory came by?”

She impatiently wiped at one eye with the back of her hand. “We all were.” Her voice was flat but under control. She had gotten the message. “It was late in the day. Bobby was back from school, but second milking hadn’t started yet. That man drove up in his car, and I went to find out what he wanted. I thought maybe he’d gotten lost. Once I figured what was what, I handed him to Linda. She took him in for some coffee, like you do for folks, and then she showed him out-maybe a half hour later.”

“No one else talked to him?”

“We all did, a little. After he came back out, Bobby was waiting. He’d seen the car and spread the word, so all the men ended up standing around and yammering about it like twelve-year-olds. I let them be. Waste of time.”

Gunther visualized the scene, having seen its facsimile enough times. “How would you describe Gregory’s attitude?”

“Like I said, full of himself. I hate it when men get that way.”

Joe sat back down on the edge of his seat, leaning forward to better make his point. “Marie, now you know why I’m asking. Was there anything at all that stood out that afternoon?”

She put her fingertips against her temples, her elbows on the table. “I’m not being difficult, I swear to you. But there was nothing to it.” She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. When she spoke next, half her face was still covered. “Why did he do it, Mr. Gunther? Why did he kill my boy?”

It was the first time he’d ever heard her use his name. He reached out and took one of her wrists. She let him lower her hand until he could squeeze its fingers. “We’ll find that out, Marie. We’re close already. You said Bobby was the one who got everybody interested in the car. Did you pick up on anything going on between Gregory and him, good or bad?”

“Nothing,” she repeated.

He sat back, took a sip of his coffee, studied the children’s art decorating the wall for a moment. “Okay. Different questions, then. You’re going to have to bear with me, though, or I’ll leave right now and spare us both.”

“What kind of questions?”

“Personal. The ones you hate.”

She drew her eyebrows down into a scowl. “Why?”

“Put it together,” he told her. “A complete stranger in a fancy car comes by to list your farm with his firm. You turn him down, but there’s nothing unpleasant about it. In fact, everyone comes out to admire his car before he disappears into the sunset, never to be seen or heard from again. That’s your story, right?”

“That’s what happened.”

“Half a year later, he hires a professional arsonist to burn your barn down with everything in it, shortly before he gets murdered himself. You see my point? There’s got to be a connection to something or someone inside this family.”

She nodded without comment.

“All right. Try not to take offense. These are questions only. They don’t necessarily mean anything, but they may suggest some ugly ideas.”

“Get on with it.” A hint of her old edge had returned.

“I asked you a long time ago about how things were in the family. I’ve got a better idea now that I’ve done some digging, especially about Bobby, but how’re relations between Linda and Jeff?”

He hesitated about telling her that he didn’t want another rant against her son-in-law, and so was pleasantly surprised when her response was quiet and measured. “Fine, as far as I know.”

“Linda’s never come to you complaining about how maybe she doesn’t get enough attention from him?”

Marie actually smiled slightly. “If she didn’t, she wouldn’t be a farmer’s wife. That’s one reason women have begun getting out in the fields more, to be with their men. It’s not just feminism and all that political talk. It’s loneliness, too.”

“Is she particularly lonely?”

Marie picked up her coffee and held it in her hands, letting the steam drift by her face. “She’s always been a dreamer, talking about far-off places, wishing she could go there. She used to spend hours reading National Geographic as a child, studying the maps they included sometimes. ‘I’m going to travel, Mama,’ she used to tell me. It didn’t last. She grew out of it, like all kids. And when we did travel, going to Boston or Springfield to shop or see the museums, she didn’t like it much. I think that’s what ended it for her, seeing the reality. We got lost once in Boston and ended up in a bad neighborhood, and she was amazed at how people lived. That time, she even made a fuss about coming back home-couldn’t get here fast enough.”

She paused to take a sip. “I don’t like Jeff Padgett. You know that. But she does, and she always did, since the day Cal took him in like some alley cat.”

“And he’s good to her?”

“He’s never given me any reason to think otherwise. I’m probably the only person on the face of the earth who doesn’t like him.”

Joe paused, not sure he wanted to pursue that. She saved him the choice.

“So why’s that?” she asked in his stead. “Because I’m a bitter, disappointed old woman who can’t stand the idea of people being happy.”

He opened his mouth to protest, but stopped. In fact, she might have been right. He didn’t know her well enough to challenge her.

“Is Linda,” he asked instead, “as enthusiastic about the farm as her husband? When she and I spoke, I thought I picked up on a couple of small things that indicated otherwise.”

Marie shook her head. “Farming’s a funny life. No money, terrible hours, no security. It’s dirty, smelly, and dangerous. Some of the dumbest beasts on earth get to rule your life and kick you out of bed and drive you to ruin. You get stepped on, pushed around, and slapped in the face with shitty tails every day. And that’s not even talkin’ about the regulations and agencies and inspectors and politics. You’ve got the organics and the traditionalists and the nonorganics and GMOs and hybrids and antibiotics and more paperwork than they got trees to make paper. And yet every farmer I know-everyone born to it, at least-understands that this life is why we’re on earth.”

She paused to take a breath before adding, “When you get away from all that crap, and you’re just out there, in a field or working the animals, you feel like the people who did this a thousand years ago.”

She placed her hand flat on the table’s scarred wooden surface. “This is how we all started out-when we left the caves and started working the land. We created the world like it is. Everything else followed from what we started. They try to tear it down and screw it up, and they treat us like dirt in the process-paying a hundred thousand dollars for a stupid car and demanding that bread and milk stay the same price they have been for decades. But we’re still here, ’cause in the end, even with their chemicals and fancy seeds, messing with Mother Nature and maybe poisoning the soil, they still need us to make it grow.”

Joe gave her a small smile. “A wild guess tells me you argued against letting Gregory list the place for sale.”

“You got that right.” Her cheeks were slightly reddened with the passion of her speech.

“Who argued for it?”

Her expression saddened. “Linda. Cal wobbled a bit when he saw she was keen on the idea-until he saw the rest of us weren’t interested.”

Joe nodded slowly. “So the ambivalence I picked up from her wasn’t totally off base.”

It wasn’t phrased as a question.

“No,” she admitted. “She’s had her troubles. The kids complicated her life. Got in the way of the dreams, maybe. I don’t know. I don’t like talking about that stuff.”

Joe thought about the vitriol he’d seen Marie pour over the heads of this family, visiting her own disappointment on them like a Bible-thumper invoking the devil. No wonder she didn’t peer at it too closely.

But he stuck with the topic at hand. “Just how heated did this conversation get?”

Some of her old fire flickered bright. “I told you that. She spoke her piece and it was done.”

Joe merely stared at her.

She shifted angrily in her chair. “For God’s sake. That’s all there was to it. This farm was everything to Bobby, it’s been everything to Cal and me, and Christ only knows, Jeff would be nowhere without it, so he sure as hell wasn’t for killing the golden goose. Linda said what she had to say and that was that-she gave it up. Why don’t you, too?”

She suddenly flared, a second wave building on the first. “Why are you so damned hot on this? We’re the victims here. You may be clueless about what happened-I sure don’t know why some rich flatlander bastard in a fancy car wanted my son dead-but that doesn’t give you the right to harass us just because you have nobody else to poke at.”

Joe sighed. Figuring he had little left to lose, he swung for the bleachers. “If I were you, Marie, and I resented this farm for how it reminded me of my father’s failure and I hated my husband for giving my son’s birthright away, I might do something drastic to force the rest of the family to accept an offer I’d never get again in a lifetime.”

Her face drained. Trembling with rage, she stood up, causing the chair to skitter away behind her, and shouted at him, “My son died in that fire.”

Joe stood also, slowly, deliberately, and spoke in a calm but firm voice. “Your son was killed by accident, Marie. His dying was no one’s intention. Maybe that’s what hurts the most.”

She staggered back as if he’d pushed her, hitting her shoulder against the wall. She gasped a couple of times and finally burst into tears. “You bastard. You total bastard.”

He circled the table and approached her. She held both her hands out to prevent him. “Don’t you come near me.”

He stopped. “Take your time.”

Catching her breath, she managed, “I want you out of my house.”

He considered arguing with her, or trying to console her-to somehow get across how her outlook and hostility helped make his suggestion appear reasonable.

But he saw it was a lost cause, just as her husband’s efforts to explain his giving the farm to Jeff had been futile, and Jeff’s persistent kindness and forbearance had been wasted. Marie Cutts was worse than a dog with a bone. She was hell-bent on martyrdom and righteous indignation and was now more committed to her suffering and loss than she could possibly be to the remnants of her family. The death of one of them had laid permanent claim to her spirit, and it would take more leverage than a mere love of the living to dislodge it.

“I’m sorry, Marie,” he said at last, and stepped toward the door. “I truly am.”

She said nothing and made no motion, so he turned, crossed the front hall, and showed himself out, pausing on the front porch to take in the view that had greeted this clan for generations, now missing its life-sustaining centerpiece.

He sighed and dropped his gaze to his feet, considering the conversation he’d just left, and his suspicions about the tortured train of events that this pain-racked, grieving woman had most likely set in motion.

For it was Joe’s growing conviction that Marie had conspired with Gregory to have the barn burned, in an effort to free her family of its tyranny, deprive her son-in-law of her son’s rightful inheritance, and yet still receive enough money to put them all comfortably on another track. Except that in a miscalculation of classically Greek proportions, she’d sacrificed that very son in the process-and had created a source of such enormous guilt that only more bloodletting could satisfy it.

Thus the murder of her happenstance accomplice-a hated, swaggering, city-born hustler on the fast road to riches. A man who’d probably accommodated her request for an arsonist to prove to himself that he had the makings of a real operator.

Joe shook his head, forever amazed at how the human species worked to tie itself in knots.

Joe looked back over his shoulder at the door he’d just shut, thinking he might try talking to Marie one last time, when he saw it hanging neatly from a wooden peg set into the wall, as conveniently located as a snow shovel.

It was a wooden-handled baling hook.