The Northeast Kingdom

Chapter 1

There are two types of police traffic stops: “high risk” and “unknown risk.”

“High risk” are stops of vehicles fitting the description of a stolen automobile or of one suspected of being used in the commission of a crime. Every other stop represents an “unknown risk” because a police officer never knows, as he or she approaches a vehicle, what might be going through the operator’s mind at that moment on that particular day. The element of surprise, and therefore the advantage, is always on the side of the driver. The “low risk” traffic stop does not exist, unless the officer finds that he has pulled over his own mother.

The big man wedged behind the steering wheel of the white Ford cargo van was not Deputy Sheriff Brian Kearney’s mother. Brian’s mother was a fading violet named Annette who, at six o’clock on a dusky August evening in Huddleston, Montana, was already settled in on her back porch not three miles away, a second small bottle of Michelob Light soaking a water ring in the imitation redwood patio furniture Brian’s father had been assembling for her on the night he died. Brian’s mother’s second husband, Perry, a semiretired bank manager and the reigning Border County Tenpin Champion, always took care, Brian had noticed, never to set his own drink, nor the little cigarillos he left smoking in plastic Bank of Huddleston ashtrays, on any of the porch furniture, the assembly of which Brian had completed himself that long night between his father’s wake and funeral. That bit of family respect was what had sold Brian on his stepdad, that and the fact that his mother was happy again and no longer alone. At this hour Perry would be sitting right next to her looking up at the mountains and the sun dipping behind, content to share her small beers from the beat-up Igloo cooler between them and tapping his foot in time with the rockabilly music playing through the screen door. Brian lived just a couple of streets away from them, the same mountain shadows falling over the ranch house he shared with Leslie and their twin daughters. Leslie had mac and cheese on for the girls, who were both fussy eaters, and last night’s leftover Shake ’n Bake heating in the microwave for Brian who, when he pulled over the Ford van with Arizona tags, had been on his way home.

Brian was alert as he left his Bronco and approached the suspect vehicle. Huddleston was a small farm town, but being just south of the Canadian border, it saw its fair share of trouble. Some drug couriers got lazy, thinking they were home free after passing the border checkpoint, and let their attention to lawful driving slide. That part of Montana, the furrowed brow of its northwestern face, was also separatist country, a small but militant portion of the population saw the police as invasive agents of an unfriendly government. Six years before, on a stunted mountain named Paradise Ridge, just down the road from where Brian now stood, a white separatist facing eviction from his cabin home had held the FBI at bay for more than a week in a standoff that had culminated in a near-riot in which a federal agent died preserving order. Since then Paradise Ridge had become a monument for antifederalists and reactionaries of all stripes, a wailing wall for militant radicals, and the adopted Pearl Harbor of a local fanatic order of separatists known as The Truth. The Truth had fallen on hard times since their church-bombing, race-warring sociopath founder, Jasper Grue, had been sentenced to life plus life plus forty years in a federal penitentiary; but the movement was still alive in the area, and always a law enforcement concern.

The van was long and windowless in back. As Brian walked past the rear bumper, he saw the driver watching him in the side mirror. Brian twirled his finger in the air to get the man’s window down, then put his thumb and forefinger together as though turning a key.

The driver’s side window went down obediently and the engine shut off. The driver placed both hands on the wheel where Brian could see them, and Brian moved to the window with more confidence. The driver appeared to be alone.

The first thing Brian noticed about the man up close was his scar, thick and bubble-gum pink, drawn across the base of his neck just above his sternum. A shirt with a collar, such as the flannel one crumpled on the passenger seat, would have covered it.

Beyond the scar, there wasn’t much to see. A beefy white male wearing a Marlboro baseball cap and a faded yellow T-shirt, cheap sunglasses hanging on a bright orange cord, sparkless brown eyes. Peanuts and coffee, those were the smells.

Brian didn’t make a practice of hassling out-of-state motorists, so he told the driver straight out that he had been stopped for speeding. The man had his license and registration ready, as well as a shipping invoice for the cargo he was carrying: a load of ladies’ dresses.

Brian took the paperwork back to his Bronco. The van was registered to a company in Tempe and the driver’s name was Durwood Roby. The tag and the license both came back clean. That nagged at Brian. There wasn’t much call for profiling offenders in Border County, but the man’s necklace of scar tissue had raised Brian’s antenna. He took a second look at the registration, noting the model date. The vehicle year was listed as 1995, though it seemed to him clearly a newer ’98 or ’99. Brian and Leslie had been over at the Ford dealership in Little Elk the month before, as the girls were out of car seats now and the repair bills on the station wagon were testing their budget, and Brian had admired the sleek lines on the millennium models, more curved and aerodynamic like this one. It was another pebble of the suspicious side of the balance scale. Brian radioed for police backup — the sheriff was on a two-week angler’s holiday in Idaho — and returned to the van.

Roby was waiting patiently, drumming his thumbs on the steering wheel, the skin around his cuticles picked raw. Brian stood with his holster away from the door. “Mind my asking where you’re coming from?”

Roby smiled, an unfriendly man trying to be friendly. His teeth were like little pills. “Alaska.”

Brian saw Canadian coins in the open ashtray. He saw some dresses behind the driver’s seat. “Do you know what model year this van is?” he asked.

Roby shrugged. “Got me. It’s a company car. I just drive it. I’m a workingman.”

Brian nodded, stalling, still deciding. Backup was minutes away, but waiting meant being even later for dinner and enduring Leslie’s scolding. This was not the first time Brian had pulled someone over on his way home. He glanced up and down the road. It was hedged by woods to the turns at each distant end, quiet and untraveled at dusk.

Brian backed away from the door. “Mind stepping out of the vehicle for me, sir?”

Roby’s first expression betrayed that he did in fact mind. “No problem,” he said, opening the door and stepping out. Brian was awed by the man’s size and his right hand moved casually to the pepper spray canister on his belt.

Roby strolled toward the rear of the long van. He seemed used to being hassled, a big, ugly-looking guy with a scar, and the thought of such discrimination shamed Brian but did not deter him. Beneath the tight cuff of Roby’s T-shirt were two letters seared into his triceps, raising a scar.

“Quite a tattoo,” Brian said.

The man looked down at his arm and proudly fingered the brand.

“BR” read Brian. “I have your first name as Durwood. Ever serve any prison time, Mr. Roby?”

Roby was still admiring his arm, smiling like a flat-nosed dog pressed up against a wire fence. “Naw. I did this myself.”

A police car rolled down the road earlier than Brian had expected. His hand eased away from his belt and his confidence again lifted. “Okay if I take a look inside your vehicle, Mr. Roby?”

A trick question, a standard law enforcement trap. Answering “No” naturally invited further scrutiny beyond the threshold inquiry. The process of trying to establish legal grounds for a probable cause search could stretch on for as long as Brian wanted it to, even if Roby was ultimately found clean. Answering “Yes” was a waiver of the individual’s Fourth Amendment rights and a consent to a police search.

Roby weighed those options as he stared at Brian, his dogged agreeableness faltering. “It’s just dresses,” he said. “I’m on a schedule here. They checked me across the border.”

“Then you won’t mind if I take a quick look?”

Roby stared at him, deliberating, and at that moment Brian knew there was something hidden inside the van.

“Sure,” Roby said, with a flick of his wrist. “Knock yourself out.”

The cruiser stopped in front of the van and Merce Patterson climbed out, a short-limbed, mustached man, chewing his Nicorette gum. Brian nodded him over to Roby and then went around the front of the van to the passenger’s side door.

Brian checked under both front seats and inside the well beneath the radio. He used the butt end of his four-battery Maglite to pick through the fast-food litter on the floor.

“Do you have a passport, Mr. Roby?” Brian called out to him. There was no answer. “Can’t get across the border without a passport.”

Nothing from Roby. Either he was thinking or no longer cooperating. Brian could see Merce Patterson through the open driver’s side window, his mustache riding the movement of his jaw, but Roby was obscured by the wall of the van. The look on Patterson’s face told Brian to move it along.

He pulled the keys from the ignition and went around to the rear doors, opening them and facing a rack of dresses sheathed in cleaner’s plastic. He removed one of the hangers and looked the dress over: a matronly blue cotton pullover with snaps up the top half, a loose bib front, and a matching rope belt. The rest were all variations on that same basic style, some with buttons instead of snaps, some floral patterned or striped, some with collars, some without. Brian removed some hangers in order to reach through, finding a second garment rack. Beyond that lay more piles of plastic-coated dresses, which he poked and probed with his flashlight, finding nothing. He stepped back from the fender, shoving the dresses back inside. Around the open door he could see the back of Roby’s head and neck, and Merce Patterson standing wary of him.

Brian opened the side door and stepped onto the running board. There were dresses everywhere, folded on the floor, stacked lengthwise and bundled with bungee cords, lying loose. He waded in, feeling around, and eventually uncovered a stack of long, white cardboard boxes near the back left wheel well. He quickly opened the top box: more dresses. Discouraged, he pulled back and surveyed the interior of the van. The scar on Roby’s neck drove him back to the long boxes.

Moving the top one off the others required an enormous amount of effort in relation to the task, half emptying the box, sliding dead dresses around, and then balancing the box on his hip as he opened the one below: still more dresses. He gave them a defeated stab with his flashlight butt and struck something hard.

A muffled clink, like a small sack of nails dropped on the floor. He listened a moment for Roby — it was silent outside — then, with the first long box still balanced against his holster, swept away the top layer of dresses.

He had dented one of dozens of small, red boxes of rifle cartridges packed in neat rows. Brian pulled out one of the tapered, copper-jacketed rounds, then shoved the rest of the dresses off the far end of the box.

He had uncovered a sizable brick of U.S. currency sealed in plastic wrap.

The first box fell to the floor as he backed out of the van, the shimmering plastic-wrapped dresses swirling at his feet, slinking off the running board to the ground. Brian fumbled his flashlight back into the loop on his belt and unsnapped his side arm, moving around the rear doors. He saw Merce Patterson and pointed to Roby’s back, nodding fast, all the while trying to keep calm. Merce Patterson’s face paled with concern and his hand went immediately to his own gun.

“Mr. Roby,” Brian said. His voice came out dry. “I need you to turn around and face the van, sir.”

Roby only turned a little, his eyes tracking Brian as Brian circled in front of him. Merce Patterson was still getting out his gun.

“Turn around and face the van, sir, please, right now.”

Roby looked at the two of them there, at ninety degree angles to himself. Merce Patterson had drawn on him but Brian still had not.

“You don’t want to do this,” Brian said — not at all certain exactly what Roby was doing. “You really don’t want to do this, Mr. Roby.”

Brian remained ready with his hand on the butt of his side arm, and just when it seemed he was going to have to make a move, Roby sneered and turned to face the van.

“Flat up against it, sir,” Brian said.

Roby did as Brian commanded, lacing his fingers behind his head and spreading his legs. Brian advanced on Roby’s back, not bothering to pat him down, pulling out his handcuffs and going directly for Roby’s wrists. But Roby’s hands would not meet behind his broad back, and with his free arm strong between Roby’s shoulders, Brian motioned to Merce Patterson. Merce linked his cuffs with Brian’s and finished the job.

Brian rushed through Roby’s Miranda warning. Roby looked at him contemptuously now, mean and dead-eyed, refusing to speak. He refused even to acknowledge having been informed of his rights.

Two more cruisers arrived in the time it took Brian and Merce to unload the van. Thirteen semiautomatic AR-15 assault rifles lay on the side of the road, with the cash and ammunition stacked to one side along with, curiously, a child’s chemistry set. The bottom box had been removed whole. It contained four objects: a long, tube-shaped barrel, a wire connected to a small box, a hand trigger, and something like a sighting mechanism. The casting and texture of the metal parts all had the feel of military issue, although large sections along the barrel were filed down.

Roby, asked to identify the unassembled device, stood mum.

The last item was a Chock Full o’ Nuts coffee can. Merce peeled back the lid and pulled out a small plastic sandwich Baggie full of white powder. He gave Brian the knowing cop look, and Brian nodded back, though a fistful of cocaine did nothing to explain the assault rifles, the money, the unidentified device, or Roby’s forged identification. Merce handed Brian the bag — actually two bags, one Glad-style bag sealed inside an airtight Ziploc — and Brian worked the package with his fingers. It had a sticky, oily texture, more like laundry detergent than cocaine.

“You don’t want to open that,” Roby said flatly.

The big man wore a teasing smile, a grin even uglier than his jagged scar. Brian, an affable, reasonable young man, felt a flash of anger heat the nape of his neck. But Roby would not elaborate. The tow truck arrived and Brian dropped the bag back into the coffee can, impounding it and the cash and transporting it all back to the stationhouse the sheriff’s department shared with the local Huddleston police.

Roby was uncuffed and fingerprinted without incident. The company listed on the van’s registration returned “No Known Address” in Tempe, and Brian decided to wait at the station for Roby’s prints to come back through the computer. He left him to be processed into a holding tank and ducked into the sheriff’s office to call Les, apologizing, telling her he’d explain later. She wasn’t happy. Then he called the emergency number the sheriff had left, getting neither an answer nor a machine. Brian would have to sort through this mess alone.

He rejoined Merce Patterson in the conference room, and they laid out the evidence on a dusty meeting table. Merce broke the seal on the cash and counted a bundled stack. There was maybe $50,000 total, all circulated bills. Brian shook his head. He took the loose packet of currency and fanned it under his nose.

“Too much to trust to the evidence locker,” he decided. “We’ll double count it, you and me, start a chain-of-custody form, then padlock everything in the sheriff’s office overnight.”

“Right,” said Merce, taking a whiff of the cash himself.

Brian picked up one of the AR-15 rifles, drawing a bead on a pretend target, then set it down and worked on assembling the four-piece puzzle. It came together more easily than the porch furniture that had killed his dad. Brian arranged the open, box-shaped sighting mechanism at the busy end of the barrel, and after a moment of weighing the contraption in his hands, hoisted it up onto his shoulder.

It was one of those surface-to-air missile launchers movie terrorists use to blow up helicopters.

“Jesus,” said Merce.

That solved, Brian set the launcher carefully back down on the table and turned his attention to the double-bag of white powder.

“Drugs,” said Merce. “Or anthrax.”

“Right,” scoffed Brian.

Still, neither of them moved to touch it.

“A narcotics rap is nothing compared to running rifles and missile launchers,” said Brian, recalling the man’s taunting grin. “Reverse psychology? Maybe he wants me to open it?”

“Didn’t seem like a psychology major, that guy. I think he was just playing with us.”

Brian pulled the bag of powder toward him. He lifted the airtight pack carefully out of the loose bag, soft and squishy, almost like a bag of dough.

“Thirteen small arms,” he said, “thousands of rounds of ammunition, a missile launcher.”

“And a little bag of white powder inside a Chock Full o’ Nuts can.”

Brian massaged the bag, feeling its weight. “And the driver, likely a convicted felon looking at the rest of his life in prison, surrenders without a fight?”

He thought of Roby grinning at him again. The condescension, the ex-con looking down on the deputy sheriff. This was a big collar for Brian. He passed the bag of powder lightly from one hand to the other. He did not want the guy’s respect, but did not deserve his insolence either.

Brian pulled apart the top folds of the bag, breaking the seal.

Chapter 2

Gilchrist was a small town nestled in a valley in the broad upland hills of the small-town state of Vermont, in the heart of the region known as the Northeast Kingdom. Geographically defined by the counties of Essex, Orleans, and Caledonia, the Northeast Kingdom forms the bulge of the top-heavy Green Mountain State as it leans, casually, onto New Hampshire and the rest of New England. The Kingdom is modest, conservative, remote. The Kingdom is old country. Glacial lakes and boreal forests, cut from the same rugged stock of timberland that roughs Canada’s wilderness. Farmland that yields its owners a modest living, and dirt-floor general stores run by generations of the same family. It is open, available, and, in parts, still wild and free. Driving through the Kingdom is like taking a trip back through time. This is the place old men talk about when they talk about America.

A man in a somber black suit eased a polished Fleetwood Limousine along country roads grayed with winter, his normal evening commute. He steered the gleaming automobile with slender hands and long, unadorned fingers, navigating corners and hills with the care and concentration of a battleship captain forging a winding strait. Gilchrist Common, as the Fleetwood left it, was postcard Vermont, a white clapboard school, town hall, and steepled church all set around a wide, tree-bordered common featuring a prim, white bandstand. The names of the streets outside the common were like signposts to the town’s past. Railroad Street. Mill Road. Abenaki Way. Then the roadside stops of commerce, such as Corey’s Satellites, Reynolds’s Gun and Archery, and the Pit-A-Pattern store where catalog orders for JCPenney were placed. Then the land really opened up.

The Fleetwood followed the power lines strung along old telegraph poles, two-lane roads linking homes and working farms with expanses of land in between. In early January, the land was generally shin-deep with snow, drifting and settling like time-sand against the crooked stone walls marking century-old property lines. The air was clean and cutting and arctic cold. He passed a mobile home up on cinder blocks in front of a struggling farm. Yellow light spilled out of a kitchen window as children in hand-me-down snowsuits made desperate fun in the fading light, tramping around a yard cluttered with cars in various stages of salvage. A handful of men stood around a pickup in a driveway of frozen mud, neighbors and hunting buddies jawing. One of them waved to the Fleetwood as it cruised past, and Tom Duggan, town undertaker and church sexton, pulled his hand from the smooth steering wheel and waved back.

It was dusk when he arrived. The driveway had been cleared by the Department of Public Works as a favor to him, and he nosed the long Fleetwood under the carport. He could just make out high, curling cirrus clouds, usually welcome as a harbinger of fair weather, though these had been streaking and multiplying all day, the wind increasing from the north, tree branches creaking behind the house. Forecasting weather was a lost skill, another task trusted to radar and computer. The Weather Channel was calling for six to eight inches, but Tom Duggan judged it would be more than that, perhaps much more. If the wind summoned the right momentum, he thought they had all the ingredients for a low-grade blizzard.

He let himself into the house and hung his black undertaker’s coat neatly on the peg in the closet and moved through the kitchen and the dining room to the parlor. The timers had come on, the tasseled floor lamp in the corner spraying sandy light over the tired furniture, the house dim and warm. The radio was playing — it was always playing — tonight, a sports talk show from New York. The broadcast did not matter, only the voices, the companionship.

She lay in the recliner they had picked out at the Wal-Mart in Burlington, her slippered feet up, eyes closed, hands at rest in her lap. She stirred as he approached, opened her eyes, and smiled. “Tommy.”

“Evening, Mother,” he said.

She smiled again, drowsily, radiantly.

“It’s Friday night,” he said. “And you know what that means.”

She gave it some thought before answering. “Franks and beans.”

“As always.”

She reached for his hand and held it a moment. “Shall I get up then?” she asked, and worked the control of her automatic chair to do just that.

Tom Duggan cooked in the kitchen while his mother sat in the breakfast nook watching the Channel Six news. Like the radio, the TV helped fill the absence left by his father, deceased six years now. Tom Duggan’s mother was eighty-six and in good health, careful about fire and stairs and determined to live alone. She was a mortician’s widow, and therefore disabused of the usual superstitions and phobias of death. But recently Tom Duggan had sensed an uncertainty in his mother, a fear of the dark, a creeping loneliness not assuaged by television or radio. He dropped by every weeknight for supper, remaining until she fell asleep, usually around eight-thirty.

In the outside world, an aging bachelor such as Tom Duggan would have been the subject of some gossip, but in Gilchrist, home to many Quaker families, the lifestyle of the “Yankee Amish” was widely understood. While not a peculiar man, Tom Duggan was by now quite set in his ways, a man of routine and purpose; and at his age it was easier to go on living as a bachelor, beholden to no one but himself and his church and his town.

He called to her from the stove. “Snow might get in the way tomorrow. Sure you feel up to it?”

The delays before her responses were growing longer, as though she were communicating with him across greater and greater distances. “I don’t think I’d miss it for the world.”

He felt a proud tingle behind his eyes, the warmth of nascent tears. “No, Mother, I don’t trunk you would.”

Tom Duggan was being honored that next day for having saved Gilchrist from extinction. The town had originally been founded in 1788 by Colonel Coleman Gilchrist, one of Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys, a band of civilian revolutionaries who fought to preserve the independence of the New Hampshire Grants, as Vermont was then known. The Boys joined the American effort during the Revolutionary War, winning a key battle alongside Benedict Arnold at Fort Ticonderoga. Colonel Gilchrist survived a lead ball through his lung in Quebec, and after Arnold’s treasonous plan to surrender West Point to the British was uncovered, the colonel was engaged by Thomas Jefferson himself in an effort to recapture the traitor. Failing in that enterprise, Colonel Gilchrist retired his commission and settled in the area with his wife, Marguerite Estelle Duggan.

Now in its third century of existence, Gilchrist had seen prosperity come and go. The railroad boom of the late nineteenth century had lasted no more than two decades into the twentieth. The millworks had failed to survive a third generation. Mining briefly revived the town in the 1950s and ’60s — but it was an asbestos mine, and the good times were not to last.

Forgotten among the boom years of the 1980s was the economic downturn of small-town America. Money that flowed vitally through arterial city streets recirculated there without reaching the extremities, and by the end of the decade many rural communities had turned necrotic and began to die. Geography also had a hand in Gilchrist’s recession. The high, cloud-snaring mountain peaks to the west, north, and east isolated the town, and the nearest state highway was nothing more than a two-lane road with the number 17 posted next to it, fifteen minutes on the other side of brake-wearing Planter’s Rise. So there was little hope of Gilchrist refitting itself to appeal to the recreational dollar, as had the thriving ski resorts to the south, or luring a light manufacturing plant, as had Essex Junction with IBM. In truth, many Gilchrist residents would rather have watched the town fade quietly into history than endure the lifestyle changes commercial solutions would have engendered. And so into the last decade of the twentieth century, Gilchrist continued to wither on the vine.

The town’s financial woes came to a head in late 1991. There were only three public streetlights in Gilchrist, all of them posted around the historic town common. Tax revenues for that fiscal year were such that, not only was the town unable to pay the electric bill to keep the streetlights shining, but it lacked even the funds to afford the service charge required to shut them off. Gilchrist was broke and in trouble. The migration of younger families to more centrally located towns, coupled with the depressed local economy, rendered Gilchrist “tax-base poor.” State aid dwindled, and in the final accounting the three-member board of selectmen came up $49,344.84 short of anticipated revenues, which for a town of Gilchrist’s size meant bankruptcy and certain ruin. Long-delayed maintenance on public buildings had become a safety concern. The church cemetery was nearing capacity. The town truck needed a new slide-in sander, the cost of which the Department of Public Works — a seventy-year-old diabetic named Dickie Veal — officially tagged at “pricey.” And $763.14 raised at bake sales and barbecues was not enough even to fund the volunteer fire department. But the most severe blow came in the form of a town referendum in early March of 1992 when cash-strapped residents decided they could not afford to contribute any additional local aid, forcing a vote to deny tax-limit overrides for Gilchrist’s two most expensive municipal institutions, the police department and the board of selectmen. A mostly quiet crowd followed Police Chief Roy Darrow down Main Street that evening after the meeting and watched him padlock the tiny clapboard station-house. The four-member force was officially disbanded and the Vermont state police were alerted. The next day, with a few strokes of the ceremonial town quill, Gilchrist’s government was downsized to exactly two employees: a jack-of-all-trades administrative clerk, and an emergency town administrator nominated from among the three selectmen.

That town administrator was Tom Duggan. A selectman for twelve years, he had devoted much of his life to the town and was known for his levelheadedness and a shrug-and-roll-up-his-sleeves attitude. The business of saving the town required the patient temperament of a man accustomed to heating soil before digging graves below the frost line.

Tom Duggan took to his duty piously. He spent all his off-days researching the matter, driving west to the university in Burlington, usually in the Fleetwood but occasionally in the hearse. He would bring books and notes back to Mae’s Pantry, nursing a wedge of lemon pie by the front window, and voices would hush out of respect and newspapers would stop rustling as he pored over figures, a two-inch-long pencil in his cramped hand.

At a special town meeting convened on the common on a cool evening that June, Tom Duggan faced the gathered townspeople from the crumbling front steps of the town hall. He was exhausted from checking and rechecking his math late into the night. Word had spread throughout town that he had a miracle bailout proposal that would be Gilchrist’s salvation.

It was a kind of industrial plant, he announced. So specialized an industry that highly trained technicians would relocate with it, thereby eliminating the obstacle of attracting new workers. The plant was virtually guaranteed never to go out of business, as there was an unyielding demand for the service it would provide. In fact, it was recession-proof, a unique business invulnerable to changing economic concerns, public fashion, even competition. And as it provided a service, rather than a manufactured product, there would be no negative environmental impact whatsoever.

At that point people were shouting questions. What was this revolutionary new industry?

A federal correctional facility, he told them. A United States penitentiary.

He quickly laid down some background in the face of their stares. The business of American justice was a growth industry doing one hundred billion dollars-plus annually. One out of every four males in modern America had an arrest record. This fact so clouded the minds of those gathered, whose own doors were never locked and whose own children never disappeared, that he had to repeat it twice. More prisons had been constructed in rural areas during the previous fifteen years than in the past two centuries. Communities that had sued the government in the 1980s to keep prisons out of their backyards were bidding for such projects now, requiring reliable sources of tax income in order to survive. Prisons were to millennial small-town America what military bases had been during the Cold War. The domestic “War on Crime” had created a public works project of immense financial proportions. The urban crime wave had become a rural bonanza.

Through inquiries to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the agency responsible for maintaining federal correctional facilities nationwide, Tom Duggan learned the BOP was exploring sites for two new penitentiaries in the northeast. Based on similar projects across the country, he pegged the construction cost at roughly $120 to $130 million, payable by the federal government, bringing Gilchrist some $275,000 in annual taxes right off the top, with various generous “hidden” financial benefits to follow. What gave Gilchrist the edge on competing communities, he argued, was the wealth of town-owned land lying fallow to the north and northeast, arguably Gilchrist’s sole marketable asset. His recommendation was that one hundred acres be offered to the federal government free of charge. Existing access roads and local utilities would have to be modernized to accommodate a state-of-the-art prison facility before a bid would even be considered, necessitating an approximately one million dollar bond issue — an enormous financial gamble for the town. And Gilchrist would be competing against other aggressive and similarly desperate small towns in neighboring New England states. But Tom Duggan viewed the prison as a last ditch effort.

“Our inaction here,” he proclaimed, “will mean our ultimate demise.”

He contended that the prison would in no way interfere with Gilchrist’s integrity or daily life. The town would go on as it always had, uncompromised, with the only measurable change being the influx of prison employees and their families, the quantity of which could be set by the town. Indeed, housing subdivisions would have to be planned and constructed, requiring the sale of hundreds of acres of privately owned farmland at prices easily ten times the current recessionary rate. This last fact was not lost on the oldest families in town, who owned the most land and wielded the most influence.

And so the motion carried. The bond was issued, roads were built, pipe and wire were laid, and in the end the long shot paid off. Gilchrist won its prize prison. Tom Duggan himself ceremonially heated and broke ground on the 312-bed facility in the northern outlands, before a cookout on the town common to celebrate the return of solvency to Gilchrist.

And now, tomorrow, a bust of his likeness was to be installed inside the town hall foyer, alongside the rest of the town’s founding fathers and Revolutionary War heroes, including Colonel Gilchrist himself.

Tom Duggan rolled the swelling franks around the pan with a wooden spatula, still concerned about the coming snow. Clara Nibe had passed on two days before, so with her wake soon after the ceremony, he had arranged for Dickie Veal to drive his mother home. He would check the propane tank outside before leaving. She had plenty of food. It was the isolation of the house that bothered him.

He sliced the franks and served them with the beans and a splotch of ketchup, fixing place mats on the table as he told her about the wake arrangements, making conversation.

“Wasn’t Clara Nibe whosit’s sister-in-law?”

“Yes,” Tom Duggan said. Family pride prevented his mother from uttering Marshall Polk’s name.

“Think he’ll come down out of the hills for that one?”

“I doubt he even knows about it.”

Marshall Polk had been the town postmaster for forty-four years, cranky yet beloved, as much a Gilchrist institution as the town hall. But he had been one of the two sitting selectman removed from office when Tom was anointed town administrator; and he never forgave the town for its slight, nor was he ever the same afterward. When Tom proposed his prison bailout plan, Polk formed a small but vocal opposition group. He retired from the postal service and turned vehemently antigovernment, protesting at town meetings in his lumberjack coat and fur-lined boots, railing against the dark specter of federal intrusion on Gilchrist land. Toward the end, even his small cadre of supporters abandoned him, but Polk persisted as the lone voice of dissent, growing more and more radical, eventually calling for the destruction of the town either by his own hand or by God’s. He fled before seeing the turnaround of the town’s fortunes. On the first day ground was broken at the prison site, Polk announced his secession from Gilchrist and declared war on the town, withdrawing into the northeast mountains.

People claimed to see him fishing now and then, or rummaging through the abandoned buildings out by the asbestos mine. Some sympathetic outland residents left food for him that routinely disappeared. But never had a single shot been fired in this one man’s revolution. And he had departed the town before what would have been partial vindication for him, Tom Duggan’s one glaring error of judgment.

Among the five official security-level classifications of the Bureau of Prisons — high-security, medium-security, low-security, minimum-security, and administrative, listed in that order — Tom Duggan had reasoned that “administrative” dealt with the lowest-risk inmates, and neglected to investigate the matter any further. He later learned, along with the rest of the town, that in fact an “administrative” facility is a specialized institution charged with the containment of extremely dangerous, violent, or escape-prone inmates.

The Administrative Maximum Unit Penitentiary at Gilchrist became the United States’s twenty-first century Alcatraz, a high-technology Devil’s Island of no parole, no release, no escape. It was, in the words of one pundit on TV, “the latest advancement in the Bureau of Prisons’s legacy of maintaining ‘Control Unit’ penitentiaries, the government’s instrument of revenge upon the country’s most infamous or dissident criminals.”

But this incredible gaffe was overlooked by the townspeople as soon as the enormous financial benefits began to roll in. The guards’ neighborhood, a seventy-house subdivision in the old village of Gilchrist Falls, went up like a boomtown, a planned community of three-bedroom colonials, thirty-by-fifteen-foot asphalt driveways, and freshly sod front yards. The police force was rehired full-time and repairs were made to the crumbling granite steps of the town hall. The three streetlights were updated and two new ones were added, bringing Gilchrist Common’s total to five. The town truck got four new all-weather tires as well as its slide-in sander, and the iron fence around the cemetery next to the church was widened and improved. The 312 felons were quietly added to the population rolls, allowing for even more tax income due to census-based state support. With the growing budget surplus, the school and fire department buildings were revamped and the old police station was replaced by a modern brick facility. Five years after the penitentiary received its first inmate, tax rates had plummeted to a thirty-five-year low. A high, white flagpole, the second-tallest structure in town after the church steeple, was erected next to the bandstand on the common. Town revenues grew and grew, allowing for a second snow-clearing truck for public roads, a two-man DPW staff and a generous retirement plan for Dickie Veal, a modernized water and septic system, and, by special vote, the construction of a municipal golf course and country club at the foot of the eastern hills.

But, for the most part, the town went on as before, only more prosperously. The prison in the northern out-lands turned out to be an excellent, if exceedingly private, neighbor.

“How are the beans?”

“Delicious,” Mother said.

“That’s the brown sugar.”

It was a conversation they had shared many times before, but Tom Duggan found comfort in the repetition. His mother’s house was a sanctuary, unassailable by time. He often thought of the fine mahogany he kept in storage over at Fred Burnglass’s mill, the other half of the order that he had placed for his father. And he had saved yards of the best ivory satin fabric over time. Knowing that she would be well attended at the end pleased Tom Duggan as much as it did his mother. It gratified him to know that she was a woman at peace.

A waxy paper bag from Mae’s Pantry lay atop the table, full of the usual Friday night treats: a plain cruller for her tea and a Bavarian crème donut for him. Tom Duggan smiled during a quiet moment, watching his mother’s dry, hardening eyes focused on the television as the lively theme music from Wheel of Fortune played.