One
August 1965
The wicker basket sat in the very center of the porch, a yellow cloth tucked over the contents. Franklin Warren opened the screen door and stepped outside, the fresh air welcome after the close, dusty inside of the house. The basket was clearly meant for him; there was something precise about the way it had been placed in front of the door so he couldn’t miss it, a clear communication of intent.
It was heavy and when he got it inside onto the kitchen table and folded back the cloth, he found it full of riches: a pint of milk, the glass cold to the touch; a parcel, wrapped in wax paper, that proved to be a slab of yellow butter, flakes of salt glistening on the surface; cheese, also in wax paper; a loaf of bread, still warm, the crust a deep brown; six brown eggs, wrapped in individual scraps of cloth and nestled in a small box; a jar of red jam—raspberry, according to the precisely lettered label, which also said, “From the kitchen of A. Bellows.”
Bellows. The large house to one side belonged to a family called Farnham. “That’s the Farnham place,” his new landlord had said offhandedly, as though even a recent arrival from Boston would know of the Farnhams. To the other side of Warren’s rented house was a law office—DAVID WILLIAMSON, ESQ., read the sign.
So who were the Bellowses?
To whoever had left the basket, Warren said a silent thank-you. He found a knife, tore a piece of bread from the loaf, and slathered it with butter and jam. The milk and eggs and remaining butter and cheese went into the giant white Kelvinator pushed against the back wall of the kitchen. He folded the yellow cloth into the bottom of the basket. He’d return it on his way out later, if he could discover the identity of the gift-giver. It was a well-made basket and the cloth looked like some sort of antique, with intricate embroidery around the edges.
He had awakened that morning, sore from the effort of carrying boxes, the sun slicing in through the bedroom window and onto his bed, making it uncomfortably hot. His hand, reaching out to the other side of the bed, found only the rough sheet he’d bought before leaving Boston. He’d dreamt of Maria; that was nothing new. But his certainty that she would be there when he reached across to her side of the bed had startled him awake.
It took three hours to unpack the rest of the boxes. The movers had brought the bed and bureau up the stairs the night before and now he muscled the bookcases into the parlor and unpacked the books into them. He was organizing utensils and pots and pans when there was a knock on the door.
A teenaged boy now stood exactly where the basket had been. He had light hair shorn close to his scalp and he was wearing dungarees and a dirty collared shirt that had seen better days. He had a malnourished, haunted look about him, as though he’d stepped out of Life, a ghost from one misery or another, a flooded river, dust bowl migrant camps.
“Missus Bellows says there’s a phone call for ya. Fire up on Agony Hill. She’s holding it since there’s no phone at the vicarage,” the boy muttered. Warren had to lean forward and listen closely to catch the words. These Vermonters had a funny way of talking, their mouths rolling over the ends of their sentences. Agony Hill? Vicarage? None of it made any sense to him.
“Thank you. I’ll follow you?” The boy didn’t answer but turned and walked briskly down Warren’s steps and around the side of the house. The house next door—the Farnham house or the Bellows house?—was a large white Greek Revival, elegantly maintained, with a broad snowy porch and black shutters on the windows that looked out over the large almond-shaped green that comprised the center of the town of Bethany, Vermont, Warren’s new home. The boy unlatched a high side gate and let Warren through; it wasn’t until he had closed the gate behind him and started hustling up the stone path toward the back of the house that Warren looked around him.
He had entered paradise.
The house was backed by a huge garden, the tall, trimmed hedges forming an impenetrable border around the outside perimeter and rows of flowers and vegetables and fruit trees forming intricate spirals inside it. Running water could be heard from somewhere inside the plot. A floral scent wafted on the air: Rose, perhaps. Or violet.
“Do you live here?” Warren called up to him.
The boy turned around, shocked. “I help Missus Bellows with the garden,” he said, as though Warren had greatly offended him.
Warren said no more and followed him past the beds and paths, onto a stone patio and through wide glass doors into a hallway, a pantry, and then a large kitchen. A thin elderly woman was standing at the new electric range and stirring a large pot of steaming stock. A strong smell of chicken and onion rose on the steam. She was sweating profusely and looked unhappy. Was this Mrs. Bellows? But she didn’t speak to him, and the boy pointed to a black telephone on the wall, the shiny black cord curling across the floor. Warren walked past the woman and took the receiver from the small table it rested on.
“Hello?”
Tommy Johnson’s voice came down the line. “Warren? Tommy here. Sorry to throw you into the soup before you’ve even unpacked. There was a fire at a farm there in Bethany last night. It’s out, but they’re sifting through what’s left and they’ve got a body. I thought it’d be a good way for you to meet some of the local folks, and it’ll be your jurisdiction anyway.”
“All right,” Warren said. The smell of the stock wafted up from the rangetop again. The woman had barely moved. One hand slowly stirred the pot. “Where do I—?”
“I drove down from Montpelier this morning. I’m at the barracks now, but I’ll meet you at the field with the bull. The one looking at the mountain. You’ll see. The boy will tell you. Bye-bye.” The connection ended and Warren replaced the receiver on the wall.
“Thank you very much,” he said to the boy and the woman, though neither of them acknowledged him. He stood there for a moment, looking through the doorway at one end of the kitchen into a graceful sitting room or living room. The walls were hung with paintings or drawings of green forms arranged in geometric designs. The green silk chairs and settee were grouped around a low wooden table piled with neatly arranged books. There was an air of cool gentility that confused him. Who lived here? Were they Farnhams or Bellowses? Who was the woman? Who was responsible for the garden? But the boy had already started heading out the back door and into the garden again and Warren had no choice but to follow him, asking, “Could you tell me how to get there? He said there’s a bull…”
At the side gate, the boy wordlessly stepped aside to let him pass, and said, “Go out that way,” pointing to the way Warren had come into town on Route 5. “Take a left on County Road, go two miles, and you’ll see the Churches’ bull standing in the field, looking at the mountain. Turn up there. That’s Agony Hill.” He shut the gate behind him, disappearing from view without another word.
Warren headed back toward what he supposed he ought to start thinking of as his own house, feeling very much in exile, as though after being ushered into Eden, he’d now been turned out.
Two
The directions brought him to the bottom of a steeply climbing dirt road and, just as the boy had promised, a bull stood in the field, staring at the mountain that arose from the landscape across the road in the near distance and slowly moving his jaws. He was the picture of perfect contentment, reddish brown, with a huge set of horns, and his back rippled and shone in the bright August sunlight.
Warren pulled the Galaxie over to the side of the road and was rolling up the windows when a sedan with the words STATE POLICE and a seal with a pine tree in the center turned up the road behind him and pulled over.
Detective Lieutenant Tommy Johnson of the Vermont State Police’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation called to him, “Don’t bother with the windows. How are you, Frankie? How’s the moving going?” It had been Warren’s father’s nickname for him when he was a boy so of course Tommy would use it. But it felt strange, a relic of his childhood. Everyone but his parents just called him Warren now. Carefully locking the driver’s side door and then feeling silly about it since his windows were wide open, Warren got into the sedan and grinned at Tommy, who grinned back and winked before pulling out and speeding along the road. Tommy, an army buddy of Warren’s father who had been a regular if infrequent presence in Warren’s life, had always reminded Warren of an elf. Though he was nearly six feet tall, his thin face, small nose, and slightly protruding ears gave him the mischievous air of a character in a children’s book. A radio crackled on the car’s dashboard stand.
“Almost done,” Warren said. “I was unpacking the dishes when the boy came over.”
“How are you finding the place?” Tommy had put Warren in touch with the real estate agent who had arranged the rental, sight unseen. “Nice town, Bethany, isn’t it?” His voice held a little uncertainty. Warren had never been to Bethany, Vermont, before Tommy had convinced him to move here.
“Yeah, it’s a pretty little place all right.”
“Well, sorry to call you out before you’ve settled in, but it’s a good chance for you to get the lay of the land.”
They started up the hill. Both sides of the narrow, hard-packed dirt road were lined with low stone walls tumbling over in places, brownish-green fields stretching beyond. As they climbed, a herd of black-and-white cows came into view and they passed a white farmhouse and a big red barn.
“Fire was at a farm owned by a man name of Weber,” Tommy said. “His wife smelled smoke and sent one of her kids down to call it in. They’ve got a volunteer fire department here in Bethany and they rang the alarm and the boys went up and put it out. Took a little time, but they kept it contained. The farmer—Hugh Weber’s his name—they couldn’t find him last night so it wasn’t a surprise when they found a body. The regional medical examiner has been here to look at the remains but they’re not much more than bones at this point.”
The scent of smoke was getting stronger through the open window.
“Tell me about the farmer. Weber.”
A little smug grin flashed across Tommy’s mouth for a moment. “According to the chief of police here in Bethany, he’s a bit of an odd duck. He pronounced his name Vay-ber.”
“Was he German?”
“Not for a long time. Grandparents, maybe. Grew up in New York City.”
“Really? How’d he end up running a farm here?”
“Chief says he was one of these back-to-the-land types, came up for the simple life and so forth. We’ll find out more once we get up there, I’m sure.”
“Wife?”
“Yeah. Although … I guess she’s an odd duck too. Chief Longwell said she might be slow, not right in the head. Not much more than a girl herself but she’s got a bunch of kids around the place, all boys. Ah, here we are.” They’d reached the top of the hill. Warren could feel the land fall away on either side, the fields open, sloping down from around a small homestead, with a gray house, stone walls, outbuildings, and a big wooden barn, one side of it a black dent where it had burned. Across the road, twenty or thirty sheep grazed, white-and-black dots in a sea of green. A couple of cows stood by a tree in a small paddock next to a smaller barn.
Out of Tommy’s car, the air was thick with the smell of burnt wood. Agony Hill. He wondered how it had gotten that name.
A large pickup truck with a pile of hay in the bed, a Bethany Police Department cruiser, and a fire truck sat in the barnyard. There were a couple of firefighters still hosing down the side of the barn, but the fire was mostly out. “They think they saved about half of the hay,” one of the men said and Tommy nodded seriously. Warren wasn’t sure how valuable hay was. Obviously it meant something for the man to mention it, though.
The barn was standard New England fare, from what Warren could tell, tall, with a steeply pitched roof and a simple rectangular shape, except for a few small extensions, one of which had clearly been the source of the fire; it had burned down to its headers, beams, and a few sections of roof. The front of the barn was blackened by the fire and a large set of double sliding doors lay on the ground, splintered by what looked to Warren like a hatchet blade.
A young officer, gangly, red-headed, dressed in the green uniform of the Vermont State Police, was guarding the entrance to the barn. He stepped forward and Tommy introduced him as Trooper Goodrich. “Trooper Goodrich here is interested in criminal investigation,” Tommy said with a wink. “He can be your assistant, help you get up to speed. It’s going to be great to have you helping out down here.”
Warren smiled at the young trooper. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty and he looked extremely nervous. “Franklin Warren. Nice to meet you.” The kid blushed deeply and shook Warren’s hand.
“Who called it in?” Warren asked Goodrich.
“One of her boys,” Goodrich said. “They don’t have a telephone here so he drove down to one of the neighbors’ places.”
Warren pointed to the splintered wood on the ground. “Tell me about these doors here.”
“Well, the fire chief said it was bolted on the inside when they got here so they broke it down,” Goodrich said, his voice squeaking a little. Warren knelt and inspected the pieces of door that had been splintered and destroyed by the firemen.
“This was the only way in?” Tommy asked.
Trooper Goodrich nodded and Tommy said quickly, “Get a cordon up. This is evidence.” Goodrich nodded and went off to do it.
Warren studied the pieces of wood and the hardware for a few more seconds and then said, “Let’s go in.”
The barn was cavernous inside, the ceiling soaring high above them. Sunlight shone in through holes and gaps in the boards high on the walls, sending strange beams of light here and there that reminded Warren of a spiderweb. To one side, bales of golden hay were stacked high like a staircase. That hay seemed not to have caught fire, but across a narrow channel to the right, more stacks were blackened and soaked with water.
“By God, they’re lucky they didn’t lose it all,” Tommy said. “Those boys did well to put it out before it all went up.” Warren took that in. Tommy was right. The barn was essentially a tinderbox. That the firefighters had managed to save so much of it was a small miracle.
The body had been found in what was left of the scorched extension to the side of the barn by the ruined hay, about twenty feet by twenty feet. There had been a door separating it from the central space of the barn, but it was gone now, burned and on the ground. A small group of men, some in uniforms, were standing around, looking at something, and Warren, knowing it was probably the body, slowed his pace, trying to steel himself. Tommy looked back and waited for him.
“You okay, Frank?” he asked.
“Yeah, fine.”
They entered what was left of the extension.
The object of their interest lay on a metal cot. Warren took a handkerchief from his back pocket and covered his mouth and nose with it as he approached. He felt dizzy all of a sudden; the room smelled horribly of cooked meat. The remains were heavily damaged by fire, the familiar stick-figure shape of the skeleton barely recognizable.
It was hard to tell what else the small room had contained; everything had been burned almost beyond recognition. But as Warren looked at the collapsed forms in the early light filtering through the gaps in the roof, he thought he could make out a desk and chair and a bookcase, some blackened and waterlogged piles that must have been books.
“Tommy,” said a tall, burly man in a uniform. Not green, so not state police, Warren thought. He must be local, an assumption that was confirmed when Tommy introduced him as the chief of the Bethany Police Department, Roy Longwell.
“Good to meet you,” Longwell said to Warren. “Tommy told me he was bringing a hotshot new guy up from the city.” There was a bit of an edge to the words and Warren found himself glancing over at Tommy, who looked slightly uncomfortable and said, “We know anything about this yet?”
“Just what you’ve got in front of you,” Longwell said slowly. “You heard they had to break down the door?”
“Yeah,” Tommy said. “I heard. What do you think, Detective Warren?”
Warren looked up quickly, letting the handkerchief drop and feeling suddenly on display. “He was lying on the cot,” he said to Tommy. “I don’t think he tried to get up. So sleeping, maybe. This room is definitely where the fire started, so the question is, why didn’t he wake up?”
“That might have something to do with it,” Longwell said, pointing to a gin bottle against the wall, the label scorched.
Warren patted his trouser pocket, looking for his notebook. But of course it wasn’t there. He hadn’t planned on working this morning.
Copyright © 2024 by Sarah Stewart Taylor
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