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Ben watched Vermont Trooper Jennifer Julia Kennisaw walk back to her cruiser in his rear view mirror and wished he could put all his facts together and solve his case. He knew it would somehow solve everything that was wrong in Stansbury, including Jenny’s case against the druggist. He had enough facts to fill a large room from wall to wall. He had a room built to hold all his facts and, when he wasn’t accumulating speeding tickets, he was sitting on the threadbare couch in that room trying to put those facts together in some kind of meaningful way. He stopped sleeping in his bed years ago after his wife, Virginia, died. There were times that he thought he should move to a smaller place, just big enough for him and his facts. However that would require moving those facts and that might upset the work and that might set him back and that would mean another girl would die when he could stop it if he could just figure it all out, so he stayed in his room on his couch with all his facts all around him.
Jennifer waved as she drove off.
Ben waved back at her. In a way, he was glad she stopped him. Not because he wanted another speeding ticket. His collection of those did not need company. He was just happy to stop for a moment and look at the world around him. He loved Vermont. He couldn’t rightly think of a better place on the good green Earth to live. It was a perfect place as places go. The people were right in the head in a way that the people elsewhere just couldn’t get. He heard that the people in New Zealand were cut from a similar cloth, but he didn’t need to travel to the other end of the planet to have what he already had. Plus, Vermont had the best cheese, the best syrup and the best scenery. It was the people though, people like Jenny who thought people shouldn’t speed because they were more than likely to hit a moose and she felt worse for the moose that got hit rather than the fool who hit it. The people here didn’t care what the rest of the country thought because what happened to the people of Vermont was entirely different than what happened to the people in Oregon. And while the people out west were certainly sure to be nice enough, they could take care of themselves and make their own cheese, which Ben had heard was good quality, but not to match the local stuff. Ben loved America to be sure, but he loved Vermont most of all and sometimes, just sitting on the side of the road, he felt lucky to know this place and know these people.
Ben put his car in drive and headed on back to Stansbury. For all of its strange luck, he loved Stansbury. He had been sheriff of the town for a good long time and it never occurred to him that he would do anything else. But he had to give it up. Sheriff Tom received just the three votes in the last election. Everyone else in town had voted for him. Including Sheriff Tom. But Ben had voted for Tom. So did Tom’s mother, Danielle Hawkins, and his girlfriend, Mary Beth Ketchum. Everyone else in town voted for Ben. Including Sheriff Tom, who told Ben that he really did not want to be Sheriff. Ben felt sorry for the boy, but he could not be sheriff any longer. Just before the votes were counted, Ben withdrew from the election. The people of Stansbury were rightfully angry and confused by what he had done. Sheriff Tom was not quite as rightfully angry and confused by what he had done, but he still resented Ben just a little. Ben never felt too badly for Sheriff Tom because the boy had gone and filled out a form to run for the position. No one forced him to give up his promising career as a cartoonist. No one except, perhaps, his mother and girlfriend who were always after him to grow up and do something important with his life. Ben was certain that what angered people the most about his abdication of the post he had held for so long was that he refused to talk about it. The election was a thing of the past and yet no one would talk to him about anything else - especially Sheriff Tom - which is why he was often found driving 80 miles per hour rather than sitting at Charlie’s Grill drinking a cup of coffee and doing the Sudoku. He used to do crosswords but the number puzzle was so much more compelling because it did not require him to have command of the increasingly esoteric knowledge that crossword writers inserted into the puzzles to show how wonderfully clever they were to all of the crossword aficionados… solving the Sudoku was about expanding his mind to the point that he could see the patterns and numbers in ways he had not seen them before…and he needed to see things differently these days…everything depended on it. Charlie used to keep a table for him. Charlie told him that a man of his stature needed his own table and no one else could sit at it, no matter how full the place was. To be fair, the place was rarely, if ever, full enough that people would have to stare at Ben’s table and wonder why they could not sit there. Charlie even affixed a “Reserved” sign above the table next to a placard that read, “We proudly support our local law enforcement – and that means you, Ben Hamilton!” Ben was certain that Charlie was the angriest of all those who were angry about his abrupt retirement. Something about the way Ben could never get a table anymore or the way Charlie would snarl, “All full up,” when there wasn’t a customer that led him to avoid the place altogether. In fact, the only place in Stansbury that Ben could get the time of day was at the blasted pharmacy and that was only because Shelley, the current girl behind the counter, was like a daughter to him and old Osno, well, he only communicated with the pharmacist via notes through his slot and the answers had about as much character as a bar of white soap. He didn’t imagine the strange recluse that Jenny was sure was the devil himself gave much thought to local politics or who wore the badge these days. Ben would occasionally drop by the place to get a soda and chat with Shelley. Those chats always seemed to turn to Gil and Ben really didn’t want to spend too much time talking about Gil or to Gil. Not that he had any ill feelings towards his boy, but between Gil and that poor boy, Kurtz… Well, Ben had decided some time ago that there wasn’t much he could do until he solved his case and these wasn’t much use getting into the kinds of conversations with or about Gil that would inevitably lead back to his case and why he had stopped being sheriff. Gil had taken it worst of all. Ben loved Stansbury and he ached to tell every last body in the town why he up and abandoned the care of it to the very young Sheriff Tom who had never been anything but a doodler. Actually, there was one body in Stansbury who Ben wouldn’t tell and that was the reason he couldn’t tell anybody.
Ben looked at the road and decided it was time to hit it. There were still enough hours in the day that he could do something other than wander and think. Thus far, wandering and thinking hadn’t done him a whole lot of good. It seemed a better idea to do the job he quit his last one to do. He had been just around this spot on the road into town when he had first realized that something was wrong in Stansbury and he needed to fix it. He had just come back to town from a stint working for the state as a member of the governor’s personal guard. He mostly did the driving. The governor always said that Ben was the best driver he ever sat behind because Ben seemed to understand that driving was intuitive and Ben didn’t over-think every turn. He just turned. The governor, Deane Chandler Davis, was one of the nicer people in power that Ben had come across. Sure, he was a Republican, but Vermont Republicans were not like other Republicans and were certainly nothing like the current crop of politicians who use that name for their political party. No modern Republican would push through something like Act 250, but Governor Davis did. Act 250 kept - and still goes on keeping - the Green Mountains green. Ben’s favorite criteria that the act put on land developers was the eighth, which read, “Will not have an undue adverse effect on aesthetics, scenic beauty, historic sites or natural areas, and will not imperil necessary wildlife habitat or endangered species in the immediate area.” Ben thought this should be part of the U.S. Constitution. Every place has its own beauty - although none as beautiful as Vermont of course - and none of it deserves to be spoiled by stupid development like Ben had seen and heard about in other places. These land developers build houses and business parks as if there are hordes of people who are waiting in line to buy a house and open a small business. The reality seemed to be that people couldn’t afford the houses and there just weren’t enough small businesses to
fill up all the spaces. These places would stand empty and eventually looters and squatters would come in and leave the places even more ugly than they were when they were new. Gil told Ben that when he was working as a roofer in Sacramento, California - it was such a long way away to fix roofs…Gil always went such a long way to do such unimportant things…not to say that roofing was unimportant, it just seemed to Ben that he could have stayed in Stansbury to fix roofs or do any of the other hundred or so jobs he had done in other places before he lost his arm and had to come home - that these developers just kept on building long after the market demanded their buildings. They kept on building in every empty field and they kept on building through every grove of trees and other beautiful bit of nature the Golden State had to admire. Ben had heard that parts of California were amazingly beautiful and wondered how such a liberal state had gone so long without something like Act 250. Gil said it got so that he would drive around on the new empty roads that had been built to provide access to all the new empty buildings and he would pull into the empty parking lots and park for hours and just listen to the nothing of it all. Nature had been wiped away and there was nothing left but glass and concrete and emptiness. Gil said they were simply the most depressing places he ever came across because so much effort had gone into creating a void. Ben couldn’t make any sense of it. He supposed it was because he was a human being. All those creatures that went around destroying the world by making empty buildings, they had no more connection to humanity than the buildings they made. They were all empty inside, waiting for some soul to fill them. But these places and these people were soul vacuums…they were vampires sucking the life from the earth. The world needed a global Act 250 to wear around its neck like a talisman against the life-sucking developers and miners and drillers and killers and then the human beings could survive in a world with more trees and fewer empty strip malls.
He remembered one time that he was escorting the governor and his wife, Marjorie, to dinner at the Dog Team Tavern outside of Middlebury. Ben was more than happy to sit in the car and wait for the governor to finish eating before heading out to grab a bite for himself. Governor Davis would have none of it and invited both Ben and his partner at the time, John Farrell, to sit at the next table over and enjoy what would become Ben’s favorite restaurant. Ben actually loved Middlebury only slightly less than Stansbury. He had taken a few classes down at Middlebury College after his wife died. He had needed the company and Gil had gone off to do his odd jobs in odd places. He wanted to be with people who didn’t call him Sheriff Ben all the time and ask him to do things for them all the time. He knew this was why the people of Stansbury were so angry at him. He just about never turned down a request and would do some of the oddest things a sheriff could be asked to do such a the time he had performed an exorcism of the cabin out back of Fred Merrick’s house because, as Fred had complained, that damnable ghost was breaking all kinds of laws and it was Ben’s job to deal with lawbreakers, both corporeal and spiritual. What Ben wanted was to eat at the Dog Team Tavern as often a possible because he couldn’t imagine a better restaurant in all of the world. Yes, it was kind of corny with all the bric-a-brac, including an old historic overcoat, a child’s snowsuit, a huge collection of old political buttons, a dollhouse, an old sign for orange soda and the hide of a wallaby. He asked the owner at the time, Eben Joy, why there was a head of a wallaby on the wall and Joy had replied, “Why don’t you have the head of a wallaby on your wall?” There was a head of a bear, some throw pillows with the face of a husky embroidered on them, some historical artifacts owned by or about the original owner, a missionary named Sir Wilfred Grenfell, a marble statue of snow drifts with a little dogsled and dogs and at least a dozen unique silk mats. Ben liked corny and he loved coming in and looking at all the stuff about Grenfell and his missionary work. Ben had often thought he would have liked to travel up to Newfoundland like Grenfell did before he retired to Vermont and bring some culture to the Newfies, but they would probably just try to cook him some fish and laugh at one of their damned stupid Newfie jokes. “Didja hear da one aboot the fish oot a da water? No? Oh, it were a good un. Too bad you missed it. hurr hurr.” Of course, none of the bric-a-brac would mean a thing if the food wasn’t so great - great not only in size, but in quantity… the portions were generous and you never left hungry. When you sat down, they gave you a sticky bun. The sticky buns at the Dog Team Tavern were like heaven. Ben was always going out of his way to get a sticky bun. Ben was always making other people go out of their way to get him sticky buns. Some things in life were unimportant to go without. Those sticky buns were not one of those things. Ben sometimes used his position as sheriff to commandeer those buns. The owners strictly rationed them, which forced Ben to abuse his power just a little. They would half-heartedly complain that they were not even in his jurisdiction, but Ben would throw his then considerable weight around – although he had lost a bit of his girth in recent years - and they would give in to his demands that the buns were needed as evidence in some minor case and turn them over to his care. Of course, the buns were just the first part of the meal. Ben’s portions from the relish wheel, a kind of Ferris wheel of sides and condiments that the waitresses would roll up to your table, had, over time, decreased from when he would require the kitchen staff to refill the wheel after he had served himself. Ben was always partial to the horseradish cottage cheese and the apple butter, which he would slather all over the homemade bread. By the time they got around to bringing the prime rib he would just about always order, Ben would have little room left. The first time he went there with the governor, he just about filled up on corn relish and sauerkraut before the beef arrived. He knew he would have to finish the portion when the governor looked over at him with a smile and gave him a thumbs-up. After that evening, Ben learned to pace himself a bit and even saved room for dessert from time to time - no mean feat! Ben proposed to his Virginia there, arranging for the ring to be placed on the relish wheel. For Ben, there was no better place in all the world. But there would be no more desserts. There would be no more generous portions of prime rib. There would be no more relish wheel or homemade bread. There would be no more sticky buns. The Dog Team Tavern burned down one day with its owner and its relics and its memories. Ben remembered hearing about it from John Farrell. Ben had been sitting on the floor of his little room with all his files when John walked in looking like death. Ben hadn’t seen John in years, but John knew this was the kind of news best delivered in person. Ben hadn’t cried very often in his life, but he cried that day. When that place burned down, a part of him burned down with it that could never be replaced.
Ben thought about how fast he was going and decided to stay within the speed limit for the time. It wouldn’t be beyond Jenny to drive a mile down the road and wait for him to go speeding by so she could give him another lecture and ticket. Plus, the closer he got to Stansbury, the slower he took the road. It just wasn’t a good practice to go speeding through the town with the worst bit of luck in all of New England. He had been called out to about this spot in the road when he was a new deputy in these parts. He liked being a deputy in Stansbury a whole lot. He knew everyone in town and everyone knew and respected him. He wasn’t a greenhorn like so many before him and his service to the governor gave him a bit of status in the small town he was from and, of course, he never took advantage of it because he wasn’t in it for the status. He loved the law and he loved his town and people knew that about him, which made him even more popular. Sheriff Marsters, ol’ Jim, used to tell him all the time that he would be the next sheriff of Stansbury and that he would be sheriff so long as he wanted. Ben couldn’t have imagined at the time that he would ever not want to be sheriff of Stansbury. Of course, Ben still wanted to be sheriff of the town he loved, but he couldn’t. It was a day in early November just after the leaves had fallen and the tourists had gone their way to warmer climes and he was just a deputy on duty, driving down this stretch of highway making sure that no
thing was wrong and feeling in his gut that something was very wrong. Ol’ Jim used to say that every good lawman had a gut he could trust like a Swiss watch. That day Deputy Ben knew that something was wrong in town. He went to bed the night before knowing it. He woke up knowing it. He told his wife over coffee and cider donuts - the same silly recipe Gil still used in his little store, God bless him - that something was wrong. Of course, Virginia said there was always something wrong in town and no one would speak about it. As if they did, that something would come crashing down on their heads. She didn’t believe in jinxes, but she did believe in the bad luck that plagued their town and she was always after Ben to leave and he knew that if they had just left town when she wanted she wouldn’t have died like she did. He still didn’t leave town because curse or no, he still loved it and would never leave. Deputy Ben told Ol’ Jim that something was wrong that day, really wrong and the sheriff agreed with him. They both just kind of sat in their office for a time waiting for a call and not talking about it but knowing it was really bad all the same. Finally, Ben couldn’t take the sitting and waiting and told the sheriff he was going out for a drive to check in on the town. The sheriff just nodded. He didn’t have to tell Ben that he would find something because they both knew that something was waiting out there to be found and neither of them had really wanted to be the first to come across it. But Ol’ Jim knew that Ben was likelier than most to volunteer for such a thing and later told Ben that he was just kind of waiting for Ben to go rather than asking him. It was the kind of thing that was best volunteered for, that way there’d be no blame later on for the darkness that always followed the discovery of that kind of evil. Ben got in his cruiser and just kind of meandered around, not really knowing where he was going but knowing if he wandered enough, whatever it was would find him. He kind of expected that everyone in the town would know what he and the sheriff knew, but the day was like any other. No one seemed to be aware that their lives would all change that day. And, strangely, after all was said and done, the only life to really change that day was Ben’s. Everyone else in town just kind of went on as before trying not to think about the horror of what happened and succeeding in not putting it together with the other horrors just like it that happened before and would continue to happen long after. They just didn’t want to know because if they did, they wouldn’t stay. There was a kind of communal amnesia that even Ben would occasionally cling to in order to just do the day-to-day work of keeping the town as safe as he could for as long as he could. The people of Stansbury did not want to acknowledge that there was nothing natural about the black luck that lingered in the heart of the place like an incurable slow moving cancer. Ben kept driving that day, looking for something out of place and, the longer he drove, the more he began to feel that maybe his gut was wrong about today. He began to hope he was wrong and his hope made his mind muddy. He stopped off and had a cup of coffee at Charlie’s Grill. Charlie wouldn’t take a dime from him that day or any other. Charlie stood by Ben while he drank his cup.
“What is it, Ben?” There was an unspeakable sadness in Charlie’s question.
“I’m afraid I don’t know, Charlie.” Ben looked at the little bit of sugar and grounds that had not dissolved at the bottom of the cup as if he could tell the fortunes of the day from the remains. He wanted to see a sign that nothing was wrong but there was just the bottom of the cup. “I’m afraid to know.”
“If anyone can make it stop, Ben…” Charlie suddenly stopped. He and Ben knew that what he had to say was unfair. “Coffee’s on the house.”
Ben left a dollar on the table anyway and went back to his cruiser. In this time in between autumn and winter, the town had a strange beauty. There was a clear blue that extended from the sky to the ground, the leaves no longer lingering to filter the light and the snow not yet there to color it all white. It was bluer that day than most and the blue held a coldness to it that chilled Ben more than any deep winter had ever done and Ben knew it was all about to come crashing down around him. He knew that he would find that thing that would change him fundamentally and instead of going home and climbing into bed and letting Ol’ Jim find it, Ben volunteered. He made a promise to keep the town safe and he always thought he would keep that promise even if it destroyed him. But when he got back in the cruiser he balked. Something in his mind did not want him to be there and without even realizing it, he steered the car out onto the highway and started heading down towards Middlebury and sticky buns and relish wheels. He was just past the tourist shack that Gil now owned and ran when his trip to Dog Team Heaven was aborted. When he thought about it later, he realized that he never meant to leave town that day. It was that instinct inside him that set him on a course out of town and towards the darkness. He was just past the little path that led on down towards the Lakebridge when he saw Jack Bixby sitting there by the path with his old fishing rod leaning over his shoulder and a hand-rolled cigarette burning in the corner of his mouth. That wasn’t an odd thing in and of its self. Jack was always out fishing some little place like Ewell Pond just north of Peacham, which was bigger than Stansbury Lake by a half. It could be the coldest day in the coldest winter on record and Jack would be out with a hole cut in some pond or lake with a hand-rolled cigarette burning in the corner of his mouth and he would have that old pole ready for a fish to come along and get itself cooked. Jack would even catch a fish sometimes, but never in Stansbury Lake, even though he was just about the only one who ever gave a thought to trying. For some reason, people didn’t recreate there. It never felt right.
So it wasn’t odd for Jack to be out by the lake. Ben pulled up in the shoulder next to Jack the same as normal because Ben had always done so before. There was nothing like routine.
“How they biting, Jack?” Routine question.
“Seen better days, Deputy.” Routine answer.
Ben checked his watch and saw that it was somewhat early for Jack to have given up for the day. This was different and Ben knew.
“Calling it a day a bit early, eh?” Different.
Jack looked up at Ben and began to cry softly. “I won’t be fishing the lake anymore, Deputy.” Jack took the hand-rolled cigarette from his mouth and crushed the ember out on the ground and then put the stub in a little silver box. “You need to go and see. I stayed until you got here so you could go and see.” Jack got up, leaving his pole on the ground. He wiped the tears away on his sleeve and looked at Ben. Later on, after Ben understood about the people of Stansbury, Ben sincerely hoped that Jack would be able to forget what he saw that day. “You have to go and see, Ben.” But like Ben, Jack had never been able to let it go.
“What, Jack?” Let it go, Jack. Forget.
“Go and see.”
Ben left Jack on the side of the road and headed towards the bridge. Jack never was able to forget. For awhile, he had tried to put it behind him and stopped fishing the lake. That wasn’t enough. He knew what he knew and he had seen what he had seen and he couldn’t stay. Much like anyone else who was from Stansbury, he loved the town and never thought of leaving it and when he told Sheriff Ben that he couldn’t stay any longer, Ben knew why he was leaving. It was why Ben couldn’t. Even though Jack left Stansbury, the town never did quite leave Jack. He moved out to Maine, thinking that maybe fishing the ocean would help cure him. He found a little place in Kennebunk and would spend his days out in a little boat beyond the breakers fishing for dinner. He wrote to Ben that he could fish the ocean because there weren’t any damned bridges over the ocean to ruin things. Just the sea and the boat and the fish. Ben had always imagined that Jack was sitting in that little boat of his with his line in the water and a hand-rolled cigarette burning in the corner of his mouth when the storm took him. They never did find the boat or the fishing pole or the little silver box that held the makings of hand-rolled cigarettes and they never did find Jack either. They said it was the storm that took him, but Ben knew better.
Ben didn’t look back at Jack as he headed down t
he path towards the Lakebridge. He rarely visited the town’s lone attraction. He saw no charm in it. It was a stupid thing. There was no reason to build a bridge, let alone a covered bridge, over a lake that was no more than a pond. But it did bring the tourists by and that helped the town, so Ben just tried to live with the thing without giving it too much thought and without visiting it. He remembered going down to the lake with a bunch of friends when he was about eight. His friends said the bridge was haunted and he had heard that too and they all laughed about ghosts in that scared way that eight year olds laugh about things that terrify them so they don’t cry and they all went down to the bridge that day to challenge the ghosts to come out and scare them away. The ghosts never came that day, but the boys didn’t stay around that long either. There was just something wrong and they could all feel it, like when you walk through a cemetery and suddenly it gets hard to breathe and you know if you don’t leave right away your throat will close up on you and then you’ll be just another ghost haunting that old piece of ground. Ben and his friends rarely went back down by the lake after that day. No one encouraged them to and no one mocked them for their fear. Everyone in town had it and no one in town talked about it much in the same way that everyone in town knew they had the blackest of luck and with the exception of the few who made a habit of pissing in the wind, people like Gil, no one talked about it. Ben walked down the path to the bridge that day and he knew it would change him.
Now that Ben was no longer Sheriff, he rarely lingered by the path to the Lakebridge. Unless something happened, it held no interest for him. It was an evil thing. Normally, he wouldn’t even slow down for it but today he saw his son and a pair of tourists standing by Gil’s little shop talking to Jenny and thought there might be something to know.