Tucker Peak (29 page)

· · ·

That plan, however, was dependent on factors beyond our control for the moment, such as David Hawke’s finding something incriminating in the vacuum bag, and Kathy Bartlett putting together a tightly bundled package with her federal counterparts with which to sway a judge. Not that we were guaranteed success even then, of course—it was within the purview of the U.S. Marshals to take this case over. However, given the implied warning I’d made to Freeman, I was hoping they’d feel it was also not in their best interests.

In the meantime, therefore, I decided to tackle Roger Betts’s concerns once more by looking into Norman Toussaint, the under-the-gun, mechanically inclined environmentalist.

· · ·

Norman and Abigail Toussaint lived in the hills several miles outside the small Vermont town of Jamaica. There were no landmarks of note indicating the entrance to their property, just a dirt track butting into the paved road. The deputy sheriff who’d given us directions had stressed that point: “No mail box, no road sign, no power lines, not a goddamn thing—they wouldn’t even put a 911 number up, in case they get in a jam. Granola-heads with an attitude.”

It was pretty remote. Sammie looked out the side window as I slowly negotiated the ice-filled ruts, and commented, “I like the countryside okay, but this gives me the creeps. It’s like living in the middle of nowhere. Wonder what they do for entertainment?”

“From what Betts told me,” I answered, “that’s not high on their list right now.”

“Still,” she said softly, “it’s like going to Transylvania or something.”

I empathized with her there. The farther I drove into the woods the more encased I began to feel. No effort had been made to trim or thin out the trees. In fact, it was more like the forest was being encouraged to take back the road, with limbs sticking out to rake against the car, and the overhead canopy low and dense enough to imperil the passage of a regular-size delivery van. Despite the relative brightness of an admittedly overcast day, the tunnel we were traveling was dark enough that I eventually turned on the headlights.

Conceptually, I could see a logic to keeping the approach to a house this overgrown—it would heighten the delight of coming into a clearing fully equipped with a hundred-mile view. I was therefore doubly disappointed when we rounded one last curve some two miles into this journey and almost smacked into a dented, rusty old Jeep Wagoneer parked outside a completely hemmed-in, low-profile, almost windowless log cabin so covered with snow it looked like a bear den. It reminded me of the makeshift shelters thrown up against the elements during the Alaskan gold rush a hundred years earlier. Like the driveway leading up to it, the house was shrouded in gloomy darkness. I pulled alongside the Jeep and killed the engine.

Sammie frowned, imagining the flip side to this frozen, glum setting. “Must be a joy when the bugs’re in full force.”

We got out and tentatively approached the heavy wooden front door, sensitive as always out in the country to the sounds of any dogs readying themselves to attack. I was especially prepared to use my right arm as a defense this time so I could balance out my scar tissue. But all was still, both inside and out.

The term “log cabin” nowadays usually evokes images of a pampered conspiracy between a hormonal Lincoln Logs set and someone with buckets of cash. This was another thing entirely: small, crude, emphatically homebuilt, and almost purposefully oppressive.

Sammie pounded on the door with the heel of her hand, creating a series of dull thuds as if she were wailing on a tree stump.

We waited for half a minute, fully expecting a no-show, and thus gave startled jumps when the door suddenly and soundlessly swung open.

“Yes?”

The woman facing us was small, thin, dressed in heavy layers, wearing a pair of granny glasses and a wool watch cap. She looked dressed for a hike outdoors, although her appearance belied the physical ability to do that.

“Mrs. Toussaint?” I asked.

“I’m Abigail Evans,” she answered tiredly, seemingly without curiosity about who we might be.

I showed her my badge. “We’re from the Vermont Bureau of Investigation—Agents Martens and Gunther. We were wondering if we could speak with your husband.”

She was hollow-eyed and gaunt and merely blinked in response.

“Is he here?” Sam asked.

“He’s on the platform,” she replied finally, gesturing feebly beyond where the cars were parked. “Just follow the trail.”

We both glanced in the direction she’d indicated and discovered in the meantime that she’d quietly closed the door on us.

Sammie raised her eyebrows at me. “And I thought my relationship was under stress.”

· · ·

The hike up the trail gave new meaning to a walk in the woods. Emulating the drive to the house, it was narrow, overgrown, rutted and uneven, and as dark as a tunnel leading far underground. Sammie and I stumbled and caught our balance repeatedly against the nearby trees before settling down to a slow, steady pace that saw us through the better part of a one-hour trip.

Along the way, I couldn’t resist following up on her one-liner at the cabin. “Things going any better between you and Willy?” I asked, watching the heels of her boots as she marched ahead of me.

She didn’t bother looking back at me. “Yeah, actually. I think they are.”

I didn’t say anything, making the subsequent long pause do my prodding for me.

Her hands flapped out to either side of her in a frustrated gesture—faintly comical when seen from behind. “What the hell do I know, Joe? Out of the blue, he said we ought to get away for a few days after this case wraps up. This from a man who wouldn’t know a vacation if it bit him in the butt.”

“You know where you’ll be going?”

At that, she quickly glanced back at me, laughing and rolling her eyes. “You think I’m picky? I don’t care if it’s Guilford.”

Guilford was the next town south of Brattleboro, and not much more than a crossroads.

“Besides,” she added, “We’re only talking a long weekend, if that.”

“Still,” I said after a couple of minutes of reflective silence. “Must be nice to be back on track.”

I wasn’t sure how that comment would go over. As their recent falling out had established, Willy and Sammie were hardly a match made in heaven. And for all my maternal meddling in their business, which of course I pretended was for the good of the squad, I wasn’t sure if the best thing might not be a permanent breakup.

But the tone in her voice as she spoke straight ahead, leaving her words to drift back and surround me, was soft and hopeful and filled with optimism and let me think that perhaps my efforts weren’t quite so misguided.

“It is nice,” she said. “Feels really great. And I know in my heart we can make this work.”

· · ·

Finally, mercifully, on the verge of thinking Abigail Evans had just conned us into trekking halfway to New York City, we came upon a wooden ladder heading straight up into the canopy overhead.

Sammie leaned against a nearby trunk and peered into the crisscross of pine and denuded hardwood branches. “There’s a platform, all right—way the hell up.” She kept her voice to a near whisper.

I tested the ladder, obviously homebuilt and covered with the green skin of some slippery fungus. “Feels solid enough.”

“You want to knock, or make like a lizard?”

I thought how I might respond if I were camped out on top. “Knock,” I said, stepping back and cupping my hands around my mouth.

“Hello on the platform. Is there anyone there?”

A long silence elapsed during which we heard only the slight creak of the trees in the breeze high above.

“Who wants to know?
” The voice was clear, neutral, belonging to a man.

“It’s the police, Mr. Toussaint. We’d like to talk to you. Could you come down, please?”

“You come up. There’s no danger.”

Sammie made a face. “Wish he hadn’t said that.”

“No history of violence,” I tried soothing us both.

She wasn’t interested. “That we know of.”

I grasped one of the ladder rungs. “I’ll go first. You cover. Just make sure you don’t shoot my ass off from below.”

We headed up slowly, discovering the platform to be much higher than it appeared. The ladder was actually made in multiple parts, ingeniously connected across several large trees, and hinged here and there to compensate for any movement caused by the wind. The more we climbed, the brighter it got, and the more prevalent the snow that the lower branches had stopped from reaching the gloomy forest floor. I was reminded of an article I’d read in
National Geographic
in which researchers had lived for months in the top of the jungle canopy, studying Christ knows what. Only here, the ladder was cold and increasingly slippery and was beginning to sway much more than I found comfortable.

We paused some distance below the closed trapdoor of a solid wood platform that blacked out about a fifteen-foot square of sky.

Sammie’s voice was barely audible below me. “Okay—all set.”

She linked one leg through the rungs and braced both her hands around her gun, taking a bead on the door just over my shoulder.

Unhappy with the William Tell positioning and unable to come up with a better suggestion, I finished my climb, leaned out to one side, and rapped on the wood overhead.

The trapdoor opened almost instantly to reveal a clean-shaven, thin man with a wrinkle-free face and what looked to be prematurely white hair.

“Come up,” he said simply, and vanished from view.

I motioned to Sammie to follow and climbed into a small, warm, glassed-in tree house the size of a very large, square closet. It was flooded with the blinding light we’d been missing for over an hour by now and overlooked the view I’d been hoping for from the log cabin—miles and miles of tree-choked hills and valleys, with a horizon of snow-covered mountains in the distance. It was exactly like one of the fire warden towers of old, including a narrow cot, a small wood-fired stove, and a pair of binoculars balanced on a window sill.

I could appreciate all this because our host was standing at one of the windows, his back to us, his hands in clear sight, spread out and leaning against an overhead beam—as if he was consciously trying to appear non-threatening.

It worked. Sammie holstered her weapon.

“Mr. Toussaint?” I asked.

He turned then and nodded wordlessly.

I made our introductions as I had to his wife earlier, repeating, “We’d like to ask you some questions.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“You don’t sound surprised.”

He crossed over to the one chair in the small room—a rocker—and sat carefully, leaving us to stand over him. I noticed the whole cabin was swaying slightly from side to side, which made me wonder what it was like to be up here during a storm.

“I’m not,” he said. “I’ve been expecting you.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because of what I’ve been doing at Tucker Peak.”

“What’ve you done, exactly, Mr. Toussaint?” Sammie asked, sitting on the cot near him.

He smiled sadly. “This where I confess my sins and ask for mercy?”

I pulled a small recorder from my pocket and turned it on. “You’re not under arrest here, but if you want to confess to something, we’re willing to listen.” Given what little we had against this man, I was silently praying all this meant what it seemed to.

“I did it for my son,” he admitted after a pause.

“We heard about that,” I said. “How’s he doing?”

“Not well. He’s alive, but too damaged to appreciate it. It’s one of the great ironies of my life that after decades of fighting for a cleaner, healthier environment, I’ve fathered a doomed and crippled son.”

“He still might make it,” Sammie commented. “Especially nowadays.”

He looked at her with scorn. “You sound like his mother. You people are fools. You don’t get the joke.”

I decided to return to something more tangible. “What did you do on the mountain, Norman?”

“I rigged the chairlift—almost killed that woman and her child. Christ, what a piece of work that would’ve been.”

I wondered how long he’d been up here, herding his thoughts into ever tightening circles, perhaps hoping that eventually he’d turn into himself entirely and drift out among the treetops like a ghostly black hole.

“What else?” I asked.

“I blew the water main to flood the ski slope.”

“And the pumphouse fire?”

He’d been staring at his hands resting in his lap, but now looked up at me quizzically, “No. I don’t know who did that. After the water main, I came here. I couldn’t handle the guilt.”

“What about putting the dye into the storage pond?” Sammie asked.

He let out a small, mirthless laugh. “That was classic—environmental guerrilla tactics, one-oh-one, just like nailing that shed door shut and chaining the snowmobiles together.” He then shook his head. “No, I left that stuff to the firebrands. I had more serious work to do. Private work. Feats of redemption.” He returned to studying his hands.

I crouched down before him to better look into his eyes. “Norman, you were making money doing these things, right? To pay for your son’s treatments.”

“To do that; to buy back a lost love; to betray the beliefs of a lifetime. I can’t believe I almost killed another human being.”

His tone was that of a man in a near suicidal depression. I was glad we’d located him when we did.

“When you blew the water main, the power went out, too—a two-man job. Who paid you? Was he also the other man?”

Toussaint finally locked onto my gaze and shook his head. “Oh, no. You can have me. You can’t have him.”

“Norman. The bottom line is you didn’t kill anyone, and you do have a wife and child. Things are tough, but they can get better. What you’re doing now will ruin everything. We’ll bust you, take your life apart, seize your assets, interrupt the cash flow to your son’s treatment. You can prevent that. Give us the name of the man paying you off. That’ll make you a witness for the prosecution, cut you some slack, buy your family time to heal, and take the son of a bitch who’s exploited your tragedy off the street.”