Fiction from The Literary Review
It is April 2nd. In the past three months, the Vermont sky has gone through every shade of gray known to man. The streets-sunny and calm and pristine in all the postcards-have been awash in snow and slush and ice, chameleons metamorphosing every hour to hide themselves from Vermont's hideous temper. Today it is raining, a firm spray polishing the mounds of soot-speckled snow. I slip and slide the quarter mile to work and in the raw cold, under the weight of rainclouds fat and leaky as unmilked cows, I feel as if I have been buried, as if an avalanche swept over me long ago and I am waiting for the thaw, waiting to be uncovered. I am not unhappy in this state. Nor am I happy. The question is irrelevant. I am simply frozen. But sometimes I wish for the elemental things: to breathe, to move, to be warm again. And after three months here, I have started to doubt whether this will ever happen.
I came to Littleton at the invitation of Arlon Winter, who is married to my cousin on my mother's side, Rebecca Brooks. He has his own law practice in Littleton and needed a paralegal, and as I had made my way through a year and a half of law school, he thought I might be able to fill the bill. I am not sure, even now, whether the offer was made out of pity or genuine need. But I was unemployed, living with my sister, Laura, in her apartment in Boston. I had just been released six months earlier from the Sunrise psychiatric hospital in Boston and did not know what to do with myself. Sarah could not support us both and she was tired of having me underfoot. So, after a lot of prodding and some threats, I took Arlon up on his offer.
I arrived in Littleton on a dog-cold January day, the air frozen into a tight crystal lattice that made it hard to breathe. Arlon was waiting in his blue Volvo at the snow-encrusted parking lot that doubles as the beverage redemption center and bus depot. When he stepped out, dressed in his off-hours uniform of jeans, snow-worn boots and a black fleece pull-over, he looked taller, older, more imposing than I had remembered him. He clapped me on the back, gave my hand a quick crush, his rugged, acne-scarred face stretched into an impossibly wide smile. On the way to his house, he shotgunned questions at me. I realized then that I did not know this man and he did not know me. We had met less than three times, once at their wedding, twice more when he and Rebecca had made pilgrimages to Boston several years ago. I did not understand why he had invited me to work with him. It seemed a risky thing to do, especially given my recent history. But he seemed-and still seems-oblivious to the fact that I am not the most well-balanced person on the planet. I am simply an unknown quantity to him, and unlike me, he enjoys the unknown.
Arlon's office is on South Pleasant Street, less than a quarter mile east of the center of Littleton. The house was built sometime in the 1880s, a tiny Queen Anne with green shutters and a small balustered porch in front. The place is immaculate now, but Arlon and Rebecca put years into restoring it. The wiring and half the plumbing had to be replaced. The floorboards clapped and rattled like bones. "It was like trying to rebuild your hundred-year old grandmother," Arlon once said to me. "You wonder what held her together in the first place."
I arrive to work a half-hour late, as usual. Bridget Collins, our office manager, receptionist and bookkeeper, is making coffee, which alerts me to the fact that Arlon must be with an especially important client, because Bridget never makes coffee and Arlon is never foolish enough to ask her.
Bridget motions me quickly into the tiny kitchen, and I assume she is going to give me another installment in her never ending tales of the life of a Vermont adventuress. At the age of twenty, she is perhaps the wildest woman I have ever met. She is a member of the Green Mountain Riders, a motorcycle club whose past three leaders have all gone to jail on various charges of assault and theft. She once, on a dare, rode a rubber raft over Littleton Falls, breaking an arm and her nose in the process. She is not dumb. She graduated from school a year early, with straight A's. Her family, who emigrated from Dublin when Bridget was six, planned for her to apply to Boston College, or Holy Cross. But instead she ran away with her boyfriend to Alaska and worked in a cannery for a year. Then she met a musician and traveled with him to Seattle. He was more interested in having a good time, however, scraping up change for booze and coke, than in making any real music. So she left him and hitchhiked back to Vermont, getting arrested twice along the way, once for vagrancy and another time for knifing a salesman who thought a stroll through Bridget's clothes was part of the bargain.
"Fucking cops. They could have cared less that the guy was trying to rape me," she told me. "I called my mom and dad and they called Arlon. If it wasn't for him, I'd be in the South Dakota state prison right now."
Bridget's current goal is to save up as much money as possible and go to school next year. But she always makes it a point to explain that she is not doing it for her parents, or propriety, or because she has been tamed in any way, shape or form.
"I've just had enough of people treating me like shite," she says. "I'm going to help myself now, maybe even become a lawyer so I can go back to North Dakota and sue the ballocks off those people."
Today, Bridget is wearing a short black knitted dress with a white T-shirt underneath and orange cotton tights. The auburn stubble on her head has grown out somewhat, but not so much that you cannot see the dragon tattooed on the left side of her scalp and the rose tattooed on the right side. Her dark, amber eyes flash with excitement and she is nearly dancing up and down on the carpet in her stockinged feet.
"You'll never guess who's here!" she says, grabbing my arm and nearly spilling the pot of coffee on me.
I am not in the mood to guess anything. It is a game that has always felt sadistic to me, like asking a Parisian in 1793 to kneel down and stick his head through a hole. "O.J. Simpson?" I say.
"Better," Bridget says. "Mrs. Vaughn!"
"Daniel Vaughn's mother?"
Bridget nods, obviously pleased to have someone with whom she can finally share her news. The twenty minutes or so she had to wait must have been the most difficult in her life.
Up until two days ago, Daniel Patrick Vaughn was a student at Littleton College. Sunday morning, a friend found him hanged in his room. There was no note, no indication of a struggle. Friends and school officials, including the school psychiatrist, confirmed that he had appeared very depressed and agitated the last few days. And most of the people who knew him, or knew of him, say that they are not surprised that he killed himself, though no one will go on record to say why.
The suicide has been in all the papers, even The Boston Globe and The New York Times. The administration, of course, is shocked and dismayed. Littleton has suffered through its share of depressed and troubled students, but it has not had a suicide in more than eighty years. Classes have been canceled for the week. A memorial service is scheduled for Thursday night. School counselors have been scurrying about trying to contain the damage, offering support groups and extended office hours, knowing that suicide is like an earthquake, it cracks foundations and generates aftershocks; it can excite the despair in others.
Bridget and I discuss what business might have brought Mrs. Vaughn here. She assumes a lawsuit, but I am skeptical. People as wealthy as the Vaughns usually have their own family attorneys. They would not come to an unknown small-town lawyer.
"Anyway, it's become a big circus already," Bridget says. "Did you watch the news last night?" I saw a few reports, but evidently my television does not receive quite as many channels as Bridget's does. "Nothing but students crying and hugging each other. I think half of them must be crying for themselves, because he certainly didn't have that many friends. At least, not according to my mom."
Bridget's mother works in the dining halls, serving institutional slop that she says is ten times better than anything she had in Dublin when she was growing up. I wonder how she would know about Daniel's friends. But before I can ask, Arlon emerges from his office.
"Mark, can you come in?" he asks. "And bring the coffee."
I fill two mugs, then step into Arlon's office. Mrs. Vaughn is seated in one of the two Queen Anne chairs orbiting Arlon's desk. Arlon is an avid furniture collector. He loves woodworking and cabinetry and has a complete shop in his basement at home, but he is, as Rebecca says, the Walter Mitty of furniture making: all dreams and thumbs. At some point, he discovered a cabinetmaker in the old Powderhouse building (now converted into an artists collective), and decided that if he could not make fine furniture himself, the next best thing would be to buy it from someone who could. So Arlon's office, which is relatively small and unimpressive in most respects, has become a showcase for some of the finest handmade furniture anyone in Littleton has ever seen. In addition to the chairs, he has a massive Federal-style desk, an inlaid drop-leaf Pembroke table, and a shaker rocking chair in which he likes to read. These are contrasted, along the left wall, by a mammoth and slightly irregular mahogany bookcase that he made himself and which, despite its crudeness, he always insists on showing off to friends and clients.
Mrs. Vaughn rises to greet me. She is tall, well over six-feet, with thin, spidery legs and hips slightly too wide for her shoulders. Her hair, wiry, threaded with grey, forms a stylish halo around her head. She grasps my hand in a half handshake, her fingers dry, delicate, a mass of South American silver bracelets jangling over her boney wrists. She is not beautiful, not in the modern sense. Her nose is too masculine, her neck too long and thin. But she has poise and a slightly aristocratic air, so that you feel you are in the presence of a woman who can never be considered dull or ugly, even if she does not conform to the current standards of beauty.
Arlon introduces us and Mrs. Vaughn smiles, a pleasant smile, though it is clear she is tired and has been crying a great deal. I wonder how she can do this, how she can go about the mundane and practical business of making funeral arrangements, talking to school officials, getting legal help. When my mother died, my father made all the arrangements. My sister took care of me. I did nothing but follow them around, watching everything from behind a cold gray curtain of despair and confusion. I did not understand what they were doing, did not understand why we needed to do anything. Mom was gone. What else mattered?
"You've heard about Mrs. Vaughn's son?" Arlon says as we all sit down.
I nod, offer some pathetic condolences to Mrs. Vaughn, who somehow, mysteriously, seems grateful for them.
"Mrs. Vaughn would like us to do a little investigating into the circumstances of Daniel's death," Arlon continues. "She isn't completely convinced that Daniel killed himself."
"I'm completely convinced that he did not kill himself," Mrs. Vaughn interjects, suddenly becoming quite stern. "I thought I made that clear."
"I'm sorry," Arlon replies. "I didn't mean to imply anything. It's just that for the purposes of an investigation, especially where there is no evidence of murder, it would probably be better to keep an open mind."
Mrs. Vaughn appears less than pleased with that response. "An open mind would be refreshing. At the moment, the only open one seems to be mine. The police believe it was suicide; the school thinks it was suicide; my ex-husband thinks it was suicide. And everyone is very eager to close the book as quickly and cleanly as possible."
I have clearly walked into the middle of a conversation, but I don't want to ask any questions. Arlon hasn't indicated to me whether he wants me to be a witness or a fellow interviewer, and though I am curious as to what they have already discussed, I prefer the role of observer to that of journalist or detective.
"So you think the school's claims that he was depressed are wrong?" Arlon says.
Mrs. Vaughn sniffs, pulls a Kleenex from the box on Arlon's desk. "No. Daniel had a lot of problems with depression. He had a lot of things to be depressed about. And I know that he had been going through a rough time lately."
"Did he talk to you about it?"
"Not very much. But he left a message on my machine Sunday afternoon. He said he needed to come home, needed to get away from the college. He was crying . . ."
"Could he have been . . . ?"
"He was not depressed!" Mrs. Vaughn snaps. "He was afraid-of someone or something, I don't know, but he was definitely afraid. I know my own son, I know his voice."
Arlon apologizes.
"I know how it looks," Mrs. Vaughn says. "But I also know that in all his years of depression and therapy, even when he talked about suicide, he never actually tried it. He never once cut himself, or tried to hang himself, or did anything. He just talked about it."
"Is it possible he tried it but never told anybody?" Arlon asks.
"No," Mrs. Vaughn says. "He told me everything. And, in any case, he was feeling better. He had really come into his own the last year or so. I don't see why he would suddenly end it all like that."
I can think of a million reasons. But I am more curious as to why Mrs. Vaughn has come to Arlon for this investigation. He is a lawyer, not a private investigator. And Mrs. Vaughn, from what little I have heard in the news, has more than enough money to hire the best private eye in New England.
"Well, we're willing to help you, Mrs. Vaughn," Arlon says, much to my surprise. This does not seem like the kind of case he would want to get involved in. But Arlon is still a mystery to me, even after three months. "We'll need some more information about your son, though. Also, we'll need you to draw up some sort of letter of reference, just stating that you have authorized us for this investigation and we are to be allowed access to Daniel's records, etc. Legally, it won't mean much, but it could keep a few doors from slamming in our faces. Littleton is what you might call a very private college."
"I've told them of my intentions. President King has promised to cooperate."
"They still won't like it."
"Probably not. But at the moment they stand to lose a three-million dollar endowment from me. I think they would like that even less."
Arlon smiles. "I'd say King's probably a little depressed himself right now."
Mrs. Vaughn rises to leave. She has an appointment with the school officials at noon, but says she will return in the afternoon to give us whatever details of Daniel's life we need and sign the letter of reference.
When she is gone, Arlon and I recline in his office, Arlon sipping coffee from his baseball-shaped mug. He is an ardent though inevitably disappointed Red Sox fan.
"So why did she come to you?" I ask him finally.
He laughs. "You mean besides the fact that I'm the best lawyer in Vermont? The Van Halens recommended me."
"The Van Halens?"
"Mr. and Mrs. Charles Van Halen. Their son George was caught in a drug sting at the college a few years back. He picked up a little package of coffee beans containing a quarter-kilo of cocaine and the Littleton police nabbed him. It was in all the papers. His father, Charles Van Halen, was running for the Massachusetts Senate at the time. It nearly killed his campaign."
"What happened?"
"Well, Mr. and Mrs. Van Halen brought in some big guns from Hale and Dorr in Boston, but they couldn't get anywhere with the school officials or the police. The school said it was out of their hands and the police thought they had made the bust of the century and weren't about to let any high-priced lawyers mess it up. Everyone was keeping a tight lid on the case. So Bob Johnson, who worked at Hale and Dorr, gave me a call.
"I did some asking around and found out a couple of things that eventually cleared George. First, he was a beer-drinker-exclusively. He would get stone-drunk all the time, but no one had ever seen him touch pot or coke or anything else. Secondly, he wasn't too bright. In fact, he probably would have flunked high-school if they'd sent him back. Most of the other brothers in this frat were pretty sharp, though. They didn't really like or respect George, but he had money and was easy-going, so they put up with him."
"So someone in the frat set him up?"
"They all set him up. That package was paid for by the brothers of Lambda Chi Upsilon-minus George-for their exclusive use. They pooled their funds to buy a half-kilo of coke and then they picked George to be the fall guy, just in case things went sour."
"I thought you said George picked up a quarter ki."
"He did. But there were two packages. The other one came from a different address and was shipped to a different name, just in case. So it was still waiting at the post-office. The Littleton police didn't have a clue."
"How did you find all this out?"
"You know Julia Cray?"
"Works at the redemption center?"
"Yeah, well she supplements her income with entertainment services. I defended her on solicitation charges a couple of years ago. I heard that a few of the boys at LCU were regulars with her, so I went and talked to her. She likes to do a little snow herself now and then, unfortunately, and it seems one of the more drunk and desperate LCU brothers, low on cash one night, told her about the shipment and promised her a gram if she would extend his credit, so to speak.
"Anyway, I fed this information to George's lawyers and they cut a deal with the DA. The Littleton police found the second package in the post office and let it sit there. When someone at LCU finally got desperate enough to pick it up, they let him take it back to the frat, then busted everyone in the place. The cops were happy, the college was not unhappy-they had been trying to get rid of LCU for years-and George's family was, well, maybe not happy but certainly relieved. They yanked George out of Littleton, though."
"I still don't understand why Mrs. Vaughn came to you, though," I say. "She could afford the best PIs in the country."
Arlon stands, stretches his arms and back. "She did contact a couple of PIs before coming here."
"And?"
"Seems Mr. Vaughn, her ex-husband, does not want this thing investigated. So he's been spreading some money behind Mrs. Vaughn. Both agencies called her back within twenty-four hours and told her they didn't have the manpower right now to help her."
"Is that legal?"
Arlon shrugs. "What can she do? She's got a dead son on her hands. She doesn't have time to sue PI firms with questionable ethics."
"Why wouldn't her ex-husband want this thing investigated?"
"I don't know. But I imagine we'll find out."
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