The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [20]
Chapter 5
Joe Gunther left Brattleboro with Sammie Martens by his side around midmorning, heading west on Route 9 over the southern tail of the Green Mountains, toward Bennington. By map it didn’t come to much, maybe forty miles, but it did bridge the state from border to border and included some of Vermont’s least heralded yet most tumultuous scenery, including a cluster of eleven wind turbines stabbed onto the top of Searsburg Mountain like a sampling of supersize whirligigs.
“This is near where your undetermined turned up, isn’t it?” Sam asked, reflecting on a passing road sign near Wilmington, the journey’s midpoint.
“Five miles down that road,” he agreed.
Route 9’s geography had long been of interest to Joe. It marked the upper east-west edge of a roughly ten-mile-wide corridor whose lower line of demarcation was the border with Massachusetts. Just north of them, deep in the Greens, were the ski resorts of Haystack and Mount Snow, and a string of tourist-centric towns sporting an often frail veneer of seductive, economy-impervious Vermont quaintness.
To the south, however, throughout that far less traveled swath where Michelle Fisher had lived, the area had a more curious and telling identity. Mountainous, weather whipped, thickly forested, and crisscrossed with twisting paths, trails, and roads—many unmarked—this dramatic and secluded section of the state kept aloof from its neighbors. Thinly populated and not easy to access, it was a hunter’s heaven, a Realtor’s dread, and a cop’s nightmare. Emergency responses to the region took forever, to the point where routine law enforcement fell largely to a few marginally trained, locally elected constables.
Sam was evidently thinking along similar lines as they skirted the region’s boundary. “God, I’m glad we didn’t have to cover all this when we worked for the PD. I never envied the troopers this territory.”
It was a salient point. She, Willy, and Joe had all once worked for the Brattleboro police, and half their turf had extended in this direction and had involved some remote stretches, although thankfully not quite this far.
The region resembled Vermont’s famously quirky and isolationist Northeast Kingdom, in the corner where Canada meets New Hampshire. Unlike that area, however, it had no title or identity, no picturesque, flinty reputation. Aside from the Harriman Reservoir, attractive to fishermen and boaters, for the most part it remained a large and unknown place to contemplate from a moving car.
And therein was the telling symbolism that had triggered Gunther’s musings to begin with. Given their target destination, it was less this particular countryside that he was considering, and more how it served as a no-man’s-land between the rest of the state and that much overlooked town.
“You go to Bennington much?” he asked her, almost as a test.
She shook her head. “Never have much reason to. I don’t know anyone who does,” she added after a moment’s reflection.
He smiled and nodded as if in confirmation. “Right.”
Bennington was in Vermont’s southwest pocket, shoved up against New York and Massachusetts, and while it did connect to its mother state via the Route 7 umbilicus heading north to Manchester and Rutland and finally Burlington far away—as well as Route 9 going east—it was, and always had been, isolated by the very Green Mountains that Joe was presently enjoying. It had forever been Bennington’s burden to be considered, geographically and thus psychologically, more a part of its neighbors than of Vermont.
From the air, this became even clearer. Bennington’s sprawl didn’t loom into view until the last of the Greens gave way to the relatively flat farmlands of New York beyond. Only the token Mount Anthony in the town’s southwest quadrant presented one last upheaval, and it remained largely undeveloped. By contrast, Brattleboro was so scattered across hilly ground that it could barely lay claim to a single flat acre.