THURSDAY NIGHT
The Burlington International Airport is awfully busy for a weekday evening in my recent, albeit limited, experience. It’s been several years since I’ve had an occasion to travel or greet someone coming off a flight, and I’m as timid as a child making my way to the arrivals gate. Another downside of the pandemic, I suppose: becoming a hermit.
“Her flight’s on time,” Doreen says, reading the digital boards reporting arrivals and departures. “Another sign of the looming apocalypse.” It speaks volumes that my assistant’s willing to drive an hour after work to greet a stranger. Usually, she’s out the door by three on the dot.
Doreen jabs me in the ribs. “Hey, I bet that’s her.”
A tiny figure topped by a mass of bright blond hair and engulfed in a puffy sunshine-yellow parka bobs toward us on stiletto heels dragging a Barbie-pink plastic case.
“Gotta be her. Florida colors.” Doreen waves her arm like a windshield wiper. “Yo, Tammy!”
She instantly brightens and returns a friendly wave. “Hey! Y’all must be Doreen and Kim.” Coming to a halt, she points a long red nail at Doreen and says, “Physically fit. Triple earrings. Tells it like it is. Doreen.” To me, she says, “Sensible shoes. Sensible haircut. Can-do gal. Kim, the clerk. Mother of my daughter’s assistant.”
Doreen and I are speechless. Who is this tiny witch?
As if we were on the fence about that, she closes her eyes and says, “My baby’s nearby and she’s alive. I can feel her.” Lifting her blue lids, she lets out a big sigh and smiles. “That was half the reason I wanted to be here, to get the vibe. Okay, I’m ready to find her now.”
* * *
“This is a highway?” Tammy peers out the windshield at the black ribbon of asphalt. It is nine thirty and we are the only cars on Vermont Route 7.
“It is and it’s a dangerous one,” Doreen says from the back seat. “Two lanes are the pits. If you’re not swerving for a dumb deer or getting clocked by a moose, some idiot’s drunk or checking his cell and crossing the center line smack into you. Got too many morons in this state crossing the center line and killing people.”
Thanks for your tact, I mentally message her, gripping the wheel extra tight. Concrete pilings can be more sensitive than Doreen.
“I ain’t never seen a moose,” Tammy says, her face pressed to the window. “Deer we got in Florida. Monitor lizards the size of palm trees lying across the road. Reptile speed bumps, I call ’em. No moose.”
“October’s their mating season. Their brains are so doped on hormones they’ll walk right into your car and you’ll never see them ’cause they’re big and black. Eyes don’t reflect off the headlights and wham! Next thing you know, you’re waking up in the ICU.” Doreen pauses to revise her doom-and-gloom report. “If you’re lucky.”
“Mercy!” exclaims Tammy, flinching from the door as if a moose were on the other side, ready to charge.
“I gather you haven’t been up this far north?” I ask, changing the subject.
“No ma’am. The farthest I’ve been is Tallahassee for Haylee’s graduation from Florida State. I’ve been itching to visit, but she said there’s so much going on with the rehab she wouldn’t be able to pay me much attention. Then, when she told me she was getting married, I looked into flights. I’m her mama; it’s a given I’d be at her wedding, right? But she didn’t want me around for that, either, ’cause of that mean owner she was so worried about showing up and making a scene at the ceremony.” Tammy goes back to looking out her window. “Or so she claimed. Deep down I know Haylee’s never forgiven me for being a shitty mom, even after all these years.”
Doreen and I keep quiet because how do you respond to that kind of comment? We met the woman in person only twenty minutes ago.
“Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t abusive or anything. I didn’t cuss or use the paddle,” Tammy clarifies, recrossing her legs. “I just wasn’t around, what with working during the day and stopping by the bar in the evenings where I solicited most of my clients. Not exactly a wholesome lifestyle for a child.”
Doreen slaps one of her mitts on Tammy’s shoulder. “Don’t be ashamed. My great-grandmother raised five kids as a widow during the Great Depression up north of Boothbay Harbor in a piss-poor town called Sumsquat. She’d leave her children for weeks on end while she went down to Portsmouth Naval Shipyard to entertain, so to speak, the sailors on shore leave. When you’re a single mom, you do what you gotta do to put bread on the table, you know what I mean?”
“Well, uhm, no. Not exactly.” Tammy slides me a puzzled side-eye. I smile like a simpleton and keep my focus on the dark road, pretending as if my assistant did not just imply she was a prostitute. “I ran my own accounting firm, you see. Started it from the ground up. Beauregard and Associates. Pretty successful, if I do say so myself. Those clients I was picking up needed their books balanced or their taxes prepared.”
“Then when were you homeless?” Doreen asks, confused.
“Homeless?” Tammy coughs a laugh. “We were never homeless. For the past twenty years, I’ve owned a three-bedroom house on the Homosassa River, private dock and all. What’re y’all talking about?”
“I think what Doreen’s referring to are your daughter’s blog posts where she mentions, for example, that she never thought she’d be so fortunate to live in a house this beautiful growing up as a homeless teen,” I explain, rescuing the wide-mouthed frog in the back seat.
“Oh, that? The only time Haylee was homeless was when she ran off when she was sixteen. She broke curfew and she was none too pleased when I laid down the law, grounding her for a week. She was gone for one, two, maybe three . . .”
“Months?” Doreen offers.
“Nights,” Tammy answers. “Lemme tell ya, living off microwaved hot dogs at the Circle K gets real old, real fast. Say, are we pretty close to the place where the body was found? I heard it was on a remote road like this.”
I’ve just turned off the state highway onto the main drag that leads into Snowden. “Every road from here on out is remote. I believe the body was found in the Green Mountain National Forest, about forty minutes south of here, but I have no idea exactly where.”
And I’m not about to start searching at this hour. All I want to do is drop off Doreen at town hall, where her car is parked, and Tammy at the Snowden Inn, go home, take off my bra, and grab a bowl of cereal. It’s been a long day with a lot of stress and driving. I’m ready to call it quits.
“Mad Tom Notch Road mile marker sixty-six, according to the state police press release.” The light from Doreen’s phone bounces off my rearview mirror as she hovers in the back seat Googling. I’m surprised she can get reception. Surprised and bummed, since this means I won’t be in my jammies, feet up, anytime soon. “You can knock off twenty minutes, Kim, if you cut through Landgrove.”
“If you don’t mind going out of your way, I know it’s a bother, but if this is where they killed my son-in-law, then my baby must be . . .” She can’t go on. She’s too upset.
“Don’t think that way, Tammy,” Doreen urges. “Be positive. We don’t even know for sure it’s Robert.”
Tammy sniffs and dabs at her nose with a tissue. “Oh, you know it is. That’s near where Erika’s car was found, right? The car Robert and Haylee were driving. No one’s been able to find them since and . . .” Her shoulders heave in a quiet sob as I turn off the main road to Snowden and take a right toward Landgrove and the Mad Tom Notch Road.
What else am I supposed to do?
“How did Haylee and Robert meet?” Doreen asks. “A Floridian like her and a Yankee like him. That’s gotta be a cute story.”
It sounds like she’s being nice, trying to distract Tammy from her daughter’s disappearance, but knowing Doreen, she’s up to something.
“Whacked is what it was,” Tammy says, clearing her throat. “Haylee had been bouncing around trying to make a career out of her communications degree from FSU, not having much luck. Came home broke and discouraged. Ended up subletting my girlfriend’s apartment and waiting bar on the strip to pay the bills and, on my recommendation, studying to get her real estate license. I had a couple of clients who were Realtors and they were doing quite well, financially.”
There are no streetlights after we leave Landgrove, which is easy to miss if you blink. Which I don’t dare attempt, not with animals poised to leap into my headlights. I grip the wheel and sit forward, forcing my aging eyes to be alert in the darkness. I can barely make out the edge of the road as we inch up the mountain.
“Then she took an online course on vlogging, or whatever you call it. Making videos. Next we knew, she had seventy thousand followers on Instagram and even more on TikTok following her vlogs about properties for sale in the greater Citrus County area. Very popular with snowbirds up north looking to retire.”
“You want to make a left at the intersection with Mad Tom,” Doreen interrupts. “Should be one point four miles down the road. Be careful. It’s definitely dropped a few degrees. Could get slippery.”
I turn left and shiver against a chill. During the day, the view is spectacular, especially during foliage season with the sweeping mountain and valley swales brimming with color. In the dark, it’s downright scary because at any moment my wheels might slip off the berm and we could go tumbling, crashing down the hill.
Tammy prattles on, oblivious. “Last fall, right around this time of year, she reached out to Robert.”
At the mention of this timeline, Doreen drives her finger into the back my neck for me to pay attention.
“She emailed him a suggestion that he incorporate video into his Robber Barron blogs about real estate. He blew her off—or so she thought—until, out of the blue, he called her around Christmas and asked if she wanted to go to Vermont to shoot a video of this house he got for a steal.”
“Had she ever been there before?” Doreen asks. “I mean here, in Vermont.”
Tammy turns slightly in her seat, thinking. “I don’t believe so. We weren’t living together then, so I guess I may not have been aware of her comings and goings. Uhm, no. I remember her distinctly asking me what to wear when she came here in December because she’d never been this far above the Mason-Dixon Line before. Why?”
“Just curious,” Doreen says, giving my neck another poke.
To me Tammy’s response doesn’t prove squat. Holly could have sneaked up to Vermont weeks before without her mother’s knowledge. Or, possibly, it was a mere coincidence that the person who came to research our records last fall had the same name. Surely there had to be many, many Haylees in this world.
“Slow down,” Doreen commands. “Pull over. This is the spot.”
I park in a turnoff and kill the engine. The silence is deafening, broken only by the whsssh of wind blowing through the pine trees. The woods loom, tall and mysterious, engulfing us.
“Oh, my.” Tammy rapidly pats her chest. “It’s so deserted. Not a soul for miles.”
“That’s why people like it,” Doreen says, opening the rear door and getting out. “Oh, smell that!” she exclaims, stretching. “This is why people come to the woods.”
We get out and breathe the clean mountain air. Tammy clutches her coat. “It’s freezing.”
Suddenly, we’re blinded by a beam of light so bright we have to shield our eyes. I grab Tammy’s arm as footsteps crunch across the gravel toward us. Doreen, I don’t have to worry about. She’s got one hand on her pistol.
“You ladies in need of assistance?”
His voice is gruff, official. I don’t have to see a badge to know it’s a cop keeping watch on a crime scene, perhaps to protect its integrity. Perhaps to see if the murderer will return.
“Looking for my daughter,” pipes up Tammy, lowering her hand and extending it for a shake. “Tammy Beauregard. I’m the mother of Haylee Beauregard. Or, as y’all call her up here, Holly. Holly Barron now.”
“ID?” asks the cop.
As Tammy fumbles through her purse for her wallet, I make a mental note of his brass nameplate. V. Drury. Vermont State Police. Does not ring a bell.
“Here,” she says, handing him her license. “Please, if you have any information on the body they found, I’m worried sick it’s my son-in-law, Robert Barron. I flew all the way up from Florida ’cause I can’t take the not knowing. My daughter’s been missing since Sunday.”
He returns her license. “Thank you. I’m sorry I can’t help you, ma’am. If you have any questions, I suggest you contact the state police barracks in Westminster tomorrow. Meanwhile, we’re trying to keep this area clear. So, if you—”
“Would move along?” I finish for him. “Gladly. Come on, Tammy.” I tug her jacket, but she doesn’t budge.
“This is my daughter, officer,” she says firmly. “Be a human being and ease a mother’s heart. Tell me what you know.”
He lowers the flashlight. “What I know is that I’m not authorized to answer any questions.” In a kinder tone, he adds, “And everything’s better in the morning, ma’am. Trust me. Now, drive safe and be careful. It’s a jungle out there.”