FRIDAY AFTERNOON
“How did your husband die, Kim?”
When Freddie Crenshaw knocks on my door after dropping off my daughter, this is the last thing I expect to hear out of his mouth. “Is that important to Erika’s case?”
“Could be. Do you mind?” He waves his briefcase inside, where Tammy and I are finishing up a late lunch.
The lawyer looks as if he’s been in a windstorm, brown curly hair mussed and tie half undone. His disheveled appearance and grumpy demeanor might be part and parcel of the job of being an overworked attorney, but I have a sinking feeling it didn’t go well at the barracks. If it had, surely Erika would have stopped by for an update instead of zipping off in the Tesla, freshly searched by the Vermont State Police.
Tammy and I watched the search from the bedroom window as the police officers carried my daughter’s personal belongings to their cruisers—a banker’s box of stuff, a blanket, several items of clothing in a plastic ziplock bag and a dark green coat similar to the Barbour my husband, Craig, wore the day he died.
The scene boiled me with maternal outrage. A ziplock bag of Erika’s soiled underthings—was that really necessary? Did they really have to go through our trash? I was coming around to Erika’s point of view that a certain segment in town has it out for her. Never gave that much credence, until this charade.
She’s not a drug dealer, for heaven’s sake. This isn’t a meth house. What judge in their right mind granted the cops’ request to search the studio apartment of a twenty-seven-year-old executive assistant with no criminal record? An imbecile, that’s who. Or maybe someone on the take.
Supposedly, the police would have had to produce concrete proof that a crime had been committed in order to get a warrant but, like Tammy said, crooked cops have sneaky ways of cooking up evidence. When this circus is over, I plan to file a howler of a lawsuit against the VSP. How dare they allow a trooper with a vendetta to abuse his power like this.
In light of the circumstances, I wanted to ask Freddie about whether or not to turn over the PJs I’ve returned to the basement freezer. Instead, he’s asking me about a tragic event nearly a quarter-century old.
“Have a seat,” Tammy says to the lawyer, carrying a plate with the remains of my sandwich to the sink. “I’ll make some coffee and clean up, Kim. That is, unless you’d like some privacy.”
“Are you kidding? Everyone the greater Snowden area knows this story. I’m surprised you don’t, Freddie.”
Freddie helps himself to a potato chip spilling out of the open bag. “I’ve heard bits and pieces. I’d like to hear it from you, if you don’t mind.”
I retell the story that’s become Snowden legend. How it was my twenty-sixth birthday, March 15, the Ides of March, and I was making myself a cake. Banana with chocolate ganache. My mother, the town clerk at the time, was in Florida recovering from a town meeting with her sister, Aunt Julie, who’d recently retired there. My father had died the year before from a sudden heart attack and Julie was pulling out all the stops to convince Mom to live with her.
I was alone with Erika, who was also alone. She’d turned four in December and was already reading to her dolls between frequent scolds and remonstrations. We used to joke that unless she had a younger brother or sister to boss around, she was going to boss us around. As if she wasn’t doing that already. That pixie with her bouncy brown pigtails had Craig wrapped around her little finger.
March fifteenth was also the height of sugaring season. The sap was flowing that year and Craig and his two friends from high school had built a sugar shack amid a stand of maples—a “sugar bush”—in the back land. Boiling was nonstop and required constant supervision, lest the syrup burn. Craig and his buddies had to take turns stoking the wood fire and stirring the evaporating sap, carefully adding more until it reached the “boiling off” stage. A steady supply of hop-based beverages helped fuel their stamina.
Some mornings, I would step outside and inhale the smell of maple wafting from the sugar shack’s chimney and feel a craving for waffles swimming in melted butter and warm syrup. Craig would bring home a quart and reduce it to the hardball stage on the stove, pouring a spoonful or two over snow Erika gathered into her plastic bowl.
“Sugar on snow. As yummy as you are, chipmunk,” he’d say, pinching her chubby cheeks.
“It’s all gone.” Erika would pout at her empty bowl, tears brimming in her big eyes.
And Craig, who couldn’t resist our daughter’s charms, often sneaked her another helping behind my back. Now that I think of it, maybe that’s how she learned to sweet-talk men.
He’d forgotten my birthday, though. He always did. Wedding anniversaries, too. No big whoop. We all have our strengths and mine was not expecting others to make me happy. So I baked myself a birthday cake, letting Erika lick the spoon as a treat. A light snow was falling and it was cozy in the post-and-beam house. The woodstove on the brick hearth glowed brightly and Erika’s new kitten, Sammy, was playing with a ball of scrap yarn on our wide-planked wooden kitchen floor.
I reminded myself how fortunate I was to have a husband with a solid job at the post office, a healthy daughter, a helpful mother, and free housing on forty acres in Vermont. True, I hadn’t lived out my childhood dream of becoming a working girl in a bustling city, but I was better off than most.
And then the dogs barked.
I have never heard dogs make hair-raising sounds quite like that before or since. To this day, I have no idea whose dogs they were or if they even existed. All I remember is how, from a distance, there came a howling that flayed my soul. The kitten leaped and scampered down the hall, its fur on end. I dropped the knife I’d been using to spread the frosting. Erika instinctively burst into tears.
The back door flew open. Tim, Craig’s best friend, rushed in shouting, “Call 911! There’s been an accident!” I turned to see Wilson, the other member of the threesome, filling up the door with his bulk. The only one not calling for help was my husband.
I put Erika in our bedroom, turned on the TV full volume, and shrugged on my coat and slipped into my farm boots, following the boys and the dogs down the path to the sugar bush. My mind was a blank. My peripheral vision was gone as I focused, step by step, on my boots crunching through the wet snow. I tugged my coat tighter. I blinked up at the blue sky peeking through the clouds.
I tried not to scream.
Craig was in the new Barbour, my Christmas gift, spread eagle on the snow, the top of his head—or what was left of it—bathed in a halo of red. Off to the side was the tree limb that had crushed his skull. A widow-maker, they call it. Checking the buckets of sap had disturbed the equilibrium of the forest, causing the massive log to dislodge from where it’d been hanging by a thread to clobber my husband.
I got as close to him as I could stomach, peering down at his ashen face, searching for signs of life, praying there were none. If he lived, he’d be a vegetable, and my husband was a strong, self-sufficient man for whom 24/7 care in a nursing home would be excruciating.
The EMTs came with stretchers and oxygen and crackling radios. We gave them wide berth. Tim and Wilson made themselves useful by clearing brush so they could haul Craig to the ambulance. He was already dead by the time they closed the doors.
“The police did just a cursory investigation, since neither Tim nor Wilson was within sight of Craig when the limb fell,” I tell Freddie, who’s devoured all the potato chips. “There was scuttlebutt in town that the accident hadn’t been random, but the rumors didn’t go anywhere. Craig wasn’t in debt to anyone. He had no enemies. You know how small towns are; everyone’s got a theory.”
“And gossips,” Freddie says with a shake of his head. “Some things never change.”
“I’m sorry, Kim,” Tammy says from the kitchen sink, a hand across her fuchsia velour bosom. “That breaks my heart. It really does.”
Freddie isn’t exactly tearing up, which tells me that the “bits and pieces” he’s heard are the nasty rumors. “I assume Erika knows all this,” he says.
“Yes.” I push my cup to Tammy, who’s pouring coffee. “Why?”
“In speaking to the troopers, I get the impression they’re profiling Erika as a femme fatale, if you will, who’s so obsessed with men, she’s willing to commit foul play.”
“Because she allegedly drove her car into a girl Jake Waskow liked better than her back in high school?” Disgusting. “Honestly, after all my hard work for this community, you’d think people would treat us more decently. I’m half tempted to pack up and move tomorrow.”
“You can come live with me in Florida,” Tammy pipes up.
“I hear you, Kim, and I concur,” Freddie says. “However, if I may play devil’s advocate, let’s say Erika does suffer from some sort of obsessive disorder.” He lifts a hand to block me from objecting. “If she’s been formally diagnosed with a mental illness, that could be helpful in our defense.”
“Defense?” I’m gobsmacked. This ridiculous thread needs to be snipped at the source before Erika finds herself entangled in a web of lies. “For what? She’s done nothing wrong.”
“Manslaughter,” Freddie says flatly. “That’s the most likely charge the state will file against her in the death of Colton Whitcomb, who was killed by a fallen tree limb, much like your husband.”
That’s it. Sliding out of my seat, I get close enough to Freddie to count the hairs over the bridge of his nose. “You tell those lazy-ass cops to leave Erika alone. They need to roll up their sleeves and put their shoulders to the wheel instead of picking on an innocent woman with a big heart who might be a little lonely, capisce?”
“Maybe that way, they’ll find my daughter, too,” Tammy adds, arms folded. “Instead of throwing shit on the wall to see what sticks.”