MONDAY MORNING
The Snowden town hall dates all the way back to the nineteenth century. A creek runs through its dirt basement and the floorboards are four feet wide, hewn from virgin pines logged before Vermont was almost completely deforested. A black soapstone counter runs the length of my office and the walls are paper thin, meaning there’s no privacy, either for the ghost occasionally moaning in our attic or for Doreen, my brittle assistant, who’s had it up to here with our noisy—and nosy—Listers.
“I’m about to go in there again,” Doreen says, thumbing over her shoulder to the conference room where the Listers, our town’s elected tax appraisers, are holding a contentious hearing. “You should have heard them earlier. Had tell them to keep it down and they got all pissy. Could have used some backup but no one was around . . .”
Ah, yes, the daily dig about my tardiness. Hanging my coat on its peg, I hand her the Barrons’ marriage license for processing and go to my desk. I’ve learned to ignore my assistant’s gripes about my coming in late. What can I say? I’m a night owl. I can’t help it if she’s up at the crack of dawn, in by eight and out by three. That’s her nutty schedule, not mine.
Doreen’s from northern Maine, where she spent her youth hauling lobster traps with her brothers on bitterly cold, rainy, miserable mornings at sea. She and her husband, Elliot, moved to Vermont for the warmer climate, the way normal people retire to Orlando. On her off hours, they trap and hunt and traipse through the vast Green Mountain National Forest foraging for mushrooms, morel and psychedelic.
A toned marathoner with close-cropped red hair and a grin that makes babies cry, Doreen can be unintentionally and intentionally intimidating. She once scared a bear by sprinting at him buck naked. Her lower back tattoo proclaims IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU’RE TOO CLOSE. From our twelve years of working side by side, I’ve reached the conclusion she is half raccoon.
“How’d the wedding go?” she asks more civilly as she shakes the license out of the envelope.
“Fast and furious. Great food. So-so music.” Booting up my computer, I check my phone for any word from Erika. None.
I tried phoning her yesterday concerning the bloodied PJs that are now a frozen, hard ball in my basement freezer, only to discover I’ve been blocked by my own daughter. Nor did she answer my subsequent banging on her front door.
Yet again I ask myself, Was she worth twenty hours of back labor?
“Who’s grieving today?” I ask, scrolling through my work emails. We’re not talking death here, unless it’s the death of a property owner’s bank account. Grieving is the statutory process of disputing the taxable value of a property as determined by a town’s elected board of Listers.
“The dentist,” Doreen whispers.
The dentist needs no introduction, since Snowden has only one. Dr. Emmons lives in a large Victorian at the edge of town. Never married, no children, no significant others to speak of, he keeps the shades drawn and his lawn unmowed, an instant red flag to certain members of our community.
Historically, our Listers have never been allowed inside the dentist’s house for a property assessment. That changed last month, when a maid sporting a dog collar and apparently not quite conversant in the English language graciously served them iced tea and gingersnaps in the parlor. Bingo!
Listers are like vampires. Unless property owners or their agents grant them permission to enter, they have to stay outside. When they have to stay outside, they have to make guesstimates of what’s inside and, by law, are directed to assume the quality of the interior and fixtures are the absolute best. Top notch. You really screw yourself over when you don’t let in the Listers.
Case in point: Dr. Emmons. After their interior inspection, the Listers reduced his assessment by $100,000, thereby lowering his taxes by at least two grand. But Dr. Emmons was incensed, not grateful, since during the inspection Dex and Morty, our dynamic duo of tax appraisers, happened to stumble on a basement of “exercise equipment.”
Hence, the esteemed doctor’s request for an immediate grievance hearing, which, judging from his thundering voice and table pounding, is going about as well as might be expected from a medical professional humiliated by the outing of his private sex dungeon.
“I’ll sue the town until it’s bankrupt!” Dr. Emmons yells from the other side of the wall. “You know damn well I’d never allowed the Listers in my house and never will!”
“And because of that, you’ve been overassessed,” replies Dex, a retired farmer and himself the owner of a million-dollar estate. “Look, Morty and I counted only twelve fixtures, not twenty, as we’d had to estimate previously because you denied us access. That’s a savings for you right there. As for the, er, remodeled playroom downstairs, even with the new wall-to-wall and recessed lighting, you’d be surprised. We downgraded the room since some prospective buyers might find the anchored handcuffs, you know . . . off-putting.”
“Haylee Dawn Beauregard?” Doreen frowns at the license. “So that’s why she keeps calling.”
“Who?” I ask absently, deleting a slew of junk mail.
“Tammy Beauregard. She’s called here a number of times asking if we know how to reach someone named Haylee Beauregard. Had no idea who she was talking about.”
“That’s odd.”
Doreen flips through her desk calendar, where she keeps a written log of calls, including phone numbers, by date, a habit she picked up while serving in the US Navy. I used to tease her about being so antiquated, but once or twice her scribbled notes have turned out to be surprisingly helpful.
“Let’s see. Twice. August thirtieth and then again just last week. Thursday. Claimed the matter was urgent.” Doreen neatly replaces the pages of the calendar.
“What did you tell her?”
“I said I was sorry, but there wasn’t anyone in town by that name. Nothing in the land records or voter rolls, either. I checked. How the hell was I supposed to know Haylee Beauregard was Holly Simmons? I’m not a mind reader. Should I tell Erika?”
“Better you than me. I’m giving her some space. She’s not exactly happy with me these days.”
“Again? You’re always on her shit list.” Doreen types out a recording statement to imprint on the back of the license. “She’s just manipulating you, you know.”
Here’s the thing: Doreen’s never had kids. Yes, she’s a supremely generous aunt who’s a second mother to her nieces and nephews, whom she loves with all her heart. But that’s not the same as surviving the turbulence of daily coexisting with a teenager who hates your guts. I tend to take her parenting advice with a grain of salt, and maybe that’s a mistake. Doreen has a tendency to be 100 percent right about everything. Eventually.
“Relax, Bob,” Morty is saying now to the dentist. “Our only interest is in making an accurate assessment of taxable value. We don’t care about anyone’s dirty laundry.”
Those two don’t know from dirty laundry, I think, my thoughts gravitating magnetically to the frozen ball of bloodied PJs. I find them really disturbing, especially the way they’re wedged in my freezer between a turkey roast and a bag of peas that will someday be thawed and consumed. If only there was someone I could talk to about this, seeing as how Erika is giving me the silent treatment.
At the sound of scraping, I look up from my emails and see Doreen sharpening her pencil with a pearl-handled buck knife.
“Pssst!”
She whips around. “What?”
I nod to our concrete bank vault where we keep the land records, our own cone of silence. I get up and go in. Two seconds later, Doreen enters and shuts the door. “What the fuck’s up?”
“I’ve got a problem.”
Doreen nods. She loves problems. “Bring it.”
I tell her about Robert’s visit to Erika’s apartment and my discovery in the trash. “Whaddya think?”
“Well, it definitely meets the definition of creepy.” She studies the spines of our black vital record books as though they might contain the answers. “Maybe Holly had a heavy period and he was being the gentleman, disposing the evidence, so to speak, in a container where the paparazzi wouldn’t find it during their Dumpster dives.”
“They have paparazzi?”
Doreen shrugs. “These days everyone who’s anyone has paparazzi, right?”
“No clue. I’m so out of it.”
“Tell you what I do know,” Doreen continues. “If I forgot to change a tampon or whatever, I sure as hell wouldn’t throw away perfectly good PJs. Didn’t you say they were washable silk?”
“Not cheap, either. I looked them up online. Like two hundred bucks.”
Doreen lets out whistle. “Dunk them in cold water and baking soda. Good as new. Where are they now?”
“In my freezer.”
“Remind me not to come to your house for dinner. Why’d you put them there?”
“To preserve them, in case they turn out to be evidence.”
She half smiles, tolerating my paranoia. “Here’s some more oil you can throw on the bonfire of conspiracies I see you got burning in your noggin. While I was processing that marriage license, I remembered that last fall a woman who said her name was Haylee, ahem, spent about two hours going through our property records. She was a brunette then, but approximately the same build. Trim and tidy, kind of like your daughter. And, as we all know, anyone can change their hair color, right?”
“I don’t remember a Haylee coming to the office.”
“Probably because you were home, late again that morning. Anyway, now I’m thinking she might have been Haylee Dawn Beauregard. What’re the chances they’re two different people, huh?”
“Slim. I read in a To the Manor Build Q&A that Holly’s first-ever visit to Vermont was last winter. You have any idea what was she researching?”
“Our policy is don’t ask, don’t tell, right? So, I didn’t.”
Then an arresting thought crosses my mind. If that really was the same Haylee, then the only reason she would have been in the office would be to research a certain tax sale in which her future husband ended up with a plum piece of Vermont real estate for a pittance.
Lately, I’ve had some regrets about how I handled that sale as the collector of delinquent taxes. My intentions might have been noble, but because of my bold decision to go outside the law, a struggling young family was booted from their homestead, losing the log cabin they’d built by hand.
It’s almost too painful to think about. I remember when Zeke Strickland dropped off his building permit at the office. Muscled and tanned, he was such a rugged, hardworking young man full of big plans to live off the grid on land he and his wife, Gretchen, had scraped together all their pennies to buy. He dug the foundation, put up the walls, and even built a chimney for the woodstove. It was straight out of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
And then random tragedy struck. While shingling the roof, Zeke fell off the ladder and hit his head, supposedly causing permanent damage to his brain. I don’t know how that injury affected their finances except that they stopped paying their taxes. Gretchen was trying to make ends meet, I’d heard, by selling honey from their beehive and crocheted washcloths at the farmers’ market. With Zeke out of commission, whatever she was earning from a few jars of honey and some cheap cotton dishcloths would barely cover the cost of cereal for the twin toddlers they now had.
When they fell into arrears after a year, I tried to contact the Stricklands to see if we could work out a payment plan. Zeke was unpleasant, to say the least, a far cry from the grinning, determined man bursting with enthusiasm when we first met. He was surly, angry, and every other word was a crude expletive.
Gretchen had left, he said, and taken the kids with her. I could go fuck myself and my payment plan. The town was going to take his property over his cold, dead body, because he wasn’t leaving without a fight. They’d have to drag him out. It was a little after ten a.m. when we chatted and I’m pretty sure he was blind drunk.
Eventually, the sheriff did literally drag him from the cabin per the eviction order secured by the new owner, Robert Barron, and, as he promised, he made quite a scene. Zeke was kicking and punching wildly, vowing to burn the place down and to make Robert pay if it was the last thing he did. Fortunately, the sheriff was able to slap him in handcuffs before he was able to reach for his guns.
None of that would have happened if I hadn’t done what I did. It’ll haunt me forever.
“You okay?” my assistant asks.
Rousing myself back to the present, I see her giving me a crooked smile, like she knows exactly where I’ve mentally gone, which is definitely possible. She’s Doreen. Nothing happens in this office without her knowledge, and just because we haven’t discussed the illegalities of the tax sale doesn’t mean she’s unaware of what I did. She’s really, really good at holding her cards close to her chest, which might explain why she’s the reigning poker champ down at the Legion.
“You seem lost in thought. Anything I can do to help?” she coaxes.
“It’s nothing,” I lie, pointing to the permit binders. “I remembered I forgot to send in the town hall’s water-system renewal application to the state DEC. It was due Friday.”
“Pssh. The state doesn’t care. They’re all working from home, out taking hikes with their dogs. Submit it and you’ll be fine. It’s not like it’ll land you in jail.” She pulls down the black marriages record book from the shelf. “At least, not for that.”