THE SCREAM OF a woman startled Test who looked up from being lost in thought on the sidewalk.
Outside the town hall a crowd of people clamored to speak to television and newspaper reporters stationed on the sidewalk. A woman wailed: “Love the sinner, hate the sin!”
Picket signs read: Take Back Vermont and Take Your Hate to Another State.
To get to the office for the Family Matters roster records, Test needed to push through the throng occupying the public-meeting section of the town hall.
Inside, every seat was taken. People stood with no space between them, from the front stage all the way back into the vestibule and outside onto the steps. As Test elbowed her way, she took note of faces. The body heat from the mob tamed the November cold coming from outside, but that heat compared little to the heat of emotion, hatred, and vitriol as the news-camera lights set throughout the hall turned faces waxen.
At the podium, district representative Jasper Madock, owner of the local lumberyard empire, tapped the microphone at his podium at the front. A popping noise came from two car speakers wired into the corner of the place.
Test tried to push her way through the crowd, putting to memory faces as she did.
“This issue hits home,” Madock said. “But we must act with civility. Everyone has a right to be heard and everyone will be heard.” His persuasive tone explained some of his business success. That he was strikingly handsome perhaps did not hurt either.
“Each person who chooses to speak will have one minute of the floor. Janey there, my daughter,” Jasper nodded to a young girl with bad skin who blushed at her mention, “will come around with the microphone. Let’s hear one another out, even if we disagree. My brother down at the Bee Hive is having a special Night Owl Breakfast. Two eggs, bacon, toast, and coffee for ninety-nine cents, if we can get this done by six in the A.M.”
Laughter erupted.
Jasper cleared his throat, the phlegm in his lungs sounding like an old boat motor failing to start, and wiped sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his Carhartt jacket. He wasn’t nervous. The lights caused the sweat. Not the crowd.
Test edged sideways between two women, one of whom smelled of beer.
“All right, raise a hand and I’ll call on you in an orderly fashion,” Madock said.
Almost every hand shot up.
Test cut along the back wall, some people put out to have to make room for her. She wished she were wearing a uniform.
Madock’s daughter handed the microphone to a woman.
“I know that these people,” the woman said, “and those supporting them, they believe this is right. That it hurts no one. But what do we tell our kids?”
Test had heard it all before. Yes, she thought, what about our kids? What shall we do if we can’t mold them in the image of our bigotry?
Test was halfway to the door that would lead her to Public Records.
The sharp odor of drugstore perfume and noxious aftershave seared her throat.
“Do we tell our kids it’s OK?” the woman said. “They are good people. I pray for them, but I cannot support this.”
“Moral rot!” a man shouted.
“That’s once.” Jasper stared the man down, a man Test could not see in the crush of people.
A young man with muttonchops and a faded army surplus jacket not unlike the kind Test had worn in high school when she’d wanted come off as ironically anti-establishment, took the microphone. “I’m a law student,” the young man said. Three middle-aged men groaned.
The young man continued, “These instances are precisely what the law is for: to assure the rights of the minority are protected. We should be proud.”
A man shouted: “Let’s not wrap this up in pretty PC BS! Call a spade a spade!”
“That’s twice,” Madock said. “I must ask that you leave.”
“I won’t!” the man shouted. He was close to Test. A big man with a roughhewn face. If he got physical, Test would have to intervene. She didn’t want to. She was within sight of the door to Public Records.
“We’ll have even more gays pouring into our state!” the man shouted.
People clapped, others hissed.
“Enough,” Jasper said. “Please, leave. Or you will be escorted out.”
Test followed Jasper’s eyes to see, to her surprise, officer Larkin in civvies and a camo Red Sox cap. He stood in the back wings, nondescript. Larkin approached the man through the crowd, showed the man his badge. The man scowled and left with Larkin at his side.
A woman shouted, “Take your hate to another state!”
Several other people joined: “Take your hate to another state!”
Jasper pounded the gavel until calm was restored.
Test made it to the door to Public Records.
“We are never going to get that ninety-nine-cent-breakfast deal if we keep this up, people.”
The microphone squelched. “The Vermont Superior Court legislated from the bench and whatever comes of this should be considered a bastardization of the process itself,” a woman said. “Why is no one up in arms about this? Thank you.”
Test slipped into Public Records, and the voices from the main hall dulled as she leaned against the shut door and sighed.
“Exhausting, isn’t it?” a voice said.
Test looked up to see the clerk, a tiny woman in her fifties or sixties, smiling at her from behind her desk. She held a spoon in one hand and a yogurt container in the other. She set them down and dabbed with a napkin at yogurt staining the front of her red sweater, which sported a big snowflake on the front. “Detective Test, right?” she said.
Test nodded, embarrassed she did not recall the woman’s name. She’d interacted with her numerous times to pay for her dog’s license and buy a beach sticker for Maidstone Lake.
“How can I help you?” the woman said. “Or are you just seeking refuge?”
AFTER NEARLY AN hour, Test found the roster she needed. In a small cone of light cast on the clerk’s desk by a brass lamp, she worked her finger down the list of names. Many of the signatures required deciphering. She knew most of the names. Some surprised her.
The members were a disparate lot: farmers and store owners, plumbers, teachers, a family physician, a gas-station attendant.
“V. Who was V?”
She looked down the list. Looking for a V.
It took her nearly a half hour to find a name that started with a V.
It smacked her in the face.
Victor Jenkins.
Test had seen him on local TV and in the paper, taking opposition to the gay marriage bill. But he was in his fifties. Test couldn’t see any young girl being smitten with him. Was there a Victor junior? No. Jenkins had just the one son, Brad, who was in the paper regularly: The most gifted high-school football player ever to hail from this tiny state, perhaps New England, excluding Flutie, of course.
What did Test know about Victor Jenkins? He coached at the high school Jessica had attended. He’d been a star athlete in his time, as Test understood it. Test could imagine a scenario where an older man might hold sway over a teenage student because of some leverage, but not a girl actually having affection for that man, as Jessica’s e-mails and letters clearly showed; though it did happen. Nothing good ever came of it.
Test set herself up at the lone computer made available to the public in a small cubicle.
She Googled Victor Jenkins, Canaan Vermont.
He had no Facebook page, no social media presence whatsoever.
The articles she found on him mentioned him by way of being father of Brad, star quarterback and pitcher for Lamoille Valley High School. There were plenty of such articles to mine; it seemed Brad was mentioned in every Sunday sports section of the Lamoille Register during football and baseball seasons. There were annual profiles on him too. And a profile on Victor, who had apparently made it to Syracuse University, a Division One program, with hopes of a possible NFL career waylaid by injury.
Test looked up.
The time had gotten away from her while searching online. It was nearly 10 P.M.
She pulled the chain on the lamp at the cubicle desk, turning off the light so she sat in the opaque glow from the streetlamp outside the window, thinking for a good long time.
She needed to call North.
But didn’t want to.
In the hall, she drank at the water fountain, sloshed water in her mouth and spat. Wet her hands and doused her face.
The outside office was dark. The clerk had gone home, either thinking Test had left or trusting Test to lock up after herself.
Test could hear voices beyond the door. The meeting was still going.
Test locked the door behind her.
Out in the old theater, she worked her way back through the crowd as a woman spoke softly into the microphone. “I represent Family Matters,” she said.
Test stepped up on her tiptoes to glimpse the woman who tucked the microphone close to her chin. “There’s many here tonight,” the woman said, her voice so quiet it was hard to hear even with the microphone. “While we reach out to all God’s children and we pray for those living in sin to come right with the Lord, we cannot stand aside while secular laws overrule the law of God. We therefore stand opposed to bill H eight forty-seven. We pray for another solution that protects our children and our most holy of all traditions: holy matrimony. Amen.”
A murmur of Amen went up.
A young man beside Test muttered, “I guess she knows what God wants better than the rest of us.”
Test pushed her way outside and was glad for the cold fresh air. She felt soiled and sticky from the closeness of bodies in the town hall, and the noxious tenor of the place. She was exhausted and starving. Exhilarated too, by her find in the roster. She hadn’t felt this bone-tired and amped up at the same time since her Dartmouth days pulling all-nighters.
She still did not want to call North, especially at this hour. But she needed to bring him in on it. Keep her word.
She brought out her cell phone and called him.
He did not berate her but thanked her for keeping him up to speed. He sounded tired, and something else, too. Preoccupied. Perhaps she’d wakened him. She asked him to meet her at her office at the station.
As she spoke, she noted that the windshield of a VW Bug was smashed and a message had been written in shaving cream along the hood: Learn from tonight. Vote for what’s right.
It was impossible to determine which side of the issue the messenger supported.
If Larkin was still inside, she’d tell him about the vandalism. Except, going back in there was the last thing she wanted to do.
She told North about the vandalism and he said he’d send a trooper out to look into it.
She called Claude next. He’d sent her several text messages and she saw now he had left a voice mail shortly after 9:00. Likely to tell her what the texts told her: he was going to bed. He hoped she was all right. Wake him if she wanted when she got into bed.