The Second Mouse Read online

  Again, she began, a few shots at a time, getting a feel for the recoil and the new stance. But then she settled in, becoming one with the gun’s staccato rhythm, enjoying how it vibrated against her ribs and spread across her hips. Her husband’s lovemaking this morning, even though desired, had been brutal and perfunctory, as usual. And, as usual, it had served mostly only to whet her appetite for more. She had no idea what effect shooting guns had on men—glancing over at Mel, she saw nothing like what she was experiencing—but she now knew its appeal for her, at least in this one instance.

  They continued shooting for several hours, taking turns with the M–16s and firing a couple of pistols as well, until the beer and the ammunition were spent, the guns almost too hot to handle, and their ears numb and throbbing with the abuse. When silence finally fell, none of them had any appreciation of it. They lay on the rocks, soaked through, their hands tired and darkened with gunpowder, and themselves as dazed and glistening as fish brought to the surface by a grenade.

  Mel was the worst off. He’d fired the most and consumed the most alcohol, ending the session by chasing the beer with whiskey. He’d acted out the day as he typically did, at full bore, without restraint, talking nonstop, laughing and swearing, his body language balanced on a perpetual knife edge between camaraderie and hostility. Even in this place of his own choosing, his humor always approached anger, his jabs and pokes falling just shy of punches. But now he was unconscious, deeply asleep in the sun, his mouth open and his eyes closed. For Ellis and Nancy, this was the moment they’d come to anticipate—when Mel’s self-indulgence would once more do its near daily job of reducing him to a genuine nonthreat.

  As slowly as dogs left too long in the sun, the two of them finally stirred, peeling themselves off the rocks and staggering toward the pickup parked under the trees. There, their backs against the relative coolness of its metal side, they shared a bottle of lukewarm water from the toolbox behind the cab. Then Ellis, still holding the bottle and with a careful glance at the distant, audibly snoring Mel, said softly to Nancy, “Put your head back.”

  She, too, followed his gaze, intrigued, and smiled up at him, oddly stirred by how his tone of voice fed into the sensual mood that had been percolating within her all day. “What’re you going to do?”

  “You want to find out?”

  In response she tilted her face up, her shoulder blades flat against the side of the truck’s bed, her damp hair hanging loose over its edge. Her breasts rose and fell under the thin fabric of her tank top.

  Slowly, Ellis upended the bottle, letting the water dribble onto her forehead. She shut her eyes and laughed softly as the liquid began trickling down her face and neck. Ellis increased the flow slightly, and the water spread to her upper chest and slipped under the tank top. Nancy blew some air through her mouth, causing a line of small bubbles to form at her lips.

  Without a word, he stopped pouring the water and brushed those lips with his own, barely touching her. She smiled. They had kissed before, in a perfunctory social way, either following a congratulation or in celebration of a birthday. Not that it had been completely innocent, either. Separately, each had harbored the memory of such contacts and wondered what any kind of follow-up might be like.

  But those exchanges had been either in public or before Mel. The two of them hadn’t been slippery with sweat, half drunk, and in Nancy’s case, thoroughly worked up by both her earlier sexual encounter with Mel and the odd experience she’d just been through with that vibrating machine gun.

  Ellis pulled back slightly, poured more water on her, and watched as it soaked her top.

  At that, they reacted simultaneously. As she lifted her head off the truck’s gunwale to kiss him fully and passionately, he slipped his free hand up inside her tank top and took her bare breast in his palm. She gasped at his touch and reached out for him, pulling him close and grinding up against him, her leg sliding up the outside of his thigh, and her foot hooking behind the back of his knee to bring him closer. Their hands skimmed across each other as if seeking cover, exploring, learning the topography. It was as if the only time they had available would be gone in a moment.

  Which was exactly right.

  Ellis broke off first, being the more cautious. Nancy had just slipped her hand down the front of his pants when he straightened and pulled back, his hand on her wrist, stunned and pleased by her eagerness but terrified of its consequences.

  “Wait, wait,” he panted, nervously looking over the hood of the truck at Mel’s recumbent shape. “Not here.”

  “Where?” she asked, breathing like a runner. “I want to do this.”

  Though gratified, he wasn’t surprised by her comment, even if he was by its timing. He knew of her background, after all, and of her particular appetites. That was in part what had fueled his own desire. He was already Mel’s sidekick when they’d first met Nancy at a biker bar outside Albany. Both men had Harleys, criminal records, and generally poor attitudes, although only Mel really worked at the bad-boy stereotype. Mel would engage in the male rituals that some of his brighter companions were beginning to see as old news, while Ellis headed straight into the anesthesia of cheap beer, loud noise, and a fog of cigarette smoke.

  Nancy took to Mel right away that night, responding to his challenge of her date like a doe might to a dominant stag. Ellis had almost laughed at the lack of subtlety, except that he, too, had been captivated by her youth, looks, and open sexuality. It was with mixed emotions that he’d seen his friend eventually translate this particular mating encounter into a walk up to the altar.

  Nancy followed Ellis’s glance toward her husband, who’d rolled slightly onto his side to face the other way.

  “He might as well be dead. We could do it right here.” She rubbed the front of his fly with her open hand, kissing his neck as he averted his face, trying to think clearly. “Shit, you’re so big.”

  She suddenly unsnapped her shorts and tried unzipping them before he stopped her.

  “Wait, wait,” he said. “He sleeps like that for hours, right?”

  She kissed him again. “Like a dead man.”

  “Then we can take him home and you can drive me to my place. We’ve done that before.”

  Which they had, with him longing for exactly what was about to unfold. In fact, it had been at such a recent drop-off that she’d first told him of her unhappiness with Mel, much to his private delight. Not that Ellis had been surprised. The marriage’s troubles had been clear for quite a while.

  It was all she needed to hear. She rebuttoned her shorts. “Let’s get him in the truck.”

  The whole trip back, Ellis worked to maintain the mental fog he trusted to cloud his better judgment. He had practice at this—even considered himself an expert. The countless bars he could no longer recall, the times in Mel’s company, as at the armory, when he’d known he should be elsewhere.

  And Nancy did her best to undermine his failing self-preservation. As he drove toward Bennington on ever-improving roads, she undulated against him, slipped her hand up under his shirt, and kept trying either to kiss his neck or bite his ear as he halfheartedly fended her off.

  Mel, in the meantime, stayed jammed into the cab’s far corner, snoring, his legs sprawled.

  Ellis had to admit that the presence of a man he knew would kill him for what he was thinking, much less what he hoped to be doing in thirty minutes, heightened the excitement to a nearly uncontainable intensity.

  But it was a long trip, and it was harder getting Mel into the trailer than it had been hefting him into the truck. Inevitably, he woke up, at least enough to demand what the hell was going on; the enhanced meaning of his question wasn’t lost on his companions. By the time they finally reached their goal, and Nancy, now at the wheel, pulled up beside Ellis’s motorcycle at his apartment across town, they were sitting at opposite ends of the cab, each waiting for the other to pick up the pieces of their passion and see what was left.

  Nancy killed the engine, pu
t her hands between her thighs, and let out a deep breath, staring straight out the windshield.

  “Fuck.”

  He laughed softly. “Right.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Probably a bad idea.”

  She made a face but didn’t turn her head. “Yeah.” It was a sigh, tired and sad, and it touched him in the middle of his chest.

  “It’s not for lack of interest.”

  She looked at him. “You mean that?”

  He caught her meaning. “Ever since me and Mel both met you in that bar, way back when.”

  She twisted in her seat, her face bright with a surprised smile. “You’re shitting me.”

  “Nope. From the start. That can’t be news. Every guy I know thinks of you like that.”

  She waved her hand dismissively, looking disappointed. “Oh, that stuff. I thought you meant something else.”

  But they both knew he did. He confirmed it a long pause later by admitting, “I was the unhappiest man there at your wedding.”

  She reached out and touched his hand briefly. “That’s really sweet, Ellis. I don’t guess I was too happy, either.”

  “You’re just saying that now,” he told her. “You were in seventh heaven.”

  She gazed down at her hands. He barely heard her say, “Yeah. I was.”

  There was silence as they thought back across the intervening years from different perspectives—Ellis reflecting how the lusty joy between new husband and wife had eroded to where Mel regularly dismissed it by word and deed, picking up women at bars almost every weekend; and Nancy ruing the death of her dream of kids, a house, and a life of security, paradoxically and illogically hinged on the wild man who’d won her heart.

  Each was left wondering at the implications of such thoughts.

  “You want to ask me in anyway?” she finally asked. “If only for a cup of coffee?”

  He nodded and got out of the truck, digging for his front door keys as he approached one half of a gray, slightly worn building that represented his small part of a ninety-unit affordable-housing complex—a scattering of two-story wooden boxes.

  He opened the door and stood back to let her in. In the few years that he’d lived here, after moving out of the trailer to make room for her, he’d never asked her in.

  Glancing about in the twilight afforded by the drawn curtains, he was now embarrassed that he had.

  “I’m sorry,” he said as she entered. “It’s a mess.”

  He closed the door and turned to find her not surveying the shabby view, but standing in the miniature entry hall, staring at him.

  There, without another word, they moved into each other’s arms.

  The frenzy of an hour ago was gone, its explosiveness replaced by a deeper appreciation for what they’d enjoyed in one another for years but had never openly acknowledged—his tenderness and quiet consideration, her openness and honesty.

  This time their hands moved slowly, their earlier eagerness for pure inventory yielding to the pleasure of time and temporary safety.

  Stumbling slightly, they moved from the foyer to the small living room and then to the couch facing the blank-faced television, their clothes dropping along the way. By the time he helped her fall back naked against the cushions and nestled between her legs, he felt all his burdens slip free and believed himself to be the luckiest man he knew.

  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.

  Those weren’t the only important differences between Vermont’s two southern corner towns. Unintentionally, Sam had revealed an instinctive and time-honored common prejudice that had favored her home over Bennington for hundreds of years.

  Brattleboro, after all, had the interstate and the Connecticut River—commercial conduits, new and old, that had all but guaranteed its label as the Gateway to Vermont—along with a solidly anchored middle-class population, while Bennington remained merely another ex-mill town to the west, host to several small industrial plants and a large medical center, forever regretting the erosion of its own middle class and the fates that had spurned it when Interstate 91 had been drawn elsewhere on the map in the 1950s.

  Bennington County regarded itself as Vermont’s black hole, and its populace i
nstinctively looked inward to solve most of its own problems. This was an area of practical-minded, largely working-class people who didn’t pay much heed to what was going on in a state they figured didn’t have much time for them in the first place.

  Sam suddenly laughed. “I heard somewhere that in the old days the Indians wouldn’t bury their dead in Bennington because of the ill winds. Guess the place has always kind of sucked hind tit.”

  His mind having wandered already, Joe reacted only halfheartedly. “I like it. It stands on its own two feet.”

  She snorted. “Stands more in Mass and New York, from what I hear. And what’s the deal with that weird bypass? Their politicians live and die by whether they support an interstate traffic circle that’s supposed to go completely around the town? That is really bizarre.”

  Joe glanced at her. He wasn’t about to argue the point one way or the other. For years almost uncountable, Bennington had, in fact, had a huge bypass on the books that would ease the pressure from the all-important intersection of Routes 9 and 7 in the heart of downtown. One side of the debate called it financial suicide; the other touted it as economic salvation. Only one leg of it had been completed thus far—a beautiful quarter circle running from New York State to Route 7 due north of Bennington, complete with sweeping panoramas of the valley and bordering mountains. But since it didn’t accomplish the overall goal, most outsiders—and a few locals—were still hard pressed to figure out what it foretold.

  Joe only knew, as apparently did Sam, that unless you held an opinion on the matter, you were clearly overlooking one of the area’s touchstone topics.