“Here’s my question, Stanley: There are five of these iron lampposts strung out along the wall on each side of the gate. Why blow up the one closest to the entrance?”
He wiped a raindrop that had fallen on his nose. I couldn’t tell whether he was thinking about my question or worrying about the approaching storm.
I touched the repaired lamppost. “At night, this one’s not only illuminated by its own bulb but also by the lights from the entrance. Why risk burying a bomb under the best-lighted lamppost? Why not plant the bomb in the shadows at the end of the wall”-I pointed down the road-“where it’s darker and less visible?”
Thunder boomed closer in the west. Big raindrops started falling, dotting Stanley’s pale blue uniform shirt. We started toward the entrance.
“Is that important, why he chose one particular lamppost?” he asked over his shoulder as I opened the door of the Jeep.
“Beats me.”
The rain came down then, hard. Stanley ran for the guard shack. I shut the door of the Jeep, started it, and pulled away.
I drove a half mile west, took a right, and went north through the woods, past the sculpted yews of the golf club that stretched down to the road. It cost a hundred grand to drive through those yews, and that was just for openers. The rain was falling in sheets now; the golfers were inside, deepening their sun flushes with gins, tonics, and limes. I doubted that any of them had set out pickle buckets before coming to the club.
The Maple Hills Municipal Building is a single-story, redbrick confection with stubby white pillars and black shutters, meant to look like it’s been there two hundred years longer than it has. It holds both the library and the village hall. I parked and ran through the rain to the arch that opened into the library. Two old men in pastel shorts, National Geographics spread open on their laps, dozed in big nubby chairs across from the reception desk.
I asked the sturdy woman behind the counter for old issues of local papers. She led me to the microfilms of the Maple Hills Assembler. I remembered the Assembler; I’d leafed through a couple of issues Amanda hadn’t gotten around to throwing out. It was a ten-page local shopping and good news rag, just right for the bottom of a hamster cage, so long as the hamster wasn’t looking for much beyond wedding announcements, real estate ads, and recipes for dishes that blue-haired old ladies could eat with little spoons. I threaded the spool for the 1960s and forwarded it to 1968.
The first mention of Crystal Waters came in September. The Assembler reporter-a woman with the same last name as the publisher, and whose own recipe for corn soufflé took up half of page three-gushed with the news that Maple Hills, population 868, had been selected as the site for a new, high-security residential development. Coming so soon after the “unfortunate events of MartinLuther King, Robert Kennedy, and those riots,” she wrote, “it is welcome news that occurrences such as those will not be taken lying down. Crystal Waters is going to be the state of the art, a virtual Tomorrowland of personal security.”
The rest of the article read as though it had been lifted intact from a sales brochure. Twenty-seven homes, each in excess of five thousand square feet, each with a library, a three-car garage, multiple alarm systems, and access to a bomb shelter, among other amenities too numerous to mention, were to be designed by name architects and constructed on one-acre lots. The exteriors would be of brick, with cement tile roofs, to make them impervious to fire, and had been carefully designed to blend with one another to create a “harmonious whole.” An unnamed representative of Safe Haven Properties, the developers, said the homes would have features that would make them virtually impregnable, details of which, of course, could not be released. Surrounding the development would be a high brick wall with a guard structure at the only entrance. The Assembler article ended with the news that potential purchasers had already been invited to submit applications to the new development, and construction was expected to begin the following spring.
Safe, snobbish, and selective. No wonder the corn soufflé lady had gushed.
I slow-forwarded through the next issues. The year 1968 may have been a rough one for America-assassinations and “those riots,” as the reporter had put it-but in Maple Hills, all the news was good. A vegetable market opened, a flower show was well attended, and the developers of Crystal Waters donated a new fire truck to the village. Even the recipes I read, in case I ever graduated past Lean Cuisines and microwaved macaroni and cheese, sounded positively delightful.
The next mention of Crystal Waters came two months later, just before Thanksgiving. The corn soufflé lady reported that over fourhundred applications for the twenty-seven homes had been received, some from as far away as Europe. All, she noted, had been accompanied by the requisite one-hundred-thousand-dollar deposits. I wondered how the reporter came up with such a tidbit. Good, hard journalistic investigation, I supposed, or perhaps she’d bribed one of the Safe Haven developers with a soufflé.
The vetting process must have been extensive, because it wasn’t until March of 1969 that the Assembler reported that twenty-seven families had completed their final interviews with the developers and had been notified that their one-hundred-thousand-dollar deposits would be retained. It must have been a grand day for all.
Ground was broken the next month, and the Assembler carried periodic updates and photographs throughout 1969 and early into 1970, all of them on the front page. In May of 1970-the month students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State had been shot by nervous National Guardsmen, an event that went unreported by the Assembler-the paper ran a photo of a group of deliriously happy Mexicans laying the last bits of sod outside the wall at Gateville. There had been no report of the guardhouse explosion, as I’d expected.
I advanced the film through June, the month the Members moved in, and then through July and August. The next mention of Crystal Waters came on the Wednesday after Labor Day, in a photograph on the front page. It was a grainy close-up of a dozen children waiting for a school bus in front of a brick shelter outside the wall of Crystal Waters. I stared at the photo, only dimly aware that my heart had started pounding like an oil derrick.
I leaned closer to the microfilm screen. To the left of the shelter stood a lamppost, and immediately to the left of that, in the upper corner of the photograph, appeared a fragment of an ornate shape. I stared at that shape in the corner of the photo for a full minute, then fed a dime into the printer and ran a copy of the picture. I rewound the spool and went out into the hall connecting the librarywith the village offices, trying to tell myself that odd little ornate shape might mean nothing.
I followed the signs on the wall, every one of my footfalls echoing loudly down the green tile stairs. I turned the knob on the frosted glass door marked BUILDING DEPARTMENT. Only one of the six gray metal desks inside was occupied. A three-hundred-pound man in a plaid shirt, with a plastic shirt-pocket protector full of different-colored felt tips-an assortment I would have killed for in third grade-looked up from the newspaper spread out on his desk. By the hard set of his jowls, he didn’t appear delighted by the interruption.
“What do you need?”
The security of a city job, I almost snapped at him, but that would have been the knots in my gut talking. “I’d like to look at the site drawings for Crystal Waters,” I said instead.
His oak swivel chair creaked as he shifted his attitude to look at the wall clock. It was ten to five. “Can’t do.”