Although lately, sadly, that hadn’t been as comforting as it used to be. Gail was undergoing a change-a fundamental life change, she realized-and her relationship to Joe was looming large within it.
She blinked a couple of times and checked into what was happening around her. She was sitting in Senate committee room 7, the so-called Ag Committee, along with her five colleagues, listening to some ideologue ramble on about the perils of the United States falling behind the rest of the world in food production. Nothing to be learned or believed there, she thought, allowing herself to drift once more.
Gail had come to believe that her life was losing purpose. Born to wealthy New York parents, one of two daughters well trained, well traveled, and well educated, she’d hit the social tidal wave of the 1960s at just the right time and age to be swept completely off her expected course. She’d ended up in Vermont several overstimulated years later, in a commune outside Brattleboro, wearing cotton tie-dyes and pulling garden weeds, her brain foggy, her body worn, and her ideals a jumble of rehashed political and social rhetoric. That period had started a rebirthing process that had led her to running a successful realty business, to local and now statewide politics, and to completing an interrupted law degree and pursuing a short and tumultuous career as a deputy state’s attorney.
In the midst of it all, she had met and fallen in love with Joe, whose steady, stalwart presence had often served as a crucial anchor in turbulent times, despite his being-on the surface, at least-her exact opposite: a farmer’s son, a lifelong cop, and someone whose travels had been almost exclusively paid for by his employer, including the military, who’d seen fit to put him into combat at a tender age. To all her friends, he could not have been less suitable for any A-list of potential suitors.
Except that in her mind, she, like Joe, had made a life of being purposeful, successful, and of use to others, especially after she’d left the commune.
But something else had happened during these years just past, something so overwhelmingly pervasive that it had truly changed her life. She’d been raped. She’d survived, of course, had suffered no physical handicap, and had seemingly resumed a healthy, normal life, whatever that meant. But she’d never been the same. It was following the rape that she returned to law school, became a prosecutor and later-by contrast-an environmental lobbyist, and then accepted the urgings of friends to run for state office. The rape started her on what had first appeared as a random progression but which, looking back, now seemed like a blueprint for political ambition, including high-profile stints on both ends of the polemical spectrum.
And one of the reasons that this evolution hadn’t appeared contrived or cynical was that she’d devoted herself completely to each step, with no thought about the next until she’d found herself taking it with a true believer’s zeal. It was only now, in hindsight, that she recognized that a series of haphazard choices born of trauma and emotion had turned out looking like a coherent plan. Even so, Gail was slowly realizing-long after most of her friends, including Joe-that, as a result, she might be poised on the threshold of her most exciting stage yet.
She cleared her head enough to once more check in on what was unfolding before her. The witness had broken out hard-backed charts that he was holding up to buttress his argument in favor of genetically modified plant seeds-charts already included in the folders he’d handed out earlier. Eyes open and expression intent, she retreated back into her thoughts.
So why was she constantly returning to Joe during these ruminations? It wasn’t like things were amiss in their relationship. If anything, his switch from the Brattleboro Police Department, where he’d worked from the start, to the VBI had done them both some good, exposing him to new challenges and making their own conversations more interesting-to her, at least.
One of her colleagues, a liberal Democrat from Chittenden County, interrupted the witness to challenge him on a point he’d just made. Gail sat forward in her chair, using her own mental autopilot to retrieve from her subconscious what had just been said. It was a long-standing and handy talent, being able to do two completely separate things at once, even if one of them was daydreaming.
The topic being discussed-if not the speaker-was actually of great interest to her: the exponential use of so-called GMO seeds versus the concerns about their potential long-term effects. Vermont, frequently a hotbed of political controversy, was, as usual, garnering national headlines with the debate, and the statehouse was buzzing with a pending showdown between the two camps, of which this small piece of boring testimony was just a preliminary twitch. E-mails and phone calls were already escalating as interested parties began waking up. It was looking as though Vermont might be made a litmus test on the subject.
But not right now, Gail thought, watching the bland face of the man addressing them. This one was a bench-warmer she doubted would be around for the final showdown. And that, she had to admit, was a battle she was looking forward to.
The mere thought of it brought her back to the here and now, and Joe was allowed to slip from her mind as she asked a pointed question of her own.
The setting this time wasn’t a restaurant. For one thing, no restaurant had a big enough table for what these three men required. For another, Tim Shafer was now safely on board and no longer in need of a nurturing environment. As a result, he found himself lugging his two boxes of files down a narrow hallway and into the conference room in the Vermont State Police barracks building in St. Albans. There Joe Gunther and Jonathon Michael were already setting up their own paperwork piles along the length of a large wooden table. A thermos of fresh coffee was parked in the middle like a surveyor’s cairn.
“Hey, Tim,” Michael greeted him as Shafer bumped the door open with his hip. “You need help?”
“Nah,” Shafer grunted, dumping the stacked boxes on the table’s one clear area. He began opening them up and distributing their contents, mimicking his two colleagues. “You wouldn’t think traffic in Vermont would be anything to bitch about, but Burlington is going straight to the dogs, if you ask me. Be faster to use the back roads.”
Burlington, also along the shore of Lake Champlain, and the state’s largest town, was about twenty-five miles to the south. Gunther checked the clock on the wall. “It’s after five. You must’ve hit rush hour.”
That did little to calm Shafer down. “Story of my life.”
Michael was oblivious, still shuffling his paperwork. “I heard Chittenden County’s population is growing every week.”
“Well,” Shafer countered, “you can have it. I’m happy living in St. J. with two woodchucks and a cow next door.”
Joe, the first to have arrived, chose a seat and propped one foot on the edge of the table, waiting for the others to catch up. “Not to get the cart ahead of the horse, Jonathon, but did you ever find out why that developer bought out Loomis?” Loomis was the farmer who’d lost his farm to a presumed electrical fire.
Michael didn’t bother looking up. “Nope. I talked to the buyer again-Clark Wolff-and he told me it was a pure investment. That the same urban sprawl that just gave Tim fits in Burlington is heading this way. According to him, it was money well spent. In the meantime, he’s leasing out the fields to neighboring farmers.”
Joe tapped the side of his head. “Wolff-that’s why it rang a bell. When I was interviewing Linda Padgett, I saw a business card on the bulletin board in her kitchen. Belonged to someone called John Samuel Gregory-sounded a little over-the-top, so I commented on it. But now I remember the card said he was with the Wolff firm.”
“He put a price on the farm?” Jonathon asked.
“Wasn’t that kind of conversation. He may have wanted it to be, but I think all he got to do was leave behind that card.”