It was for this last resource that I’d been steered toward Eric Blaushild. A lifelong Newfane resident, a jack-of-all-trades who plowed driveways and serviced cars in the winter, and did anything he could think of to make a living the rest of the year, he was a man I’d known about but had never met, and was reputed to be a walking who’s who.
I found him in a makeshift garage, behind a battered 1940s tract house, similar to what had made Levittown synonymous with suburbia. It didn’t look out of place in Vermont, however, despite the calendar shots of Greek Revival farmhouses that the Department of Tourism cranked out in great volume. In fact, although I doubted anyone had actually done a count, I guessed that Blaushild’s kind of home-inexpensive, non-picturesque, a little threadbare, and eminently practical-outnumbered the other by a considerable margin.
The garage was wood-floored, dark, and none too warm, despite the fiery glow leaking through the gaps of an ancient makeshift wood furnace in one corner. Following the instructions of the woman who’d come out to meet me when I drove up, I shut the rickety door behind me and called out, “Eric Blaushild?”
A voice answered from under the pickup beside me. “That’s me.”
“Joe Gunther. Vermont Bureau of Investigation. I was wondering if I could ask you about someone.”
With a chorus of squeals, a man slowly rumbled out from under the truck on a creeper, his hands resting on his stomach and his head supported by a small, very dirty pillow. He didn’t bother getting up. “I heard about you-and the VBI. Never thought I’d meet both at the same time. Who do you want to know about?”
I liked his no-nonsense manner-no jokes about VBI, no kowtowing either-just the facts. I perched gingerly on a dubiously constructed sawhorse. “All I’ve got is a first name: Shayla.”
“Rossi. Lives on Steepway. Owns a Rottweiler named Ben,” he said without hesitation.
That caught me by surprise, which he obviously enjoyed. But it also made me wonder what else I should know.
“You friends with her?”
He shook his head. “Barely know her, and didn’t like what I met. Had to give her a warning a few months back-dog was on the loose. That’s why she’s fresh in my mind. What’s she done?”
“Nothing I know of,” I answered truthfully. “Her name came up in a case, and I just want to talk to her.”
Blaushild finally rolled off the creeper, got onto his knees, and stood up, pulling a rag from his pocket and wiping his hands. “Good luck there. Attractive woman, till she opens her mouth.”
“Violent?”
He shook his head. “She just sounds off, is all-got an opinion about everything and everybody and isn’t shy about sharing it. I got an earful about the dog ordinances, the selectmen, the road crew, the sheriff, her neighbors, the governor, and the president of the United States, all in the time it took me to fill out that warning.”
“She live with anyone?”
“Nope, and I can see why.”
“What about the dog?”
“He’s fine. Potentially lethal but trained to a gnat’s eyelash. When I rounded him up, all he did was try to lick my face off.”
I asked him for directions and for any other information he might have on Shayla Rossi. He escorted me outside to his vehicle, where he retrieved a metal clipboard from the front seat. Sitting on the car’s fender, he leafed through its contents until he reached a copy of the warning he’d written her months ago. It had her birth date, social security number, and mailing address.
I copied it all down, commenting that this was a lot more information than I’d ever put on a warning back when I was in uniform.
Blaushild smiled ruefully. “Saves time later, when I give ’em a ticket, which usually happens pretty soon after. Always has to cost money before they pay attention.”
I thanked him for his time, drove back to the village and the parking lot in front of the Newfane Market, and called my office on the cell phone.
Judy, the secretary, put me through to Lester Spinney.
“Goofing off?” I asked him.
“Going nuts is more like it. Chasing all these people down is gettin’ to be a royal pain in the butt.”
“Good. I got another one for you.” I gave him Shayla’s name and statistics and waited while he entered her into the computer.
“Nothing,” he finally reported. “She’s got an old Toyota wagon she’s driven too fast a few times, including once under the influence, but that’s it. She one of the letter writers?”
“Yeah. Got her name from the constable up here. I’m in Newfane.”
“You going to see her? Want some company?”
I mulled that over. It was good procedure to team up, and Newfane was only fifteen minutes north of Brattleboro, but we’d been conducting interviews nonstop for days and had gotten nowhere fast. There was no indication this encounter would be any different.
But there was the dog, and Lester was sounding stir-crazy.
“What the hell,” I told him. “I’m at the market.”
It turned out the aptly named Steepway was closed during the winter. Being a challenge to climb in summer and an impossibility with snow on the ground, it was ignored by the town’s snowplows. For all intents and purposes, it was a dead-end street unless traveled with a snowmobile. Lester and I approached it from the bottom, following Blaushild’s instructions, and discovered, just shy of where the plows gave up, a brown house so modest it looked plucked from a toy box. It was tucked under the trees and clung to the edge of a truly abrupt, overgrown incline-dark and claustrophobic even in the middle of the day. A thin plume of smoke drifted out of the metal chimney.
“That the one she drives?” I asked Lester, pointing to a rusty Toyota wagon parked in the yard.
He read the license plate. “One and only.”
Typically, no great effort had been made at snow removal, resulting once more in our stumbling across a series of frozen ruts until entering a slit trench aimed at a small porch sagging with cordwood and trash cans. Evidence of the Rottweiler was abundant-a zip line with a leash attached, a doghouse, several metal dishes, and countless paw prints-but no dog.
I was first in line and heard Lester slip and almost fall behind me. I looked over my shoulder in time to see his acrobatic recovery.
“Legislature should pass a shovel law,” he said, catching his breath. “It snows, you gotta shovel it, or a year in prison.”
I was about to tell him how the constable’s description of Shayla Rossi made her the perfect candidate for such a conversation, when both his startled expression and the small, almost indiscernible click of a door opening made me violently face forward.
I was too late. My entire field of vision was filled with the huge, open-mouthed head of a Rottweiler coming at me in midair, as silent and lethal as a cannonball.
I only had time to throw up my left arm before we collided with tremendous force, the impact throwing me back onto Lester and forcing the air out of the dog’s lungs into my face.
The pain in my forearm was electric in intensity: crushing, radiating, mind-numbingly sharp. I opened my mouth to yell but could only gasp for air, noticing all the while the total silence around me, filled solely with the labored grunting of the dog as he tried to adjust his grip, his hind legs scrabbling against my thighs.
“Get off me, Joe. I can’t reach my gun.”
I was on top of Lester, and we were locked inside the icy trench-an idiotic spectacle if it hadn’t been for the dispassionate brown eyes, mere inches from my own, of the hundred-pound animal trying to eat through my arm to my throat.
But Lester’s words had some effect nevertheless, cutting through the shock of the initial assault and forcing me to think of what to do next.
Wrestling with the dog, whose front claws were now swatting at my head, I rolled enough to one side to reach my belt for my own gun. But I didn’t have enough room to clear the holster.