A Death in Canaan Read online

  Amid all the change, some things remained constant. The mountains still skimmed straight up, the South Canaan Congregational Church still stood small and white and proud, as it had for generations, across the street from the Kruses’ house.

  Fred and Helen Kruse, Barbara’s landlords, had lived in the big white house since they came up from New York in 1946. Fred Kruse had bought land across the highway, too, and ran the gas station there.

  For a while, after she was fired from her job in Cornwall, Barbara had worked at the gas station. When she filled out an application for the state-run Work Incentive Program (WIN) she wrote that her last regular job was “Service Station Operator.” Even after that, although the station was leased to various people, it remained a part of Barbara’s life. One man who leased the place accused Barbara of stealing $50 from him, and Paul Beligni and Peter got even with him by way of an elaborate prank involving ammonia, dead fish, and an electric fan, on a 102-degree day. Barbara had the last word. “I might consider stealing fifty thousand dollars,” she told the man, “but never fifty.”

  On the day Barbara died, she planned to drive into Canaan to do some shopping, although the car was in rotten shape—the transmission was almost entirely gone, and the only gear that would operate was fourth. But Barbara didn’t want to trade it in. For all her shabby clothes, she liked being special, and the metallic blue Corvette that Auntie B. had paid for looked very sporty and special. Peter wanted a bigger car so he could carry around his musical equipment.

  Barbara needed to buy a new wallet. About two weeks earlier, her old one had been stolen, with over a hundred dollars in it. She had reported the loss to the police. There was another old wallet in the drawer in the living room, with some old pictures and papers in it, but it was worn out. Barbara planned to drive into town and buy a new wallet at Bob’s. She was expecting a check, too, and planned to stop by the bank.

  So Geoff Madow picked up Peter for school; Peter didn’t like the bus ride, slow and bumpy and roundabout. Geoff drove straight over Route 7, past Eddie Houston’s Garage, where Peter’s first car, a little red 1967 Triumph that Auntie B. had bought from a man in Vermont, was still sitting on blocks. Then Geoff made a sharp right, down the long driveway of Regional High. The driveway curved widely around the sprawling, handsome stone building. Steve Blass, the professional baseball player, was a graduate of Regional, and his autographed picture hung on the wall in the principal’s office.

  It was Friday, September 28, 1973.

  Barbara did her errands. She went to Bob’s Clothing Store and bought a new wallet, a folding, man’s wallet, $7.50. She went to the bank, then across the street to the Falls Village market. When Barbara pulled out her wallet, the grocer noticed she was carrying a lot of money.

  She didn’t go by the library, which was open only two mornings a week. Whenever it was open, Barbara almost always appeared. The librarian expected her. Even at 9:30 in the morning, Mrs. Kester remembered, you could usually smell liquor on Barbara’s breath, though she wasn’t what you would call under the influence, and in fact Mrs. Kester had invited her to come to tea at the library. Barbara never came. She didn’t socialize much, at least not in that way. She had had an ulcer in 1969 and, a year later, a hysterectomy. She thought maybe she had cancer and was often depressed. She had mentioned suicide. Barbara didn’t look at all, anymore, like the beautiful, healthy, robust young woman who’d once effortlessly held a grinning man on her shoulders. When she died, she weighed 115 pounds and, at just a little over five feet, she seemed frail.

  When she got home from town Barbara probably did some reading, though no one can say for sure. Or writing. Some people suspected that she wrote for porno publications, but no one ever proved it. Mrs. Kester, who knew Barbara’s reading habits so well, thought maybe she wrote mysteries, and after wondering about it for a while, she came right out, once, and asked her. “Do you write mysteries?” Barbara said no, but Mrs. Kester had her doubts, so she mentioned it to the postmistress. “Ruth, did Barbara Gibbons ever send anything out in big envelopes, like manuscripts?” The postmistress said she hadn’t noticed.

  Barbara had written some little fillers for magazines, though, and she wrote letters of all kinds, including one to The New York Times, challenging the grammar in an editorial. Herbert Matthews of the Times wrote back, acknowledging the error, and Barbara kept his letter for nearly ten years. When she died, it turned up in the assorted pieces of her life, along with a stack of Peter’s report cards, showing him failing geometry; a glossy picture of an unidentified man with a lean, hollowed, cynical face, sitting on a tabletop, smoking a cigarette; a $30,000 flight insurance policy from Auntie B.’s trip to St. Croix, made out to Peter; a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver; a gas mask; and warranties for Peter’s amplifier and her Black & Decker electric drill. There was an itemized statement of hospital costs, in Barbara’s handwriting: “$15.50—me; $5.50—Peter,” multiplied by eight days, plus $20.00 for anesthesia and $1.50 for the newborn’s I.D. bracelet. One file of papers involved a running feud Barbara had had with Jacobs Garage in Falls Village, in which Jacobs had been represented by a lawyer in Canaan named Catherine Roraback.

  There was also a picture of Auntie B., smiling demurely, looking vaguely like Betty Grable, and one of Auntie B.’s father, a man so brilliant he’d been admitted to the New York bar a year before he finished law school. There were many letters from Auntie B., including one in which she’d threatened to stop sending checks after April 1 and suggested that Barbara get a job washing dishes. Barbara retorted that even if there were a place to wash dishes, she had only one pair of shoes, a pair of ostrich pumps. And she pointed out the irony in the date Auntie B. had given, All Fools Day.

  Barbara had kept some of Hilda’s letters, too. The two women never saw one another again. After Hilda returned from Switzerland, she went to Florida, where she had two sisters, and began writing letters to Barbara. Eventually she asked to come back, promising to give Peter money. Hilda had written other letters to other people, letters that Barbara called “poisonous” and claimed had cost her jobs. She told her Uncle Jim that Hilda’s letters had made life so difficult that she might have to leave Falls Village. Even years before, Barbara complained, Hilda had always tampered with her private mail. Hilda died in Florida, two years before her daughter. Uncle Jim gave her clothes to Goodwill, except for her fur coat, which he sent to Barbara. Hilda left $7,352.22 when she died, but when the medical and legal bills were paid, there was only $2,854.60 left. She had willed it to Jim, but he sent Peter a check.

  Among the letters and papers and fragments of her life that Barbara left behind was a questionnaire from welfare. She hadn’t bothered to fill it out. The welfare people wanted to know:

  What would you consider as your most pressing problem?

  What can the average citizen expect from the police?

  How can you prepare children for your absence?

  At ten minutes past two, the students assembled on the lawn in front of the school and gave three cheers for the janitor, who was retiring. Then Peter got a lift home from Geoff Madow. When Geoff dropped Peter off, Barbara was over at the gas station. She and Peter were friends with the young man who ran the station, Ken Carter. He was a photographer, too, and had taken the picture of Barbara and Peter, back in the spring.

  That afternoon, Barbara and Peter played a game of gin rummy. She showed him the new wallet she’d bought that day at Bob’s. In an hour or so, Geoff came back, and he and Peter drove up to Great Barrington to see whether the Shopwell Market, where Geoff sometimes worked, needed him that weekend to work in the deli section. They didn’t. Back at Geoff’s house, he and Peter watched TV until dinnertime. The Madows asked Peter to join them at the table, but he stayed in the den.

  After a while Geoff and Peter drove back to Peter’s. When the boys arrived, Barbara was eating a TV dinner, but Peter said he wasn’t hungry. Geoff sat outside in one of the chairs for a while, holding Barbara’s cat in his lap,
watching the sun set.

  Peter and Geoff were going to a meeting at the Methodist Church in Canaan, a meeting to discuss the future of the Teen Center. In the Lakeville Journal, Joanne Mulhern, wife of State Trooper Jim Mulhern, had said there was very little adult support for the center, and she hoped people would come to the meeting. Joanne and Jim’s son Michael was just a second-grader, but Joanne was interested in the status of teen-agers in the town. All summer long the center had been closed, and Joanne felt the young people needed something to do.

  When Geoff and Peter left the house, each driving his own car, Barbara was watching the news, hollering back at Walter Cronkite. It was twenty minutes past seven. Less than three hours later, Barbara was dead.

  2

  Marion Madow was curled up on the sofa in the den, watching the Friday night movie, when the phone rang. Her mother was sitting at the opposite end of the sofa, with the dachshund nestled in her lap, the dog’s shiny black nose sticking out from under the rainbow-colored afghan. Marion’s sister, who had come up from New York for the weekend, was watching the movie, along with a family friend, a nurse.

  Marion’s husband, Mickey, had been watching television along with the others, but at 9:30, when the Mama Cass special ended and the CBS film, Kelley’s Heroes, began, Mickey wandered out into the living room. He eased into the soft green armchair by the window, looking out onto the blackness of Canaan Mountain, and picked up the new copy of Time.

  It had been a busy day, a busy week, and everyone was glad to relax. Marion had been up at 6:30 that morning, as usual, to make coffee, to put a load of clothes in the washer before she went to work, to get the rest of the household up and moving. Mickey got up without much prodding, but the boys liked to stay in bed in the morning till the last possible moment, and beyond.

  When Arthur had graduated from Regional two years earlier, he’d had trouble finding a job, and Marion worried that Geoff would have trouble too. Jobs were scarce in Canaan. Many of the girls who graduated went to Hartford to work for one of the big insurance companies, or to New Haven to take up nursing. The boys could be hospital orderlies, or they could work for a construction company during the busy summer months and get laid off during the winter. Marion occasionally talked with her boys about their future, encouraging them to think about what they wanted to do. She thought Geoff, with his sense of humor, his gruff, good-humored voice, and his flair for words, would make a good radio announcer, and she was willing to send him to a broadcasting school to be trained.

  As long as the boys had enough money for cigarettes and enough time to tinker with their cars, they seemed content. Almost every night they went down to the basement where they kept their musical equipment; Arthur played the electric guitar, Geoffrey took the drums, and when Peter Reilly came by, he played guitar too. One of the Madow cousins, Jamie, who lived down at the bottom of Locust Hill, often came by to sing. “He’s got a scratchy voice,” Peter would say jokingly, “but he’s comin’ along.”

  Sometimes Marion thought it really would have been better if she and Mickey had stayed in New York and raised their sons there. She felt Art and Geoff had missed something by being brought up in a country town.

  Both Marion and Mickey were New Yorkers, and had lived in the city for a few years when they were newly married. Mickey was a salesman for a construction tool company then. “I broke the territory in Westchester,” Mickey said proudly. They moved to Connecticut in 1950, so Mickey could work out of the home office.

  The boys were born in Canaan. When Geoffrey, the younger boy, started school, Marion went back to work fulltime, as a bookkeeper at Mickey’s office. Marion’s father had died, and her mother Hanna took care of the boys and the house. She cooked big meals and grew plants—Swedish ivy, flowering cactus, and trailing philodendron. The boys called their grandmother Nanny, or Nan, and soon everybody else did too.

  Marion and Mickey, and Mickey’s brother Murray and his wife, Dorothy, were just about the only Jewish families in town. But they seemed to be accepted, especially Mickey. His real name was Meyer, but he was so jaunty and sociable that Mickey seemed a much better name. He became a junior vice-commander at the VFW, and he was always a star of the annual Variety Show. He volunteered for the ambulance corps, and once had his picture taken with Dr. Ernest Izumi, the Assistant Medical Examiner for Litchfield County.

  Marion wasn’t as outgoing as Mickey, but she joined the VFW Auxiliary. Canaan was an easy town for knowing people: Dr. Martin, the dentist; Mario, the barber; and John Bianchi, who had been appointed State’s Attorney for Litchfield County, the prosecutor’s job, in the summer of 1972. Before that, when he was in private practice, John Bianchi had handled Mickey and Marion’s property sale, and he’d handled some matters for Barbara Gibbons, too. He knew about her problems. “Around here, people know when you part your hair,” was a local saying. Sometimes that seemed like a good thing, sometimes not.

  At the VFW Auxiliary, Marion got to know Joanne Mulhern, wife of the state trooper. Jim Mulhern was young. He had a fresh, boyish face, and he seemed especially friendly with young people. They seemed to trust him. One night Arthur Madow was in a car accident in Hudson, New York, and at two in the morning Jim Mulhern was the first person Arthur thought to call. Mulhern got out of bed and drove all the way to Hudson to help Arthur out. In midsummer 1973, the Madows put up new wallpaper in their dinette, a dark blue and red poppy print, and Jim Mulhern came over to help. Then, when Jim Mulhern put in a sidewalk at his house on Church Street, the Madow boys went over to help him. Peter Reilly and Paul Beligni helped too. Sometimes Peter stayed all night at the Madows’, although he usually went home. Barbara was often depressed and drank too much, and although it felt good to be away from her, he always decided, sooner or later, that he ought to go back. Peter felt Barbara needed him. Besides, when he didn’t come home, Barbara often would call up other people’s houses, looking for him. It was easier just to go home. One night near the end of the summer, when Peter had been visiting the Madows and Marion drove him home, Nan went along for the ride. Barbara was sitting outside in the twilight; she’d been reading. Peter hopped out, and Barbara walked over to the car. Barbara knew Marion by sight, but she’d never met Nan, so Peter introduced them.

  Nan motioned toward the house, small and squat, looking closed and even sinister in the gathering dusk, nothing but marsh and the mountain around, and looked at Barbara curiously. “Aren’t you afraid to live out here?” Nan asked Barbara, who laughed and said she kept a gun in the house and was never afraid.

  When the phone rang, Marion was close enough that she could reach out her hand and pick it up, still watching the TV screen. One of Kelley’s men had just jumped up on the tank and yelled to his buddies that he wanted to go with them across the river to get the gold.

  Geoffrey had just come in from the Teen Center meeting. He had picked up a bag of chocolate chip cookies in the kitchen and was walking into the den, taking a bite, as Marion spoke.

  “Your Mom sick, Peter?” the others heard her say. “You call your doctor, and we’ll be right there.”

  Marion hung up quickly. “Peter says he needs the ambulance,” she said. “Something’s happened to his mother.” In the hallway between the den and the living room, Mickey was grabbing for his orange ambulance jacket with VFW in black letters on the back. Geoffrey dashed for the door. His car was out of gas, so he jumped into the little Toyota that belonged to their friend Fran Kaplan, a nurse. Marion, Mickey, and Fran took the Chevelle. By the time they got to the bottom of the hill, Geoffrey and the Toyota were out of sight.

  At the four-way stop by the Arco station, Mickey made a quick left and drove faster. The ambulance was parked at Geer, the nursing home across from the VFW. When they got there the three of them jumped out of the car and ran to the ambulance. Within seconds they were back on Route 7, heading south.

  Peter stood at the edge of the road, waiting. It was very dark. The floodlights that Barbara used to read by, at the corners o
f the house, were turned off. Peter hadn’t turned them on because the switch was in the closet, in the rear room. He didn’t want to go through the bedroom, so he waited in the dark. The gas station across the road was closed. The night was thick and black as Peter strained to see.

  Then he saw the headlights of the Toyota, pinpoints of light that grew rounder and brighter as the little car hurtled down the long straight stretch of road. Geoffrey braked sharply and leaped out. He ran over to Peter.

  “Where is she?” Geoff asked.

  “She’s in the bedroom,” Peter said.

  Geoff ran toward the house, with Peter just behind him. Geoff didn’t wait at the door. He raced right in, into the living room, to the bedroom door. Then he stopped.

  Barbara lay sprawled on the floor, a pool of blood around her neck. Her short black curly hair was soggy with blood. Her throat had been slashed and her vocal cords hung out. She was nearly beheaded.

  In the light from the clamp-on reading lamp, Barbara’s body shone whitely, the blood glaring around her. There were gaping cuts in her stomach. Three of her ribs were broken, and both her thighbones were broken too. Her legs were spread apart; she was nude. Her blue jeans and underpants lay beside her body, soaking wet. Barbara’s left arm was lying flat, but her right arm was bent at the elbow, in an upraised position. Her right fist was clenched. Her nose was broken. Her eyes were blackened and staring open.

  Geoff stared at Barbara. He turned and stared at Peter.

  Peter looked blankly at Geoff. “Well, come on then,” Peter said after a moment, his voice tight. “Let’s go outside.”