Bellows Falls Read Free Page B

feeling comparatively sane. We still didn’t have enough time to ourselves, but we were at last enjoying what little we could get.
    I was therefore in an unguarded mood when Chief Tony Brandt appeared in my office doorway and inquired, “You have much on your plate right now? Or anyone you can spare?”
    I waved a hand at the paperwork before me. “My head’s above water. I don’t know about the others. Why?”
    He entered and sat in my guest chair, wedged between the door and a filing cabinet. “I just got a call from Emile Latour. He needs a little digging done on one of his officers.”
    Latour was Tony’s counterpart in Bellows Falls, a small industrial-era town a half-hour’s drive north of Brattleboro, just inside the northern reaches of Windham County. “Who’s the officer?”
    “Brian Padget. Two-year man, good record, well liked. It’s a sexual harassment claim filed by some woman’s husband. Emile was wondering if we could lend him someone to conduct a quick internal on it.”
    I made a face. The request was not unusual. If a grievance was filed against a department or one of its officers, and the outfit was too small to have its own Internal Affairs division, it was routine to ask another agency to supply an investigator. The task was usually mundane—often going through the motions to make everyone feel better. The majority were crank cases resulting in the officer involved being cleared, a happy circumstance that never helped the guy conducting the investigation—that poor bastard was always stamped a Judas before he even reached town.
    I hedged my response. “I take it you’d like us to accept.”
    “Latour’s a decent guy. It helps to be friendly.”
    “Have they even looked into it? Sexual harassment’s a bit of a catchall. Maybe they could handle it themselves.”
    Brandt shrugged. “I didn’t ask. Could be they’re just playing it safe.”
    “You give him a deadline on how many days we can spend on it?”
    “Not in so many words, but I’m guessing a couple.”
    I flipped the pencil I was holding onto my desk. “All right, but I won’t saddle anyone else with it. I’ll do it myself.”
    · · ·
    Bellows Falls is a troubled community. A village swallowed whole by a cantankerous township, developmentally stalled since the Great Depression, and, reduced to being the bedroom to almost every other town within a half-hour’s commute, it has a dour and pessimistic self-image out of all proportion to its size.
    It is not big. The village covers a single square mile. It is also strikingly photogenic, as much for its glut of statuesque nineteenth century mansions as for its glumly quaint, abandoned factories. Seen from the air, Bellows Falls protrudes like a pregnant stomach into the Connecticut River, forming a tight half-circle, at the apex of which is the dramatic, rocky cascade that gives the town its name. It owes its existence to that water’s energy, which in the early years gave the upstart, industrially minded settlers an advantage over their more staid agrarian neighbors. For a succession of grist mills, rag-paper plants, and pulp mills, the ceaseless water became literal life blood, supplying power, spawning river, rail and road transportation, and creating other tangential manufacturing. Now, as if personifying the village’s current impotence, the Connecticut’s flow is controlled by a dam sluicing water down the remains of an old canal to feed the turbines of a local utility company.
    Its picture postcard prettiness may in fact best represent Bellows Falls’ most paradoxical irony—that while most other places proudly point to a few older buildings as standard-bearers of an earlier time, the past is about all this town has left to brag about. It is a pantheon of long-vanished industrial might. Ancient red brick shells can find but a few new tenants, a once thriving railroad junction has been reduced to a single platform, and the elaborate mansions have mostly been diced