But he’d been wrong.
Rose Yates was a fortress wall, smooth and solid, with no place for handholds.
Colin paused for one last moment before getting in the cruiser waiting for him. One breath. Three seconds of silence. Then he opened the passenger-side door and slid in.
“No go?” Officer Drew Simmons—Colin’s local PD escort while he was in Bury—started the ignition, and cool air blew from the Dodge Charger’s air vents. Colin hadn’t been expecting seventy-degree weather in New Hampshire in the second half of October.
“Negative,” Colin said.
“So now what?”
“ I go back to Milwaukee tonight.”
“That’s a shame,” Simmons said.
“Yeah.” Colin sighed. “It is.”
Simmons pulled the cruiser from Tuli’s parking lot and turned right on Bryson Street toward the police station, about a mile away. He kept to the speed limit, bringing all other cars around theirs to the exact same speed. Everyone’s cautious around a cop, Colin thought. Some of the folks in traffic just didn’t want a ticket. Others perhaps really had something to hide, maybe the kind of crime that only gets discovered after a routine traffic stop.
Colin scanned the rows of houses along the boulevard, sensing he was staring at a Norman Rockwell painting. After taking in the town for a few seconds, he turned to Simmons. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-five.”
“And you said you grew up here?”
“That’s right.”
“What was that like? I mean, this place seems so perfect.”
Simmons shrugged, as if he had never considered his childhood before. “It was okay. Boring, I suppose. I’m sure my parents hoped I’d do something other than be a cop, but it’s what I wanted.”
“Boring,” Colin repeated. “Nothing exciting ever happened?”
Simmons turned to him. “Exciting like how?”
Ever since Colin had found out about Clara Tomson, he couldn’t get the write-what-you-know notion out of his head. It was an overly simplified and ignorant notion, of course. Writers didn’t only write what they knew. There would never be a Game of Thrones or Pet Sematary if wild imagination didn’t come into play.
But Colin had also learned to listen to himself. When an idea struck him in a certain way, as obtuse as it might be, he’d learned how to nurture that idea until it yielded something of substance. The idea that Clara Tomson committed murder when she was a teen and then lived the rest of her life writing mystery novels… Well, that struck Colin in a certain way, especially when he added Rose Yates into that same thought process.
“Crime,” Colin said. “What kind of crime you have here?”
“What, growing up or now?”
“Has it changed?”
Simmons allowed a grin. “Not really. Nothing here much changes. You’ve seen the board at the station. Not a lot on it.”
“Pretty quiet town.”
“We’re in the top three safest cities in New Hampshire. Truth is, it’s just that kind of area. Was the same way when I was a kid. Never really had to worry about being out at night, things like that.”
The Pleasantville metaphor was becoming even more apt. “But you have crime,” Colin said. “Every place has crime.”
“Sure, of course we do. Had a rape a couple of years ago.”
In Madison, they had over a hundred rapes in Colin’s last year there before he’d transferred to Milwaukee. That was a much bigger city with a large university population, but still.
“Okay, what else?” Colin asked.
Simmons thought about it. “Car break-ins. The occasional DUI. Maybe three or four legit house burglaries a year. A couple of months ago, a guy torched his self-storage unit. Turned out he was going through a nasty divorce and wanted to burn all his wife’s stuff.”
Colin processed this. He supposed given Bury’s size—just about seven thousand—it wasn’t unusual to have such a low crime rate. He also knew the socioeconomic profile of the town had a lot to do with it. Affluent white folks were less inclined to commit crimes warranting a 911 call. The crimes likely being committed in Bury were the less obvious ones. Those involving offshore accounts, routing numbers, and shell corporations.
Then there were the vices of the rich.
“Does Bury have a drug problem?”
“Nah,” Simmons said. “Not like Manchester or anything like that. Some heroin issues, some opioid abuse. Nothing off the charts. Other than that, yeah, we’ve busted some kids with coke at parties. Some pot. Nothing more than recreational. No large-scale dealers or anything.”
“And murder?”
Simmons shook his head. “No, sir. At least not since I’ve been on the force the last two years. Had three suicides. One vehicular manslaughter. But no murders.”
Not that you know of, Colin thought, not really knowing why that thought popped into his head.
“When was the last murder in Bury?”
Simmons thought about it a minute, then shook his head. “Can’t say I know. Like I said, it’s just not that kind of place.”
Moments later, they arrived at the station. Colin had a couple hours before he had to leave for the airport, so he worked at an open desk and caught up with paperwork. He also spent some time chatting with Wallace Sike, the Bury chief of police. Sike had been around about a decade and mostly confirmed what Simmons had said.
“Ayuh, Bury’s pretty quiet. Lower crime rate than Hillsborough County as a whole, that’s for sure. We assist the other jurisdictions more than they assist us.” Sike appeared on the edge of fifty and had a mustache as bushy as a raccoon tail, completely hiding his upper lip. His pronounced gut affirmed the fact that he didn’t spend a lot of his day running down suspects. “But there’ve been murders over the years, no doubt about it. Can’t think of any place without a murder every now and then. But ours are extremely few and far between.”
“When was the last one?” Colin asked.
“Been seven years. Manchester is the murder capital of the county, but they only average about one homicide a year up there. Though a few years back, they had that whole Mister Tender mess. Not sure if you heard about that, but made national news.”
Colin indeed remembered.
“Did you
