Tucker Peak Read Online Free

hitting a mule with a two-by-four.”
    “So there’s no truth to it?”
    “I don’t know,” he said with disgust. “That’s your job.”
    · · ·
    I found Willy sitting quietly in the car, staring out the window at the view.
    I didn’t start the engine immediately. “Am I going to have problems with you on this?”
    He remained looking straight ahead. “I was just asking myself the same thing.”
    “And?”
    “Not if I don’t have to spend any more time with him.”
    I turned the ignition key. “Deal.”

Chapter 3
    IT HAD BEEN WHOLLY APPROPRIATE TO DRIVE OUT TO Tucker Peak on a Saturday on Snuffy Dawson’s request, but given the low profile of the crime and our own budgetary constraints, I was now happy to drop Willy off outside the office and just quickly double-check by phone that the sheriff’s deputies had filed the initial paperwork, processed the evidence, and set all the appropriate electronic inquiries into motion. After that, I headed back home to my woodworking shop.
    Not that my project there was anything monumental. In fact, I was replacing an elaborately shaped but cracked wooden seat from a chair belonging to Gail Zigman, the woman with whom I’d eccentrically shared my life for just under twenty years.
    We weren’t married, and we didn’t live together, although we had briefly not long before. But through thick and thin, some of it quite traumatic, we’d proven to ourselves and to each other that we were as closely intertwined as any couple we knew.
    Gail was younger than I, born to privilege in New York City. Well traveled and highly educated, she had come to Brattleboro at the height of the commune movement to try living a life far different from that of her parents. Living the countercultural life in Vermont hadn’t been a waste of time. It had opened her eyes to values she still held dear. But it had also been relatively short-lived. Within a few years, she’d yielded to an ingrained and natural ambition and had joined the town’s business and political world, growing and evolving over a couple of decades from successful Realtor to selectman to deputy state’s attorney, to where she’d recently become legal counsel to VermontGreen, the state’s preeminent environmental group, based in the capital city of Montpelier.
    Now, Gail was one of that growing class of professionals who’d taken advantage of computers, faxes, and cell phones to stretch the lines connecting her to the office. When the state’s citizen-legislature was in session, roughly from January to April or May, she lived in a condo in Montpelier so she could watch the political pot. The rest of the time, she worked out of the house we’d once shared in West Brattleboro, from which the chair I was repairing had come.
    As foolish as it sounded for a man of my years, I was intent on returning to my repair job less for the daunting task of making a new piece match an old chair, and more because handling it brought me at least tangentially closer to Gail.
    We didn’t live apart because of any friction. We didn’t argue, or dislike each other’s politics or eating habits or taste in late-night movies. It was more that since we’d met later in life—I a widower and a settled, lifelong cop; she a professional woman increasingly eager for a new challenge—we’d already come to terms with the bachelor lives we’d adopted. We instinctively needed more breathing space than a younger couple and were less willing to compromise for the sake of steady companionship.
    In the end, it had been neither easier nor harder than an old-fashioned marriage. It had merely evolved into something rich and rewarding enough to keep us coming back for more.
    So, I kept at my project for the rest of the weekend, until by Sunday night I fitted a reasonably antiqued seat between the old and slightly battered legs, arms, and back of a hundred-year-old wooden chair, knowing that the effort I’d put into it would count for more with Gail than