Bury the Lead by Archer Mayor

Author:Archer Mayor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Pat Smith had been correct about Bob Beaupré’s pickup. Joe discovered it—suitably dusty and utilitarian—parked on the edge of the pea-stoned dooryard fronting the house. Right beside the Cadillac Escalade and Porsche Boxster GTS, both of which were being needlessly washed, it appeared, by a man in dark blue utility clothes, outside the five-door garage.

Joe was in Colchester, Vermont, north of Burlington, and a fifteen-minute commute from GreenField’s corporate headquarters, in front of a home of—if such a term existed—rich, rural excess.

It was probably called a log cabin by its owner, and it appeared to be built of felled trees. But that’s where this and any notion of what Jeremiah Johnson might have called home parted ways.

It was large enough to make Joe stand and stare for a while, soaking it in.

“Nice, ain’t it?”

Joe turned to see the car washer watching him, the hose in his hand still dripping.

“You probably see a lot of people with their mouths open,” Joe said.

“Fair share,” the man said. “It’s not the kind of place most’re used to. Not around here.”

“Reminds me of those tourist lodges you see out West,” Joe observed. “Yellowstone or somewhere. How big is this?”

“Seven thousand square feet.”

“Damn.”

Joe studied the man more carefully—less the clothes and more the way he carried himself—before asking, “How long ago did you build it?”

Bob Beaupré chuckled and laid the hose on the ground, wiping his hands on his pants to dry them. “Busted. Most people just walk by me. Course, you’re not them, are you?”

“That can be good or bad,” Joe said, shaking hands. “Joe Gunther.”

“Call me Bob,” Beaupré requested, not bothering to answer the question. “You’re the one who phoned. You like to come in?”

“Absolutely.”

With Beaupré preceding him, Joe stepped into a home with decor deserving of Newport, Rhode Island. The lobby’s arched and timbered ceiling lofted overhead, anchored by a chandelier made of an enormous stripped and lacquered tree trunk, festooned with lights running along its spider-leg-like roots, but modestly sized in these surroundings.

Joe’s host took him through a dining hall big enough for the Round Table, and into a library out of My Fair Lady, complete with two-story bookcases, a second-floor gallery running around its periphery, and a wrought iron spiral staircase in one corner.

Joe kept his counsel about all of it, but his expression was obviously not so guarded. Beaupré caught his look and smiled. “I know,” he said. “I went a little nuts. I saw too many musicals. Have a seat.” He gestured to a pair of leather armchairs before a movie-screen-sized row of French windows revealing what the massive house had been blocking: a broad wooden deck with a view of Malletts Bay, looking out onto Lake Champlain—comparable to something Joe imagined might be visible from the bridge of the Queen Elizabeth, as she was about to set sail.

“You want coffee or something?” Beaupré asked, settling in and looking like the groundskeeper taking liberties in the boss’s absence. Joe noticed that he’d left a trail of wet footprints upon entering the building.

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