Chapter 2

Three years earlier, before I first took over as crisis service manager, Jimmy’s policy was that, once the cops showed up on the scene, our obligations ended and we could go home.

The problem with that policy was that it turned a mental health problem into a law enforcement problem, which was just bass-ackwards to my way of looking at things. We were the ones with the training and degrees in this field, not the cops.

A couple weeks before Jimmy turned the crisis service over to me, I was out on a call, my very first time in the rotation. I was in Foo Berry. Well, we called it Foo Berry. The little town was actually named Foughbury, pronounced FOH-burr-ee. But, trust me, it wasn’t the worst of the jokes that went around about the place.

Foughbury didn’t have a police force. They had an elected justice of the peace they called their town marshal. He wasn’t even full time, but owned one of the two gas stations in town. The other gas station owner was the chief of their volunteer fire department. Of course, I didn’t know all this back then. I was pronouncing the town’s name as FOW-berry and my only instruction in local crisis procedures had been Jimmy’s “Good luck!”

It was the Saturday night of my Monday-to-Monday week on crisis rotation and I was starting to think I might get through the week without any calls, when my cell phone started buzzing at 02:37 on Sunday morning.

I was always able to wake up pretty quickly, when necessary.

“Coldwater County crisis service, this is Gary, how can I help you?”

“Gary, this is Ben Vernon, I’m the town marshal down here in Foughbury.” It took me a second to put the pronunciation together with the name I’d been mangling.

“Oh,” I said, “Foughbury, that’s how you pronounce it. What can I do for you, Marshal Vernon?”

He chuckled. “Yeah, there’s still a few of us purists.” Then, again serious, “I’ve got a situation here that I don’t quite know how to handle. Got a guy, mid-twenties, in his mother’s house, threatening suicide, says he’s got a gun. I know he’s had psychiatric care in the past. He may have been drinking, I’m just not sure.”

“Is his mother there, at the house?”

“No, no. She’s out a’ town. I reckon that’s why this is happening. She usually rides herd on ‘im.”

“Do you think he’s got a gun?”

“Oh, probably.”

“So, what? You want me to come down there?”

“If you would. I’m way the hell out ‘a my depth here. I could call a reserve deputy, but he’ll have no more idea what to do than I have.”

“Okay, tell me how to find you and I’ll leave soon’s I get some pants on, be there quick as I can.”

“Just come to the flashing traffic light, turn left, then second right, you’ll see my strobe.”

“Probably thirty minutes.”

“I’ll be here. Bye.” Click.

Greta, my wife, hadn’t even stirred. I left a note on my pillow.

Got there in twenty-two minutes. Didn’t see a single other moving vehicle once I left Leaufroide. Foughbury was small, maybe ten square blocks, and I quickly found Vernon’s pickup with the magnetic-mount blue strobe on its roof, the type of emergency light that plugged into the cigarette lighter.

It was a night to remember: Blood-smeared walls, firearms slipped through a dark bedroom window, capturing a bleeding drunk, a call to my boss for guidance -- and his useless recommendation that I do whatever I wanted. It was a slow-motion circus.

As I parked, nose-in to his truck, Vernon waved me over. Tne truck had a crew cab, and I got in the front passenger seat. Ben Vernon turned out to be a forty-ish guy of medium height and weight, pleasant-looking, with a receding hairline that presaged male pattern baldness. He was friendly and good-humored, and we decided to work out what to do as we went along.

After I clicked off from my useless call to Jimmy, Vernon said, “I know where his mom keeps the rest of her guns. While he’s in the living room, I can get into the bedroom through the window and get the guns from the chest at the foot of the bed. C’mon. You can stand outside the window and I’ll pass ‘em to you.” Which is what we did.

It was a single story house with old-style, double-hung windows. Not locked, of course. I helped boost him through the window, then waited in the shrubbery, outside the dark window. Soon enough, he began passing me guns from out of the bedroom’s shadows: two rifles, two shotguns, and three pistols, two semi-automatics and a long-barreled revolver. He also handed me a wool army blanket which we subsequently used to wrap up the firearms. He put the bundle on a high shelf in the detached garage behind the house. The garage, too, had been unlocked.

Then we went to the front door and cautiously entered the house. We found a man, of smaller stature, facing the hallway wall, slowly moving sideways, deliberately smearing blood from his slashed wrists on the wall as he went along. Ben handed me a set of disposable gloves and pulled on a pair, himself. Then we each grabbed an arm and walked the unresisting man over to the couch and sat on either side of him. He was singing some sad country-western song in a fairly decent voice. The cuts on his wrists were superficial, but messy. We found a revolver on the end table.

Vernon said, “I’ve got a first aid kit in the truck. Be right back.”

As soon as Vernon went out the door, the guy went to smear his blood on my shirt, but I caught his arms and held him away. It wasn’t much of a struggle, but his beery breath defined the real problem.

Vernon was back in barely a minute with a small suitcase with a big label depicting a blue Rod of Asclepius superimposed on a six-pointed star.

“I’m an EMT, too,” he said, “on the volunteer ambulance crew.”

He cleaned and bandaged the wounds while describing the man’s history of what were likely manic-depressive episodes. By this time, the young man had fallen asleep, his head resting on the back of the couch.

I asked, “How do you know all this? And how did you know where she kept the guns?”

He kept working and just chuckled. “You didn’t grow up in a small town, did you?”

I admitted I hadn’t.

He said, “Probably most of the adults in Foughbury, half the kids, too, could tell you everything I just told you, even to where she keeps her guns.” He chuckled again. “Living in a small town is like living in a fishbowl. Everyone knows everything about everybody else.”

Vernon closed up the medical kit, then gave me a speculative look. “Ah...,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“I know it’s not Health Center policy, but would you ride over to the state hospital with me? I hate to take the ambulance and a crew away from town. This guy’ll probably sleep all the way there, but just in case.”

I thought about it for a moment. “Sure, what the hell. In for a dime, in for a dollar. Let me call my wife. She works at the Center, too, and can take over the call line for me.”

The phone rang fifteen times before Greta answered it. I told her where I was headed and that I’d keep the phone on and only call her if there was something that needed handling. Greta was a counselor in the substance abuse program and a member of the crisis on-call team. She could fill in for me while I was over in Plattsburg, if there was a pressing need.

She said, “Jimmy’s policy is to turn it over to the cops and go home. He never rides over to the state hospital. Nobody else does, either.”

“I called Jimmy. He said I could do what I wanted. I’m gonna ride along.”

“Alright, but you’ll owe me a day when my next week comes around.”

“No problem.”

“I’m going back to sleep.”

“See you later.”

On the mostly deserted mountain roads, with the strobe on, but no siren, we made the forty-six miles to the hospital in just under an hour.

But the state hospital doctor, seeing the wrist wounds, wouldn’t admit the man until he’d been cleared through the local ER at the Plattsburg Regional Medical Center. It was a big name for a sixty-bed hospital that boasted some advanced diagnostic equipment and a Level III trauma center. The ER doc just cleaned and redressed the wounds, exactly as Venom had. Fortunately, we found an insurance card in our man’s wallet.

While that ER detour cost us another hour and fifteen minutes, it did allow me to get all the paperwork completed, so we were finished at the state hospital fifteen minutes after we got back there.

Vernon offered to buy me breakfast and I admitted as to how I was getting hungry. I thought he’d go to some little storefront, mom-and-pop diner in town. Instead, he pulled in at The Kitchen Table, a chain restaurant that was frequently found near second-tier motel franchises, like Motel Belle, the one out by the interstate. He said he liked the Kitchen Table’s spinach, Swiss, and mushroom omelet. I tried one and it became the first of many over the next few years.

Vernon said he’d try to locate the mom and give her my name. I got home a few minutes before eight and went back to bed, careful not to disturb Greta.

Two weeks later, Jimmy, apparently miffed that I hadn’t maintained his dump-it-on-the-cops-and-go-home practice, dumped the whole crisis program on my desk. I was to be in charge, having all the responsibility, but no actual authority, at least not over staff from other teams.

That was three years ago. It was also what led to my friendship with Tate Plummer.

About a month after I’d taken over the crisis service, I was in my office on a Monday morning when I got a call on the county’s direct-dial extension system. The system allowed one county phone extension to dial another county phone extension without going through The Phone Company and the various department switchboards. Those calls rang with two short beeps rather than the longer single tone of outside calls.

“Mental Health, this is Gary.”

“Gary, this is Tate Plummer, over in the sheriff’s office. Wonder if you might help me with somethin’?”

I was a bit nonplussed, still relatively new and not having spoken with the county sheriff before.

“Well, sure, Sheriff Plummer. I’ll help if I can.”

“We’ve got a situation over in Limekiln. Woman over there has been taking the odd pot shot at things in town, y’know, with her rifle. John Durkee, ah, one of the deputies, is over there keepin’ an eye on things, but we need to, ah, get this under control so folks can go about their business. Thing is, I know this woman’s been drinkin’ and that she got into a big fight with her ex-husband last night. But she also’s been under psychiatric care and takes prescription meds for whatever sort of problem she has. It’s kind of a tricky situation and, ah...”

“Sheriff, what is it you’d like me to do?”

“Well, would you ride over there with me and talk with her when we get things settled? Her family’s sort of a, ah, big deal over there and I don’t want to do anything that isn’t, ah, necessary.”

“You got it Sheriff. You want me to drive over to your office?”

“Nah, I’ll pick you up out back a’ the Center in a few minutes.” He hung up.

I grabbed my crisis portfolio, which, besides various admission and commitment forms and a condensed version of the “Papa” diagnostic handbook, now included some extra-large disposable rubber gloves. I was barely out the door before the sheriff’s cruiser was pulling up in the parking lot behind the Center, which occupied two of the four buildings of a former Rosencian seminary, on a hillside at the edge of town. The other two buildings were occupied by the county commission and other elected county officers and by the county and district courts.

Contrary to what I expected of a top cop, it turned out that Tate Plummer drove the oldest car in the sheriff’s five-car fleet. His policy was to let the deputies who were doing the patrol work use the better equipment. Consequently, his first words to me after I got in the passenger seat were, “Sorry for the smell.” A lingering sour odor of sweat, vomit, and other human excretions was noticeable, but not overpowering.

It was hard to guess Tate Plummer’s age. He had one of those boyish faces that seemed to defy aging. He was clean shaven and had brown hair worn short but just long enough to comb. As I was to learn later, he was lanky and might have had an inch or two on me. His face reminded me of some of those cowboy movie heroes from the 1930s. I had to suppress a smile because he just looked like a sheriff should look, to my thinking, anyway.

As we pulled away from the Center and headed back down into town, he switched on the lights and siren, though he kept his speed in check and concentrated on traffic, pausing at every stop sign and the only two traffic signals in Leaufroide. Once we’d passed under the interstate, though, he opened it up.

“Call me Tate, Gary. Bit of a hurry. John called in that she shot out a window at the market. Nobody was hurt, but still ... Folks are generally tolerant of her quirks, but then she hasn’t ever shot into town before. Usually, she just shoots up stuff in her back yard, which is up against a mountain, so no one minds.”

We were passing other vehicles and the traffic demanded his full concentration for a few minutes. Then he went on.

“I’m not exactly sure what her problem is, mental-wise, I mean. She sees some shrink over to Kingston. Been on the wagon for a few months, but fell off last night after arguin’ with her ex-husband. Actually, I don’t know if the arguin’ came first or the drinkin’ did. I’d guess the arguin’, though they were at the bar at the time.”

He shook his head and fell silent.

“What’s her name?”

“Ah, Evelyn Durkee.”

“Like your deputy?”

“Yeah, John’s her ex-brother-in-law. More like it’s the Durkee family that’s the big deal out there. Used to own a major spread, but Travis Durkee’s kids eventually sold it off. Nobody wanted to be farmers and ranchers. Can’t blame ‘em. Done some a’ that myself.

“Anyway, Evelyn got the big ol’ family house as part of the divorce settlement. It’s only on a few acres, now. Lives there by herself. With lots of cats. Her ex, John’s brother, Nick, lives over in Plattsburg. Must’ve come over for John’s birthday, yesterday. Think I’ll suggest they celebrate in Plattsburg next year.” He explained that John Durkee was the sergeant who supervised the sheriff’s department patrol service.

Within a few minutes we were approaching the village of Limekiln, clustered on the rising, open slope of the valley where it met the mountain forest. Tate killed the siren.

“When we get there, you just stay with the car. I’ll give a shout when we’re ready for you.”

“Works for me. The only police procedures I know are from cop shows on TV. I count waiting on hold and staying out of the way as two of my more practiced skills.”

He glanced at me, then grinned. “So, you don’t want my extra six-shooter, then?”

“Well, probably not today. But I’ll start practicin’ my quick draw, so I won’t have to be a wallflower at your next shindig.”

He chuckled. “Heard you were a city boy, from Vernon, over at Foughbury. Didn’t expect you to cotton on to our country ways. Yee-ha!”

“Yee-ha yourself, Sheriff.”

“It’s Tate, Gary. Oops, here we are. Where ‘n hell’s John?”

“That him, over by that tree?”

“That’s him. Remember, stay here ‘til I call.”

“You got it.”

Between the two of them, they managed to outmaneuver Evelyn Durkee, who’d fallen asleep on her front porch swing. She was not happy to be awakened. And her continued belligerence meant that she had to be in custody somewhere, so Tate decided to do an emergency mental health admission. In fact, I couldn’t disagree.

John Durkee, to whom I was introduced, said that, as far as he could determine from the reports of other people in town, she hadn’t had but a couple drinks, and those before eleven the night before. So her current agitated condition didn’t appear to be directly alcohol-related.

However, there was no record of her ever having been evaluated by the county mental health program (I called in to check), so I didn’t have anything to go on except her lengthy string of profane invectives that were aimed at Tate, John, and, finally, me. I’d asked a few evaluative questions, but they’d only been met with more vulgarities, so I gave it up. With what little I knew, the best I could diagnose was a manic episode of unknown cause. By that time, they had her handcuffed and in the back of Tate’s cruiser.

Tate said, to me, “How ‘bout I buy you lunch? I know a great Mexican restaurant over in Plattsburg.”

“Would that be before or after we drop off Missus Durkee at the hospital?”

“Reckon after would make the food taste even better.”

I had to smile at his approach. I said, “Works for me. Do I get to play with the lights and siren?”

And so I got to be a nodding acquaintance with the county sheriff.

A few weeks later, I answered another double-beep ring on my phone.

“Mental Health, this is Gary.”

“Gary, it’s Tate Plummer.”

“What, need another date for a gunfight?”

“Well, you never called, you never wrote...”

“Okay, you win. What’s up?”

“Someone said you were good at grant writing.”

“Trained, yes. Experienced, yes. But good? Jury’s still out.”

“Tell you what I’ve got goin’. I’m, ah, workin’ up a request for some Homeland Security money for a few jail upgrades. Better kitchen equipment, some recreation stuff, a couple monitoring cameras. But this ain’t the kind of paperwork I’m used to and I don’t want to waste a bunch a’ time if I’m blowin’ smoke up the wrong, ah, whatever.”

“Well,” I said, “the most common screw-up is not giving the granting agency exactly what they ask for, like sending a copy of a bank account statement instead of a bona fide financial statement, or skipping some of the questions.”

“Okay. Makes sense. But I’m stuck on whether or not this request for proposals even covers the sort of improvements I’m looking for. Any chance I could get you to take a look at it and see if I’m even in the right ball park?”

“Sure. Email me a copy, or give me a URL to look at and I’ll check it out today, get back to you no later than tomorrow morning, even if it’s to tell you I got no, ah, whatever idea.”

“So I won’t need this arrest warrant?”

“Not this time. Maybe save it to get me to attend the next Fourth of July parade. I mean, a parade that goes up the street, then turns around and comes back? And it’s still over in ten minutes? And what’s parade-worthy about manure spreaders? You looked good, though. I saw they let you drive the new cruiser.”

“Yeah, but they put a governor on the throttle. That’s as fast as I could get it to go. But, okay, I’ll email a link. I appreciate this, Gary.”

“No biggie. Talk to you later, or early tomorrow.”

That’s how we ended up with a whole new jail -- I mean, Detention Center. And it’s how Tate and I became friends.

Prior to the latest Wall Street Recession, the community mental health services and the substance abuse rehabilitation services in Leaufroide had been provided by independent agencies, two non-profit corporations operating on state and county grants and on earned revenue through fees and insurance billing, including Medicaid and Medicare. At the same time, public health services, as was common throughout the U.S., were provided directly by the county government.

But the recession put everyone, everywhere, in a bind -- well, except maybe in Tribeca, Central Park South, and Hudson Yards in New York City. But at the local non-profits, staff took pay cuts, there were layoffs, programs were reduced or abandoned, and still the supporting funds shrank. The bind had become a choke hold.

In desperation, the Leaufroide mental health and substance abuse agencies’ boards of directors met with the county commissioners to work out a solution. At the end of the day, the independent agencies agreed to turn over their assets to the county in return for the county operating a combined services organization, Coldwater County Health and Human Services, with three major service divisions: Public Health (PH), Community Mental Health (CMH), and Substance Abuse Rehabilitation (SAR). There were also three ancillary services: Developmental Disabilities Habilitation (DDH), an Administrative Services Team (AST), and a Discretionary Services Team (DST), the latter sort of a catch-all for the odds and ends of county outreach services, like Veterans Services, Housing Assistance, and the county extension agent.

It was only a few days after that agreement was signed that the county had the rug pulled out from under it: the county, virtually everyone that worked for it -- commissioners, all the departments and the courts -- were being forced out of the historical county courthouse. Only the sheriff department was unaffected, as their offices were in a separate building with the old jail.

The three-story Coldwater County Courthouse served as the central location for all the traditional county departments: county clerk, treasurer, tax assessor, planning, roads, building and land use, parks and wildlands, and public health, as well as the county and district courts and the district attorney. The courthouse, an ornate Victorian edifice, was constructed in 1888, toward the end of the Embargo Mountains silver rush.

Unfortunately, it was built on a loose rubble foundation, which was now failing. Moreover, itsa brick structure and fascia had been laid using a mortar of porous quality that was, itself, crumbling, especially over the worst portions of the deteriorating foundation. Well over a century and a quarter of the mountain valley’s winter freeze and thaw cycles had taken a heavy toll. The entire structure was compromised. The state condemned the building and ordered the county to move out within ninety days.

Of a quite different background, some fifty years before, the Rosencians, a Roman Catholic religious order, had built a seminary at the northeast edge of Leaufroide. The purpose of this religious college was to train priests and brothers to proselytize in the Catholic foreign missions of Asia, Micronesia, Latin America, and Africa. The post-World War Two baby boom had seen a significant uptick in the number of young Catholic men being drawn to a vocation in the priesthood. (‘Nuff said about that.)

The seminary’s architecture was modern rather than traditional, an experiment in design that was glass and steel, rather than brick and stone, spare and square rather than embellished and arched. It consisted of four interlinked buildings: three two-story structures and one three-story, two of which had additional, walk-out ground floors. The complex presented a striking edifice on the slope of a wooded foothill of the Embargo Mountains, overlooking the town. The subdued, modern buildings in the rustic, natural setting provided a contrasting aspect that was, at once, both ethereal and restful.

Even so, in the later decades of the Twentieth Century, and into the Twenty-first, fewer and fewer young men joined the ranks of the Rosencians, similar to the experience of virtually all other Catholic religious orders in the United States. Finally, the Rosencian North American Provincial Council decided to consolidate their western-U.S. training programs at a seminary near Grants Pass, in Oregon, and put the Leaufroide property on the market.

The real estate market being what it was, following the recession, the vacated seminary, an unusually large complex for such a rural area, languished for years on the sales lists. It was becoming a trysting place for young lovers and the target of vandals.

Of a sudden, however, Coldwater County had urgent need of a large facility in which to relocate their operations, including the newly expanded Health Services.

It was a match, some said, that was made in heaven.

Using emergency funds from the state, and with a complex land deal that sold off thirty-five of the forty acres that the seminary sat on to the National Forest, the county was able to purchase the former religious training school and convert it to its purposes.

Wednesday, June 5

My office was on the first floor of the former Saint Maurice Hall, now prosaically re-named Building Three. It was the former dean of student’s office, which included a smallish bedroom and a larger outer office. I used the former as my office and the latter as a conference and interview room.

It was a Wednesday morning, two days after I’d put Caldwell on the bus and the day after Tate helped me get Richie Jenner over to Plattsburg. My phone emitted the two-beep signal of an internal call.

“Mental Health, this is Gary.”

“Hey. It’s Tate.”

“Howdy, Sheriff. What are you after, now? A helicopter? Air Force One?”

His tone remained measured. “Did you hear about that pedestrian killed on the interstate, up at the Junction, Monday night?”

“Uh, yeah. Some folks were talking about it in the bakery. Why?”

“Turns out it was that guy you talked to in the jail, Monday afternoon. That Caldwell kid.”

“Holy shit!”

“There’s more, Gary. The state patrol says he wasn’t walking along the interstate. Seems he jumped from the Route Thirty-Nine overpass, right in front of a semi doing about sixty.”

“Oh, fuck! Shit-shit-shit-shit-shit! Holy Christ! I have never been so fucking wrong in my life. That poor sonuvabitch! FUCK ME!”

“Yeah, figured you might feel that way. Listen, reckon it’s little comfort, but Jerry said he and all the jail officers read that guy the same way you did, same’s the city cops who brought him in.”

“Nah! This is on me. I was being arrogant, I had the goddamn bit in my teeth. Poor dumb bastard showed me. Holy shit. I should’ve just sent the kid over to Plattsburg. He was only fuckin’ nineteen! He might ‘a put all that shit away, a few more years of frontal lobe development. Never happen now. Ah, damn me to hell!”

“How ‘bout you and Greta come over for some burgers or something, tonight, right after work, have a couple beers?”

“Huh? What? Tonight? I don’t know, I don’t think, uh...”

“Don’t be a bigger ass than you already are. Never mind. I’ll have Louise call Greta. Then you won’t have to do any decidin’. If you’re lucky, they may return your free will to you sometime next week.”

Just then, a tall, thin, bearded, thirty-eight year-old man stood in my door.

“Got ‘a go. My boss just walked in.”

“Good luck!” Tate said, and he clicked off.

Jimmy Schuster sat down in one of my side chairs, crossed his legs, rested his elbows on the chair arms, tented his fingers in front of his lips, and just looked at me. He loved the psychological dominance games. To me, it just seemed petty.

Facing Jimmy, I knew if I didn’t pull myself together, I was in for hours of bullshit. So I just jumped straight in.

“I am really glad you’re here, Jimmy. I just learned that the guy I put on the bus to Kingston, that Kendal Caldwell? Well, he apparently got off at Coldwater Junction, then he jumped off the highway bridge up there in front of a semi. Killed himself. Looks like I sure as hell called that one wrong.” Jimmy blinked. Rotten as the situation was, I was still alert enough to take the wind out of his sails. Even so, he’d screw me over any way he could, but at least he couldn’t make it seem as if I were trying to hide something or minimizing it.

Solemnly he intoned, “I’ll say you were wrong. Dead wrong.”

How long had he rehearsed that line? But I said, “You got that one dead right.” I wanted to play, too.

“So, what are you going to do about it?”

“Not sure. What would you suggest?” I knew what was coming, but I might as well get it over with.

“First,” he said, in a deliberate manner, “an immediate return to the practice of referring these situations to the police or sheriff and letting them handle it.” I began writing notes, as if I actually didn’t know what he was going to say. Next would be a thorough incident “autopsy,” then a corrective action plan to assure that such a situation could not possibly ever, ever happen again. Then I figured he’d try to cut out accompanying the cops on the run over to the state hospital.

I looked up at him, my signal that he should continue. Talk about psych games. I knew how to play without being so obvious.

Jimmy began again, “Second, Grant and I...” Interesting. Jimmy felt the need to borrow some authority and to let me know he’d talked to the big boss. “ ... want to see a detailed evaluation of the entire incident, describing your observations, interactions, conclusions, and decisions.”

I scribbled a few more seconds, then looked up. I had him trained to my signal.

“Third, a step-by-step corrective action plan, with completion dates, for policies, procedures, and implementation and the dates by which all must be completed. Let’s make the plan due forty-eight hours from now.” He made a display of looking at his wristwatch. I glanced at my watch, then made a big production of writing down the time.

I scribbled a bit more, then paused. I heard him take in a breath, ready to speak, so I went back to scribbling for a few seconds, then paused again to raise my eyes.