rise from the crags of mist at dawn on cold pastureland.
Sheila LaBarre came to Epping from Alabama after answering a personal advertisement Wilfred “Bill” LaBarre had placed in a magazine. Her hair was too long, her lipstick too red for the tiny town. Sheila drove around in either her pickup truck or her luxury car, both paid for by Dr. LaBarre. She was warm as pie to strangers, but could turn quickly on acquaintances. She was like a fist full of bees. Few people got a second chance with her.
Sheila had been in her late twenties when she shacked up with the sixty-year-old chiropractor. She paraded around town in a pair of skin-tight leopard-print pants. Men watched, and her radar for detecting their stares was infallible. She took up flying lessons, but never stuck with it long enough to get a license. Around the airfield, the men dubbed her “Sheila the Peeler” in hopes she’d shimmy right out of her form-fitting ensembles.
There were stories about Sheila’s temper. They all had to do with some imagined slight done to Sheila followed by a gross overreaction. But residents of Epping got the message: if you had to deal with her, stay on her good side.
Dog walkers on Red Oak Hill Lane made it a point to wave and smile at those coming and going, including Sheila. Sometimes Sheila acknowledged the wave. Other times it appeared the driver was so focused on her own thoughts she probably couldn’t even see the road. Usually she was accompanied by a man who did work on her farm.
Sheila had always been flirtatious, but things escalated after Dr. LaBarre died. When deliverymen knocked, she often came to the door dressed in nothing but her mink coat (or nothing at all). As her figure became more Rubenesque, it did not slow her down or increase her modesty. It did slow the number of workingmen who would take advantage of a free fling with the housewife. Eventually, some companies stopped delivering to the door or making service calls.
Sheila had unusual taste in men. She seemed to fancy adults who were developmentally disabled—semi-retarded. They were grown men living at home whom Sheila drove to her farm to work the land. She paid them in beer and cigarettes. Perhaps, some hypothesized, she paid them with something else—some of the men went home with bruises or fire engine red slap marks on their faces.
The Harveys’ home was modest. For all the McMansions that were popping up around them, it seemed like little of the new money made its way to their homestead. Daniel Webster Harvey knew his land was worth so much more as someone else’s backyard than as a vegetable patch. But the Harveys were farmers going back three centuries and one’s eighties are not a good time to change careers.
“We’ve got company,” Harvey called to his wife in the kitchen. She adjusted her glasses and bobbed the tight curls of her white hair.
“I’ll put some coffee on,” she said, ducking back into the kitchen.
“I sold Bill LaBarre that land,” he told me, his New England accent as thick as clam chowder. “He and Leone bought it in 1962, I think i’twas. Leone was Bill’s first wife. We all just got together for her eighty-second birthday last month. Ah-yep. She’s still livin’ with her son on the seacoast. Portsmouth, I think.”
Harvey and I sat in the living room. There was a large picture window overlooking the crest of the hill on Red Oak Lane. A few bud-less, gnarly apple trees appeared like witches casting spells. The farmer’s wife came out with a cup of something hot to drink, then returned to the kitchen.
“That land had been in my family…oh…I don’t know how long. And for the longest time people just called it the Old Harvey farm. Then Sheila came along and renamed it, ‘The Silver Leopard Farm.’” Harvey sipped from his mug. “Ah-yep. Drew quite a few chuckles, it did.”
“When did Sheila come to town anyway?”
Harvey thought back to the spring of 1987. “It had been a tough few years for the doc. He and Leone had been split up for a while, nearly ten years. But he had remarried a beautiful young woman. Her name was Edwina Kolacz. She got cancer and passed on in 1983. Doc was crushed. Walked around like there was no life in him. That’s when he placed the ad.”
“A personals ad?”
“Can’t recollect how many letters he got, but there musta been something about Sheila’s that Doc found appealing. In no time ‘tall she had moved up here from down South and was livin’ on the farm.”
“So Sheila was the doctor’s wife?”
“Nope. Started calling herself ‘Sheila LaBarre’ instead of ‘Sheila Bailey.’ She just took his name. And eventually…his farm. That didn’t sit well with the rest of Doc’s family. Nor the government.”
Dr. LaBarre had given Sheila power of attorney over him in 1990. LaBarre’s ex-wife and adult children were not pleased with the move. He also declared Sheila executrix of his will. Over the next decade, that status never changed, even though Sheila had from time to time moved out, taken new lovers and even married.
When Dr. LaBarre died in December of 2000, Sheila used her position as trustee to transfer property to herself. This included not only the Epping farm, but also LaBarre’s clinic in Hampton and a house and duplex in Somersworth that they had rented out for extra revenue.
Three months after Dr. LaBarre’s death, Sheila received a bill from the New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration. It said she owed $120,580 in legacy and succession taxes to the state. Sheila claimed LaBarre as her common law husband, but the audit supervisor did not have any documentation of that. This sparked an immediate flurry of letters of protestation from Sheila, tapped out with angry fingers on her manual typewriter. At issue was more than money; it was also pride.
In May of 2001, Sheila fired off a letter to the state Commissioner of Revenue requesting a hearing. It summed up everything that the Sheila LaBarre experience was: intelligent, enraged, obstinate and sprinkled with details so bizarre they must be true.
My late husband, by common law, placed this real estate in these INTER VIVOS years ago with the legal intent to avoid probate. He even asked Bea Marcotte, now deceased, and Cheryl Oikle, alive and in the navy in Spain at the writing of this notice, to witness the trusts…I am struggling as it is and to receive a tax notice for property when none is due is distressing to me…I was told by Rockingham County Probate when I relinquished his will to them that I DID NOT HAVE TO BE APPOINTED BECAUSE I DID NOT HAVE ANYTHING TO PROBATE. I agree with this.
The audit supervisor for the Estate of Wilfred LaBarre figured she was on strong legal ground to deny Sheila’s petition and request payment. The property wouldn’t be taxed if it passed to a decedent’s spouse (Sheila didn’t dispute she was not married to the doctor). State law required a couple to have been “cohabiting and acknowledging each other as husband and wife…for the period of three years.” Here, Sheila was on shaky ground as she had been still married to a man named Wayne Ennis about two years before LaBarre died.
“Nope,” said Harvey drawing deep on his cup of coffee. “That was a fight that poor civil servant didn’t want. Sheila took it real personal and went after her with everything she had. You don’t cross Sheila.”
“She sounds like a colorful character,” I said.
Harvey looked back at me incredulously. “She’s not colored. She’s white.”
I swallowed the laugh that was pushing out the corners of my mouth. I didn’t want to be disrespectful. “Are you friends with her?” I asked,
