didn’t respond; she only blinked.
“How about,” she continued, “if I gave you one-hundred dollars to take Little Satin for me and take care of him.”
“Whoa,” Amy blurted out laughing. “Why can’t you take care of him anymore?”
The woman rubbed her nails through Little Satin’s back. “I had a fight with my boyfriend, and I’m not going to stay with him ever again. I have to take care of myself, but I need someone to look after my babies. Someone has to look after my rabbits for a little while, darling.”
“You have more rabbits?”
The woman gestured to the parking lot. “In my car. Satin’s sister and brother, Sapphire and Snookster.”
Amy looked at Donald, then back at the woman with the long blonde hair. She liked the way the woman talked to them. She didn’t talk down to them, like some people did. She listened to what they had to say. “But we don’t have a cage or anything.”
The woman looked over at the hutch on the shelf. “What if I bought you this hutch? That way, all three rabbits will have a place to sleep tonight.”
Amy was excited. Not only was she getting the bunny and hutch for free, but also she was getting one hundred dollars to take care of it. That was a real grown-up responsibility. Then again, another complication occurred to her. “We can’t carry the hutch home.” Donald asked if they could take the bus, but Amy didn’t know if they even let rabbits ride the bus.
The woman smiled. “Then I’ll give you a ride home, darling.” They all walked out of the store together. Donald stroked Little Satin’s fur as his sister held the rabbit. The woman led them through the parking lot to her awaiting car, a green sedan. It was turning out to be a perfect day.
“You are an angel, darling, for taking my baby,” she told Amy.
“What’s your name?” Amy asked.
And sweetly, as sunbeams for cherubs, she told them, “My name is Sheila LaBarre.”
3
Proof of Murder?
Writers who describe crime in a small town often try to make the community seem smaller than it is. Just a wide space in the road, where nothing extraordinary happens. Communities that the evils of the world have failed to notice. As if that town were the sole repository of innocence and purity left in the Western world, then the suspect is one who not only committed a crime but also soiled an Eden.
Epping, New Hampshire, is a small town, but probably no more or less shocked by violent crime than any other. Much of New Hampshire’s modern development occurred south to north, along the pathways of the two major arteries out of Massachusetts. Along Interstate 93, Salem grew into a major retail destination; Derry and Londonderry became huge bedroom communities. Up Route 3, a.k.a. the Everett Turnpike, Nashua became a fine city that was named Best Place to Live in America twice: in 1987 and 1997. Both highways shake hands in Manchester, the state’s largest city and the state’s center of economic activity.
Aided by demand for available and accessible land, the communities within this triangle flourished as Massachusetts expatriates settled in. But small towns outside that area remained landlocked, linked instead by a series of back roads and secondary highways that tempered sprawl. Those dozens of towns, with their New Deal-era road plans, worked to keep growth to a minimum and to preserve their perception of small town New England. Epping was just such a town.
Residents meet each March for the annual town meeting. While the town has a part-time Board of Selectmen, they’re relatively powerless. It’s the residents who vote Norman Rockwell-style to approve spending plans. The previous year, Police Chief Greg Dodge watched quietly as about thirteen hundred people voted on whether to approve his proposed $4.3 million operating budget for that year. Dodge asked the citizens of Epping to give him two new officers. The cost to taxpayers would be only $20,810 , because a federal grant of $50,000 would cover the rest. But in true Yankee fashion, residents rose from their seats and voiced their concerns about what would happen in three years when the grant expired. By a hand vote, citizens amended the request to one officer, but the proposal still failed 527 to 811. Dodge did not go away empty-handed from the town meeting. Epping residents had okayed his request to lease a new police cruiser by a vote of 791 to 558.
Epping was experiencing growing pains, as developers finally had spotted the town and recognized its key position if further growth was to happen. Residents wryly called it “The Center of the Universe” and bumper stickers saying so can still be spotted. At one point, Epping was considered the Great Crossroads to the state, back when highways were two lanes wide. Windy, crooked Route 101 had been renovated a decade ago to be a multi-lane east-west route from Manchester to the Atlantic. That sowed a row for commercial and residential development to also blossom. Epping is roughly halfway to Portsmouth from Manchester, and State Highway 125 intersecting there offers good shortcuts to Durham and other eastern communities.
After the Wal-Mart opened off exit 7, Epping’s police department felt the impact. Shoplifting calls and fender benders in the parking lot were consuming time in what once was a Mayberry-like patrol route. The extra calls, which included criminal assaults and one rape, did not sit well with Dodge.
The crimes reported at Wal-Mart were serious and sometimes violent. But as far as anyone could remember, there had never been a murder in the town of Epping.
I rarely had a need to go to Epping as a television reporter in New Hampshire. To me, the signpost merely meant halfway to the ocean or halfway back to the station after a live shot. But after one hour on the story, I knew it would change my life.
Sunday afternoons are deadly quiet in newsrooms everywhere, deadly for the young college graduate-cum-television producers who have to fill thirty minutes of news at 6:00. I had been blessed (and that’s definitely the way we viewed it) the previous two Sundays with breaking news. A week prior there was the murder investigation in which one woman in the mountain town of Tamworth stabbed another woman to death at a party in a fight over beer money. The weekend before in the woods of Alstead, a closeted-homosexual shot his roommate and chased another man through the forest with a handgun, all after smoking one-third of a marijuana cigarette. It’s these examples of stupidity and tragic miscalculation that give reporters “happy feet” and make producers high-five one another.
The assignment desk had little for me and my videographer to do when our shift began at 2:00 P.M. on Sunday, March 26, 2006. Indiana Senator Evan Bayh was speaking at a campaign event for a democratic state senator. No one comes to New Hampshire to speak at a political gathering who isn’t running for president.
WMUR-TV, an ABC affiliate, is the only network station in the state. Channel 9 wields a lot of power within New Hampshire’s borders and beyond. It’s the big fish, small pond dynamic that has suited it well. Dozens of television reporters have made the jump from New Hampshire to Boston (where starting salaries are tripled and anchormen and women can still earn a million dollar paycheck). Some WMUR alumni have gone on to much greener pastures, such as Nannette Hanson on MSNBC or Carl Cameron on Fox News. Even Chris Wragge, former Entertainment Tonight host and former husband to Swedish model and Playboy playmate Victoria Silvstedt, once did the weekend shift at channel 9 as a sportscaster.
I had no intention of leaving WMUR anytime soon. But I really wanted to get off of weekends. It was
