Open Season by Archer Mayor

twisting its way north along the Connecticut Valley floor. The scene looked safely Christmas-like, all twinkling lights and snowy motes. Most of the other houses on the block added to the mood with lingering holiday mementos: wreaths on doors, snowmen, colored lights, even an illuminated Santa on a roof, complete with blinking HO-HO-HO.
    I don’t know what made me notice the dark green Plymouth Duster parked across and down the street. Maybe it was that I had once owned a Duster and had considered it the best car I’d ever had; maybe it was that the snow hitting its hood melted instantly. I couldn’t see through the windshield. In any case, at the time I didn’t give it much thought.
    I drove down to Western, caught the interstate to the exit below, and bought some groceries at the Finast nearby, not far from Thelma Reitz’s house. I then retraced the route I’d traveled a very long day ago.
    Brattleboro is an appealing town, at least to me. Modernization and the trendy urban remodelers have all but passed it by, settling for the outlying areas like the Putney Road north of town to set up their shopping plazas and fake colonial restaurants. The city itself, whose heart is the T intersection of Main and High, hasn’t changed much from its industrial nineteenth-century heyday, when two organ companies, one sewing-machine company, and a factory turning out baby carriages guaranteed a healthy income for most of the town.
    There’s a pretty good reason developers stay away from down-town—apart from the challenge of tearing down the massive red-brick buildings that line the major streets—and that’s the hills. Brattleboro has a hard time gathering together a single flat acre. For reasons I’ve never figured out, the original settlers passed up the more spread-out regions to the north and south and planted their town on a crazy quilt of slopes and ravines tumbling precipitously down the banks of three rivers—the Connecticut to the east, the West River to the north, and Whetstone Brook, which neatly slices the town in two.
    Homes and businesses, large and small, brick and wooden, hang on to the hills for dear life, like a haphazard collection of Matchbox toys left scattered across a rumpled blanket. The streets conform to the topography, plunging straight down or twisting back and forth, sometimes barely gripping the sharp inclines. It is not unusual to have a wall of trees, rocks, and grass on one side of a house, a view of the neighbor’s rooftop on the other.
    All this is covered with a thin layer of generations-old city grit. A Dunkin’ Donuts has incongruously appeared smack in the middle of downtown—with all the architectural finesse of a broken-down spaceship—and a few other buildings have been built with more sensitivity to their older neighbors, but generally the place is pretty static. The rich live in old rich homes of Victorian excess, the poor live in old poor homes that look like small-town slums all over New England—wooden, peeling, ramshackle, and depressing on a sunny day. Vaguely speaking, Whetstone Brook marks the DMZ below which the handful of “haves” rarely wander, but above which the more numerous “have-nots” have established a few minor toeholds. Gluing the two together, as always, is a majority middle class, which more than anything else has given Brattleboro its identity. It’s a regular-people kind of town.
    My apartment represented this smorgasbord rather well. Located on Oak Street—an area Gail labeled “intellectual—young rich”—it was on the top floor of an ineptly remodeled Victorian townhouse on the corner of High Street, a short stroll from both the Municipal Building and downtown. There were two other tenants, both as young and as rich as I, and all three of us had been living there for years. Trying to explain this anomaly, Gail figured we could afford it either because the High Street traffic noise had kept the rent low, or because our benevolent octogenarian