Chapter 01
Now
quinn
Small towns are good at hiding big secrets.
Quinn Wilde throws her laptop charger into her backpack and then checks her phone to see how close her Uber driver is: six minutes away.
She double-locks the door to her fourth-floor walk-up and heads to the stairwell.
She’s not good with steps. Losing her right eye in an IED blast in Syria five years ago threw off her spatial awareness, but the apartment was a pandemic bargain she couldn’t turn down.
It’s not like she’s here that often anyway; she’s on the road for the news network INN most of the year.
Quinn arrives at the kerb just as the Uber driver pulls up. ‘JFK,’ she says, opening the rear door with her good arm and tossing her backpack in.
It’s only a forty-five-minute flight north from New York City to Vermont. She’ll be in the Green Mountain State by nightfall.
She settles into the back of the Uber. She could really use a drink.
She’s three years sober: she could always really use a drink.
Quinn runs a tongue around the few teeth the IED left her.
She forgot to floss again; her mouth feels like the bottom of a birdcage.
She reaches into her jacket for her pack of Gauloises Reds – imported at eye-watering cost from France – and lights up.
When the driver objects, she tosses a hundred-dollar bill onto the front seat and cracks open the window.
Her cameraman, Phil, is waiting for her at the airport. She spots his rangy frame and Tintin tuft of copper hair from halfway across Terminal 4.
He hands her a twenty as they join the line for TSA PreCheck. ‘You called it,’ he says.
Quinn pockets the money. ‘You know it.’
‘Where are we staying?’
‘Stowebury Inn, same as last time.’
‘Fuck,’ he says.
‘Fuck is right,’ Quinn says.
Stowebury is the kind of picturesque, sleepy New England town used on the cover of travel magazines: all covered bridges and red barns and white church spires.
Nestled on the shore of Lake Champlain, it has a population of fewer than eighteen hundred people; its fire service is manned by volunteers, its police chief greeted in the street by his first name.
The town’s chief industry is tourism: boaters in summer, leaf peepers in autumn, and skiers and snowboarders in winter.
She and Phil made their first visit to Stowebury fifteen months ago.
Before then, like most Brits, Quinn couldn’t have found Vermont – a tiny rural state tucked away in the Northeastern corner of the US next to Canada, with almost as many cows as people – on a map.
She wasn’t alone: no one on the news desk in London had known where it was either.
Everyone knows where it is now.
Quinn had been less than thrilled when she was first assigned the story last June: she was a senior war correspondent, not a local news hack.
But there’d been no one free to go from INN’s Washington Bureau, and she’d been killing time in New York between Ukraine and Gaza rotations, so she’d done the news desk a solid and headed off to Vermont.
She’d assumed the story would be routine, done and dusted in a couple of days – tragic for those involved, of course, but not meaningful on any macro scale.
It’s the sort of thing that INN might revisit to mark the one-year anniversary if enough people had died, but beyond that it’d be forgotten by the next news cycle.
She’d been in Stowebury less than a day before she’d realised the story was far from routine. There’d been a maggot in that pretty peach of a town, rotting it from the inside out.
Twenty-one teenagers dead.
One missing. Another in a coma.
And no one in Stowebury would talk about what’d happened.
Almost half of the high school’s graduating class had been wiped out overnight – but not one single person would speak about the disaster to the media. In Quinn’s experience, grieving relatives and friends always spoke to the press, if only to demand answers or pay tribute to those they’d lost.
The local police chief had refused to comment or even provide factual updates on the number of dead.
The mayor had passed middle-of-the-night emergency legislation prohibiting journalists from coming within a hundred feet of the school.
The fire marshal had threatened to punch Phil’s lights out when he’d tried to film B-roll footage by the lake.
Later, a National Transportation Safety Board inquiry – delegated to an “independent” team drawn from experts, all of whom the mayor and police chief seemed to know – declined to publish their results, citing the ongoing civil lawsuits.
A year on, the anniversary memorial service at Stowebury High School had been closed to all but immediate family.
The whole thing had been fishier than a mermaid’s ass. Quinn had known it was only a matter of time before the other shoe dropped.
A small town doesn’t run on a twenty-four-hour news cycle.
A small town never forgets.
Quinn stares out of the window now as the aircraft starts its descent over the flaming russet and gold and ochre of Vermont’s Green Mountain range in autumn. What they know about this picture-perfect town is a drop, and what they don’t know is an ocean.
She’s out of her seat the moment the seatbelt sign is switched off, pulling up the Uber app on her phone as Phil opens the overhead locker above them. Events are moving fast; they have to stay ahead of the curve.
She’s been waiting fifteen months for a crack in this story.
And now it’s about to blow wide open.