Читать книгу Wicked Intentions - Kevin Flynn - Страница 13

5

Talk Around Town

When daylight broke Monday morning on Red Oak Hill, I returned with a camera crew to the little Epping neighborhood. The assignment was easy: get some sound bites from neighbors about Sheila LaBarre. It ended up being much harder than we thought.

In every television story about a homicide, a reporter is always able to locate someone who will stand in the frame of their screen door and say something about the people involved.

I can’t believe it.

They never were any trouble.

It always seemed so quiet over there.

Canvassing the neighborhood around Red Oak Hill Lane, things were very different. It was unlike any story we’d been on before. Neighbors opened their doors warmly to us, recognizing a familiar face from television. Then when they heard the story had to do with the woman down the street, they blanched and quietly closed the door. Some said “no comment,” as if that were a magical talisman that would send us away. They were all afraid to talk, too afraid to even explain why they wouldn’t talk. One woman whispered something reporters weren’t meant to hear as she closed the door.

“She’s evil.”

Some of the neighbors made their way to the spot where the dirt road leading to the farm forked off from Red Oak Hill. Their homes were modern, comfortable inside. Their land had grown something years ago, but now its loam and lawn are cushion for small feet and soccer balls in the backyard.

I made my way to a small ranch-style house on a hill. The name on the mailbox said Harvey, but so had some of the other mailboxes on the street. The videographer kept back, so as not to spook the already-jittery citizenry. An old man opened the door and didn’t wait for me to introduce myself. He returned my smile and sized me up as a “friendly.”

“Why don’t you come in out of the rain?” he offered. With it being a perfectly sunshiny, early spring morning, I found this salutation to be the most charming I’d ever received. So I went inside the home with the sense of being greeted by a long lost friend.

Rumors are the only things that sprout year-round in a farm town like Epping. There had been a time when people didn’t believe the catty talk about Dr. LaBarre’s live-in lover. The rumors just seemed so wild, so plentiful, that they could only be the product of a region that gave the world writers like Stephen King, Grace Metalious and even Nathaniel Hawthorne. They seemed like tall tales, the kind of stories that 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, raising my voice in hopes of better clarity.

Harvey didn’t answer for a moment, but not because he hadn’t heard the question. “Oh, I don’t suppose anyone’s that close to Sheila. But she comes by and says hello to me and the missus. When she colored her hair blonde she said she looked like she could be my daughter. So she started sayin’ she was one of my kids.”

“How would you describe her?”

“Sheila,” he chuckled, “Some people’d say she’s crazy.”

Years later, one neighbor explained to me why she shut the door on me that day and didn’t comment about Sheila. She was afraid of what Sheila would do to her if Sheila heard the neighbor commenting negatively about her on TV or in the newspaper. It didn’t matter if Sheila was in custody or sentenced to jail or given the electric chair. If there was the slightest chance that Sheila would be able to come back around, the neighbor was sure Sheila would make it a priority to get her.

This woman and her husband often walked past the entrance to Red Oak Hill Lane, glanced down the wooden lane and joked about the nasty, sexual things Sheila must have been doing to those men. They joked about it being a “stud farm.” They also giggled that she was doing “Jeffery Dahmer things” down there.

“I suppose Gordon would be able to say more about her,” Harvey told me in his home. He was referring to Gordon Winslow. His farm along the dirt road was visible from the street and, at three-quarters of a mile, was the closest neighbor Sheila had.

“They didn’t get along?”

“Ah-yep.”

Harvey knew the Winslows shed no tears for Sheila LaBarre’s current predicament. The two farmers had talked over the fence post many an afternoon. Winslow had seen things. And he had questions about the men he knew had lived there. Where were they? Where was Wayne? Where was Jimmy? Where was Mikey? Now Kenny?

“Sheila could be a bad hostess to those boys,” Harvey went on. “Even to Dr. LaBarre. There were quite a few nights she ran Doc off the farm and he slept on my couch. One of the boys told me she waved a gun at him. So he ran off and spent the night in my orchard. I think he slept in a tree,” Harvey winked.

Like a skilled car salesman, I sensed now would be a good time to ask if I could invite the cameraman in and ask some questions. Harvey agreed. We chatted for a few minutes more on camera. I had my sound bite, but my questions about who Sheila LaBarre was were still largely unanswered.

When I finished my cup of coffee, the old man brought it to the sink and walked me to the door. Harvey had been a selectman in the small town for years. And although retired from service, a New Englander is never retired from politics. He still followed all action and remained plugged in.

“Did you know they have to have a special meeting later this month?” Harvey was referring to the Board of Selectmen. There had been a fight between a male and female member and a complaint was filed. “He called her a ‘camel’s foot.’ Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

Again, I stifled the laughter. “Have never heard of anything quite like that.”

“Darn fool,” he swore.

I left the Harvey home and breathed in the morning air. I had to pass that dirt road again and caught a glimpse of the Winslow farm. Looking at it, I remembered one of the stories Dan Harvey had told me and it brought a chill to my spine.

It had happened about two years earlier. It was winter and a snow had just covered the ground. One of the young studs from the farm—he thought it was the one named “Michael”—came stumbling down the dirt road. Gordon Winslow was out and working near the fence. As the man came closer, he noticed he was on a slow run. There was a gash on his head that was bleeding. Drops of red fell into the snow. It looked like his ear was ripped. And his skin tone was odd. His complexion was no longer a healthy pink, but not the shocking pale a winter wind does to an uncovered face.

He limped by Winslow and caught his eye. The man opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Then like an old hinge, he croaked out a single word.

“Sheila,” he said.

The man’s eyes glanced back into the woods, toward the Silver Leopard Farm, his trail of blood and footprints and the mysteries too bizarre to be real. He looked back, but his feet kept him moving forward, past the stunned farmer. In my mind, I could hear him speak one last time.

“Sheila.”