The Buffalo Soldier by Chris Bohjalian

lasted until about a quarter past eight. There were the men on their way to the day shift at the furniture mill, and the women who worked at the hospital. There would be the people who drove into Newport to work, and at least a dozen different mothers: mothers who brought their children to the bus stop thirty yards from the store, and mothers who for one reason or another drove their children to school. There was always something they needed, even if it was just information about a neighbor. There was nothing that Frank didn't know and wouldn't share if someone asked.
    By eight-thirty the traffic had slowed, and would remain a quiet trickle till lunch. Phoebe sat down on the squat bar stool beside the register and watched Frank put in his order with the bread salesman who'd been waiting patiently beside his dolly while they finished with the last flurry of customers.
    She kept thinking of the state trooper she'd slept with, and comparing him to the few state troopers she knew. They weren't a single breed, that was for sure, but they all shared one thing: They were control freaks. That wasn't a bad thing--in fact, it was probably a pretty good thing professionally--but it seemed to be something they shared.
    They were control freaks and they were decisive.
    In an instant she had a vision in her mind of Terry Sheldon sitting in the front seat of his idling green cruiser somewhere on Route 22A, with a silver BMW he has stopped just before him. He was making a flatlander from New York City wait an extra minute or two--stew behind the wheel while his wife and kids watched him, or looked uncomfortably out the window at the woods--before he was issued his ticket, because the New Yorker had the temerity to ask if it was possible that Terry's radar was in error.
    Terry probably did such things all the time. They all did. He said there were few things that annoyed him more than someone handling three or four thousand pounds of metal recklessly. Speed and metal were a bad combination, especially in a state in which there were still many more miles of dirt roads than paved ones, and there was a whopping 375 miles of four-lane interstate. The rest of the paved roads were two lanes: picturesque, yes, but also twisting and narrow and filled with people frustrated by the notion that they were expected to drive between thirty-five and fifty miles an hour.
    She didn't ask, but she figured Terry had seen some pretty nasty car accidents in his time. She figured he'd seen a lot of nasty things, on and off the roads. Theft. Assault. Women whose men had just beaten the living hell out of them.
    Domestic abuse, she knew, was Vermont's dirtiest little secret. The state had only ten or fifteen murders a year, but the vast majority of the time the victim knew the assailant. And though a batterer wasn't likely, in the end, to actually kill the poor woman he had under his thumb, she'd heard far too many tales of wives and girlfriends who'd had their heads rammed so hard into walls there were permanent indentations in the Sheetrock, or who had been bludgeoned with wrenches and shovels and two-by-four pieces of wood.
    All that blood and violence and gore. The injuries and the death. It had to affect how the man grieved.
    Of course, even when the violence was of the more random sort that plagued less rural states, it had its own twinge of rustic excess. Not too long ago, a lunatic in central Vermont had allowed his grudge with the town clerk to fester, and then decided to shoot the fellow and the town treasurer--a young mother who'd had the misfortune of being in the town clerk's office at the wrong time. Then he grabbed some guy on the road crew who stopped by the office to take a pee, and lit out. Quickly there were troopers on his tail, and after a looping forty-minute car chase along both back roads and the interstate, he holed up inside his cabin and held off the state police there for almost six hours. Supposedly he'd had an arsenal inside with him