It was early afternoon on Route 2 in Vermont, and my wife and I were involved in various contortions inside the car. Never mind that we were traveling at 60 mph or that snow crept to the sides of the road like sly ghosts. We needed a cellular signal and we needed it now. We pointed our phones this way and that. We tried aiming the phones at each other because you just never know. Nothing. No bars or pulses of hope.

Welcome to the first three hours of my autumn vacation.

In the hills of Vermont, signals from space are as elusive as the winds that blow across the long fields. Mountains and trees have no regard for the faint murmurs of human technology high above the Earth. There was no signal to be found, and I had gnawed the last of my fingers down to the first knuckle.

There was mischief afoot back home and I had no way of connecting to it.

In some circles, it has become a grisly, timeworn truth. Every time I leave town, news runs rampant in the city I left behind. This time, there were two bodies in shallow graves. A bona fide mystery was at hand and I had only three hours of road time behind me.

I want to repeat a profoundly sincere statement in case anyone has missed it: I don’t want bad things to happen. I just want to be there when they do.

Not so long ago, a time growing smaller like a sight in the rearview mirror, crime had been my franchise in Lewiston. Covering it was what I was paid to do and also what I loved. No vacation was too big to cancel if there was mystery and madness in Lewiston. No holiday dinner was important enough to be left uneaten when things got crazy on the beat.

Now, it was a bright afternoon, Oct. 29. We pulled to the side of the road where I was mocked by nearby birds. My wife had that “here-we-go-again” look as she regarded me from the driver’s seat.

“Do you want to turn around and go home?”

I considered this. I took off my shoe so I could begin gnawing my toes instead of my fingers. Then I suggested we continue our trip.

I’d like to take on a lofty tone and suggest that it’s some powerful commitment to the job that tears me up when this happens. The truth is, I’m like a small boy who feels cheated when somebody else is prancing along his domain at home. When I miss an opportunity to explore the evil that sometimes descends on Lewiston, I feel wronged. I feel, somehow, deposed.

We continued the vacation and I tried to put the unsolved murders out of my mind. The night before Halloween, we prowled the back roads of some very dark place called Williston in Vermont. We were looking for “The Haunted Forest,” said to be the coolest, most frightening attraction to be found. I wanted to see it because a harried, bald man at a convenience store told me it was the thing to see. And it was just up the road, he said. Why, a few dozen turns after Wild Duck Running Crazy Lane and you’re there.

We searched. And searched. We turned this way and that way, down roads where light was not a guest. Signs everywhere announced this attraction, yet the haunted forest did not loom into view. It grew darker. Hours passed.

We found the haunted forest by luck. We drove down a dark dirt road as bumpy and dry as the backbone of a long-dead beast and there it was. But there were no giggling revelers to be seen. There was no leering ticket man collecting money or bright lights marking the way. The only thing there was a large, arching sign that said “Haunted Forest” – and a whole lot of darkness.

I got out of the car and examined the empty field. There was a bright-blue glow from a tangle of tall grass, as though some thrill-seeker had tossed away his flashlight as he ran shrieking from something too horrible to be illuminated. There were a pair of muddy shoes beneath the large, arched sign. Clues to another mystery beyond my reach. Just these few things, darkness and a light wind that revealed no secrets to what had happened here.

I suppose I’m being melodramatic. I suppose I’m only expressing frustration at having been so far away when things got strange back in Lewiston. But it’s worth pointing out: The very day we returned from the dark back roads of vacation, there was a police shootout in a quiet little city called Williston, Vt.

A big-time shootout in a place we thought so quaint, and where few things of note likely ever happen. Another point of drama narrowly missed in the few hours and miles since I had passed.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. Visit his blog at www.sunjournal.com.

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