Goody

By Kenneth Labich

After enduring some hard times, college professor Douglas Hatcher and his teenage daughter Blaire move to the old Connecticut town of Fairfield to restart their lives. But things soon become strange. They meet a beautiful blonde bartender, a woman who displays mysterious powers and seems to know all their secrets. When Blaire enrolls in high school, the headmaster approaches her with evil intentions, leading to a town-wide scandal and an act of terrible violence.
Then things become even stranger. Douglas learns about Goodwife Knapp, a woman hung in Fairfield in 1653 for practicing witchcraft, and he comes to realize that she remains a ghostly presence in the town—one who looms over everything that is happening to them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796075175

Kenneth Labich

Kenneth Labich has worked as a staff writer and editor for various magazines, including Newsweek and Fortune. He is the author of four previous novels—Angry Pigs, Fishing Mishaps (2008), Precious (2009), Moisture Management (2011), and Moving the Meat (2014).

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Professor Moron

A LTHOUGH HE DIDN’T know it at the time, Douglas Hatcher’s prospects began to brighten in August 2015, when a hip-hop musical very loosely based on the life of Alexander Hamilton opened on Broadway to great acclaim. Doug, a professor of American history, had a decade before published a biography of Hamilton. It was reasonably well reviewed in three academic journals, but sold less than 400 copies and was soon out of print; over the years, he had more or less forgotten about the entire painful experience.

Then, on a dreary late-autumn afternoon a few months after Hamilton opened, his office phone rang and a man with a high-pitched voice announced that his name was Mark Bradley and he was an editor at Simon & Schuster Publishing Corp. in New York. He said he had just acquired the North American rights to Doug’s book from his previous publisher, the University of New Hampshire Press. In light of all the hoopla surrounding the Broadway production, they would be putting out a new edition, said Bradley, and an advance against royalties would be coming his way. Over the next two weeks, Doug wrote a new forward, highlighting the great surge of interest in Hamilton, and Simon & Schuster commissioned a handsome new cover, with an elegant watercolor portrait of the former Treasury Secretary. Just below the portrait were large red letters that read HAMILTON! THE BOOK THAT INSPIRED A BROADWAY MEGAHIT! This time, Doug’s biography was reviewed by a dozen national newspapers and magazines, sold 28,000 copies in the first two months, and inched onto the bottom rungs of The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list. He began getting calls from newspaper and TV reporters, looking for quotes from an expert on the Hamilton mania on Broadway, and a segment producer from 60 Minutes called to set up an interview. Whenever anyone questioned him about the show, he always tried not to dwell on the musical’s distorted portrayal of Hamilton as a champion of American democracy. The man Doug wrote about believed most fervently in the concentration of wealth among the few and the ruthless application of military power when rich people’s interests were at risk. Doug shut up about all that; he received a check for $65,000 from Simon & Schuster.

A month later, Doug was slumped over his desk one afternoon, grading a stack of grad-student essays on the Industrial Revolution, when the phone rang again. This time, an overly perky female voice informed him that, based on his insightful study of one of the most important of America’s Founding Fathers, he had been granted a MacArthur Foundation grant—a so-called genius award. He would receive a check for $125,OOO, free of all taxes, each January 1st for the next five years and, while most recipients engage in projects related to the work for which they were being honored, Doug could basically do whatever he wanted with the money.

This double whammy of good fortune came at a crucial time for Doug. A few months before, his wife Heather had walked into their bedroom early on a Saturday morning and told him she was leaving him and taking with her their 14-year-old daughter Blaire, who was the sole unalloyed joy in his life. Heather said she had taken a job as chairman of the French department at Reed College in Oregon and would be leaving that very day. She said the U-Haul was packed and parked outside and she had been in touch with a divorce lawyer who would be calling him. I don’t think we have to talk much about what’s happened, she said. We’re both the culprits in this mess.

That’s probably right, said Doug. But culprit is such a weaselly word.

She stared at him for an eternal five seconds, and then she just left. Doug lay there in bed for an hour and tried to figure out how to think about it all. He decided he felt relieved—their arguments had become meaner and more frequent—and he also felt emptied-out somehow, alone. He was confused as well; though they seldom said a kind word to each other at the end, their sex life had become ever more robust. He didn’t want to think about how much he would miss his daughter.

His college, a second-tier liberal arts operation, located in an old mill town in western Pennsylvania, shepherded 1600 or so students through an old-fashioned curriculum unsuited for the technological world, and it charged them more than $60,000 each year for the privilege. Administrators did what they had to do to keep the school’s US News rankings high, the best path to prosperity for American colleges; campus rumors swirled about deans fudging numbers in late-night sessions before submitting them to the magazine. In any event, the place continued to attract an overflow of mostly white suburban youths too dim or lazy or poorly connected to get into the Ivies or tonier schools like Kenyon or Middlebury.

The nearest sizable town was an hour away, and there wasn’t much to do if you were faculty except drink and gossip about your fellow teachers and their spouses. So when Doug went to work on the Monday after Heather walked out on him, everyone he talked to already knew what had happened. Just one person, a woman who had shared an office with Heather, said she was sorry about it.

For a few days, nobody told Doug that Heather had run off with a man, but then the philosophy department head sidled up in the men’s room and told him she had left with Geoffrey Sherman, an associate dean who had also found a job at Reed. He wore a goatee, was fond of turtleneck sweaters, and talked a lot about wine; Doug had always despised the guy, but never suspected he would be the one to barge into his life and break it up. Doug soon found out that everyone he talked to already knew about Heather and Sherman. When he got up in the morning and looked in the bathroom mirror, Doug felt in his bones that he was staring at a pathetic excuse for a man—Professor Moron.

After a while, Heather’s departure became a sort of mental toothache, throbbing away somewhere in his cerebellum, and he thought every ten minutes about Blaire. She called him often, but he could feel her getting farther from him week by week.

Doug drank, always had. He grew up in Evanston, north of Chicago on Lake Michigan, and he and his friends got drunk every weekend all through high school. His father, a patent attorney who worked down in the Loop, drank too—Bombay martinis, straight up with three green olives on a toothpick. He had set up a lounge in the knotty-pine basement of their big old Victorian, and at least a dozen full bottles of assorted liquor filled the shelf behind the bar at all times. He didn’t keep close track of his inventory, and Doug and several friends got so sick on Chivas Regal on his 16th birthday that two of them were carted off to Evanston Hospital; they had vomited so much that dehydration had set in.

Doug drank a lot every weekend—three-day tequila binges—during undergraduate school at Duke. At graduate school at Penn, he stepped it up, becoming very drunk every other day, weekend or not. It was a six-year slog to a PhD.

Doug met Heather at Penn. She drank too, and she did it badly, going through ups and downs of paranoia and rage. A doctor once told her that when she drank she went into a state of rapidly cycling bipolar disorder. She drank anyway, beer and Stoli shots, and she and Doug boozed their way through grad school. Then came Blaire, a quickie marriage ceremony in her mother’s backyard, and they both got jobs at the so-so school in Pennsylvania.

Doug drank hard for ten days or so after Heather left him, starting every afternoon after his last class and continuing on into the night. The four bars in the drowsy college town all closed by 1 A.M., so he had to finish up at home, passing out on the couch in front of the TV. He drank mostly Irish whiskey, Jameson, on the rocks, splash of soda. The Irish made him sad, and on most days he wallowed in his travails.

At some point, he fell in with a group of English department faculty who were often in one of the bars—a dozen or so flirty men and women in their 30s, a decade younger than Doug. Most of them were hard-core Neo-Socialists who talked politics more than literature, and all but a couple Hillary diehards were supporting Bernie Sanders in the upcoming Democratic primary. Several of them lived together in a big stucco house up in the hills above town, and everyone drank sangria and smoked a lot of weed at their parties, which broke out three or four times a week. Doug, who had pretty much stopped smoking the stuff in grad school, took it up again and found his way through at least two joints a day, along with the Irish. He had drunken sex four times with three different women in a one-week period, and he could not remember a time when he felt worse about himself.

People on campus, friends, stopped him and asked after his health. Gotta tell you, said one of his grad students, a wise-ass kid from New Jersey, you look really terrible, I mean in a physical way. None of my business, obviously, but you really need to get that shit checked out.

Doug lectured most days with a skull-splitter of a hangover, sipping on black coffee laced with crushed aspirin tablets and a shot of Irish. He had a light semester, just two survey courses, a course on the economic aspects of the Revolutionary War, and a weekly graduate seminar on the Ten Worst U.S. Presidents, so he managed to stumble through his schedule and then spend the nights destroying brain cells.

One night at the bar of the only Italian restaurant in town, an older man with a white beard on the next stool said he was going to stop drinking alcohol after fifty years of bad bar behavior. He tipped his half-full glass of amber liquid toward the bartender and drained it in two gulps. I think just one more glass, Tommie, go out with a bang or whatever, he said.

The old guy inspired Doug to quit the Irish, drink red wine instead, and cut his weed ration to one joint a day. That lasted four days, until Saturday, when he tumbled off the wagon hard and just kept going.

The semester was ending, and Doug wasn’t scheduled to teach until an August seminar on George Washington. He had vaguely planned to spend the free time researching an article about the Battle of Ticonderoga for Smithsonian; he had tenure, though it never hurt to publish if you could manage. But his brain was so scattered by then that any kind of rational work seemed beyond him. He drank more and smoked more; he twice vomited blood. He scheduled an appointment to see a woman from the psychology department who counseled despondent colleagues. One night in bed with a red-haired woman who taught Elizabethan poetry, he cried for the first time in twenty years.

Then came the phone calls about the book and the grant, and he began to wander out of the Jameson fog. He didn’t go completely dry as he worked on the introduction, but he did cut back. He taught the fall semester and was prepared to take on a full load in the spring, but then he got a $96,000 royalty check and his first MacArthur check arrived. Doug started thinking about his options, and teaching the next semester didn’t seem like an attractive one.

In the week before classes started, he scheduled a meeting with his department head, Dorothy Nagy, a frail, gnome-like Hungarian woman who wore a bright red wig and was a world-class Nazi scholar, and he asked her to get someone else to teach his spring courses. I thought you would come to see me, she said. All these things have happened to you.

Doug was slouched in the black leather chair in front of her desk. Yeah, he said. Lots of stuff, good and bad.

Well, of course, we will make this work, said Nagy. The trolls in the dean’s office are all excited about the publicity you’re generating, with the book and the MacArthur. It’s good PR for the school, they say. They’re going to do their best to keep you involved here.

Great, he said. I don’t know what I’m gonna do, but it’s probably better to go somewhere else right now. You know, take a sabbatical

Nagy was smoking a clove cigarette and sipping at a cup of tea; the office smelled of lemon. Have you thought about the research you might undertake, with all your money? she said.

Doug felt slightly ill and smelled of the previous night’s Irish; he spotted a splash of dried vomit on the cuff of his brown tweed jacket. Uh, I have been looking into the Battle of Ticonderoga, said Doug. Benedict Arnold. Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys. First actual coordinated military action of the Revolution.

Nagy smiled at him, showed her yellowed teeth. Ah, that would be something safe, something small she said. But you could do something bigger. The trolls would salivate.

That afternoon, after he walked out of Nagy’s office, Doug went in search of lunch at what passed for an Irish pub two blocks off campus. From his favorite stool at the end of the bar, he could look out over the town green, a bronze statue of a bewhiskered Union general in the center of it. He was working on a second drink and a bowl of lamb stew when his phone buzzed in his jacket pocket. Bradley, the man with the high-pitched voice, came on the line. Two words, he said. Aaron Burr.

The notion of writing about Burr had been drifting around Doug’s sodden brain for years. He had researched the former Vice President for a year for the Hamilton book, and he found him the more interesting of the two men—the military exploits, the wild term in Washington, the years whoring around New York as a top lawyer. The duel, of course. Bradley said he had a contract to send him. He said Simon & Schuster would give him a $90,000 advance to do a Burr biography—we’re thinking something, you know, popular, as non-academic as you can manage.

Doug couldn’t find a reason to say no, and he didn’t really want to; it was as if the phone call was destined to come at that moment, as he sat on a stool in the pseudo Irish pub, to let him know his next move. So he told Bradley he had a deal—I’m gonna need some time, you know, try to get my act going.

Of course, said Bradley, "you should just know that this whole pop history thing is very hot right now. The longer we wait, the more likely Jon Meachem or Bill O’Reilly or some other asshole will put out some trash on Burr—Killing Hamilton or whatever."

Pop history, said Doug. Think we could not say that anymore?

When he left the bar, he called the town’s lone real-estate office and offered up his old brick house as a one-year rental. Over the next week, he turned down several groups of students who were looking for a place to party hard. He eventually signed a one-year lease with a grad-school couple with a feral two-year-old son, who seemed capable of pulverizing all the wood paneling on the first floor. Doug threw a final party with his English-department friends, two days devoted to gin and mescal, and then he paid two students to help him pack up his furniture in a U-Haul and move it to the storage lot in the next town.

Doug decided to move to Fairfield, Connecticut, an old Colonial farm town on Long Island Sound that had turned into an affluent suburb of 60,000 souls. Burr spent much of his childhood in New Jersey, but most of his forebears lived in and around Fairfield in the 18th and 19th centuries, so it seemed like a good place to start his research. A restored Burr family mansion, first built in 1790, stood on a corner on the Old Post Road in the center of town, and a local foundation maintained a small library on the second floor that contained a trove of Burr material. New York City was just over an hour away on the train, so he could head into the Public Library’s Reading Room whenever he needed to. Fairfield looked like a reasonably sane place on the web sites he looked up, maybe a bit dull—a town green with a white wooden gazebo, a classic wooden town hall and a historical museum, a restored 17th century tavern, and lots of healthy-looking white people—shopping, eating in restaurants, walking on the beach, riding bikes, mowing their lawns.

After two days on his laptop and more than twenty phone calls to real estate agents, he rented a small house on a cul-de-sac two blocks from the beach, within walking distance of the history center and the Burr Homestead. It was a two-bedroom Cape painted dark gray, with white shutters and a red door, and it had a first-floor study and a quiet backyard, bordered