When Steve Brody's kid, Mark, claimed to've seen Julian once or twice doing business with the dealer in Holyoke who had supplied Mark for about a year, until the night State Police dropped in on a buy, Merrion was not wholly convinced by Mark's story. He had no trouble believing Julian used coke, but doubted he'd use a local supplier and if he had, it was probably Steve's rotten kid. Merrion believed Mark was setting the stage to retail Julian to the cops unless his father's clout with Merrion, earned by faithfully looking out for Larry Lane, was enough to save his ass from hard time. That made Merrion apprehensive that the time'd finally come when he'd have to say something to Heck, no matter how much it hurt him. After Mark's diversion into rehab, he braced the kid for the truth about Julian. Mark rubbed his red eyes, snuffled his corroded nose and said Heck's kid had been clean for a year. Merrion hadn't told Heck.
Heck Sanderson hadn't needed that. He owned the Mohawk Printing Company on Route 2, a couple miles east of Greenfield. He claimed it was grossing $6.3 million a year, nearly double the amount it had been making in 1968 when his father left it to him, when Heck was thirty' Seven But for an unadventurous young man from a settled, comfortable family, prepared at Deerfield for Syracuse, a family tradition; excused by a heart murmur from military service; married to a childhood sweetheart from the family's Unitarian congregation in the town where he'd grown up, Heck had taken his share of punches.
His father, Haskell senior, had been a man of indisputably upright character, moral and honest to a fault. The fault was that he was a domineering, overbearing, parsimonious, 'general-purpose son of a bitch." Heck had had to subordinate his own mind and spirit all the years he'd had to work for Haskell, grimly deferring to decisions that prevented the business from growing. When Haskell died of a stealthy brain tumor undetected until three weeks before he died 'he got a headache so all-fired bad he was actually forced to spend the time and the money to go see a doctor' Heck had managed the ceremonies of committal with spare, bleak, formal dignity, and that was all.
Having come into the life that his brains and hard work had earned for him, enjoying a few reasonable luxuries like membership in Grey Hills and a ski lodge in Vermont 'if the old bastard wasn't dead, what I've spent would've killed him' Heck wife, Lisa, died at the age of forty-one.
She was felled by a cerebral aneurysm while standing in her back yard one sunny April morning, feeling very good indeed, a dark blue headband on her dirty-blonde hair, slim in her starched pale-blue man-tailored shirt, stone-washed blue jeans and white sneakers, her feet apart and her arms folded under her breasts, smiling in her certainty that she fairly sparkled.
When it hit she was talking animatedly with a handsome young nurseryman named Nick Hardigrew. He had blue eyes and wavy black hair, white teeth and the well-muscled body of a lifelong athlete, former lifeguard and outdoor worker. He had driven up from Suffield, Connecticut at her invitation to look at the property and prepare a bid on re-landscaping it, planting dogwood, cherry, silver birch and red maple trees. A certified arborist, he had earned his bachelor's degree in arboriculture at the University of Massachusetts in his mid-twenties after two years in the infantry. He had enlisted out of high school planning on a military career, but after washing out of airborne school at Fort Benning, had taken an honorable discharge. He had learned cardiopulmonary resuscitation so that he could support his family by moonlighting as an EMT while building his business.
When Lisa Sanderson collapsed he kept his head and used all of his skills on her, but nothing worked. When the Northampton Rescue Unit arrived he told the driver: "That oxygen's not going to work. There was nothing I could do, that anyone could've done. She was dead before she hit the ground."
