Part 1 (2/2)

With the summer temperature pus.h.i.+ng eighty-five degrees, Susette had her long red hair pinned up in a French twist. Her form-fitting, navy blue uniform stuck to her tall, slender figure as she grabbed an oxygen bag, a heart monitor, and the drug box from the truck. But even while doing this she couldn't help noticing the attractive beach cottages lining the avenues along the water.

”Boy, it's beautiful down here,” she said to her partner.

He headed straight for the patient, whose wife explained that they had been out for their routine morning walk and her husband had collapsed with chest pains. The man labored to breathe.

Susette gave him oxygen and applied cardiac-monitor cables to him while Douchette checked his vital signs. She saw fear in the elderly couple's eyes as an ambulance arrived.

”You were probably overcome by the heat,” Douchette told the man, rea.s.suring him that he would be okay. ”But just to be safe, we're going to bring you to the hospital. And I'm going to go with you.”

Susette helped the patient onto a stretcher before packing the equipment back in her truck and taking the keys from Douchette, who climbed into the ambulance. ”I'll meet you back at the hospital,” he told her.

Pulling away, Susette spotted a house with a private dock, a small patch of beach, and a ”For Sale” sign. That afternoon, when her s.h.i.+ft ended, she returned to the scene to get the Realtor's name and phone number off the sign and take a closer look at the house. The setting sun put a sparkle on the ocean water that lapped up to the property's sandy sh.o.r.eline.

I really have to move down here, she thought. she thought.

For more than a year, Susette had been trying to talk her husband into selling the ranch and moving closer to the water, convinced she could cope with an unfulfilling marriage if she had the water as a friend. But Jorsz consistently resisted. A machinist at a paper-recycling mill, he spent sixty to seventy hours per week at work. The ranch offered a place to unwind on the weekend doing what he enjoyed-tinkering on engines and fixing things. Besides, his job was only fifteen minutes from the house. He really had no interest in leaving a rural town for a more congested coastal community close to an hour away from his job.

Susette called the Realtor and got the price for the beach house: $170,000. If her husband would agree to sell the ranch, she figured, they could pay cash for the beach house and still have enough left over for a small retirement nest egg. She hoped a house with a private boat dock might be enough to finally persuade him. That evening, Susette approached her husband in the yard while he worked on a piece of farming equipment. She described the house.

”You wouldn't have to work anymore,” she told him.

”I don't want to leave,” Jorsz said, not bothering to make eye contact.

She could tell he had been drinking. ”You know, you might like this place,” she added. ”There's a dock. We could get a boat.”

He ignored her.

”I'm going to ask you again for the last time,” she said in desperation.

”I'm not leaving Preston,” he said.

Susette took a step back. ”Well, if you don't want to go, I'm going anyway.”

He showed no expression. Neither did she.

She had been let down her entire life. It had begun with her father, William Stevens, who had walked out right after Susette's birth on June 14, 1956. Stevens had left Susette with nothing, not even a last name. Dest.i.tute, Susette's mother, Josephine Cha.s.se, had waited tables at a diner to support her six children in Millinocket, Maine, a remote rural town over sixty miles north of Bangor, not far from the Canadian border.

While her mother worked, Susette and her siblings fended for themselves during the long, hard winters. Her older brothers often fed her water with chocolate flavoring for breakfast. She wore socks on her little hands for mittens. At age four, Susette learned to keep warm inside their frigid house by climbing under the kitchen sink to be near the hot-water pipe. She had few friends and very little to look forward to.

In need of more steady work, Susette's mother moved to New London, Connecticut, before Susette's tenth birthday. She enrolled Susette in a Catholic school. After getting pregnant at age sixteen, Susette married Michael Kelo. By the time Susette turned twenty-five, she and Kelo had five sons.

Two years later, she divorced Kelo but kept his name. When her ex-husband failed to pay child support, Susette and her sons ended up on welfare for a short time before she found employment as a s.h.i.+pyard electrician at Electric Boat, a division of General Dynamics that manufactures submarines. With her five boys, she moved into a small house next to a chicken farm in Preston.

That's when she met thirty-two-year-old John Jorsz, who lived down the road, alone on his ranch. He had never married. At thirty-one, Susette had a body that defied the fact that she had delivered five children. Her fiery red hair ran all the way down to her waist. After a hurricane took down a tree in her yard, she asked Jorsz to cut it up, which he gladly did. Then when her boys' dog died, Jorsz helped them bury it. He even made a grave marker-a wooden cross bearing the dog's name.

In 1988, Susette married Jorsz and moved into the ranch house, along with her sons. Although the marriage never sizzled, it suited their needs. Jorsz provided a roof and three square meals a day, and he cared for the boys as if they were his own. Susette brought livestock to the farm and used her green thumb to dress the place up with gardens and crops.

Things worked for eight years. But when Susette hit forty, she yearned for something more. Tired of the day-to-day grind of maintaining the ranch and a marriage headed nowhere, she wanted to pursue something for herself. Childhood poverty had cheated her out of an education. Early pregnancy and a determination to be a good mother had negated any chance of a career. She had worn out her life raising five sons and trying to make two unfulfilling marriages work. There had to be something better out there. To figure it out, she needed a fresh start.

But the beach house wasn't the answer. It was nothing but a pipe dream without her husband's help. She knew she could never afford it on her own. That's all right That's all right, she figured. One way or the other, she'd find a place of her own by the water. And when she did, she'd leave Jorsz.

Any hope of landing near the water rested in New London, one of the oldest cities in America. Established in 1658 and named after Great Britain's main city, New London, at the juncture of the Thames River and Long Island Sound, thrived as a colonial port. Whaling made it a commercial power in the 1800s. In the twentieth century, though, New London was transformed into a blue-collar, industrial city, with the defense industry exploiting the city's seacoast for U.S. Navy and Coast Guard installations. But as the cold war wound down and the defense industry cut back, New London's unemployment rose, and its property values fell.

Susette's EMT unit had its home base at New London's city hospital, where Susette spent most of her weekends. A few weeks after her husband insisted he'd never leave Preston, Susette and Jeff Douchette got called to an emergency at New London's Naval Undersea Warfare Center, a thirty-two-acre vacant campus of buildings and laboratories on the banks of the Thames. The call turned out to be a false alarm. As they left the base, Susette asked Douchette for the keys and suggested a scenic route back to the hospital. Douchette agreed.

Susette exited the base onto East Street, which ran between the base and a civilian neighborhood settled by Irish and Italian immigrants in the early 1900s. Some homes on East Street had views overlooking the base and the water. Susette coasted to a stop sign at the end of the street.

”Wow, look at that house,” she said, pointing at a two-story Victorian that occupied the corner of East and Trumbull streets.

Douchette was not impressed. The house looked abandoned and had no yard or driveway.

Susette parked the truck to get a closer look. Vines and overgrown brush concealed a set of brick steps leading from the street to the front door. Dreary beige paint, cracked and peeling, covered the exterior. A weathered ”For Sale” sign dangled from a fence.

”I think I'd like to buy that,” she said.

”Are you crazy?” Douchette said.

”No, I'm serious.”

”You gotta be out of your mind.”

The front of the house's foundation ab.u.t.ted the cracked sidewalk on East Street. The left side of the house went right to the edge of Trumbull Street. Fewer than ten feet separated the right side of the house from an almost identical Victorian that also had a ”For Sale” sign on it.

Susette didn't care. The place had a water view. The fact that it needed work convinced her she just might be able to afford it. She jotted down the phone number and the address ”8 East Street” on a sc.r.a.p of paper and stuffed it in her pocket.

2.

BIG AMBITIONS.

John G. Rowland had reason to smile. The Republican governor's polling numbers had top Democrats backing off from challenging him in his upcoming bid for reelection. Rowland had strung together an improbable series of convincing victories at a remarkably young age. After winning election to the state legislature at age twenty-three, Rowland had become a U.S. congressman at twenty-seven. Then in 1994, the state had elected him governor at age thirty-seven. Handsome, charismatic, and immensely popular, the governor had established dominance in a blue state in the heart of the northeast.

His meteoric rise had not gone unnoticed by the Republican National Party. Another four-year term as the state's chief executive would solidify his hopes of reaching the national stage. In this campaign, however, Rowland had more in mind than just winning: he also wanted to carry some of the state's most Democratic cities.

No Connecticut town voted more Democratic than New London, where Democrats outnumbered Republicans more than four to one among registered voters. Democrats absolutely dominated local, state, and federal elections there. But these overwhelming odds only fueled Rowland's ambition. He figured the city's economic woes gave him an opening. New London's unemployment rate was twice as high as the statewide average. Industry and business had fled the city. The crime rate was up, and a feeling of hopelessness had set in.

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