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UNTIL NORM’S stroke, the growing roster of busted locals had been as titillating as it was unsettling. News of Eugene Stremler’s arrest flabbergasted just about everyone, especially those whose animals he’d cared for and those he’d enlisted in his anti-casino brigade. But the rich-vet-gone-bad zinger—Customs found forty pounds in his Mercedes trunk during a rare random search of NEXUS lane vehicles—was soon upstaged by news of Luther Stevens. The beloved principal, caught with 160 pounds in his wood shop? Still, from what Sophie could tell, people seemed more shocked by Norm’s alleged involvement.
When rumors first slipped about illegals buying access across his land, Sophie heard outrage. Things had gotten so absurd that even stalwarts like Norm were getting slandered. There was, however, another reaction. If Norm, Luther and the doc really were involved, then all the rules had changed, right? If they think it’s okay to cut themselves a piece of the pie, what’s to stop the rest of us?
And something about those busts and rumors brought on a mass confessional in which people almost lined up to tell Sophie about their indiscretions. Even the mousiest locals suddenly had stories. They started mild, with tales of sneaking undeclared cases of whiskey over the line, but often swerved into the bizarre. Beekeeper Tawni Metz admitted smuggling eight thousand queen bees to Victoria, where she sold them for $100,000. Another’s crime was profiting off the Beanie Babies craze in the nineties. Several farmers fessed up to hauling in hundreds of gallons of Canuck Gold, the Canadian version of Roundup. Elderly couples told Sophie about repeated trips to Canadian pharmacies for discounted Lipitor, Celebrex and Zoloft. Others shared old family secrets about rum-running uncles and grandfathers who bushwhacked the same routes bud runners used today. A few came forward saying they’d recently sold overpriced border parcels to shady out-of-towners.
To Sophie it felt as if the citizenry were undergoing some sort of group therapy. Even quiet Vern Moffat took a break from his leaf blowing to tell her how his younger brother had smuggled eighty pounds in the false floor of a horse trailer. “Nobody wants to get in there and shovel the manure out.” Smaller indiscretions—an ounce here, a gram there—were more prevalent, of course, back when the border wasn’t watched so closely, and there were also the oddball things people or their “friends” snuck over the line—whether grizzly hides, black-bear teeth, whale bones, wolf skulls, moose meat, crane jerky or Cuban cigars. Katrina Montfort veered off-topic to relate a twenty-five-year-old story about her teenage affair with a hazelnut farmer who kept hopping the ditch to sneak into her parents’ house on Peace Drive.
Sophie chronicled all of it, and people increasingly asked to go on camera. After three vodka tonics, even Alexandra Cole ventured into the light to describe exactly how the bank could tell which locals were laundering money, without naming individuals or businesses but making it tantalizingly clear who was about to get busted.
Still, the tiny blood clot that lodged in a narrow vessel in Norm Vanderkool’s brain while he rose to shake Dale Mesick’s hand at Duke’s on a two-for-one Tuesday took the fun out of this mass confessional, especially since Norm increasingly appeared innocent and wrongly maligned. They’d even ransacked his bank account!
The clot lasted just long enough to give Norm what the doctor called an ischemic stroke, though it did enough damage to launch a new prevailing notion: The increased security is killing us. Sophie heard rumblings about an anti-government posse forming to “take the county back,” a mood summed up by Dirk Hoffman’s new reader board: BP GO HOME.
As it played out, many agents were already on their way. Within a week, headquarters transferred fourteen of them to the southern line and flew a cost analyst out from D.C. to examine the sector’s books and particularly its handling of the border cams, which reportedly malfunctioned whenever temperatures rose above seventy-one degrees. Patrols were trimmed, and the green-and-whites soon blended in with the tractors and trucks lumbering along Boundary, H Street and beyond.
When Brandon Vanderkool quietly resigned to take care of the family dairy while his father recuperated, it felt, to most, like the end of a very peculiar era.