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An Oral History of the Black Goat Tavern

Before we get to the truth and lies and everything in between surrounding this place, I want to start with my own confession. I came to Prudence, Massachusetts for selfish reasons. I told my editors I wanted the assignment because no one else, no one on staff or from the freelance pool, wanted anything to do with it. To some degree this was true. The story, as far as anyone could tell from local coverage and social media posts, was a grinch. The kind where committed professionals know to keep their heads down and their pens in pocket. The second you think the people who pay you aren’t looking, you take out your thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole and push it off your desk until it’s buried by the next pitch cycle. I didn’t want it because of the challenge in and of itself. Any working life is challenging enough, and I don’t see any point in inviting more frustration onto the factory floor of my mind. It’s already been working past capacity for years.

What really appealed to me about the assignment was the distraction it could provide. In that regard, Prudence was so excessive it may as well have been temperance. Sad to say the cliched truth is I’d gotten carried away during the pandemic and wanted a go at sobering up. I know, a writer with a drinking problem, why even bother to point it out? The less desirable but more accurate truth is that I hadn’t gone a single twenty-four hour period without at least one drink in over seventeen years. For whatever reason, most likely the dumbest of dumb luck, this hadn’t kept me from slogging through work and relationships without ever letting on that there just might be a problem or twelve lurking in the bright light of day. Turns out, everyone else knew what I did not or chose not to learn about myself. And it also turns out that my colleagues, family, friends, and partners are all human as well.

It would never occur to them that something so obvious merited any comment or scrutiny. In the same way it would never occur to me to tell them that the sky was blue. They too were busy dealing with their own set of issues, problems, and limitations. There’s no blame to be had and none I could dole out in good conscience. Our divorce was finalized before my ex-wife found out she was color blind. I’d assumed her wardrobe was carefully chosen and curated for some trendy maximalist color clash effect. What did I know about clothes? What did I know about women? I did know we fought all the time and simply thought she was someone who valued conflict as a creative force. Few things conflicted as much as the dialectic between her mismatched shoes and handbags. Further complicating things were the hefty price tags they didn’t bother to put anywhere near those shoes and handbags. They were always boutique or pop-up purchases, which meant you paid whatever they charged at the sleek, glowing white plastic cryptocurrency register. Don’t even think about asking the people whose job it is to sell these things to you how much any of those somethings might cost. Such was their faith in capitalism that the market value could be plucked out of the ether once the black card was in their hands. Such was my faith in capitalism that their unjustifiable expense only led credence to my unjustified conclusions. She knew how to dress. I was the one who wasn’t seeing things clearly.

We tend to let one another see only a few narrow bands of light compared to what is actually visible. Some of this tendency is good. An eye fixed on suffering often does as much good as a blind one. As far as I know, my unfounded compliments for my ex’s sartorial indiscretions made her feel genuinely good in the moment. Prudence, on the other hand, has a low-key confrontational way of making you see the sides of things you’d rather wish didn’t exist whatsoever. That’s why I’m blaming the town for my choices here. I didn’t set out to publish an oral history. If I wasn’t honest about my motives, at least I was honest about my intentions. I wanted to put together a proper, well sourced piece of longform journalism on behalf of this fine magazine. It was merely this chaotic superdeterminist corner of the universe that kept me from doing so. That and the unexpected ten days of waking up feeling hungover without the pleasure of having indulged the night before. That and the even less expected two weeks of my sweat continuing to smell like ethanol despite my newfound commitment and resolve. That and the excessive amount of time I, paranoid, threw away combing over bank and credit card statements to make sure I wasn’t really buying bottles, chugging them, and somehow removing all traces of the evidence before I blacked out each evening. If my skills as a journalist rivaled my skills in forensic accounting, maybe I could have made a go at writing a real quality piece.

Instead, we’ll have to settle with the chronology I barely had time to scrape up and we’ll have to take the people I interviewed at their word. Given how much effort it took to procure the incredibly costly bitter Italian sodas I’ve been using to replace ritual hard drinking with ritual soft drinking, I hope you’ll come to view this as the accomplishment it really is.

I’m also no stranger to the format. My agent is quick to remind me that my most read, most shared, most royaltied, most anthologized, etc. published work is the oral history I put together about Space Jamaicans. My treatment of that appropriately maligned syndicated Saturday morning cartoon from the late 1980’s is readily available online. I’m told by critics and comment sections that it’s a meditation on the unreliable nature of memory. The show’s viewers, people who were small children at the time of its initial run remembered it vividly but couldn’t find any way to confirm its existence. It was a lucid, collective dream they could call up at will. Meanwhile, people who worked on the show could not remember it, even after being shown archival footage and studio bank records that confirmed they were a paid part of the production.

I bring this up not only to generate the clicks my sober self is worried I’ll never see again, but because being in Prudence felt like watching a very special episode of Space Jamaicans surfacing into reality in real time. Potentially, I learned everything that is knowable about the subject of this oral history. But it’s just as likely that I learned nothing about the guy. I don’t know if I even learned anything about the narrow bands of real and unreal that my interview subjects honed in on for themselves. What’s certain, what I’m confident of, is that the people I interviewed told me all about what they wanted me, you, and everybody else to know.

Each and every one of them is feeding us a thin slice of experience, lived and imagined. All product. All for our consumption. We the reader. We the people. We the jury they take us to be. To what end each player produced their narrative is unclear. The goodly terrible thing is when we look to the larger pattern, we don’t need to be so hard on ourselves and the general confusion we find ourselves in. We can always take a step back and remember that this sort of thing just seems to happen during a witch hunt. And in doing so, hopefully we can keep each other from getting too carried away. I’m afraid that’s all we can hope for.

The Hunters and the Hunted, persons of interest

Elliot ‘Eli’ McRae: Born January 1969 in Prudence, MA. Disappeared June 2021. Owner and proprietor of the Black Goat Tavern since 1995. After college, McRae worked in the restaurant and hospitality industry. He inherited his family home along with his only sibling, Olivia, upon their mother’s death in 1995. Olivia chose to sell the house and Eli used his share of the sale to make a down payment on the Goat. At that time, he also remodeled the living space above the bar. The Black Goat was renovated, and operations expanded in 2003.

Ricky Pardo: Eli’s closest childhood friend. He died during their senior year of high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts in October 1986.

Olivia McRae: Eli’s older sister and only sibling. Mother to Evelyn, Kathryn, and Amelia. She is a tenured professor at the Central Massachusetts Community College, teaching in their nursing program.

Evelyn McRae: Eli’s eldest niece. Computer scientist and university professor for the Nashaway Institute of Technology. She is currently on sabbatical.

Kathryn McRae: Eli’s second niece. She was the shooting guard for the Prudence Academy co-ed varsity basketball team. She received an athletic scholarship to attend college and then used college funds set aside by her uncle to attend and graduate law school.

Amelia McRae: Eli’s youngest niece. She won the Ms. Commonwealth beauty pageant in 2012. Today she owns and operates an art gallery in Madrid, New Mexico that exclusively shows work by underground artists who were discovered on various social media platforms.

Maya Francis: From Jamaica Plain, she met Eli during college. They had an on again/off again romantic relationship. She worked at the Black Goat Tavern from 1997-2005 and was Eli’s only employee for much of that time. Did not reply to requests for comment.

Regina Francis: Maya’s daughter and only child. She was the star forward on Prudence Academy’s co-ed varsity basketball team and grew up at the Black Goat Tavern. While her mother worked there, Regina would do her homework upstairs with Evelyn, Kathryn, and Amelia, or play basketball with Kathryn on a court just outside the Goat. Francis played basketball professionally in Europe for over a decade. Did not reply to requests for comment.

Officer Craig Heaton: High school friend to Eli and Ricky. He was their teammate on the 1987 state championship high school basketball team. He also coached the Prudence Academy co-ed varsity basketball team to a state tournament berth in 2004-2005. After high school, Heaton joined the Prudence Police Department where he continues to work.

Jake Frobisher: Line cook for the Black Goat Tavern at the time of Eli McRae’s disappearance.

Rachel Charon: Bartender for the Black Goat Tavern at the time of Eli McRae’s disappearance.

Connie Velasquez-Smyth: Founding board member of the non-profit Black Goat Gardens. She was the organization’s acting executive director before Eli’s disappearance. Her group used the Black Goat Tavern’s basement as a meeting space and later leased it from Eli as an indoor grow area.

Cooper Reed: Evelyn’s biological father. Allegedly kidnapped Kathryn in 1997 and then disappeared while awaiting trial. His spouse and alleged accomplice Susan Reed also disappeared shortly after.

Chap Butler: High school rival of Eli and Ricky Pardo. He was also on the championship winning basketball team. Served as the chief administrative officer for the Prudence town council until criminal investigations forced his resignation in 2016. Now best known for leading a white nationalist organization he founded in 2010 called the Pride Guys. Refused comment.

The knock at the door…

Jake Frobisher: It was crazy.

Olivia McRae: Eli called me. Even though his voice was calm, I knew something was up. He doesn’t call. Eli texts. Something is off [if] he calls and it’s not your birthday.

Rachel Charon: We were looking forward to another great summer season after we’d missed out on the Spring. It was rough. We’d made it through those dark months by going to all take out. I had to move to the kitchen and was really happy to be back behind our bar where I feel a lot more comfortable. I’ve been working as a bartender for over a decade with most of that time coming at the Goat. I[’d] just got in because the bar has less prep work than the kitchen and I hear Eli telling us to all head upstairs to his apartment because there were protesters at the door.

Jake Frobisher: The Goat has a great I don’t know like Old Word public house vibe that Eli nailed when they redid it. That and the local produce he was using and getting a reputation [for] were [sic] what drove me to work for him after I finished up at culinary school. I’d grown up nearby in Clinton and knew all about the Goat. It’s where people went to celebrate things- birthdays, anniversaries, retirements. It was much more than a bar. Part of that was the entrance with the huge hanging sign above [the doorway] with the wrought iron Black Goat standing in the middle of it. And he put in a great oak door recycled from one of the old social clubs each immigrant group used to keep up in Prudence when the leather industry still existed. Bang, bang, bang! They didn’t knock on the door. They were punching it. Kicking it. Slamming things into it.

Rachel Charon: Nothing really got to us by then. After Covid hit, the ground was always shifting beneath your feet, in every part of your life. All the things you used to rely on. Finding childcare was now impossible. Fuck, finding toilet paper was almost impossible for like a week or two at one point. Eli let us take the industrial rolls he had for the restroom stalls home because we couldn’t have anyone dine in. He booms out in his dry, steady Eli voice for us to get upstairs and lock the door. We’re all thinking it’s the mask people. You saw stories of people freaking out over the mask mandates all over the country on social media and on the news. Thank God we weren’t in Boston and didn’t have to do vax cards too. We all assumed they’d made their way to the Goat and it wasn’t even that upsetting. It was like, ‘Ok. This was always going to happen. This is what happens now.’ Like always, Eli refuses to let anyone- and I mean fucking anyone- treat his team with disrespect. He’s going to handle this. It’s Eli. These fucking idiots are barking up the wrong tree. There’s nothing that’s going to get him to budge from his doorway. The Goat belongs to our community, but it’s his. Other than his nieces and the Red Sox, what does Eli care about? He is The Goat and these anti-mask people are fucking up big time.

Jake Frobisher: From the apartment upstairs you could see part of the sidewalk. What was really unsettling is that they were packed from the door to like halfway into the street. And it looked like there were more of them with megaphones and all sorts of banners and shit getting ready at the little half basketball court across the way that The Goat took care of. And we’re like at this point in disbelief, me and Rach, our little pandemic skeleton crew, looking at each other in complete disbelief.

Rachel: There were guns everywhere. That was what hit you first. Fucking guns everywhere. Out in the open on purpose, whether or not that’s even legal here. It’s unbelievable to me that we hear about that all the time too. Mass shootings. Always hear about them happening and happening everywhere. Now it’s happening here. Where I work. Me and Jakey both call 911, but he stops me and makes me call home to talk to my son.

Jake: One look out that window. It was disgusting. It was medieval. I was sure we were going to die. There was no way out.

Rachel: I’m in tears after telling my son how much I love him and it’s all racing through your head. Was it the LGBTQ+ nights? Was it replacing the words ‘Black Goat’ with ‘Black Lives Matter’ on our signage? Did the Chap Butler people finally want to get back at Eli for making him look like an asshole at all those town meetings? We always felt safe. We always felt like the Goat was the safest place in a safe, tolerant town.

Jake: You’re realizing that [by] creating a safe, vibrant community, that this place is exactly what they want to destroy. And after I’m off the phone with 911 I’m texting everyone goodbye. It was very much ‘Oh my god, we’re going to die.’ It was terrible. To know in the pit of your stomach that you’re going to die for going into work. Work that I love and live for. My job is to feed people and bring them some happiness, especially in difficult times like we were going through with all the Covid stuff.

Evelyn McRae: I get a call from mom mid to late morning. I was in between classes and I’m pretty sure meeting with a grad student in my office. She was frantic. It was close to how she sounded if I didn’t remember to call to check in after going to a friend’s house as a teenager. That’s my only point of comparison for how worried she sounds. It put us under a lot of stress. I cancelled my afternoon lecture and sat there, waiting for him [Eli] to call. He didn’t waste any time. There was no self-pity or woe is us with my uncle. Straight away he’s telling me that he’s emailed me the SaidIT thread that kicked this all off. ‘How quickly do you think you and your students can find these people?’ And I’m like possibly never. The whole point of SaidIT and why law enforcement hates it, is the encryption it uses. They really want to keep the anonymous speech anonymous. As I’m explaining this, he just cuts me off. He goes ‘Evie, I’ve met them in person. They are ignorant. You are educated and you are brilliant. How quickly do you think you and your students can find these people?’

tru_paytriotluv: evry1 knos they perform black mass @ the goat evry full moon

1nayshun_gawd: not evry full moon

tru_paytriotluv: wdym?

1nayshun_gawd: ur solutely right that they do black mass there

Rachel: I don’t know how he did it. He kept them at the door long enough that the police could show up and sort of close in on everyone.

Jake: This entire time, in real time you could see other businesses on Wolfe and Main were calling the police. They were all posting what was happening, pictures and videos to social media and tagging the town, tagging the emergency services.

Rachel: The police didn’t have much choice because they were so outnumbered. They basically got these wackjobs to retreat and leave the area and that was that. It would’ve been nice if they could have arrested them then and there, but it wasn’t really possible. You can’t blame the cops for doing the best they could in a situation no one should ever have to deal with. If they’d tried that a war would have broke [sic] out all over downtown. The other downtown area businesses really stepped up for us. They were the ones sneaking pictures of these thugs and their license plates. It was really good to know that someone had our back- that the people we shared Wolfe and Main with had our backs.

Jake: Before the Goat remade itself, none of those businesses existed, because there was no reason for anyone to go downtown. The Goat brought people there and kept them there and kept them spending money. It was always the anchor for the sort of renaissance Prudence experienced with its commuter line. Eli brought Wolfe and Main back from the dead and everyone around here knows it.

Rachel: In the aftermath, it was weird to see all those pictures and videos online. Almost all of the mob that showed up were from out of state. New Hampshire plates, Vermont plates, New York state. It was wild and honestly pretty fucking depressing to think people would go so far out of their way to destroy a thriving local business that wasn’t anywhere near local to them. Eli was the best boss and working the Goat’s bar was the best job I’ve ever had. I’m still devastated when I think about it. I try not to think about it, but of course people should know what happened here, so I’ll talk about it for things like this. I think the worst part of talking about it is still trying to get over the fact that I was powerless to do anything to stop it while it was unfolding. I know I’m a mom, but when I’m forced to think back on it, I wished I’d stood up for the Goat and told Eli not to close. To not back down. He probably wouldn’t have listened because he put us and our safety first. I know I’m not responsible, but I still feel guilty. If I’m there and the kitchen is there and our awesome, super loyal customers are there, does Eli vanish without a trace? No, he doesn’t. He stays and he runs the Goat like he did the day before all this happened and the day before that and the day before that one.

Jake: My life is in the kitchen. It’s a huge regret I didn’t tell Eli I wanted to stay open. Not that he would have agreed or listened. Seeing how everything went down after the fact, I should have let him know how important the Goat was to me and everyone else here in Prudence. That I regret.

Evelyn: Would you believe it? My uncle was right, again. It took hours if that to track down the OP (original poster) and other commenters from the thread. They were quite-if not stupid- naïve. They all used the exact same usernames or very close variations on other platforms that do make user data public. Actually, they were very stupid, because they opted to use these same or similar signifiers on platforms that exist expressly to make user data public. Like, that’s the whole point of signing up and making an account for those services. So, to see them making crazed claims and threats with the same or pretty much the same usernames on a separate, more secure, platform, was a real time saver in terms of identifying them. I couldn’t believe our luck. The photos taken in downtown Prudence that day matched profile pics on some of these platforms too. They’d found photos of themselves [allegedly] committing crimes and posted them to their own accounts. Truly stupid. All we needed to do was take screenshots really. My uncle easily could have done this on his own if he wasn’t stuck dealing with police and media requests and everything else. But he was, so I put it all on some thumb drives that we passed around. We kept one. I gave one to the Prudence Pioneer and they shared it with other papers and news sources. I gave one to the local police in Prudence. And I gave one to the Nashaway County District Attorney’s Office.

hltrskltrKknight19: wtf

tru_paytriotluv: share this the ppl need to kno whats going on

hltrskltrKknight19: done

Ujame$cityS: abxolutely well take him down

1nayshun_gawd: dun shared with all active forums im n

hltrskltrKknight19: on it

Jake: If I’m not mistaken, it was Evelyn who tracked down the first group, the ringleaders who showed up. There was no way she or anyone else could have figured out who all fifty of them were. They didn’t each come up in their own cars registered to them.

Rachel: We thought that was that. All the idiots who were IDed pretty quickly turned on the ones who police couldn’t identify to try to avoid jail time.

Jake: To my thinking, once all the charges were filed it was nothing more than a really weird day. It had already moved from crisis to the best story I could tell at a party. We all thought we’d turned the corner and I remember texting with Rach, we were both really upbeat and positive that Eli would reopen any day now. This was maybe two weeks after they’d shown up. The footage was on national news and we were both turning down cable news interviews. All we wanted was to get back to work and get back to our lives.

Rachel: That’s about when Eli called and said he was offering us severance pay because he couldn’t see it being safe to reopen anytime soon. It was a huge shock. I couldn’t believe it.

Jake: He was down, you could tell by his voice. He sounded worn down and tired. I didn’t want to push too hard, but I wanted to know what was going on, so of course I asked him why he was so worried about our safety. All he said was that the religious ones were in on it now and I let him leave it at that. I didn’t really know what to make of it.

Rachel: Me and Jakey started to go here and there on the web and search for ‘goat’, ‘black goat’, ‘#blackgoat. All that sort of thing. We searched Eli’s name. It was a bottomless pit. It simply did not end. One site would bring you to the next. One link would bring you to ten more and so on. There were playlists of videos. Pastors and preachers throughout the country, even some in Canada and Australia. They were all following the same insane script, claiming the same things the SaidIT posts did, only now, they could hold up the arrests and charges against the first wave of fuckheads as some weird sort of proof that it was all true.

Jake: What was his name? Reverend Mountain Coombs? He was everywhere with it. He was going church to church, saying that it was clear the liberal elite were hiding what was going on in the Goat’s basement because one of the judges who convicted Rob Warner, the ‘mastermind’ if you will, his brother [Judge Stendhope’s] went to an Ivy League school and was a fundraiser for the Dems. It was never ending bullshit. Cascades of bullshit. Video after video of it, with more outrageous claims in each and every one. This guy turned it into an industry. He’d travel from church to church collecting money to save the children of Prudence, Massachusetts from satanism after he’d killed them all ten times over during the sermon with the crazy shit he was saying.

Rachel: We did our best. God. What a disaster. The first thing me and Jakey tried to do was post comments on these things and fact check what was being said. If we were lucky they’d remove our posts, because when they stayed up for even a few hours the death and rape threats and vitriol would pour down on us from these so-called Christians.

Jake: No matter how many times you reported this stuff, they were always so many steps ahead. Even the most responsive and responsible sites, they need to look into these things. They can’t take everything down that people might find objectionable. There wouldn’t be anything remaining. But some of them did stick to their [community] guidelines and remove posts and videos because they were legitimately dangerous and threatening. The problem was, one came down and three went up to replace it. It was never ending whack-a-mole. Even without work and being paid to stay home, we couldn’t keep up with it. That’s the dark nature of the web today. I hate to say it because I grew up online like everyone from my generation and I love so many things about the internet and technology. But it can be a very dangerous place too.

Rachel: It became clear pretty quick that Eli was right. There was no hiding from this thing. It had really gotten completely out of control. In hindsight, there was no way back to safety for him.

tru_paytriotluv: evry1 needs to kno why its called the black goat

hltrskltrKknight19: ???

tru_paytriotluv: its bible the black goat was the azaazzle the one the jewz kill for all the wiekced shit they do to try and confuse god

cristnday_dreamz: thats right and when the satanists took it over they called it baphomet thats the black goat that sits and guards there temple and theres more right is for light and left is for darkness the bible tells us the sheep are on the right and the goat is on the left where its dark where its black its all right there in matthew chapter 25! read it and know they dont read it where this bar is so thehy dont know whats going on there

Jake: We got another call from Eli. This time he was pretty angry with us or angry with the situation we found ourselves in. Someone must have shown him the threats people were making against us online.

Rachel: All I remember about the last phone conversation, the last conversation period, I had with him was how final it all felt. Which made a kind of sense at the time because our business relationship was really over. He called to ask when I’d be home so he could send Dolan, that was his lawyer I think, around for me to sign the severance agreement. He told me how terrible it had become. Out of habit he still woke up early each morning, and that was why no one ever saw the graffiti until he disappeared. Every day he scrubbed off swastikas and awful things people wrote about his sister.

Jake: He didn’t have to do any of that. He knew we were already protecting his and the Goat’s reputation. I’d never heard of a restaurant job giving severance. They open and they close. If you choose this field, that’s part of what you’re choosing. He was looking out for us again, one last time.

Rachel: I signed the afternoon we spoke and I think Jake signed the next day. That weekend is when it happened. After that, Eli was gone.

Olivia: I stopped by the Goat to check in on him Monday morning. Oh, it was I don’t know maybe around ten or eleven. I’d brought coffee that I knew he liked. And there at the entryway, the brick was covered in pure filth. They’d spray painted, or someone had spray painted, this and that about Aryan purity. And there was stuff about me. ‘Your sister’s a whore. Three men and three children. Burn the whore in hell.’ All sorts of uplifting messages. The glass [windows] were still intact, but the main door opened. Eli had kept it locked and bolted since the first incident. I was planning on using the backway up to his living space until all the vandalism stopped me dead in my tracks. Before I went in any further, I called the police.

Officer Craig Heaton: Every door and every window was unlocked. Eli, as you know, was not found in the dining area, kitchen, bar, patio, basement, or upstairs apartment. One by one, we brought Olivia, Evelyn, Rachel, and Jake through the building to see if they could notice if anything was missing. Maybe a day or two went by and we had Connie tour the scene. Nothing looked out of place. There were no signs of a struggle or confrontation of any kind. All that was gone, and Evelyn picked up on it right away, was Eli’s laptop. His computer. But the power strip for it, [was] still plugged into the wall. That Toyota truck with a million or more miles on it was parked on the street where it always was when Eli wasn’t driving it. Same spot it had been for pretty much twenty years. I actually responded to the first call from Olivia. After my first tour of the scene, I’m going over everything, which isn’t much for the reasons I’ve outlined for you. Eli’s done it again. He’s got me scratching my head again. I’m sitting in the cruiser and I can’t remember how to drive for a few minutes. You know he’s got me stuck thinking over and over in my head, thinking ‘Oh my God, he’s done it again.’

Doing the Research

Evelyn McRae: Let’s say he did run away. If some right-wing extremists didn’t kill my uncle, he would have left some clues. They’d just be cryptic clues. I don’t know that he’d use a cipher or anything too sophisticated. My uncle likes to keep things simple and get the job done efficiently with as little fuss as possible. One of the many wrong impressions people got of him is that he’s finnicky and overcomplicates things. Like when he got the solar panels. No one had used them before in Prudence in a large array like that. Before the Goat had them installed they [solar panels] were something you’d see one or two at most of outside some hippie dippy’s unkept barn. Everybody sees the panels going in and they all assumed it was some flashy way to stand out that you really didn’t need for a neighborhood bar. It wasn’t that at all. It was different, yes. At the same time, it was simple and effective. He knew they needed an outdoor patio space to expand into and for whatever reason the patio area was already zoned and ready to go. He didn’t need to amend the liquor license or anything crazy like that. And God he hates bureaucracy. Red tape is not simple to cut through. Taking shortcuts with the solar panels was more an act of self-preservation than anything during the rebuild.* What the solar array did was it provided shade for the patio area while providing him with power he didn’t have to pay for each and every month. He didn’t want to worry about paying for all these upgrades. It was an obvious opportunity to offset some of that over time by bringing in more revenue and lowering his bills. It was really smart, simple, and efficient. Naturally, everyone in Podunk Prudence raked him over the coals for it. But he was right. And he has this really flexible mind that can make its way through difficult situations. He could always see what’s hiding in plain sight. Right?

Can I tell you another story about my uncle? Ok. Thanks. So, my junior year in high school, I wrote an article for our school paper about the persecution of single women in the Nashaway River Valley during the 17^th century. You know, a quaint looking back piece. He helped me research it before the Goat opened on the weekends for lunch. It was so much fun. We were like detectives tracking this thing down. He had me make phone calls to professors, university libraries, history departments-let’s see- women’s study departments, tribal groups, historical societies. All of it. I’d always considered myself to be a very on my own and not intimidated type of person, but he really pushed me to do all of those things for myself. And of course, when I got to college, when I got to grad school, I was at such an advantaged. It was all old hat to me. Especially in computer science, where yes, a lot of the high achievers don’t really have the most polished social and interpersonal skills that you need in academia. But yeah, the research process was very challenging and a lot of fun. Remember, keep in mind, this was to write something to pitch to a high school newspaper. We’re talking way above and beyond. They hadn’t even asked for anything on this [topic]. They were looking for recaps of the latest OC episode, coverage for school events- stuff like that. Like most things with my uncle, this was different and better. Now, what we found out was not much fun at all. We found all these women whose only crime was surviving and thriving on their own. They went to church like everybody else, but they made a go of it off little plots of land that they had and by using the town commons to keep some livestock. They also tended to have more interactions, or more known interactions, with the native indigenous peoples than their accusers were comfortable with. It wasn’t like Salem where they were accused of witchcraft per se. It was a little more subtle. Generic charges of ungodliness. Not keeping the Sabbath and other bullshit like that. Who can really answer to a charge like ungodliness when you’re a mere mortal? We’re all guilty and oddly enough I thought that was the point of the whole garden and the apple story. Not my namesake by the way. I’m named after Evelyn Waugh which is a different bag of snakes. You probably already know [that] my mom raised three girls solo. I’m not going to question her on something silly like a name.

Olivia: Oh, yes! I really liked Brideshead [Revisited]. They used to air it on PBS. It was my sort of highbrow soap opera when I was pregnant with her. I got sucked into Downton Abbey years later too. We like what we like. I like a good melodrama I guess. My mom and dad were with me when I named her. Then my brother gets to the hospital and tells me Evelyn Waugh is a man. And then right away he starts telling me it’s ok because his first wife was also called Evelyn. I don’t know if he made that up to make me feel better, or what was going on with him. I didn’t care. I’d just given birth. I had no idea why he was telling me these things. Really trivial trivia, you know? All we wanted him to do was hold the baby for a bit. That was probably the moment in my life I felt the most ‘older sister’ with him. Who the hell would care about what Evelyn Waugh had between his legs at a time like that? It’s a beautiful name and she’s a beautiful daughter. She was a beautiful baby too. Age wise, in terms of maturity, the space between us two in that moment seemed really large, which usually wasn’t the case with Eli.

Evelyn: And what was the other one I remember? Sabbath, yeah, that’s it. Thank you. Remember at this time the religion was established. That meant worship was state supported and enforced. You had to go to church. Not going was criminal. And if you were on your own then like these four women, of course you had to work more than everybody else who had family and servants to rely on. What my uncle suggested, and there wasn’t any anything we could find in the records to back this up, what he thought was that when the lengthy church services ended and everyone went to their respective homes and stayed there, it was the perfect time for these women to meet up and help each other out. It was like the one opportunity they’d have to sort of organize their efforts. If you think about how scandalous they made it for one woman to make her way through the world, then yeah, all of them banding together and succeeding would’ve been a real challenge to their patriarchal society. You’d have to hide it. How sad is that? You’d care for these people so deeply and they’d being doing the same for you, but it all has to happen in secret because some weird impotent men are so insecure about everything. Fast forward a couple centuries and pretty much the same exact fucking thing happened with Black Goat Gardens. It’s an idea from the past that we’re still not ready for sadly.

One of the things he brought up when I was telling him about all this stuff I was learning about- and I mean out of the blue- like he always brought up the big ideas they don’t want to talk about in school like it was some sort of afterthought or something…I remember over his kitchen table where we’d sneak coffee together- sorry mom- he just goes ‘Oh, it’s Hegel.’ And I was sort of thinking we should get donuts instead. ‘No, Hegel. The master and the servant.’ Then he goes on and explains how these women didn’t have a master, specifically a man, in their lives to master them. That meant their society, the society they found themselves living in was hellbent on finding one for them. What made it all the more pressing was how they had mastered what little land was available to them and really made it flourish. These members of an alleged weaker sex had mastered themselves and worked with nature to eke out somewhat comfortable lives under really difficult circumstances.

Enter Wadleigh Bell, the town’s father, which in this context made him everybody’s father if you lived in Prudence. What’s his answer? They must be witches, or in his rather unenlightened view, ungodly. They do have a master. They are servile and devout to someone or something. You might even be familiar with the guy. It’s Satan. That’s right. They were stuck like every other woman accused of living in her own way. There’s no way to defend yourself when the evidence stacked against you is other people’s fears and delusions. To his credit, Bell didn’t take any testimony outside the four accused women. They denied the then politically correct accusations against them but were judged guilty. Bell didn’t kill them either like Hathorne in Salem. Instead, he gives them what he assumed to be a fate even worse than being condemned to a torturous death. He banished them from any Christian settlement. Naturally, doing so on God’s authority, because town daddy and sky daddy must have been real close. For Bell, he has to maintain that illusion because that’s where he derives his authority from. But that’s where the paper trail ended. We don’t have any diaries or confessions from one of them having repented and returned or anything like that, like you see from Deerfield.

The specter of what happened at Deerfield hangs over all of this. The trials happened only a year after the raid. Everyone was closing ranks in response. Outsiders had to go. People were afraid. And it’s all irrational. You look at a contemporary map, which I did in one or more of the college libraries I accessed and you notice Prudence is nowhere near the border, the frontier by this point in time. But that’s what fear does. It shrinks the distance to the border, the distance between you and the unknown in our minds. Once you commit to that mistaken line of thought, it’s very hard to get back to reality. Confirmation bias kicks in in a very big way. If you tend to be superstitious to begin with, then you’re really lost. Everything becomes a sign, a justification, that you’re right and the other is not only wrong, but actually evil. That’s not the type of thing that people and their societies suffer. I mean, for them, that evil threatened not only this life, but the eternal one to come as well.

Getting back to Prudence. No records like Deerfield. None of the four were children and one of them, Nettie Smart, was frequently referred to as being of advanced age in the court documents. I promise you this is going somewhere about my uncle. His opinion…which I might as well mention at this point since I finally brought him up again…his opinion was that we couldn’t conclude anything else about what happened to them because it was all speculation. There was no more evidence to go on. I wanted to put the theory out there that maybe they lived happily ever after in the Great North Woods, where they were finally appreciated, free, and living in community with the Native groups who had somehow survived smallpox. He shut that down right away. I mean, he acknowledged that yes, he wanted the Disney romantic happily ever after as much as anyone. What we want and what we live aren’t always the same. He convinced me to take my own scholarship seriously and not put any what-ifs into my writing. I stuck to the facts.

Problem was the facts clearly articulated that the town and its central square hero [Wadleigh Bell] to be a bunch of misogynist assholes. My uncle read and reread each draft. He was so proud of me. And he kept telling me what made him happiest about the article was how proud it made me feel about myself. That was one of his uncle mantras when he gassed us up- my mom, me, my sisters. He’d say this world needs proud women. Maybe you can see where this is going, because clearly he valued different things than these creeps who idolized the Wadleigh Bells of history. I wrapped this all up and I submit the article for the October edition of the school paper. Took me most of the summer and September to get all this research in. And for a high school article it is more than top tier. Frasier levels of pretension. Opens with a quote from Phenomenology [of Spirit]. We’re fully expecting it to be front page, the featured main article. My uncle is trying to convince me to submit it into the editorial desk at the town newspaper too. We had high hopes.

[I] Think the cycle was like submit on a Tuesday, faculty review Wednesday/Thursday. Edits and punch-ups until the following Tuesday, and finally it would get into students’ hands on that Friday. Either way, later in the week, I get called over the loudspeaker to go into the assistant principal’s office. Everyone oohs and aahs real dramatic in class, because they’d all seen me firsthand get straight A’s since kindergarten and this guy was the person in charge of discipline. I felt fucking cool for once. I wasn’t worried either because I assumed they wanted to congratulate me in person about this article I’d worked so hard on. I’m walking down to his office on cloud nine until I get there. The door is already open and he’s in a swivel chair facing away from it so he can swivel around like the dickhead he is when he hears me go inside. Standing next to him, behind his desk, is Chap Butler. I’m guessing you’ve heard of him by this point too. You probably heard of him before you ever heard of Prudence after he [allegedly] engineered those mass murders on the highway.

At the time he was super into preserving the town’s whitewashed legacy. Then he moved on to preserving the Commonwealth’s whitewashed legacy, then the country’s, and now I think he’s up to all of western civilization or whatever it is this asshole does. My heart sinks. It’s really clear I’m not going to be congratulated and that this piece I’d worked so hard on is being flushed. Exactly how you’d expect, vice principal shithead and Butler take turns mansplaining how the article is all wrong and historically inaccurate. Any time I try to counter and ask them if they’ve read the sources I used they change the subject. And I’m at a loss as to how to deal with this, because I wanted to slap the shit out of them. I wish I’d fought back harder, but it was a lot to take. At my age or any age, that kind of letdown is so hard. It had gone… it had played itself out so different from what I had in my mind before getting to the office and it freezes you, you know? I really hope you don’t know actually. It sucks. It’s truly awful.

I wasn’t even pushing for an apology from the town, or some reconciliation process. You know the 1619 Project was decades away. I wasn’t even correcting some well-known record, trying to set it straight. Sadly, I didn’t know enough then to try to be that ambitious. I was merely trying to report some facts about our town’s history that I thought people should know about. And these two condescending shitbags with seemingly all the power in the situation steamrolled me into agreeing on a rewrite that literally rewrites the history and doesn’t even mention that they were witch trials. I felt physically ill and went straight to the nurse right after. Never returned to class. Someone brought my bag to me at the nurse’s office I guess. I think mom was working in Worcester, so when the nurse- who’s known me forever and knew I loved school and would never fake to get out of it- she calls and has my uncle pick me up.

I was too ashamed. I’d let these women down. And I thought I knew them better than anyone had for hundreds of years. I knew that I knew them better than the cowards they got stuck with for neighbors. I shutdown. I’m not talking at all. Not telling him about what’s wrong. And I see this is killing my uncle who’s running up and downstairs from the Goat to get me pillows and stuffed animals and make me French toast and make me French fries. We always told him everything. Me, mom, Kat. He leaves me to myself for a bit. Takes out the rated R VHS tapes for me. Eventually when he checks up on me I’m crying and sniffling and blurt it all out for him. He’s fucking furious. He can’t believe how they treated me and he’s trying to get me to name names. I never told him that Butler was involved because my uncle hated this guy since childhood. He sort of inherited this feud from his best friend who mom said died very young- like around the same age I was when all this was happening. That and he told us as a kid Butler would go around throwing rocks through the beautiful 19^th century stained glass in the abandoned buildings around downtown. Probably the only thing my uncle and the guy he bought the Goat from had in common. They both hated Butler. Makes sense. They were both builders and all Butler ever does is work to destroy things.

Olivia: My brother hated Crap Butler. I called him by his name. I’m tenured. I’ll keep doing it too. Like clockwork, for maybe five or six years starting when they were in junior high, I’d run into Crap and find him with a blackeye. And it would be like, ok, my brother knocked you out again. Once girls became interested in my brother, he was so shy about that stuff, and he’d get plenty of attention because of his looks. That’s when this all started. My brother would deflect that attention to Ricky. Because Ricky was the life of the party and had this larger-than-life personality that everyone loved. They were so close. Ricky had been dead for basically two decades and my brother bought him a seat next to his to watch the Sox finally win the World Series.

You could see why Chap would resent him [Eli]. He’s got attention from girls and this beautiful, close meaningful friendship with Ricky. Chap didn’t have any of that. He didn’t have any of that because of his shitty behavior. When people find out I knew him [Butler] growing up, they always ask me why I think so many people follow him. And it’s just like, do you drive? There are so many selfish assholes out there. This guy is telling them all the other people refuse to accept them not because of their terrible behavior, but because they’re really patriots and everyone else is the enemy or something. It’s an easy out is all it is. Everyone puts their worst self forward in some part, some area of their lives- at least occasionally. It’s all about not being an adult and figuring out how to own those failings and improve. That’s the appeal. That’s his ethos.

What this meant at the time when they were in junior high and high school was Crap starting rumors about Eli and Ricky being more than friends. It didn’t bother Ricky that much because he was dating all these girls my brother passed on, but he never dated them for long. It bothered Eli though. I don’t know if it was a social status thing because he only felt popular because of his connection with Ricky. Maybe there was some truth in it. I never asked. Maybe he did have or maybe he desired a romantic relationship with Ricky too. You go back to that empty seat in Fenway. Whether the rumors were true or not, given all that’s happened in between, it was a very touching gesture. It went beyond any friendship I’ve ever been a part of. Now that I have the distance and maybe the vocabulary for it, I do think it was really homophobic of my brother to beat the shit out of Crap for saying those things. Ricky was right. Who cares? Only morons care about things like that. It’s difficult to judge him though. I know we throw this around a lot, but it was a very different time. The threat of people knowing or presuming you were gay in this town during the 80s… that could undo someone completely. Crap Butler also has a very punchable face. Anyone who had to deal with him and his beady little snake eyes on a daily basis probably wanted to hit him. The adults too.

Evelyn: But I knew he would fucking kill him [Butler], so I only mentioned the vice principal. Immediately, he’s like ‘Fuck him. We’ll give him exactly what he wants because he’s a fucking moron. He’s the guy you told me thought Ben Franklin invented electricity.’ This was true. My freshman year in high school he was a fill-in social studies teacher when the actual one was on her maternity leave. Poor woman. She had to undo so much when she got back, with a newborn at home to boot. He’d marked a quiz wrong because I noted Franklin made discoveries about electricity and that the word bank he gave us shouldn’t have read ‘invented.’ This same guy then insisted I was wrong, even when I explained that would mean prior to Franklin electrical forces didn’t exist at all.

Now that my uncle had me thinking about that we’re both laughing and joking about how lightning wasn’t a thing until colonial Philadelphia existed. My tears start to clear up. I know he’s [Eli’s] right right away. This guy from the school is an idiot. We are smart. We are right. He is wrong. We are going to win. Once I’ve gone through a box of tissues, my uncle asks me if I know what an acrostic is. He knew I’d heard of them because he’d helped me check out all of these code cracking books when I was in my middle school spy phase. So, that’s what we did. We knew the formatting the school paper used. All we had to do was rewrite the puff piece they wanted with their bullet points, which took no time at all because Butler made sure I left the office with a ‘sample’ article they’d rubber stamped. That was their downfall. Instead of just asking some other student to put their name on what they wanted and how they wanted it, they thought it would be best if it appeared in a student’s voice- that’s what they told me over and over again. Weird how bullshit like that never seems to leave your memories.

The actual acrostic we snuck in I can’t remember. Think it was something along the lines of ‘It was a witch hunt’ or something close to that. My uncle had to talk me down from ‘Fuck Censorship’ or anything heavy handed I couldn’t play off as a coincidence if they caught it by some miracle. Anyway, no one ever noticed. My uncle put his copy up behind the bar with some tacks and highlighted the first letter of each line, but it was too dimly lit in there and the stools were too far away from that back wall for anyone to really notice. It was just between us. And all this is a very, very long-winded way to say I think he’d leave breadcrumbs for us if he were ok.

More than anything, I want to stick to the present tense with him like mom does. Maybe you noticed? I’m going back and forth, past and present, with him. Because I want to believe he’s pulled off some daring escape from Prudence and its angry villagers with their pitchforks and torches. Same how I wanted to believe those extraordinary, successful, independent women found their own way in the world after all those insane accusations were levelled at them. Of all the voices, it’s his I hear the loudest. He’s telling me I can’t follow a path where there is no evidence. For once, I don’t want to listen to my uncle. There’s way too much at stake.

The other thing that has me worried about him is that he followed me and my research closely. He wasn’t like everybody else begrudgingly watching [the] two or three minute explainers I put up of YouTube for the University [Nashaway Institute of Technology]. Zero knowledge proofs were genuinely an area of interest to him, or so he had me believe. The cast a sort of spell on him, for lack of a better term, like they do for me. He seemed to understand some of what is behind them and the possibilities they might open up for human freedom. Every time I published, every time I spoke at a conference, even when my research was cited by others in the field, he’d send me an email or two. With questions. Not just praise and pride. There was plenty of that too, don’t get me wrong. But he asked really good questions that other mathematicians and data scientists also puzzle over.

Given the amount of knowledge he had, I think it’s strange that he wouldn’t have used a zero-knowledge proof to spit out clues on where he was going and what he was up to, if he did have a plan. Maybe I’m completely wrong. Maybe I want to know so badly where he went or where he was taken to that my biases are shining through again. I think everyone wants to be the key to solving the big mysteries in their lives. What bigger mystery is there than our own families?

A Family Reunion

Officer Craig Heaton: You have to give him credit. He saw things that everyone else missed out on all the time. He took on huge debt and expanded his business because he knew the commuter line was going to be putting down roots nearby. Everyone else saw the headlines and the funding and was like great, we can get hammered at the Celtics and not have to worry about driving home. As police, that’s where our heads were at too. Fewer drunk driving incidents involving people coming back from Boston. Eli didn’t care about that at all. He realized people would move out here and commute into work every day and they’d want a place to eat that was like the other places in the city that they were used to. Up until the line extended through Prudence, his business was the regulars he inherited when he took over the Goat. He’d talk about how he was going to be first to market and we’d be like what market? And he’d try to tell us about how cell phones were going to change everything. That people would be expected to work on their commutes all of a suddenly [sic]. That they’d need to get out of their cars and onto the trains if they wanted to keep their corporate Boston jobs.

The other thing he realized was that they were going to get priced out of the suburbs right around the city. He would really try to explain it, but no one cared at the time. We’re talking about 99 or 2000. He’d point to the bells and remind us how the factories put those in, not the churches. He’d say, that was the first train age, the next one is right around the corner, and the people who own everything are going to put the bells right inside your pocket this time. If you knew the guy you knew he hated this type of control, but he was a realist. He knew it was going to happen anyways, whether he liked it or not. So, he got the money from the bank after fighting for it, over mortgaged everything, and gambled on all these people moving in and needing a place to relax. Then he fought for all the permits and variances.

It seemed very childish and stupid and naïve. It was so hokey and like I don’t know, Field of Dreams, or something. I know quite a few people were pressuring Olivia to give him a reality check and let him know that’s not how life works. In the end, he was right. He knew it was a sure thing and it was. That was his way. He had this way of seeing the past, present, and future all at once. It’s like he saw one ongoing moment or something. I don’t know. I don’t know how to describe it right. It was like that for him in school and when we played basketball. It was like that for him on the court. In every part of his life, except maybe his personal relations, he had this way of flowing through all the bs that distracts and sinks us regular people. You know, he was like an athlete when he’s in the zone, but for everything.

Sure, that’s great, but it made him really difficult to deal with a lot of the time. So many things were obvious to him that he wouldn’t bother to try and explain them at all. It could make him come across as really demanding. He’d go ahead and say something or do something that left everybody else shocked and never bring it up ever again. When the kidnapping happened, that was the breaking point of our friendship, which was kinda [sic] flagging by then anyways. I’d gotten married young and was settling into adulthood. He was busy running a bar. My wife didn’t want me keeping friends I could only see at a bar. Who could blame her? Especially when that friend owns the place and can comp you shots all night long.

Yeah, the kidnapping broke us apart forever. We went from growing apart to living on different planets pretty much overnight. He went and told me what was going to play out instead of trusting us and asking for our help. We’re the police, that’s what we’re here for. Even if it did play out exactly how he told me, it put too much strain on what was normal growing up and growing apart stuff. He always remained polite, but we never really spoke as friends again. Might be why it’s easier for me than other people you might talk to- to talk about Eli in the past, like he really is gone. The person he used to be and the things he used to do.

He pretty much disappeared from my life a long time ago, not just last year. Between high school and his return to run the Goat, we didn’t see each other much. Maybe at holidays and when his dad got really sick, he was around. Other than that, he’d spend summer breaks away from college in Montana or Washington somewhere working at a hunting lodge. I think he was doing that full time too after he finished with school. I don’t know. It was unclear, because it was the money from his parents’ house that he used to buy the place and its liquor license.

Olivia: I knew this would come up and I’ll do my best to face it head on with you. Eli would hate it, absolutely hate it if I wasn’t open about it with you. He’d always tell me not to be ashamed of anything that had happened to me. He would wind up into one of his long, blowhard speeches on society keeping unfair expectations for women and making women feel ashamed for being human. And he was right of course, but the real reason you’d agree with him was to get him to stop ranting and raving about it. I always wanted to be the strong one in the family as his big sister, but it was really the other way around.

Yes, my brother is an incredibly open-minded man. But he’s also one of the most intolerant men I’ve ever met. He will not tolerate me or my daughters talking bad[ly] about ourselves. Eli was who you went to if you needed a problem solved or a pep talk. If what you wanted was a sympathetic ear to hear you out- no. Absolutely not. Reassurance is not his thing. Wrong guy. If you weren’t a patron at the bar, he was not going to let you or anyone else vent. He was very much ‘Fuck them. You are incredible. Here’s what you’re going to do.’ When that was needed, and I need that now more than ever with him missing, it was the best. That’s always what I’ve channeled or tried to when I’m working with my [nursing] students. You know when they get out into the world to start working, especially in the hospital environment, that they’re going to have to not only care for their patients physically, but you’re also going to have to mediate their patients’ experiences with the doctors. My students are more often than not women and people of color and that means they’ve likely been underestimated their whole lives. And my job, a big part of my responsibilities, is to be like Eli and get them as confident as possible in their abilities. Because you know doctors will come bursting through those doors, spouting dead languages and scaring what little life is left out of the patients. And as a nurse, you’re the one who has to go toe to toe with them. It’s up to you to deal with the aftermath of that and make sure the patient feels respected and cared for and listened to.

But sometimes all you wanted was to express some emotions, to talk out your feelings. If he had done that, or I could have been better at helping him do that, maybe none of this would have turned out the way it did. Because when he went to pick up Kat and she wasn’t there, he saw it as a problem, or maybe even more like a puzzle, that he already had the solution to. Eli was way overprotective of Kat and Meli to begin with. I think he felt guilty about missing out on Evelyn’s early years. He was in college for part of it and then he was out West learning how to run restaurants and bars at all these fish and wildlife hotspots where they always needed people. They’d let you try anything without much professional experience and that’s how he gained his. It’s not like the Cape or other touristy places. The places he lived were too remote to attract foreign and seasonal workers. When it came to the younger two, it made him very overbearing in the best of times. Finding out your child is missing, yeah, that is about as far away from the best of times as you can find yourself.

Amelia: Hi. Yes. My name is Amelia McRae. I’m the youngest of the three [nieces] and that’s why I know more about it than anyone, or much more than anyone thinks [I do]. When you’re the baby, people talk about things in front of you that they probably shouldn’t- like all the time. Including the kidnapping attempt. So, because of people putting their guard down, I picked up all these bits and pieces. I’m not completely comfortable talking about it because it happened to Kat. Kat’s never going to talk about.

Kathryn: That’s right. I was so young I don’t really remember any of it. Meli knows way more about it than any of us anyways. And the other reason I don’t want to talk about it is because it’s another story where he gets to be the hero. We didn’t really have a relationship like that. With everyone else he seemed light and fun. When it came to me, once I showed an interest in basketball, he put a lot of pressure on me.

Amelia: On the surface, they’re the most alike. More than anyone else, Kat reminds me of him.

Evelyn: Few friends. Fewer words. Both amazing at basketball until they started piling up injuries in college.

Amelia: And there’s an intensity that the two of them share. We’re all lucky enough to be successful in our own ways, but Kat has the same drive as him to be good at pretty much everything.

Evelyn: There was a hoop behind the Goat. He wouldn’t let Kat come inside until she hit however many free throws or layups or three pointers she was supposed to make in a row. No matter how cold or how tired she was. And that was from like early middle school, all the way through high school.

Kathryn: That started when I was eight or nine.

Amelia: She did get to eat whatever she wanted. Evie or myself if we asked for a snack it was ‘Wait until your mom gets here. You’re all eating together.’ Kat got to scarf down French fries because she was burning off so many calories playing basketball every moment outside of school.

Evelyn: I can hear his grumpy voice telling us to wait for dinner while Kat polished off nachos and chicken tenders.

Kathryn: He expected me to get all of my homework done during school to free up the rest of the day for basketball. It didn’t leave me with much time for socializing. I really only ever had the one friend.

Evelyn: She [Kathryn] and Regina were the very best of frenemies. They had such a rivalry and were always pushing each other until they found themselves on the guys’ basketball team. Then they were truly friends. Because how could they not be? What everyone was putting them through, for playing basketball, it was ridiculous. Not only the other kids at school, but the adults from Prudence and all the other towns they played against. They went through that together. They were the only people who could really understand how the other one felt at that time. When they kept winning, all the attention- wanted and unwanted- grew and grew.

Kathryn: And then the burden of being on the boys’ team. He knew the enrollment in Prudence public schools was so low that I’d have an outside shot of playing boys’ varsity. And he told me when I was like in sixth or seventh grade that that was my goal. It was a lot. And it only became more and more and more. It didn’t stop. It never felt like I was in a position to say no to him. I did love playing the games. Everyone could see that. So, it felt impossible to explain that I didn’t want to spend every moment of every day obsessing about basketball. I’m sorry that my uncle lost his best, and probably only friend when they were in high school and playing ball together. But I didn’t have anything to do with that. People say Violet was his friend. In my mind she was an alcoholic who told wild stories and dirty jokes. She was good for his business, but not a real friend.

Olivia: Violet was not good for business. How is a drunk old woman who confronts everybody and antagonizes them over God knows what good for business? When it was a dive, no one noticed her. The people who spent money there, spent money there because they were alcoholics. They didn’t go to The Goat to fraternize and make friends. That’s one of the reasons he was so hellbent on risking everything to upgrade the place when the commuter station came in. He was tired of the moral ambiguity behind serving alcohol-sick people more alcohol. Eli [would] probably go farther. He might say it was downright immoral. Either way, it really bothered him. It was much better to attract and serve people who actually wanted to eat the food and have a couple drinks once in a while as like a social thing. They tipped better too. Once that happened, once that change took hold, Violet didn’t really fit the décor anymore. But he still kept her around, maybe more out of guilt than anything else.

Evelyn: Maybe they’re both right. You have to remember we didn’t see the start of that relationship like mom did because we were too little. I’m not trained in psychology, but maybe it was [his] cognitive dissonance. He had to reconcile the feeling bad about overserving an older lady and did that by over time becoming genuine friends with her, or convincing himself that they were genuine friends. I don’t even know that there’s a difference between those two things in practical terms. I guess I come down on the side of them being friends.

Kathryn: My mom is his family. I love my sisters and they love me, but I don’t think any one of us would consider each other friends. Maya, I couldn’t ever see them as truly friends because he could fire her at any moment if he’d wanted to. That doesn’t really fit my idea of friendship. I’m sorry he lost him [Ricky], but I was not even alive yet. I had nothing to do with it and still I think him putting all that pressure on me to succeed in basketball had a lot to do with him trying to recapture or relive that part of his life in some way.

I was a kid. I’d never told anyone this, but the intense training regimen and all the psychological stuff from dealing with being one of two girls on the quote unquote boys’ team, I missed periods. I think my junior and senior years of high school while everyone was having fun and enjoying their hometown before going off to college and other places, I had four or five periods total during those school years. Your high school memories shouldn’t involve menstruation. That’s not what should stick out to you. Anyone can tell you all the things I gained from him and learned from him, and all of that. And I’m not saying any of that isn’t true. I’m telling you it’s much more complicated than that. And I’m telling you I don’t want to talk about another one of the thousand times where he got to steal the show and be the big hero. I’ll leave that to Meli if she wants to open up about it with you.

Amelia: Once I was away at college it all came together, the story of what happened to Kat. I went to Los Angeles for the showbiz and sunshine. I loved it out there. My uncle hated it. He visited only once, even though he paid for anything the Ms. Commonwealth scholarship didn’t cover. My uncle wasn’t really the Hollywood type. When he left me for the airport, he told me it was refreshing to be around so many self-absorbed people. And that it helped him appreciate what he had back home.

Olivia: Pure Eli.

Amelia: Oh, the pageant [Miss Commonwealth]. Yeah, I haven’t thought about that in years. It only ended up happening because of him. He always props you up and convinces you to be yourself when maybe all you really want to do is relax and leave the self-actualization to someone else. Especially when you’re a teenager. But Evie had run the numbers and concluded that if I wanted to win I needed to do a dance routine for my talent.

Evelyn: That’s a literal OMG. I forgot all about that. It’s quite the part of our family lore. We had a hand-me-down laptop from my mom’s work that she got to keep. Everyone in the house was supposed to get turns using it. Meli [Amelia] got super into the idea of winning a beauty pageant at like a young age and mom never entered her in one, because why the fuck would she? She was a responsible mother. High school came around and she started talking up the Miss Commonwealth thing because there’s a scholarship attached to it for the winner. Mom told her if she can convince our uncle, she can do it. That’s because he’d stashed away college funds for all of us. And because never in a million years did my mom think he’d go for it.

Amelia: It didn’t take any convincing. I simply asked. He knew it was something I wanted to do, so he said yes.

Evelyn: I remember him trying to explain that we needed to let Meli make her own choices and treat her more like an adult if she was ever going to grow up. Being older than her, of course I didn’t buy it. What kind of sibling let’s the youngest just grow up like that without any resistance? It was my birthright to push back. I must have been working on my master’s in computer science at Nashaway Tech, because Meli was finishing up high school at the time. And I’d stop by to see everyone at the Goat because it wasn’t far away from where I was living then. My uncle challenged me. He said run some models [linear regression models] on this hunk of junk and see what it’s going to take for her to win. Total masterstroke. He could be almost manipulative the way he knew how to press the right lever and make you do something. He knew how to change your perspective on things if he wanted to.

Now, I’m totally invested because I have a discrete set of problems to solve and I have to do it without crashing this piece of shit laptop. And he put a wager on it. Hundred bucks or something like that says you can’t. The pageant people kept an oddly detailed like geocities webpage or something. But it had loads of info. Contestant ages, hometowns, talents, high schools. Disgusting stuff like you’d expect- height, weight. They didn’t include race, but like you’d sadly expect, all the winners’ pictures were snow white or spray tanned. I mean, it’s called ‘Miss Commonwealth’ and not even ‘Ms. Commonwealth’. I feel like that tells you everything you need to know about how it’s organized and how it views young women. It was a thinly veiled showcase for each municipality to shop its most attractive girl in the hopes of finding her the best husband. It’s gross. You know these judges, these are the creeps who run around telling women they don’t know to smile more. That’s the type of pageantry they’re into.

Amelia: Evie is losing her mind over this dumb computer thing that keeps restarting itself or something like that. I don’t know. There were probably a million spreadsheets on screen because its Evie. I wasn’t paying any attention to her. She seemed happy, and more important she stopped giving me shit about the pageant.

Evelyn: Public or private high schools is where I sunk too much time. Oddly, no correlation between that and winning. My fingers were crossed on private showing a strong positive [correlation]. Since Meli went to public schools like the rest of us, I thought that might knock the wind out of her sails and keep her from competing in this thing. Because the data started from when they introduced three or four contestants per county I think and then expanded to five [per county] there was actually more to comb through than you’d think. You couldn’t eyeball it. What it all came down to was the talent competition. If you wanted to win, you had to stick to song and dance. Both of which Meli is a natural at. We’re talking head cheerleader out of the womb. I’m putting it poorly actually. Because basically everyone who competed, and I’m using that term very generously, did a song and dance routine. The thing is, if you didn’t, you were condemned to finishing dead last. Every time someone popped up to do something creative, a little out of the ordinary, they were punished for it in the scoring. That’s what the numbers showed plain as day. It would put you well left of center.

Amelia: Yeah, I already did enough of that stuff and wasn’t really interested in doing another dance routine. Evie painted a pretty clear picture though. If I wanted to win, that’s what I needed to do.

Evelyn: The results were very statistically significant. That’s why I figured it out. I’d fried the old laptop by then. All you needed were your eyeballs to see that if you wanted to win, you needed to sing or dance.

Amelia: Evie figured her math problem out or whatever and is being super unbearable about it and my uncle forked over the hundred dollars to her for this. I couldn’t believe it, but I could. Classic older sister move to take my thing and turn it into her thing.

Evelyn: It was a hundred dollars! Great prize for some basic analysis. I really think he wanted to watch me kill that computer or something.

Amelia: Crisp one-hundred-dollar bill comes out of his wallet and into her hands. Then he turned to me and asks what I need to compete in the competition. And I’m like, well probably nothing. Cause the nerd stuff says I need to do a song or a dance number. And I really don’t want to do anymore of that. I’d had my heart set on a couple of magic tricks. I know! It’s corny, but it’s what I wanted to do.

Evelyn: I was ecstatic. I’d got club money for two weekends and now Meli’s seriously on the fence about dropping out of this thing.

Amelia: He asked me what it is I wanted to do and how much that would cost.

Evelyn: Without hesitation he booted me. He was like, why don’t you check-in on Violet? She misses you. Or, something like that. Man I wanted to stay, but I knew what he was going for. I went off downstairs to the bar and next thing you know my baby sister is Miss Universe.

Amelia: Once Evie got bent, he asked me again what I wanted to do and how much it would set him back. I like wanted to run away and hide, but eventually I came clean. I told him I wanted to do a little magic show- illusions. He told me it was a great idea because it’s what I wanted and not what anybody else wanted for me. And he told me it was the only way to go, because what was the point in competing in and winning this thing if I did it as someone other than myself? He was like, my wallet is actually pretty much empty now that Evie cleaned me out, but if you do this thing and you do the magic act, hundred dollars for you. Win or lose, just stick to what you want to do and I’ll hand one over to you right in front of Evelyn if you’d like. To be fair, I added that part.

Evelyn: I couldn’t believe she did a fucking magic show. The whole thing was surreal. It was definitely the coolest thing anyone did though. God, I remember mom pulling out all the stops to get me to go to that fucking pageant. I was planning on protesting the fucking thing until maybe a week before they held it.

Amelia: I promised him that’s what I’d do and then he paid my entrance fees for the contest. And he gave me a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill fresh from the bank after they crowned me Ms. Commonwealth. He also told me mom used to do magic.

Olivia: What? This is news to me. Maybe a prank or two on him. He is my little brother. No magic tricks though.

Amelia: So, yeah a magic show. That’s how I found myself alone at college with the entire country between me and my family and how I was able to finally figure out what had happened to Kat. When I was away on the West Coast I could finally look up all these things I’d heard about my family online without worrying that anyone would know what I was doing. I didn’t want to be confronted by them for digging too deep into the past and I really didn’t want them to give me a bunch of easy explanations before I could make up my own mind. I’m sorry if I’m repeating myself, but I knew what to look for in the first place because I was the youngest and that meant people always talked around me without really filtering themselves. Since Kat has given you her permission, I’ll keep it as basic as I can. It’s pretty white trash soap opera though, so it’s still real complicated.

When she was in elementary school, Evelyn’s biological father, Cooper, attempted to kidnap her by picking her up at school early. He went to the wrong school and wound up kidnapping the other McRae girl- poor Kat. My uncle used to pick them up from school after he’d prepped the bar for the evening. Maya would take charge and he’d bring them back so they could do their homework and hangout upstairs where he lived. He figured out right away when he got to Kat’s school who took her and went straight to the trailer park where he knew he’d find them. He found Cooper’s car and called the cops.

Pretty fucking traumatic for Kat as is, but it gets stranger. They don’t charge him with kidnapping for some reason and he gets bailed out. Like a week goes by and he just vanishes. Disappears. Another week or so goes by and his sole accomplice vanished. Just disappears. The last place she was seen in public happens to be my uncle’s bar. I think for Kat that must have been so much worse. These people show up and steal you and now instead of knowing they’re dead where they belong or behind bars or something, now no one knows where they are. Or, if they do know, they can’t ever tell you. It must have been triggering to think they could come back whenever, at any time, and take you again.

Obviously, it also placed a ton of suspicion around my uncle for what happened to them. And that shit showed up in a big way in all the nasty SaidIT messages people were posting anonymously about him. But I think he was afraid they’d [the alleged kidnappers] return too and didn’t feel comfortable talking about it, which was totally him. He didn’t feel comfortable talking about how he felt about anything. All I’m saying is he didn’t push Evie or myself out on that basketball court. The basketball court he and Maya and Violet could see through the bar’s windows at all times. Not to mention me and Evie would spy on her without being asked to. There were eyes on Kat all the time after that. All the way up until she went off to college.

Officer Craig Heaton: Yeah. That certainly complicated things. So, Cooper was really good at snaking his way into women’s lives. Had to be his only talent. What they saw in him, I don’t have a clue. And if Elliot wasn’t dealing with all the stuff around Ricky’s death would any of this happened in the first place? That’s something I’ve always wondered. Because I don’t think that guy goes anywhere near his sister if Eli and Rick are in the picture. They knew this guy was a predator. They’d seen him knocking around the high school and high school events despite being way too old for that kinda [sic] thing. Since childhood they’d always been the ones to step in and mix it up if they thought something was wrong or out of place. If you know anything about how Ricky was killed, that’s how he lived. Never hesitated to try and do the right thing. Even if it put him at risk or in danger.

It’s true though. Cooper Reed up and vanished. His lawyer did well to confuse the judge enough so that Reed’s family could bail him out while he awaited trial. It’s a lifetime or two ago. I think that’s what happened. I think they dropped the kidnapping down to something else, some other charge. It was really face saving for everyone in the end. It helped protect the poor secretary that he charmed into having Kat picked-up by him instead of by Eli. And to Eli’s credit, he stood up for the secretary and made sure Olivia didn’t pin anything on her. Beating dead horses here, but again, he knew this was what Cooper does. He cons his way into things. Eli saw the school secretary as much of a victim as anyone else Cooper got all mixed up with his bs.

Yeah, that was it. I’m getting it right. Reed’s lawyer worked out some mistaken identity scheme, which had an element of truth to it. Cooper being the screwup that he was didn’t actually know how old his own daughter [Evelyn] was and went to the wrong school when he was trying to kidnap her. So, he got the wrong McRae girl. How in god’s name that worked in his favor, I’m not sure. I am pretty sure that’s what the court decided. They set bail and then Cooper’s uncle, I’m guessing through his mom, is Dr. Masiello the dentist. He’s the one who fronted and lost all the cash in this.

Not a week goes by after he’s bailed out and whoosh. Disappeared. Like leaves in winter. Masiello took his Camaro so that kind of thing wouldn’t happen. We’ve got his Camaro sitting in his uncle’s garage and no Cooper anywhere to be found. His accomplice, Suzy or Suzanne? [Susan Reed] They’d eloped only a couple weeks before the alleged kidnapping or whatever they ended up calling it. She had to have been at least a decade younger and she has no idea where he went off to. Another woman caught in this guy Reed’s web. We’re a small-town police department. We don’t have huge resources to throw at something like this. What you do is what you’re supposed to do. You leave it to the State Police to track down someone like that. If I were them, would I be highly motivated to find him? Now you have a better sense of why my relationship with Eli became completely torn apart. Of course, we have to investigate him. We definitely had to look into that.

And then the plot gets chopped again. Maybe another week goes by and Suzy [Susan] Reed goes missing. We’d been keeping tabs on her until everything got shifted to the State Police. Now she’s up and disappeared. Where do you think the last place was she was seen? That’s right. The Black Goat Tavern. People saw her walk in one morning before the Goat was open and heard her screaming at Eli. Just our luck, Violet Watters was sitting there reading her paper and having Irish coffees with Eli while he worked. You think Violet would ever cross Eli? Not a chance in hell. In fact, she ends up being his alibi for the next however many years until she died recently. If you believed her they were never out of each other’s sight. We had a complete mess. We had two people who were standing trial and are now gone forever. Everything points to Eli, except there’s no hard evidence and our only possible witness to anything is completely unreliable in his favor.

There’s also zero will in town or anywhere else to pursue anything against him. Not even Masiello is upset. He came in to ask us how long it would take to get the Camaro titled under him so he could sell it. If anything, he saw that bail money as an investment in getting Cooper out of his life for good. And the girl Reed was with, she had drug problems that were well known. That’s how she found herself with him in the first place I think. Pretty much an unspoken thing, but the general mood was ‘good job Eli’. I get it. I get the temptation to think that way. Because if he did get rid of those two he was sticking up for his family. And who can argue that? That’s not how things should work though and everyone deep down knows that too. We all need the rule of law to protect each and every one of us and all of our families. If he acted like he was above the law, and if you knew Eli you knew he had a tendency to act like he was above everything at times, he needed to be held accountable.

Feel like we’ve been talking for hours here. But if you remember when I mentioned him investing in his business when everyone was trying to get the hell out of Prudence, this is what we were up against. We’re trying to pin a popular Robin Hood crime on a guy who can plan things out, figure out possible futures that most of us are blind to. We had a past as friends. We’d lived through quite a bit together at a young age. There was never going to be a future between us though. With or without him around, I’m still waiting for the tip that’s going to uncover what he did to the Reeds. It’s not like they didn’t have any other enemies. It was the execution for me of how they disappeared. Only Eli could have pulled something off like that. All the other people Cooper crossed would have left a mess and would have been happy to brag about the mess they left too. Not Eli. Think he had more vision than sense. Especially when it comes to his own disappearance right now. He’s stuck us all in a terrible cycle here. So that’s my personal sense of things. Not my professional sense of where things stand. He should have left Cooper to us the whole time.

Olivia: I’ve always liked Craig as a person, but he’s police. Anything police say about my brother needs to be put into context. The Black Lives protests were not the first time my brother butted heads with the cops. Him dictating what they needed to do to get Kat back did not go over well. Especially since he was completely right about all of it. I don’t know if it’s true, but people used to gossip about how he gave Craig like an hour head start-oh, ten minutes. Well, if Craig told you that I guess it is true. You know about this? Ok.

The other thing he did that pissed them off was before the big renovation at the Goat his business was really a couple of barflies, family events, and Christmas parties. He made a lot of what he needed on Christmas parties. They were guaranteed revenue and he knew exactly what to expect and prepare for, which for my brother is like perfect. A ton of work, but he knew what to expect. So, families held parties there, a couple of small businesses, the firefighters, and the police. Maybe town hall did a few years too. This wasn’t much of a thing until after the renovations. Everyone saw how great the place looked and really it did stand out at the time. Our community had very little investment, since like I don’t know after the Civil War? It really looked great, but that made it look out of place too. It was my brother as architecture. Looks too good to be true, especially here in Prudence.

And this got people from outside the community interested in what he was doing and coming in to visit. The people from town got suspicious and started gossiping about what was going on at The Goat. They all saw this and thought he was flush with cash. He wasn’t of course. It was an investment. It was for his future and the town’s future too. It looked fantastic because of all the debt he took on to get it all done, even though he kept costs as low as he could by somehow getting the redesign to be an unofficial contest over at Plantations. Either way, they couldn’t help themselves. Everyone started complaining about the rental fees and the catering costs and everything else for these private functions. But it was The Goat or the cigarette-stained walls at the Legion Post.

The cops were the biggest pain in his ass. It took them forever to pay up for their Christmas party that year, and then they wanted to host a fundraiser for their relief association. My brother already gave them the Christmas one at cost, because he realized that was the only way they’d ever pay. Now here he is working his ass off to make loan repayments and they’re pressuring him to give up the space for free as a donation. He hated the fact that this association existed at all. He’d remind the people harassing him that police are pensioned employees and that he was paying property taxes, income taxes, payroll taxes, excise taxes that supported their work. They would not relent. He stopped answering the phone when he saw their numbers pop up. I mean this was way back when caller ID was like cutting edge.

Eventually some off duty guys came in, not in uniform, saying they wanted to talk. I know all this because Violet, his favorite regular loved to tell this story. She’s the only person he didn’t make settle when they left at the end of the night. They were peas in a pod and he even wrote her obituary and fought or paid to get it published in the Pioneer unabridged and unedited. But the cops were giving him a hard time just like they’d been doing for weeks over the phone. He told them they could talk if they bought drinks. They refused and told Eli they’re going to talk in the back whether or not he wants to because it’s a police matter.

Now everyone is perked up and taking notice. It’s clear there’s something going on. My brother says he’ll talk right here and there because they aren’t in uniform, and they aren’t working as cops. They realize everyone is watching them, so they agree to talk it out at the bar. Then Eli says I just have to make a quick call. This pissed them off, but again they realize all eyes are on them and everyone knows who they are, so they wait. Eli picked up the phone and put it on speaker. He called the firehouse off of Main Street. ‘Hey this is the Black Goat, how are you today? Well no, there’s no emergency. Sorry to bother you. I have a couple quick questions if you have the time. Yeah, so do I need like a sticker in my window or some decal type thing that shows I’ve donated to the firefighters’ relief association.’

Complete confusion on the other end of the line. ‘I mean I was just wondering, you know we just made it through these expensive renovations and of course I’m insured and that costs a ton too, but like if anything ever happened and I needed the fire department to help save the building or God forbid the people in it I just want to know I’m covered.’ The poor guy on the call is still confused but starts to reassure him that it’s their job to respond to any emergency that might happen and no, you don’t need a sticker in the window for them to do their jobs. ‘You know that’s such a weight off my shoulders. Why don’t you have your next Christmas or retirement party on me. Whichever comes first.’

The guy at the firehouse turned him down of course, because the whole thing is weird, too good to be true. And he finally asks my brother what’s going on. ‘Oh, some off duty cops are down here telling me my business needs to donate to their charity thing or they won’t do their fucking jobs, whatever it is they do anyway. Or maybe I’m supposed to put this little sticker on my windshield, so they won’t pull me over. I don’t know.’ He’s smart enough on the other end to hang up immediately, but the damage is done. These guys hightailed it out of there, and Violet denied this all the way to her grave, but Eli swore that he had to jump over the bar and grab a hold of her because she started shouting ‘Fucking pigs! Fucking fascists! Stay the fuck out of my fucking bar!’ and God knows what else. Eli is not a convincing liar. Outside of childhood he never even tried it. He’d own up and take whatever consequence was coming his way rather than lie. It was easier for him. And his love for Violet ran deep. What I’m saying is she definitely shouted obscenities at the police. And I’m also saying God love her it probably wasn’t the first time.

But anyways, people wanting special or preferential treatment drove my brother nuts. He doesn’t care if you’re a cop or a movie star. He’s huge on treating people fairly and always wanted people to stand up for themselves, especially against unfair authority figures. I don’t want you to get the wrong impression. He wasn’t proud of it either. Every time Violet started in on that story- I really wished she’d survived long enough for you to interview her- Eli walked away. He couldn’t stand to hear it and didn’t want to relive it. He knew that sure he was in the right, but he also thought he let things get out of control. For Eli, making a big show of it was never the best way to handle something.

A real victory would have meant taking care of this diplomatically and quietly behind the scenes instead of with all the grandstanding. Policies, not politics. That was one of his million sayings that used to drive me nuts. Policies, not politics. And what was the other half of it? Politics, not theater I think is how it went. When he felt like he did need to make a stand, and that it needed to be public, he never shied away. It was always more of a last resort than anything. That’s one of the reasons he really resented law enforcement in Prudence. They’d forced him into this Nichols and May routine he wasn’t proud of. And it’s a lingering resentment. That’s where they should look for him- in a church. Last place you’ll find him is a church. He never went after he moved out our parents’ home. Forgiveness isn’t a big virtue for him. Not fucking people over in the first place, that’s more my brother’s speed. People really don’t like to be held to that kind of standard. Especially when they’re used to hiding behind a gun and a badge.

But let’s be clear. That day at the Goat, I called the police right away. Despite everything that happened in the past I did not hesitate to call them and let them know something was deeply, deeply wrong. For what it’s worth, when everything was happening with the basement, Eli did not hesitate to call them either.

The Basement

Olivia: They diversified. After Butler and his brownshirts took away the public gardens from them [Black Goat Gardens] they signed a lease with my brother for a nominal amount and paid to put up a wall that blocked their activities from the bar’s draught system. He said it was for their privacy. That he didn’t need to know what was going on in their organization because it was theirs and not his. Since they were in a basement, they mainly focused on mushrooms. Maybe they kept a couple of grow lights, but those add costs that cultivating mushrooms don’t. And like before, they supplied the Goat [the tavern] with all this wonderful produce. What were they? The king oysters? I think those were my favorite. They soak up any sauce you put them in like nutritional sponges. Loved them. Eli was able to stay local too. He found enough farms nearby to fill the gaps that were made when Chap stole the public gardens away from us.

Officer Craig Heaton: Of course there were marijuana plants in the basement. You could smell them. Who cares? The state had decriminalized a decade before and then legalized rec use by then. As long as you couldn’t see the plants, our directive was to leave it [sic] alone. I have no idea how Chap has gotten so far in life. He kept pushing for us to bust the doors down and arrest everybody. No matter how much he pressured the department we stood firm and let him know that no judge was going to grant a warrant. Without being able to see anything, no one is signing off on that. Chances are what? You find they’ve got ten plants or whatever it is and are in compliance with the statute that passed in the Mass General Court. Not a good look.

He didn’t seem to understand the difference between public and private property. When Black Goat Gardens was using the public spaces, yeah, he and the council had some oversight of what they were doing. Once they started leasing space from Eli, a private business, you can’t just go bursting through the doors. You need a warrant. My three-year-old grandbaby understands the difference. She gets the distinction better than Butler. Her little pack of crayons is for her and her only. It’s private. The big sixty-four crayon one she has to share with the other kids. That one’s public. We let Chap know we’re here to protect and serve the community, not to play politics for him or anybody else.

Connie Velasquez-Smyth: Oh, we pivoted. We pivoted in a big way to catering. Underground catering. The model shifted to a decentralized thing too. Members simply used the space and the equipment and the vehicle the org owned for their own projects. It gave us a layer of protection or like plausible deniability if the Mass Cannabis [Control] Commission got into it with us. We’d already dissolved the nonprofit [Black Goat Gardens] before Eli went missing. It was getting too tense. Eli confronted these nutjobs who came to the Goat with a stockpile of weapons looking to break into the basement. He found them online and he let us all know they were really obsessed with our little basement.

It was one thing after another. We’d started in raised beds across our community. They made the neighborhoods look beautiful and we sold the produce our members couldn’t use back to the pub. It was sustainable and fun and it brought together this amazing group of women from different backgrounds and across generations. Then Chap Butler took over the town council and we became public enemy number one. Everything we did was scrutinized and became subject to an investigation and public hearings. We couldn’t do our work anymore because we were spending all our time and resources prepping for hearings and writing op-eds and every other thing under the sun that didn’t have anything to do with gardening. Our raised beds were all on unused public land that the town managed. He [Butler] took all that away.

That’s when Eli offered us a one dollar per century lease of his basement space. We’d always been associated with the [Black] Goat Tavern, because that’s where our founding members would meet and work out our organization’s vision and goals. And Eli was great. Here was this man, this successful man who left us alone. He trusted us to do what we needed for ourselves and stepped aside. All of us had experiences with plenty of men, usually unsuccessful men, pushing us around and telling us what to do. He never wanted any say or input ever. That was the freshest breath of air. When it was time to incorporate [as a nonprofit] we asked him if we could use the ‘black goat’ in our name. He said of course. Something very Eli, like he didn’t invent the color black or goats, so it was free for anybody to use it if they wanted to.

After we lost all the [raised] beds, he offered us this space and we jumped at it, because we knew unlike the unsuccessful men running this town, he was going to leave us be. But that didn’t last either. The internet people showed up. They showed up with guns, over and over, demanding to see the basement. That’s why we dissolved our org, terminated our lease, and redistributed the few remaining assets among our few remaining active members. What you’re smoking right now is made from one of those assets. We saw that Eli went missing and called an informal board vote. I don’t know, I guess it was a ghost board because the organization didn’t exist any longer but the people who comprised the board still care about it deeply. And about Eli. That’s why we voted unanimously to tell all the truth about the basement if it means it might help us find Eli. We think if we’re honest about the cannabis dinner parties we worked maybe other people will be honest too. Honesty is the light. Only honesty will find what’s hidden in the dark.

Margaret Aylward (Black Goat Gardens Member): I’d been cooking and baking with marijuana since my teenage years. I barely got through high school here and hitchhiked to California as soon as I could. It was the early seventies. I wound up in Oregon on a sort of commune and that’s where I learned these skills that I passed on to the other women in the group. How to infuse oils. How to infuse butter for the baked goods. Nothing but harmless. I’d always kept a plant or two hidden for myself.

It came up real naturally in one of our planning sessions. A couple of the women there were struggling, really hurting with rheumatoid arthritis, and inflammation, and chemotherapy. Some of them were struggling with aging. We all do. Without talking about it out loud, I brought some cookies with me at the next session a couple weeks later. Didn’t pressure anyone to take any. Free will above all. I always keep to that. Free will above all. But the ones who enjoyed them really thought they were great and they wanted to learn more about how I was turning this plant into a temporary relief for them.

Connie Velasquez-Smyth: That’s all that we were hiding in the basement. What should have been a legitimate female initiated and led enterprise for a brilliant woman powered non-profit. We invested in the used Transit van with the fast racks and off we went. It wasn’t difficult to find clients. The attitude towards cannabis had completely changed. We weren’t making fast food for Cheech and Chong. We were catering sophisticated dinner parties and events for doctors, lawyers, and artists mainly in the Berkshires Spring through Fall. The food was unpretentious but incredible. We’d done several cookbooks back when we had raised beds to fund this or that initiative, or to keep our giving fund going. That was already in place. We pulled from what we already knew and added the new underground element to it. We committed ourselves to making sure that taste wise it was subtle. When we nailed it, it was no different than any other well done dinner party, except the ride home may have been a little wilder for the guests.

You have to remember this was a couple years ago. This was before a lot of the major producers came online and started harvesting. Now, the demand for this isn’t really there because there’s so much flower and oil being produced. Right now, the Commission is projecting an oversupply, a glut in the [recreational] market. For lack of a better way to put it, we cultivated a list- a paper list, much like our member rolls that we started with and kept up- of these clients who could be trusted to keep what we were offering only to themselves and other interested people. It was about trust, not secrecy. The names on those lists would really surprise a lot of people. It turned into a who’s who by the time we had to shred it. There’s no way to prove any of this except maybe piecing together the GPS data from our phones, which is way beyond worth it.

When they came after the basement, that’s what we did. We shredded our client list, our bookings, and our membership list. Sadly, our donor list was digital. We would have loved to have gotten rid of that too and fully protected all the great people and agencies that supported us over the years. After it was all shredded into a million scraps of paper we went down as a group to Thornton’s Pond and lit it up in [a] bonfire. It was beautiful to be together like that again. We made smores over it and drank the rest of Violet’s red wine that Eli gave us. He told us that she was a huge admirer of what we did. I don’t know. Maybe she was. [It] Doesn’t matter now. Black Goat Gardens is all over forever. And for nothing. We were never up to anything truly scandalous in that basement. No hocus. No pocus. But the online people got going with their mumbo jumbo and it just grew and grew until it all went up in flames. Like these things so often do.