The Woman From The DOH
The woman from the Vermont Department of Health came on a Wednesday in the second week of August, and she had the extremely specific gravity of a civil servant who has driven eighty-three miles on purpose. Her name was Peggy Gauthier. She had a laminated badge on a blue lanyard, a clipboard with a metal clip that had been chewed at one corner as though she routinely tapped it against her teeth, and a way of introducing herself on a porch that suggested she did this forty times a year and had long ago stopped expecting to be welcomed.
*Ms. Fell,* she said. *Peggy Gauthier, Vermont DOH. I'm here about retreats being held in Bethany at the Wintergreen Inn.*
*Please come in,* I said, because what else do you say, and Peggy came in, and she sat at the kitchen table, and she accepted, after some consideration, a glass of tap water, and she placed her clipboard flat in front of her and she put her pen on top of it at a perfect horizontal, and she looked at me with the patient dispassion of a woman who had been, in the preceding week, to visit a commercial kombucha operation, a Buddhist retreat in West Glover, and a summer camp on Lake Willoughby that had been serving improperly-refrigerated chicken salad. I had, professionally speaking, been prepared for.
*Ms. Fell,* she said. *Are you aware that between April and July of this year, the Wintergreen Inn, located at 44 Village Road