Carleton "Chachi" Murphy III, left, and Sean Pitcher, 14, hang out at Armory Square Apartments in April. Murphy said a lot of younger people get into trouble because there are few constructive places to go in Windsor, especially in the evening.
Chapter One
Earlier that week, on the day after the stabbing outside Julie's apartment, 17-year-old Felicia Cardi, wearing red sweatpants and a black fleece, points one foot, arched against a white flip-flop, at Gary and Ryan Hogge.
"You should move out of this hell-hole," she says.
Gary, 37, a compact man with close-cropped hair and brown eyes, is sitting in his wheelchair on his back porch smoking a cigarette. He looks tired. With him on the porch are Ryan, his 19-year-old nephew, and their friend Carleton "Chachi" Murphy III. Ryan and Chachi grew up with the young man who was stabbed, and are talking, in solemn tones, about last night's events.
"I saw blood on the stairs," Chachi remarks.
The men suck on their cigarettes, looking around. "I think people are worried," Gary says.
"I'm not worried about nothing now," Chachi says. "It's all over."
Ryan leans back against the railing.
"I think it's pretty crazy," he says.
Felicia, Chachi, Ryan — they all used to play behind the Block deep into the hot summer nights, beneath the streetlights, under the maple trees, above Mill Brook, which snakes around the building's back parking lot. It may not have been your typical rural New England childhood, but at least it was safe. Things have changed since then, however, and they are changing still. This place has gotten bad, long-time residents say, and it is getting worse.
As they speak, a bottle crashes into the parking lot, hurled from an upper-story window. They crowd to the edge of the porch rail to see the shattered glass. Bruce Waugh, an ex-trucker who lives two floors below Julie — it was he who told her of the stabbing — ambles out the front door of his apartment with a frown, joining them. Upstairs, there is nothing to see: just a row of empty windows. Punctuated by this diversion, conversation about the stabbing ends. Another day at the Block wears on.
Truth be told, Julie has seen the place's end in her dreams.
This was when she still lived in Montana, before she had ever set foot in Vermont. She dreamed one night that she walked through a small town, somewhere far away. Many buildings had been destroyed, though some, unharmed, still stood. One of them — what looked as though it had been a brick edifice that spanned an entire block — lay in rubble. In her dream, construction workers milled about. They spoke of turning the building's remains into a parking lot.
It was like the prophet's vision in the Book of Jeremiah, Julie says: she had foreseen an uninhabited ruin. Her sister, Cheryl, has seen more. She has had visions of the building's collapse. Cheryl sees it while she is awake: she looks at the Block and sees not a sturdy and immovable mass but a sudden disaster, four stories and 72 apartments tumbling down in a cascade of worn porch planks and bricks and broken glass.
The sisters do not take such visions lightly. They say they must mean something.
In a way, they may be right. A new story is taking shape at the Block, and it is big — big enough to touch, in some way, the lives of everyone who lives here. Rumors of it have been in the halls for months.
Life at the Block — at least as it exists now — could soon come to an end.