4 go through the mill over a rumor

Here is the rumor that got four women fired in this old mill town:

On a chilly day in March, a man walked into the building department on the second floor of town hall. After finishing his business, he asked a secretary: “Did you hear?” Word on the street was that the town administrator was having an affair. The mistress was a municipal employee. Was it true?

The gossiper left.

“You’re not going to believe what I just heard,” the secretary said later to three co-workers downstairs in the assessor’s office. The four women chattered on. Could that explain the late nights their boss spent at work? Could that be why the town employee had been promoted, even though others had more experience?

As they speculated, another employee listened. Then, she told the town administrator. The administrator told the Town Council. The Town Council launched an investigation. After interviewing most of the town hall’s 16 workers, officials concluded the four women were guilty. The charge? Gossiping.

The rumor was false, the town administrator said, and it had damaged him and humiliated his wife.

On a Wednesday in April, the council members -- eight men and one woman -- voted in closed session to fire the four workers. The next day, an ice storm raged through town. Three of the women made it to work. When they arrived at town hall, a counselor told each separately: “Your services are no longer needed.” The fourth found out the next day.

Local newspapers dubbed the fired women the “Hooksett Four.”

Now, people in this town of 13,000 can hardly avoid gossiping about the rumor that has since spread across the nation. The Hooksett Banner devoted two front-page stories to the women: “Fired four a ‘frenzy over nothing’ ” and “Two of four in court.”

Gerry Lachamce, 68, read the latest Hooksett Four articles over a cup of coffee at Robie’s Country Store, a red barn deli that sells Tootsie Roll, licorice whips, pickles and homemade potato salad. He shook his head, unhappy with the attention his home town has received.

“No matter where we go lately, everyone says, ‘Oh, you’re from Hooksett, that’s where those four gals are from,’ ” he said. “That’s kind of embarrassing. That shouldn’t be happening in this town.”

In a living room a town away, the four former co-workers -- who have become tightknit friends -- gather over banana bread and chips and dip for their weekly support session.

They compared job hunts and combed through the latest articles featuring them. They laughed about how much time they have to weed their gardens. They have designed matching gray T-shirts for themselves with a bull’s eye and the slogan: Support the Hooksett 4.

Talk turned to the council members.

“They want remorse,” said Michelle Bonsteel, 55, the former code enforcement officer who inspected buildings, homes and businesses for Hooksett for two years.

“Remorse for what?” said Sandra Piper, 59, who used to be the head of the assessing department. Piper and Bonsteel reported to the town assessor.

“Was there a murder here that I didn’t know about?” said Joann Drewniak, 47, a town secretary for nine years.

The women laughed.

But their smiles didn’t last long.

“Four lives were destroyed,” said Bonsteel, who can’t find an employer willing to risk the publicity by hiring her. “I mean we’re in the paper everyday.”

“The media, and everything, following us around and questioning us,” Drewniak said. She keeps a suitcase full of every article that has been published about the firings. On this afternoon, she had opened her Manchester home for the gathering, making sure the women stayed in the living room so as not to disturb her husband and teenage daughter.

“We’re frustrated,” said Piper, who often speaks on behalf of the Hooksett Four and is the only one of them who lives in Hooksett. Every time she visits the grocery store or Wal-Mart people stop her, so she has been staying at a summer home with her husband in another town.

In 27 years of service with the town, Piper had seen five town administrators come and go. When she was hired, there was no town council, only a board of three selectmen who she said “ran the town like Dodge City.” Through it all, she loved her job and wanted to retire there.

“You get the depression,” Piper said. “You get the anger.”

Jessica Skorupski, 30, stayed quiet. The former town secretary looked like she might cry. She had worked there for seven years and had hoped for a promotion.

Bonsteel, who is divorced with two adult daughters, said she had received a glowing review and a raise a month before she was fired. “I send out my resume on average one a day,” she said. “I am ready to apply at Lowe’s and Home Depot, just to be able to put food on the table.”

“This is high school baloney,” Piper said. “This is like grammar school children, ‘yah, yah, yah, Johnny said this about me.’

“This,” she added, “was a witch hunt.”

Store is gossip central

Hooksett is a town built on dried goods, long memories and talk. Shirtless boys swim in the muddy Merrimack River, where barges used to carry flour, grain and beans before the railroad was built in 1842. A sign in front of Robie’s advertises: “Live bait” and “Ice.”

The 120-year-old store, decorated with antique ice cream scoops and yellowed posters promoting “Kennedy for President,” is the gossip center. Here, residents catch up over $6.99 lunch specials of ribs and corn on the cob. As lore has it, Jimmy Carter walked into Robie’s in 1976 and said: “I’m Jimmy Carter and I’m running for president.” The owner, Lloyd B. Robie, who died last year, looked at him and said: “Jimmy who?”

Stories like this bring smiles to the faces of old-timers. But mention the Hooksett Four, and faces cloud over. People are tired of talking about the rumor and its aftermath, though they can’t seem to stop.

Sitting at a picnic table in front of Robie’s, across the street from the firehouse and town hall, Sybil Lachamce and her husband Gerry speak cautiously. They feel bad for the Hooksett Four, and ashamed of the Town Council .

“In this community you’ve got to be very careful,” said Gerry, 68. “They’re a small town and they’re vindictive.”

“We need some new blood,” said Sybil, 73.

“The people who are running the council have been here for the longest while,” Gerry said, “and they still think about it in terms of 1960 when we had a population of 3,000 people and nothing much happened.”

“They fight within themselves,” Sybil said.

In the last two decades, residents have seen Hooksett grow from a small bedroom community into a scrappy town with a Target, a Kohl’s and new homes blooming throughout the area.

“You have to run this town like a business,” Gerry said, “and they don’t, they run this like their little corner store.”

The town fired four hard-working employees, he said. “It’s very difficult for the town to undo what they’ve done. I mean, really, they look like fools.”

For months, the council of elected officials stayed quiet on the firings. Local newspapers taunted them with headlines like: “Hooksett council can’t talk to press.”

The council wrote a letter to a local newspaper criticizing its coverage of the firings. The newspaper ran an article with a quote from its city editor, John Toole, in response: “The New Hampshire Union Leader sure as heck is going to report about whatever goes on at Hooksett Town Hall, with or without the council’s help.”

On June 5, the Manchester-based Union Leader published a letter from the council. It said the ordeal had damaged the reputation of town Administrator David Jodoin, “a respectable family man.” Jodoin, who has held the job for two years, has not talked publicly.

“It was clear to the council that the issue was not one of idle gossip but a conscious and concerted effort to damage reputations, to spread untrue stories with the knowledge that they were not true and evidently to retaliate for some perceived preferential treatment,” the letter continued.

It concluded: “The Town Council accepts full responsibility for its decisions in this matter and stands squarely by them.”

“They were malicious,” said George Longfellow, chairman of the Hooksett Town Council, in a recent interview. He is the only council member who has talked to the media about the fired four. “It wasn’t only gossip, it was slander. They tried to ruin his life and his marriage.”

About 420 registered voters have signed a petition asking the council to restore the women’s jobs. But the council rejected it. The Hooksett Four have since filed separate lawsuits against the town.

Bonsteel said she missed being a building inspector, and had wanted to be a part of the town’s booming construction and growth. She has considered taking out a home equity line of credit to pay the mortgage.

Piper said she was struggling to pay $1,000 a month for health insurance and she no longer had money going into a retirement fund.

The other two have found jobs but don’t want to disclose what they do for fear that more publicity might jeopardize their new positions.

Even if they did gossip, Piper said, what is the big deal? “There isn’t a person who doesn’t do it.”

“They made it sound like everybody who walked in our door was told, ‘Oh did you hear?’ ” Bonsteel said.

“We discussed the preferential treatment of this one person,” Piper said.

“We never said they had an affair,” Drewniak said. “Not once.”

“Was there malicious intent? Was there slander? Did we sit around and say how can we get rid of the administrator?” Bonsteel said. “It never happened.”

The administrator “didn’t want this to go any further than town hall,” said Drewniak. “He wanted it swept under the rug in case his wife found out.”

Instead, she said, it feels like everyone is pointing at Hooksett and laughing.

Bonsteel rolled her eyes. “How stupid.”

erika.hayasaki@latimes.com