The detectives who arrived on the scene immediately suspected him. They felt his calm and disconnected affect was typical of a violent offender numbed to his gruesome act, a man able to carry on living and working and taking care of children while his wife lay mangled in their modern, up-to-date kitchen.
But when Mr. Tourvalon’s employees were questioned, an airtight alibi emerged: until he left in the late afternoon to go home and fetch the check, he’d been stuck all day on his job site, his time fully accounted for. And then the medical examiner in Concord, New Hampshire, pronounced that Janet Tourvalon had died close to noon, her wounds severe enough that she expired rather quickly. Finally the investigators reluctantly abandoned the notion of Mr. Tourvalon as the madman drifting around the Upper Connecticut River Valley, searching for just the right woman to murder.
* * *
In the middle of April, two weeks after I found Angela Parker’s body, Anthony called one afternoon right before I left to teach my reading and writing class at the local minimum-security prison. Apparently the warden was putting in my group a recent inductee who’d been arrested and booked just a few days before for going into a gas station mini-market at eleven-thirty at night, yanking out his sizeable erect penis, and laying it on the counter in full view of the young woman working the till. Outraged, she’d begun screaming; he in turn leaped over the counter and wedged his hand over her mouth to quiet her down. In the midst of the struggle a football player from Dartmouth College strolled into the store to buy beer, yanked the pervert off the poor woman, and then decked him. This particular inmate, Anthony informed me, was one of several locals being investigated.
The prison is located right in downtown Woodstock, ironically one of the wealthiest towns in Vermont, whose buildings and surrounding land had been conserved by twin industrial titans: Frederick Billings, the president of the Northern Pacific Railroad, who financed the western railroad systems and for whom Billings, Montana, is named; and Lawrence Rockefeller. Frederick Billings became a leader in forestry management at a time when Vermont’s rolling hillsides had been deforested by the potash industries and sheep farmers. Billings planted thousands of trees on his estate, which became one of the first continuously managed forests in North America. His granddaughter Mary French, who married Lawrence Rockefeller, poured a lot of money into refurbishing this shire town’s nineteenth-century brick and clapboard buildings. The result of their efforts: everything in Woodstock is almost too picture-perfect, especially the central green surrounded by grand neocolonials and Georgian mansions and Greek revivals. The New York Times once hailed Woodstock as the Hollywood of Vermont, suggesting that in all its beauty, it came off like a stage on a movie lot. The prison is located incongruously amongst all this prosperity in a building that was once a courthouse.
Most of my “students” were waiting to be transferred to the maximum-security prison down in Springfield. As this was my first day teaching since I found the body of Angela Parker, I knew that “my felons,” as I affectionately called them, would ask about it. And I would tell them what I’d told the police and Anthony and everyone else, trotting out my signature description about the Coca-Cola snow and the pale, frosted face, beads of lapis draping her chest that only became visible when Marco Prozzo, wearing a pair of rubber gloves, unzipped her parka in search of corroborating wounds. I conjectured that when I told my prisoner-students my story, their faces would hardly be as shocked or concerned as those of the townspeople and the authorities, but rather greedy for further details. But who would the new guy be; and how creepy and unnerving if he happened to be the killer—then, too, how ridiculously coincidental. And yet just as much as I might have flinched from meeting him, I actually dreaded seeing the woman with whom Anthony Waite was probably having an affair: Fiona Pierce, who also volunteers at the jail, where she teaches an art class.
A second-grade teacher at the local elementary school, Fiona Pierce happens to be one of the few people in the town of Woodstock who ever laid eyes on Matthew Blake, when, in the wake of our tumultuous breakup, he showed up at the prison and waited two hours for me in the anteroom of the warden’s office.
That afternoon two years ago, Fiona and I had finished our instruction and were walking together down the long, polished cement corridor on our way out of the complex. We were brainstorming about requisitioning more art and paper supplies from the state, resolving to pick them up on our own at Staples in West Lebanon, when I saw Matthew sitting in a plastic half-moon chair and staring at us. His soft, luxuriant brown hair was parted in the center and brushed back, a throwback to an eighties hairstyle. He liked having a mane, liked having it brush against his bare broad shoulders; and it was lovely hair that added softness to a body that sometimes I’d found youthfully hard and unforgiving when we made love. It had been three months since our final incident, and all I could do was stare back at him before finally managing to blurt out, “Why … are you here?” Then Fiona, in a glance taking him in and saying, “I’ll get going, Catherine. We can always pick up on this later.”
In leaving, Fiona took an appraising glance at Matthew—and I could tell she found him attractive. And then she looked at me, competitively, I believed at the time, perhaps wondering why this man in his mid-twenties would pursue somebody fifteen years older. As I watched her heading toward the exit, I looked to make sure there were other people around: a few guards were standing in a group perhaps fifteen yards away.
I regarded Matthew again and shook my head. “You can’t stay, you have to go. You promised you wouldn’t come near me again.”
“I know, I know I promised … but please talk to me,” he said. “I’m in hell.”
“You don’t think I am?” Then I noticed the red cardboard top of a Marlboro pack sticking out of his shirt pocket. “Don’t tell me you started smoking again!”
“I know I promised you I wouldn’t. But I don’t have you after me about it, either. So I started again and can’t quit.” He looked at me with beggar’s eyes, and his large veined hands were shaking.
This admission pierced through my flimsy armor. I avoided staring at his face directly, a man’s face on somebody so young. His pain was so much more difficult to handle than his fury.
He reached for the pack.
“You can’t in here,” I warned.
He said, “I know I can’t. I just want it—I need something—in my hand.” He took a cigarette out and held it between two shaking fingers. “I continuously feel like shit, Catherine,” he said, but managed to smile again. “Seeing you … this is a break … from it.”
I shut my eyes and swallowed and said, “Don’t, please!”
He ran his hand tightly across the top of his head, gathering his hair in a fist and pressing it against the back of his neck. “At least you’re lucky you have somewhere else to be, ” he said. “Everywhere I go in Burlington reminds me of us.”
“We’ve spent plenty of time down here at my house, too. It’s not like I don’t go around and find things that remind me of you, especially what you left behind.”
“I guess I need to collect it.”
“Better to tell me where you want me to send it.”
I needed to get to my classroom and was about to inform him when he looked at me fixedly. “I’m trying to say, Catherine, that I had a life before you. All I want now is to have that life back.”
“You sound quite resentful,” I said. “I didn’t take your life away from you.”
“Well, I was happy until you came along,” he said.
“And I was happy until you came along, ” I told him.
Without another word, he got up and left the prison. He had a loping walk in which his shoulders dipped from side to side, an endearing stride that I could have spotted in a crowd; and with a terrible ache I knew I would miss it, I knew it would be a very long time until I saw him again. Shortly thereafter he fled the country for Thailand.
* * *
When I came into our little shared office in the
prison, Fiona was leaning over a paper cutter, shearing large squares out of thick vanilla-colored drawing paper, the precise ripping sound that I always used to love in grade school now raking my nerves. She turned to me with a look of dolorous concern that did not belie her air of blooming happiness. Now she was the one in love, radiantly in love with Anthony Waite. And admittedly I was jealous, wondering what he saw in an attractive woman who I imagined was a lot less interesting than his wife.
“Catherine,” she said softly, dropping her sheaf of drawing papers and moving toward me. “How are you doing with everything?”
I waved her away, something I would not have done so blatantly in the past. “I’m okay, really. Just, ya know, shook up. And therefore can’t sleep. Don’t,” I warned, meaning don’t hug me, which is something that Fiona did reflexively with many people. I could see how my defensive response offended her. “Everybody’s worrying,” I complained. “And while I appreciate it, I would like things to go on normally. Remember, I didn’t know her. No sympathy should be spent on me.”
“I realize that,” Fiona said, “but finding a body—”
“You find people dead in your life,” I made myself say. “And it’s a lot worse when you actually do know them. Although in this case, unfortunately she was … brutalized.” Fiona flinched at my choice of word. “And then lay there frozen for months. So it wasn’t the ordinary finding of a body. Anyway, how are you doing?” I asked.
She frowned at me. “You really want to know?”
“I asked, didn’t I?”
“Well, the usual: swamped at school. I have parent/teacher conferences next week.”
I wouldn’t say that Fiona and I have ever been what one would call “friendly.” We do see each other every other Monday at the prison and sometimes have sat together at town meetings. Perhaps her greatest strength is her way of setting you at ease, as though you could confide in her and in return she’d empathize and guard your confidence. She jogs around Woodstock’s stately green, stays fit, seems to have plenty of friends, mainly male friends, and there is something just a little bit disconcertingly bubbly about her. And I know I’m splitting hairs, but Fiona does have this one yellowed front tooth that I always find myself staring at, wondering why she doesn’t have it attended to. That tooth drives Wade crazy. Whenever he sees Fiona he says, “I wish she’d just get that damned thing bleached!”
I put down my spiral notebook and the seven one-page assignments that I’d collected from the felons the previous session, for the most part atrociously written and which I’d gone over relentlessly with a red pen. “Did I see you drive by me the other day, Fiona?” I asked her, which of course I hadn’t.
She couldn’t help but glance away for a moment. “Where?”
“Up on Cloudland.”
She blushed deeply. “Oh … I keep forgetting you live up there.”
“Whom do you know up there besides me?” I asked her mildly, thinking she must realize that there were only three full-time households.
“Well, I mean, I know Anthony, but who doesn’t?” she said nervously. “I … I actually go up there to that old Seventh-Day Adventist cemetery back in the woods. I get rubbings from the tombstones. Distribute them to my second graders. I like to combine art and history in one project.”
“Even at this time of year?” I probably sounded disingenuous.
“Snow is gone now in most spots,” Fiona said, which was true. “I should stop by and see you the next time I go,” she offered, realizing too late this was probably ill-advised.
“Yes, do drop by and see me,” I said, “the next time you’re up…” I wanted to say “doing grave rubbings” but refrained. After all, I reminded myself, who am I, who’d had an affair with one of my students, to judge? Then again, Anthony was still married.
* * *
The classroom has bulletproof windows, a steel door that buzzes one in and out, and a portly, pimpled twenty-year-old guard standing outside monitoring the discussion by intercom. In the five years that I’ve been volunteering at the prison, there have only been a few occasions when the guard—and not I—determined that the classroom was getting out of hand and burst into the room with reinforcements to restore order.
When I arrived to teach that day the guard was looking at me curiously. “Everything okay, Miz Winslow?” His question wasn’t exactly unusual, but he leaned toward me when he said it so that I sensed what drove his inquiry.
“Swimmingly,” I said as he buzzed me into the classroom.
“Hey, here’s who’s in charge,” said Daryl when I walked in.
“Hello, Tattoo King,” I said without missing a beat, and for a moment stood there gawking at my students. Daryl was a balding, bulky guy with Harley-Davidson flames inked up and down his arms and on his neck all the way up to his ears. He’d had a disagreement with a cousin over a lawn equipment transaction, and while they were out riding their motorcycles, he was observed running the poor fellow off the road. The cousin died and Daryl was convicted of manslaughter. Everyone else in my group was tattooed but to a lesser degree, except one-legged Jess, who, up on a rooftop in Rutland, had an altercation with a drug dealer, stuck a knife into his adversary’s thigh, then was pushed off and fell five stories—luckily into shrubbery—and shattered one of his legs. When the police found him he was carrying six ounces of cocaine. He now got around either on crutches or in a wheelchair. Then there was Peter, a doughy seventeen-year-old who, in the midst of doing his biology homework, went into a fuguelike rage, grabbed his father’s shotgun and, finding both his parents in bed having TV dinners, murdered them with many more rounds than was necessary. After the fact he was unable to remember his act of slaughter, and this was a source of constant torment to him.
I looked around, nodding at Raul, a quiet Latino who’d taken a piece of lead pipe and smashed in the kidneys of a man vying for the same woman. And then the new guy, who apparently liked preening his manhood in front of ladies working at convenience stores and whose name I’d learned was Jones: a corpulent fellow in his mid-thirties who could have passed for an insurance salesman out of Boston. I couldn’t help looking between the legs of his orange prison pants, and saw nothing out of the ordinary. I got riled up when I thought of him trying to sexually intimidate a poor twenty-one-year-old girl. He did have a family crest sort of tattoo on one arm, definitely an old-school tattoo.
It occurred to me, not for the first time, that any of these men who took my class could possibly have it in them to murder a woman like Angela Parker.
“Only six of you today?”
“Jimmy’s in lockdown,” Jess said, wearing a semi-toothless smile.
“Ah … and Bo?”
“He volunteered for laundry,” said Daryl. “Didn’t think you were going to be here anyway.”
“Why not?” I put down my books and papers. All throughout this exchange, I noticed that seventeen-year-old Peter was staring down at the floor, seeming almost catatonic. He looked up at me suddenly and I could see his blank eyes narrow. “Because you found a dead woman,” he said with a questioning lilt to his voice.
“Trauma, you know,” Jones spoke up, meeting my gaze with a devilish expression.
It was unusual for a newcomer to speak up so soon. Beyond this, “trauma” was a word that made me wonder if he was fairly well educated, not that educated people can’t stoop to homicide. Most of my guys hadn’t finished high school, but nearly all of them had areas of expertise. Daryl could take apart and put together car and two-stroke engines. Jess, who’d been in the merchant marines, knew everything about boats.
“So what was it like, finding a murdered girl?” Daryl murmured.
“You know,” I said. “You’re the first person who’s had the nerve to ask me that.”
“Hey, honey, come closer,” he said with disgusting lasciviousness.
“Don’t push your luck,” I told him.
“So then you’re okay,” Jess said.
“Don’t I look okay?”
“Well, just so you know,” Jones said, shocking me, “none of us are that kind of guy.”
The other inmates were glaring at him; his outburst struck them as impertinent.
I scrutinized this inmate, whom I found to be both flabby and slovenly. “And what kind of guy is that?” I said.
Raul cut in, preempting Jones from garnering too much spotlight. “The kind of guy who kills for no reason. Kills people he don’t know.”
“As opposed to people you do know,” I said.
Jess said, “If somebody fucks with you and then you kill them, man, that’s different.” He glanced around at his fellow inmates.
It always fascinates me how they differentiate the severity of their offense from those committed by their fellow inmates, as though to calibrate what kind of crime is truly reprehensible.
“I don’t think he knew her.”
“Probably didn’t know her if he’s a serial killer,” Jess went on, doing a push-up on the arms of his wheelchair. “Serials do their thing. They have a plan and they stick to it. So whoever drives into the rest area at seven P.M.… boom.”
Normally I might have let them carry on conjecturing, but today I just didn’t feel up to hearing any more of the sort of discussion that I’d already been having with myself, with Anthony, and others. And so I said, “Let’s table this for now. Thanks for your concern. Did you all finish the reading I passed out?” I’d given them the short story “The Captain’s Daughter” by Alexander Pushkin.
Cloudland Page 5
