They all nodded, except Travis, a young, skinny black guy wearing a do-rag. He’d said nothing thus far and looked angry and bored.
“Okay, so…”
Jones surprised me yet again by having managed to get a copy of the story from one of the other inmates and reading it. He began the discussion. “Tell you one thing. It snows a fucking lot in Russia.”
“Yeah, even more than here,” Peter spoke up.
“Got to be way north of here,” said Jess.
“I love the bad guy in the story,” Daryl said. “The fake czar.”
“How so?”
“He was all dressed in black and shit and the way he just turned up in the middle of that snowstorm. Boy, he turned out to be one no-nonsense dude.”
“Riding his horse all over the place, taking out towns, cutting off heads. Not bad for a badass life,” said Raul.
“Well, until you’re caught and executed,” I pointed out.
“I hated that servant,” Peter spoke up. “I wanted the fake czar to kill him.”
“And why did you hate him?”
“He was always interfering.”
“The captain’s daughter … she was kind of like an olden-days version of a bimbo, wasn’t she?” Jones said, and everybody laughed.
His manner was a bit too flippant for my liking, much less to be harboring the secret of having stalked and killed several women within a short period of time. But then again, the brand of insanity that might drive such a serial murderer was probably something I could hardly fathom. I supposed I had to reserve judgment on Jones.
When the class was over, Peter waited behind as he often did. He’d been writing journal entries, scribbling dispatches about his life up until the school night when he committed an act of such extreme violence, claimed by his teachers and friends to be a dumbfounding contradiction to his quiet and self-contained nature. Then again, wasn’t it always the quiet types, the introverts, the dreamers who ended up surprising us with unforeseen malice? Peter seemed genuinely bereft and agonized to be held responsible for his parents’ murder. He’d been put on a potent psychotropic medication that, he confided to me, only made him feel fogged in. Despite my revulsion at what he’d done, I managed somehow to feel motherly toward him.
“They say you actually knew her,” he spoke up. “The woman who was killed.”
I told him she drew my blood at the hospital, and that even though plenty of photos of her had been published in the local newspaper, when I found her I didn’t recognize her, but quickly assumed who she was.
Peter’s face wrinkled up. “My mother used to follow them, the stories of these murders. She used to worry about them.” He hesitated again. “She even got scared whenever she was alone.”
I pictured him grabbing a shotgun, slowly and purposefully climbing the stairs to his parents’ bedroom, hearing their murmuring voices, the look of terrified disbelief on their faces when he aimed at them, the concussion of firing, the impact of hailing lead, the splattering of their blood everywhere, even on him, and the smell of gunpowder in the mortal quiet that followed.
FIVE
IN THE MIDDLE OF MAY I received a letter from one of my readers in Birmingham, who claimed the best way to unclog a drain was dumping in baking soda and chasing it with white vinegar. Down in the shallow cavern of my two-hundred-year-old cellar was an old clothes-scrubbing sink whose drain had been clogging and backing up for years, resisting conventional cleansers, and the diligent efforts of plumbers. Watching the bubbling mixture with the same fascination I had when I combined vinegar and baking soda in elementary school, I felt torn. For someone who’d begun a career as a college intern at The New York Times, approaching journalism with the loftiest ideals of exposing fraud, corruption, of developing the instinct to recognize the glimmering, elusive fact that might illuminate the dark soul of an interviewee, here I was watching a practical alchemy that might or might not unblock a drain. It could be argued that I was helping the world of domesticity like the clean-it-fix-it-find-it equivalent of Martha Stewart; however, as popular as my column had become, I sometimes felt a pang of having abandoned my true calling. This despair was obvious to people who were close to me. Matthew used to ask me why I just didn’t take up investigative journalism again. And my answer to him was my answer to myself. I didn’t have the mettle to keep battling egos for the integrity of turns of phrase. I was tired of my prose being rewritten, hacked into more pedestrian form. Once I stepped out of the ring, I just didn’t have the heart, or the drive, to throw myself back in with the big-timers. I guess I discovered that I wasn’t as ambitious as I thought I was.
Instead, I was helping housewives wow their husbands with Moroccan tagines made with lemons that marinated for months in earthenware jars, spreading the word of where to find shoes for tiny feet, or feeding brewer’s yeast powder to dogs to help rid them of fleas—there was something quietly satisfying about this pursuit. With that thought, the cordless phone rang in the pocket of my baggy Carhartt jeans. I wiped my hands with a towel, checked the incoming number and, seeing it was Anthony, trotted up the steep wooden stairs and answered.
“You sound all breathless,” he said to me flirtatiously. “Anybody I know?”
“Dream on,” I said, and then explained where I’d been and the procedure I was testing.
“Let me know if it flies.”
“Read the column, save me the trouble.”
“Catherine, do you really care if I read your column?”
“Of course I care!”
“Whenever you speak about it, you’re always so disparaging.”
“Self-protection of a battered ego,” I explained, heading into my study with the phone cradled between my shoulder and my ear. There was a short lull. “Something tells me this is not a social call.”
“It’s an update call,” he said. First he told me that Roderick Jones, the new guy in my prison writing class who’d exposed himself and forcefully fondled a cashier, had been cleared of suspicion in regard to the River Valley murders. Jones had been able to substantiate he was in Massachusetts the night of Angela Parker’s abduction. “He’s one of those guys who sits on every receipt. And he’s got one from a liquor store in Acton right outside of Boston that we were able to verify. Says 9:07 P.M. So that fairly rules him out. It was a mother of a storm and the roads all over the northeast that night were a complete mess.”
“Good,” I said. “I didn’t relish the idea of instructing the man who dumped a body in our orchard.”
Anthony went on to say that, believing that the Seventh-Day Adventist pamphlets shoved into the pockets of Angela Parker and Marjorie Poole might bring a more significant clue to the murderer’s identity, he had immersed himself in the Church’s literature, focusing in particular on the religion’s view on health and medical care and dying. He’d discovered a belief in vegetarianism, general respect and reverence for plant and animal life, the sacredness of trees, which many believers felt had an animus.
The last fact had special significance. Anthony went on to confide that (being kept from the public record), three out of the five bodies of the dead women had been discovered near a downed tree. “Janet Tourvalon was murdered in her house, so she wouldn’t be part of the statistic.”
“What about Angela? I don’t remember seeing a tree down.”
“Oh yeah, it was right near her. A big one. It was still covered with snow when you found her.”
And then I remembered that when Leslie Fullerton and I first went to find the body, the Statie had tripped over a tree trunk and tumbled into the snow. I mentioned this to Anthony.
“Noted. Anyway, the more I read about this particular religion the more I’m not sure whether or not the killer is a member of the tribe or just borrowing their philosophy merely to cast suspicion in another direction.”
“Or just one of those Adventists whose wheels have come off,” I said.
“Precisely.”
“Just don’t assume that this religious
sect is as peace-loving as they proclaim.”
“What do you know about them?”
“I’ve known a lot of them over the years. When I was growing up and went to a youth camp down in Putney there were some Seventh-Day Adventist kids who lived on the lake we occupied and who always bullied the campers. One girl even beat me up.”
“Yeah, but you can’t indict a whole culture due to a couple of miscreants.”
“True. I just want you to see there might be a flip side to all this vegetarianism and pacifism.”
“I hear that.”
Then something struck me and I momentarily let my thread of the conversation drop. “Are you with me, Catherine? Are you there?”
“Yeah,” I said foggily. “I was just thinking. There is something familiar about dead women being found by downed trees with religious literature shoved into their pockets. I could swear I read about it somewhere.”
“Where is somewhere?”
“Good question.”
The conversation lagged for a moment or two and then Anthony said, “Maybe a newspaper story?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Online?”
“I think it’s probably a book,” I said, staring across the room at a suite of built-in bookshelves, chockablock with volumes. When Saint Mike’s let me go I had to clear out my office, and two years on had yet to incorporate my two book collections: towering piles on each of the stairs up to my second-floor bedroom, and at least twenty novels stacked on my nightstand. I desperately needed to thin out my collection, but as yet had been unable to do so—like getting rid of a beloved dead person’s effects, in this case my five-year stint as an adjunct professor of journalism and nonfiction. Then again, it was difficult for me to get rid of books in general. Among the one hundred or so I read every year, I find myself sloughing off few of them, even the ones that I dislike and abandon after a few chapters. “It’ll probably drive me crazy until I figure it out. All the more reason to get back to my drainage. How ’bout I call you when I remember.”
Fact of the matter: I was on deadline for my column, which meant returning to the dirty basement and monitoring the problematic pipe. Just as I was watching the foaming clot blocking my drain miraculously get sucked down into the depths, saying to myself, “Kudos to the reader from Birmingham,” it occurred to me that the book I was trying to place was probably a nineteenth-century novel.
That old hankering to track down a lead. I climbed the steep stairs, crossed my study, and stood before a built-in bookshelf overflowing with volumes by Dickens and Mrs. Gaskill, George Eliot and the like. I ran my finger over the literary landscape of the nineteenth century, feeling like a needle on a Ouija board trying to get a stronger sense of which author it might be. And then it came to me: the Gothic nature of the subject matter made it likely to be Wilkie Collins, plus the fact that I’d read his novels many times over. I shifted to the part of my bookshelf that contains the majority of his work and started flipping through the obvious ones: The Woman in White, No Name, The Law and the Lady, No Thoroughfare, and The Moonstone, whose last lines I find to be among the most elegiac in all of English literature. As I was drawn into reading them once again, I was suddenly struck by the name of a book of his called The Widower’s Branch, a flash of recollection that it dealt with the serial murders of mostly married women whose dead bodies were found near … fallen trees! I was relieved and even proud that I’d figured it all out relatively easily.
Curiously, The Widower’s Branch is actually the very last novel Wilkie Collins ever wrote. Theresa, my Victorian scholar/former college roommate, claims it was written after Blind Love, which many scholars advance as the author’s last work, whose completion was interrupted by his death. Knowing he wouldn’t finish Blind Love, Collins arranged for another writer named Walter Besant to finish the work from detailed notes. The Widower’s Branch, on the other hand, was never tampered with by anybody; it was left by his literary executors as a fragment, a mere eighty pages with a detailed outline published posthumously in an extremely limited edition, a copy of which Theresa managed to procure for me.
I kept my Wilkie Collins in chronological order and meandered along the bookshelf, looking at the various spines of his novels until I came to Blind Love. There was a slender space between it and the flank of the bookshelf; The Widower’s Branch was gone.
I stood there blinking, realizing that it had vanished. It was as though my mind were playing a trick on me. I was confused. The first thing I did was go backwards through the other volumes to see if any more were missing. The only other one I couldn’t find was Armadale, but I happened to know it was upstairs on a bookshelf outside my bedroom. I keep close tabs on the books and authors that mean a lot to me. I began to worry that I’d somehow lent it out and completely forgotten to whom. Perhaps my memory wasn’t so good after all.
Then a comber of panic slammed me, as unnerving as losing sight of a neighbor’s child at the beach. I tried to think clearly, to remember where it could be. The phone rang again and it was Anthony.
I was so riled up I almost didn’t pick up. “Now what?” I said to him.
“You still circling that drain?”
“Why and what’s it to you?” I said a bit sharply, still unnerved.
“Marco Prozzo just stopped in to see me. He’s here for a reason that … well, I haven’t discussed it with you. Having to do with a suspect, one of the people we’re investigating.”
“Somebody I know?”
“Yeah. This is his idea: he wants to ask you a few questions. He thinks you might be able to help.”
That’s curious, I thought. “When would this be?”
“How’s about ten minutes?”
I glanced at my watch: I didn’t have time for much of anything—my deadline was looming. “It’s not the most convenient moment.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t think—”
My curiosity took control. “All right, come on over. I do have one other thing in the works besides the drain: dog biscuits.”
Anthony laughed. “Just as long as you don’t pawn them off on us.”
Right after I ended the call with Anthony, my editor at the newspaper syndicate rang to chitchat. The man, a hard-bitten, inveterate flirt, was not one to read subtleties. Itching to get back to work and spare a few minutes to continue searching for the Wilkie Collins, I was nevertheless unable to untangle myself from the hand that fed me until I heard the knock on the sliding glass door that led into my sunroom. “The dogs are barking because the cops are here,” I announced. “Sorry, but I got to go,” and was finally released from my editor’s burbling bondage.
When I met Anthony and the short, squat detective at the door, I noticed Prozzo wore the same sharkskin suit he was wearing when he came to my house six weeks before in the company of the other Staties. “I’ve been on the phone with my editor in New York,” I told them. “Go on into the kitchen and give me five minutes. I’ve got basement crud all over me,” I added, patting the dogs to calm them down.
I rushed upstairs to wash and change into a button-down shirt and a pair of tan slacks. I did a quick scan of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf in my bedroom for the missing Wilkie Collins and once again came up empty-handed. I gathered my thoughts and returned to find both men sitting at the kitchen table, Prozzo patting the big head of Mrs. Billy, my bullmastiff. Anthony was also dressed in a suit, but his was a loosely cut lightweight gabardine. I wasn’t used to seeing him so spiffy and couldn’t help wondering if it had something to do with Fiona. During the last six weeks since Wade told me about the affair, I’d been keeping an eye out but hadn’t spied her VW Beetle tootling up Cloudland.
“What’s baking?” Prozzo said. “Smells heavenly.”
“Canine heaven,” Anthony told him. “Dog biscuits.”
I said, “They’ll be out of the oven in ten minutes. You’re welcome to try one. They’re actually not bad. Just a bit bland. Salt isn’t especially good for dogs.”
“So you try out all the recipes and remedies?” Prozzo asked, crossing his legs at the ankle.
“Have to. At least the ones that I can. One of my most popular prescriptions turns out to be what to do when your dog gets skunked. You squirt your pet with Massengill vinegar disposable douche. I didn’t have the opportunity to test it before it was published, but my readers say it does an amazing job reducing the odor.”
“No kidding,” Prozzo said, laughing. “That’s good to know.”
“And get this, a guy sent me the formula. I wrote back to him and asked, ‘How did you stumble upon that little miracle?’”
Both men laughed.
“But then I have readers who have nothing better to do than find something wrong with my concoctions. They send complaints to the newspaper syndicate, who, when they believe I’m mistaken, feel obliged to publish my errors.”
“Even if you’ve already tried it yourself and it works?” Prozzo wondered.
“Then I tell my editor; more often than not he backs me up. But I have been wrong a few times. And it isn’t fun to have four hundred newspapers print your failure.”
“My wife and my daughter read your column,” Prozzo told me. “They love it. Especially those great cake recipes.”
“Believe it or not, most of those recipes come from far-flung readers. Not some San Francisco gourmet. Sorry that I don’t have a cake on hand to offer you. Something to drink, though, either of you guys?”
Prozzo waved his hand to say he was fine. Anthony said, “What do you have?”
“I was about to make some hibiscus tea.”
“Sounds great,” he said.
“Good for cognitive brain function, apparently,” I said, again dogged by thoughts of the missing book.
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