“No kidding … speaking of which,” Anthony went on. “As I was saying on the phone, Marco would like to ask you a few questions.”
I reached for a cornflower-blue ceramic teapot, poured in water that I’d heated in an electric kettle. Facing them again, I said, “I’m dying to know whom you’re investigating.”
Anthony and Prozzo exchanged a glance. Anthony said, “It won’t make you happy.”
“It’s okay. My day is already getting punky.”
Prozzo said, “We’re getting some heat on the guy who carts away dead animals.”
“Hiram Osmond, the knacker man,” Anthony said.
“Oh, no!”
There was a cylindrical vase of daffodils in the middle of my oblong dining table and Prozzo began batting it back and forth between his large, meaty hands. Terribly dismayed, I resumed, “I mean, we’re talking about a gentle guy whose wife left him and then he lost custody of his daughter.”
The detective looked up at me and said quietly, “These are just the sorts of people—”
“It takes all kinds,” Anthony interrupted. Echoing my thoughts he said, “Sometimes the quietest, most mild-mannered end up being the most brutal and remorseless killers.”
“I’m aware of that,” I managed to say, in a state of disbelief. I’d known Hiram from summers I’d spent in Woodstock as a teenager. I’d known him to be kind and hardworking. “I guess I never thought the murderer might turn out to be somebody I’m actually acquainted with.”
“Anyway, hear us out,” Prozzo said.
“What choice do I have?”
As more motorists driving in the blizzard of January 17 were interviewed, a profile arose of someone trudging along Route 12 in a long green military coat and a Russian fur hat that matched the description of Hiram Osmond’s signature winter gear. Osmond already admitted to having been out on the road that night, hoofing it homeward because his truck had gotten stuck in a driveway.
He claimed to have received a call from an elderly woman who informed him that one of the two dairy cows she kept had dropped dead. A mild spell of January weather during the week leading up to the blizzard indicated that a dead animal lying in deep snow would already have begun to ooze fluids, which would, when the mercury dropped, freeze and make the carcass difficult to prize away from the ground. Hiram always listened to a twenty-four-hour weather drone on his shortwave radio and had heard that the temperature would edge up to forty degrees for two days before the major storm ascended from the Carolinas. He decided to wait until it got just a bit warmer before driving to the old lady’s house to hack the beast’s head off and winch the two-thousand-pound carcass up into the back of his pickup truck.
But the meteorologists at the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury (who, in my opinion, spend too much time citing the warming and cooling trends in faraway North American places like Hudson Bay and Saskatoon) predicted that the snow would begin a lot later than it actually did. And at one point during the early afternoon of the day that Angela Parker disappeared, Hiram Osmond told the police that he found himself standing near his barn with his measuring stick, calculating that within a few hours, twelve inches had already fallen. The temperature was hovering at thirty-five degrees. Knowing that it was now or never in terms of the dead cow, he headed to the farm but skidded into a ditch on the old lady’s long, icy driveway. He bushwhacked three miles home, got another truck, drove back, hauled the first one out and towed it home. He gave up at that point. Two more feet of snow fell before the storm diminished, obscuring the place where he’d gotten stuck. The woman whose house he’d been driving to apparently never heard the rumor of an incapacitated vehicle, the sounds of tires whipping around and caterwauling, digging themselves into the hard ground, spraying up fine frozen grit. All she cared about was that her cow had never been removed and would continue to lie inhumed in several feet of snow and, like Angela Parker, remain frozen until spring.
Producing a pocket-sized notebook and pen, Prozzo said, “Have you been out to the Osmond farm?”
“Not since I was a kid.”
He noted that. “Do you remember it?”
“Vividly.”
I remembered dead fauna in various stages of rendering, a repository of sharpened instruments: long, scabrous knives, ponderous yet shiny cleavers for skinning and hacking limbs into small enough pieces so that they’d fit into the metal vats under which the Osmonds built wood fires. I remembered bones scattered all over the property, hides of various mammals hanging out to cure before being sold to tanneries. Somebody recently told me that Hiram had struck a lucrative deal with a high-end company in Arizona that purveyed animal skulls to rich ranchers who used them for décor.
The timer for the dog biscuits sounded and, taking a quilted mitt, I opened the oven and pulled out the tray. Even though I had a cutter that could have sliced dough into bone shapes, I’d chosen to make the canine cookies round. They had browned perfectly.
“Do you know much about his marriage breaking up?” Anthony asked.
Setting the hot tray on top of the stove burners, I said, “Oh yeah. I ran into him a while ago at Billings General Store. He told me that Celia had finally left him.”
Prozzo said, “He mentioned they were married ten years.”
“That’s about right,” I said, remembering how the day I encountered him, Hiram had complained to me that Celia no longer could abide his lifestyle; staring at his blood-tainted hands, at the reddish stubble he never seemed to shave, I’d imagined her living with the smell of rotting flesh and his devotion to rendering dead carcasses. I told Anthony and Prozzo, “Stupidly Hiram showed up in divorce court without a lawyer, and a sawtooth knife in the pocket of his pants. It rang the chimes of the metal detector. Celia jumped on it. She lied to the judge, said he was dangerous and violent, and he lost his bid for joint custody of their ten-year-old daughter. And get this, that judge granted Celia the right to go and live all the way down in Georgia. Now he only gets to see his child a couple times a year.”
“I couldn’t live with that,” Prozzo said. “Not being able to see my daughter.”
“Neither could I,” I agreed with him. “Is she your only?”
The detective nodded and looked troubled.
“So is mine.”
“Well,” Anthony said, “sometimes children actually find it easier to live with one parent rather than to go back and forth.”
“Maybe so,” I said, “but for Hiram this was tragic.”
Prozzo went on, “Unfortunately, there are a bunch of complaints against Osmond on record at the family court in White River Junction. Photographs of Mrs. Osmond with bruises and lacerations. There was a relief-from-abuse order filed.”
I was flummoxed. “I have to say that really surprises me. Any way her accusations could have been trumped up?”
“Oh, sure,” Prozzo said. “Happens all the time. But how well do you know this guy?”
“How well do you know anybody?” I said to them. “The Osmonds were all no-nonsense hardworking people. Osmond père would come over and fix stuff. Hiram we hired to do yard chores. Always really sweet and dedicated. Always seemed incredibly gentle.”
“He’s not in what you’d call a gentle profession,” Anthony pointed out.
“Well, no, but he inherited that job and the farm. He had no choice. Couldn’t go to college. Wasn’t allowed to because he had to help out.”
And then I thought of Wade, who, with his horrible upbringing, his violent desecration of Paul’s house, would make for a much more compelling suspect.
“And what about her, about Celia?” Prozzo asked.
“She’s five years younger than Hiram and me. Didn’t know her as well.”
“Any impression?” Anthony wondered.
“Like I said, the Osmonds were industrious, lower-income people, whereas she, as far as I knew, was … no other way to say it, white trash. Parents had the family on welfare and were known to be druggies. Her father had a garden equipment
repair shop that didn’t seem to do much business and was suspected by the locals as a front for a drug-selling operation.”
“Kind of like our waitress, Sheila,” Anthony said.
“Ish … maybe I’m jumping to conclusions, but I have heard Celia is a notorious liar.”
Prozzo said, “He was already living alone two years ago when the first murder occurred.”
“That woman who was hitchhiking out of Weathersfield.”
“Right,” Prozzo said.
I grabbed the teapot and poured steaming red liquid into three mugs, pushing one at Prozzo. “I know you didn’t ask for some but I want you to try it anyway.”
“Be glad to,” he said, accepting my offering.
Then I said, “Look, obviously I know where you’re going with this.”
“Past history is everything,” Anthony pointed out. “His early life, his relationship with his parents.”
Looking back and forth between the two men, I said, “I guess up until now I never imagined that Hiram could harm anything that wasn’t already dead.”
Prozzo nodded his head respectfully. Then resumed, “Didn’t the Osmonds for a time make an additional living selling pigs?”
“Until the pigs were found to harbor trichinosis. The health department shut them down.”
Both men stiffened. Anthony finished his cup of hibiscus tea and complimented it. Glad to be stepping away from the subject of Hiram Osmond, I said, “It’s great on a winter night when you’ve already had too much caffeine.”
“Speaking of winter,” Prozzo said, “might we go back to the night of the snowstorm … what you saw and heard?”
Six weeks ago, when the body was found, I’d ended up being questioned by Woodstock police chief O’Reilly, and not by Prozzo, who’d merely read my testimony.
“Sure, if we have to.”
“If you don’t mind.”
I once again recounted how I’d been preparing my column, transcribing a list of nineteenth-century medicinal preparations largely unavailable in most of the country but sold by mail order at a pharmacy in Nebraska, the price lists of sassafras oil, witch hazel gel, spring tonic, coal tar ointment, when I heard the plow plundering the road.
“And where were you sitting?”
I pointed to the green leather love seat in my television room, which was visible from where we were clustered at the kitchen table and where Mrs. Billy was sprawled and snoring with some of the teeth showing from her black boxer’s mask of a face. Almost as though she knew I was looking at her, she picked up her head and looked at me groggily.
“And from there you hear things pretty well out on the road?”
“Well, it depends on the barometer. I tend to hear things a lot better when the pressure is low.”
“So during a storm?”
“Usually before or after a storm I can hear the Great Northern freight train crawling through White River Junction. But during a storm there is too much wind and precipitation to hear anything coming from afar. The night of the blizzard, for example, the wind was crazy, the snow was pitting itself against the windows. I listened to it, shivering and huddling under a blanket. The lights went out at some point. I remember holding the medicinal vials up to the woodstove’s light.”
“But you did hear the plow?”
“Yeah, I heard it scraping and rumbling past.”
Prozzo wrote a few sentences and then looked up at me. “And can you remember anything else?” His voice momentarily went hoarse.
His asking the proper questions was making a difference; something in my memory became dislodged and, like a weightless flake, funneled up to the surface of my reasoning. Perhaps a half hour before I’d heard the plow, the dogs began barking: Mrs. Billy exploding into a deep-throated yipping, stopping to growl and then letting loose again; Virgil, my old Labrador, throwing his head back and slowly woofing like a bass beat to Mrs. Billy’s wailing; and Henrietta, riled up by both of them, scurrying around, trotters clattering over the hardwood floors. I now wondered aloud: had another car passed in the storm just before the plow; had all my animals been able to detect a dying woman being driven through a blizzard?
Detective Prozzo looked confused when I described having a potbellied pig. “Where is this … where is she now?” he asked.
I pointed to the far end of the table under which my darling was sleeping on her side, her back hooves twitching from a dream in which she was probably feasting on scrumptious apple parings and vegetable scraps.
The detective glanced at the floor and when he noticed sleeping Henrietta said, “Holy moly. I thought I’d smelled something funny in here.”
“Still a city boy after all this time,” I teased him.
Staring intently at Henrietta, he said, “Is she friendly?”
“Until you cross her.”
He looked up at me. “Protective?”
I found myself wondering yet again what Henrietta, snoring under the table, was truly capable of. “I hope so.”
“Anyway, back to my question. Your animals were reacting to a vehicle going by?”
“Something was definitely bothering them. It took me a while to calm them down.”
I knew from my reporting experience that some serial murderers, determined to avoid capture, cut a wide enough swath in order to be elusive, while others stick to the turf they know, aspiring to a seamless execution of premeditated violence and perversely risking being caught.
I turned to Prozzo. “Anthony says you all think it’s somebody who knows the area.”
“Yeah, a local. Somebody who’d know the roads down Springfield/Claremont way as well as around here. Hiram Osmond fits that description.”
“And the only person seen anywhere near where her body was left,” Anthony added.
“But he was just walking down the road,” I pointed out.
Prozzo answered, “Like I said, claims his truck broke down. That may have happened and he’s just refashioning the rest of his alibi. Anyway, he’s agreed to take a lie detector test. So we’ll see where that lands us.”
The detective’s last words coincided with a clattering commotion under the table: Henrietta preparing to put in an appearance. A moment later she’d trundled out from one end and was staring at us, her mottled snout quivering. I began scratching her flank and she moaned in pleasure. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” muttered Prozzo.
“Honey girl,” I said to Henrietta, “go on in the other room and find the missus. Go on.” At the sound of my voice, Virgil appeared with his gray beard on his black face, his tail thumping against the door that led between the kitchen and the television room. “You stay there,” I ordered him. “March, Henrietta!” I pointed. She glared at me, bobbed her head once, and then slowly began trotting toward the television room. I scratched her rump as she wriggled by and she grunted. She stopped and took a long leak down through the grate that used to allow forced hot air up from the basement before I switched the house over to baseboard. Watching her urinate, Prozzo said, “Will you look at that!”
“That’s her P-spot. I have a big rubber tub down below to catch her stream.”
“Yuck,” the detective said. “Where does she poop?”
“Outside, with the dogs.”
“Smart little bugger, isn’t she?” said Anthony.
“My daughter always wanted a house pig,” Prozzo said, fidgeting in his chair.
“How old is she?”
He looked at me squarely and something about him seemed melancholy. “She’s twenty-seven. And yours?”
“Twenty-two. She live near you?”
“Well … yes, as a matter of fact … yours?”
“Down in New Jersey.”
“My home state. Where?”
“Morristown.”
“Nice little upscale place,” he said with a bit of an edge. “Where I’m from in Perth Amboy, we called Morristown the other side of the tracks.”
“I wouldn’t know. I have yet to visit.”
“Wha
t are you waiting for?”
I chuckled and then I said, “Trust me, you don’t have time.”
Glancing at his gaudy, gold-plated watch, Prozzo said, “You’re right. But sometime I might.” He stood up and said he had another appointment, flicking his head at Anthony, as though expecting him to follow.
“Why don’t you go along,” Anthony said. “Catherine and I have a few other things to discuss.”
The detective looked disappointed.
I caught his eye. “Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful about Hiram.”
He made a dismissive gesture. “Oh no, you were helpful. You were great.” He shook my hand and then something seemed to occur to him. “Oh, there’s the other thing.” He tilted his head toward Anthony. “You think you know of a place.” He hesitated. “A book maybe where similar murders occur: women found dead near fallen trees with religious tracts in the pockets.”
“I do. I now think I know which one. Just been trying to find it. To make sure.”
“So what is it? What’s it called?”
“The Widower’s Branch. By Wilkie Collins.”
Prozzo said to Anthony, “You’ll let me know if she finds it.” And then to me, “And if not we can always get a copy.”
“Not so easy,” I said. “It’s really quite obscure.”
“We have our sources.” Prozzo winked at me and told us good-bye.
SIX
I WAITED UNTIL I HEARD the detective’s car starting. And then said, “He’s an interesting customer. Very professional, but there’s a sadness there, wistfulness. Don’t you think?”
“Yeah, I noticed it when he was talking about his daughter. He mentioned to me she’s had a rough time with depression.”
“So has Breck … as you know.”
“I got the sense that his daughter has been living at home. And isn’t working.”
“He actually reminds me of a guy Daddy used to do business with. A larger-than-life toughie with a big heart who owned a bowling alley on the Lower East Side.”
Anthony looked puzzled. “Didn’t you tell me at one time your father was some kind of blue-blooded loan shark?”
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