One morning shortly before dawn, a young clerk wandering along the river shore trips over a shriveled, blackened foot sticking out of the mud. Despite the strong pithy odor of rotting flesh, he feels compelled to reach for the dead limb, which separates from the buried body like a piece of tenderized meat. The narrative ends abruptly; the last phrase of fiction that Collins may have ever written was: “the man to whom she was soon to be married,” describing his young protagonist yearning for the woman he loved, who had recently announced to him that she was engaged to somebody else—the reason why he’d been wandering the riverbank all night long, nearly out of his mind with wretchedness.
According to Theresa, Collins never made any arrangement for the book to be completed. What follows the text is the author’s twenty-page outline of the plot, which proposes that other dead bodies, including the body of the main character’s beloved, will be similarly found “next to large, tumbled-down trees” and that “scrambled religious writings of a fanatical nature would be discovered in the pockets of their soiled clothing.”
So here it was, a ghostly antecedent to the murders unfolding in the Connecticut River Valley. I held my breath for a moment.
But then I began to reason. This, after all, was a general reference in a book that was quite obscure; I couldn’t imagine there being very many copies in the United States of an unfinished piece of fiction privately printed in Britain. Beyond this, in rural areas such as ours, plenty of dead bodies must be found near fallen trees; and at least one of the women murdered in the Upper Valley was not found this way. So really, were the religious writings the hard-and-fast link to the River Valley murders? How significant was this coincidence?
As far as somebody in the area being able to get their hands on the book and copy the plot, I was familiar with Dartmouth College’s collection of Wilkie Collins and knew definitively that its Baker Library had neither acquired this novel nor Blind Love. There was no other library within a hundred miles whose collection of Wilkie Collins would be nearly as extensive as Dartmouth’s.
Then I thought: Let’s just see how available this book actually is. I booted up my computer and typed my way to the Wilkie Collins Web site, where most of his novels (now in the public domain) have been digitized. As I suspected, The Widower’s Branch is given an entry with no available online text. Next I did a general library search and found four hard copies: UCLA; the University of Wisconsin, Madison; the University of Delaware, Newark; and Yale University; the last of which was nearly two hundred miles away.
There were other considerations. For example, I knew that writers such as Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins and Edgar Allan Poe were galvanized by grisly crimes, avidly following the progress of murders or abductions reported in the newspapers, which in the nineteenth century were more opinionated and often rendered judgment—unthinkable nowadays—on whom they felt the murderer might be, as well as commentary on how investigators were proceeding. Murder trials themselves tended to attract gargantuan crowds. Collins and Dickens often exchanged theories about these felonies and their outcomes. Both of them, for example, had been electrified by (and had written about) the Road Hill Murder of 1860 in which a three-year-old boy had his throat slit by a jealous older half sister who then threw his body down into the servants’ privy. This sort of crime seemed to have its heyday in Victorian England when the queen went into perpetual mourning over her husband’s death, casting a general pall of dreariness over the entire realm. Might there have been a famous murderer during the Victorian era where female victims were left by fallen trees with religious matter stuffed in their pockets? Theresa probably would be able to answer that question fairly easily. I sat down immediately and wrote her an e-mail.
Afterward I called Anthony and told him what I’d learned; intrigued, he promised to run the information by Prozzo and get his reaction.
SEVEN
TWO WEEKS LATER, on June 1, I turned forty-two. After a fitful night’s sleep, punctuated with my third rereading of Bleak House, a novel that I cherish despite the fact that its treacly heroine, Esther Summerson, annoys me, I woke up with the tome splayed across my chest. More often than not, the first thing that struck me when I awoke every morning was a feeling of dread, of being alone with no one in bed with me. I’d think of Matthew, who, in a better world, might still be next to me, his slumbering body softly stirring, the impish smile radiant on his face when he’d wake and realize that I was there. Instead, I felt the black muzzle of Mrs. Billy, which was soon replaced by a fierce tongue bath from Virgil. Almost as though they knew it was my birthday, both dogs had left their usual sleeping habitat downstairs and had come during the night to curl up with me. I lay there looking groggily at their big sleepy heads, listening to them breathing and snorting, and kept thinking: My lovelies, my children. The sunlight was streaming through an eastern window and illuminating a spray of white iris with yellow throats that I’d filched from my garden and submerged in an azure bottle of Venetian glass. There was a marble on my nightstand. I closed my book, stacked it on the night table, and in a moment of whimsy tossed the marble and watched it roll with the slant of my nineteenth-century floor. The dogs perked up their heads at the sound.
I took a shower, wrapped myself in a terry-cloth bathrobe, remarking that the ache for Matthew was at a manageable distance now. I could get on with my day.
I studied myself in the mirror. When I kept my chin up my skin looked pretty tight and my high cheekbones were still prominent. Comma lines were just beginning to form on the right side of my face, and when I smiled there were faint crow’s-feet around my eyes.
As I transited my thirties and edged past forty I began to find to a far greater degree that anytime I mirror-gaze I see my mother, who everyone says I resemble greatly but whose resemblance I refused to acknowledge until after she died of an aneurysm ten years ago. She was Ukrainian, the bloodlines visible most acutely in the exotic slant of her eyes and in her high cheekbones. As a child I bore no likeness to my blue-blooded father, a fact that some of my paternal relatives found troubling. It was commonly known that early on in their marriage both my parents had had affairs; my father’s sisters subtly let me know they thought that I was illegitimate, and treated me in kind. This sense of dubious identity was incredibly difficult for me growing up; I was so afraid it might be true. Luckily, by the time I turned sixteen, I’d grown a good deal taller and lankier and it was hard for anybody to deny that my limbs and my gait were just like Daddy’s.
I deliberately took out a pair of blue jeans I hadn’t worn in perhaps fifteen years, delighted that they still fit me. I made myself a little pot of espresso on my stovetop, then took Virgil and Mrs. Billy and went for a five-mile hike along the Appalachian Trail.
The forest had a sharp aroma of spring earth, and wildflowers were burgeoning—purple wood violets, Dutchman’s breeches, trillium and hepaticas, and long unfurling tongs of new ferns. I pushed myself hard up the inclines, hugging the hillside when the trail narrowed and partly etched into a steep face of rock. Luck led me to three morel mushrooms that I brought home and made into delicious pasta with butter and Parmesan cheese for an impromptu birthday lunch. I felt okay, perhaps just a tad melancholy. But I couldn’t dwell on this too much because I was once again on deadline.
A Houma, Louisiana, homemaker claimed that soaking white clothes in a solution that was one-third dishwashing powder, one-third nonchlorine bleach, and one-third water would have a remarkably rejuvenating effect far beyond that of plain chlorinated bleach or even Mrs. Stewart’s Bluing solution. I owned several dun-white Oxford shirts that I’d saturated in a blue plastic pail. I’d picked up one of them by the collar and was noticing a marked improvement when I heard a car pull up: Wade’s Ford Ranger. Through the antique-glass dreamer’s windows in my study I watched him climb out and approach the house holding before him something in a small white box. I met him at the door. “What brings you here?” I said. Even in these rural parts it’s still uncommon for neighbors to
drop by without notice.
“I would have called but didn’t want to spoil the surprise. Happy birthday.” He folded back the top of the box and showed me a tall, beautifully iced white cake. “It’s carrot,” he said. “Your favorite. You tied up?”
I looked at my watch. “Kind of. But I can spare a few minutes. Are you on the way in or out?”
“Out. I went home and had a BLT with Paul.”
Taking possession of the cake and leading the way toward the kitchen, I asked Wade if he’d like a piece.
“I’m good for now,” Wade said, and then informed me that Paul had a gift for me as well and would be dropping by at some point.
I set the cake down on my oblong cherry dining table and then put on my electric teakettle. “Tea?”
“You still have that Lapsang?”
Definitely detecting something troubled in his manner, I told him a new batch had just arrived by mail. I half filled the kettle and, switching it on, said, “I might have a piece of that cake now.” Turning back toward him, “Sure you don’t want one?”
He caught me appraising his emaciated frame. Nervously combing his wispy mustache with his thumb and forefinger, he said, “I know what you’re thinking, but don’t say it.”
“What am I thinking?” I challenged him.
“That I could use the calories.”
“Well, you could.”
“You just worry every skinny person is suffering from anorexia.” He reminded me in his case, conversely, he’d been trying to put weight on, taking high-caloric food supplements, and consuming heavier meals and lots of red meat. He looked down at himself. “But nothing seems to help. Speaking of anorexic, heard from Breck?”
I pointed to a gorgeously arranged bouquet of gerbera daisies, ranunculus, and peonies. “Those arrived. And she sent me these earrings,” I said, pointing to the retro mod sixties white hoops in my ears. “I haven’t heard from her today yet, but I will.”
“Very fetching,” Wade approved as I saw his face furrow and darken. I was thinking that we were not having our usual spirited repartee when he said, “Look, I need to talk to you.”
“I’m all yours. You know that, Wade.”
He sounded nervous. “Where do I begin? Yesterday I spent an hour with this guy Marco Prozzo.”
I inwardly groaned. Having imagined that Wade would make a better suspect than Hiram, I’d obviously put my finger on the pulse of something. “Oh, him!” I forced myself to say.
“Do you know him?”
I mentioned that the detective had visited me recently in the company of Anthony. “So why is he sniffing around you?”
“He questioned me to the nth degree. Not exactly as though I have a clean slate.”
Although I agreed, I thought I should try and console him. “He’s probably questioning all former juvenile delinquents.”
This managed to make Wade chuckle. “Great,” he snorted, but then his face soured again. I poured us mugs of tea and set his down in front of him with a loud knock. He went on, “Look, I can’t account for myself the night Angela Parker was abducted. And Paul, whose memory is for shit, can’t either.”
I was momentarily perplexed. “What do you mean, Wade? It was the major snowstorm of the winter. How could you not account for yourself?”
“I can remember the snowstorm, you dingbat. But I spent the night in my office. Paul doesn’t remember where I was. He looks at me with those huge infantile eyes of his and says, ‘Gosh, weren’t you home?’”
“So why did you spend the night in the office?”
“Catherine, come on. I couldn’t get up the fucking hill, for fuck’s sake.”
“But you have a pickup truck.”
“Even so, the snow got too high.”
“But the plow.”
“I didn’t know when the plow was coming.”
“Paul easily could’ve called you when it came through.”
He glared at me. “You’re suspicious, too.”
“Who wouldn’t be—”
“Look, I decided I was going to spend the night in the office. No big deal. It’s not like I haven’t done it before.”
I reflected on this for a bit and my instinct was that he just didn’t sound convincing. “Does Detective Prozzo take into account that you weigh one hundred and twenty-five pounds and that some of these women arguably were heavier than you?”
“When somebody goes postal they’re capable of more than you’d imagine.”
“Some hidden meaning there?”
“No,” he said innocently, and I decided to let him slide. “So why did the detective come to see you?”
“Because they’re looking at a suspect they’ve sworn me to secrecy on.”
Wade looked perturbed. “And … that would be me?”
“No!”
Wade was nervously sucking one end of his wispy mustache. “Do you promise?”
“I swear on everything that is sacred. My dogs, my pig, my daughter. What else is there to swear on?”
“How about your ex-lover?”
I winced. “Him too.”
Wade crossed his arms over his chest. “Come on, Catherine. You can tell me.”
“Wade, I can’t!”
“Since when did your big mouth shrink to a pucker?”
“Since I turned forty-two at three o’clock this morning.”
“An inconvenient time to be born, if I must say.”
“So said my mother my whole life.”
“Nasty bitch that she probably was.” Then he looked at me forlornly. “A hint?”
“Yes, a hint, you don’t know this person.”
“Have I heard of them … him, I guess I should say?”
“Yes, but that’s as far as I’ll go. And from henceforth I am mum. Now, come on,” I cajoled, “snap out of it and have a piece of your carrot cake.”
“No thanks.”
There was a strange tension in the room. At last I said, “If you’re innocent, Wade, why so worried?”
“Come on! How many innocent people have gotten convicted of crimes, especially before DNA testing?”
“Yes, but there is something called evidence.”
“And it begins with whereabouts. Which I cannot establish,” he said crossly.
“Suspicion and arrest require a lot more than that.”
He stared at me for a moment and then said, “I’ve got to get back to work.”
We hugged tentatively, I thanked him for the carrot cake, and then he left without a further word. He seemed unusually jittery for someone who theoretically had nothing to worry about. And yet I knew that if I were Prozzo I’d be questioning him, too.
* * *
Breck called me just as I was washing the cake crumbs off my plate and asked if I’d seen today’s Times. I hadn’t. “Well, I guess they wanted to give you a birthday present.” She went on to inform me that there was a long article on various unsolved serial murders in New England, including the ones in the River Valley, and that the most recent body had been found by Catherine Winslow, “an esteemed journalist, a Times contributor, and former editor” at the various magazines with which I was once affiliated.
“Esteemed journalist who now makes a living hovering over clogged drains.”
“Whatever!”
“I wonder why the Times didn’t even contact me. I could’ve given them some good copy.”
“If you check out the article then you’ll see it makes sense they’re not calling you. It’s more of a roundup. Your commentary probably would have made your mention a bit top-heavy.”
“Listen to you.”
“Well, I am the journalist’s daughter. Happy birthday, by the way.”
“Oh yeah, there’s that. And since it’s my birthday and we’re on the subject of The New York Times—”
“Oh God, do I know what’s coming.”
“Then need I remind you of my one and only death request?” I laughed.
“Ma, you just turned forty-two. Don’t go
all doom and gloom on me yet.”
“Excuse me. A serial killer just happened to drop by my rural outpost where only three families live full time.”
“I assume that lightning won’t strike twice in the same place. But okay, your point landed … you want to make sure the Times mentions that Aunt Eleanor Roosevelt was your second cousin twice removed.”
“Now don’t be flip. She was hardly that distantly related.”
“Mom, you’ve got more going for you than your pedigree.”
“Hey, I’m a burnout. You have to stress what you can.”
“I can’t believe we’re talking about this … you’re still going strong. An established journalist. And now a nationally syndicated columnist.”
“I’m only half serious,” I told her. “Anyway, I’m a household hints columnist. The Times really has high regard for that!”
“I disagree. Your accomplishments would make for good enough copy to get your own article. Not to mention related to Eleanor and several presidents of the United States. Anyway, why are you so hung up on what The Times thinks and does?”
“Because I used to write for them until The Sophisticated Traveler killed my piece on Venice. When some famous novelist decided he wanted to write about it.”
“There are other sections to write for.”
“I guess my pride has gotten in the way.”
Hesitating for a moment, Breck said, “Look, I really hate getting into this … but I actually asked somebody I know who works at The Times. You remember Sarah, my college field hockey friend? She did a stint in Obits. I mentioned your crazy concern about your morbidity and she said somebody like you would definitely be, in her words, ‘on ice at The New York Times.’”
“Ah, that’s birthday music for my ears!”
“I’m glad that makes you happy.”
“By the way, thanks for sending the book back so promptly. I didn’t mention it to you but I needed it back for a reason.”
Cloudland Page 9
