Cloudland

by Joseph Olshan

“No kidding,” I said. “Where’s all the shame coming from?”

  He stared icily at me. “Nothing to do with shame. I’m just not comfortable divulging it.”

  “Why? We all want intimacy. We all want love.”

  “If I knew why I wouldn’t be lying about it.”

  And it dawned on me that for Wade, lying was a knee-jerk response that went back to his blighted childhood. Unfortunately, as an adult this trait was hardly going to help him to diminish the level of suspicion that he’d already generated. Then it occurred to me that perhaps he was afraid that disclosing any relationship at all might threaten his adoptive father. Maybe he was paranoid that Paul might disinherit him, another subliminal reason why he didn’t mention it to me?

  Leaving that thorny thought and attempting to ease some of the annoyance they were undoubtedly feeling toward each other, I confided in Paul and Wade, “Well, you’re not the only one they’re looking into. Remember I told you—”

  “Yeah, who is it, anyway,” Paul said. “You can tell us.”

  “Okay, just keep it under your hats. Hiram Osmond.” Although both men expressed surprise, they felt this suspicion made sense. I went on to say that Anthony’s report of the visit to the farm portrayed Hiram as unnerved to the point of panic.

  “I’ve known him for most of my life,” I said. “And I feel bad. I’d like to go and pay him a visit.” Turning to Wade with a smirk, I added, “I was thinking you should come with me. Both of you can’t be the killer, so I figure that I’ll be safe one way or another.”

  Wade considered the proposal for a moment and then said, “All right.”

  “How about after work tomorrow,” I said.

  “That’ll be fine.”

  * * *

  I picked him up the next day and we began driving along Route 12 toward the Osmond farm in the town of Hartland. It had been raining on and off the entire afternoon and the macadam road had taken on a glaucous sheen. “I have to be honest with you,” I said to him. “The news of your affair took me completely by surprise.”

  He turned to me and I could feel his caustic stare. “How so?”

  “I honestly didn’t think you were into women.”

  “Why, because I used to be fascinated by Mother’s dress patterns?”

  “Not at all,” I lied. “We’re very good friends and you’ve never talked about your love life.”

  “Exactly. So why presume?”

  “Because people who don’t talk about their love lives usually have something to hide.”

  “But if I were gay, why would I hide that?”

  “You might not hide it in a city but you would in a rural area like this. Anyway, I think you’ve sent out lots of mixed signals.”

  “Not true. I just play my cards close to the vest. And nobody—even Paul—knows me very well in that way.”

  “Clearly,” I said, and thought, How sad. “For all I know, you could have children scattered all over the world.”

  “As if,” he said.

  We fell into a sullen silence and finally Wade said, “So what’s the upshot with Hiram? You said he took the lie detector test.”

  “It wasn’t conclusive.”

  “Great!” Wade exclaimed, crossing his pale, sinewy arms. “All I need to hear. They’ll be asking me to take a lie detector test next. I’m sure I won’t do any better.”

  “If you’re so innocent why are you worrying?”

  “Isn’t Hiram worrying?”

  Wade turned toward me, raising his lower lip and nervously pulling one point of his flimsy mustache into his mouth. “Any kind of test gets me agitated. Even the driver’s exam pushed me over the edge … and let’s face it, I have a permanently guilty conscience left over from all the bad shit I did when I was a kid.” He swiped his hand over my dashboard and disdainfully looked at the dust that collected. “Honey, you need to clean this sucker.”

  “Lay off me, will you?”

  Wade burbled something inaudible in response.

  We were now following the Ottauquechee River, whose rapids were low and brackish, passing a rope swing hanging from a tall tree high up on a bank. Just as we drove by, a shirtless boy was swaying out in an arc and then caroming into the water. “That brings back memories,” Wade said wistfully.

  “Good ones?”

  “Not really. Getting teased for being scrawny. When kids want to be cruel, they are unmerciful.” He reflected for a moment. “They did use to call me ‘gay’ when I was in high school but only because I didn’t play sports or seem to date anybody, although I did.” I could feel him glaring at me. “I just didn’t brag about it like everybody else did.” He cleared his throat. “I just never belonged in this place, in this town. If it weren’t for Paul I’d be so gone from here.” Then he explained that Paul’s main dealer in New York City had recently called to request that Wade take over cataloging the artwork, because Paul, with his dimming short-term memory, kept losing track of his inventory.

  “Well, one day you’ll inherit everything and … the rest needn’t be said.” I looked over to study his expression.

  Wade exhaled sharply. “We’ll see. If he doesn’t drive me crazy. Like that Prozzo guy who loves to keep in touch. He’s like a shadow on my kitchen wall.”

  “You brought this on yourself by lying, Wade.”

  “How many times are you going to make your point?” I had nothing to say in response and finally he went on mockingly, “And you know, what the fuck … about Anthony?”

  “What about him?’”

  “Where was Anthony the night Angela Parker disappeared?”

  I glanced over at him. “Claims to have been home with his wife and daughters.”

  “Convenient, don’t you think?”

  “I agree. I suppose if it came down to it … they could be asked to substantiate his story.”

  “Yeah, but now they’re in North Carolina. Anyway, why did she leave if he was the one having the affair?”

  “I’ve wondered the same thing. He said she’d been after him to move south. So in one sense he played into her hand.” I paused for a moment. “But I concur it is rather unusual that a parent just lets their spouse move out of state with the children. There’s something—I don’t know what it is—about their whole separation arrangement that doesn’t add up to me.”

  “Hiram let his wife move out of state,” Wade said as we turned into the long dirt driveway of the Osmond farm.

  “No, the court granted that. She screwed him.”

  We went around a bend and were able to finally view a mishmash of fading white outbuildings, connected to one another with awkward Quonset hut–like passageways. We crossed over a brook on a small wooden bridge that groaned under the weight of the car. “God, this place has hardly changed,” I said, “from when I was a kid.”

  “I couldn’t tell you because I’ve never been here. But it certainly looks like the dump that I expected.”

  “Believe it or not there are beautiful antiques inside. Or were.”

  Wade looked dubious. “Come on.”

  “I kid you not. Picture this: dirt floors with good Empire furniture perched on little wooden blocks.”

  “How many times have you been here?”

  “Only a few. People—even Hiram’s closest friends growing up—didn’t come often. It wasn’t exactly a welcoming place, although the parents couldn’t have been nicer.”

  Back in the late seventies Hiram’s mother worked as a laundress, and when her husband was out on farm errands with the family’s only car, she’d walk a mile or more to pick up and deliver clothing. During the summers when my mother and I would spend July and August in Vermont, often driving we’d come upon Mrs. Osmond walking with bundles strapped to her back and stop to give her a lift. Once when we picked her up, Mrs. Osmond invited me to visit their farm because a pig had been born with two heads.

  I was around thirteen at the time. I rode my bicycle down their long dirt driveway and on arrival had to pass through the door
of a chicken-wire fence with which the Osmonds surrounded the entire house in order to protect their fowl from predators like fisher cats and coyotes. It was a surreal, bizarre farm: pigs and chickens milling around amongst the carcasses of cows and sheep and horses that were just open-air curing, waiting to be rendered.

  On that particular occasion I’d been expecting Hiram to answer the door, but was greeted warmly by Mrs. Osmond, a diminutive woman with onyx-dark eyes who was said to be part American Indian. She ushered me into the parlor, where period antique chairs and tables were positioned on a raked dirt floor. She told me to sit down on a finely brocaded divan. I asked her where Hiram was and a moment later he entered the room grinning ear to ear, clutching a large pickling jar. Inside, maybe eight inches long, floating in formaldehyde, a tan-colored piglet body with two heads was delicately magnified in the solution. I was shocked and frightened by this diminutive monstrosity. “I thought this was going to be alive,” I said to them. “I thought we’d be seeing it outside.”

  “A two-headed pig can’t live,” Hiram said in a patronizing tone.

  I was nevertheless disappointed.

  Mrs. Osmond offered me homemade molasses cookies; slightly nauseated by what I’d seen, I politely declined and waited an appropriate amount of time before saying that I needed to get home. Hiram ushered me out, but instead of bringing me in the way I came, he led me through a different entrance. Not ten feet away lay a dead black cow, smelly and festering with huge pink sores and swarming with flies. I stopped, afraid to walk past it. Hiram took my hand and was leading me when suddenly I saw a small young pig scampering out of the cow’s belly.

  “What’s it doing there?” I cried.

  “What do you think, it’s eating,” he said.

  “That’s really sickening!” Wade exclaimed when I finished telling him the story.

  The main section of the two-story 1700s Cape was partially caved in, and a makeshift standing seam gutter had been built to overlay where the roof had collapsed. It was hard to imagine that this jerry-rigged contraption could completely protect the interior from rain or snowmelt. The chicken-wire fence once used to circumscribe the main house had been taken down. The farmyard itself was overgrown with tall, limp grass. There were no live animals wandering around as far as I could see; the place was a lot less chaotic than I remembered it. But then again, this man was living alone now, probably with more time to organize his life. From where we stood we could see several large, dark hides hanging from a clothesline, a collection of enormous femurs leaning against the thick trunk of an ancient, gnarled maple. There was a chemical tang in the air, something both acrid and metallic; I assumed it was whatever substance Hiram used for rendering. Then, on the far side of the property, I spied the alpaca pens and the strange-looking space-age creatures. “I wonder why he’s raising those,” I said.

  “You got to be kidding,” Wade said. “It’s potentially huge money. But let’s not go any farther. I don’t want to see anything dead.”

  Hiram came out a moment later wearing deeply stained tan Carhartt worker pants and a grease-marked T-shirt lettered with POMFRET PULL, advertising a yearly competition between local teams of oxen. He was tall and lanky and I could tell he probably ate poorly, the bare minimum to sustain the enormous physical labor of ferrying around dead carcasses. As he’d gotten older his bright red hair had darkened to silvery auburn and he wore it long and clasped in a ponytail. He had his mother’s exotic-shaped Indian eyes, but they were pale and watery, the eyes of his Welsh father. His face was several days unshaven, his fledgling beard sun-bleached blond.

  “Afternoon,” he said, stopping a few feet in front of us, as though conscious of the fact that he might reek from working outdoors with dead flesh and probably not showering as frequently as he should. I caught a whiff of his deep and rancid smell. The next thing I knew a calico cat ran into view, leapt on his shoulder and, cradling its body against his neck, began to do that strange kneading foot dance cats do. The cat was glaring at us. “This is Squirrel,” he introduced us. “She’s protective … I guess like a dog. We don’t get visitors much.”

  “At least not until lately,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic.

  Hiram grimaced and then remarked, “You haven’t been up here since we were kids.”

  “I was just telling Wade … about that time.”

  “When you came to see the two-for-one pig?”

  “Yeah.”

  Very gently, he grabbed hold of the cat and shooed it off his shoulder. Dusting his hands together, he said, “You won’t believe it, but I had another like that two-for-one not even three months ago.”

  I looked around and didn’t see any swine. He saw me searching and said, “Dead on arrival. Didn’t preserve it this time, though. Just rendered it.” He went on to say that he still raised a few pigs but they were penned and kept from roaming and grazing indiscriminately. He smiled, his teeth surprisingly white and straight; his forearms were vascular from all the heavy lifting he did. “It’s funny, Catherine,” he said, “in all these years since you been here, until the one recently, there hasn’t been another two-for-one pig. And then you arrive … again. What do you think that means?”

  “I think it means maybe I’m a porcine fertility symbol.”

  Wade guffawed and said under his breath, “Oh my God, here we are getting all woo-woo.”

  “Don’t mind him,” I told Hiram. “He’s knee-jerk cynical.”

  “Haven’t seen you in a while.” Hiram turned to Wade. “You look the same.” Then his expression turned speculative. “You know, I heard somewhere that you were pocketing the money from Paul Winters’s paintings.”

  “You got to be kidding me,” I said.

  Wade was hardly rankled by the rumor. “The tongue-waggers around here are so desperate that they’ll invent something outrageous for their own amusement. It’s absolutely not true.”

  “I didn’t think it was,” Hiram said. “God knows what the gossip is about me.”

  Neither Wade nor I said anything in response. A moment later Wade’s cell phone rang. He held up his finger, excused himself, and walked several steps away and took the call. I heard him say, “Okay, all right, I’ll be right there.” He returned to us and said, “I have to get back to the office. The tax assessors are meeting right now and there’s a problem that only I can solve.”

  I really dreaded being left alone with Hiram. I said to Wade, “Right away?”

  “Seriously. Can I use your car, Catherine?” I bugged my eyes out at him, as though to say, “Don’t leave me here.” “I really can’t stay.”

  “If you want to take her car I’ll drive Catherine home,” Hiram offered.

  This was the last thing I wanted, but could hardly think of how to alter what seemed to be the most logical plan. With great reluctance I said, “I left the keys in.”

  You really have no choice, I told myself. Just get through this one and stay calm. This is your childhood friend, after all. Hiram and I watched Wade drive back down the long dirt driveway, my car leaving plumes of dust. The moment it disappeared Hiram turned to me, his face darkened and on the verge of tears. Seeing him in this vulnerable state made me relax a little bit. “I’m getting behind on all my accounts,” he said in nearly a whisper. Then, “I don’t know why the lie detector said what it said. I was relaxed when I took it. And I told the truth.”

  “I assume you did,” I told him.

  “I mean, you’re friends with Dr. Waite, who was here with the rest of them. You can vouch for me.”

  “I already have.”

  “I might do what I do for a living because I can’t do anything else, but I don’t kill people one after another.”

  “Hiram, I want to believe you. I … think you’re probably innocent.”

  “Probably?”

  Reckless though it might have been, I made myself say, “Unfortunately, a few things add up against you. You were seen walking on Route Twelve pretty near where Angela Parker’s bod
y was dumped. You drive a rig with a certain kind of tire that matches the truck or the SUV that drove up Cloudland. And White River Junction has a record of a history of violence toward your wife.”

  Hiram’s voice grew shrill and angry. “She invented that. The bruises … I don’t know how she got them. I never hit her. Somebody else obviously did. Whoever it was, she was protecting him.”

  “So you’re saying she might have been having an affair?”

  He looked skyward for a moment, and when he looked at me again, his expression was hopeless. “She easily could have. I was out all the time working, trying to support her.” He began scratching his beard. “I know she grew to hate being here.” With a glance around the bizarre farm he murmured, “I guess I don’t blame her for that.”

  “Okay, Hiram,” I said, “but listen to me, if your wife arrives at the police station with bruises and marks of beating and, using them as evidence, blames you, it’s a tough accusation to refute.”

  Hiram grew so annoyed he slapped his thighs with both hands. “So then you think I’m lying about this part.”

  “Let’s put it this way, Hiram. I know Celia and the kind of background she came from and that she was a known liar, herself. And I told them, I told Anthony and Prozzo that. But it doesn’t matter what I say or what I do or do not believe.”

  “I keep expecting them to … that one day they’re just going to show up and cuff me and lead me away.”

  “One thing you should know, Hiram,” I said. “You’re not the only one they’ve got their eyes on. Several other people have been questioned more than just once.” I wanted to say Wade but knew I couldn’t.

  “Jesus, do I wish I’d called a tow truck that night—”

  I said, “Also realize they’re under pressure from all sides, from the governor to civic organizations … to come up with a culprit. People who live up here and are used to leaving doors unlocked all the time are now locking them. I don’t know if you’ve been reading the paper, but they’ve been warning anybody whose car breaks down not to knock on doors. Because people are afraid and they’ll shoot at a shadow, let alone a stranger. They—people who live here—don’t realize that in the rest of the world, there are plenty of murderers and thieves and in most places doors have to be kept secured.”