Cloudland

by Joseph Olshan

  This statement seemed to mollify him, if only momentarily. He launched into small talk, asking me about my column and Henrietta, whom he’d met a few times, and even wanted to know how Breck was doing. Then his face brightened. “Can you just stay out here for a minute? I have something for you.” This request unsettled me. I didn’t want him going inside and leaving me alone; who knew what he might bring back? But then he said, “Something my mom would have wanted you to have,” ducking into the farmhouse. He remained there for a while and by the time he reemerged holding a small jar of pickled fiddleheads, I was terribly edgy. “Last batch she made before she died. Still delicious.” I had no choice but to politely accept his gift. The brined fiddleheads looked like cochlea blanched to the color of dirty ivory. I didn’t even think my Henrietta would be interested in eating them.

  A moment later I noticed my car rambling back up the driveway. Soon Wade pulled up beside us. “Before I got back to the office, the tax people called to say they solved the problem without me. Amazing!”

  With great relief I said, “Well, we’re done. You can move over. I want to drive my own car.”

  ELEVEN

  THE NEXT EVENING I was sitting on the Waites’ porch next to Emily’s greenhouse, watching fireflies and luna moths hurling themselves against the screens. Despite the considerable heat, Anthony was wearing a long-sleeved cambric shirt. The drone of the insects was rowdy in comparison to the hush within the house: by now Emily and the girls had been gone for weeks, and with them gone was the din of chattering siblings and clattering pots and the sluicing of tap water. What, without the arguments about conflicting schedules, disputes over school permissions and sleepovers, and wrangles over whether or not to give in and buy a certain pair of designer blue jeans that all the girls at school seemed to be wearing, does a man like this do with his now voluminous free time, when he’s solely occupying a house once inhabited by a family of four? I assumed he plunged more deeply into his love affair with Fiona Pierce.

  Did he think I disapproved of this new relationship, a palimpsest over his doomed marriage? Was this why Anthony had been using the investigation as an excuse for his busy schedule? Lately I’d seen Fiona’s green Volkswagen Beetle scurrying up and down Cloudland Road at all hours of the day and night. Meanwhile, the one time I’d spoken to Emily in North Carolina she sounded positively cheerful, filling me in on how she and the children were spending the summer, their tours of North Carolina’s coastal areas and school enrollments for the autumn semester.

  I was also determined to find out why Anthony so easily agreed to his children living in another state, something any compassionate family court judge would have forbidden.

  I’d brought him a jar of sun tea and sprigs of fresh mint, and was happy to see that he was keeping up with the considerable gardening that was required by all the perennial beds of delphinium and phlox and mallow and echinacea Emily had planted when they first arrived on Cloudland five years ago. Sipping out of a tall plastic glass, he remarked that it had been nearly seven months since Angela Parker had been abducted.

  “I keep hoping our murderer decided to retire ahead of the game.”

  Anthony shook his head. “No such luck. The vast majority of serial killers can’t stop themselves. They’re predatory, like lions who kill and get sleepy and content until they go hungry again.”

  He was looking out over the expanse of his just-mown fields, strewn with pinwheel bales of hay that resembled runes on a trestle table. The sky above us was a dimming chalky blue and the clouds streaking across it looked dense and corrugated, ponderous with moisture. “I think we’ll probably see something from him fairly soon,” he mused as though predicting a tempest.

  I swatted a green-headed fly that was dive-bombing me. “That’s comforting to know.” How could he be so sure, I wondered.

  With his fingers, Anthony carefully combed the hair off his forehead and tilted his head back and let loose a groaning sigh. “I detest this heat,” he said. “We never used to get heat like this … where I grew up in New Brunswick.”

  “There’s something called a short-sleeved shirt.”

  “I actually keep cooler this way.”

  “Must be a Canadian or English practice,” I said, and then reminded him the newspapers were claiming this summer the Eastern United States was more acutely affected by global warming than the rest of America. He nodded and wondered aloud if up in Canada they were enduring heat to the same degree.

  “Speaking of feeling heat,” I said, “I saw Hiram yesterday. Did you get enough blood samples?”

  “Yeah. We took samples everywhere we could find them.”

  I waited for a few moments and then said, “He’s sick over the fact that the lie detector didn’t clear him.”

  Anthony pulled his shirt away from his body and flapped it so that some air could get in. “You believe his story?”

  “I don’t think he’s a killer. And he swears up and down that he didn’t beat his wife.”

  “That’s the problem right there. I saw the photos of his wife. She looked pretty battered. Who else could’ve done it?”

  “Somebody she was having an affair with, he claims,” I said, watching for any change of expression on Anthony’s face.

  He looked dubious. “You know this kind of denial is older than the hills. Nice, sweet guys who keep it all in until they can’t contain it anymore and let loose on the person closest to them.”

  “I understand that, but I’ve known Hiram a long time.”

  “Means nothing. Love brings out the worst in people. Love is war.” He glanced over at me in a scrutinizing way. “As you well know. All due respect, I don’t think you’ve seen enough profiles of killers who began their murdering careers by beating their wives.”

  “Or profiles of wife-beaters who don’t go on to commit murders. But okay,” I said. “Point made. However, even if he drives to the places where some of these women have disappeared, he’s on such a tight schedule. Always hauling some dead beast from one place to another. Would he really have the time to spend trolling for victims, not to mention having a dead cow or horse in the back of the pickup truck?”

  “He makes his own schedule, Catherine. He never got that frozen cow he was supposed to haul away,” Anthony reminded me.

  “But that was during a blizzard.”

  “Precisely, a blizzard and an excellent opportunity to abduct a woman making a phone call at a deserted rest area.” Anthony pinched his shoulders together and looked at me wearily. “Gut-wise I don’t get an all-clear on him, Catherine. And I don’t think you do either. You just don’t want the killer to be somebody you know and like. And who could blame you there?

  “But let’s put this all in perspective for a moment.… Do you know how many people we’ve questioned and have asked to take polygraph tests?” I probably looked bored. “I could give you a round number. Let’s say we’ve questioned one hundred people in the Upper Valley, four of whom were asked to submit to the polygraph.”

  “Anybody else I know?”

  “No, thank goodness.”

  “You’ve really questioned one hundred people?”

  Anthony explained that something about each person matched up with some significant detail common to all the serial murders. It could be as simple as a man convicted to five years in prison for stabbing his wife, or a man accused but never proven guilty of strangling his girlfriend, or even a few men who stopped their cars at rest areas and unsuccessfully tried to lure women into them.

  “And of course there are the known psychological histories of some of these people. If a once-convicted felon ever told some prison psychologist about being severely beaten by a parent, we check him out. If he ever confessed or implied that he hated or attacked women or presented a history of impotence, then we consider interrogating him.”

  I wondered, “Did you ever consider that instead of a local, it’s just some flatlander? Somebody who came to the north country and made it his business to memori
ze all the old dirt roads with their ninety-degree turns and switchbacks, even the roads that lead to nowhere?” Somebody such as himself, I thought, now living alone.

  “I consider everything.”

  “Every time I try to imagine who this person might be, I always come up blank.”

  The silence that followed seemed curiously long. Anthony decided to move on. “And now that you know Wade lied the way he did, what do you think of that?”

  I grumbled, “How do I know about Wade? He’s so mysterious and cagey. So how can I be objective? What I do know is law-abiding people often lie because they’re petrified of being falsely accused. When I was working for newspapers we’d always come across these situations during a murder investigation.”

  Anthony nodded in agreement. Some distinct birdsong caught my attention. I glanced at my watch and saw that the time had gotten on to seven-thirty in the evening. “Do you hear that?” I said. “The wood thrush?”

  Anthony tilted his head back, trying to detect the warbles amidst the dissonance of avian chatter.

  “There it is again,” I said. “Hear it?”

  “I think so,” he said, bringing his head forward again. “But not clearly.”

  “All this … music is what I love about Vermont summers.”

  Anthony glanced toward the empty blue house. “Hey, I’ve always loved living here. Obviously, it’s a lot harder now.”

  Noting his sadness, I asked, “So, besides Hiram, besides the other four suspects you mentioned, have there been any other leads?”

  “Just that homicide up in Burlington.”

  He was referring to the murder of a college coed abducted in the streets of Vermont’s largest city at one o’clock in the morning. But she’d been sexually assaulted in a brutal way before she was killed, so there was really no strong forensic link to the women murdered in the River Valley.

  Knowing he’d reached a momentary dead end, Anthony now explained that, in search of more information, he’d revisited the assault on Marjorie Poole, the drug-using potter attacked outside her studio who escaped with a stab wound. Knowing that she had been high on Vicodin and cocaine and alcohol during the attempt on her life, Anthony had taken it upon himself to try to improve her drug-hazed recall by hypnotizing her. He’d managed to regress her back to the night of her attack and suddenly she’s standing in the doorway of the refurbished mill, bleeding, watching her assailant, bent over the stab wound she inflicted on him, staggering away to an old Ford Rambler, a vehicle whose tires do not match the tire marks found near the orchard where Angela Parker perished.

  She’s reliving the aftermath, standing outside in subzero temperatures, her breath billowing into dense freezing vapors, her nostrils crystallizing, and trying hard to read the license number.

  Anthony naturally asks her to take her time, to let numbers float into focus, and she frowns and squeezes her eyes shut and finally comes up with a New Hampshire plate and the letter “R.” Then three numerals, 8,9,2, and she sounds certain, definitive. And Anthony is thinking this could be a real break in the case, even if she misidentified the make of the car, they can plug the numbers into the New Hampshire system—even into the Vermont and Massachusetts systems. However, when they scanned the motor vehicle data of all three states, there was no exact match to the plate, and the close contenders were cars a lot newer than an old Ford Rambler—a BMW X5, a Saturn Vue, a Cadillac Escalade. And when a search was run on the car owners, none were linked to any prior criminal offenses.

  “A Ford Rambler is not exactly a common car,” Anthony said.

  “Maybe Marjorie Poole once knew a Ford Rambler. And her memory of it barged into her hypnotic state.”

  Anthony frowned. “I can see the value you place on hypnosis. But it has been very helpful solving crimes.”

  And I realized I wasn’t skeptical of hypnosis, but rather just skeptical of the idea of resurrecting Marjorie Poole’s testimony. “But more to the point, a Ford Rambler, being a two-wheel drive, could not possibly have made it up Cloudland.”

  “There were some four-wheel-drive models made, but few and far between and sold mostly on the West Coast, California in particular,” Anthony pointed out.

  “Whereas those gas-guzzling SUVs are as common as street trash.”

  Whatever it was, the vehicle had to have been able to make it up our road during that storm—presuming, Anthony said, that I actually did hear somebody barreling up the road long before the plow. I glared at him and he glared back at me and said, “Well, you weren’t so sure when Detective—”

  “I’m certain now!” I snapped. “One way or another I hear and see everybody and everything. I see people coming and going. I see Emily. And I’ve seen Fiona. Plenty of times.”

  A tight smirk tuned itself on Anthony’s face and he sat back in his chair, gripping the handles. “So why haven’t you just come out and asked me?” he said at last with a bit of irritation.

  “Maybe because I believed in you and Emily as happily married, a paradigm for my own fucked-up romantic life.”

  Anthony chuckled cynically.

  I couldn’t help being a little catty. “But Fiona … she’s so white bread.”

  “You’re not exactly an exotic, yourself,” he said with a bit of stridence.

  “Well, you and I—we’re not having an affair!”

  Anthony’s expression was momentarily dazzled with anger.

  “Look,” I told him, “it’s not my intention to ask you what or when or how. I just want to know why?”

  “Why does any relationship end, Catherine?” he implored me. “Or begin, for that matter?”

  “Often because there is somebody else in the picture,” I said. “So what’s your excuse?”

  Anthony took a moment to compose himself before continuing. “Okay, point taken. So let’s look at the situation. In a forensic sort of way. Here’s a woman, my wife, with a secure university job in nearby New Hampshire. She separates from me, wants to give up her job and move to North Carolina to be with her family. Why such an upheaval?”

  “So hurt by the fact that you were having an affair that she just had to get out of here.”

  “Usually the person who’s having the affair is the one to move out, right?”

  “My thoughts exactly. Maybe you stayed because the land came through your family. And she wanted to move anyway.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that she might have been having an affair?”

  Blindsided, I stared at Anthony. “So then you were both having affairs?”

  “My affair, as you know through the grapevine, is relatively new. Whereas Emily has been involved now for at least a year and a half.”

  “With somebody in North Carolina?”

  “Yes.”

  “Somebody she met visiting her family, or at a conference?”

  “The latter.”

  “So who is he? Another academic.”

  “Bingo, you’re hired.”

  I stared at him, gobsmacked. Anthony chuckled flatly, jostling his legs up and down, and leaned back in his deck chair.

  “Emily didn’t want me to tell you. I had to respect her wishes.”

  “Why was she embarrassed? Especially with me, of all people.”

  “You’ll have to ask her why.”

  I stared fixedly at him. “And you have somebody, yourself.”

  Anthony looked aggrieved. “But I didn’t for a long time. And I had to live day to day with somebody I loved who fell in love with somebody else. And stopped making love to me. And was very open about her feelings for this other guy, who I can’t deny is great-looking.”

  “How old is he, do you know?”

  “I believe he’s two years younger than she is.”

  “And so what about Fiona?”

  “Fiona is great, don’t get me wrong.”

  With that, he looked back at the two-hundred-year-old house lacking its family, creaking with aged timbers settling on its foundation, mute with lack of life and activity
. “But Fiona is one person, she’s not a family. I miss my girls. It’s so quiet in there now.… I can’t get used to it. That’s why I stay out all the time. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve thrown myself into this investigation.”

  There was a gnawing silence during which I decided to be conciliatory. “You know,” I said, “it’s not like I haven’t been in your position before. When I was married. And my husband started an affair. And then I had one.”

  “Exactly. I know you understand.”

  “Now that you’ve bothered to explain everything to me.”

  Anthony looked impatient. “Like I said, it was her decision to keep her relationship private. And mine too, because of the obvious embarrassment.” He slapped at a mosquito that had landed on his wrist.

  And then I recalled my visit to the Waites the morning Anthony was making pancakes for his daughters, who sat obediently at the dining table, drawing pictures while I was reflecting on what Granny had once said about him and his cruelty.

  “I have to admit. I never thought that separating would be more Emily’s decision than yours because … of something I just happened to remember Granny saying about you.”

  Anthony frowned. “Your granny was certainly opinionated, I’ll give her that.”

  “She told me you were capable of cruelty. And I guess I made assumptions about yours and Emily’s breakup … do you happen to know what I’m referring to?”

  He looked positively stricken. “I think so.”

  I waited for him to continue.

  “During med school I fell in love with another student who was doing research on the Ebola virus in a lab in Toronto. She caught the illness. Almost died. Then ended up blind in both eyes.”

  For some reason I thought of Dickens’s Esther Summerson. “Did you leave her?”

  He nodded. “After her illness she kept trying to talk me out of the relationship … now I realize she did it because she was afraid I’d leave her and wanted to at least have a hand in it. So things ended and she was … devastated.” Anthony’s voice quavered and tears flashed in his eyes.