Cloudland

by Joseph Olshan

  “One of the search dogs found a finger.”

  I felt nauseated. “Oh? Do we know it’s her finger?”

  “It went to Concord,” Anthony explained, “to see if it matches the hair sample. The fact that the finger was found by one of the New Hampshire search dogs made it Concord’s jurisdiction. They have their own forensic squad on it. I didn’t even get a chance to see it before it was shipped off. That does make me wonder if they are deliberately keeping us out of the loop.” He paused for a moment and said, “So we’re feeling a little … let’s call it the spirit of competition.

  “And in that vein, Marco and I decided that we really need to pursue the Wilkie Collins connection. Because that bit is ours. New Hampshire knows nothing about it.”

  “But then you’d be withholding information from them.”

  “Well, let’s see how relevant we decide the book actually is.… ‘You and her,’ for example. Have you thought any more about it? Any ideas?”

  “I know I lent the book to a few of my students, the ones I trusted to return it in good condition.”

  “Any idea when?”

  “Probably during the last two years I was at Saint Mike’s. I have to dig up the rosters of those classes.”

  “Yeah, maybe you should,” Anthony said. I could hear him draw a deep breath and expel it.

  “I’ll do it right now.”

  After we were done speaking, I went into a storage closet and combed through several file boxes I’d brought down from Burlington. I found the file of my last semester at Saint Mike’s and one from a year and a half before that. I scanned all the names and nothing jumped out at me. Somehow I knew that two of the writing files missing from the boxes were the ones for the students with whom I’d trusted the book. Momentarily abandoning my search, I sat in my study with a pen and notepad, trying to recall the names of some of the borrowers. No one immediately came to mind.

  In the meantime, who also had read the book? Violet apparently had, but she’d never been to Vermont. Ironically, from the photographs I’d seen, this large-boned woman with a sheaf of tawny hair was, in terms of physical strength, probably a more likely candidate than Wade. And then I remembered something. I had gotten Wade into Wilkie Collins. He’d read quite a few, even borrowed some books from the library. Could he have borrowed The Widower’s Branch? I had no choice but to check with him. So Violet and possibly Wade. Theresa, my college roommate, had given the book to me; being a Victorian scholar, surely she’d read it. But she lived in Connecticut and was small and mousey, the sort of person who ushered flies outside of her house instead of swatting them. Unlikely suspect. I had nothing to go on, but I just couldn’t imagine the murderer being a woman.

  Standing there in my study, I thought to myself: I’ve momentarily exhausted my resources on this particular conundrum. Besides, there was another one to deal with: Matthew’s sudden reemergence in my life, the dilemma of whether or not to see him again after nearly two years and wondering, Wouldn’t it be better to meet in a neutral place such as Joanie’s Café? I knew he’d probably agree to it, I knew it was the right thing to do, but I found myself resisting what was right and wanting to see him alone. This desire frightened me but it also compelled me.

  I went outside into the thrumming late-afternoon heat and deadheaded some of my day lilies. I turned my attention to the lawn, which was looking ragged and uneven. It never looked so good as it did the summer two years before when, from time to time, Matthew would insist on mowing it for me. Listening to the crescendo humming of the tractor blades, I’d sit in the cool sanctuary of my house researching and writing my columns: about how to best launder feather pillows; a clever extension duster for swiping cobwebs off high ceilings; or homespun recipes such as a marinade of garlic and sea salt, molasses and vinegar that made a tender melting morsel out of the toughest piece of beef. I’d contentedly watch Matthew through the same rolled-glass window where several years later I’d witness the blizzard that would bury Angela Parker in the orchard higher up on Cloudland. He’d work outside, stay for dinner, we’d drink wine, watch the wings of light fleeing the fields and the distant orchard full of gnarled apple trees, we’d make love in the lengthening shadows and he’d spend the night. And then wake up to blue bowls of milky coffee, crusty baguettes from the local bakery, and my homemade orange marmalade. Then he’d be off, back to his parents’ cabin in the Northeast Kingdom, to some odd job or another.

  Toward the end of this, his first postgraduate summer, Matthew traveled to Scandinavia with a student group organized by the university. His plan was to get lost in the adventure of roaming with a bunch of college friends; however, during that three-week period he called me every day on a cheap phone card he’d procured in Stockholm. He sent me long, rather boring travelogue e-missives from Internet cafés and seemed to be counting the days until his return.

  It was while he was away that the chairman of the English department called to explain that the university had received yet another batch of anonymous letters leveling false accusations, including the sordid allegation that Matthew and I frequently had had sex in my office. Copies of these letters had been sent (by the anonymous writer) to several key administration officials and, apparently, to Matthew’s parents, who were also informed of where the other copies had been sent and contacted the college to verify the complaint. A week after I’d learned about the correspondence, as if one had nothing to do with another, I received a phone call from the Human Resources provost saying that, due to budgetary constraints, one of the permanent adjunct positions in the English department needed to be eliminated and unfortunately it was going to be mine.

  I was devastated by the news, but hardly shocked that, in light of the discomfort caused by the vicious letters, something like this could happen. Knowing that I was powerless as an adjunct, I told the provost that I loved teaching, felt that I had much to offer Saint Mike’s. He informed me quite flatly that other adjunct professors had better student evaluations than I and ended the call rather abruptly, leaving me staring at the telephone as though it were an alien.

  A few days later Matthew came straight to my house from Logan Airport, which meant that he had yet to be confronted by his parents about our affair. I was glad to see him, but knew my firing would be bringing on new complications. And for this reason I didn’t want to spring the news on him immediately.

  “I decided something,” he said after we’d made love greedily and were lying in my bed together.

  “What have you decided?” I asked, trying to hide my wariness.

  Arms cocked behind his head, a lascivious look of conquest etched on his face, he said, “Well, life experience is as important as work experience.…” He looked meaningfully at me. “I think we should live together.”

  Knowing I now needed to launch into what had happened, I merely asked him, “But how?,” knowing that his postgraduate plan (strongly endorsed by me as well as his parents) was to live in New York City with a friend on the Lower East Side and begin hunting for rent-paying work until he could decide whether or not he wanted to apply to business school. He now confessed he’d prefer living in Burlington and seeking employment there.

  I let a few moments elapse before I said sadly, “I won’t be in Burlington in the fall, Matthew.” He turned to me, looking bewildered. “I lost my teaching job.”

  “You lost your job? How?”

  “They said it was budgetary but I know it has nothing to do with that. They got a whole bunch more of those anonymous letters. Saying we had sex in my office, among other things.”

  Matthew slapped his hand against his forehead and lay back in bed looking defeated. “Oh no! So I’m the reason why they fired you.”

  “Do you have any idea or theory of who might have sent all these letters?”

  His face cracked in pure misery. “No! I have no clue who could be doing this. Maybe the letter writer wanted you to lose your job, but they also really want to come between us. And we can’t let them.”<
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  I could think of nothing to say at that moment and thought it best to keep silent.

  He bolted upright in bed. “Is there no way to turn this around? Can I go and see them, the administration, and tell them the person is obviously deranged?”

  This is precisely where youth and inexperience get in the way, I told myself. “Matthew, I’m an adjunct. We basically have no rights. We’re drones, in essence. At the university’s beck and call. At the university’s mercy.”

  “You’re not going to break up with me because of this, are you? I mean, you love me, don’t you?”

  “Of course I love you, Matthew, that doesn’t change. But I won’t be in Burlington. I already gave notice on my apartment. So there is no other incentive for you to be there unless you want to be there.”

  “I don’t want to live in New York,” he told me emphatically.

  * * *

  Matthew followed his own instincts. He found an apartment share in Burlington, a job as a bartender at a very popular bistro that paid excellent money but required a commitment of more than forty hours a week. So naturally we saw a lot less of each other—maybe one day each week during his time off. He’d drive down to Woodstock to visit me, often arriving very late at night, and exhausted by his late hours, would sleep long into the following day. Sometimes when I was dressed and drinking my morning coffee I’d steal into the bedroom and watch his slumber, which was always still and deep. I’d look at him and feel sad, knowing that I was in effect pushing him away from me. But then I’d hear a voice in my head saying, “At least you’ve awakened him in ways and maybe that will be enough.”

  I had to go to Burlington one afternoon to finish gathering the rest of my belongings, mostly books, from the apartment I’d given up on Willard Street. I was standing at the bookcase, positioning volumes into moving boxes, when I heard knocking on the door. Knowing I was there, Matthew had arrived unannounced, smartly dressed in a white button-down oxford shirt, crisp khaki chinos, his face tanned from kayaking on Lake Champlain on a few days off, his shirtsleeves rolled up. I was holding Bulfinch’s weighty Mythology under one arm when I answered the door; he gallantly reached forward and relieved me of it. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” I carped, as I turned around and headed back into the apartment cluttered with moving crates.

  Handing me the book back, he said, “I assumed you’d be happy. We haven’t seen each other in more than a week. I figured you missed me.”

  Of course I missed him, missed making love to him, but I merely said, “You should’ve just called. I have so much to do here and today is my last day to do it.”

  My words afflicted him, his face pinched up and he looked stung. I moved back to the bookcase and continued clearing it of books.

  “I’ve seen so little of you lately,” he pointed out.

  “You’ve been here and I’ve been there.”

  “I’ve been waking up sick to my stomach,” he informed me. “Because I can feel you moving away from me.”

  I would not even try to refute the truth. “How about something to drink?” I said, leaving the bookshelf and heading into my small kitchen, Matthew following close behind me.

  I was thinking more along the lines of iced tea; however, with a peremptory gesture, Matthew fetched a flask of vodka from my liquor cabinet, took one of the remaining jelly glasses from a nearly empty cupboard, headed to the refrigerator, cadged a few ice cubes, and made himself an impressively stiff drink. He’d never done such a thing before. “Hey, don’t quaff that too fast,” I warned him. His eyes glittering with malice, he pounded the drink in two gulps.

  “What’s wrong?” I said, resting my hand between his shoulder blades, loving him with great despair.

  He pressed his hands against his head and now looked at me with reddened, tearful eyes. “When we’re not together, when I’m seeing you so much less, my faith, my faith in you falls apart. I feel like … I have nothing to hold on to. I keep waiting for everything to crash. I go to bed and wake up several times through the night sweating, thinking about you. I feel like I’ve been cut off from your body. I go through all the photos I took of you. And read your letters over and over. I’m just a mess.”

  I told him I was suffering in my own way, that I’d been reviewing my decisions, the mistakes I’d made, both with my husband and Breck and the subsequent men I’d been involved with.

  Reaching for his glass and draining dregs of vodka from the ice, he continued, his voice in tremolo, “That include me?”

  “I don’t know, Matthew.”

  “But my case is different from everybody else … because I’ve had this thing for you forever. And I’m so sick of people—like my parents—saying it’s not valid because of the difference in our ages. It does matter because it’s very real to me. You’re my first love, Catherine, and I don’t want to give you up.”

  I looked at him, sadly nodded my head, and said, “I understand.”

  “What about your first love, Catherine,” he said. “Who was it?”

  “I guess I’d have to say my husband.”

  I suddenly felt terribly conflicted: between wanting him with me and wanting him to leave. I wondered how many months it would take to recover from the druglike withdrawal for this lover. Beyond this, my relationship with Matthew had already harmed my professional life. That was no small thing. Then with great tenderness I saw that his hands were shivering, his beautiful strong hands that nevertheless were palsied due to the nerve damage of his childhood illness. I loved his hands. I loved them for their power and I also loved them for their obvious frailty.

  “Why don’t we go for a walk,” he said at last. “Just stroll along Willard Street.”

  I turned to him. “Okay, Matthew, we’ll go for a walk. But I want you to go back to your apartment … when we’re done.”

  He looked baffled. “Why can’t I come back here with you?” I slowly shook my head. “Why can’t we make love?”

  “I don’t have time to make love, Matthew. I have to get the place cleared out today.” I indicated the cartons and the duffel bags and the boxes for hauling books. “Surely you see how much more work there is to do.”

  “Let me help you.”

  “I want to do it on my own. This is my failure and I want to live through it without any company. So let’s go for that walk, shall we?”

  Matthew turned to me with fervent eyes. “I just can’t do it,” he said.

  “Can’t do it?” I echoed flatly, not knowing whether or not he was referring to going for a walk.

  “Be the person you think I should be. Be the guy going off to make his life someplace and dating and eventually meeting somebody else and getting married. I just don’t want any of that, Catherine. I want to be with you.”

  It was so simply and honestly said, and like a plaintive musical chord, struck surprisingly deep. In the resonance of it, I seriously considered giving in to him and, age difference notwithstanding, setting up the life of a couple, younger man, older woman, and just seeing how it went. But then I remembered my reservations, I remembered my husband’s betrayal and my inability to forgive him. How would I ever forgive Matthew for his inevitable betrayal of me? But I’d have to and I didn’t know if that would be possible.

  “If we stay together, Matthew, I’ll always be afraid of your leaving me. I’ll be waiting for it, I’ll be expecting it. And as time goes on I’ll keep feeling older and older in comparison to you.”

  “Don’t you think I know all this, Catherine?”

  A change came over Matthew and he suddenly seemed almost calm. And then I admitted to myself how much I’d missed him during the last few weeks, his loping walk across my kitchen in a formless T-shirt, his hair all tousled, watching him sleep in my bed and the light creeping in from the edges of the shutters to fall in a muted cascade on his slack and unsuspecting face. He’d slept in my bed without a clue of how close to the end our affair really was.

  “Let me stay here and help you,” he insis
ted once more, his face now inches from mine, his breath sour from nerves. “And then we can say good-bye.”

  “I want to say good-bye now,” I heard myself say. “I really think we’ve reached the end of this.”

  His expression changed once more and his eyes looked dulled and distant. And then slowly, almost gently, he put his damaged hands around my throat.

  FIFTEEN

  A SUMMER DAY IN LATE JULY, unseasonably chilly for Charlestown, New Hampshire, and Bellows Falls, Vermont. Goldenrod burgeoning in the fields, auguring the first frost, which could possibly come as soon as six weeks away. In these parts we can get the first twinges of autumn cold toward the beginning of August. There are those who will begin to dread perishing flowers, will dwell on the shorter lifespan of their domestic animals and, of course, their own mortality. At Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, some people will go for routine blood work that comes up abnormal, provoking a battery of tests, and bad news will arrive like a bullet shattering window glass while outside an unsuspecting world still exalts in warm-weather activities, knowing that before too long cold weather will invade and turn life inward. This momentary seasonal melancholy was particularly meaningful to the good townspeople of Vermont and New Hampshire who’d shown up to search the area around either side of the Connecticut River for the body of twenty-four-year-old Elena Mayaguez.

  I volunteered for the search, too, my party led by a man, part Abenaki Indian, who tracked wilderness for the police, a man who knew how to recognize signs of disturbance in the forest, telltales of skirmishes and struggle that the rest of us would never notice. As I trekked along in his wake I felt strange and disembodied. It was as though the forest had swallowed me whole and I was wandering inside the cavity of some great beast, trees towering around me like the gargantuan ribs of a whale.

  After we’d wandered around a designated area for an hour, our laconic guide sprang into motion and fell to his knees as though in prayer. He’d caught a glint of something in the dirt that had already been trampled by unobservant policemen. He bent down and, gingerly putting on a pair of latex gloves, extracted a small rectangle caked in mud. Without explaining what it was, he held it up to a fractured shaft of sunlight beaming into the forest. There was a moment where I thought I saw an iridescent flash, which turned out to be a small holographic emblem on a credit card. “Follow me,” he said to everyone, and we marched dutifully behind him. When we reached the clearing, he handed the card to one of the forensic people dressed in yellow and said, “I can even read the name. It’s Felice.”