Cloudland (11 page)

Shortly after we returned to Vermont, Breck allowed me to place her in a psychiatric facility down in Brattleboro. The medical staff forbade me to see her for two weeks, making me feel that I was the cause of her illness. Wasted from her self-inflicted starvation, her organs were functioning weakly. She had to be put on intravenous sustenance and the hospital feared that her heart might give out. When they told me this bit of news, I remember looking through the antique rolled-glass windows of my study at my red barn with its sagging, rusted metal roof, to my exuberant garden of tiger lilies, Cherokee sunsets, and golden jubilee. The heads of the flowers bowed over, looking dried and sapped of life as though a fierce spell of winter had suddenly invaded July. I knew Breck’s life was in peril and, having already lost my husband, I didn’t know how I would go on if my daughter died.

I lived from day to day in a stupor of anxiety, hardly eating anything myself, waiting for bulletins that were never very promising. “She’s the same today. Not eating. She sleeps mostly, even without medication. She’s too weak to walk very far. She’s dizzy.” What they didn’t tell me, couldn’t tell me, wouldn’t dare to tell me was “She wants to kill herself.”

And it was just when things were looking particularly dire that Breck responded to the idea of having some white toast with butter and maple syrup spread on it. It was the first good-news phone call, and the flood of relief allowed me to sleep for several hours, the first substantial bout of sleep I’d had in days. The small meals increased over the next ten days and slowly Breck found her way back into the rhythm of regular eating. After a few more weeks of gradually expanding food intake and intensive therapy, she was released from the hospital.

But the problem persisted, particularly whenever she felt depressed or overly anxious. She left for college that autumn, ironically in Maine, and while most women report gaining weight during the first semester, Breck returned home five pounds lighter. The doctors had already explained to me: now she’d come so close to dying she’d be more susceptible to bouts of anorexia—I suppose the way fingers and toes, once frostbitten, are forever prone to it.

*   *   *

The day after Breck and I conducted our exchange of text messages, I returned home late in the afternoon to find that UPS had left leaning against my back door a small package with her return address in Morristown. I tore off the wrapping to find a book whose antique vellum dust jacket was inscribed with an etching of a huge willow tree overhanging a river, with the words
The Widower’s Branch
superimposed over the image, and below it
Wilkie Collins’ final work.
I was relieved to have my rare book in my hands again. On a yellow Post-it in her characteristic up-and-down flourish, Breck had written,
Ma, sorry I sat on this one for so long. Love B.

I thought of Gogol dying in the midst of writing
Dead Souls,
a great work in comparison to this very slim volume, whose text, not even one hundred pages, opens with a description of the River Nene in the East British Midlands, a place that I remember visiting once with Theresa and a bunch of loopy American tourists. Somehow, in the last bit of prose he ever wrote, Collins is able to rise to a fairly considerable height of descriptive powers: bogs and camphor trees draped in misty eeriness and situated on a river (whose current is even more powerful than the Connecticut) that requires a boat full of oarsmen to navigate upstream.

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

T
WO 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.