Cloudland (12 page)

“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.”

“What
ever
!”

“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.”

I told her I’d reread it and then detailed the curious coincidences between the plot of
The Widower’s Branch
and the River Valley murders.

“So you think the book has something to do with it?” Breck sounded doubtful.

“I have no idea.”

There was a distinct silence on the other end of the line. And then Breck began again. “I meant to tell you I noticed a slip of paper in the book when I was getting ready to send it. With some writing on it. Wasn’t anything remarkable, so I threw it out.”

“What kind of writing?”

“It was barely anything. It had like three words: ‘you and her,’ something of that order. Didn’t resemble your handwriting.”

“Maybe Vi’s?”

“Nope, not her handwriting, either. It was kind of scrawled. Vi grew up in the era of penmanship.”

“How odd,” I said, and then let it go.

“But I mean how
is
the investigation going? Do you think they’re even on the right track?”

“Hard to know. They think it’s probably somebody local who knows the back roads and isolated areas. Believe it or not, they’ve just questioned Wade.”

“Now,
that
nutjob makes total sense.”

“Breck! Don’t be unkind.”

“I’ll be honest with you, Mom. I’ve had the weirdest, creepiest feeling all along that we might know the person who has done all of this. Somebody who goes off on a rampage and then quiets down and lives normal. Then the cycle begins all over again. Somebody like Wade, with a fucked-up early life.”

“Some would say
you
had a fucked-up early life. And you’re not going around killing people.”

“No, but look how angry
I
was.”

Still are, I thought but didn’t say.

Breck continued, “In my case I turned it inward on myself. I easily could’ve become … an aggressive delinquent.”

“I don’t think so. Not in your nature.”

“Come on, don’t be so naive.”

“Says she who took Psych One in college.”

“Anyway, whenever I see him, Wade always seems wound so tight.”

“He is, but that doesn’t mean when he uncoils he’s going around systematically killing people. Remember, he committed one act of violence at the age of fourteen.”

“It has been proven that violence toward objects can easily become violence toward living things.”

I thought of changing the subject by confiding Anthony’s suspicion of Hiram Osmond but then decided not to.

“Who’s running this investigation, anyway?” Breck asked after a pause.

I mentioned Marco Prozzo and Breck thought his surname sounded blunt. I told her he’d loved my hibiscus tea.

“Ah,” Breck said. “That reminds me. I knew I wanted to ask you something. Vis-à-vis tea.”

“Is this going to be painful?”

“Doesn’t have to be. I guess it all depends on how attached you are to a certain heirloom.”

“I knew it, I knew it! What do you want
now
?”

“The tea tin we brought back from Grand Manan, the one that belonged to Granny. It has that delicate design of yellow roses.”

“I used it yesterday.”

“Ah, so … it’s in circulation?”

“You always do this to me!”

“I was fantasizing about how it would look in our kitchen—and wasn’t sure if it was…” She didn’t finish her sentence.

Our kitchen. Even though I felt possessive over this relic of my childhood, I forced myself to be generous. “Well, it
is,
but you’re welcome to it. I’ve got tea tins up the ying yang. Just do me one small favor. If anything happens … between the two of you, just make sure that you don’t lose it.”

There was a disagreeable pause and I was about to broach it when Breck said, “You never even ask how she is.”

“I’m sorry, Breck,” I said. “You’re right. How
is
Violet?”

“Violet is actually fine. She’s wondering when you’re coming to pay us a visit. We were going to invite you for the Fourth of July.”

Here was precisely where, to my great mortification, I had further failed my daughter, having had difficulty accepting the fact that she was in love with another woman.

Since Anthony and I had been more in touch of late, I’d recently spoken of this to him. His opinion was that women can be more fluid in their relationships, that a fair percentage float back and forth between male and female partners, that I shouldn’t assume that Breck (at the age of twenty-two) had settled down with a woman for the rest of her life. “Maybe she’s trying to find the love that she thinks she didn’t get from
you,
” he actually said to me. “Work it through with another female … an older female,” he added.

“Oh please, that is so trifling and simplistic,” I berated him. “How can you even call yourself a shrink, slinging that hash around?”

Somehow he’d maintained his patience. “Okay, Granny,” he retorted, but then pointed out something that actually
did
sink in: I had better be very careful, because any ambivalence, any disapproval of my daughter’s romantic life could do even more damage to our already tenuous relationship. For how could I, having had an affair with a man close in age to my own daughter, not support any serious relationship Breck was having, no matter with whom? Quite right.

“Honey,” I resumed to Breck, “you know how little I’ve traveled in the last few years. The dogs, Henrietta. It’s hard when you have critters.”

“You’ll bring the dogs. And I thought you had that young vet student who likes to come and look after Madame.” Her nickname for our beloved pig.

“As long as I can get him. That’s a popular weekend and I’m not the only person he pet-sits for who has an exotic animal.”

“Your
only
child has been living in New Jersey for over a year,” Breck reminded me. “A five-hour drive. If it comes down to it, we’ll send a car for you.” Violet made a pile working for the World Bank.

“Don’t waste that kind of money. I can drive myself. If you have so much dough lying around, for God’s sake give it to a charity.”

“Granny used to send cars for you.”

“I was a child. What choice did I have? Even then I thought it was needlessly extravagant.”

There was a lull in the conversation and then Breck said, “What about dear Aunt Laura? You go and visit her and her partner.”

“That’s the previous generation. I visit out of respect.”

“And devotion. You love them both.”

“I do love them, that’s true.”

There was a thoughtful lull and then Breck spoke to me in a wobbly voice, “Well … if you got to know Violet … maybe you could love
her
too.”

EIGHT

A
FTER SPEAKING TO BRECK,
I drove down to the Billings General Store to get my mail from the smart-ass postmaster who was always reluctant to hand anything over whenever I neglected to bring my mailbox key. Once I misplaced my key for almost a year, and even though the man claimed to have ordered one, it never seemed to arrive, which forced me to request my mail every time I went in, giving him a chance to harangue me. I’d neglected to get my mail for several days now and a pile of it was wedged into the postbox and needed to be yanked out. “How about those yellow slips you got for those packages last week?” the silver-haired fortyish man said to me.