Cloudland (13 page)

“They’re at home.”

“Not where they should be,” he said with a smirking sort of glower. “Make sure you bring ’em in next time you come.”

“I’ll try to remember.”

He shook his head. “Don’t try. Remember! If I don’t get them back here, I’m not giving you your mail the next time you forget your key,” he said.

“You’re so wonderfully kind.”

“I’m being more than kind!”

Billings is a nuts-and-bolts general store, selling milk and basic staples: solid, unaffectedly prepared food, unlike the surrounding general stores that offer an array of Vermont food products and fancy sandwiches made with such garnishes as mango chutney. Billings attracts a cluster of die-hard locals who gravitate to the back of the store and gather around a butcher-block table and a coffee machine—some of them gossip-mongers. I was standing near a group of them, sifting through my wedge of mail, when I felt a tap on the shoulder. Dressed in a cut-off T-shirt and baggy shorts, Anthony was standing behind me, holding a cardboard soup container. He was wearing a bicycle helmet.

“Happy Birthday,” he said. “Emily reminded me.”

“That my present?” I asked.

“No, it’s my lunch. Corn chowder.”

“Ah, they do make the best here.” I turned to see a line of people waiting to pay, holding containers of soup and half gallons of milk and cans of soda. “You’ve been scarce the last few days, ” I remarked.

“Been around the house a lot.” He glanced away. “Emily is getting all packed up and ready to leave. I’ve been helping her.”

Then I realized Emily had left me a phone message a few days ago and I had yet to return it. I mentioned this to Anthony and said, “Please apologize for me. I hope she doesn’t think I’m avoiding her.”

“I will. Don’t worry. She’s been really busy.” He managed to grin.

Intent upon avoiding being overheard, I motioned Anthony to step outside, and once we went through the door, I said, “Wade came to see me. Is Prozzo now changing course?”

“No, just widening his lens. He’s obligated to check out certain offenders with records.”

“But Wade is physically not very strong. It’s hard to imagine him overpowering women in a car, strangling and stabbing them.”

“I get your point. But nothing can be ruled out until all the i’s are dotted and all the t’s are crossed.”

“But would he dump a body in his own neighborhood?”

“If it turns out to be somebody down Claremont/Springfield way, they’d be dumping bodies in
their
backyard.”

“True. But Angela Parker weighed more than Wade.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Seems like I know all the suspects.”

“People give themselves away. You’d be surprised.”

“I don’t think anything would surprise me,” I said. “Except if the killer were you.”

“I have a wife and children who can vouch for my whereabouts on January seventeenth.” He winked at me. “Who out there can vouch for you?”

“My pig.”

“That should fly.”

“Anyway, your kids are too young to be credible witnesses.” I winked back at him. “Maybe the real reason why Emily is leaving is she can’t bear to lie for you any longer.”

Anthony suddenly looked incredibly sad. “I know you’re joking, but I guess I don’t have a sense of humor today.”

Realizing I’d pushed him too far, I apologized.

“It’s all right, for obvious reasons it’s just not a great day.” He glanced at his watch. “And now I have to go meet Marco to discuss a finding at Angela Parker’s crime site that somehow got overlooked.”

“Can you tell me about it?” I asked tentatively.

“As a matter of fact I was encouraged to tell you about it … by Marco. He seems to want to keep you in the loop. He agrees that you’re a good sounding board. Must say, it’s unusual for a seasoned investigator to want help from a civilian.”

“I guess I charmed him with dog biscuits and my homemade hibiscus tea.”

Anthony laughed. “So anyway, here’s what we have.”

On the verge of Cloudland Road, next to the orchard and right below the snowbank that was made by the plow, the Staties had found a pair of frozen tire tracks in the mud. “Those tracks were half thawed out the day you found Angela Parker,” he said.

Assuming where he was headed, I said, “But they could have been any pair of tire marks.”

“True. But remember, the snow was pretty scant up until the night of that blizzard. And the location of tire marks are off the road, meaning the driver pulled over. And then there was all that snow … to petrify them.”

“What make?”

“Bridgestone. SUVs and pickup trucks.”

“That’s a wide category.”

“It’s a certain popular issue of the tire that hardly allows us to narrow it down much except to suggest the vehicle in question had to be an SUV. The irony is that two of the models they come standard on are Wade’s and Hiram’s and my pickup truck.” I probably looked at him malevolently because he raised both hands. “Just saying.”

Then I saw some humor. “That contradicts the claim of all those folks who swear they saw some of the murdered women climbing into smaller cars. Red Ford Focus and Saturns and the like.”

“Pinch of salt with eyewitness accounts,” Anthony said. “You and I always said that only a vehicle with substantial clearance could have traveled that far up Cloudland Road, even in the beginning of the storm.” He tilted his head in the direction of the store entrance. “I have to go back in and pay for my soup. I’ll check in with you later.”

*   *   *

When I arrived home and began sorting through the mail, I noticed a blue aerogram that made my breath catch: the hand stamp of Matthew Blake. This was the first I’d heard from him in nearly two years. The letter showed domestic postage and the mailing mark was Cambridge, Massachusetts. I needed to steel myself before opening it. I sat down at my desk, shoving aside correspondence from readers and displacing my towering stacks of paperbacks.

Inside the envelope was a photograph of me that Matthew had taken and a printed letter—very unlike him, who always preferred to write by hand.

Dear Catherine,

I am hoping that this reaches you by your birthday. I came back to the States in early April and just happened to read about your finding the nurse’s body in
The Boston Globe
. When I first read it, I couldn’t imagine the shock of finding somebody murdered. I wanted to write to you then, but I was afraid you wouldn’t respond. Since I’ve come home I’ve just been trying to carry on and not think about you. But I have to admit it has been really difficult.

I don’t know if you remember when I took this photo, but it was toward the end. I can’t imagine that you look much different on your 42nd. Still beautiful, of that I am certain.

Love,
Matthew

The photograph he enclosed was taken in my apartment in Burlington in front of a cupboard where I’d displayed some of the old china that I inherited from my father’s side of the family. My dark hair was longer then, clasped behind my head in a braid that had come partially undone; and I remember we’d just finished making love. My gray eyes are lighted well, I am slightly disheveled, my cheeks rosy. And I remember thinking at the time that in the picture he’d caught me at an angle where I looked more attractive than I actually felt I was. This was flattering, obviously, but oddly painful.

Matthew had wanted to frame the photo but I had discouraged him because I felt it was an unfair representation of what I looked like. I feared finding it in years to come (after the affair was long over) and then having to witness what would strike me to be some kind of momentary (and even artificial) radiance. But now I realized with a pang this is exactly how he saw me, and, more important, perhaps how I actually appeared. And I realized that grief over this love was unalloyed with such things as survivor’s guilt, and that it probably would last the rest of my life as a series of pictures and painful memories.

I went upstairs to fetch the cardboard box where I’d stored all his letters, arranged in translucent plastic folders. I reached in and randomly selected one of two blue aerograms he sent me from Asia before he abruptly stopped communicating, my name and address penned in fountain ink, foreign stamps in oriental filigree.

“I’ve been reading Maugham,” he wrote to me. “Seems like the sort of thing you should read if you’re in Bangkok. The bookstores here have British editions and he seems to be very popular. Luckily I am living in a guest quarters that has a pretty good library. I think about you a lot and lately I’ve been doing some of the writing exercises you had us do in class.…”

*   *   *

I had a hard-and-fast rule that I advanced to all the students in my seminars. Avoid writing about animals, especially dogs. When you write about animals, you engage sympathy without necessarily earning it, and then the reader can quite easily feel manipulated, something you want to avoid at all costs. A student turned in a piece about his German shepherd being hit by a car that crushed its leg and how the animal bled to death on the way to the veterinary hospital. As soon as I finished reading it, I scanned the list of student e-mails and fired one off, asking the fellow to come and see me during my office hours.

Matthew had taken some time off and, at twenty-four, was several years older than most of the other students. He arrived and left class with a bit of a swagger, with an arrogant grace, but also gave off a kind of troubled air. During the most recent class, in which he wrote about his dog, I remembered that he’d been one of the early finishers of the assignment. He’d worn a football jersey that draped barely past his belt buckle so that when he leaned back in his chair to stretch, the shirt hiked halfway up his taut belly, showing a mature line of hair weaving its way down to his beltline. I swallowed and said nothing. I’d had plenty of other male students who’d done similar things, wore their pants inappropriately tight, showed up to class in cut-off muscle T-shirts or with jeans worn low like prison garb, showing the crack of their ass, and I knew they did this out of some kind of insecurity. A remark like “This is a classroom, not an athletic field” was usually strong enough to beat the boldest boy into abeyance. But when Matthew Blake leaned back I said nothing to correct his posture, and failing to do this made me worry about the effect he had on me. I resolved then and there to make him transfer to another writing section or drop the class. The dog piece had now presented me with an opportunity.

For sometimes there are students, sexually provocative students, who question you at every turn—an unnerving mix. They know their power, they presume that you’re attracted to them. I’d been at Saint Mike’s for five years and I could spot this sort of narcissistic student pretty easily.

When he came to our first meeting my door was closed. There was a knock, Matthew opened it and poked his head in without waiting for an answer. I saw dark hair tumbling over a pale forehead, reddish brown eyes, a faint dusting of acne over his broad cheeks. “Did you hear me say come in?” I challenged him.

“No,” he admitted.

“Well, but here you are
inside
my office.” I spoke sharply, expecting an apology.

There was none; instead he remained unruffled and said, “Should I go out and start again?”

“No, but next time wait until you’re invited.”

He breezed in and immediately coasted into a chair. He looked around the office and noticed the inverted map of the world that I’d pinned up on the wall, with the continents of Australia and Africa and South America upended. “Wow,” he said. “That’s fantastic.” He asked where I got the map and I told him obviously in the southern hemisphere. He said, “Maybe the world
is
like that. And it’s just a question of perception.” I was secretly pleased by this remark.

“Well, let’s talk about that … perception,” I said. “I just want to make sure you’re aware why I asked you to come in.”

“Because I’m not to write about animals getting hurt or killed.”

“I told the class ‘avoid.’ I suppose that’s not quite as strong as ‘don’t.’”

He grimaced. “I just couldn’t think of anything else.”

I reminded him that he’d finished the in-class assignment early. And perhaps he didn’t ruminate long enough on what might be an appropriate subject to write about. “There must be other harrowing things.”

“There are, I just don’t want to write about them.”

“But that’s the whole point. You want to dip your pen into that well of discomfort. That’s where the good stuff lives. I mean, what are some of the things that frighten you?”

He wavered. “I don’t know. Relationships, I guess.”

“Are you in one now? If so, maybe that might be a worthy subject.”

He frowned and said, “Not really. Just … dating different people.”

“Is there anything that frightens you when it comes to dating?” I didn’t want to say “women,” not wanting to assume what his sexuality might be.

“The out-of-control part. The possibility of great pain.”

“That’s a good subject.”

This seemed to frustrate him. “So was my assignment any good at all?”

“Not particularly.” He looked crestfallen. “You clearly rushed it. You dryly state the facts. You don’t even make an attempt to describe how it affected you.”

He looked puzzled.

“What have I been saying in class: about how to approach emotion and get to it without writing about it so directly?”

“But I thought I did.”

I shook my head. “Hardly.” I studied his face, its broad, angled planes, long dark lashes, soft straight hair, and saw a rugged delicacy. Then I went full throttle. “There are three other writing instructors here at the college. I don’t think any of them has this writing about animals dictum, so you’re welcome—”

“No,” he interrupted, looking terrified. “I don’t want to take anyone else’s class. You’re the one everybody recommends.”

Although I was pleased to hear this, I said, “That’s not true. In fact, I happen to know that one of my colleagues has better student evaluations than I do.”

He looked genuinely discomfited. “I don’t care about them, Mrs. Winslow.” He leaned forward in his chair and, clearly shaken up, said, “The only other thing I thought I might write about was when … my dad left us.… For two years, he just completely disappeared.” The last three words got out shakily. “But I don’t want—I just can’t—read that to the others.”