Cloudland (15 page)

“Hello, Catherine Winslow,” I answered at last.

“Hello, Mrs. Winslow,” he began tentatively, and introduced himself.

“I saw your name on caller ID.”

“Of course.”

There was a terribly uncomfortable pause and then I said, “Let me tell you how sorry I am; how awful all this must be for you.”

The lull continued. The man had either momentarily lost his nerve or succumbed to a tidal current of grief that made it impossible to go on. “Yes … it is,” he said finally.

“A lot of people around here are thinking about you,” I told him. I was even tempted to say “praying for you,” but for me to say that would have been disingenuous.

“Oh, people have been … awfully kind,” he said with flat affect.

“I’ve been meaning to write to you. Because I wanted to tell you a few things.” I hesitated.

“Yes,” Hubert Parker said.

If the coroner was correct and Angela Parker actually died in the orchard rather than in the parking lot of the rest area off the interstate, that meant she’d been stabbed several times, perhaps strangled into submission, had endured the ten-mile ride to Cloudland perhaps believing that her captor still had it in him to set her free, even imagining that being dumped off somewhere in a blizzard would locate her at least within a few miles of a residence whose inhabitants would surely take her in.

“She looked very peaceful when I found her,” I told Mr. Parker. “Her face was relaxed and calm. I think … my feeling was that despite everything, she died quietly.”

There was a sucking gasp on the other end of the line. I waited for a moment, sounding my thoughts for meaningful words. Finally, I said, “It’s like carrying a huge sack of stones around on your shoulders, isn’t it?”

“Especially when I get up in the morning.”

“I know that feeling,” I said, “that horrible feeling when you wake up. I know it from other things.” I immediately thought of my husband’s death and Breck’s severe anorexia and the inevitable sense of despair over my disintegrating relationship with Matthew Blake.

“When she was missing … even after they found the blood in her car and figured that something happened, I never really ever gave up hope. There was a big part of me that … believed she was still going to come … home. I used to lie in bed and imagine she’d slip in right next to me while I was sleeping and that her cold side of the bed would suddenly be warm with her. And then of course—” He broke off and seemed to weep quietly for a few moments. “I know … I just can’t believe that I won’t hold her, not even one more time. That I have to accept that it’ll be ‘never.’”

“I hate that word, never,” I found myself saying.

“If I held her just one more time, I…” He faltered. “I think … maybe I could finally let go. We were very close, Angela and me. We’re almost the same age and now she’s torn away from me and I’ve just been hanging there.”

This was almost unbearable to hear. I remembered how my bed felt like a vast, empty plain when Matthew finally stopped sleeping in it. I remembered the sorrow of finding his orphaned socks, and certain possessions that he’d forgotten to take with him: a chinning bar that for months leaned against the corner of my bedroom, a pair of water shoes that he used for walking along the bottom of the Ottauquechee River. And I remembered one of the last things he ever said to me. “It’s my doom, Catherine, that I love you as much as I do.”

“So, Mr. Parker,” I said. “Is there any way that I can help you with any of this?”

A few moments passed. He barely got the words out. “Well, I was actually hoping I could come and see you.”

Oh no, I thought, why? How could I be of any help? “You can come and see me if you’d like,” I offered. “Although I don’t know if somebody who didn’t know your wife at all will be able to help you. I’ll certainly try, though.”

“You
did
know her,” he objected. “She took your blood at the hospital.”

“But I hardly remember her more than that she was good at her job.” I told Mr. Parker that his wife had been gentle with me, kind to me.

“But that’s one of the few things that I find … I don’t know, a little comforting. That somebody who knew her actually discovered her.…” His voice warped again; he was really trying to hold it together. “And if she was driven right by your house, then you were the last person to be near her … except, of course,
him
.”

Angela Parker’s last minutes of life elapsing only a few hundred yards away from where I was carefully setting out the ingredients for a cake I’d never made before and making a list of long-lost drugstore items that could be mail-ordered from Nebraska. During her short-term captivity on a slippery, fishtailing ride up blizzarding Cloudland, Angela Parker was probably fretting about her children and her husband, who’d long since expected her arrival. Did she wonder or suspect that the ending of her life was merely minutes away? Surely she still hoped something—the murderer’s mercy at the very least—would intervene? She could probably feel the blood from the initial stab wounds pooling on the inside of her parka, and the pain that should’ve radiated from there might have been masked by shock. Anthony surmised that when they reached the orchard, the killer probably carried her like a death bride over a threshold of drifts banked like graves on either side of the road, dug her a shallow tomb in the freshly fallen snow, and laid her down, bleeding.

Mr. Parker resumed, “I try to remember that she helped people, how she was with others, how the nurses who worked at the hospital with her there felt about her. But of course I also … I wonder about how afraid she must’ve been and how much pain she was in, when he … when it was happening to her.”

“Of course, you would. But now tell me, how are your children doing?”

“Oh … my children. They’re too young to really get it. I guess that’s a good thing.”

“I hope it is.”

“I’ve explained everything to them again and again—”

“When you say explain, do you mean—”

“I just tell them that she was taken to heaven. Before her normal time. That it wasn’t expected but that sometimes people go there sooner. But of course they keep asking when she’s coming back from heaven. And they think Mommy does everything better than I do.” He drew in a sharp breath. “So I hear that from them too.”

I found myself hating the fact that these tragedies tend to become even more painfully complicated and elaborate in their aftermath.

Mr. Parker went on, “Thing is, when they find him—if they find him—it’s not going to make a difference at all to my girls.”

“But it will to you.”

“And … even though I want them to find him, I … I don’t know if I’m ready to see who this person actually is.”

“He stopped being a person a long time ago,” I said. “He has less conscience than my animals. He
is
an animal.”

“A calculating animal,” Mr. Parker said, and then we both fell silent. Then the widower said, “Oh, Mrs. Winslow, I really shouldn’t bother you with all my troubles. After all, it must be hard enough, living so close to where she was found.”

He was right about that. “Well, it
is
weird and unsettling, but right now I’m thinking how it must be for you.”

There was a significant lull before he spoke again. “Do you ever worry that one day he might double back? Back … to where you are?”

“Of course I do. I’m alone here, you see. Except for my animals. But if it’s the same person who harmed the others, he’s never … revisited any of the other places.”

“Yes, that’s true.” Then he said, “Mrs. Winslow, maybe I should give this more time. You have your own difficulties to deal with. I … I actually feel better now. Sometimes … I hope you’ll understand this … it gets so bad that I start looking for any way to feel better.”

“Well, then, if it does again and if you’d feel better talking to me, by all means, call me,” I said. “I absolutely mean that.”

*   *   *

I gathered the rags drenched with Henrietta’s pee dribbles and stepped outside for a moment. My tree peonies were just opening their dense pink pompom blooms. It then occurred to me that when Buddhists say “life is suffering” they don’t necessarily mean that one suffers through life, but rather that suffering is what defines life, the pain that equalizes us, the pain that brings us together. I tried to think of all the months that Angela Parker was missing and how despite everything he’d been told that pointed to her demise, her husband felt determined to hold out some hope. Not that it bore any real comparison but I couldn’t help thinking after Matthew and I had ended our relationship definitively, in full knowledge of all the reasons why it couldn’t and wouldn’t work between us, he still told me he went to bed every night hopeful that something would change the climate between us and the relationship would burst back to life.

We just don’t want the good things in our life to die, and how and when the death bullet will strike and in what form becomes more and more of a preoccupation. When I think about dying, as I often have, I find myself musing on the forms of death that I could not bear: the slow, crippling shutdown of a body afflicted with Lou Gehrig’s disease; being locked in the trunk of a car, and the meld of claustrophobia and bodily cramp and the panicking on how long the unbearable captivity will last, the desperation for any possibility of rescue. Or being high up in an airplane on a fatal journey and having to accept in a matter of moments the smooth glide transmogrifying into a lurching motion, the downward spiral toward a cold and pitiless ocean amid screams—or even the whimpers of those too stunned to cry out. Or a sudden collision on a motorway and the thunderous sounds of braking and colliding, the crystalline crack of shattering glass and the tangle of car wreck, the paralysis, the shock, the hemorrhaging blood. Those who die quickly, unforeseeably, are they given subtle presentiments that soon their light will go out? Did this nurse wake up the morning of her death wearing an inexplicable mantle of sadness? Were her good-byes to her husband and children tinged with regret? Did she, on the way home from her skiing excursion, driving slowly and carefully through a blizzard, feel an emptiness? Or perhaps in the steady inner warmth of her car humming through the slush and grit of Interstate 91, she, for the last time in her life, indulged herself in a sense of brimming contentment for the family she had waiting for her at home? And what terrible divine intervention had made her choose one rest area as opposed to another in order to make her phone call? What decision sets people to make that fateful turn onto the avenue of their death?

I suddenly felt exhausted and decided I needed a nap, and slowly made my way upstairs. I fell into a deep sleep and awoke disoriented. I didn’t even know what time of day it was because I’d drawn the shades. There was something wrenchingly familiar about this and I tried to remember what it was. Ah, of course: those last few days when my husband was dying and Breck and I were taking turns staying up all night with him (she insisted, refusing to sleep or go to school), when I became so weary and fatigued but kept pushing myself. I didn’t want the father of my child to be alone with his suffering and was already missing him terribly, lamenting my decision to divorce him. I remember him telling me that as his body got weaker he began recollecting places he’d been to that he hadn’t thought of in decades, street corners, single exchanges with people he’d met only once in his life, the fragrance of his mother’s face cream.

One afternoon I took a reprieve from the death watch to sit down in my bedroom and inadvertently dozed off. I woke up to a strong burning sunlight intaglioed on my wall, and palpably feeling my husband in the bedroom with me while some voice inside my head kept saying, “I’m almost gone, Catherine, I’m almost gone.” And then a split second later Breck calling me into the next room where we watched him take his last, laboring breaths.

More awake now, I wandered back to my earlier conversation with Mr. Parker, suddenly consumed with overwhelming hatred for the evil entity who waylaid his wife off Interstate 91. She was understandably too traumatized to be able to muster up the mettle that might have empowered her against him. And I knew that if this man were to come into my bedroom now, I would summon up my every resource. I’d reach into my night table for the dagger I’d brought back from St. Petersburg, and brandishing it at this murderer of women, of mothers, I’d cut him to his heart.

PART TWO

TEN

A
FEW DAYS LATER,
in late June, Hiram Osmond took a lie detector test whose results were inconclusive. A group of investigators (including Prozzo and Anthony) requested permission to inspect his arsenal of knacker’s tools. A tightly organized cortege of official vehicles drove up Happy Valley Lane and made the turn onto the three-quarters-of-a-mile-long driveway that led to a farmhouse dating back to the 1700s and whose foundering, collapsing state was a reflection of the brokenhearted man who lived there. Knowing they were coming, he’d done little to prepare for his official visitors, and met them with hands permanently stained and cured from hauling beasts, from rendering hides hung to dry all over the property, from butchering carcasses for bounties of bones. To their surprise they found ten alpacas, animals usually owned by more affluent people. Milling in two different enclosures, the white Huacaya have long, elegant necks and fluffy heads that look extraterrestrial, their large aqueous black eyes riveted to each of the visitors’ movements.

When Hiram opened his workshop and showed the officials his tools, they found long, thin knives that closely matched the description of the weapon that had stabbed all the missing women. They found grisly rags and blood-tainted garments, shreds purportedly left behind by his wife and daughter. The detectives asked to collect the knives as well as the ensanguined rags to be tested by Vermont’s crime lab in Burlington. The results were hardly surprising to me: the cloth was covered with the blood of steer and alpaca and goats and even dogs.

*   *   *

I decided that it might be best to confront Wade about his lie in Paul’s presence. Knowing that they often gardened together in the late afternoon after Wade got off work, I stopped by around five-thirty on a very humid, overcast day.