Cloudland (2 page)

Imagining the desolate task of guarding the body, I shivered and said, “Well, I can offer you plenty of coffee and homemade doughnuts. I don’t sleep much most nights anyway, so I may as well drive up and bring you refills.”

Leslie grunted and thanked me for the offer.

Back at the house Virgil and Mrs. Billy greeted us with howling barks, Henrietta oddly absent. When I led Leslie into the kitchen I could see that my 250-pound potbellied pig once again had gnawed through the childproof plastic lock on the garbage cabinet, rummaged through the bin, and was lying on her side, scarfing a bunch of lemon rinds. “Look at you!” I scolded, and she stopped and peeked at me with a familiar craven glint in her eye. I was too rattled by now to care.

“Holy shit,” Leslie said when he saw Henrietta. “She doesn’t bite, does she?”

“Do you?” was my answer.

My calendar was lying on the kitchen counter, and I saw my own notation that Malcolm Banfield and his wife (who substituted for me at the local prison where I taught a writing class) were actually away on vacation. When Leslie learned this, he began radioing for the name of the deputy assistant medical examiner. I interrupted to say it was Brenda Moore and that I also had her phone number. “You’re sure on top of things, aren’t you, Mrs. Winslow?” he said with a sarcastic edge.

“Well, I don’t feel like it,” I said, blinking and seeing afterimages of pink.

Taking in the room with a glance, noticing the piles of books and magazines on the dining room table, Leslie said, “Man, you got lots of reading to do.”

“I collect information for my column. And for my column I’ve interviewed both Malcolm Banfield and Brenda Moore. That’s why I have their phone numbers. Brenda also deals with the prison.”

“Yeah, that’s right. You teach at the prison, don’t you?”

“Every other Monday.”

“Anyway, not to contradict, but the barracks will have to be the ones to call her.”

A moment later the dogs went crazy barking again, and I went to look out my study windows. Several state police cars had swerved into my driveway, as well as an unmarked Jeep Cherokee, enough commotion so that even Henrietta left her snack of lemon parings and barreled ahead over to the sliding glass door to survey the new arrivals.

“Your buddies are here,” I informed Leslie, watching men in starched uniforms emerging from their vehicles. He hurried outside to join them, and I numbly followed and stood just outside the door. I immediately recognized Detective Marco Prozzo, in an ill-fitting sharkskin suit, getting out of the unmarked car. Prozzo was the Springfield-based detective running the serial murder investigation from the Vermont side of things. On local television I’d seen this New Jersey transplant meandering around with volunteer crews searching for missing bodies. A short, squat man with a wide nose and full, asymmetrical lips, Prozzo gathered the group together in the driveway, presumably to discuss investigation strategies. I assumed he would have to honor the protocol of steering clear of the victim until the coroner’s own personal Statie could arrive. “Yeah, well, guess what,” I heard the detective say. “He didn’t answer his page or his cell. We can’t wait too long. There could be something crucial here.”

“Won’t be a happy coroner,” one of the Staties warned him.

“I’ll take the heat,” Prozzo said.

The reprieve of the unseasonably mild temperature was quickly fading as a northern chill knifed through my cardigan. I pulled its flaps around me.

The detective turned toward me and called out, “You must be Catherine Winslow, hello there. I need to ask—” The conversation was interrupted by the arrival of the county sheriff in his white SUV. Leslie had been telling the others about the sorry state of Cloudland Road, and it was quickly decided that they should pile in the all-wheel-drive car to travel the short distance to the site of the body. As the men began squeezing in, Prozzo took a few steps closer to me. “What time would you say you first saw her?” I checked my watch and estimated that I’d made my first pass around 2:30
P.M.
He thanked me with a wink and joined the others.

*   *   *

Three days later, my Cloudland neighbor, Anthony Waite, invited me to lunch at Joanie’s Café in Hartland Three Corners. Anthony, a doctor from Canada, came to live on Cloudland when his wife was offered a college professorship at Colby-Sawyer College in nearby New Hampshire. He worked at the psychiatric hospital down in Springfield, the only place that was hiring when they moved to the area. Anthony also had invited one of our only other Cloudland residents, Paul Winter, an internationally recognized painter.

We chose a secluded, tattered vinyl booth facing a horseshoe-shaped counter. The moment I sat down all eyes in the restaurant were fixed on me, looking concerned; after all, this was a local café and I knew most of the patrons. One by one folks began rising from their places, leaving their half-eaten breakfasts to tell me they were sorry I had to witness what I did. One or two even dared to gently suggest that I consider renting out the studio apartment that I’d fashioned out of an extra sitting room—so I’d have another presence in the house. Living in rural New England and dealing with people on a daily basis requires a certain kind of protocol, a “what do you think of the weather we’re having” sort of preamble before business is done or opinions are delivered with reticence and sometimes even wry humor. Some of those who left their meals to come over made a few moments of small talk before asking if I owned a gun. I assured them I had a rifle. One young electrician I’d watched grow up informed me that the sale of firearms had skyrocketed in recent days, particularly to women like me who were living alone. That doors, forever left unsecured, were being bolted. That Home Depot over in West Lebanon kept selling out of security locks. People paid their respects and went back to eating, but I could read in their faces that they were wrestling with the reality of a series of brutal crimes that remained unexplained and unsolved.

I automatically ordered scrambled eggs, knowing I’d probably have no appetite. Since discovering Angela Parker’s body I often felt queasy whenever I smelled food, imagining her gelid gray flesh, what little blood that remained in her body frozen in her veins, its deep rusty stain like Italian ice in the orchard’s snow, her neck purpled from strangulation.

Combing his thick, shiny auburn hair out of his eyes, Anthony said, “I guess I should have realized you’d have to receive people here. Hope that’s not too uncomfortable for you.”

“It’s okay. I actually appreciate all this concern. Let’s face it, everybody is freaked out.”

Glancing around the room, Anthony said softly, “I asked both of you to lunch to let you know that I’ve begun working on all the cases, going over the evidence that has come in.”

We stared at him for a moment and then Paul said, “Working on the cases? I thought you were down in Springfield dealing with all the schizos.”

“Do you know anything about forensic medicine?” I challenged.

“Back in New Brunswick, forensic psychiatry was one of my specialties. I offered to work on these murders when I heard Dr. McCarthy”—he paused respectfully—“was unable to.”

We’d all heard that Dr. McCarthy, Windsor County’s forensic psychiatrist, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Anthony turned to me. “The police don’t want anyone to know I’m working for them until I get up to speed.”

“So you invited us here to tell us to keep our mouths shut,” I pointed out.

“No, just a request. I’m actually concerned about how everybody is doing.” Anthony was looking meaningfully at Paul, a short and gnomelike seventy-five-year-old with prominent, questioning blue eyes. “Let’s face it, the two of you, Wade, my family, and myself are the only full-time residents on Cloudland. It’s pretty desolate up where we live. The perfect place to leave a body that won’t be found for a good while.”

There was a gnawing silence between the three of us. Finally, I said, “So you’re working with that guy Prozzo?”

“Directly.”

“He seemed to know me.”

“I’ve spoken of you. He told me his wife and his daughter read your column. Anyway, Marjorie Poole, the woman who got away from our killer last year, is a bellwether.” Anthony was speaking of the only woman attacked who’d managed to escape. “Most of the other women were pretty badly decomposed by the time they were found, whereas Angela was frozen for nearly three months. The strangle marks on her neck and Marjorie’s are pretty identical, as well as the stab wounds. It’s a certain kind of knife.”

“A filleting knife,” I said. “Deep-sea fishermen use them.”

“So could he be a fisherman who came inland?” Paul asked. He was looking at me oddly. I’d been inadvertently tracing my finger along a scar on my neck. The moment I realized he was peering at me I could actually feel the pressure of sadness that had been chasing me for the last two years, reliving the alarm of having my windpipe blocked, my breathing thwarted by a man I loved.

“It’s a common enough knife, really,” Anthony said, adding that as in the other murders, there had been no handling that suggested sexual intent; and that this could mean the killer himself was sexually impotent.

“One thing that continues to amaze me,” I said, “is that Marjorie Poole has been such a terrible witness. You would think she’d be able to give enough detail so that they could nail this guy.”

Anthony looked from one of us to the other. The rolled-up sleeves of his shirt had slipped down his forearms, which were covered with golden hair. As he rolled them up again, he said, “I’ll explain, but once again, it can’t go beyond this table.” He looked around to make sure our waitress, an inveterate gossip named Sheila, was out of earshot.

He reminded us that Marjorie Poole, a twenty-seven-year-old potter, had been attacked outside her studio loft in Claremont, New Hampshire. At seven o’clock one winter evening, carrying two plastic bags of groceries she’d been keeping in a small refrigerator, Marjorie began heading along the row of deserted offices and studio spaces. The building had originally been a wool mill, whose oak floors creaked and sighed when you walked along them and whose ceilings rose high up into an industrial cathedral. Out of the corner of her eye she claimed to have seen a densely built man sitting on a bench in front of one of the refurbished offices. Head in his hands, he was wearing a camouflage army jacket and a Boston Red Sox baseball cap. She sensed an air of distress about him and almost stopped to ask what was wrong. But a glance down the long, empty corridor was enough to make her wary. Later on she swore that he never looked up at her, that she’d never been able to see his face very clearly. A few moments after she passed him, he leapt off the bench and attacked her from behind, jamming his jacket sleeve into her mouth.

He ringed her throat with fingers encased in woolen gloves. Then she felt a sharp, stupefying pain in the small of her back; he’d pulled up her soft down jacket, her striped jersey, and found bare skin. That winter Marjorie Poole had been going to a tanning parlor in West Lebanon, in anticipation of a holiday with her boyfriend in the Lesser Antilles. There was a tan line between her lower back and the top of her buttocks that was adorned with a discreet shamrock tattoo. With his long blade, the killer aimed for it, and the knife drove in halfway, piercing the shamrock, just missing her spleen, the tip barely nicking the wall of her bladder. She managed to backhand him with a grocery bag lined with large pouches of frozen strawberries, striking him forcefully on one side of his head, stunning him into momentary submission. He let go of the knife and she foolishly but instinctively reached around and yanked it right out of herself. While she bled her pain distilled into fury. She took a savage lunge between the flaps of his camouflage jacket, jabbing an inch into his gut, mixing her blood with his before fleeing and, unfortunately, leaving the knife behind.

Anthony leaned forward. “What you don’t know is that Marjorie Poole was high when she ran into this guy.”

“How high is high?” I asked.

“They found traces of cocaine and Vicodin and alcohol in her blood.”

“That’s
really
high,” I agreed.

“She was so high that she couldn’t really give the police any details about his face or how old he looked.”

“So that’s what it was,” I said. “Not traumatic memory loss.”

“Correct.” Anthony leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. “But here’s the thing,” he said. “Being high probably saved her life. In medical school they say, ‘God protects the inebriates and the babies…’ Basically she was too stoned to panic. And really fought back hard with everything she had. Even though she couldn’t give us any particulars about his face or his age, she does remember one very significant thing.” Anthony paused, scrutinizing Paul and then me. “When he was trying to kill her he told her about ‘The Day of Judgment’ and that she’d sleep until then. And when she was on the way to the hospital, they found a few Seventh-Day Adventist pamphlets shoved into the pocket of her peacoat.”

“And the connection?” I wondered aloud.

Raising his ginger-colored eyebrows, Anthony said, “It hasn’t been reported and it won’t be reported, I don’t think, but a similar pamphlet was actually found in Angela Parker’s ski jacket.”

Shuddering, I said, “What about the rest of the women?”

“We’re checking through the files, but as far as I can see, nothing like this has been linked to any of the other bodies. But we have to take into consideration that every other victim was killed when it was warmer, so the bodies had decomposed and were picked over by animals by the time they were found. Had it been left, printed matter might have been scattered.”

“Or depending on the weather, decomposed or dissolved in the elements,” said Paul, who, being an artist, knew about the durability of paper.

“How about the one killed in her home?” I said.

“Janet Tourvalon?” Anthony said. I nodded. “Nothing printed found anywhere near her. However.” He held up a finger. “Everything else matches, the strangle marks, the knife wounds.”

“Maybe he found God and His literature more recently,” said Paul, a lapsed Catholic.