Cloudland (18 page)

I wondered, “Did you ever consider that instead of a local, it’s just some flatlander? Somebody who came to the north country and made it his business to memorize all the old dirt roads with their ninety-degree turns and switchbacks, even the roads that lead to nowhere?” Somebody such as himself, I thought, now living alone.

“I consider everything.”

“Every time I try to imagine who this person might be, I always come up blank.”

The silence that followed seemed curiously long. Anthony decided to move on. “And now that you know Wade lied the way he did, what do you think of that?”

I grumbled, “How do
I
know about Wade? He’s so mysterious and cagey. So how can
I
be objective? What I
do
know is law-abiding people often lie because they’re petrified of being falsely accused. When I was working for newspapers we’d always come across these situations during a murder investigation.”

Anthony nodded in agreement. Some distinct birdsong caught my attention. I glanced at my watch and saw that the time had gotten on to seven-thirty in the evening. “Do you hear that?” I said. “The wood thrush?”

Anthony tilted his head back, trying to detect the warbles amidst the dissonance of avian chatter.

“There it is again,” I said. “Hear it?”

“I think so,” he said, bringing his head forward again. “But not clearly.”

“All this … music is what I love about Vermont summers.”

Anthony glanced toward the empty blue house. “Hey, I’ve always loved living here. Obviously, it’s a lot harder now.”

Noting his sadness, I asked, “So, besides Hiram, besides the other four suspects you mentioned, have there been any other leads?”

“Just that homicide up in Burlington.”

He was referring to the murder of a college coed abducted in the streets of Vermont’s largest city at one o’clock in the morning. But she’d been sexually assaulted in a brutal way before she was killed, so there was really no strong forensic link to the women murdered in the River Valley.

Knowing he’d reached a momentary dead end, Anthony now explained that, in search of more information, he’d revisited the assault on Marjorie Poole, the drug-using potter attacked outside her studio who escaped with a stab wound. Knowing that she had been high on Vicodin and cocaine and alcohol during the attempt on her life, Anthony had taken it upon himself to try to improve her drug-hazed recall by hypnotizing her. He’d managed to regress her back to the night of her attack and suddenly she’s standing in the doorway of the refurbished mill, bleeding, watching her assailant, bent over the stab wound she inflicted on him, staggering away to an old Ford Rambler, a vehicle whose tires do not match the tire marks found near the orchard where Angela Parker perished.

She’s reliving the aftermath, standing outside in subzero temperatures, her breath billowing into dense freezing vapors, her nostrils crystallizing, and trying hard to read the license number.

Anthony naturally asks her to take her time, to let numbers float into focus, and she frowns and squeezes her eyes shut and finally comes up with a New Hampshire plate and the letter “R.” Then three numerals, 8,9,2, and she sounds certain, definitive. And Anthony is thinking this could be a real break in the case, even if she misidentified the make of the car, they can plug the numbers into the New Hampshire system—even into the Vermont and Massachusetts systems. However, when they scanned the motor vehicle data of all three states, there was no exact match to the plate, and the close contenders were cars a lot newer than an old Ford Rambler—a BMW X5, a Saturn Vue, a Cadillac Escalade. And when a search was run on the car owners, none were linked to any prior criminal offenses.

“A Ford Rambler is not exactly a common car,” Anthony said.

“Maybe Marjorie Poole once knew a Ford Rambler. And her memory of it barged into her hypnotic state.”

Anthony frowned. “I can see the value you place on hypnosis. But it has been very helpful solving crimes.”

And I realized I wasn’t skeptical of hypnosis, but rather just skeptical of the idea of resurrecting Marjorie Poole’s testimony. “But more to the point, a Ford Rambler, being a two-wheel drive, could not possibly have made it up Cloudland.”

“There were some four-wheel-drive models made, but few and far between and sold mostly on the West Coast, California in particular,” Anthony pointed out.

“Whereas those gas-guzzling SUVs are as common as street trash.”

Whatever it was, the vehicle had to have been able to make it up our road during that storm—presuming, Anthony said, that I actually did hear somebody barreling up the road long before the plow. I glared at him and he glared back at me and said, “Well, you weren’t so sure when Detective—”

“I’m certain now!” I snapped. “One way or another I hear and see everybody and everything. I see people coming and going. I see Emily. And I’ve seen
Fiona.
Plenty of times.”

A tight smirk tuned itself on Anthony’s face and he sat back in his chair, gripping the handles. “So why haven’t you just come out and asked me?” he said at last with a bit of irritation.

“Maybe because I believed in you and Emily as happily married, a paradigm for my own fucked-up romantic life.”

Anthony chuckled cynically.

I couldn’t help being a little catty. “But Fiona … she’s so white bread.”

“You’re not exactly an exotic, yourself,” he said with a bit of stridence.

“Well, you and I—we’re not having an affair!”

Anthony’s expression was momentarily dazzled with anger.

“Look,” I told him, “it’s not my intention to ask you what or when or how. I just want to know why?”

“Why does any relationship end, Catherine?” he implored me. “Or begin, for that matter?”

“Often because there is somebody else in the picture,” I said. “So what’s your excuse?”

Anthony took a moment to compose himself before continuing. “Okay, point taken. So let’s look at the situation. In a forensic sort of way. Here’s a woman, my wife, with a secure university job in nearby New Hampshire. She separates from me, wants to give up her
job
and move to North Carolina to be with her family. Why such an upheaval?”

“So hurt by the fact that you were having an affair that she just had to get out of here.”

“Usually the person who’s having the affair is the one to move out, right?”

“My thoughts exactly. Maybe you stayed because the land came through your family. And she wanted to move anyway.”

“Did it ever occur to you that
she
might have been having an affair?”

Blindsided, I stared at Anthony. “So then you were both having affairs?”

“My affair, as you know through the grapevine, is relatively new. Whereas Emily has been involved now for at least a year and a half.”

“With somebody in North Carolina?”

“Yes.”

“Somebody she met visiting her family, or at a conference?”

“The latter.”

“So who is he? Another academic.”

“Bingo, you’re hired.”

I stared at him, gobsmacked. Anthony chuckled flatly, jostling his legs up and down, and leaned back in his deck chair.

“Emily didn’t want me to tell you. I had to respect her wishes.”

“Why was she embarrassed? Especially with me, of all people.”

“You’ll have to ask her why.”

I stared fixedly at him. “And you have somebody, yourself.”

Anthony looked aggrieved. “But I
didn’t
for a long time. And I had to live day to day with somebody I loved who fell in love with somebody else. And stopped making love to me. And was very open about her feelings for this other guy, who I can’t deny is great-looking.”

“How old is he, do you know?”

“I believe he’s two years younger than she is.”

“And so what about Fiona?”

“Fiona is great, don’t get me wrong.”

With that, he looked back at the two-hundred-year-old house lacking its family, creaking with aged timbers settling on its foundation, mute with lack of life and activity. “But Fiona is one person, she’s not a family. I miss my girls. It’s so quiet in there now.… I can’t get used to it. That’s why I stay out all the time. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve thrown myself into this investigation.”

There was a gnawing silence during which I decided to be conciliatory. “You know,” I said, “it’s not like
I
haven’t been in your position before. When
I
was married. And my husband started an affair. And then I had one.”

“Exactly. I know you understand.”

“Now that you’ve bothered to explain everything to me.”

Anthony looked impatient. “Like I said, it was
her
decision to keep
her
relationship private. And mine too, because of the obvious embarrassment.” He slapped at a mosquito that had landed on his wrist.

And then I recalled my visit to the Waites the morning Anthony was making pancakes for his daughters, who sat obediently at the dining table, drawing pictures while I was reflecting on what Granny had once said about him and his cruelty.

“I have to admit. I never thought that separating would be more Emily’s decision than yours because … of something I just happened to remember Granny saying about you.”

Anthony frowned. “Your granny was certainly opinionated, I’ll give her that.”

“She told me you were capable of cruelty. And I guess I made assumptions about yours and Emily’s breakup … do you happen to know what I’m referring to?”

He looked positively stricken. “I think so.”

I waited for him to continue.

“During med school I fell in love with another student who was doing research on the Ebola virus in a lab in Toronto. She caught the illness. Almost died. Then ended up blind in both eyes.”

For some reason I thought of Dickens’s Esther Summerson. “Did you leave her?”

He nodded. “After her illness she kept trying to talk me out of the relationship … now I realize she did it because she was afraid I’d leave her and wanted to at least have a hand in it. So things ended and she was … devastated.” Anthony’s voice quavered and tears flashed in his eyes.

I pondered his story for a moment and then I said, “Well, at face value it does make you sound cruel. But those situations are really hard. I can understand choosing not to marry her. And you were so young.”

Anthony was momentarily too choked up to speak. Finally he said, “I’ve carried the guilt with me. Especially because she never met anybody else and still lives with her parents in Nova Scotia. And so when this whole thing happened with Emily I just figured it was payback.”

I took this in and then said, “So you really loved Emily?”

“I
still
love Emily,” he said just as a brigade of cyclists dressed in colorful spandex suddenly appeared, climbing the steep grade of Cloudland Road in a tight pack, their panting bursts of conversation preceding them.

TWELVE

W
HEN I GOT HOME FROM ANTHONY’S
that evening, before listening to the messages I scanned the list of calls that had come in: one from Burlington and the other Boston. The Burlington one was accompanied by the name Nan O’Brien, a name familiar to me but which I couldn’t immediately place. When I began playing the message I realized this was the clairvoyant the Burlington police had consulted regarding the abducted coed who was murdered in a rocky gorge, as well as the young student who’d mysteriously gone missing at Middlebury College at the same time that Angela Parker disappeared. The message was very simple. “I am Nan O’Brien. I work to find missing people. I need to speak to you about something in particular. If you could call me I’d appreciate it.” She left a number. It was nine-thirty in the evening, too late by Vermont standards to make a phone call, but my curiosity got the better of me.

“Hello, Catherine Winslow,” answered a smoky voice. “I had a feeling it might be you.”

Did she have caller ID? “I hope it’s not too late.”

“I’m a late one,” she said.

“Your message intrigued me,” I said. “How can I—”

“No, how can
I
?” she interrupted. “I’ve been having this vision over and over. A vision about you. And a book that you’re trying to find. Does that have any meaning at all?”

“There
was
a book I was trying to find, but I found it.”

“Oh, well then I guess I’m a bit late. This can happen.”

“Late but at least not incorrect.” I hesitated. “I don’t believe in psychic phenomena but I will say this is pretty interesting. Funny thing is that I recently read about you working with the police.”

“Trying to. With the Middlebury boy, nobody is really listening to me.”

“So you have a theory as to what happened to him?”

There was a pause. “I’d rather not go into it, especially over the phone. Because it’s not exactly a straightforward theory. I get this information, but I don’t interpret it, necessarily. Anyway, I would love to meet you sometime. I’m a huge fan of your column.”

“That might be something to hold against you.”

She laughed heartily. “Well, I read you for pure pleasure. Your hundred-year-old recipes. Those sachets that keep mice away. But I will confess to you that I am a
terrible
housekeeper. I did try one of your recipes, though, a caramel sheet cake that was sent, I believe, by a reader out in Texas.”

“Well, believe it or not, I’m not the greatest housekeeper myself. My daughter will vouch for that.”

There was a short pause and then she said, “Look, I know you found the body. I read about it in the
Burlington Free Press.
If I was right about the book, I’d like to help you figure out who did it.”

I felt suddenly woozy. “What makes you think
I’m
trying to solve it?”

“I just assumed you were. You’re a journalist, right?”

I laughed. “Sort of.”

“I’d offer to drive down to you, but I hurt my foot going on the search for the woman who was murdered in Burlington. I fell between some rocks when we were sweeping Huntington Gorge.”

I was intrigued and suddenly got an idea. “The
Valley News.
They’ve been bugging me to do something else for them. I’ve gotten out of the habit of doing profiles, but maybe I can do one on you.”