Cloudland (21 page)

Anthony disagreed. “No, she seems too earthy, too grounded. Too crunchy to have a feather pen. She probably worries about her carbon footprint and sustainable living and is green as green can be.”

I decided to defer to him. “You could be right about that.… I will say, her recounting of what might have happened to that student … as she was telling us, I could see it all so clearly.”

“I went into this with skepticism,” Anthony admitted.

“You and me both,” I said.

“But I feel differently now. I don’t know why exactly, but I do.”

“So do I.”

We’d just passed the halfway point in our journey home from Burlingon to Woodstock when his cell phone started ringing. He hated talking while driving and, grabbing the phone nestled against the outside of his thigh, handed it to me and asked me to read the number.

“It says private.”

“Answer and tell me who it is?”

I announced, “Anthony Waite’s line,” and got a “Who’s this?”

Recognizing the New Jersey accent, I said, “How ya doing, Marco?” and then told him Anthony was driving.

“I’ve been better, to be honest. Can I speak to him?”

I held out the phone, Anthony grabbed it and placed it over his ear. “Yeah, what’s going on?” he said, and listened for a bit.

From where I sat on the passenger’s side, Prozzo’s end of the conversation was intermittently audible. I heard him say, “Back down here in our neck of the woods.” And then something about, “But on the New Hampshire side.”

I was delighted to hear Anthony reply, “Do you mind if I put you on speaker?” He fiddled with his phone and finally, after a bit of feedback and background noise, I heard Prozzo’s voice blaring, “Doesn’t matter who hears now. The reporters already know about it.”

“Any idea how long the car’s been there?” Anthony asked.

“Ten days or more … they didn’t want to tell us about it, those New Hampshire fucks, pardon the French, Catherine,” he said. “Anyway, when can you get here?”

“Hang on so I get Catherine up to speed.” Anthony shifted slightly in his seat and was about to speak.

“Sounds like they found an abandoned car,” I said, preempting him.

“Yeah, down in Charlestown, right next to the river. And New Hampshire has been all over it for ten days,” Prozzo fumed over the speaker.

“Maryland plates,” Anthony informed me.

“And a trunk full of a woman’s stuff,” Prozzo added.

“Anyway, Marco, Catherine and I are driving back from Burlington. I need to drop her off before I head down there.”

There was a significant silence and then Prozzo asked suspiciously, “What were you doing up
there
?”

“I’ll explain when I see you.”

“Come on, Ant, what’s the big secret?”

“Okay, Catherine was interviewing a clairvoyant who helped find the body of that Burlington woman.”

“The one who got shoved into Huntington Gorge,” Prozzo said.

“I decided to go along so I could ask a few questions about our situation.”

“I can’t believe you’d buy into that crap,” Prozzo remarked. “Whenever there’s a murder those people always come out of the woodwork.”

Anthony looked over at me and said, “Let me jump, Marco. As soon as I drop Catherine I’ll head down to you.”

“All right. And if on the way you happen to run up against any New Hampshire Staties, just mow ’em down.”

“Will do.” Anthony handed me the phone and I switched it off.

Anthony’s car was traveling over an uneven section of highway and for a moment I listened to the tires thumping and thwacking. “So you think it might be another one,” I said at last.

He nodded. “Out-of-state car parked by the river, a whole trunk full of a woman’s clothes. Where is she? There have been other dead bodies found near the Connecticut.” He cogitated for a moment or so. “Funny sometimes how you just get a few details, they aren’t necessarily conclusive, but you know in your gut where they’re going to lead you.”

“A little bit like Nan O’Brien,” I ventured to say.

“But I mean, surely what I’m describing happens when you’re doing investigative journalism, right?” Anthony asked.

“Well,” I said, “you might divine the truth. But everything has to be backed up with fact. No leaps of faith. You can get discredited. Or sued.”

FOURTEEN

A
N ARTICLE ABOUT THE ABANDONED CAR
appeared the following morning in the
Valley News,
stating that the Maryland owner was from the Dominican Republic, living in the United States on an expired visa. It had yet to be determined if the driver was alone or if there were other passengers, but certainly one of them was a woman: a battered sky-blue suitcase was found when the trunk was jimmied open, and among the contents were black spandex brassieres; a pot of iridescent eye shadow, cherry-and-lime-green-colored panties, a box of tampons, several pairs of low-cut blue jeans adorned with spangles, and one embroidered dress that seemed as though it were made by hand. There was a copy of the Bible in Spanish.

I pictured the owner of the suitcase as a young woman in her early twenties, lured to America, wide-eyed and hopeful, and that the dress was perhaps something her mother gave her with great ceremony on her very last night in Santo Domingo. I kept thinking/hoping that the stranded car was just a coincidence and had absolutely nothing to do with the River Valley murders.

Shortly after reading the article, I went to the prison to teach my class. When I arrived, the inmates already knew about the marooned vehicle—I assumed there was access to the newspaper—and immediately asked if I believed there might be another victim whose body had yet to be found. I told them I knew as much as they did.

One-legged Jess was sitting in a fold-out chair holding on to his crutches, struggling to gain a standing position. “Why don’t you put them down. Stay a while,” I said. He shook his head and refused. Then Peter, my patricidal seventeen-year-old, explained that during outdoor activity people had been stealing Jess’s crutches and pushing him around. The rest of the guys were sitting in a circle holding their copies of
Dead Souls.
They had seemed to appreciate Pushkin, so I thought I’d hug Russia and try them out on Gogol’s fantasy of crossing social and financial lines with a scheme.

Raul spoke up. “Well, you know, buying the names of dead people is kind of like having a cell phone in here. No reception most of the time, but people who got ’em, even when they can’t use ’em, still don’t want to share with nobody else.”

Very good analogy, I thought, and should have run with that but found myself floored by this incredible piece of information. “Cell phones?” I said. “You have cell phones?”

“Unofficially,” said Jones, Anthony’s former suspect incarcerated for sexual misconduct in a mini-mart. He was turning out to be one of the more vocal of the bunch.

“Shouldn’t they be confiscated?”

It was explained to me that people visiting had managed to smuggle them to the inmates in spite of the security regulations.

“They some kinds that get through metal detectors and shit,” said Travis, slumped down in his chair, bony shoulders pointing through his orange prison jumpsuit. I was surprised to hear him speaking; he hardly ever contributed anything much to a discussion.

“Good to hear from
you,
” I said to him.

He narrowed his eyes at me and said, “You don’t want to hear from me.”

“Sure I do.”

“He’s talking about something else,” Peter warned, and was then silenced by a malignant look.

“Travis.” I attempted to further engage him. “Did you get a chance to read
Dead Souls
?”

“Hell yeah, I read it. Or most of it anyway,” he said. “Guy’s a fool. Buying the names of dead people so the world would think he was rich? What was he on?”

“Yeah, buying the names of dead slaves,” Raul interjected.

“People find you bullshitting sooner or later,” Travis pressed on. “But nah, didn’t get to the end. Does he get thrown out of town or somethin’?”

I pointed out the man gets caught; however, the book itself was a bit inconclusive because the author died without having had a chance to properly finish it. Like Wilkie Collins and
The Widower’s Branch,
I remarked to myself.

“Then why are we reading it?” asked Raul, crossing his tattooed arms over his chest.

Travis spoke up again. “Damn. I should write a frigging book. Could clean up with what I know.” He thumped on his temple. “What I got in my head.”

I took this in for a moment and then I said, “Maybe you should.”

I always encouraged them to write down their stories and promised that I’d gratefully read them. Crude as the execution would undoubtedly be, embedded in them surely would be fascinating material.

“’Cause the shit I got to say you don’t want to hear.”

“Try me.”

Travis looked at me as though I were an alien. “I know where this guy’s head’s at.”

“Which guy?” Raul asked before I could.

Addressing the entire group, Travis said, “This killer fucker up here who’s going around finding women and whacking them.”

“Oh yeah, where’s his head at?” Jones asked.

Travis was getting flustered and started waving his hands, his eyes raging. “I seen shit like this before. Somebody goes crazy. They start popping people in a certain way like warming up for somebody else.”

I told him I wasn’t sure I got his meaning.

“You better get it, lady. Because
your
ass is next in line.”

“Pardon me?”

“I say this
mofo
will be coming for
you
.”

Even though I knew what he was driving at, I felt I had to be sure. “But he did that already, came around to where I was.”

Travis was losing patience and pinching his shoulders together and said, “Not talking about no down the street from you. Talking about right down your driveway.”

“Oh Travis, shut it!” somebody said.

Looking thoroughly disgusted now, Travis said, “I’m just telling you what I know from what I seen.”

*   *   *

Peter purposely lingered after class was over. In the midst of his chemically induced placidity, he seemed anxious to speak to me.

“Anybody in your family come to visit you last week?” I began, and was told that his cousins had. His older brother was a sophomore at Williams College; in the wake of the senseless murder of their parents, this boy refused to have anything to do with his younger sibling, a rejection that Peter tried to outwardly slough off in his late-adolescent way, but which I knew pained him terribly.

I asked if he’d been writing in his diary. In response, he gave me several pages that he’d been able to print out in the prison’s computer room. With a quick glance I saw they were scantily filled with writing and larded with lots of juvenile drawings. Disappointed in his lack of effort, I folded them carefully and put them in one of the manila folders I was holding.

“He’s not joking, you know.” Peter was gazing at me steadily with his rheumy gray eyes.

“Who?”

“Travis.” I could see that two pinpoints of color had risen to his doughy cheeks.

“He doesn’t talk much but he reads the paper. He knows what’s going on. And he told me you have to be careful.”

“I
am
being careful.”

Peter’s face flushed even more when he added, “He just said it makes sense.”

“That what makes sense?” I repeated impatiently.

Peter shook his head. “That the guy would come after you, too.”

*   *   *

Perturbed by the bizarre, unforeseen warning, I found Fiona standing in the little office we shared. As soon as I came in, she smiled, said a cautious hello, and then settled back down at her desk to begin collating a bunch of very skillful drawings of the nineteenth-century brick prison building, the double-height chain-link fence, and the field beyond it populated by an old rusted hay thresher with huge, spoked metal wheels.

“Who did those?” I said, instinctively moving closer to her.

“Oh, this older guy I have who’s a … molester, I guess you’d call him.”

“His first incarceration?”

“I think actually it’s his third.”

“They’re really lovely.” I was glad to be drawn away from Travis’s dire prophecy. Surely he was just trying to frighten me; the killer had yet to return to the same exact location. His radius was rather short but he’d kept moving.

Fiona went on. “I’m amazed that this man has the will to even do them. The other guys, they punch him, they torture him and push him down. He’s got cuts and bruises all over him to prove it.”

“May be his way of retreating and surviving,” I said. “But don’t the guards protect him?”

“Not really. Not somebody in for sexually molesting children. They’re the lowest form of life in prison.”

“Yeah, the whole prison pecking order.” I sat down at my desk and swiveled the chair around so that I could face her. “Human nature. The strong punish the weak, and criminals in turn punish those whose crimes they believe to be worse than theirs.” I reached toward her. “May I flip through them?”

She handed me the sheaf.

“I don’t know if you’ve read the writer Primo Levi,” I remarked as I began studying moody, detailed drawings of the prison from different angles, interior corridors and close-ups of grimy windows, barred cells, a parallax view of incarceration.

“I haven’t,” Fiona said. “But I’ve always been meaning to.”

I went on to say that Levi writes movingly about the pecking order among the inmates of the concentration camp: the top of the ranking being political prisoners; next, Scandinavian inmates; then French; then English; then Poles; continuing down to the lowest rung, which are the Jews, Primo Levi among them. “According to him, each group of the incarcerated mistreats the group perceived to be just below it. He believed that such behavior is basic human nature.”

Fiona was shaking her head and I could tell she was perturbed by the truth of this. “That’s very depressing.”

“I guess it’s no surprise that Primo Levi killed himself. But not until years later,” I added.

Fiona murmured something inaudible, and I returned to the drawings. It was sad to see such incredible skill demonstrated by somebody who’d lost control of his life. But then again, sometimes I felt as though I kept losing control of mine: my love, my resentments, fear of losing my daughter, fear of losing my life. “These are actually good enough to be exhibited somewhere.” I handed the drawings back to her. “Don’t know about you but sometimes I feel there is just a thin membrane separating me from my guys.”