Cloudland (24 page)

“They’ve alerted.” He used a term from the search-and-rescue nomenclature.

“To a body?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I looked downriver and saw a chocolate Labrador retriever wearing an orange vest doing twirls, hacking barks echoing across the currents. “I don’t know if you can see it from here,” he said, “but the river is boiling right where that boat is. Now they’re trying to hit bottom with the poles because the dogs have narrowed it down. They’re prodding now, to loosen the body from a place where it might be lodged so it can begin moving with the current.”

And naturally I thought of the Middlebury student whom Nan O’Brien claimed was lodged under a pile of debris at the bottom of the Otter Creek. To think that after all these months he might still be down there: a victim of mishap or of murderous intent, out of his loved ones’ reach.

Shielding his eyes with his hand, Prozzo seemed to calculate. “If they’re closing in it would mean half to three-quarters of a mile she might have traveled downstream.”

I glanced at Elena Mayaguez’s uncle, whose narrow shoulders hunched forward. “So she might be found soon?”

“Appears that way.”

I felt my stomach churning.

One of Prozzo’s underlings approached, told him something, and he turned to me. “The uncle says, ‘no eat.’”

“Makes sense,” I said. “Wouldn’t be hungry if I were he.”

“Neither would I,” Prozzo agreed.

There was an uncomfortable pause and then I went on, “Do you get much chance to speak Spanish?”

He looked at me askance. “Up here, in white land?”

“Why do you even live up here, in ‘white land’?”

He laughed. “Because my wife is originally from here. I met her when she was down in New Jersey spending a week with her cousin. We got married before I got out of the academy. She convinced me here was a good place to raise kids.” His tone was unmistakably sardonic. “So I found a job.”

“It can be a good place, theoretically,” I said, thinking, however, that Breck probably would have been better off if we’d remained in New York City.

Prozzo echoed my thoughts. “It is if your child fits in. And if not…”

“I remember you said you have a daughter. An only child, right?”

He nodded.

“I have an only daughter, too.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Almost as though on cue, Anthony showed up and informed Prozzo he was needed. Once the detective departed, Anthony scanned the welter of the river.

Then commotion. A flare rocketed up from one of the boats as the activity between the dogs and handlers became frenzied, as the shadows of the sun were moving across the water like crows. Shielding his eyes from the glare of the water, Anthony said, “Looks like they found her. They’re just going to pull her out like she’s been living down there.”

And as we waited to see the bloated body surfacing, breaking the water’s skin, I ached for the mother back in Santo Domingo, imagined her getting the phone call from the uncle. Of how she would let hurl this primordial cry that was … well, not recognition so much right away but rather a last-ditch attempt to deny the dreaded news that traveled more than a thousand miles in an instant, news of what had become irreversible, news that would plague the rest of her life. And with this howl of her desperation she would morph into all the mothers who come to grief over dead children, wailing with rage and protest at the world’s cruelest turn of fate. If it would be my daughter’s corpse borne up from the depths of the Connecticut, her body all water-engorged, her face eaten away, how could I possibly manage to go on when her life was torn from me?

PART THREE

SIXTEEN

“C
AN YOU IMAGINE,”
Wade was saying to me. “This woman probably risked her neck to come to this country, spent all her savings on passage, gets a lead on a job, drives up into the boondocks and then … runs into a freaking lunatic!”

We were sitting opposite each other in Paul’s living room. I merely stared back at him, wondering how to broach the subject of whether or not he’d ever borrowed my copy of
The Widower’s Branch
.

“Did they find any literature on her?” he wondered.

This really threw me and I probably gaped at him. “Literature?” I repeated, thinking somehow he was referring to the Wilkie Collins novel.

Wade looked impatient. “Yeah, you know, the Seventh-Day Adventist pamphlets.”

Of course, those. I told him dissolved papers
had
been found in the victim’s pockets, but Anthony said it would be difficult identifying printed matter that had dwelled in river water.

Wade pondered this for a moment and then went on, “Why can’t either of us get a eureka moment on who this guy is? He’s got to be local. My bones are telling me. And I listen to them.”

We were sitting in Paul’s living room, surrounded by a few of the paintings that were the prototypes of his most famous museum pieces: haunting figures that recall the stalwart yet joyful Maya whose innocent features and protuberant, vulnerable-looking eyes one could say are exaggerated versions of Paul’s perpetual childlike look of wonderment. He sets them amok in subway stations and in city scenes, naive, primitive countenances peeking out of crowds like ghosts. He had just been awarded a medal of achievement by the American Academy of Arts and Letters; that very evening Wade and he would be traveling down to Manhattan to accept the honor. From where Wade and I sat, we could peer down a long corridor into the greenhouse that doubled as an artist’s studio. There Paul clung to his rigid eight-hour schedule at an easel in a big empty room that, during the winter, was staged with his beloved orange trees that cheered him through his seasonal affective disorder. Now the citrus were summering outside in a little semicircle fifteen yards beyond the farthest glass wall of the greenhouse that Wade liked to call the ice palace.

“I’m assuming the uncle went back to Maryland,” Wade was saying. He shook his head and remarked, “Must’ve been horrendous for him the moment they found her.”

“What about the parents getting the phone call? And their grief and even their rage.”

There was a long, appreciative pause and then he surprised me. “Well, I understand rage. Rage almost ruined my life.”

Looking around the living room, whose walls were crowded with the paintings of Paul’s contemporaries, I said with some discomfort, “When you nearly destroyed this place.”

“A place I’ve come to love,” he remarked.

“Wade,” I said, “I know how awful your parents were. I guess I never asked what made you do it. What sent you over the edge? Why did you come
here
of all places?” To ravage so many precious and beautiful things, I thought but did not say.

He rubbed his palms on his trousers a few times before he said, “I was so hateful of my life and everyone in it back then I didn’t even realize what I was doing. It’s not like I even chose this house or Paul. It was just a place nearby that belonged to somebody who clearly was a lot better off than we were. And wasn’t my father’s employer.”

“So you would have drawn the line somewhere. You wouldn’t have gone in and destroyed the employer’s house.”

Wade thought about it for a moment. “No, I was scared to death of the man. My father, who was so domineering normally, turned to mush around the guy. I didn’t have the nerve to strike out at somebody I saw who was much more powerful than we were.”

“But Paul?”

“I hardly knew Paul. I had no impression of him, really. Probably what made it easier.” He paused for a moment. “I remember, though, when I broke in here, while it was going on I felt dead to the possibility of any consequence.”

“So it
was
like blind homicidal rage,” I said.

“I guess you could say that. Because I didn’t feel bad afterwards. I felt numb.”

Like a killer would, I thought but again didn’t say.

“But when I was forced to meet Paul and reckon with everything I destroyed, especially all the sentimental objects he’d inherited from his mother, then I began to realize what I’d actually done.”

I considered this and then said, “It’s amazing he was able to forgive you, Wade.”

“It was a grace I didn’t deserve, really. And whenever I get impatient with him, I remind myself of that.

“But I will tell you … and this probably relates to somebody who commits serial homicide … even after I met with Paul and the priest and even after I confessed and apologized, it took quite a long time for me to take full responsibility for it. The regret kept growing and growing over a period of years. I was eventually able to atone for it by helping him, by devoting my life to him.”

“Your rehabilitation,” I suggested.

“Which prisoners, like the ones you teach, will probably never get. Believe me.”

Paul called out from his studio to say he’d join us shortly. And so I knew I had precious little time to ask what I’d come to ask. “Wade,” I said, “you’ve borrowed some of my Wilkie Collins, haven’t you?”

He screwed up his face. “Yeah, several, why?”

“Did you ever read one called
The Widower’s Branch
? It’s his last book. Very short one.”

He looked at me vacantly for a few instants, blinking rapidly. “Sounds familiar, but I don’t think so. What about it?”

I distrusted his answer and without really thinking it through, I explained, “Oh, it’s been missing for a while. It’s the rarest edition of a Wilkie Collins that I own. Turns out I lent it to Breck but it came back … with pages torn out,” I lied. “She claims the book was like that when she took possession of it. And … it was a valuable book.”

Wade looked at me sternly and yet took the bait. “Well, even if I had borrowed it, I would have treated it with kindness. Treating things gently is second nature to me now. I’m constantly dealing with all those one-hundred-year-old records at the clerk’s office; I have to be really careful because they can fall apart so easily.” He paused for a moment, as though pondering something. And it occurred to me that he might have detected suspicion behind my questioning. Here was Wade, who once destroyed beautiful objects indiscriminately, now the steward of land and tax records, the gatekeeper of antique documents. His story, his confession about ransacking the very house we sat in, was illuminating, but who was to say definitively that he had been rehabilitated? Certainly not him. Could a substantial part of his psyche have remained corrupt, still demanding some sort of outlet?

At that moment we both noticed Paul standing at the entrance to the living room holding a cerulean bowl full of tempera paint, the medium he worked in and which he’d made himself from fresh eggs. Hanging from a carpenter’s belt at his side was a large brush that presumably was creating a background wash. Glancing at a bulky plastic wristwatch covered in acrylic splatters, he announced, “We have to be out of here in an hour, Wade. You know that, don’t you?”

“Why do you think I’m sitting here when I should still be at work?”

“Have you sorted out which suit you’re going to wear? You can’t get away with your normal sweater and blue jeans.”

Wade rolled his eyes at me and then scolded Paul, “You don’t think I know that? Jesus Christ!”

There it was, I thought, a glimmer of rage that might derive from a greater well of anger. To dispel the tension between the two of them, I threw something out that I knew would distract them. “Guess who I heard from?”

They both looked at me quizzically. And then Paul said, “The young ’un.”

I nodded.

Wade looked down at his feet. “Doesn’t surprise me.”

Paul’s huge crystal blue eyes were watering. “I suppose he’s back?”

“For a few months.”

“But have you seen him?” they both asked in unison.

“Nope.”

“But you
will
see him?” Paul said with disapproval in his voice.

“He’s up at his parents’ cabin.”

“If you see him you shouldn’t see him alone,” Wade told me.

“I know.”

“If you did that it would be stupid of you,” Paul seconded him.

In light of my immediate thoughts about Wade, I decided to be perverse and, knowing he’d decline, I said, “Do you want to be there when he shows up?”

“Why don’t you get Anthony?” was his response.

“I haven’t told Anthony about this. Anyway, I haven’t agreed to let Matthew stop by. I told him I’d prefer to meet him in a neutral place.”

“At least for once you’re thinking,” Wade said.

“And Breck, does she know about this?” Paul asked.

I gave him a look to mean “What do you think?”

Wade said, “I think she’ll crucify you when she finds out.”

“Everybody is just going to have to let me deal with this on my own,” I told them.

Paul looked disgruntled. “I’ve heard
that
one before. Besides, I thought we all agreed that since it’s just you and Wade and me and Anthony—I guess we can’t include his family anymore—up here on Cloudland, that we’re all going to look after one another.”

“You’re right. We did.”

Wade asked, “So
where
is Matthew living? Is he
living
in the cabin?”

“No, he’s living and working in Boston.”

Paul went on, “Well, I just need to get this off my chest now.… Wade and I—we think you made a big mistake not pressing charges.”

My hand instinctively traced the scarred divot on my neck that lingered from Matthew’s desperate grasp, remembering how for days the skin was puffed and swollen, how difficult it had been to swallow. As it happened in mid-September, at least I could wear a light cotton turtleneck to cover the abrasions until they faded.

“I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

“That’s because you felt responsible somehow,” Wade said.

“The victim is not responsible,” Paul added.

“I felt I could have handled it differently,” I told them.

“We all think that about lots of things we could have handled differently, don’t we?” Paul said with a trace of bitterness.

*   *   *

I called Matthew back when I got home from Paul and Wade’s and he immediately offered to meet me somewhere neutral if that was the only way he could get to see me. “I’ve thought about it and it’s okay if you stop by here tomorrow,” I told him. “Late tomorrow afternoon. Paul and Wade will have returned from New York by then. I’ll promise to call them twice during your visit.”