Cloudland (3 page)

“I think he’s just trying to mix it all up, red-herring style,” Anthony said.

“Or maybe just getting bolder,” I said, “and taunting us with clues.”

Sheila, our waitress, arrived with more coffee and refilled Anthony’s cup and mine. “Whatya up to these days?” she said to everyone. “You doing all right, honey,” she addressed me, and then was uncharacteristically direct for a Vermonter. “Talk about one crazy day, going for a walk and finding a stiff in the snow!”

“Not one of my better ones.”

She grimaced. “I can only imagine.”

Sheila was a tough-talking, rail-thin blonde who was rumored to have been a partner in a crystal meth lab that was run out of an auto body shop attached to an old, degraded farmhouse. The local scuttlebutt claimed that she was out of town when the operation was raided and shut down.

Glancing at Paul, who knew her a lot better than Anthony, I said to Sheila, “I’m coping. And
you
?”

“Oh, keeping my thoughts and deeds pure,” she said with a saucy smile. “Be a lot happier when the weather perks.” We all reflexively glanced out the window across the parking lot and past the drive-up bank teller to a short field where the snow had melted down to stubbled grasses that were a monochrome, mud-seasonal brown. “Dreary, isn’t it?” Sheila remarked. I looked back and saw her winking flirtatiously at Anthony, who waited until she drifted over to the next table of customers.

“I think she
likes
you,” I said.

Ignoring my remark, Anthony said sotto voce, “Angela Parker was an atheist … according to her husband.”

“Well then, slim chance she’d be carrying around inspirational literature in the pocket of her ski jacket,” said Paul, who tore his last piece of toast in half and tossed it on his plate. He unfolded his paper napkin and laid it on top so that it spread over his unfinished omelet like a funeral shroud.

*   *   *

On the way out of the restaurant, Paul stopped to chat with our local state representative, who was dining alone at the counter. As Anthony and I walked to the parking lot, he asked how I’d been feeling day to day. “You’re looking a bit slimmer than your usual svelte self,” he said.

I told him I’d scarcely eaten in the seventy-two hours since I’d found her, my thoughts still hounded by visions of pink parkas, a lacerated neck, and melting ice on her forehead.

I told him that over and over again I’d been imagining myself in my last day of life, leaving my family for an outing with friends, the ozone smell of snow in early hours, sweet wood smoke, the feeling of a solitary adventure on the horizon, driving with my skis in the back of the car, and then, after a long day on the slopes, legs and thighs burning from all the exertion, heading home cozy and warm as the snow begins to ping the windshield. I’m gripping the steering wheel tightly, peering out into diminished visibility, holding the road carefully, afraid of veering off the highway, just wanting to make it back to my family safe and sound.

“I feel disconnected and vague,” I admitted. “All the time. I usually have trouble sleeping. Now it’s worse than ever.”

“Do you take anything for it, the insomnia?”

“On and off. Basically just live with it. Stay up late at night reading.”

Raking his heel across a loose patch of gravel as though to get a cake of mud off of it, Anthony said, “I’m surprised Breck hasn’t offered to come and visit.”

My daughter was living five hours away in New Jersey. I hadn’t seen her since early January. “Breck’s caught up in her girlfriend right now,” I explained with a pang of missing her. “But she calls fairly frequently. When I told her what happened she offered to come … halfheartedly.”

He fixed his pale eyes on me. “Why don’t you drop by the house. I’m happy to give you a script … for your sleep.”

I hesitated.

“Seriously. When is good for you? How’s tomorrow morning?”

“Tomorrow morning’s fine.”

“Come by around…” He thought a moment. “Ten o’clock.… Now, just one more thing, Catherine,” he said, looking toward Paul, who was standing well out of earshot. “You’re not going to write about anything we spoke of, are you?”

This puzzled me; he was well aware that I no longer did investigative journalism.

“I never knew you gave that up forever,” Anthony said when I reminded him.

“Never say forever … but for the most part, anyway. Not that I think that you read my columns, but FYI: the only thing that might be usable from what you told me would be ‘how to stop a killer with a bag of frozen strawberries,’ which I honestly think my syndicate editors might sneer at.”

He laughed and then said, “I know you’ve done a lot of true crime reporting. And I know you’ve been following this investigation.…”

“Meticulously,” I told him.

“I’d like to be able to discuss … certain findings with you from time to time to get your take on things.” Glancing at the restaurant, where Paul was just beginning to make his way toward us, Anthony said, “I think you could be helpful to me. But it would just have to be between us. And there will be certain things that I might not be able to divulge.”

“I understand. I’d be happy to assist.”

“Great.” He gave me a bone-breaking hug, approached Paul and squeezed his shoulder, then trotted off to his red pickup truck.

Paul and I climbed into his vintage Saab and drove a mile homeward down Route 12 as it opened onto a piebald landscape of snow and brown. It was April 1, still many weeks away from any hint of green.

“You’re awfully quiet, dearie,” he said to me.

“That’s because I’m feeling
queerie.
” I managed to smile.

“How come?”

“I keep thinking about her, poor soul.”

“Angela, you mean?” Paul said.

“Of course Angela! I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound so impatient.”

“It’s okay … Oh now,
Je
sus!” Paul exclaimed, and pulled over to the side of the road.

“What’s wrong?”

“I forgot to pick up a dozen eggs.”

“You just had them … for breakfast.”

“Not for eating,” he snorted. “For mixing tempera.”

Then something occurred to me. “Tell you what, leave me at Wade’s office, go get your eggies, and I’ll make Wade give me a ride home.”

“Fine,” Paul said, but then went ruefully quiet as he carefully made a U-turn and drove us back toward Hartland Three Corners. “When you go in there, tell my…” He hesitated and then said, “
Son
he owes me a call.”

“Before I leave, I’ll pick up the phone and I’ll put it in his hands.”

Paul finally stopped the car in front of the town clerk’s office, turned to me, and said, “I was watching you while Anthony was talking. I saw you touch your neck like that.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, of course I was wondering—”

“I figured you were wondering.”

“That boy,” he said with a dismissive tone.

“Yeah, I was thinking about
that boy,
” I said with the bitter taste of longing.

“Still away, though, isn’t he?”

“Yup. Says he’s never coming back.”

“I certainly hope that’s true.…”

“You do, huh?”

“I hope
you
do!”

I didn’t answer.

THREE

H
E WAS A STUDENT OF MINE
who strategically waited until the class was over before approaching me. I used to call him a boy; however, he was very much a man in every way except perhaps in his unbridled idealism. And I guess in the end that idealism came between us but it didn’t kill us. Youth that is as yet unbroken allows the young to believe that if they set their mind, most of what they desire will be within their grasp. He was no different.

I don’t believe in love at first sight. I do believe that some people dazzle you at first glance; however, who they really are never catches up to how they first appear. In my experience the ones who crawl under your skin and stay there like stubborn splinters are those who might put you off at first with, let’s say, nervous arrogance or something physical such as pinched and narrow shoulders. But then they begin to grow on you slowly, insidiously, until you realize they somehow know you without knowing you, that their body fits yours perfectly, that their touch and their words have set your whole being burning on some kind of crazy high flame. And no matter what happens, that flame continues to burn. It burns even after you’ve reached the sad and disillusioning moment when you realize the complications greatly outnumber the virtues, it burns when you know you’re sinking into a terrible, tortured darkness.

I was thinking this while walking into the Hartland town hall, thinking that if you hate longing and pain you can choose to live on the outside of things and not let them or anyone in. As much as I had suffered over him, I was still glad that I loved him, glad that I’d allowed myself few delusions about the relationship.

But, ironically, I had deluded myself about Vermont. About all the years I spent here
part time
thinking I was woven into the local fabric, believing that I was passionate about the rural conflicts, that I cared about the disputed rights of public passage over class 4 roads, or even that I grieved over reckless rural tragedies such as when four high school kids driving at eighty miles an hour in a fifty-mile-per-hour zone hit black ice and thundered into the bedroom of a local veterinarian, killing everyone involved but the doctor, who luckily was out in her barn feeding farm animals. It was only when I began living here full time eight years ago that I really began to cleave to the placid, lovely landscape, that I truly felt the resentments between the landed gentry and the tradespeople forced to rely upon them, that I became embroiled in the disputes about architectural integrity. But most of all I entered deeply into the lives of Paul (whom I’d known for years) and his adopted son, Wade.

Their relationship began in a most usual way. At one time Wade and his parents lived down the road from Paul in caretakers’ quarters; Wade’s father used to manage the one-thousand-acre farm that still belongs to the CEO of a biotech firm who lives primarily in Boston. Wade’s father was annoyed that his son shied away from helping him take care of the vast tracts of land and cattle, whereas Wade’s mother, who worked as a part-time dressmaker, was horrified and embarrassed by her son’s fascination with fashion patterns. Both parents called him “lazy” and “girly.” He despised them so much that he ended up venting his rage on Paul, the “rich” artist who lived nearby.

One winter evening while Paul was in Florida, Wade broke into the artist’s home and went on a rampage. He demolished crystal goblets and Windermere porcelain plates. He shattered pre-Columbian vessels and, with an ax he’d found in the barn, splintered ancient African masks. He tore down curtains, flung books from the shelves and scalped them from their bindings. He found an heirloom strand of
peau d’ange
pearls that he snapped, loose baubles bouncing and scattering over the wood floors into nooks and crannies and taking forever to find. At least he had the presence of mind to leave Paul’s canvases alone, as well as those of some of his contemporaries, including a Robert Motherwell.

When Wade was suspected and finally tracked down by the police, the priest of the local Catholic church intervened. He contacted Paul, described Wade’s miserable home life, and managed to bring the two of them together. Wade offered a sincere apology and proposed to atone for the damages by doing odd jobs around Paul’s house for a year. After some careful consideration, Paul decided to accept Wade’s offer. Soon he began to feel compassionate toward the young man, insisted on paying him for household chores, and, after Wade learned how to drive, to run errands. As their unconventional friendship solidified, Wade eventually learned everything he could about Paul’s art: how to stretch canvases, to make tempera, and soon began keeping track of all the paintings for cataloging and exhibitions. His work was meticulous and it served him well when eventually he was elected to be the town clerk.

The closer the two became, however, the more Wade drifted away from his family, who were repulsed by his innocent friendship with Paul. This happened to coincide with Wade’s father being laid off by the Boston CEO. When his parents ended up taking another job and moving to a neighboring town, Wade began living at Paul’s house. Ten years later Paul adopted him, and from then on they’d lived together as father and son in an uneasy alliance. As though having never quite recovered from that strange initiation, their relationship, though close, had always been marked by a certain tension. They reminded me of two lovers who’d become strictly platonic and who’d been living together for far too long.

*   *   *

Wade was sitting at his desk, perusing a stack of revised tax bills, one of his early spring tasks. Thirty-eight years old, he was dressed in neatly pressed blue-collar Carhartt jeans and a bulky sweater, which I knew he wore to give padding to his scrawny upper body. His mustache was pencil-thin, but it was as much of a mustache as he could muster.

“You wanted to see me?” I said to him.

He looked up and smiled sardonically. “Hiya, Catherine. Give me a sec, will you.”

Across from Wade, sitting at a long, scarred banquet table, was John Dutton, a nonagenarian historian for Windsor County. He was scrutinizing record books and reading aloud the details of land records and property transfers, road construction and subdivisions to a transcriptionist that Wade used from time to time. John was a deliberate man with a face that showed its age like dried, cracked earth. Entries handwritten a hundred years ago are difficult for most people to decipher; John Dutton, with amazingly sharp lucidity, was able to read the faded sepia-colored ink in the old ledgers. He declaimed names aloud with beautiful cadence and deliberation, and they were invariably proper English names: Evangeline Peabody sold 6.2 acres to Lawrence Saunders for sixty-two dollars; William Mathews subdivided a five-hundred-acre parcel of woodlands and wetlands and sold a seventy-five-acre meadow to Alida Buchanan; a class 4 road runs across the northern ridge of Robert Bacon’s land one hundred yards from the property line. Seeing that John was in the midst of his stentorian declarations, I suggested to Wade that we talk in the records room.