Cloudland (4 page)

He gestured his assent, and I followed him into an adjacent office with one entire wall neatly filled with dozens of green and red leather binders. The room smelled like glue and carbon paper. We sat down opposite each other at a rectangular monk’s table.

He scrutinized me. “Miss Rural Elegance, you look tired.”

“I’m a wreck. Can’t sleep. Nightmares.”

“Maybe you should read two books at night instead of one.”

“I do. Last night I started with a Josephine Tey mystery and then around three I switched to this book about what the world would be like if none of us were in it.” I paused and ran my hands over the table bearing the scars of what was probably life at the mills in the nineteenth century. Thinking for a moment of all those hardscrabble lives, I said, “I just keep seeing her. I keep seeing Angela where I found her. It was like he … it was like he dug up the fresh snow so he could lean her against that tree. So that somebody like me would find her propped up and bright pink when the melting began. When the sun was thawing her face.”

“So you think he thought about it, that he planned it … how she was going to look in three months’ time?”

“I do.”

I heard a gust of early-spring wind slamming against the town hall, the rafters creaking. Wade had a lost look on his face and for a moment he reminded me of an emaciated, contemplative figure in one of Paul’s better-known paintings, owned by the Whitney Museum. And then I remembered.

“Before I forget, Paul wants you to call.”

Wade hunched down in his chair. “Yeah, I know, he left one of his frantic messages. Worrying about something insignificant.”

“Worrying about you, mostly, I would say.”

“What’s to worry? I have no other life. No lover. He sees me every day and night.”

“That’s just it. Maybe he thinks you will … go off eventually and leave him.”

“How could I do that? He needs me. I’ve repeatedly told him that I’m terminally single.” Wade paused thoughtfully. “He’s just generally afraid of things.”

“Elderly fright, I think they call it.”

The biographical content on Wikipedia and other Internet sources gave conflicting information about Paul’s actual age. He claimed to be seventy-five, but both Wade and I hedged that he was closer to eighty—Paul guarded his real age as zealously as an over-the-hill starlet. The wind had brought with it a raw draft of cold that seeped into the room. I rubbed my hands together. “Jesum … chilly in here,” I said.

Wade indicated all the leather-bound folders of land transfers, of births and deaths and marriages. “It can get a bit breezy from all the ghosts trafficking in and out of this place,” he remarked.

“Come on!”

“I’m telling you. It gets really weird in here sometimes when you’re alone. Winter nights especially. I often think I hear people whispering—”

“Whispering words of the dead,” I said. “And I wonder what they’re saying to each other.”

“How about what they’re saying about
us,
” Wade amended. He crossed his legs at the ankles and looked at me appraisingly. “Okay, so what did Anthony want from you two?”

I shook my head. “Not supposed to tell anybody.”

“You don’t think Paul’s going to blab as soon as I get home?”

“So let
him
break the confidence.”

“You’re being ridiculous. I’m going to know by nightfall so you might as well just spill it now.”

He was right. And so I explained that Anthony had just become an unofficial psychiatric consult for the serial murders.

“So that must mean Doc McCarthy is officially gaga.”

“Apparently so.” And then, knowing that he’d soon hear it from Paul, I relayed the gist of the breakfast conversation: that, according to Anthony, the potter, Marjorie Poole, was drunk and high when she was assaulted, and a religious pamphlet was stuffed into her pocket as well as in the pocket of Angela Parker.

Wade bunched up his lips so that one side of his flimsy mustache touched the tip of his nose. “But how was that kept out of the newspaper?”

I told him what a journalist knows: that investigators filter what goes public; presumably, the killer will be out there reading whatever is written and published. That there are details they don’t want him to know they know.

“So now they think this guy is some religious freak?” Wade was incredulous. “Anybody buying that?”

“Not yet.”

“How about you?”

“Me? What do I know to think?”

Through the closed doors we could make out John Dutton’s mellifluous droning of the names of people who, by all accounts, had finer handwriting and more hours of the day to devote to the inscription of ledgers with painstaking, calligraphic flourishes, when families tended to settle in one home and stay put for the rest of their lives and even when death itself didn’t seem like such an anomaly.

Wade remarked, “In this day and age you’d figure they could get some of his DNA off of Marjorie or Angela or any of the others.”

“He wears gloves, Wade.”

“Still … something … hair or fibers.” He paused for a moment. “Catherine, it amazes me we had no idea somebody drove up our road and dumped a body.”

Even though he appeared concerned, he sounded oddly flat and dispassionate, and I took dutiful note of this. “We’re hardly clairvoyants,” I told him.

“No, we’re certainly not. And that’s why I called you. Because there is something else going on that I think you should know.”

“Shoot,” I said.

“I was fixing a leak in the greenhouse over the weekend. I saw Emily Waite driving down the road like a bat out of hell. Bouncing over potholes.”

“She’s usually such a careful driver,” I noted.

“Well, obviously in a state. When she glanced at me, she looked, pardon the expression, dead,” Wade said, pausing for effect. “Then five minutes later I saw Fiona, Fiona Pierce, driving up the hill in her Volkswagen Beetle.”

“And?”

“That’s the third time I’ve seen Emily leaving and Fiona arriving,” Wade said with no inflection in his voice.

Fiona was one of my fellow volunteers at the prison. “Maybe she knows one of the weekend people,” I made myself say, even though I sensed where he was heading.

“I also saw them early in the winter, Anthony
and
Fiona walking in the snow at the tree line way behind Paul’s house—Emily and the girls weren’t home.”

“How come you never told me
then
?”

“Because
then
I didn’t know for sure what was going on.” Wade leaned back in his swivel chair. “And because I knew it would bug you.”

“So you just wait until I find somebody murdered and
then
tell me?”

“Hey, I can’t help … the timing of certain things.”

“Okay, let’s go slow. So they were walking out in the open?”

“Yes, Catherine, in the open.”

“And they seemed …
together
.”

“Holding hands together.”

I knew that Wade needed to get back to work, but I wanted to sit there in his vault of deeds and land records, the moldering smells of nineteenth-century documents, letting the news settle in a bit more. I wondered whether Emily had any idea about Fiona. Finally I said, “The Waites have always seemed … relatively content together.”

“I won’t disagree,” Wade said.

“But people should realize that if they do something on the QT around here, more often than not somebody in this town will find out about it.”

Wade looked at me warily. “Except of course if they happen to be a serial killer.”

*   *   *

The following morning the temperature had remained unseasonably mild. Rather than drive the mile and a half up the road to Anthony’s house, I put on a black cashmere turtleneck and a loden wool vest that my daughter, Breck, and I found on sale at a local clothier called Ibex and walked.

Cloudland Road is flanked on either side by tall oaks that in the summer cast a lovely drape of cooling shade. Wide-open meadows and pastures gently undulate as they stretch far back to forest, the land itself slowly rising to an elevation of 1,900 feet and opening to a view of the Green Mountains that to the north end up at Camel’s Hump, and in the blue, hazy southern distance are framed by Mount Ascutney. Growing up, I’d spent summers and holidays in Vermont, and when I got married, my husband and I bought my 1800s Cape on Cloudland and continued commuting from New York City until we got divorced. Within a year of our split he developed an aggressive form of throat cancer and died, and I then began living here full time with my daughter. That was eight years ago (when Breck was fourteen) and Paul and his adopted son, Wade, were the only other year-round residents. Anthony, his wife, and their two daughters arrived a few years later.

Paul and I bought our parcels—mine fifty acres, his twenty—before property values skyrocketed. Anthony inherited approximately forty from his American grandmother. The rest of the pristine land is owned by the biotech CEO out of Boston who spends little time in his picturesque
Architectural Digest
farmhouse but who has nevertheless stockpiled a thousand acres, installed Scottish Highland cattle, and built Cape-style guesthouses for his friends and caretakers along the road and on several pinnacles of carefully cleared hillside. He’d had one of the ponds dredged in a perfect hourglass shape to please his reputedly implacable wife. My favorite house of his that he built and rarely uses is graced with a widow’s walk that gives a commanding yet lonely vantage point of the land with its swales and distant woods. Cloudland has always been largely uninhabited. When you drive along the road itself, it’s a rare thing when another car passes in the opposite direction—in short, a perfect location to excavate layers of deep snow and trundle a body.

Spring comes relatively late to northern New England: early April often feels like dead of winter. Leaves generally don’t even bud for another six weeks; you never see croci until at least the third week. That day I set out into a landscape that was still largely snowbound. At the fringe of a sloping pasture stood a copse of sumacs whose vermilion leaves of the previous autumn still clung to the branches and looked like drops of blood holding fast to white fabric. I was passing the orchard for the first time since finding the body and saw that it was cordoned off, yellow police tape spooled from tree to tree, sometimes angling sharply to circumscribe its boundary. In places where the tape had been tied off, extra pieces hung like dead appendages fluttering in the wind. I could see pockmarks where the snow had been scooped up for lab sampling—all in all, an eerie scene like something out of a TV police drama. This was the sort of disturbance I thought I was moving away from when I finally left New York City.

I walked past Paul’s house and noticed a front loader pawing at a bunch of tree stumps, the freshly spaded earth a rich terra-cotta brown. I remembered him mentioning a plan to expand his vegetable garden, but the ground, in my opinion, was still too frozen to excavate. I continued another half mile to Anthony’s, set at the back of gently sloped snowy fields, a two-hundred-year-old Colonial, stained a deep Delft blue, with an unattached barn that is painted pristine white, and, like many of the old Vermont barns, is slowly caving in on itself.

The fact is I knew the Waites somewhat, but not nearly as well as I might have. Up until now I’d kept a bit of a distance from them because of a strange coincidence. Anthony had done his medical residency at a hospital in Saint John, New Brunswick, near to Grand Manan Island, where my family had kept a summer residence since 1865. The first time we were introduced I quickly figured out that he was the young doctor who’d come over from the mainland to attend to my stubborn, domineering grandmother, who’d been having trouble breathing but refused to be hospitalized. Once we established that I was one of the Grand Manan Winslows, Anthony recounted his first glimpse of Granny sitting on the porch facing the lighthouse on Bancroft Point and saying, “I’ll be right here plugged into this chair when I go,” as he pulled a glittering vial and a needle out of his black bag. “But not yet,” she told him with wide-eyed trepidation. “Don’t worry, I’m not euthanizing you,” he joked, preparing the injection, dosing her with a steroid that made her a lot more comfortable. Granny was amused by Anthony’s comeback, and subsequently, whenever something ailed, she’d call and request him. Despite his crippling schedule, he would show up; the old lady apparently intrigued him.

Even though I wasn’t by birth a New Englander, I adopted a bit of a New England attitude toward Anthony in that I found it awkward that he actually knew my grandmother. Then, too, I happened to remember a negative remark Granny once made about the young physician who had tended to her, specifically about a relationship that he’d been in which he’d ended “cruelly”—that was the word she used.

I knocked on the sliding glass door that led to his kitchen and he opened it with a grand gesture, hair tumbling into his eyes, a dishcloth balanced on his broad shoulder. He told me to come on in, “Just pulling a few more pancakes,” returning to an old, enameled, wood-fed cookstove, beige disks of batter smoking in a black skillet. The kitchen smelled of yeast and coffee, and his two young daughters were sitting quietly at the table, elbows planted on vinyl place mats decorated with huge green frogs. Because their maternal grandmother was black, they had wonderful clear and dusky complexions. They were staring at me in such a way that I almost felt foolish for intruding.

“Good morning,” said the eldest, twelve years old, whose eyes looked huge behind the lenses of her large round tortoiseshell glasses.

“Hiya, Mrs. Winslow,” said the slightly younger and more striking of the two, with carrot-red hair and lots of big, dark freckles.

“I told you before you can call me Catherine,” I said to them.

Glancing at her father, who was ladling more batter into his skillet, the youngest said to me, “Dad says we’re supposed to call you Miss or Mrs.”

I turned to Anthony, who said, “Until you are given permission otherwise. She’d like you to call her Catherine,” he told his girls, laughing to himself while I looked around the kitchen.