Cloudland (5 page)

“So where’s Mama hiding out?” I wondered.

“Grading final exams,” the three of them said in unison. Emily was a professor of botany.

Anthony was born in 1967, the same year as I; he looked youthful and fit flipping pancakes with a happy, jaunty air, still wearing his plaid pajama bottoms. You would never guess there might be marital strife lurking behind this happy scene. His domestic ease momentarily put my own slapdash housekeeping into relief. Despite the fact that I wrote a household hints column, my place had always been chaotic: dishes stacked up to a tilting mass; mismatched socks stuffed into drawers, orphan shoes; sludged coffee cups; and too many animals roaming around—and not always in harmony. By comparison, Anthony’s house seemed orderly and clean, and the few times I’d visited them I imagined that he and Emily created a seamless, choreographed domesticity graced by all of Emily’s hothouse plants—orchids and anthurium and Hawaiian lava and plumeria, tendrils of vines strangling banisters and bookcases and support beams.

While Anthony was changing out of his p.j.’s, I went to say a quick hello to Emily. I found her surrounded by what looked like a stack of term papers, sitting at a long green table in the sunroom, which smelled of humid earth and fertilizer. The room was chilly and she was wearing an ecru-colored angora sweater. She seemed deep into her work; I didn’t want to disturb her and told her so.

“Don’t worry. I can take a short break,” Emily said, putting down her yellow highlighter pen. She had light tan skin, a curly mass of black hair with a radiant, natural streak of white running along the top. Looking at me over half-moon reading glasses, she said in her slight delicate drawl, “We need to see you more often. Drop in anytime, there doesn’t have to be a reason.”

“Same goes for you and the girls,” I said. “
Chez moi
.”

Her brow furrowed. “There is one thing I keep meaning to ask: in your column have you ever written about how to get watermarks off of wood furniture?”

“I covered that about a year ago. It depends on whether they’re light or dark marks.”

“They’re light.”

“Okay.” I thought for a moment. “So you take two small dishes, one of table salt and one of mineral oil. You dip your finger in the oil first and then the salt and you rub them into the wood. When the spot is gone then you wipe with a soft, dry cloth and polish it.

“If that doesn’t work, you can try cigar or cigarette ash and boiled linseed oil. You follow the grain of the wood and wipe the ash lightly into the spot, then wipe with the linseed oil.”

Emily laughed. “Now I just have to find some ash and linseed.”

“I’d start with the salt and mineral oil.”

“I will.” She hesitated. “May I ask: how come you write your column under a pseudonym rather than your real name?”

I got this question a lot and it made me uncomfortable. “Because I don’t consider it serious journalism. Like the major pieces, exposés, profiles for national newspapers and magazines I used to do. I got offered the household hints gig after my ex-husband died. A paradox, really. My readers should only know what a bad housekeeper I am. But the pay has been steady and handsome. And I’ve managed to stay with it. My readership keeps growing. The column keeps getting picked up by more and more newspapers.”

“I know lots of people who follow you.”

“The best part is they basically publish what I write. I don’t have to fight over every line the way I used to do with top editors. And I can’t deny it makes me a good income. Besides, I am
known
as Marian Mills. Even if I wanted to use my real name now I wouldn’t be able to.”

“Yeah, but everybody in Vermont and New Hampshire knows your real name.” Emily referred to the considerable amount of local press I’d received.

Having changed into a pair of corduroys and a blue-jean shirt, Anthony now poked his head into his wife’s study. “I’m ready,” he said to me. I noticed that they hardly exhanged a glance. I told Emily good-bye as he led the way down a hall lined with portraiture of both their families: distinguished, scholarly-looking black men; and his more rough-and-tumble Scottish ancestors, the early settlers of Nova Scotia. He opened the door into a room with a large window that faced a majestic white pine tree. In contrast to the profusion of green in the rest of the house, there were no plants at all in the office. Neatly arranged with stacks of medical journals and manila files, his desk faced the door, apparently good feng shui. Two club chairs were placed equidistantly in front of it, the wall behind him paneled with bookshelves that seemed to be filled mostly with psychiatric volumes.

I looked around. “No couch.”

“I do research reading here. Don’t see patients out of my home.”

“Well, that’s good, as I’m not quite ready for patient status.”

He took me seriously. “I don’t mind obliging friends and acquaintances who, like you, are having trouble sleeping. If
I
couldn’t sleep and thought you could help me, I’d be camped out on your doorstep.”

But I’d already been distracted by something I picked out in the bookshelf, a novel called
No Name,
by Wilkie Collins, and I asked Anthony if he’d read it.

Turning around, he scanned his library until he found the eight-hundred-page nineteenth-century novel. “Oh yes,” he said. “I
did
read that … quite a while ago. Great story, as I remember.”

“His stories
are
great,” I opined. “Was it recommended?”

He thought a moment. “Yes, as a matter of fact. By a colleague.”

“Any particular reason?”

He frowned, trying to remember. “I believe I was interested in the story of children losing their birthright because their parents weren’t married when they were born. And how people suffered under that law.”

“So, the psychological implications,” I suggested.

“Right.” He crossed his arms. “I should assume you’re a fan.”

I told him I’d read everything Wilkie Collins had ever published. Several times over. My dearest friend and former college roommate from Wesleyan is a Victorian scholar who spends a lot of time doing research in the UK. Theresa has managed to track down and send me all of the unavailable novels, including some obscure volumes that had seen printings of only several hundred copies. “I’m a defender of the Wilkie Collins faith,” I told Anthony. “I think in his own way he’s as good as Dickens.”

“Tall claim, that. I don’t know if I would agree.”

I told him that when I taught nonfiction and magazine writing at Saint Michael’s College in Burlington, I used to argue with some of the nineteenth-century people in the English department about the merits of Wilkie Collins, whom they taught mainly because of the feminist interest in
The Woman in White.
“Maybe two of his novels were on the syllabus,” I told Anthony. “As part of what’s called ‘The Novel of Sensation.’”

He paused and then said, “You stopped teaching at Saint Mike’s last year, didn’t you?”

I cringed. “Involuntarily.”

“They let you go?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

With a gentle tone he said, “I heard from somewhere about a love affair with a student.”

This was not where I wanted the conversation to head. “Former student,” I said after resisting the question. “It went on for a year. Whether or not I was let go because of that relationship, Saint Mike’s certainly wouldn’t admit to it. They didn’t have to, because I was an adjunct.”

“I think I saw him once, standing at the end of your driveway as I went by. Dark hair, well built.”

“Probably was Matthew.” A queasy feeling came over me. I sat down in one of the club chairs. And then without even realizing it would happen, I felt the tears dripping down my cheeks. Damn, I thought.

Anthony had gone perfectly still, staring back at me with a kindly expression. And in the most gentle voice said, “Here are some tissues,” handing me a box. I took them and stanched my weeping. “So you’re still missing him?”

“I’m sorry, can’t talk about it.”

Anthony raised both his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Okay. But do you think your insomnia could have something to do with … him, too?”

“Probably.”

“Takes a long time,” Anthony said meaningfully, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he was hinting at the state of his own life. “Was he just a student or was he
your
student?”

Peering out the window, distracted by the slow swaying of the pine tree, whose needles seemed to be vibrating along with my longing for him, I reluctantly divulged, “He was my student. A bit older than the others, twenty-four when we met. The affair began
after
the course was over. But before he graduated.”

“But then after a year it went south?”

“Basically, yeah.”

“The first teacher/student affair you’d ever had?” Anthony persisted.

I nodded.

“So how did the university twig?”

“Somebody sent anonymous letters. To the school. To his parents. And even to the school newspaper.”

“Who?”

“We never found out. Could have been anybody. I had jealous colleagues, I had students who thought they were given unfair grades. And I had people who thought my being with him was … unseemly.”

“What’s the age difference?”

“Fifteen years.”

“Not … inordinate.”

“Well, depends on whom you’re asking. Certainly was to his mother when she found out and to my daughter, who is only a couple years younger than he.”

“So what exactly happened with the school?”

“First the administration warned me about the anonymous letters. They asked me to keep a lid on the relationship—at least until he finished school. Which I had no problem doing. But then a second round of letters were sent during the summer after he graduated. Around that time I got a pretty perfunctory phone call from Human Resources explaining they had to cut back on some adjuncts and I was one of them. There was really nothing I could do.”

Anthony meditated on this for a moment. “That’s awful!”

“Tell me about it.”

For a moment he went reflectively silent. “So how exactly did it end?”

“Well, as I said, first all the accusatory letters. Then it got more complicated. I tried to break it off. One afternoon he got drunk and desperate and lost control and…” I paused. “He ended up putting his hands around my throat.”

Anthony’s expression froze. “Around your throat?”

I pointed to my scar.

“Did you continue seeing him after … that incident?”

I shook my head. “I never saw him again. Except for once. He showed up at the prison one day when I was teaching my class.”

There were a few moments of troubled silence. “Obviously you’ve made some connection between yourself and the fact that all these women were strangled.”

“Yes and no.”

“Have you ever considered that … he might have something to do with these murders?”

“Not really. Because he moved to Thailand pretty soon after we broke up. Been there ever since. I’ve gotten letters from him. He told me he wanted to get as far away from me as possible. He told me he never wanted to come back.”

FOUR

I
OFTEN THOUGHT
about the murdered ones, about where their mangled bodies had turned up: the River Road, the Wilder Dam, the train tracks just outside of Sharon, the shallows of the Connecticut River that divides Vermont and New Hampshire. I thought about where divers trolled for them, policemen roaming the marshes with search dogs, joined by concerned townspeople fearful that their idyll of rural life was changing into a killing zone. I’d scrutinized these victims, the published histories of their ordinary lives, their love lives. I’d read about them so many times it’s almost as though somehow I always knew I’d end up discovering one of them up the road from my own house.

He’d been striking every six months, so this all began around seven hundred days before.

One of the murdered women was too poor to own a car, forced by the lack of good public transportation to hitchhike in order to see her boyfriend in a neighboring town. Another, the mother of three children, was jogging along a backcountry road in Meriden, New Hampshire. Another, unable to get cell service, pulled into the shadowy parking lot of a convenience store and was attacked while she was using a grimy pay phone. A mother of two was accosted at her own house and stabbed to death in the kitchen. There have been hundreds of tips and clues, fragmentary descriptions of vehicles slowing down to pick up hitchhikers: Pontiac Sunbirds, GM Saturns, Volvo station wagons, or just plain red sedans. Of course, the cars people thought they saw would be red, evil red.

Angela Parker had already left to go skiing before realizing that she’d forgotten to bring her phone. By nightfall the snow was generally all over the state and was particularly heavy in Windsor County, the temperature hovering at ten degrees. The flakes were whispery light, the wind frosted meringuelike drifts everywhere, and the snow mass was fairly easy for the plows to carve. At a few minutes after midnight, a man had notified the state police that his wife, who had driven seventy-two miles from Lyme, New Hampshire, down to Londonderry, Vermont, had not turned up at home and that when she called him earlier in the evening, at seven
P.M.
, for some reason she hadn’t said which rest area she’d stopped at. It was conjectured later on that perhaps she was hurrying the conversation along because she’d already noticed somebody. She left her ski mittens in the car; they would have prevented her from dialing the pay phone. I imagine in such a squall she might have been the only car stopped at the rest area and perhaps the killer’s car swung into the parking lot while she was speaking to her husband, slowly but purposely driving toward her, headlamps stampeding the snowflakes, until he came to a stop not ten feet from where she stood. Angela Parker’s last words to her husband were “Oh, I should … I’ve got to go. See you … love you.”

The next morning, the man who plowed the parking lot of Interstate 91 apparently arrived in a jolly mood; by then the storm had blown offshore and now Nova Scotia was under siege. The weather had turned cloudless, the snow shimmered and jeweled, and there was that calm feeling of deep winter, of being far from the longest day of the year, which can be comforting to those of Nordic mind-set. I am not one of those Nordic, winter-loving people.