Cloudland (6 page)

So this lighthearted driver found a virgin parking lot and a mound that looked like an enormous marshmallow. He plowed toward it, used to finding broken-down vehicles in rest areas, left there due to overheated engines or flat tires or steering columns that have suddenly snapped like brittle necks. He plowed without being able to see that the car doors were ajar. He plowed without ever knowing that the snow was packed down by the pedals, a pair of ski pants with a wallet inside them lay on the passenger’s side, and beads of frozen blood were sprayed on the seats. I imagined that he felt generous toward this stranded, abandoned car, because with his big yellow plowing blade he chiseled around it the shape of a heart.

Nearly all of these women were found months after they disappeared, their bodies in advanced states of decomposition that made it more difficult to find traces of foreign DNA. The only one found hours after she was murdered was Janet Tourvalon, a bosomy, fair-haired woman in her mid-thirties who lived just outside of Claremont, New Hampshire. One morning a year ago, summer, she got her children off to day camp, put on a chartreuse bikini, took her favorite sunning chaise, and sat out in her backyard facing the Connecticut River. At noon, she went inside to have her lunch, apparently noticed by several male motorists who admitted to driving by her house just to be able to have a glimpse of her scantily clad. But she never returned to her tanning spot. Hours later her sandals were found perfectly lined up outside where she’d removed them, a plastic bottle of Bain de Soleil SPF 40 lying on top of them. Her husband, an electrical contractor, had called from his job site, hoping she’d prepare a check for one of his employees; when she didn’t answer the phone he came home to fetch the check himself.

He found his wife in her bathing suit, lying across the kitchen threshold, eyes wide open, smeared in her own blood, which had exsanguinated into a pool reflecting the fluorescent tube lamps overhead. The side of her head was tilted at an unnatural angle against the pocket kitchen door, her neck violet and bruised, her arms slashed so that in various places he could see the whiteness of her bones. Nothing else in the house had been disrupted; there was a freshly baked lemon pound cake cooling on a rack not five feet away from where she lay. On the kitchen table was a plate with discarded crusts of a turkey sandwich and a small creamy pile of coleslaw purchased at the corner store less than a mile away, now clustered with green flies laying fresh eggs.

For a long time Janet Tourvalon’s husband was unable to articulate the feeling so familiar to me now, of entering a time warp of grief—his for the dead, mine for the living and the dead—when a block of hours in a day dislodges from one’s sense of time and suddenly the fact that it’s evening is a travesty. When he came through the front door and saw all that dark, viscous liquid rippling across his kitchen floor, he never cried out, but rather looked with agonized bewilderment at the mother of his children lying in a skewed position, sliced to her marrow, as still as a deep-forest kill. He somehow managed to swallow the gag that erupted in his throat, picked up the phone, and called 911 (and later on 911 would replay the tape of his conversation for the police). He sat down with his wife, held one of her cold, bloodied hands in both of his, and listened to the horrific stillness of her death. Then described how he washed his hands and felt compelled to trudge upstairs to his office and write the check that he’d come home to fetch for one of his subcontractors. This was thought suspicious by the investigators, whereas I looked upon his act as a methodical person’s attempt to reaffirm his life in the midst of brutal horror. Once he’d managed to accomplish the check signing, he tried ringing the summer camp to ask that his children be kept from boarding the bus home, but found they’d already left. And so the twelve- and eight-year-old arrived home shortly after the police did, and Mr. Tourvalon was waiting for them to climb down the steep stairs of the bus. Ushering them into his car, he explained that their mother had died unexpectedly, and then, with a police escort, drove them to the house of his parents, who luckily lived nearby.

The detectives who arrived on the scene immediately suspected him. They felt his calm and disconnected affect was typical of a violent offender numbed to his gruesome act, a man able to carry on living and working and taking care of children while his wife lay mangled in their modern, up-to-date kitchen.

But when Mr. Tourvalon’s employees were questioned, an airtight alibi emerged: until he left in the late afternoon to go home and fetch the check, he’d been stuck all day on his job site, his time fully accounted for. And then the medical examiner in Concord, New Hampshire, pronounced that Janet Tourvalon had died close to noon, her wounds severe enough that she expired rather quickly. Finally the investigators reluctantly abandoned the notion of Mr. Tourvalon as the madman drifting around the Upper Connecticut River Valley, searching for just the right woman to murder.

*   *   *

In the middle of April, two weeks after I found Angela Parker’s body, Anthony called one afternoon right before I left to teach my reading and writing class at the local minimum-security prison. Apparently the warden was putting in my group a recent inductee who’d been arrested and booked just a few days before for going into a gas station mini-market at eleven-thirty at night, yanking out his sizeable erect penis, and laying it on the counter in full view of the young woman working the till. Outraged, she’d begun screaming; he in turn leaped over the counter and wedged his hand over her mouth to quiet her down. In the midst of the struggle a football player from Dartmouth College strolled into the store to buy beer, yanked the pervert off the poor woman, and then decked him. This particular inmate, Anthony informed me, was one of several locals being investigated.

The prison is located right in downtown Woodstock, ironically one of the wealthiest towns in Vermont, whose buildings and surrounding land had been conserved by twin industrial titans: Frederick Billings, the president of the Northern Pacific Railroad, who financed the western railroad systems and for whom Billings, Montana, is named; and Lawrence Rockefeller. Frederick Billings became a leader in forestry management at a time when Vermont’s rolling hillsides had been deforested by the potash industries and sheep farmers. Billings planted thousands of trees on his estate, which became one of the first continuously managed forests in North America. His granddaughter Mary French, who married Lawrence Rockefeller, poured a lot of money into refurbishing this shire town’s nineteenth-century brick and clapboard buildings. The result of their efforts: everything in Woodstock is almost too picture-perfect, especially the central green surrounded by grand neocolonials and Georgian mansions and Greek revivals.
The New York Times
once hailed Woodstock as the Hollywood of Vermont, suggesting that in all its beauty, it came off like a stage on a movie lot. The prison is located incongruously amongst all this prosperity in a building that was once a courthouse.

Most of my “students” were waiting to be transferred to the maximum-security prison down in Springfield. As this was my first day teaching since I found the body of Angela Parker, I knew that “my felons,” as I affectionately called them, would ask about it. And I would tell them what I’d told the police and Anthony and everyone else, trotting out my signature description about the Coca-Cola snow and the pale, frosted face, beads of lapis draping her chest that only became visible when Marco Prozzo, wearing a pair of rubber gloves, unzipped her parka in search of corroborating wounds. I conjectured that when I told my prisoner-students my story, their faces would hardly be as shocked or concerned as those of the townspeople and the authorities, but rather greedy for further details. But who would the new guy be; and how creepy and unnerving if he happened to be the killer—then, too, how ridiculously coincidental. And yet just as much as I might have flinched from meeting him, I actually dreaded seeing the woman with whom Anthony Waite was probably having an affair: Fiona Pierce, who also volunteers at the jail, where she teaches an art class.

A second-grade teacher at the local elementary school, Fiona Pierce happens to be one of the few people in the town of Woodstock who ever laid eyes on Matthew Blake, when, in the wake of our tumultuous breakup, he showed up at the prison and waited two hours for me in the anteroom of the warden’s office.

That afternoon two years ago, Fiona and I had finished our instruction and were walking together down the long, polished cement corridor on our way out of the complex. We were brainstorming about requisitioning more art and paper supplies from the state, resolving to pick them up on our own at Staples in West Lebanon, when I saw Matthew sitting in a plastic half-moon chair and staring at us. His soft, luxuriant brown hair was parted in the center and brushed back, a throwback to an eighties hairstyle. He liked having a mane, liked having it brush against his bare broad shoulders; and it was lovely hair that added softness to a body that sometimes I’d found youthfully hard and unforgiving when we made love. It had been three months since our final incident, and all I could do was stare back at him before finally managing to blurt out, “
Why
 … are you
here
?” Then Fiona, in a glance taking him in and saying, “I’ll get going, Catherine. We can always pick up on this later.”

In leaving, Fiona took an appraising glance at Matthew—and I could tell she found him attractive. And then she looked at me, competitively, I believed at the time, perhaps wondering why this man in his mid-twenties would pursue somebody fifteen years older. As I watched her heading toward the exit, I looked to make sure there were other people around: a few guards were standing in a group perhaps fifteen yards away.

I regarded Matthew again and shook my head. “You can’t stay, you have to go. You promised you wouldn’t come near me again.”

“I know, I know I promised … but please talk to me,” he said. “I’m in hell.”

“You don’t think I am?” Then I noticed the red cardboard top of a Marlboro pack sticking out of his shirt pocket. “Don’t tell me you started smoking again!”

“I know I promised you I wouldn’t. But I don’t have you after me about it, either. So I started again and can’t quit.” He looked at me with beggar’s eyes, and his large veined hands were shaking.

This admission pierced through my flimsy armor. I avoided staring at his face directly, a man’s face on somebody so young. His pain was so much more difficult to handle than his fury.

He reached for the pack.

“You can’t in here,” I warned.

He said, “I know I can’t. I just want it—I need something—in my hand.” He took a cigarette out and held it between two shaking fingers. “I continuously feel like shit, Catherine,” he said, but managed to smile again. “Seeing you … this is a break … from it.”

I shut my eyes and swallowed and said, “Don’t, please!”

He ran his hand tightly across the top of his head, gathering his hair in a fist and pressing it against the back of his neck. “At least you’re lucky you have somewhere else to be, ” he said. “Everywhere I go in Burlington reminds me of us.”

“We’ve spent plenty of time down here at my house, too. It’s not like I don’t go around and find things that remind me of you, especially what you left behind.”

“I guess I need to collect it.”

“Better to tell me where you want me to send it.”

I needed to get to my classroom and was about to inform him when he looked at me fixedly. “I’m trying to say, Catherine, that I had a life before you. All I want now is to have that life back.”

“You sound quite resentful,” I said. “I didn’t take your life away from you.”

“Well, I was happy until you came along,” he said.

“And I was happy until
you
came along, ” I told him.

Without another word, he got up and left the prison. He had a loping walk in which his shoulders dipped from side to side, an endearing stride that I could have spotted in a crowd; and with a terrible ache I knew I would miss it, I knew it would be a very long time until I saw him again. Shortly thereafter he fled the country for Thailand.

*   *   *

When I came into our little shared office in the prison, Fiona was leaning over a paper cutter, shearing large squares out of thick vanilla-colored drawing paper, the precise ripping sound that I always used to love in grade school now raking my nerves. She turned to me with a look of dolorous concern that did not belie her air of blooming happiness. Now
she
was the one in love, radiantly in love with Anthony Waite. And admittedly I was jealous, wondering what he saw in an attractive woman who I imagined was a lot less interesting than his wife.

“Catherine,” she said softly, dropping her sheaf of drawing papers and moving toward me. “How are you doing with everything?”

I waved her away, something I would not have done so blatantly in the past. “I’m okay, really. Just, ya know, shook up. And therefore can’t sleep. Don’t,” I warned, meaning don’t hug me, which is something that Fiona did reflexively with many people. I could see how my defensive response offended her. “Everybody’s worrying,” I complained. “And while I appreciate it, I would like things to go on normally. Remember,
I
didn’t know her. No sympathy should be spent on me.”

“I realize that,” Fiona said, “but finding a body—”

“You find people dead in your life,” I made myself say. “And it’s a lot worse when you actually do know them. Although in this case, unfortunately she was … brutalized.” Fiona flinched at my choice of word. “And then lay there frozen for months. So it wasn’t the ordinary finding of a body. Anyway, how are
you
doing?” I asked.

She frowned at me. “You really want to know?”

“I asked, didn’t I?”

“Well, the usual: swamped at school. I have parent/teacher conferences next week.”

I wouldn’t say that Fiona and I have ever been what one would call “friendly.” We do see each other every other Monday at the prison and sometimes have sat together at town meetings. Perhaps her greatest strength is her way of setting you at ease, as though you could confide in her and in return she’d empathize and guard your confidence. She jogs around Woodstock’s stately green, stays fit, seems to have plenty of friends, mainly male friends, and there is something just a little bit disconcertingly bubbly about her. And I know I’m splitting hairs, but Fiona does have this one yellowed front tooth that I always find myself staring at, wondering why she doesn’t have it attended to. That tooth drives Wade crazy. Whenever he sees Fiona he says, “I wish she’d just get that damned thing bleached!”