Cloudland (7 page)

I put down my spiral notebook and the seven one-page assignments that I’d collected from the felons the previous session, for the most part atrociously written and which I’d gone over relentlessly with a red pen. “Did I see you drive by me the other day, Fiona?” I asked her, which of course I hadn’t.

She couldn’t help but glance away for a moment. “Where?”

“Up on Cloudland.”

She blushed deeply. “Oh … I keep forgetting you live up there.”

“Whom do you know up there besides me?” I asked her mildly, thinking she must realize that there were only three full-time households.

“Well, I mean, I know Anthony, but who doesn’t?” she said nervously. “I … I actually go up there to that old Seventh-Day Adventist cemetery back in the woods. I get rubbings from the tombstones. Distribute them to my second graders. I like to combine art and history in one project.”

“Even at this time of year?” I probably sounded disingenuous.

“Snow is gone now in most spots,” Fiona said, which
was
true. “I should stop by and see you the next time I go,” she offered, realizing too late this was probably ill-advised.

“Yes, do drop by and see me,” I said, “the next time you’re up…” I wanted to say “doing grave rubbings” but refrained. After all, I reminded myself, who am I, who’d had an affair with one of my students, to judge? Then again, Anthony
was
still married.

*   *   *

The classroom has bulletproof windows, a steel door that buzzes one in and out, and a portly, pimpled twenty-year-old guard standing outside monitoring the discussion by intercom. In the five years that I’ve been volunteering at the prison, there have only been a few occasions when the guard—and not I—determined that the classroom was getting out of hand and burst into the room with reinforcements to restore order.

When I arrived to teach that day the guard was looking at me curiously. “Everything okay, Miz Winslow?” His question wasn’t exactly unusual, but he leaned toward me when he said it so that I sensed what drove his inquiry.

“Swimmingly,” I said as he buzzed me into the classroom.

“Hey, here’s who’s in charge,” said Daryl when I walked in.

“Hello, Tattoo King,” I said without missing a beat, and for a moment stood there gawking at my students. Daryl was a balding, bulky guy with Harley-Davidson flames inked up and down his arms and on his neck all the way up to his ears. He’d had a disagreement with a cousin over a lawn equipment transaction, and while they were out riding their motorcycles, he was observed running the poor fellow off the road. The cousin died and Daryl was convicted of manslaughter. Everyone else in my group was tattooed but to a lesser degree, except one-legged Jess, who, up on a rooftop in Rutland, had an altercation with a drug dealer, stuck a knife into his adversary’s thigh, then was pushed off and fell five stories—luckily into shrubbery—and shattered one of his legs. When the police found him he was carrying six ounces of cocaine. He now got around either on crutches or in a wheelchair. Then there was Peter, a doughy seventeen-year-old who, in the midst of doing his biology homework, went into a fuguelike rage, grabbed his father’s shotgun and, finding both his parents in bed having TV dinners, murdered them with many more rounds than was necessary. After the fact he was unable to remember his act of slaughter, and this was a source of constant torment to him.

I looked around, nodding at Raul, a quiet Latino who’d taken a piece of lead pipe and smashed in the kidneys of a man vying for the same woman. And then the new guy, who apparently liked preening his manhood in front of ladies working at convenience stores and whose name I’d learned was Jones: a corpulent fellow in his mid-thirties who could have passed for an insurance salesman out of Boston. I couldn’t help looking between the legs of his orange prison pants, and saw nothing out of the ordinary. I got riled up when I thought of him trying to sexually intimidate a poor twenty-one-year-old girl. He did have a family crest sort of tattoo on one arm, definitely an old-school tattoo.

It occurred to me, not for the first time, that any of these men who took my class could possibly have it in them to murder a woman like Angela Parker.

“Only six of you today?”

“Jimmy’s in lockdown,” Jess said, wearing a semi-toothless smile.

“Ah … and Bo?”

“He volunteered for laundry,” said Daryl. “Didn’t think you were going to be here anyway.”

“Why not?” I put down my books and papers. All throughout this exchange, I noticed that seventeen-year-old Peter was staring down at the floor, seeming almost catatonic. He looked up at me suddenly and I could see his blank eyes narrow. “Because you found a dead woman,” he said with a questioning lilt to his voice.

“Trauma, you know,” Jones spoke up, meeting my gaze with a devilish expression.

It was unusual for a newcomer to speak up so soon. Beyond this, “trauma” was a word that made me wonder if he was fairly well educated, not that educated people can’t stoop to homicide. Most of my guys hadn’t finished high school, but nearly all of them had areas of expertise. Daryl could take apart and put together car and two-stroke engines. Jess, who’d been in the merchant marines, knew everything about boats.

“So what was it like, finding a murdered girl?” Daryl murmured.

“You know,” I said. “You’re the first person who’s had the nerve to ask me that.”

“Hey, honey, come closer,” he said with disgusting lasciviousness.

“Don’t push your luck,” I told him.

“So then you’re okay,” Jess said.

“Don’t I look okay?”

“Well, just so you know,” Jones said, shocking me, “none of us are that kind of guy.”

The other inmates were glaring at him; his outburst struck them as impertinent.

I scrutinized this inmate, whom I found to be both flabby and slovenly. “And what kind of guy is that?” I said.

Raul cut in, preempting Jones from garnering too much spotlight. “The kind of guy who kills for no reason. Kills people he don’t know.”

“As opposed to people you
do
know,” I said.

Jess said, “If somebody fucks with you and then you kill them, man, that’s different.” He glanced around at his fellow inmates.

It always fascinates me how they differentiate the severity of their offense from those committed by their fellow inmates, as though to calibrate what kind of crime is truly reprehensible.

“I don’t think he knew her.”

“Probably didn’t know her if he’s a serial killer,” Jess went on, doing a push-up on the arms of his wheelchair. “Serials do their thing. They have a plan and they stick to it. So whoever drives into the rest area at seven
P.M.
… boom.”

Normally I might have let them carry on conjecturing, but today I just didn’t feel up to hearing any more of the sort of discussion that I’d already been having with myself, with Anthony, and others. And so I said, “Let’s table this for now. Thanks for your concern. Did you all finish the reading I passed out?” I’d given them the short story “The Captain’s Daughter” by Alexander Pushkin.

They all nodded, except Travis, a young, skinny black guy wearing a do-rag. He’d said nothing thus far and looked angry and bored.

“Okay, so…”

Jones surprised me yet again by having managed to get a copy of the story from one of the other inmates and reading it. He began the discussion. “Tell you one thing. It snows a fucking lot in Russia.”

“Yeah, even more than here,” Peter spoke up.

“Got to be way north of here,” said Jess.

“I love the bad guy in the story,” Daryl said. “The fake czar.”

“How so?”

“He was all dressed in black and shit and the way he just turned up in the middle of that snowstorm. Boy, he turned out to be one no-nonsense dude.”

“Riding his horse all over the place, taking out towns, cutting off heads. Not bad for a badass life,” said Raul.

“Well, until you’re caught and executed,” I pointed out.

“I hated that servant,” Peter spoke up. “I wanted the fake czar to kill him.”

“And why did you hate him?”

“He was always interfering.”

“The captain’s daughter … she was kind of like an olden-days version of a bimbo, wasn’t she?” Jones said, and everybody laughed.

His manner was a bit too flippant for my liking, much less to be harboring the secret of having stalked and killed several women within a short period of time. But then again, the brand of insanity that might drive such a serial murderer was probably something I could hardly fathom. I supposed I had to reserve judgment on Jones.

When the class was over, Peter waited behind as he often did. He’d been writing journal entries, scribbling dispatches about his life up until the school night when he committed an act of such extreme violence, claimed by his teachers and friends to be a dumbfounding contradiction to his quiet and self-contained nature. Then again, wasn’t it always the quiet types, the introverts, the dreamers who ended up surprising us with unforeseen malice? Peter seemed genuinely bereft and agonized to be held responsible for his parents’ murder. He’d been put on a potent psychotropic medication that, he confided to me, only made him feel fogged in. Despite my revulsion at what he’d done, I managed somehow to feel motherly toward him.

“They say you actually knew her,” he spoke up. “The woman who was killed.”

I told him she drew my blood at the hospital, and that even though plenty of photos of her had been published in the local newspaper, when I found her I didn’t recognize her, but quickly assumed who she was.

Peter’s face wrinkled up. “My mother used to follow them, the stories of these murders. She used to worry about them.” He hesitated again. “She even got scared whenever she was alone.”

I pictured him grabbing a shotgun, slowly and purposefully climbing the stairs to his parents’ bedroom, hearing their murmuring voices, the look of terrified disbelief on their faces when he aimed at them, the concussion of firing, the impact of hailing lead, the splattering of their blood everywhere, even on him, and the smell of gunpowder in the mortal quiet that followed.

FIVE

I
N THE MIDDLE OF MAY
I received a letter from one of my readers in Birmingham, who claimed the best way to unclog a drain was dumping in baking soda and chasing it with white vinegar. Down in the shallow cavern of my two-hundred-year-old cellar was an old clothes-scrubbing sink whose drain had been clogging and backing up for years, resisting conventional cleansers, and the diligent efforts of plumbers. Watching the bubbling mixture with the same fascination I had when I combined vinegar and baking soda in elementary school, I felt torn. For someone who’d begun a career as a college intern at
The New York Times,
approaching journalism with the loftiest ideals of exposing fraud, corruption, of developing the instinct to recognize the glimmering, elusive fact that might illuminate the dark soul of an interviewee, here I was watching a practical alchemy that might or might not unblock a drain. It could be argued that I was helping the world of domesticity like the clean-it-fix-it-find-it equivalent of Martha Stewart; however, as popular as my column had become, I sometimes felt a pang of having abandoned my true calling. This despair was obvious to people who were close to me. Matthew used to ask me why I just didn’t take up investigative journalism again. And my answer to him was my answer to myself. I didn’t have the mettle to keep battling egos for the integrity of turns of phrase. I was tired of my prose being rewritten, hacked into more pedestrian form. Once I stepped out of the ring, I just didn’t have the heart, or the drive, to throw myself back in with the big-timers. I guess I discovered that I wasn’t as ambitious as I thought I was.

Instead, I was helping housewives wow their husbands with Moroccan tagines made with lemons that marinated for months in earthenware jars, spreading the word of where to find shoes for tiny feet, or feeding brewer’s yeast powder to dogs to help rid them of fleas—there was something quietly satisfying about this pursuit. With that thought, the cordless phone rang in the pocket of my baggy Carhartt jeans. I wiped my hands with a towel, checked the incoming number and, seeing it was Anthony, trotted up the steep wooden stairs and answered.

“You sound all breathless,” he said to me flirtatiously. “Anybody I know?”

“Dream on,” I said, and then explained where I’d been and the procedure I was testing.

“Let me know if it flies.”

“Read the column, save me the trouble.”

“Catherine, do you really care if I read your column?”

“Of course I care!”

“Whenever you speak about it, you’re always so disparaging.”

“Self-protection of a battered ego,” I explained, heading into my study with the phone cradled between my shoulder and my ear. There was a short lull. “Something tells me this is not a social call.”

“It’s an update call,” he said. First he told me that Roderick Jones, the new guy in my prison writing class who’d exposed himself and forcefully fondled a cashier, had been cleared of suspicion in regard to the River Valley murders. Jones had been able to substantiate he was in Massachusetts the night of Angela Parker’s abduction. “He’s one of those guys who sits on every receipt. And he’s got one from a liquor store in Acton right outside of Boston that we were able to verify. Says 9:07
P.M.
So that fairly rules him out. It was a mother of a storm and the roads all over the northeast that night were a complete mess.”

“Good,” I said. “I didn’t relish the idea of instructing the man who dumped a body in our orchard.”

Anthony went on to say that, believing that the Seventh-Day Adventist pamphlets shoved into the pockets of Angela Parker and Marjorie Poole might bring a more significant clue to the murderer’s identity, he had immersed himself in the Church’s literature, focusing in particular on the religion’s view on health and medical care and dying. He’d discovered a belief in vegetarianism, general respect and reverence for plant and animal life, the sacredness of trees, which many believers felt had an animus.

The last fact had special significance. Anthony went on to confide that (being kept from the public record), three out of the five bodies of the dead women had been discovered near a downed tree. “Janet Tourvalon was murdered in her house, so she wouldn’t be part of the statistic.”