Cloudland (17 page)

“Afternoon,” he said, stopping a few feet in front of us, as though conscious of the fact that he might reek from working outdoors with dead flesh and probably not showering as frequently as he should. I caught a whiff of his deep and rancid smell. The next thing I knew a calico cat ran into view, leapt on his shoulder and, cradling its body against his neck, began to do that strange kneading foot dance cats do. The cat was glaring at us. “This is Squirrel,” he introduced us. “She’s protective … I guess like a dog. We don’t get visitors much.”

“At least not until lately,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic.

Hiram grimaced and then remarked, “You haven’t been up here since we were kids.”

“I was just telling Wade … about that time.”

“When you came to see the two-for-one pig?”

“Yeah.”

Very gently, he grabbed hold of the cat and shooed it off his shoulder. Dusting his hands together, he said, “You won’t believe it, but I had another like that two-for-one not even three months ago.”

I looked around and didn’t see any swine. He saw me searching and said, “Dead on arrival. Didn’t preserve it this time, though. Just rendered it.” He went on to say that he still raised a few pigs but they were penned and kept from roaming and grazing indiscriminately. He smiled, his teeth surprisingly white and straight; his forearms were vascular from all the heavy lifting he did. “It’s funny, Catherine,” he said, “in all these years since you been here, until the one recently, there hasn’t been another two-for-one pig. And then you arrive … again. What do you think that means?”

“I think it means maybe I’m a porcine fertility symbol.”

Wade guffawed and said under his breath, “Oh my God, here we are getting all woo-woo.”

“Don’t mind him,” I told Hiram. “He’s knee-jerk cynical.”

“Haven’t seen you in a while.” Hiram turned to Wade. “You look the same.” Then his expression turned speculative. “You know, I heard somewhere that you were pocketing the money from Paul Winters’s paintings.”

“You got to be kidding me,” I said.

Wade was hardly rankled by the rumor. “The tongue-waggers around here are so desperate that they’ll invent something outrageous for their own amusement. It’s absolutely not true.”

“I didn’t think it was,” Hiram said. “God knows what the gossip is about me.”

Neither Wade nor I said anything in response. A moment later Wade’s cell phone rang. He held up his finger, excused himself, and walked several steps away and took the call. I heard him say, “Okay,
all right,
I’ll be right there.” He returned to us and said, “I have to get back to the office. The tax assessors are meeting right now and there’s a problem that only I can solve.”

I really dreaded being left alone with Hiram. I said to Wade, “Right away?”

“Seriously. Can I use your car, Catherine?” I bugged my eyes out at him, as though to say, “Don’t leave me here.” “I really can’t stay.”

“If you want to take her car I’ll drive Catherine home,” Hiram offered.

This was the last thing I wanted, but could hardly think of how to alter what seemed to be the most logical plan. With great reluctance I said, “I left the keys in.”

You really have no choice, I told myself. Just get through this one and stay calm. This is your childhood friend, after all. Hiram and I watched Wade drive back down the long dirt driveway, my car leaving plumes of dust. The moment it disappeared Hiram turned to me, his face darkened and on the verge of tears. Seeing him in this vulnerable state made me relax a little bit. “I’m getting behind on all my accounts,” he said in nearly a whisper. Then, “I don’t know why the lie detector said what it said. I was relaxed when I took it. And I told the truth.”

“I assume you did,” I told him.

“I mean, you’re friends with Dr. Waite, who was here with the rest of them. You can vouch for me.”

“I already have.”

“I might do what I do for a living because I can’t do anything else, but I don’t kill people one after another.”

“Hiram,
I
want to believe you.
I
 … think you’re probably innocent.”

“Probably?”

Reckless though it might have been, I made myself say, “Unfortunately, a few things add up against you. You were seen walking on Route Twelve pretty near where Angela Parker’s body was dumped. You drive a rig with a certain kind of tire that matches the truck or the SUV that drove up Cloudland. And White River Junction has a record of a history of violence toward your wife.”

Hiram’s voice grew shrill and angry. “She invented that. The bruises … I don’t know how she got them. I never hit her. Somebody else obviously did. Whoever it was, she was protecting
him
.”

“So you’re saying she might have been having an affair?”

He looked skyward for a moment, and when he looked at me again, his expression was hopeless. “She easily could have. I was out all the time working, trying to support her.” He began scratching his beard. “I know she grew to hate being here.” With a glance around the bizarre farm he murmured, “I guess I don’t blame her for that.”

“Okay, Hiram,” I said, “but listen to me, if your wife arrives at the police station with bruises and marks of beating and, using them as evidence, blames you, it’s a tough accusation to refute.”

Hiram grew so annoyed he slapped his thighs with both hands. “So then you think I’m lying about this part.”

“Let’s put it this way, Hiram. I know Celia and the kind of background she came from and that she was a known liar, herself. And I told them, I told Anthony and Prozzo that. But it doesn’t matter what I say or what I do or do not believe.”

“I keep expecting them to … that one day they’re just going to show up and cuff me and lead me away.”

“One thing you should know, Hiram,” I said. “You’re not the only one they’ve got their eyes on. Several other people have been questioned more than just once.” I wanted to say Wade but knew I couldn’t.

“Jesus, do I wish I’d called a tow truck that night—”

I said, “Also realize they’re under pressure from all sides, from the governor to civic organizations … to come up with a culprit. People who live up here and are used to leaving doors unlocked all the time are now locking them. I don’t know if you’ve been reading the paper, but they’ve been warning anybody whose car breaks down not to knock on doors. Because people are afraid and they’ll shoot at a shadow, let alone a stranger. They—people who live here—don’t realize that in the rest of the world, there are plenty of murderers and thieves and in most places doors have to be kept secured.”

This statement seemed to mollify him, if only momentarily. He launched into small talk, asking me about my column and Henrietta, whom he’d met a few times, and even wanted to know how Breck was doing. Then his face brightened. “Can you just stay out here for a minute? I have something for you.” This request unsettled me. I didn’t want him going inside and leaving me alone; who knew what he might bring back? But then he said, “Something my mom would have wanted you to have,” ducking into the farmhouse. He remained there for a while and by the time he reemerged holding a small jar of pickled fiddleheads, I was terribly edgy. “Last batch she made before she died. Still delicious.” I had no choice but to politely accept his gift. The brined fiddleheads looked like cochlea blanched to the color of dirty ivory. I didn’t even think my Henrietta would be interested in eating them.

A moment later I noticed my car rambling back up the driveway. Soon Wade pulled up beside us. “Before I got back to the office, the tax people called to say they solved the problem without me. Amazing!”

With great relief I said, “Well, we’re done. You can move over. I want to drive my own car.”

ELEVEN

T
HE NEXT EVENING
I was sitting on the Waites’ porch next to Emily’s greenhouse, watching fireflies and luna moths hurling themselves against the screens. Despite the considerable heat, Anthony was wearing a long-sleeved cambric shirt. The drone of the insects was rowdy in comparison to the hush within the house: by now Emily and the girls had been gone for weeks, and with them gone was the din of chattering siblings and clattering pots and the sluicing of tap water. What, without the arguments about conflicting schedules, disputes over school permissions and sleepovers, and wrangles over whether or not to give in and buy a certain pair of designer blue jeans that all the girls at school seemed to be wearing, does a man like this do with his now voluminous free time, when he’s solely occupying a house once inhabited by a family of four? I assumed he plunged more deeply into his love affair with Fiona Pierce.

Did he think I disapproved of this new relationship, a palimpsest over his doomed marriage? Was this why Anthony had been using the investigation as an excuse for his busy schedule? Lately I’d seen Fiona’s green Volkswagen Beetle scurrying up and down Cloudland Road at all hours of the day and night. Meanwhile, the one time I’d spoken to Emily in North Carolina she sounded positively cheerful, filling me in on how she and the children were spending the summer, their tours of North Carolina’s coastal areas and school enrollments for the autumn semester.

I was also determined to find out why Anthony so easily agreed to his children living in another state, something any compassionate family court judge would have forbidden.

I’d brought him a jar of sun tea and sprigs of fresh mint, and was happy to see that he was keeping up with the considerable gardening that was required by all the perennial beds of delphinium and phlox and mallow and echinacea Emily had planted when they first arrived on Cloudland five years ago. Sipping out of a tall plastic glass, he remarked that it had been nearly seven months since Angela Parker had been abducted.

“I keep hoping our murderer decided to retire ahead of the game.”

Anthony shook his head. “No such luck. The vast majority of serial killers can’t stop themselves. They’re predatory, like lions who kill and get sleepy and content until they go hungry again.”

He was looking out over the expanse of his just-mown fields, strewn with pinwheel bales of hay that resembled runes on a trestle table. The sky above us was a dimming chalky blue and the clouds streaking across it looked dense and corrugated, ponderous with moisture. “I think we’ll probably see something from him fairly soon,” he mused as though predicting a tempest.

I swatted a green-headed fly that was dive-bombing me. “That’s comforting to know.” How could he be so sure, I wondered.

With his fingers, Anthony carefully combed the hair off his forehead and tilted his head back and let loose a groaning sigh. “I detest this heat,” he said. “We never used to get heat like this … where I grew up in New Brunswick.”

“There’s something called a short-sleeved shirt.”

“I actually keep cooler this way.”

“Must be a Canadian or English practice,” I said, and then reminded him the newspapers were claiming this summer the Eastern United States was more acutely affected by global warming than the rest of America. He nodded and wondered aloud if up in Canada they were enduring heat to the same degree.

“Speaking of feeling heat,” I said, “I saw Hiram yesterday. Did you get enough blood samples?”

“Yeah. We took samples everywhere we could find them.”

I waited for a few moments and then said, “He’s sick over the fact that the lie detector didn’t clear him.”

Anthony pulled his shirt away from his body and flapped it so that some air could get in. “You believe his story?”

“I don’t think he’s a killer. And he swears up and down that he didn’t beat his wife.”

“That’s the problem right there. I saw the photos of his wife. She looked pretty battered. Who else could’ve done it?”

“Somebody she was having an affair with, he claims,” I said, watching for any change of expression on Anthony’s face.

He looked dubious. “You know this kind of denial is older than the hills. Nice, sweet guys who keep it all in until they can’t contain it anymore and let loose on the person closest to them.”

“I understand that, but I’ve known Hiram a long time.”

“Means nothing. Love brings out the worst in people. Love is war.” He glanced over at me in a scrutinizing way. “As you well know. All due respect, I don’t think you’ve seen enough profiles of killers who began their murdering careers by beating their wives.”

“Or profiles of wife-beaters who don’t go on to commit murders. But okay,” I said. “Point made. However, even if he drives to the places where some of these women have disappeared, he’s on such a tight schedule. Always hauling some dead beast from one place to another. Would he really have the time to spend trolling for victims, not to mention having a dead cow or horse in the back of the pickup truck?”

“He makes his own schedule, Catherine. He never got that frozen cow he was supposed to haul away,” Anthony reminded me.

“But that was during a blizzard.”

“Precisely, a blizzard and an excellent opportunity to abduct a woman making a phone call at a deserted rest area.” Anthony pinched his shoulders together and looked at me wearily. “Gut-wise I don’t get an all-clear on him, Catherine. And I don’t think you do either. You just don’t want the killer to be somebody you know and like. And who could blame you there?

“But let’s put this all in perspective for a moment.… Do you know how many people we’ve questioned and have asked to take polygraph tests?” I probably looked bored. “I could give you a round number. Let’s say we’ve questioned one hundred people in the Upper Valley, four of whom were asked to submit to the polygraph.”

“Anybody else I know?”

“No, thank goodness.”

“You’ve really questioned one hundred people?”

Anthony explained that something about each person matched up with some significant detail common to all the serial murders. It could be as simple as a man convicted to five years in prison for stabbing his wife, or a man accused but never proven guilty of strangling his girlfriend, or even a few men who stopped their cars at rest areas and unsuccessfully tried to lure women into them.

“And of course there are the known psychological histories of some of these people. If a once-convicted felon ever told some prison psychologist about being severely beaten by a parent, we check him out. If he ever confessed or implied that he hated or attacked women or presented a history of impotence, then we consider interrogating him.”