Cloudland (8 page)

“What about Angela? I don’t remember seeing a tree down.”

“Oh yeah, it was right near her. A big one. It was still covered with snow when you found her.”

And then I remembered that when Leslie Fullerton and I first went to find the body, the Statie had tripped over a tree trunk and tumbled into the snow. I mentioned this to Anthony.

“Noted. Anyway, the more I read about this particular religion the more I’m not sure whether or not the killer is a member of the tribe or just borrowing their philosophy merely to cast suspicion in another direction.”

“Or just one of those Adventists whose wheels have come off,” I said.

“Precisely.”

“Just don’t assume that this religious sect is as peace-loving as they proclaim.”

“What do
you
know about them?”

“I’ve known a lot of them over the years. When I was growing up and went to a youth camp down in Putney there were some Seventh-Day Adventist kids who lived on the lake we occupied and who always bullied the campers. One girl even beat me up.”

“Yeah, but you can’t indict a whole culture due to a couple of miscreants.”

“True. I just want you to see there might be a flip side to all this vegetarianism and pacifism.”

“I hear that.”

Then something struck me and I momentarily let my thread of the conversation drop. “Are you with me, Catherine? Are you there?”

“Yeah,” I said foggily. “I was just thinking. There is something familiar about dead women being found by downed trees with religious literature shoved into their pockets. I could swear I read about it somewhere.”

“Where is somewhere?”

“Good question.”

The conversation lagged for a moment or two and then Anthony said, “Maybe a newspaper story?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Online?”

“I think it’s probably a book,” I said, staring across the room at a suite of built-in bookshelves, chockablock with volumes. When Saint Mike’s let me go I had to clear out my office, and two years on had yet to incorporate my two book collections: towering piles on each of the stairs up to my second-floor bedroom, and at least twenty novels stacked on my nightstand. I desperately needed to thin out my collection, but as yet had been unable to do so—like getting rid of a beloved dead person’s effects, in this case my five-year stint as an adjunct professor of journalism and nonfiction. Then again, it was difficult for me to get rid of books in general. Among the one hundred or so I read every year, I find myself sloughing off few of them, even the ones that I dislike and abandon after a few chapters. “It’ll probably drive me crazy until I figure it out. All the more reason to get back to my drainage. How ’bout I call you when I remember.”

Fact of the matter: I was on deadline for my column, which meant returning to the dirty basement and monitoring the problematic pipe. Just as I was watching the foaming clot blocking my drain miraculously get sucked down into the depths, saying to myself, “Kudos to the reader from Birmingham,” it occurred to me that the book I was trying to place was probably a nineteenth-century novel.

That old hankering to track down a lead. I climbed the steep stairs, crossed my study, and stood before a built-in bookshelf overflowing with volumes by Dickens and Mrs. Gaskill, George Eliot and the like. I ran my finger over the literary landscape of the nineteenth century, feeling like a needle on a Ouija board trying to get a stronger sense of which author it might be. And then it came to me: the Gothic nature of the subject matter made it likely to be Wilkie Collins, plus the fact that I’d read his novels many times over. I shifted to the part of my bookshelf that contains the majority of his work and started flipping through the obvious ones:
The Woman in White, No Name, The Law and the Lady, No Thoroughfare,
and
The Moonstone,
whose last lines I find to be among the most elegiac in all of English literature. As I was drawn into reading them once again, I was suddenly struck by the name of a book of his called
The Widower’s Branch,
a flash of recollection that it dealt with the serial murders of mostly married women whose dead bodies were found near … fallen trees! I was relieved and even proud that I’d figured it all out relatively easily.

Curiously,
The Widower’s Branch
is actually the very last novel Wilkie Collins ever wrote. Theresa, my Victorian scholar/former college roommate, claims it was written after
Blind Love,
which many scholars advance as the author’s last work, whose completion was interrupted by his death. Knowing he wouldn’t finish
Blind Love,
Collins arranged for another writer named Walter Besant to finish the work from detailed notes.
The Widower’s Branch,
on the other hand, was never tampered with by anybody; it was left by his literary executors as a fragment, a mere eighty pages with a detailed outline published posthumously in an extremely limited edition, a copy of which Theresa managed to procure for me.

I kept my Wilkie Collins in chronological order and meandered along the bookshelf, looking at the various spines of his novels until I came to
Blind Love
. There was a slender space between it and the flank of the bookshelf;
The Widower’s Branch
was gone.

I stood there blinking, realizing that it had vanished. It was as though my mind were playing a trick on me. I was confused. The first thing I did was go backwards through the other volumes to see if any more were missing. The only other one I couldn’t find was
Armadale,
but I happened to know it was upstairs on a bookshelf outside my bedroom. I keep close tabs on the books and authors that mean a lot to me. I began to worry that I’d somehow lent it out and completely forgotten to whom. Perhaps my memory wasn’t so good after all.

Then a comber of panic slammed me, as unnerving as losing sight of a neighbor’s child at the beach. I tried to think clearly, to remember where it could be. The phone rang again and it was Anthony.

I was so riled up I almost didn’t pick up. “Now what?” I said to him.

“You still circling that drain?”

“Why and what’s it to you?” I said a bit sharply, still unnerved.

“Marco Prozzo just stopped in to see me. He’s here for a reason that … well, I haven’t discussed it with you. Having to do with a suspect, one of the people we’re investigating.”

“Somebody
I
know?”

“Yeah. This is his idea: he wants to ask you a few questions. He thinks you might be able to help.”

That’s curious, I thought. “When would this be?”

“How’s about ten minutes?”

I glanced at my watch: I didn’t have time for much of anything—my deadline was looming. “It’s not the most convenient moment.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t think—”

My curiosity took control. “All right, come on over. I do have one other thing in the works besides the drain: dog biscuits.”

Anthony laughed. “Just as long as you don’t pawn them off on us.”

Right after I ended the call with Anthony, my editor at the newspaper syndicate rang to chitchat. The man, a hard-bitten, inveterate flirt, was not one to read subtleties. Itching to get back to work and spare a few minutes to continue searching for the Wilkie Collins, I was nevertheless unable to untangle myself from the hand that fed me until I heard the knock on the sliding glass door that led into my sunroom. “The dogs are barking because the cops are here,” I announced. “Sorry, but I got to go,” and was finally released from my editor’s burbling bondage.

When I met Anthony and the short, squat detective at the door, I noticed Prozzo wore the same sharkskin suit he was wearing when he came to my house six weeks before in the company of the other Staties. “I’ve been on the phone with my editor in New York,” I told them. “Go on into the kitchen and give me five minutes. I’ve got basement crud all over me,” I added, patting the dogs to calm them down.

I rushed upstairs to wash and change into a button-down shirt and a pair of tan slacks. I did a quick scan of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf in my bedroom for the missing Wilkie Collins and once again came up empty-handed. I gathered my thoughts and returned to find both men sitting at the kitchen table, Prozzo patting the big head of Mrs. Billy, my bullmastiff. Anthony was also dressed in a suit, but his was a loosely cut lightweight gabardine. I wasn’t used to seeing him so spiffy and couldn’t help wondering if it had something to do with Fiona. During the last six weeks since Wade told me about the affair, I’d been keeping an eye out but hadn’t spied her VW Beetle tootling up Cloudland.

“What’s baking?” Prozzo said. “Smells heavenly.”

“Canine heaven,” Anthony told him. “Dog biscuits.”

I said, “They’ll be out of the oven in ten minutes. You’re welcome to try one. They’re actually not bad. Just a bit bland. Salt isn’t especially good for dogs.”

“So you try out all the recipes and remedies?” Prozzo asked, crossing his legs at the ankle.

“Have to. At least the ones that I can. One of my most popular prescriptions turns out to be what to do when your dog gets skunked. You squirt your pet with Massengill vinegar disposable douche. I didn’t have the opportunity to test it before it was published, but my readers say it does an amazing job reducing the odor.”

“No kidding,” Prozzo said, laughing. “That’s good to know.”

“And get this, a guy sent me the formula. I wrote back to him and asked, ‘How did you stumble upon that little miracle?’”

Both men laughed.

“But then I have readers who have nothing better to do than find something wrong with my concoctions. They send complaints to the newspaper syndicate, who, when they believe I’m mistaken, feel obliged to publish my errors.”

“Even if you’ve already tried it yourself and it works?” Prozzo wondered.

“Then I tell my editor; more often than not he backs me up. But I
have
been wrong a few times. And it isn’t fun to have four hundred newspapers print your failure.”

“My wife and my daughter read your column,” Prozzo told me. “They love it. Especially those great cake recipes.”

“Believe it or not, most of those recipes come from far-flung readers. Not some San Francisco gourmet. Sorry that I don’t have a cake on hand to offer you. Something to drink, though, either of you guys?”

Prozzo waved his hand to say he was fine. Anthony said, “What do you have?”

“I was about to make some hibiscus tea.”

“Sounds great,” he said.

“Good for cognitive brain function, apparently,” I said, again dogged by thoughts of the missing book.

“No kidding … speaking of which,” Anthony went on. “As I was saying on the phone, Marco would like to ask you a few questions.”

I reached for a cornflower-blue ceramic teapot, poured in water that I’d heated in an electric kettle. Facing them again, I said, “I’m dying to know whom you’re investigating.”

Anthony and Prozzo exchanged a glance. Anthony said, “It won’t make you happy.”

“It’s okay. My day is already getting punky.”

Prozzo said, “We’re getting some heat on the guy who carts away dead animals.”

“Hiram Osmond, the knacker man,” Anthony said.

“Oh, no!”

There was a cylindrical vase of daffodils in the middle of my oblong dining table and Prozzo began batting it back and forth between his large, meaty hands. Terribly dismayed, I resumed, “I mean, we’re talking about a gentle guy whose wife left him and then he lost custody of his daughter.”

The detective looked up at me and said quietly, “These are just the sorts of people—”

“It takes all kinds,” Anthony interrupted. Echoing my thoughts he said, “Sometimes the quietest, most mild-mannered end up being the most brutal and remorseless killers.”

“I’m aware of that,” I managed to say, in a state of disbelief. I’d known Hiram from summers I’d spent in Woodstock as a teenager. I’d known him to be kind and hardworking. “I guess I never thought the murderer might turn out to be somebody I’m actually acquainted with.”

“Anyway, hear us out,” Prozzo said.

“What choice do I have?”

As more motorists driving in the blizzard of January 17 were interviewed, a profile arose of someone trudging along Route 12 in a long green military coat and a Russian fur hat that matched the description of Hiram Osmond’s signature winter gear. Osmond already admitted to having been out on the road that night, hoofing it homeward because his truck had gotten stuck in a driveway.

He claimed to have received a call from an elderly woman who informed him that one of the two dairy cows she kept had dropped dead. A mild spell of January weather during the week leading up to the blizzard indicated that a dead animal lying in deep snow would already have begun to ooze fluids, which would, when the mercury dropped, freeze and make the carcass difficult to prize away from the ground. Hiram always listened to a twenty-four-hour weather drone on his shortwave radio and had heard that the temperature would edge up to forty degrees for two days before the major storm ascended from the Carolinas. He decided to wait until it got just a bit warmer before driving to the old lady’s house to hack the beast’s head off and winch the two-thousand-pound carcass up into the back of his pickup truck.

But the meteorologists at the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury (who, in my opinion, spend too much time citing the warming and cooling trends in faraway North American places like Hudson Bay and Saskatoon) predicted that the snow would begin a lot later than it actually did. And at one point during the early afternoon of the day that Angela Parker disappeared, Hiram Osmond told the police that he found himself standing near his barn with his measuring stick, calculating that within a few hours, twelve inches had already fallen. The temperature was hovering at thirty-five degrees. Knowing that it was now or never in terms of the dead cow, he headed to the farm but skidded into a ditch on the old lady’s long, icy driveway. He bushwhacked three miles home, got another truck, drove back, hauled the first one out and towed it home. He gave up at that point. Two more feet of snow fell before the storm diminished, obscuring the place where he’d gotten stuck. The woman whose house he’d been driving to apparently never heard the rumor of an incapacitated vehicle, the sounds of tires whipping around and caterwauling, digging themselves into the hard ground, spraying up fine frozen grit. All she cared about was that her cow had never been removed and would continue to lie inhumed in several feet of snow and, like Angela Parker, remain frozen until spring.