Cloudland (20 page)

“Don’t second-guess me. You’re it for me. Just take what I’m saying. And believe me.”

And I did believe him and I fell in love with him, the sort of dark, disturbing love that cuts deeper than anything and in so doing becomes its own justification.

THIRTEEN

E
ARLIER THIS YEAR,
around the time Angela Parker vanished, an eighteen-year-old freshman named Timothy Marek disappeared from the campus of Middlebury College. An Arizona boy who’d been spending January break at the school, living in one of the residence halls that remained open during the holidays, he went for an afternoon stroll and never returned. The article I read about him in the
Valley News
called him “studious” and “reliable”; it claimed he was an avid lacrosse player who was tall and lanky and had a palm tree tattooed on his left shoulder. After he vanished one student came forward and said he’d been drinking. The possibility of his leaving town was quickly ruled out; the bus that stopped in Middlebury en route to Albany did not pick up anybody matching his description. Townspeople and shopkeepers along Route 7 were queried about whether or not they’d noticed anybody hitchhiking, and nothing out of the ordinary was reported.

January temperatures are the most frigid of the year in Vermont, and the night Marek was gone the thermometer dipped down well below freezing. As the next few days passed in an arctic aura, the sleepy New England college town held prayer vigils in churches, in huddled gatherings around bonfires, beseeching the wintry fates to return him unharmed. In a small town the misery of an unexplained disappearance infects the mood of everyone. Both college students and schoolchildren woke up to nightmares of violence and abduction, and counseling centers were set up to help the distressed. Adult citizens reported feeling lethargic and unusually depressed, seasonal affective disorder notwithstanding; they were haunted by the idea of a young man with his life before him ripped out of small-town reality. Meanwhile, the police infiltrated the campus, interviewing people who’d had contact with Timothy Marek, meticulously combing through his clothing and belongings, questioning the skeleton crew of workers who maintained the boilers and the dining halls and the empty academic classrooms during the coldest band of winter. The available students who’d remained on campus (and some who’d received the dean’s mass e-mail and cut short their winter holiday) and staff joined together with the townspeople into organized search parties, scouting the woods and riverbanks and snowmobile trails. Banners were draped in the center of town,
COME HOME, TIM
.
WE LOVE YOU, TIM
. One of his closest friends confided to the police that Marek had spoken of finding a cheap airfare to go and see Salzburg Cathedral, but neither his bank account nor his credit card (attached to his parents’ account) was drawn down by the price of a plane ticket.

Then the January blizzard that buried the body of Angela Parker arrived and dropped two feet of snow. The alarm and hysteria only intensified as the natural barrier of winter made detection more difficult for the search dogs and for the rescue parties.

The FBI sent a few of its field officers to try to determine whether or not Marek might have fallen prey to the group of people marauding around North America, stalking college campuses for students whom they abducted, murdered, and mutilated, burying the remains in densely forested areas. In the case of each of these crimes a grafitto of a smiley face was painted in yellow on a building or a tree somewhere near where the abduction occurred. Soon enough a smiley face was found emblazoned on a fluted metal warehouse on the outskirts of Middlebury. When that news hit, Middlebury people who never locked their doors bought deadbolts, and the most liberal-minded, anti-gun citizens went out and purchased rifles. Unfortunately, due to the harsh extremities of the weather, the forensic experts claimed it was difficult to determine whether or not the paint of this particular smiley face dated back before Marek himself had disappeared.

He’d been missing since winter and here it was the end of June.

An eight-by-eleven photostat of his Facebook shot was plastered on the clairvoyant’s refrigerator: a look of intelligence in golden-green eyes behind rimless glasses; a long narrow face that reminded me a bit of the actor John Carradine. Nan O’Brien was watching me studying Marek’s photograph and then pointed to her arm. “See these goose bumps? That’s because he’s nattering at me right now. He won’t stop talking.”

“What’s he saying?” Anthony, who was standing behind us, asked with a tone of slight skepticism.

She turned to him. “The usual. Just ‘find me, find me’.… You have no idea. He is so insistent.”

After I’d spoken to Nan O’Brien that first time, I contacted the
Valley News
. Explaining how she’d been working with the Burlington police to find missing people, I pitched the idea of writing a profile and managed to get an assignment. When Anthony heard how she’d helped locate the woman recently murdered in Burlington, he asked if he could accompany me on my first interview. And so together we’d driven one hour north to the shores of Lake Champlain and the largest city in Vermont.

Nan O’Brien is a woman in her late forties with soulful eyes, shoulder-length wheat-colored hair, her movements soft and graceful and exuding a peaceful intensity. She was wearing a gauzy top and loose black cotton pants, her exposed neck adorned tastefully with simple silver-and-enamel jewelry. She invited us to come into her living room, offering us places on a cushy sectional couch. Her injured foot was wrapped in a red Ace bandage and she limped along and sat down on the edge of the sofa and arranged it so her leg was propped up on a large cushion.

Notebook and pen in hand, I began. “So, Timothy Marek, do you think he was murdered?”

Leaning back against the couch, she shook her head. “No. My sense is there was a mishap, he fell down and died of exposure.”

“So what about the smiley face?”

“My sense is some kids did that,” she said, making a brushing-off gesture with her hands. “And are too afraid to come forward.”

I realized that I was getting ahead of myself. “Let’s just backtrack for a moment, shall we.… How did you begin all this work? Have you always done it? Or was there something specific?”

“I’ve always had visions. But it wasn’t until I was living in Briarcliff Manor, just outside New York City, and heard on the news that a … twenty-one-year-old kid living in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, disappeared. I was watching it on television and then out of the blue, I get this vision of his body underneath the Verrazano Bridge. The vision repeated itself. Eventually I began hearing his voice, too, telling me that he was down there and that’s where the searchers should look for him. I wanted to contact the authorities but didn’t. Then a few days after this a tugboat passing under the bridge saw something. A bright orange tennis shoe floating along; he was wearing it when he was last seen. They started searching for him and eventually found his body in the shoals around the bridge. It was after that that I began offering my help.”

“How many years ago was that?”

Nan swept the hair out of her face. “Around fifteen.” Seeing that I was scribbling frantically, she paused. “How come you didn’t bring a tape recorder?”

I told her I listened more carefully when I knew I had to take notes by hand, adding, “This practice, it’s not for everybody. Anyway, so how exactly do you work now? What’s the method?”

“Well, like I said, the first stage for me is like daydreaming. About missing people. The daydream or vision occurs at least twice before I pick up the phone and contact the authorities. I sometimes will call the families, depending on their request for help.” She frowned. “I don’t like to call myself a psychic, and please don’t refer to me as one in your article. I call myself an intuitive counselor.”

“Gotcha,” I said.

“The point is, the missing dead always want to be found. You’d think it would no longer matter to them, that they’d naturally be drawn to higher realms, but they’re concerned about the living, who are searching for them. They keep appearing in dreams to anybody who has the ability to perceive them.” She paused for a moment and then said to me, “The woman you found, Catherine, for two months I kept seeing her, hearing her. I can show you the notes I made on my computer. I saved them so that the date shows electronically and nobody can say I filled it in later. You probably don’t know this but she disappeared within a few days of Marek, so for a while I was getting stereo.”

“May I ask a question?” Anthony intervened.

“Ask away,” Nan said with a gracious smile.

“Angela Parker, how exactly did you see her in your … vision?”

Nan pondered for a moment and, sighing, said, “She appears to me swimming in a lake of snow, drifting through it.…” Her face scrunched up as she tried to extract the memory. “It’s like she’s weightless, and she looks really purposeful. To materialize like this requires a tremendous amount of paranormal energy.”

“If you were having the vision, why didn’t you make an effort to contact us?” Anthony asked.

“I did try. I spoke to somebody, a detective, or deputy detective who only heard part of what I had to say and then hung up on me.”

Anthony caught my glance and looked startled.

Nan went on, “I had a similar vision about the woman here in Burlington who disappeared and ended up being murdered. I was seeing her through a video camera. I was planning to wait and see if I had the same vision twice, but then my good friend who works in the Burlington police department called me. I told him what I’d seen and he ran with it. Turns out I was right.”

“And the Middlebury boy.”

Nan’s face lengthened and she said in low tones, “What I’ve been saying for months is, like the one under the Verrazano Bridge, he’s in water. And like I told you, the authorities are not really listening.” She paused, as if choking back some emotion, cast her eyes down at her bandaged, injured foot, and swung her straight hair forward. “My sense is, like that student said, he got drunk. But then he went for a walk. He slipped on ice.” She looked up at me. “He could have fallen or broken his leg or his foot so that he just couldn’t move. He was too far away from campus to cry for help. He crawled to a place where he thought he might be able to stay warm, and when the temperature dropped, just died overnight.”

I felt suddenly woozy and had to take a deep breath to compose myself.

“Then the snow came. A few days later, that January blizzard.”

“Hold on a second,” I interrupted her. “The days before the blizzard weren’t that cold.” Thinking of Hiram’s failed attempt to retrieve the dead cow, I said, “It was warm for January. The temperature was in the thirties.”

“True,” Nan conceded. “But if he was drunk and lying in the snow it was probably cold enough at night for him to have died. Anyway, when the blizzard came my sense is Tim got covered over in the drifts that melted some when it got warmer and then froze again, solid ice. I don’t know why the search dogs couldn’t smell him. But I’m assuming that when the snow finally did melt in the spring his body got swept into the river.

“There is a search-and-rescue group out of Maine,” Nan went on. “They have this helicopter camera that can take photos way down into a lake or a river. They flew over the Otter Creek and imaged a body lying in the riverbed. They relayed the report to the police, who investigated the location and found nothing. In the interim he got carried farther downstream. My sense is he’s lodged under debris.”

The silence that ensued in the room was kinetic. At last Anthony broke it and said quietly, “Can we talk a little more about
our
situation?”

“How did you see the book?” I asked.

“I saw the book and sensed it belonged to you. And felt that it wasn’t in your house. And saw somebody reading it.”

“Can you remember who it was, who was reading it?” Anthony said.

“Just a man. Not young, not old. Nothing special about him.”

“Well, it’s a short book,” I explained. “Doesn’t have much of a storyline.” Nobody spoke for a while and then I said, “Well, here’s something else for you. I think I might have the only copy of this book for miles around. In fact, there might be only one other copy of it in the northeast.”

“And where would that be?” Nan asked. I told her it was Yale University. “That’s kind of far.” She dismissively shook her head. “I mean, do you wonder if this person, this killer, could have read
your
copy?”

The question jolted me because I’d asked myself the same thing. I tried to think who else could’ve read the book and my mind went blank. And then I remembered the slip of paper that Breck claimed to have found. “Here’s one thing.” I turned to Anthony. “I didn’t even mention this to you. But my daughter, who had the book for a year and a half, said she found a slip of paper inside it. Three words were written on it: ‘you and her.’ She claims it wasn’t my handwriting.”

“Ah, that’s it!” Nan cried. “The key to what you’re looking for!”

Both Anthony and I gaped at her. “What makes you say that?” I asked.

“Just popped into my head. As these things do. Those words, those three words, have something to do with the murders.”

*   *   *

“That was eerie,” I said, as Anthony and I were driving along the banks of Lake Champlain, busy in the summer with recreational sailboats and kayaks and Jet Skis. A double-decker ferry streaming with colorful flags had just left a terminal and was making its dutiful crossing toward the shores of New York State.

He nodded and then said, “Tell me about it.”

“‘You and her.’ Even if she is on to something, that doesn’t bring us any closer to figuring out who it is.”

Anthony said, “It’s equivocal at best. But suppose for the purpose of argument, we could say ‘you’ might be the killer and ‘her’ might be somebody the killer loves.”

“Or has murdered.”

“Or has murdered,” Anthony repeated.

We made a turn onto College Street, and now with the lake to our backs began heading toward the interstate. Well-kept Victorian houses lined the route, and as I looked around the city where I’d spent five years, I felt sad and bereft. I resumed, “She seems like just some ordinary lady, like somebody who’d send me a recipe or a question for my column. You know, the kind of person whose writing pen has a feather on top of it.”