Cloudland (22 page)

“Meaning?”

“I have plenty of criminal fantasies, for example.”

Fiona smiled at me guardedly, enough for me to see her yellowed front tooth. She sat back in her chair, adjusted her skirt, and then said, “You really have it in for me, don’t you?”

“Oh my God! I’m not talking about
you
!”

“No, but I mean you’ve been assuming I had something to do with Emily leaving.”

I looked at her squarely. “Not at all. We’re all adults, right? Perhaps you’ll agree with me: sometimes as adults we make childlike choices that … I don’t know, maybe because in some way we always remain children. But not in this particular case. As far as Emily goes, I don’t think she should have taken her children out of the state. I don’t think it’s fair to Anthony. Beyond that, though, Anthony filled me in. He told me about her long-term affair.”

“I wasn’t sure if you believed him or not.”

“Why wouldn’t I believe him? Anyway, I’ve thought about it and decided it doesn’t really matter who had the affair first.”

“I think it does.”

Well, of course you do, I thought. “Just so you know, I have no moral high ground to stand on.”

Fiona blushed and pushed her hair behind her shoulders. “I just don’t want things between us to be awkward.”

“I know I’ve been frosty to you. And I’m sorry. I’ll admit to you, part of it is jealousy. I wouldn’t mind being with somebody
like
him. But obviously
not
him exactly.”

Fiona smiled and said, “Well, I was a little jealous of your young guy, to be honest.”

I chuckled. “I got that feeling. But just so you know, it came at a high price.”

“I assumed it did,” Fiona said softly.

*   *   *

When I arrived home from the prison there was another message from Matthew, asking if I’d decided when he could see me—hardly surprising. His being back in the country and now close by was making me feel terribly unsettled.

And then a message accompanied by an eerie sound of static: Anthony calling from the site of the abandoned car in Charlestown, New Hampshire. When I called him back on his cell, he told me that the registered owner of the car had not been driving it, but rather the owner’s niece, to whom the suitcase presumably belonged. She was in the country illegally, spoke little English, and apparently had borrowed the car to drive up to Waterbury, Vermont, where she hoped to join a friend and be hired to pick strawberries and corn. Two DNA samples had been collected from strands of hair extracted from the car; one, the Dominican woman’s, and the other yet to be identified.

“It’s not the uncle’s,” Anthony informed me. “They ran one on him already. Now they’re taxing the FBI’s database to see if they come up with a match.”

“So a DNA sample,” I said. “That’s promising news.”

“If it leads somewhere.”

Anthony went on to say that when the FBI showed up at the apartment of the car’s owner in Maryland, the man at first had been reluctant to identify his niece or explain why the car was in New Hampshire. He’d also been afraid to try and trace the car, figuring she might have been detained by the INS and the car impounded.

“But that makes no sense. If she’d been detained, they have already located him from the car registration,” I pointed out.

“Precisely. Anyway, we have an ID of the driver. Her name is Elena Mayaguez. She’s twenty-four.”

The name was melodious and lovely, and thinking she might be yet another murder victim left me sad and silent. Anthony explained that the woman’s cousin had provided the FBI some of her clothing to see if they could match it to some of the DNA samples they found in the car. “Apparently her parents don’t even know she’s here.”

“That’s tragic,” I said.

“There aren’t a lot of people up here with dark complexions,” Anthony went on. “A cashier at a local convenience store a few miles away from where the car was found easily remembered her.” Beyond this, the New Hampshire investigators had coughed up two reports from separate motorists claiming to have seen a dilapidated Japanese car matching the one left by the Connecticut River screaming down the two-lane highway, tailed by a late-model American sedan with flashing lights. A motorist who’d observed the car chase choreography through a rearview mirror actually claimed to have seen the pursued vehicle swerve over to the side of the road—approximately in the same place where it was eventually found.

The deserted car held a full tank of gasoline, and it’d been construed that the missing driver probably stopped to refuel at the convenience store where she’d been noticed by the clerk and perhaps spotted by the killer at a pumping station. “Something else we’ve been thinking, Marco and I. If she was driving and being chased by another car flashing its lights, maybe she figured the car pursuing her was INS or government.”

“Even if the car was unmarked,” I added.

“Whereas most people would’ve tried to drive faster and escape, she probably thought it was better to pull over.”

“That sounds plausible to me.”

“Now, that aside, there’s something else of an entirely different order going on down here.”

“Oh.”

“New Hampshire and Vermont are fighting over the sharing of evidence. It’s crazy.” I asked him to elaborate. “Well, Marco says New Hampshire sat on the abandoned car for a week before telling him. That’s why it’s already been published in the papers. He learned of it around the same time as the
Valley News
reporters did.”

“So why is New Hampshire being so uncooperative?”

“That’s the thing. They claim they haven’t. I spoke to Prozzo’s counterpart in Claremont, who says he passed along the data about the car as soon as they got it. Claremont alleges that during a phone conversation with Springfield, the car was mentioned, along with several other routine observations. They’re obligated to pass crucial info back and forth, but Prozzo insists that the car was one of ten things Claremont summarized but didn’t emphasize
where
it was found, just that it was found.”

I also knew from experience that cooperating police departments were known for withholding information from one another when they were following a very specific lead, wanting to claim all the glory for a discovery that would help solve a case.

Anthony pointed out, “Poor communication like this is not the way to find the killer. Which is Marco’s point. Hopefully they’ll work it out, especially because now we’ve got something else concrete to go on.” He paused, probably for effect.

“Which is?”

“One of the search dogs found a finger.”

I felt nauseated. “Oh? Do we know it’s her finger?”

“It went to Concord,” Anthony explained, “to see if it matches the hair sample. The fact that the finger was found by one of the New Hampshire search dogs made it Concord’s jurisdiction. They have their own forensic squad on it. I didn’t even get a chance to see it before it was shipped off. That does make me wonder if they are deliberately keeping us out of the loop.” He paused for a moment and said, “So we’re feeling a little … let’s call it the spirit of competition.

“And in that vein, Marco and I decided that we really need to pursue the Wilkie Collins connection. Because that bit is ours. New Hampshire knows nothing about it.”

“But then you’d be withholding information from
them
.”

“Well, let’s see how relevant we decide the book actually is.… ‘
You and her,
’ for example. Have you thought any more about it? Any ideas?”

“I know I lent the book to a few of my students, the ones I trusted to return it in good condition.”

“Any idea when?”

“Probably during the last two years I was at Saint Mike’s. I have to dig up the rosters of those classes.”

“Yeah, maybe you should,” Anthony said. I could hear him draw a deep breath and expel it.

“I’ll do it right now.”

After we were done speaking, I went into a storage closet and combed through several file boxes I’d brought down from Burlington. I found the file of my last semester at Saint Mike’s and one from a year and a half before that. I scanned all the names and nothing jumped out at me. Somehow I knew that two of the writing files missing from the boxes were the ones for the students with whom I’d trusted the book. Momentarily abandoning my search, I sat in my study with a pen and notepad, trying to recall the names of some of the borrowers. No one immediately came to mind.

In the meantime, who also had read the book? Violet apparently had, but she’d never been to Vermont. Ironically, from the photographs I’d seen, this large-boned woman with a sheaf of tawny hair was, in terms of physical strength, probably a more likely candidate than Wade. And then I remembered something.
I
had gotten Wade into Wilkie Collins. He’d read quite a few, even borrowed some books from the library. Could he have borrowed
The Widower’s Branch
? I had no choice but to check with him. So Violet and possibly Wade. Theresa, my college roommate, had given the book to me; being a Victorian scholar, surely she’d read it. But she lived in Connecticut and was small and mousey, the sort of person who ushered flies outside of her house instead of swatting them. Unlikely suspect. I had nothing to go on, but I just couldn’t imagine the murderer being a woman.

Standing there in my study, I thought to myself: I’ve momentarily exhausted my resources on this particular conundrum. Besides, there was another one to deal with: Matthew’s sudden reemergence in my life, the dilemma of whether or not to see him again after nearly two years and wondering, Wouldn’t it be better to meet in a neutral place such as Joanie’s Café? I knew he’d probably agree to it, I knew it was the right thing to do, but I found myself resisting what was right and wanting to see him alone. This desire frightened me but it also compelled me.

I went outside into the thrumming late-afternoon heat and deadheaded some of my day lilies. I turned my attention to the lawn, which was looking ragged and uneven. It never looked so good as it did the summer two years before when, from time to time, Matthew would insist on mowing it for me. Listening to the crescendo humming of the tractor blades, I’d sit in the cool sanctuary of my house researching and writing my columns: about how to best launder feather pillows; a clever extension duster for swiping cobwebs off high ceilings; or homespun recipes such as a marinade of garlic and sea salt, molasses and vinegar that made a tender melting morsel out of the toughest piece of beef. I’d contentedly watch Matthew through the same rolled-glass window where several years later I’d witness the blizzard that would bury Angela Parker in the orchard higher up on Cloudland. He’d work outside, stay for dinner, we’d drink wine, watch the wings of light fleeing the fields and the distant orchard full of gnarled apple trees, we’d make love in the lengthening shadows and he’d spend the night. And then wake up to blue bowls of milky coffee, crusty baguettes from the local bakery, and my homemade orange marmalade. Then he’d be off, back to his parents’ cabin in the Northeast Kingdom, to some odd job or another.

Toward the end of this, his first postgraduate summer, Matthew traveled to Scandinavia with a student group organized by the university. His plan was to get lost in the adventure of roaming with a bunch of college friends; however, during that three-week period he called me every day on a cheap phone card he’d procured in Stockholm. He sent me long, rather boring travelogue e-missives from Internet cafés and seemed to be counting the days until his return.

It was while he was away that the chairman of the English department called to explain that the university had received yet another batch of anonymous letters leveling false accusations, including the sordid allegation that Matthew and I frequently had had sex in my office. Copies of these letters had been sent (by the anonymous writer) to several key administration officials and, apparently, to Matthew’s parents, who were also informed of where the other copies had been sent and contacted the college to verify the complaint. A week after I’d learned about the correspondence, as if one had nothing to do with another, I received a phone call from the Human Resources provost saying that, due to budgetary constraints, one of the permanent adjunct positions in the English department needed to be eliminated and unfortunately it was going to be mine.

I was devastated by the news, but hardly shocked that, in light of the discomfort caused by the vicious letters, something like this could happen. Knowing that I was powerless as an adjunct, I told the provost that I loved teaching, felt that I had much to offer Saint Mike’s. He informed me quite flatly that other adjunct professors had better student evaluations than I and ended the call rather abruptly, leaving me staring at the telephone as though it were an alien.

A few days later Matthew came straight to my house from Logan Airport, which meant that he had yet to be confronted by his parents about our affair. I was glad to see him, but knew my firing would be bringing on new complications. And for this reason I didn’t want to spring the news on him immediately.

“I decided something,” he said after we’d made love greedily and were lying in my bed together.

“What have you decided?” I asked, trying to hide my wariness.

Arms cocked behind his head, a lascivious look of conquest etched on his face, he said, “Well, life experience is as important as work experience.…” He looked meaningfully at me. “I think we should live together.”

Knowing I now needed to launch into what had happened, I merely asked him, “But how?,” knowing that his postgraduate plan (strongly endorsed by me as well as his parents) was to live in New York City with a friend on the Lower East Side and begin hunting for rent-paying work until he could decide whether or not he wanted to apply to business school. He now confessed he’d prefer living in Burlington and seeking employment there.

I let a few moments elapse before I said sadly, “I won’t be in Burlington in the fall, Matthew.” He turned to me, looking bewildered. “I lost my teaching job.”

“You lost your
job
? How?”

“They said it was budgetary but I know it has nothing to do with that. They got a whole bunch more of those anonymous letters. Saying we had sex in my office, among other things.”