Cloudland (26 page)

“Do you remember it at all?”

He thought for a moment. “I do remember it because it was yours and especially then I wanted to remember it.… Isn’t there an outline that came after the text; it was for the rest of the novel?” He turned from the bookshelf and faced me. “Doesn’t this guy, round about my age, I guess, lose everything: job, connections, his beloved?”

I nodded.

Smiling weakly at me, he said, “The day you loaned it to me, I remember going home and starting it and thinking it was the perfect story for me at the time … for as long as it lasted.”

“Why was it the perfect story?”

“Because I was lonely and because I was scared. Even more so after we made love those first few times.”

“Lonely?” I said. “Frightened? Wouldn’t you feel … I don’t know, hopeful? Delighted?”

He shook his head. “You know I always obsessed about losing you because of the age difference, because of the fact that I’d been your student. I was always afraid you’d come to your senses and suddenly refuse to see me again.”

“I guess I did, finally, didn’t I?” I found myself saying.

Looking crestfallen, he crossed his arms over his chest and said, “After all this time do you think our relationship was a mistake?”

I wondered if Matthew had drawn some kind of parallel between his life and the life of the down-and-out, jilted Wilkie Collins character. After all, I’d jilted
him.
At last I said, “No.” I had a thought and took a moment to consider whether or not I wanted to share it with him. “Relationships are odd,” I said. “You don’t know how they come or even how they go. And suddenly they start failing and sometimes fail so quickly. They remind me of a recipe that I once got. Some far-flung North Dakota reader sent me instructions for a lovely cake that rose high into this beautiful shape. It almost looked like a golden hat, but then just like that it deflated into this miserable steaming curd.”

“That’s a depressing image!” Matthew exclaimed.

“But back to what I was saying before about the book … Here’s an interesting fact you may not remember. So the protagonist in the novel finds this dead woman next to a huge fallen tree. She has some printed religious material in her pocket. And the outline suggests that more dead women will be found in a similar way, next to downed trees, their pockets lined with liturgical writings.”

Matthew held me in a quizzical gaze. “I confess I don’t remember that part. But why are you telling me this now?”

As matter-of-factly as I could, I explained the similarity between the plot synopsis in the book and the manner in which a few but not all of the women in the Upper Valley had been slain.

Matthew immediately sloughed it off. “Even with the printed matter found in women’s pockets, it sounds a bit general, doesn’t it, pinning this on an obscure book published a hundred and fifty years ago? Surely lots of religious fanatics become serial killers.”

This reaction coincided with the opinion of Theresa, who, when I’d first e-mailed to ask her Victorian scholarly advice, felt that the detail of dead women found by fallen trees with, as she put it, “psalms in their pockets” could be argued as moot to the search for our killer. Beyond this, she claimed to be unaware of any widely publicized nineteenth-century murders on which Wilkie Collins might have modeled his final uncompleted fiction, but encouraged me to research it for myself. Which I did, to no avail. There was little written about
The Widower’s Branch.

“Another factoid that you might find interesting. The literature left in the pockets of some of these women was Seventh-Day Adventist.”

Matthew groaned. “Oh God. Not one of us. Well, in that case he may be purposely leaving his victims by trees with lots of homilies hoping in his own perverted mind to convert them in the afterlife.” Soon his gaze grew concerned. “This whole thing has really taken a toll on you, hasn’t it?”

“Especially since I believe that my copy of
The Widower’s Branch
is probably the only one in the Upper Valley.”

Matthew shook his head. “Not necessarily,” he said. “Even if somebody were patterning killings after an obscure novel, this particular book is well over a hundred years old. So surely there’s a digitized version of it available on the Internet.”

“There isn’t,” I informed him. “I searched with several different engines. There is just a brief synopsis. And nothing about bodies found near fallen trees or the religious material. Just a citation that
The Widower’s Branch
was Collins’s last, unfinished text, his most obscure and unknown work.”

Matthew asked, “Do you still have passwords for JSTOR and Project Muse?”

“Nope. They were inactivated as soon as Saint Mike’s gave me the boot.”

However, I’d been able to use Theresa’s Wesleyan sign-on for these two sites and had checked them all, including Boolean searches on Yahoo and Google. Then I explained how I thought my copy of the unfinished novel had disappeared, and forgotten I’d loaned it to Breck.

He looked startled to hear this. “You know, Catherine,
that
is really weird.”

“What is?”

“That the book disappeared. I just remembered something—and obviously I was afraid to tell you this at the time—but when I borrowed your copy I put it in a very specific place on the edge of my desk. And then one day it just vanished. I looked everywhere for it. I tore apart the whole apartment. I was frantic. But then, even weirder, it just
reappeared
one night wedged in the bookshelf, as though it had always been there. And I just couldn’t understand how that could be because I checked through every single book on my bookshelf at least a half dozen times.”

“That kind of stuff with missing books happens to me all the time,” I reassured him.

“Yeah, but I almost had this feeling that somebody actually took it away and then brought it back.”

“Like who?”

Matthew shook his head. “Anyone who visited me, I suppose.”

I decided to make light of this. “Literary elves burrow into the pages of books you never crack. They come out at night and do all kinds of mischief.”

“For the purpose of a mind fuck,” Matthew said, and we both laughed. “So how
is
Breck?” he asked after a few moments of silence.

I told him she was fine and had become involved with an older woman. “She won’t be happy when she knows I’ve seen you.”

“Who can blame her?” Matthew said with admirable equanimity.

“None of my friends are happy that I’m seeing you,” I felt I had to point out.

“But that doesn’t apply to you, hopefully,” he said.

I endured his steady gaze for a moment or two. “I can’t say that I feel completely comfortable … with you here.”

Matthew looked disconsolate. I was inadvertently touching my scar again, this time in full view of him, and I could see it register. He took a step forward, as though wanting to touch it himself, but then held back, momentarily at odds with himself. At last he said, “Honestly, Catherine, do you think that I’m really capable of doing something like that again?”

I panicked for a moment, unable to even speak.

“If you really thought so, then would you have invited me to visit you?” He glanced around the house and turned his palms up. “Alone?”

I had to respond even though I felt I couldn’t. “It’s not so simple, Matthew.” I managed to control my voice. “Went … against my better judgment.”

“I’m glad you took the risk. And I’m happy to leave right now just to prove a point.”

Feeling a bit more composed, I said, “So you think if you left right now the next time I’d feel safer?”

“I’d hope so, Catherine. Certainly with time.”

I knew I wouldn’t.

SEVENTEEN

T
HE MORNING FOLLOWING
Matthew’s visit I got a phone call from Breck informing me that an article about the most recent body of “an illegal alien” being found had appeared in the Newark
Star-Ledger
. The paper reported that the forensics so far were not matching the latest victim with the previous one; however, the residents of Springfield, Vermont, and Claremont, New Hampshire, were once again fearful, locking their doors at night, while the purchase of guns kept skyrocketing at the local shops. In the Upper Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire, emergency town meetings were called to debate placing a temporary moratorium on women bicycling or jogging the roads alone. The paper even mentioned incidents of frightened homeowners shooting at suspicious shadows on their land.

“So people really
have
shot out into the dark,” I commented. “I didn’t read that one in the
Valley News.
Thank you, New Jersey, for telling me what’s going on in Vermont.”

“New Jersey has its virtues, Ma,” Breck said. “Lots of them. Just waiting for you to discover.”

“Could you be any more obvious? If you’d only stop sounding like an infomercial and find me a pig sitter, I’ll throw my other two critters in the car.”

There was a brief silence. “I was actually thinking of coming
there
for a short visit.”

“I’d be absolutely thrilled.”

“I’d have some time if I visit tomorrow. Would that work?”

She’d have some time? As far as I knew, Violet was the only one employed. “I’m not going anywhere,” I told her.

As soon as I finished my conversation with Breck, I tried calling Anthony and got his voice mail. I left him a short message. I wondered what specifically he wanted to discuss with me.

The last time Breck visited me was in early January, just prior to Angela Parker’s disappearance. When she arrived this time it was on a dry, cloudless Saturday afternoon. I told her to meet me at the Norwich farmer’s market, one of her favorite venues, a once-a-week consortium of organic farmers and bakers and craftspeople that usually hired a nerve-grating fiddle band. Barely enduring the music, I was standing by a pyramid of mottled heirloom tomatoes when I saw Breck in a pair of pale yellow capri pants strolling across the trampled lawn holding a big straw shopping bag and wearing a matching sun hat. She’d gained some weight (much needed) and her face, though always augustly angular, wasn’t looking so haggard. Before noticing me, she paused at a stand selling huge bouquets of phlox and dahlia and mallow and immediately set to putting together an arrangement.

“Those for me?” I said as I approached.

She dropped all the stems, threw her arms around me, and squeezed me tightly. “You look so grown-up,” I said. “Like a young mother out shopping for her family.”

“Not with this stomach,” Breck said, pulling up her form-fitting cotton shirt and showing me a rippling abdomen. “Young mothers don’t have this.”

“Despite your six-pack you look like you’re eating,” I said.

“Eating like a horse,” she said, reaching into her purse to pay the silver-haired, florid-faced lady who was wrapping the purchase.

“But probably exercising yourself to death,” I said.

Breck explained, “Keeps me sane. What can I tell you.… May I ask you something?” Breck said as we began wandering among the stalls of local honey vendors and bakery “artisans” who offered golden loaves and pies and homespun macramé handbags. “Why do you think so many women in Vermont dress in formless clothes … even ones who are slender?”

“Rural people don’t get dolled up for daily activities. You know that. But, believe me, a lot of us know how to throw ourselves together when we have to.”

“Well, but look at you,” she said. “In your black leggings and your sleeveless linen shirt.”

“If I wasn’t meeting you I’d be sporting tennis shoes and a muumuu.”

“Baloney. You like to look good.”

“I don’t give it nearly as much thought as I used to.” I reminded her of the wardrobe that I’d accumulated at deep discounts when I was on staff at several magazines. “Most of it just sits there. When we get home, you should go through it and see if you want anything.”

“Okay, I will.” Breck considered something for a moment. “Ma,” she said, “I know you think fashions are heavily influenced by environment. But I never changed the way I dressed when I moved up here.”

“That’s because you were making a statement.”

“At school they called me ‘the dress-up freak.’ The ‘skinny minny.’”

“Well, you were a displaced city girl.”

“Still am. New Jersey isn’t exactly Manhattan. Even though we’re twenty minutes away by
twain
.”

We breezed by all the prepared food stands and found only one that Breck would consider; she bought us curried tuna salad sandwiches on baguettes and beet salad with chunks of chèvre. Just outside the perimeter of the market we grabbed an empty picnic table. Breck, who had run to put the fresh flowers in her car, returned with a thermos of herbal iced tea and a manuscript-page-sized Handi Wipe with which she scoured the table. “You certainly come prepared,” I said. “A little anal retentive?”

She gave me a withering look. “Somebody in this family has got to be.”

We unwrapped our sandwiches and Breck poured tea into clear plastic cups. After watching her take a few enviable bites, I remarked, “You’re eating like a wolf!”

“Lunch,” Breck said, jutting her prominent chin forward and waving her sandwich at me. “That’s what happens at one o’clock in the afternoon.” A stiff, sultry breeze came up and blew fine, shoulder-length hair into her face. She quickly reached into her straw grab bag and pulled out a tortoiseshell clasp to pin it back. She took another bite of her sandwich, chewed carefully, and then said, “So … Elena Mayaguez. Is she the first non-Caucasian?”

I nodded.

“Nice to know that he doesn’t discriminate.”

“I guess that’s a point in his favor,” I managed to say, sipping my iced tea. “If, indeed, it’s the same guy, who has just changed his strategy.”

Breck thought for a moment and then said, “You’ve been following this closely, Ma. Do you really think they’re doing all they can? Rather than just investigating, are they trying to create a profile of this person, what he’s all about and what he’s after?”

“Why do you suppose they’re using Anthony?”

Breck reminded me that with all the murders nobody had been able to get DNA samples.