Cloudland Read Free Page A

you. He told me his wife and his daughter read your column. Anyway, Marjorie Poole, the woman who got away from our killer last year, is a bellwether.” Anthony was speaking of the only woman attacked who’d managed to escape. “Most of the other women were pretty badly decomposed by the time they were found, whereas Angela was frozen for nearly three months. The strangle marks on her neck and Marjorie’s are pretty identical, as well as the stab wounds. It’s a certain kind of knife.”
    “A filleting knife,” I said. “Deep-sea fishermen use them.”
    “So could he be a fisherman who came inland?” Paul asked. He was looking at me oddly. I’d been inadvertently tracing my finger along a scar on my neck. The moment I realized he was peering at me I could actually feel the pressure of sadness that had been chasing me for the last two years, reliving the alarm of having my windpipe blocked, my breathing thwarted by a man I loved.
    “It’s a common enough knife, really,” Anthony said, adding that as in the other murders, there had been no handling that suggested sexual intent; and that this could mean the killer himself was sexually impotent.
    “One thing that continues to amaze me,” I said, “is that Marjorie Poole has been such a terrible witness. You would think she’d be able to give enough detail so that they could nail this guy.”
    Anthony looked from one of us to the other. The rolled-up sleeves of his shirt had slipped down his forearms, which were covered with golden hair. As he rolled them up again, he said, “I’ll explain, but once again, it can’t go beyond this table.” He looked around to make sure our waitress, an inveterate gossip named Sheila, was out of earshot.
    He reminded us that Marjorie Poole, a twenty-seven-year-old potter, had been attacked outside her studio loft in Claremont, New Hampshire. At seven o’clock one winter evening, carrying two plastic bags of groceries she’d been keeping in a small refrigerator, Marjorie began heading along the row of deserted offices and studio spaces. The building had originally been a wool mill, whose oak floors creaked and sighed when you walked along them and whose ceilings rose high up into an industrial cathedral. Out of the corner of her eye she claimed to have seen a densely built man sitting on a bench in front of one of the refurbished offices. Head in his hands, he was wearing a camouflage army jacket and a Boston Red Sox baseball cap. She sensed an air of distress about him and almost stopped to ask what was wrong. But a glance down the long, empty corridor was enough to make her wary. Later on she swore that he never looked up at her, that she’d never been able to see his face very clearly. A few moments after she passed him, he leapt off the bench and attacked her from behind, jamming his jacket sleeve into her mouth.
    He ringed her throat with fingers encased in woolen gloves. Then she felt a sharp, stupefying pain in the small of her back; he’d pulled up her soft down jacket, her striped jersey, and found bare skin. That winter Marjorie Poole had been going to a tanning parlor in West Lebanon, in anticipation of a holiday with her boyfriend in the Lesser Antilles. There was a tan line between her lower back and the top of her buttocks that was adorned with a discreet shamrock tattoo. With his long blade, the killer aimed for it, and the knife drove in halfway, piercing the shamrock, just missing her spleen, the tip barely nicking the wall of her bladder. She managed to backhand him with a grocery bag lined with large pouches of frozen strawberries, striking him forcefully on one side of his head, stunning him into momentary submission. He let go of the knife and she foolishly but instinctively reached around and yanked it right out of herself. While she bled her pain distilled into fury. She took a savage lunge between the flaps of his camouflage jacket, jabbing an inch into his gut, mixing her blood with his before