Cloudland Read Online Free PDF Page B

Catherine, in the open.”
    “And they seemed … together .”
    “Holding hands together.”
    I knew that Wade needed to get back to work, but I wanted to sit there in his vault of deeds and land records, the moldering smells of nineteenth-century documents, letting the news settle in a bit more. I wondered whether Emily had any idea about Fiona. Finally I said, “The Waites have always seemed … relatively content together.”
    “I won’t disagree,” Wade said.
    “But people should realize that if they do something on the QT around here, more often than not somebody in this town will find out about it.”
    Wade looked at me warily. “Except of course if they happen to be a serial killer.”
    *   *   *
    The following morning the temperature had remained unseasonably mild. Rather than drive the mile and a half up the road to Anthony’s house, I put on a black cashmere turtleneck and a loden wool vest that my daughter, Breck, and I found on sale at a local clothier called Ibex and walked.
    Cloudland Road is flanked on either side by tall oaks that in the summer cast a lovely drape of cooling shade. Wide-open meadows and pastures gently undulate as they stretch far back to forest, the land itself slowly rising to an elevation of 1,900 feet and opening to a view of the Green Mountains that to the north end up at Camel’s Hump, and in the blue, hazy southern distance are framed by Mount Ascutney. Growing up, I’d spent summers and holidays in Vermont, and when I got married, my husband and I bought my 1800s Cape on Cloudland and continued commuting from New York City until we got divorced. Within a year of our split he developed an aggressive form of throat cancer and died, and I then began living here full time with my daughter. That was eight years ago (when Breck was fourteen) and Paul and his adopted son, Wade, were the only other year-round residents. Anthony, his wife, and their two daughters arrived a few years later.
    Paul and I bought our parcels—mine fifty acres, his twenty—before property values skyrocketed. Anthony inherited approximately forty from his American grandmother. The rest of the pristine land is owned by the biotech CEO out of Boston who spends little time in his picturesque Architectural Digest farmhouse but who has nevertheless stockpiled a thousand acres, installed Scottish Highland cattle, and built Cape-style guesthouses for his friends and caretakers along the road and on several pinnacles of carefully cleared hillside. He’d had one of the ponds dredged in a perfect hourglass shape to please his reputedly implacable wife. My favorite house of his that he built and rarely uses is graced with a widow’s walk that gives a commanding yet lonely vantage point of the land with its swales and distant woods. Cloudland has always been largely uninhabited. When you drive along the road itself, it’s a rare thing when another car passes in the opposite direction—in short, a perfect location to excavate layers of deep snow and trundle a body.
    Spring comes relatively late to northern New England: early April often feels like dead of winter. Leaves generally don’t even bud for another six weeks; you never see croci until at least the third week. That day I set out into a landscape that was still largely snowbound. At the fringe of a sloping pasture stood a copse of sumacs whose vermilion leaves of the previous autumn still clung to the branches and looked like drops of blood holding fast to white fabric. I was passing the orchard for the first time since finding the body and saw that it was cordoned off, yellow police tape spooled from tree to tree, sometimes angling sharply to circumscribe its boundary. In places where the tape had been tied off, extra pieces hung like dead appendages fluttering in the wind. I could see pockmarks where the snow had been scooped up for lab sampling—all in all, an eerie scene like something out of a TV police drama. This was the sort of disturbance