Cloudland by Joseph Olshan Read Free Book Online

gesture of surrender. “Okay. But do you think your insomnia could have something to do with … him, too?”
    “Probably.”
    “Takes a long time,” Anthony said meaningfully, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he was hinting at the state of his own life. “Was he just a student or was he your student?”
    Peering out the window, distracted by the slow swaying of the pine tree, whose needles seemed to be vibrating along with my longing for him, I reluctantly divulged, “He was my student. A bit older than the others, twenty-four when we met. The affair began after the course was over. But before he graduated.”
    “But then after a year it went south?”
    “Basically, yeah.”
    “The first teacher/student affair you’d ever had?” Anthony persisted.
    I nodded.
    “So how did the university twig?”
    “Somebody sent anonymous letters. To the school. To his parents. And even to the school newspaper.”
    “Who?”
    “We never found out. Could have been anybody. I had jealous colleagues, I had students who thought they were given unfair grades. And I had people who thought my being with him was … unseemly.”
    “What’s the age difference?”
    “Fifteen years.”
    “Not … inordinate.”
    “Well, depends on whom you’re asking. Certainly was to his mother when she found out and to my daughter, who is only a couple years younger than he.”
    “So what exactly happened with the school?”
    “First the administration warned me about the anonymous letters. They asked me to keep a lid on the relationship—at least until he finished school. Which I had no problem doing. But then a second round of letters were sent during the summer after he graduated. Around that time I got a pretty perfunctory phone call from Human Resources explaining they had to cut back on some adjuncts and I was one of them. There was really nothing I could do.”
    Anthony meditated on this for a moment. “That’s awful!”
    “Tell me about it.”
    For a moment he went reflectively silent. “So how exactly did it end?”
    “Well, as I said, first all the accusatory letters. Then it got more complicated. I tried to break it off. One afternoon he got drunk and desperate and lost control and…” I paused. “He ended up putting his hands around my throat.”
    Anthony’s expression froze. “Around your throat?”
    I pointed to my scar.
    “Did you continue seeing him after … that incident?”
    I shook my head. “I never saw him again. Except for once. He showed up at the prison one day when I was teaching my class.”
    There were a few moments of troubled silence. “Obviously you’ve made some connection between yourself and the fact that all these women were strangled.”
    “Yes and no.”
    “Have you ever considered that … he might have something to do with these murders?”
    “Not really. Because he moved to Thailand pretty soon after we broke up. Been there ever since. I’ve gotten letters from him. He told me he wanted to get as far away from me as possible. He told me he never wanted to come back.”

FOUR
    I OFTEN THOUGHT about the murdered ones, about where their mangled bodies had turned up: the River Road, the Wilder Dam, the train tracks just outside of Sharon, the shallows of the Connecticut River that divides Vermont and New Hampshire. I thought about where divers trolled for them, policemen roaming the marshes with search dogs, joined by concerned townspeople fearful that their idyll of rural life was changing into a killing zone. I’d scrutinized these victims, the published histories of their ordinary lives, their love lives. I’d read about them so many times it’s almost as though somehow I always knew I’d end up discovering one of them up the road from my own house.
    He’d been striking every six months, so this all began around seven hundred days before.
    One of the murdered women was too poor to own a car, forced by the lack of good public transportation to hitchhike in order to see her