Cloudland by Joseph Olshan Read Free Book Online Page A

boyfriend in a neighboring town. Another, the mother of three children, was jogging along a backcountry road in Meriden, New Hampshire. Another, unable to get cell service, pulled into the shadowy parking lot of a convenience store and was attacked while she was using a grimy pay phone. A mother of two was accosted at her own house and stabbed to death in the kitchen. There have been hundreds of tips and clues, fragmentary descriptions of vehicles slowing down to pick up hitchhikers: Pontiac Sunbirds, GM Saturns, Volvo station wagons, or just plain red sedans. Of course, the cars people thought they saw would be red, evil red.
    Angela Parker had already left to go skiing before realizing that she’d forgotten to bring her phone. By nightfall the snow was generally all over the state and was particularly heavy in Windsor County, the temperature hovering at ten degrees. The flakes were whispery light, the wind frosted meringuelike drifts everywhere, and the snow mass was fairly easy for the plows to carve. At a few minutes after midnight, a man had notified the state police that his wife, who had driven seventy-two miles from Lyme, New Hampshire, down to Londonderry, Vermont, had not turned up at home and that when she called him earlier in the evening, at seven P.M. , for some reason she hadn’t said which rest area she’d stopped at. It was conjectured later on that perhaps she was hurrying the conversation along because she’d already noticed somebody. She left her ski mittens in the car; they would have prevented her from dialing the pay phone. I imagine in such a squall she might have been the only car stopped at the rest area and perhaps the killer’s car swung into the parking lot while she was speaking to her husband, slowly but purposely driving toward her, headlamps stampeding the snowflakes, until he came to a stop not ten feet from where she stood. Angela Parker’s last words to her husband were “Oh, I should … I’ve got to go. See you … love you.”
    The next morning, the man who plowed the parking lot of Interstate 91 apparently arrived in a jolly mood; by then the storm had blown offshore and now Nova Scotia was under siege. The weather had turned cloudless, the snow shimmered and jeweled, and there was that calm feeling of deep winter, of being far from the longest day of the year, which can be comforting to those of Nordic mind-set. I am not one of those Nordic, winter-loving people.
    So this lighthearted driver found a virgin parking lot and a mound that looked like an enormous marshmallow. He plowed toward it, used to finding broken-down vehicles in rest areas, left there due to overheated engines or flat tires or steering columns that have suddenly snapped like brittle necks. He plowed without being able to see that the car doors were ajar. He plowed without ever knowing that the snow was packed down by the pedals, a pair of ski pants with a wallet inside them lay on the passenger’s side, and beads of frozen blood were sprayed on the seats. I imagined that he felt generous toward this stranded, abandoned car, because with his big yellow plowing blade he chiseled around it the shape of a heart.
    Nearly all of these women were found months after they disappeared, their bodies in advanced states of decomposition that made it more difficult to find traces of foreign DNA. The only one found hours after she was murdered was Janet Tourvalon, a bosomy, fair-haired woman in her mid-thirties who lived just outside of Claremont, New Hampshire. One morning a year ago, summer, she got her children off to day camp, put on a chartreuse bikini, took her favorite sunning chaise, and sat out in her backyard facing the Connecticut River. At noon, she went inside to have her lunch, apparently noticed by several male motorists who admitted to driving by her house just to be able to have a glimpse of her scantily clad. But she never returned to her tanning spot. Hours later her sandals were found perfectly lined