Cloudland by Joseph Olshan Read Free Book Online Page B

up outside where she’d removed them, a plastic bottle of Bain de Soleil SPF 40 lying on top of them. Her husband, an electrical contractor, had called from his job site, hoping she’d prepare a check for one of his employees; when she didn’t answer the phone he came home to fetch the check himself.
    He found his wife in her bathing suit, lying across the kitchen threshold, eyes wide open, smeared in her own blood, which had exsanguinated into a pool reflecting the fluorescent tube lamps overhead. The side of her head was tilted at an unnatural angle against the pocket kitchen door, her neck violet and bruised, her arms slashed so that in various places he could see the whiteness of her bones. Nothing else in the house had been disrupted; there was a freshly baked lemon pound cake cooling on a rack not five feet away from where she lay. On the kitchen table was a plate with discarded crusts of a turkey sandwich and a small creamy pile of coleslaw purchased at the corner store less than a mile away, now clustered with green flies laying fresh eggs.
    For a long time Janet Tourvalon’s husband was unable to articulate the feeling so familiar to me now, of entering a time warp of grief—his for the dead, mine for the living and the dead—when a block of hours in a day dislodges from one’s sense of time and suddenly the fact that it’s evening is a travesty. When he came through the front door and saw all that dark, viscous liquid rippling across his kitchen floor, he never cried out, but rather looked with agonized bewilderment at the mother of his children lying in a skewed position, sliced to her marrow, as still as a deep-forest kill. He somehow managed to swallow the gag that erupted in his throat, picked up the phone, and called 911 (and later on 911 would replay the tape of his conversation for the police). He sat down with his wife, held one of her cold, bloodied hands in both of his, and listened to the horrific stillness of her death. Then described how he washed his hands and felt compelled to trudge upstairs to his office and write the check that he’d come home to fetch for one of his subcontractors. This was thought suspicious by the investigators, whereas I looked upon his act as a methodical person’s attempt to reaffirm his life in the midst of brutal horror. Once he’d managed to accomplish the check signing, he tried ringing the summer camp to ask that his children be kept from boarding the bus home, but found they’d already left. And so the twelve- and eight-year-old arrived home shortly after the police did, and Mr. Tourvalon was waiting for them to climb down the steep stairs of the bus. Ushering them into his car, he explained that their mother had died unexpectedly, and then, with a police escort, drove them to the house of his parents, who luckily lived nearby.
    The detectives who arrived on the scene immediately suspected him. They felt his calm and disconnected affect was typical of a violent offender numbed to his gruesome act, a man able to carry on living and working and taking care of children while his wife lay mangled in their modern, up-to-date kitchen.
    But when Mr. Tourvalon’s employees were questioned, an airtight alibi emerged: until he left in the late afternoon to go home and fetch the check, he’d been stuck all day on his job site, his time fully accounted for. And then the medical examiner in Concord, New Hampshire, pronounced that Janet Tourvalon had died close to noon, her wounds severe enough that she expired rather quickly. Finally the investigators reluctantly abandoned the notion of Mr. Tourvalon as the madman drifting around the Upper Connecticut River Valley, searching for just the right woman to murder.
    *   *   *
    In the middle of April, two weeks after I found Angela Parker’s body, Anthony called one afternoon right before I left to teach my reading and writing class at the local minimum-security prison. Apparently the warden was putting in my group a