Free Cloudland by Joseph Olshan

Seventh-Day Adventist pamphlets shoved into the pockets of Angela Parker and Marjorie Poole might bring a more significant clue to the murderer’s identity, he had immersed himself in the Church’s literature, focusing in particular on the religion’s view on health and medical care and dying. He’d discovered a belief in vegetarianism, general respect and reverence for plant and animal life, the sacredness of trees, which many believers felt had an animus.
    The last fact had special significance. Anthony went on to confide that (being kept from the public record), three out of the five bodies of the dead women had been discovered near a downed tree. “Janet Tourvalon was murdered in her house, so she wouldn’t be part of the statistic.”
    “What about Angela? I don’t remember seeing a tree down.”
    “Oh yeah, it was right near her. A big one. It was still covered with snow when you found her.”
    And then I remembered that when Leslie Fullerton and I first went to find the body, the Statie had tripped over a tree trunk and tumbled into the snow. I mentioned this to Anthony.
    “Noted. Anyway, the more I read about this particular religion the more I’m not sure whether or not the killer is a member of the tribe or just borrowing their philosophy merely to cast suspicion in another direction.”
    “Or just one of those Adventists whose wheels have come off,” I said.
    “Precisely.”
    “Just don’t assume that this religious sect is as peace-loving as they proclaim.”
    “What do you know about them?”
    “I’ve known a lot of them over the years. When I was growing up and went to a youth camp down in Putney there were some Seventh-Day Adventist kids who lived on the lake we occupied and who always bullied the campers. One girl even beat me up.”
    “Yeah, but you can’t indict a whole culture due to a couple of miscreants.”
    “True. I just want you to see there might be a flip side to all this vegetarianism and pacifism.”
    “I hear that.”
    Then something struck me and I momentarily let my thread of the conversation drop. “Are you with me, Catherine? Are you there?”
    “Yeah,” I said foggily. “I was just thinking. There is something familiar about dead women being found by downed trees with religious literature shoved into their pockets. I could swear I read about it somewhere.”
    “Where is somewhere?”
    “Good question.”
    The conversation lagged for a moment or two and then Anthony said, “Maybe a newspaper story?”
    “Don’t think so.”
    “Online?”
    “I think it’s probably a book,” I said, staring across the room at a suite of built-in bookshelves, chockablock with volumes. When Saint Mike’s let me go I had to clear out my office, and two years on had yet to incorporate my two book collections: towering piles on each of the stairs up to my second-floor bedroom, and at least twenty novels stacked on my nightstand. I desperately needed to thin out my collection, but as yet had been unable to do so—like getting rid of a beloved dead person’s effects, in this case my five-year stint as an adjunct professor of journalism and nonfiction. Then again, it was difficult for me to get rid of books in general. Among the one hundred or so I read every year, I find myself sloughing off few of them, even the ones that I dislike and abandon after a few chapters. “It’ll probably drive me crazy until I figure it out. All the more reason to get back to my drainage. How ’bout I call you when I remember.”
    Fact of the matter: I was on deadline for my column, which meant returning to the dirty basement and monitoring the problematic pipe. Just as I was watching the foaming clot blocking my drain miraculously get sucked down into the depths, saying to myself, “Kudos to the reader from Birmingham,” it occurred to me that the book I was trying to place was probably a nineteenth-century novel.
    That old hankering to track down a lead. I climbed the steep stairs, crossed my