Free Cloudland by Joseph Olshan Page A

study, and stood before a built-in bookshelf overflowing with volumes by Dickens and Mrs. Gaskill, George Eliot and the like. I ran my finger over the literary landscape of the nineteenth century, feeling like a needle on a Ouija board trying to get a stronger sense of which author it might be. And then it came to me: the Gothic nature of the subject matter made it likely to be Wilkie Collins, plus the fact that I’d read his novels many times over. I shifted to the part of my bookshelf that contains the majority of his work and started flipping through the obvious ones: The Woman in White, No Name, The Law and the Lady, No Thoroughfare, and The Moonstone, whose last lines I find to be among the most elegiac in all of English literature. As I was drawn into reading them once again, I was suddenly struck by the name of a book of his called The Widower’s Branch, a flash of recollection that it dealt with the serial murders of mostly married women whose dead bodies were found near … fallen trees! I was relieved and even proud that I’d figured it all out relatively easily.
    Curiously, The Widower’s Branch is actually the very last novel Wilkie Collins ever wrote. Theresa, my Victorian scholar/former college roommate, claims it was written after Blind Love, which many scholars advance as the author’s last work, whose completion was interrupted by his death. Knowing he wouldn’t finish Blind Love, Collins arranged for another writer named Walter Besant to finish the work from detailed notes. The Widower’s Branch, on the other hand, was never tampered with by anybody; it was left by his literary executors as a fragment, a mere eighty pages with a detailed outline published posthumously in an extremely limited edition, a copy of which Theresa managed to procure for me.
    I kept my Wilkie Collins in chronological order and meandered along the bookshelf, looking at the various spines of his novels until I came to Blind Love . There was a slender space between it and the flank of the bookshelf; The Widower’s Branch was gone.
    I stood there blinking, realizing that it had vanished. It was as though my mind were playing a trick on me. I was confused. The first thing I did was go backwards through the other volumes to see if any more were missing. The only other one I couldn’t find was Armadale, but I happened to know it was upstairs on a bookshelf outside my bedroom. I keep close tabs on the books and authors that mean a lot to me. I began to worry that I’d somehow lent it out and completely forgotten to whom. Perhaps my memory wasn’t so good after all.
    Then a comber of panic slammed me, as unnerving as losing sight of a neighbor’s child at the beach. I tried to think clearly, to remember where it could be. The phone rang again and it was Anthony.
    I was so riled up I almost didn’t pick up. “Now what?” I said to him.
    “You still circling that drain?”
    “Why and what’s it to you?” I said a bit sharply, still unnerved.
    “Marco Prozzo just stopped in to see me. He’s here for a reason that … well, I haven’t discussed it with you. Having to do with a suspect, one of the people we’re investigating.”
    “Somebody I know?”
    “Yeah. This is his idea: he wants to ask you a few questions. He thinks you might be able to help.”
    That’s curious, I thought. “When would this be?”
    “How’s about ten minutes?”
    I glanced at my watch: I didn’t have time for much of anything—my deadline was looming. “It’s not the most convenient moment.”
    “I’m sorry, I didn’t think—”
    My curiosity took control. “All right, come on over. I do have one other thing in the works besides the drain: dog biscuits.”
    Anthony laughed. “Just as long as you don’t pawn them off on us.”
    Right after I ended the call with Anthony, my editor at the newspaper syndicate rang to chitchat. The man, a hard-bitten, inveterate flirt, was not one to read subtleties. Itching to get back to work and