recent inductee who’d been arrested and booked just a few days before for going into a gas station mini-market at eleven-thirty at night, yanking out his sizeable erect penis, and laying it on the counter in full view of the young woman working the till. Outraged, she’d begun screaming; he in turn leaped over the counter and wedged his hand over her mouth to quiet her down. In the midst of the struggle a football player from Dartmouth College strolled into the store to buy beer, yanked the pervert off the poor woman, and then decked him. This particular inmate, Anthony informed me, was one of several locals being investigated.
The prison is located right in downtown Woodstock, ironically one of the wealthiest towns in Vermont, whose buildings and surrounding land had been conserved by twin industrial titans: Frederick Billings, the president of the Northern Pacific Railroad, who financed the western railroad systems and for whom Billings, Montana, is named; and Lawrence Rockefeller. Frederick Billings became a leader in forestry management at a time when Vermont’s rolling hillsides had been deforested by the potash industries and sheep farmers. Billings planted thousands of trees on his estate, which became one of the first continuously managed forests in North America. His granddaughter Mary French, who married Lawrence Rockefeller, poured a lot of money into refurbishing this shire town’s nineteenth-century brick and clapboard buildings. The result of their efforts: everything in Woodstock is almost too picture-perfect, especially the central green surrounded by grand neocolonials and Georgian mansions and Greek revivals. The New York Times once hailed Woodstock as the Hollywood of Vermont, suggesting that in all its beauty, it came off like a stage on a movie lot. The prison is located incongruously amongst all this prosperity in a building that was once a courthouse.
Most of my “students” were waiting to be transferred to the maximum-security prison down in Springfield. As this was my first day teaching since I found the body of Angela Parker, I knew that “my felons,” as I affectionately called them, would ask about it. And I would tell them what I’d told the police and Anthony and everyone else, trotting out my signature description about the Coca-Cola snow and the pale, frosted face, beads of lapis draping her chest that only became visible when Marco Prozzo, wearing a pair of rubber gloves, unzipped her parka in search of corroborating wounds. I conjectured that when I told my prisoner-students my story, their faces would hardly be as shocked or concerned as those of the townspeople and the authorities, but rather greedy for further details. But who would the new guy be; and how creepy and unnerving if he happened to be the killer—then, too, how ridiculously coincidental. And yet just as much as I might have flinched from meeting him, I actually dreaded seeing the woman with whom Anthony Waite was probably having an affair: Fiona Pierce, who also volunteers at the jail, where she teaches an art class.
A second-grade teacher at the local elementary school, Fiona Pierce happens to be one of the few people in the town of Woodstock who ever laid eyes on Matthew Blake, when, in the wake of our tumultuous breakup, he showed up at the prison and waited two hours for me in the anteroom of the warden’s office.
That afternoon two years ago, Fiona and I had finished our instruction and were walking together down the long, polished cement corridor on our way out of the complex. We were brainstorming about requisitioning more art and paper supplies from the state, resolving to pick them up on our own at Staples in West Lebanon, when I saw Matthew sitting in a plastic half-moon chair and staring at us. His soft, luxuriant brown hair was parted in the center and brushed back, a throwback to an eighties hairstyle. He liked having a mane, liked having it brush against his bare broad shoulders; and it was lovely
The prison is located right in downtown Woodstock, ironically one of the wealthiest towns in Vermont, whose buildings and surrounding land had been conserved by twin industrial titans: Frederick Billings, the president of the Northern Pacific Railroad, who financed the western railroad systems and for whom Billings, Montana, is named; and Lawrence Rockefeller. Frederick Billings became a leader in forestry management at a time when Vermont’s rolling hillsides had been deforested by the potash industries and sheep farmers. Billings planted thousands of trees on his estate, which became one of the first continuously managed forests in North America. His granddaughter Mary French, who married Lawrence Rockefeller, poured a lot of money into refurbishing this shire town’s nineteenth-century brick and clapboard buildings. The result of their efforts: everything in Woodstock is almost too picture-perfect, especially the central green surrounded by grand neocolonials and Georgian mansions and Greek revivals. The New York Times once hailed Woodstock as the Hollywood of Vermont, suggesting that in all its beauty, it came off like a stage on a movie lot. The prison is located incongruously amongst all this prosperity in a building that was once a courthouse.
Most of my “students” were waiting to be transferred to the maximum-security prison down in Springfield. As this was my first day teaching since I found the body of Angela Parker, I knew that “my felons,” as I affectionately called them, would ask about it. And I would tell them what I’d told the police and Anthony and everyone else, trotting out my signature description about the Coca-Cola snow and the pale, frosted face, beads of lapis draping her chest that only became visible when Marco Prozzo, wearing a pair of rubber gloves, unzipped her parka in search of corroborating wounds. I conjectured that when I told my prisoner-students my story, their faces would hardly be as shocked or concerned as those of the townspeople and the authorities, but rather greedy for further details. But who would the new guy be; and how creepy and unnerving if he happened to be the killer—then, too, how ridiculously coincidental. And yet just as much as I might have flinched from meeting him, I actually dreaded seeing the woman with whom Anthony Waite was probably having an affair: Fiona Pierce, who also volunteers at the jail, where she teaches an art class.
A second-grade teacher at the local elementary school, Fiona Pierce happens to be one of the few people in the town of Woodstock who ever laid eyes on Matthew Blake, when, in the wake of our tumultuous breakup, he showed up at the prison and waited two hours for me in the anteroom of the warden’s office.
That afternoon two years ago, Fiona and I had finished our instruction and were walking together down the long, polished cement corridor on our way out of the complex. We were brainstorming about requisitioning more art and paper supplies from the state, resolving to pick them up on our own at Staples in West Lebanon, when I saw Matthew sitting in a plastic half-moon chair and staring at us. His soft, luxuriant brown hair was parted in the center and brushed back, a throwback to an eighties hairstyle. He liked having a mane, liked having it brush against his bare broad shoulders; and it was lovely
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