Think of a Number

Chapter 1

Jason Strunk was by all accounts an inconsequential fellow, a bland thirty-something, nearly invisible to his neighbors-and apparently inaudible as well, since none could recall a single specific thing he’d ever said. They couldn’t even be certain that he’d ever spoken. Perhaps he’d nodded, perhaps said hello, perhaps muttered a word or two. It was hard to say.

All expressed a conventional initial amazement, even a temporary disbelief, at the revelation of Mr. Strunk’s obsessive devotion to killing middle-aged men with mustaches and his uniquely disturbing way of disposing of the bodies: cutting them into manageable segments, wrapping them colorfully, and mailing them to local police officers as Christmas presents.

Dave Gurney gazed intently at the colorless, placid face of Jason Strunk-actually, the original Central Booking mug shot of Jason Strunk-that stared back at him from his computer screen. The mug shot had been enlarged to make the face life-size, and it was surrounded at the borders of the screen by the tool icons of a creative photo-retouching program that Gurney was just starting to get the hang of.

He moved one of the brightness-control tools on the screen to the iris of Strunk’s right eye, clicked his mouse, and then examined the small highlight he’d created.

Better, but still not right.

The eyes were always the hardest-the eyes and the mouth-but they were the key. Sometimes he had to experiment with the position and intensity of one tiny highlight for hours, and even then he’d end up with something not quite what it should be, not good enough to show to Sonya, and definitely not Madeleine.

The thing about the eyes was that they, more than anything else, captured the tension, the contradiction-the uncommunicative blandness spiked with a hint of cruelty that Gurney had often discerned in the faces of murderers with whom he’d had the opportunity to spend quality time.

He’d gotten the look right with his patient manipulation of the mug shot of Jorge Kunzman (the Walmart stock clerk who always kept the head of his last date in his refrigerator until he could replace it with one more recent). He’d been pleased with the result, which conveyed with disturbing immediacy the deep black emptiness lurking in Mr. Kunzman’s bored expression, and Sonya’s excited reaction, her gush of praise, had solidified his opinion. It was that reception, plus the unexpected sale of the piece to one of Sonya’s collector friends, that motivated him to produce the series of creatively doctored photographs now being featured in a show headlined Portraits of Murderers by the Man Who Caught Them, in Sonya’s small but pricey gallery in Ithaca.

How a recently retired NYPD homicide detective with a yawning uninterest in art in general and trendy art in particular, and a deep distaste for personal notoriety, could have ended up as the focus of a chic university-town art show described by local critics as “a cutting-edge blend of brutally raw photographs, unflinching psychological insights, and masterful graphic manipulations” was a question with two very different answers: his own and his wife’s.

As far as he was concerned, it all began with Madeleine’s cajoling him into taking an art-appreciation course with her at the museum in Cooperstown. She was forever trying to get him out-out of his den, out of the house, out of himself, just out. He’d learned that the best way to stay in control of his own time was through the strategy of periodic capitulations. The art-appreciation course was one of these strategic moves, and although he dreaded the prospect of sitting through it, he expected it to immunize him against further pressures for at least a month or two. It wasn’t that he was a couch potato-far from it. At the age of forty-seven, he could still do fifty push-ups, fifty chin-ups, and fifty sit-ups. He just wasn’t very fond of going places.

The course, however, turned out to be a surprise-in fact, three surprises. First, despite his pre-course assumption that his greatest challenge would be staying awake, he found the instructor, Sonya Reynolds, a gallery owner and artist of regional renown, riveting. She was not conventionally beautiful, not in the archetypal Northern European Catherine Deneuve mode. Her mouth was too pouty, her cheekbones overly prominent, her nose too strong. But somehow the imperfect parts were unified into a uniquely striking whole by large eyes of a deep smoky green and by a manner that was completely relaxed and naturally sensual. There were not many men in the class, just six of the twenty-six attendees, but she had the absolute attention of all six.

The second surprise was his positive reaction to the subject matter. Because it was a special interest of hers, Sonya devoted considerable time to art derived from photography-photography that had been manipulated to create images that were more powerful or communicative than the originals.

The third surprise came three weeks into the twelve-week course, on the night that she was commenting enthusiastically on a contemporary artist’s silk-screen prints derived from solarized photographic portraits. As Gurney gazed at the prints, the idea came to him that he could take advantage of an unusual resource to which he had special access and to which he could bring a special perspective. The notion was strangely exciting. The last thing he’d expected from an art-appreciation course was excitement.

Once this occurred to him-the concept of enhancing, clarifying, intensifying criminal mug shots, particularly the mug shots of murderers, in ways that would capture and convey the nature of the beast he had spent his career studying, pursuing, and outwitting-it took hold, and he thought about it more often than he would have been comfortable admitting. He was, after all, a cautious man who could see both sides of every question, the flaw in every conviction, the naïveté in every enthusiasm.

As Gurney worked at the desk in his den that bright October morning on the mug shot of Jason Strunk, the pleasant challenge of the process was interrupted by the sound of something being dropped on the floor behind him.

“I’m leaving these here,” said Madeleine Gurney in a voice that to anyone else might have sounded casual but to her husband was fraught.

He looked over his shoulder, his eyes narrowing at the sight of the small burlap sack leaning against the door. “Leaving what?” he asked, knowing the answer.

“Tulips,” said Madeleine in the same even tone.

“You mean bulbs?”

It was a silly correction, and they both knew it. It was just a way of expressing his irritation at Madeleine’s wanting him to do something he didn’t feel like doing.

“What do you want me to do with them in here?”

“Bring them out to the garden. Help me plant them.”

He considered pointing out the illogic of her bringing into the den something for him to bring back out to the garden but thought better of it.

“As soon as I finish with this,” he said a little resentfully. He realized that planting tulip bulbs on a glorious Indian-summer day in a hilltop garden overlooking a rolling panorama of crimson autumn woods and emerald pastures under a cobalt sky was not a particularly onerous assignment. He just hated being interrupted. And this reaction to interruption, he told himself, was a by-product of his greatest strength: the linear, logical mind that had made him such a successful detective-the mind that was jarred by the slightest discontinuity in a suspect’s story, that could sense a fissure too tiny for most eyes to see.

Madeleine peered over his shoulder at the computer screen. “How can you work on something so ugly on a day like this?” she asked.

Chapter 2

David and Madeleine Gurney lived in a sturdy nineteenth-century farmhouse, nestled in the corner of a secluded pasture at the end of a dead-end road in the Delaware County hills five miles outside the village of Walnut Crossing. The ten-acre pasture was surrounded by woods of cherry, maple, and oak.

The house retained its original architectural simplicity. During the year they’d owned it, the Gurneys had restored to a more appropriate appearance the previous owner’s unfortunate updates-replacing, for example, bleak aluminum windows with wood-framed versions that possessed the divided-light style of an earlier century. They did it not out of a mania for historical authenticity but in recognition that the original aesthetics had somehow been right. This matter of how one’s home should look and feel was one of the subjects on which Madeleine and David were in complete harmony-a list that, it seemed to him, had lately been shrinking.

This thought had been eating like acid at his mood most of the day, activated by his wife’s comment about the ugliness of the portrait he was working on. It was still at the edge of his consciousness that afternoon when, dozing in his favorite Adirondack chair after the tulip-planting activity, he became aware of Madeleine’s footsteps brushing toward him through the ankle-high grass. When the footsteps stopped in front of his chair, he opened one eye.

“Do you think,” she said in her calm, light way, “it’s too late to take the canoe out?” Her voice positioned the words deftly between a question and a challenge.

Madeleine was a slim, athletic forty-five-year-old who could easily be mistaken for thirty-five. Her eyes were frank, steady, appraising. Her long brown hair, with the exception of a few errant strands, was pulled up under her broad-brimmed straw gardening hat.

He responded with a question from his own train of thought. “Do you really think it’s ugly?”

“Of course it’s ugly,” she said without hesitation. “Isn’t it supposed to be?”

He frowned as he considered her comment. “You mean the subject matter?” he asked.

“What else would I mean?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “You sounded a bit contemptuous of the whole thing-the execution as well as the subject matter.”

“Sorry.”

She didn’t seem sorry. As he teetered on the edge of saying so, she changed the subject.

“Are you looking forward to seeing your old classmate?”

“Not exactly,” he said, adjusting the reclining back of his chair a notch lower. “I’m not big on recollections of times past.”

“Maybe he’s got a murder for you to solve.”

Gurney looked at his wife, studied the ambiguity of her expression. “You think that’s what he wants?” he asked blandly.

“Isn’t that what you’re famous for?” Anger was beginning to stiffen her voice.

It was something he’d witnessed in her often enough in recent months that he thought he understood what it was about. They had different notions of what his retirement from the job was supposed to mean, what kind of changes it was supposed to make in their lives, and, more specifically, how it was supposed to change him. Recently, too, ill feeling had been growing around his new avocation-the portraits-of-murderers project that was absorbing his time. He suspected that Madeleine’s negativity in this area might be partly related to Sonya’s enthusiasm.

“Did you know he’s famous, too?” she asked.

“Who?”

“Your classmate.”

“Not really. He said something on the phone about writing a book, and I checked on it briefly. I wouldn’t have thought he was well known.”

“Two books,” said Madeleine. “He’s the director of some sort of institute in Peony, and he did a series of lectures that ran on PBS. I printed out copies of the book jackets from the Internet. You might want to take a look at them.”

“I assume he’ll tell me all there is to know about himself and his books. He doesn’t sound shy.”

“Have it your way. I left the copies on your desk, if you change your mind. By the way, Kyle phoned earlier.”

He stared at her silently.

“I said you’d get back to him.”

“Why didn’t you call me?” he asked, more testily than he intended. His son didn’t call often.

“I asked him if I should get you. He said he didn’t want to disturb you, it wasn’t really urgent.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“No.”

She turned and walked across the thick, moist grass toward the house. When she reached the side door and put her hand on the knob, she seemed to remember something else, looked back at him, and spoke with exaggerated bafflement. “According to the book jacket, your old classmate seems to be a saint, perfect in every way. A guru of good behavior. It’s hard to imagine why he’d need to consult a homicide detective.”

“A retired homicide detective,” corrected Gurney.

But she’d already gone in and neglected to cushion the slam of the door.

Chapter 3

The following day was more exquisite than the day before. It was the picture of October in a New England calendar. Gurney rose at 7:00 A.M., showered and shaved, put on jeans and a light cotton sweater, and was having his coffee in a canvas chair on the bluestone patio outside their downstairs bedroom. The patio and the French doors leading to it were additions he’d made to the house at Madeleine’s urging.

She was good at that sort of thing, had a sensitive eye for what was possible, what was appropriate. It revealed a lot about her-her positive instincts, her practical imagination, her unfailing taste. But when he got tangled in their areas of contention-the mires and brambles of the expectations each privately cultivated-he found it difficult to focus on her remarkable strengths.

He must remember to return Kyle’s call. He would have to wait three hours because of the time difference between Walnut Crossing and Seattle. He settled deeper into his chair, cradling his warm coffee mug in both hands.

He glanced at the slim folder he’d brought out with his coffee and tried to imagine the appearance of the college classmate he hadn’t seen for twenty-five years. The photo that appeared on the book jackets that Madeleine printed out from a bookstore website refreshed his recollection not only of the face but of the personality-complete with the vocal timbre of an Irish tenor and a smile that was improbably charming.

When they were undergraduates at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus in the Bronx, Mark Mellery was a wild character whose spurts of humor and truth, energy and ambition were colored by something darker. He had a tendency to walk close to the edge-a sort of careening genius, simultaneously reckless and calculating, always on the brink of a downward spiral.

According to his website bio, the direction of the spiral, which had taken him down rapidly in his twenties, had been reversed in his thirties by some sort of dramatic spiritual transformation.

Balancing his coffee mug on the narrow wooden arm of the chair, Gurney opened the folder on his lap, extracted the e-mail he’d received from Mellery a week earlier, and went over it again, line by line.

Hello, Dave:

I hope you don’t find it inappropriate to be contacted by an old classmate after so much time has elapsed. One can never be sure what may be brought to mind by a voice from the past. I’ve remained in touch with our shared academic past through our alumni association and have been fascinated by the news items published over the years concerning the members of our graduating class. I was happy to note on more than one occasion your own stellar achievements and the recognition you were receiving. (One article in our Alumni News called you THE MOST DECORATED DETECTIVE IN THE NYPD -which didn’t especially surprise me, remembering the Dave Gurney I knew in college!) Then, about a year ago, I saw that you’d retired from the police department-and that you’d moved to up here to Delaware County. It got my attention because I happen to be located in the town of Peony-“just down the road apiece,” as they say. I doubt that you’ve heard of it, but I now run a kind of retreat house here, called the Institute for Spiritual Renewal-pretty fancy-sounding, I know, but in reality quite down to earth.

Although it has occurred to me many times over the years that I would enjoy seeing you again, a disturbing situation has finally given me the nudge I needed to stop thinking about it and get in touch with you. It’s a situation in which I believe that your advice would be most helpful. What I’d love to do is pay you a brief visit. If you could find it possible to spare me half an hour, I’ll come to your home in Walnut Crossing-or to any other location that might better suit your convenience.

My recollections of our conversations in the campus center and even longer conversations in the Shamrock Bar-not to mention your remarkable professional experience-tell me that you’re the right person to talk to about the perplexing matter before me. It’s a weird puzzle that I suspect will interest you. Your ability to put two and two together in ways that elude everyone else was always your great strength. Whenever I think of you, I always think of your perfect logic and crystal clarity-qualities that I dearly need more of right now. I’ll call you within the next few days at the number that appears in the alumni directory-in the hope that it’s correct and current.

With many good memories,

Mark Mellery

P.S. Even if you end up as mystified by my problem as I am, and have no advice to offer, it will still be a delight to see you again.

The promised call had come two days later. Gurney had immediately recognized the voice, eerily unchanged except for a distinct tremor of anxiety.

After some self-deprecating remarks about his failure to stay in touch, Mellery got to the point. Could he see Gurney within the next few days? The sooner the better, since the “situation” was urgent. Another “development” had occurred. It really was impossible to discuss over the phone, as Gurney would understand when they met. There were things Mellery had to show him. No, it wasn’t a matter for the local police, for reasons he’d explain when he came. No, it wasn’t a legal matter, not yet, anyway. No crime had been committed, nor was one being specifically threatened-not that he could prove. Lord, it was so difficult to talk about it this way; it would be so much easier in person. Yes, he realized that Gurney was not in the private-investigation business. But just half an hour-could he have half an hour?

With the mixed feelings he’d had from the beginning, Gurney agreed. His curiosity often got the better of his reticence; in this instance he was curious about the hint of hysteria lurking in the undertone of Mellery’s mellifluous voice. And, of course, a puzzle to be deciphered attracted him more powerfully than he cared to admit.

After rereading the e-mail a third time, Gurney put it back in the folder and let his mind wander over the recollections it stirred up from the back bins of his memory: the morning classes in which Mellery had looked hungover and bored, his gradual coming to life in the afternoon, his wild Irish jabs of wit and insight in the wee hours fueled by alcohol. He was a natural actor, undisputed star of the college dramatic society-a young man who, however full of life he might be at the Shamrock Bar, was doubly alive on the stage. He was a man who depended on an audience-a man who was drawn up to his full height only in the nourishing light of admiration.

Gurney opened the folder and glanced through the e-mail yet again. He was bothered by Mellery’s depiction of their relationship. The contact between them had been less frequent, less significant, less friendly than Mellery’s words suggested. But he got the impression that Mellery had chosen his words carefully-that despite its simplicity, the note had been written and rewritten, pondered and edited-and that the flattery, like everything else in the letter, was purposeful. But what was the purpose? The obvious one was to ensure Gurney’s agreement to a face-to-face meeting and to engage him in the solution of whatever “mystery” had arisen. Beyond that, it was hard to say. The problem was clearly important to Mellery-which would explain the time and attention he had apparently lavished on getting the flow and feeling of his sentences just right, on conveying a certain mix of warmth and distress.

There was also the small matter of the “P.S.” In addition to subtly challenging him with the suggestion that he might be defeated by the puzzle, whatever it was, it also appeared to obstruct an easy exit route, to vitiate any claim Gurney might be tempted to make that he was not in the private-investigation business or would not be likely to be helpful. The thrust of its wording was to characterize any reluctance to meet as a rude dismissal of an old friend.

Oh, yes, it was carefully crafted.

Carefulness. That was something new, wasn’t it? Definitely not a cornerstone quality of the old Mark Mellery.

This apparent change interested Gurney.

On cue, Madeleine came out through the back door and walked about two-thirds of the way to where Gurney was sitting.

“Your guest has arrived,” she announced flatly.

“Where is he?”

“In the house.”

He looked down. An ant was zigzagging along the arm of his chair. He sent it flying with a sharp flick of his fingernail.

“Ask him to come out here,” he said. “It’s too nice to be indoors.”

“It is, isn’t it?” she said, making the comment sound both poignant and ironic. “By the way, he looks exactly like his picture on the book jacket-even more so.”

“Even more so? What’s that supposed to mean?”

She was already returning to the house and did not answer.

Chapter 4

Mark Mellery took long strides through the soft grass. He approached Gurney as if planning to embrace him, but something made him reconsider.

“Davey!” he cried, extending his hand.

Davey? wondered Gurney.

“My God!” Mellery went on. “You look the same! God, it’s good to see you! Great to see you looking the way you do! Davey Gurney! Back at Fordham they used to say you looked like Robert Redford in All the President’s Men. Still do-haven’t changed a bit! If I didn’t know you were forty-seven like me, I’d say you were thirty!”

He clasped Gurney’s hand with both of his as though it were a precious object. “Driving over today, from Peony to Walnut Crossing, I was remembering how calm and collected you always were. An emotional oasis-that’s what you were, an emotional oasis! And you still have that look. Davey Gurney-calm, cool, and collected-plus the sharpest mind in town. How have you been?”

“I’ve been fortunate,” said Gurney, extricating his hand and speaking in a voice as devoid of excitement as Mellery’s was full of it. “I have no complaints.”

“Fortunate…” Mellery enunciated the syllables as if trying to recall the meaning of a foreign word. “It’s a nice place you have here. Very nice.”

“Madeleine has a good eye for these things. Shall we have a seat?” Gurney motioned toward a pair of weathered Adirondack chairs facing each other between the apple tree and a birdbath.

Mellery started in the direction indicated, then stopped. “I had something…”

“Could this be it?” Madeleine was walking toward them from the house, holding in front of her an elegant briefcase. Understated and expensive, it was like everything else in Mellery’s appearance-from the handmade (but comfortably broken in and not too highly polished) English shoes to the beautifully tailored (but gently rumpled) cashmere sport jacket-a look seemingly calculated to say that here stood a man who knew how to use money without letting money use him, a man who had achieved success without worshipping it, a man to whom good fortune came naturally. A harried look about his eyes, however, conveyed a different message.

“Ah, yes, thank you,” said Mellery, accepting the briefcase from Madeleine with obvious relief. “But where…?”

“You laid it on the coffee table.”

“Yes, of course. My brain is kind of scattered today. Thank you!”

“Would you like something to drink?”

“Drink?”

“We have some iced tea already made. Or, if you’d prefer something else…?”

“No, no, iced tea would be fine. Thank you.”

As Gurney observed his old classmate, it suddenly occurred to him what Madeleine had meant when she said that Mellery looked exactly like his book jacket photograph, “only more so.”

The quality most evident in the photograph was a kind of informal perfection-the illusion of a casual, amateur snapshot without the unflattering shadows or awkward composition of an actual amateur snapshot. It was exactly that sense of carefully crafted carelessness-the ego-driven desire to appear ego-free-that Mellery exemplified in person. As usual, Madeleine’s perception had been on target.

“In your e-mail you mentioned a problem,” said Gurney with a get-to-the-point abruptness verging on rudeness.

“Yes,” Mellery answered, but instead of addressing it, he offered a reminiscence that seemed designed to weave another little thread of obligation into the old school tie, recounting a silly debate a classmate of theirs had gotten into with a philosophy professor. During the telling of this tale, Mellery referred to himself, Gurney, and the protagonist as the “Three Musketeers” of the Rose Hill campus, striving to make something sophomoric sound heroic. Gurney found the effort embarrassing and offered his guest no response beyond an expectant stare.

“Well,” said Mellery, turning uncomfortably to the matter at hand, “I’m not sure where to begin.”

If you don’t know where to begin your own story, thought Gurney, why the hell are you here?

Mellery finally opened his briefcase, withdrew two slim softcover books, and handed them, with care, as if they were fragile, to Gurney. They were the books described in the website printouts he had looked at earlier. One was called The Only Thing That Matters and was subtitled The Power of Conscience to Change Lives. The other was called Honestly! and was subtitled The Only Way to Be Happy.

“You may not have heard of these books. They were moderately successful, but not exactly blockbusters.” Mellery smiled with what looked like a well-practiced imitation of humility. “I’m not suggesting you need to read them right now.” He smiled again, as though this were amusing. “However, they may give you some clue to what’s happening, or why it’s happening, once I explain my problem… or perhaps I should say my apparent problem. The whole business has me a bit confused.”

And more than a bit frightened, mused Gurney.

Mellery took a long breath, paused, then began his story like a man walking with fragile determination into a cold surf.

“I should tell you first about the notes I’ve received.” He reached into his briefcase, withdrew two envelopes, opened one, took from it a sheet of white paper with handwriting on one side and a smaller envelope of the size that might be used for an RSVP. He handed the paper to Gurney.

“This was the first communication I received, about three weeks ago.”

Gurney took the paper and settled back in his chair to examine it, noting at once the neatness of the handwriting. The words were precisely, elegantly formed-stirring a sudden recollection of Sister Mary Joseph’s script moving gracefully across a grammar-school blackboard. But even stranger than the painstaking penmanship was the fact that the note had been written with a fountain pen, and in red ink. Red ink? Gurney’s grandfather had had red ink. He had little round bottles of blue, green, and red ink. He remembered so little of his grandfather, but he remembered the ink. Could one still purchase red ink for a fountain pen?

Gurney read the note with a deepening frown, then read it again. There was neither a salutation nor a signature.

Do you believe in Fate? I do, because I thought I’d never see you again – and then one day, there you were. It all came back: how you sound, how you move-most of all, how you think. If someone told you to think of a number, I know what number you’d think of. You don’t believe me? I’ll prove it to you. Think of any number up to a thousand-the first number that comes to your mind. Picture it. Now see how well I know your secrets. Open the little envelope.

Gurney uttered a noncommittal grunt and looked inquiringly at Mellery, who had been staring at him intently as he read. “Do you have any idea who sent you this?”

“None whatever.”

“Any suspicions?”

“None.”

“Hmm. Did you play the game?”

“The game?” Clearly Mellery had not thought of it that way. “If what you mean is, did I think of a number, yes, I did. Under the circumstances it would have been difficult not to.”

“So you thought of a number?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

Mellery cleared his throat. “The number I thought of was six-five-eight.” He repeated it, articulating the digits-six, five, eight-as though they might mean something to Gurney. When he saw that they didn’t, he took a nervous breath and went on.

“The number six fifty-eight has no particular significance to me. It just happened to be the first number that came to mind. I’ve racked my brains, trying to remember anything I might associate it with, any reason I might have picked it, but I couldn’t come up with a single thing. It’s just the first number that came to mind,” he insisted with panicky earnestness.

Gurney gazed at him with growing interest. “And in the smaller envelope…?”

Mellery handed him the other envelope that was enclosed with the note and watched closely as he opened it, extracted a piece of notepaper half the size of the first, and read the message written in the same delicate style, the same red ink:

Does it shock you that I knew you would pick 658?

Who knows you that well? If you want the answer,

you must first repay me the $289.87 it cost me to find you.

Send that exact amount to

P.O. Box 49449, Wycherly, CT 61010.

Send me CASH or a PERSONAL CHECK.

Make it out to X. Arybdis.

(That was not always my name.)

After reading the note again, Gurney asked Mellery whether he had responded to it.

“Yes. I sent a check for the amount mentioned.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a lot of money. Why did you decide to send it?”

“Because it was driving me crazy. The number-how could he know?”

“Has the check cleared?”

“No, as a matter of fact, it hasn’t,” said Mellery. “I’ve been monitoring my account daily. That’s why I sent a check instead of cash. I thought it might be a good idea to know something about this Arybdis person-at least know where he deposited his checks. I mean, the whole tone of the thing was so unsettling.”

“What exactly unsettled you?”

“The number, obviously!” cried Mellery. “How could he possibly know such a thing?”

“Good question,” said Gurney. “Why do you say ‘he’?”

“What? Oh, I see what you mean. I just thought… I don’t know, it’s just what came to mind. I suppose ‘X. Arybdis’ sounded masculine for some reason.”

“X. Arybdis. Odd sort of name,” said Gurney. “Does it mean anything to you? Ring any bell at all?”

“None.”

The name meant nothing to Gurney, but it did not seem completely unfamiliar, either. Whatever it was, it was buried in a subbasement mental filing cabinet.

“After you sent the check, were you contacted again?”

“Oh, yes!” said Mellery, once more reaching into his briefcase and pulling out two other sheets of paper. “I received this one about ten days ago. And this one the day after I sent you my e-mail asking if we could get together.” He thrust them toward Gurney like a little boy showing his father two new bruises.

They appeared to be written by the same meticulous hand with the same pen as the pair of notes in the earlier communication, but the tone had changed.

The first was composed of eight short lines:

How many bright angels

can dance on a pin?

How many hopes drown in

a bottle of gin?

Did the thought ever come

that your glass was a gun

and one day you’d wonder,

God, what have I done?

The eight lines of the second were similarly cryptic and menacing:

What you took you will give

when you get what you gave.

I know what you think,

when you blink,

where you’ve been,

where you’ll be.

You and I have a date,

Mr. 658.

Over the next ten minutes, during which he read each note half a dozen times, Gurney’s expression grew darker and Mellery’s angst more obvious.

“What do you think?” Mellery finally asked.

“You have a clever enemy.”

“I mean, what do you think about the number business?”

“What about it?”

“How could he know what number would come to my mind?”

“Offhand, I would say he couldn’t know.”

“He couldn’t know, but he did! I mean, that’s the whole thing isn’t? He couldn’t know, but he did! No one could possibly know that the number six fifty-eight would be the number I would think of, but not only did he know it-he knew it at least two days before I did, when he put the damn letter in the mail!”

Mellery suddenly heaved himself up from his chair, pacing across the grass toward the house, then back again, running his hands through his hair.

“There’s no scientific way to do that. There’s no conceivable way of doing it. Don’t you see how crazy this is?”

Gurney was resting his chin thoughtfully on the tips of his fingers. “There’s a simple philosophical principle that I find one hundred percent reliable. If something happens, it must have a way of happening. This number business must have a simple explanation.”

“But…”

Gurney raised his hand like the serious young traffic cop he had been for his first six months in the NYPD. “Sit down. Relax. I’m sure we can figure it out.”

Chapter 5

Madeleine brought a pair of iced teas to the two men and returned to the house. The smell of warm grass filled the air. The temperature was close to seventy. A swarm of purple finches descended on the thistle-seed feeders. The sun, the colors, the aromas were intense, but wasted on Mellery, whose anxious thoughts seemed to occupy him completely.

As they sipped their teas, Gurney tried to assess the motives and honesty of his guest. He knew that labeling someone too early in the game could lead to mistakes, but doing so was often irresistible. The main thing was to be aware of the fallibility of the process and be willing to revise the label as new information became available.

His gut feeling was that Mellery was a classic phony, a pretender on many levels, who to some extent believed his own pretenses. His accent, for example, which had been present even in the college days, was an accent from nowhere, from some imaginary place of culture and refinement. Surely it was no longer put on-it was an integral part of him-but its roots lay in imaginary soil. The expensive haircut, the moisturized skin, the flawless teeth, the exercised physique, and the manicured fingernails suggested a top-shelf televangelist. His manner was that of a man eager to appear at ease in the world, a man in cool possession of everything that eludes ordinary humans. Gurney realized all this had been present in a nascent form twenty-six years earlier. Mark Mellery had simply become more of what he’d always been.

“Had it occurred to you to go to the police?” asked Gurney.

“I didn’t think there was any point. I didn’t think they’d do anything. What could they do? There was no specific threat, nothing that couldn’t be explained away, no actual crime. I didn’t have anything concrete to take to them. A couple of nasty little poems? A warped high-school kid could have written them, someone with a weird sense of humor. And since the police wouldn’t really do anything or, worse yet, would treat it as a joke, why would I waste my time going to them?”

Gurney nodded, unconvinced.

“Besides,” Mellery went on, “the idea of the local police grabbing hold of this and launching a full-scale investigation, questioning people, coming up to the institute, badgering present and former guests-some of our guests are sensitive people-stomping around and raising all sorts of hell, poking into things that are none of their business, maybe getting the press involved… Christ! I can just see the headlines-‘Spiritual Author Gets Death Threats’-and the turmoil that would raise…” Mellery’s voice trailed off, and he shook his head as if mere words could not describe the damage the police might cause.

Gurney responded with a look of bafflement.

“What’s wrong?” Mellery asked.

“Your two reasons for not contacting the police contradict each other.”

“How?”

“You didn’t contact the police because you were afraid they wouldn’t do anything. And you didn’t contact them because you were afraid they would do too much.”

“Ah, yes… but both statements are true. The common element is my fear of the matter’s being handled ineptly. Police ineptness might take the form of a lackadaisical approach or a bumbling bulls-in-the-china-shop approach. Inept lassitude or inept aggressiveness-you see what I mean?”

Gurney had the feeling he’d just watched someone stub his toe and turn it into a pirouette. He wasn’t quite buying it. In his experience when a man gave two reasons for a decision, it was likely that a third reason-the real one-had been left unstated.

As if tuned to the wavelength of Gurney’s thought, Mellery said suddenly, “I need to be more honest with you, more open about my concerns. I can’t expect you to help me unless I show you the whole picture. In my forty-seven years, I’ve led two distinctly different lives. For the first two-thirds of my existence on this earth, I was on the wrong path, going nowhere good but getting there fast. It started in college. After college it got worse. The drinking increased, the chaos increased. I got involved in dealing drugs to an upmarket clientele and became friends with my customers. One was so impressed with my ability to spin a line of bullshit that he gave me a job on Wall Street selling bullshit stock deals over the phone to people greedy and stupid enough to believe that doubling their investment in three months was a real possibility. I was good at it, and I made a lot of money, and the money was my rocket fuel into lunacy. I did whatever I felt like doing, and most of it I can’t remember, because most of the time I was blind drunk. For ten years I worked for a succession of brilliant, thieving scumbags. Then my wife died. You wouldn’t have known, but I had gotten married the year after we graduated.”

Mellery reached for his glass. He drank thoughtfully, as though the taste were an idea forming in his mind. When the glass was half empty, he placed it on the arm of the chair, stared at it for a moment, then resumed his story.

“Her death was a monumental event. It had a greater effect on me than all the events of our fifteen years of marriage combined. I hate to admit this, but it was only through her death that my wife’s life had any real impact on me.”

Gurney got the impression that this neat irony, spoken as haltingly as though it had just come to mind, was being delivered for the hundredth time. “How did she die?”

“The whole story is in my first book, but here’s the short ugly version. We were on vacation on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. One evening at sunset, we were sitting on a deserted beach. Erin decided to go for a swim. She’d usually go out about a hundred feet and swim back and forth parallel to the shore, as if she were doing laps in a pool. She was religious about exercise.” He paused, letting his eyes drift shut.

“Is that what she did that night?”

“What?”

“You said that’s what she usually did.”

“Oh, I see. Yes, I think that’s what she did that night. The truth is, I’m really not sure because I was drunk. Erin went in the water; I stayed on the beach with my thermos of martinis.” A tic had appeared at the corner of his left eye.

“Erin drowned. The people who discovered her body, floating in the water fifty feet from shore, also discovered me, passed out on the beach in a drunken stupor.”

After a pause he continued in a strained voice, “I imagine she had a cramp or… I don’t know what… but I imagine… she may have called to me-” He broke off, closed his eyes again, and massaged the tic. When he opened them, he looked around as if taking in his surroundings for the first time.

“This is a lovely place you have,” he said with a sad smile.

“You said her death had a powerful effect on you?”

“Oh, yes, a powerful effect.”

“Right away or later?”

“Right away. It’s a cliché, but I had what is called ‘a moment of clarity.’ It was more painful, more revelatory than anything I’ve experienced before or since. I saw vividly for the first time in my life the path I was on and how insanely destructive it was. I don’t want to liken myself to Paul being knocked off his horse on the way to Damascus, but the fact is, from that moment on I did not want to take another step down that path.” He spoke these words with resounding conviction.

He could teach a sales course called Resounding Conviction, mused Gurney.

“I signed myself in to an alcohol detox because it seemed the right thing to do. After detox I went into therapy. I wanted to be sure I’d found the truth and not lost my mind. The therapist was encouraging. I ended up going back to school and getting two graduate degrees, one in psychology and one in counseling. One of my classmates was the pastor of a Unitarian church, and he asked me to come and talk about my ‘conversion’-that was his word for it, not mine. The talk was a success. It grew into a series of lectures that I gave at a dozen other Unitarian churches, and the lectures turned into my first book. The book became the basis of a three-part series for PBS. Then that was distributed as a set of videotapes.

“A lot of stuff like that happened-a stream of coincidences that carried me from one good thing to another. I was invited to do a series of private seminars for some extraordinary people-who also happened to be extraordinarily wealthy. That led to the founding of the Mellery Institute for Spiritual Renewal. The people who come there love what I do. I know how egomaniacal that sounds, but it’s true. I have people who come back year after year to hear essentially the same lectures, to go through the same spiritual exercises. I hesitate to say this, because it sounds so pretentious, but as a result of Erin’s death I was reborn into an amazing new life.”

His eyes moved restlessly, giving the impression of being focused on a private landscape. Madeleine came out, removed their empty glasses, and asked if they wanted refills, which they declined. Mellery mentioned again what a lovely place they had.

“You said that you wanted to be more honest with me about your concerns,” prompted Gurney.

“Yes. It has to do with my drinking years. I was a blackout drinker. I had serious memory blackouts-some lasting an hour or two, some longer. In the final years, I had them every time I drank. That’s a lot of time, a lot of things I’ve done, that I have no recollection of. When I was drunk, I wasn’t choosy about who I was with or what I did. Frankly, the alcohol references in those nasty little notes I showed you are the reason I’m so upset. My emotions the past few days have been bouncing back and forth between upset and terrified.”

Despite his skepticism, Gurney was struck by something authentic in Mellery’s tone. “Tell me more,” he said.

During the ensuing half hour, it became clear that there was not a lot more Mellery was willing or able to tell. He did, however, return to one point that obsessed him.

“How in the name of God could he have known what number I would think of? I have gone over in my mind people I’ve known, places I’ve been, addresses, zip codes, phone numbers, dates, birthdays, license plates, even prices of things-anything with numbers-and there’s nothing I associate with six fifty-eight. It’s driving me crazy!”

“It might be more useful to focus on simpler questions. For instance…”

But Mellery wasn’t listening. “I have no sense that six fifty-eight means anything at all. But it must mean something. And whatever it means, someone else knows about it. Someone else knows that six fifty-eight is significant enough to me that it would be the first number I would think of. I can’t get my mind around that. It’s a nightmare!”

Gurney sat quietly and waited for Mellery’s panic to exhaust itself.

“The references to drinking mean that it’s someone who knew me in the bad old days. If they have some sort of grudge-which it sounds like they do-they’ve been nursing it for a long time. It might be someone who lost track of me, had no idea where I was, then saw one of my books, saw my picture, read something about me, and decided to… decided to what? I don’t even know what these notes are about.”

Still Gurney said nothing.

“Do you have any idea what it’s like to have a hundred, maybe two hundred, nights in your life you have no recollection of?” Mellery shook his head in apparent astonishment at his own recklessness. “The only thing I know for sure about those nights is that I was drunk enough-crazy enough-to do anything. That’s the thing about alcohol-when you drink as much I did, it takes away all fear of consequences. Your perceptions are warped, your inhibitions disappear, your memory shuts down, and you run on impulse-instinct without constraint.” He fell silent, shaking his head.

“What do you think you might have done in one of those memory blackouts?”

Mellery stared at him. “Anything! Christ, that’s the point-anything!”

He looked, Gurney thought, like a man who has just discovered that the tropical paradise of his dreams, in which he has invested every cent, is infested with scorpions.

“What do you want me to do for you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I was hoping for a Sherlock Holmes deduction, mystery solved, letter writer identified and rendered harmless.”

“You’re in a better position to guess what this is all about than I am.”

Mellery shook his head. Then a fragile hopefulness widened his eyes. “Could it be a practical joke?”

“If it is, it’s crueler than most,” replied Gurney. “What else comes to mind?”

“Blackmail? The writer knows something awful, something I can’t remember? And the $289.87 is just the first demand?”

Gurney nodded noncommittally. “Any other possibilities?”

“Revenge? For something awful I did, but they don’t want money, they want…” His voice trailed off pathetically.

“And there’s no specific thing you remember doing that would seem to justify this response?”

“No. I told you. Nothing I can remember.”

“Okay, I believe you. But under the circumstances, it may be worthwhile to consider a few simple questions. Just write them down as I ask them, take them home, spend twenty-four hours with them, and see what comes to mind.”

Mellery opened his elegant briefcase and withdrew a small leather notebook and a Montblanc pen.

“I want you to make a few separate lists, as best you can, okay? List number one: possible business or professional enemies-people with whom you were at any time in serious conflict over money, contracts, promises, position, reputation. List number two: unresolved personal conflicts-ex-friends, ex-lovers, partners in affairs that ended badly. List three: directly menacing individuals-people who have made accusations against you or threatened you. List four: unstable individuals-people you dealt with who were unbalanced or troubled in some way. List five: anyone from your past whom you have run into recently, regardless of how innocent or accidental the encounter may have seemed. List six: any connections you have with anyone living in or around Wycherly-since that’s where the X. Arybdis post-office box is, and that’s where all the envelopes were postmarked.”

As he dictated the questions, he observed Mellery shake his head repeatedly, as if to assert the impossibility of recalling any relevant names.

“I know how difficult this seems,” said Gurney with parental firmness, “but it needs to be done. In the meantime leave the notes with me. I’ll take a closer look. But remember, I’m not in the private-investigation business, and there may be very little I can do for you.”

Mellery stared bleakly at his hands. “Apart from making these lists, is there something else I should be doing myself?”

“Good question. Anything come to mind?”

“Well… maybe with some direction from you I could track down this Mr. Arybdis of Wycherly, Connecticut, try to get some information about him.”

“If by ‘track down’ you mean through his home address rather than his box number, the post office won’t give it to you. For that you need to get the police involved, but you refuse to do that. You could check the Internet White Pages, but that gets you nowhere with a made-up name-which this probably is, since he said in the note it wasn’t the name you knew him by.” Gurney paused. “But it’s an odd thing about the check, don’t you think?”

“You mean the amount?”

“I mean the fact that it wasn’t cashed. Why make such a point of it-the precise amount, who to make it out to, where to send it-and then not cash it?”

“Well, if Arybdis is a false name, and he has no ID in that name…”

“Then why offer the option of sending a check? Why not demand cash?”

Mellery’s eyes scanned the ground as if the possibilities were land mines. “Maybe all he wanted was something with my signature on it.”

“That occurred to me,” said Gurney, “but there are two difficulties with it. First, remember that he was also willing to take cash. Second, if the real goal was to get a signed check, why not ask for a smaller amount-say, twenty dollars or even fifty? Wouldn’t that increase the likelihood of getting a response?”

“Maybe Arybdis isn’t that smart.”

“Somehow I don’t think that’s the problem.”

Mellery looked like exhaustion was vying with anxiety in every cell of his body and it was a close contest. “Do you think I’m in any real danger?”

Gurney shrugged. “Most crank letters are just crank letters. The unpleasant message itself is the assault weapon, so to speak. However…”

“These are different?”

“These may be different.”

Mellery’s eyes widened. “I see. You will take another look at them?”

“Yes. And you’ll get started on those lists?”

“It won’t do any good, but yes, I’ll try.”

Chapter 6

In the absence of an invitation to stay for lunch, Mellery had reluctantly departed, driving a meticulously restored powder blue Austin-Healey-a classic open sports car on a perfect driving day to which the man seemed miserably oblivious.

Gurney returned to his Adirondack chair and sat there for a long while, nearly an hour, hoping that the tangle of facts would start to arrange themselves in some kind of order, some sensible concatenation. However, the only thing that became clear to him was that he was hungry. He got up, went into the house, made a sandwich of havarti and roasted peppers, and ate alone. Madeleine seemed to be missing, and he wondered if he’d forgotten some plan she might have told him about. Then, as he was rinsing his plate and gazing idly out the window, he caught sight of her meandering up the field from the orchard, her canvas tote full of apples. She had that look of bright serenity that was so often for her an automatic consequence of being in the open air.

She entered the kitchen and laid the apples down by the sink with a loud, happy sigh. “God, what a day!” she exclaimed. “On a day like this, being indoors a minute longer than you have to be is a sin!”

It wasn’t that he disagreed with her, at least not aesthetically, maybe not at all, but the difficult personal fact for him was that his natural inclinations tilted him inward in a variety of ways, with the result that, left to his own devices, he spent more time in the consideration of action than in action, more time in his head than in the world. This had never been a problem in his profession; in truth, it was the very thing that seemed to make him so good at it.

In any event, he had no immediate desire to go out, nor was it something he felt like talking about, arguing about, or feeling guilty about. He raised a diversionary subject.

“What was your impression of Mark Mellery?”

She answered without looking up from the fruit she was transferring from her bag to the countertop, or even pausing to consider the question.

“Full of himself and scared to death. An egomaniac with an inferiority complex. Afraid the bogeyman is coming to get him. Wants Uncle Dave to protect him. By the way, I wasn’t purposely eavesdropping. His voice carries well. I bet he’s a great public speaker.” She made this sound like a dubious asset.

“What did you think of the number business?”

“Ah,” she said with dramatic affectation. “‘The Case of the Mind-Reading Stalker.’”

He stifled his irritation. “Do you have any idea how it might have been done-how the writer knew what number Mellery would choose?”

“Nope.”

“You don’t seem perplexed by it.”

“But you are.” Again she spoke with her eyes on her apples. The tiny ironic grin, increasingly present these days, tugged at the corner of her mouth.

“You have to admit it’s quite a puzzle,” he insisted.

“I suppose.”

He repeated the key facts with the edginess of a man who cannot understand why he is not being understood. “A person gives you a sealed envelope and tells you to picture a number in your mind. You picture six fifty-eight. He tells you to look in the envelope. You look in the envelope. The note inside says six fifty-eight.”

It was clear that Madeleine was not as impressed as she ought to be. He went on, “That’s a remarkable feat. It would appear to be impossible. Yet it was done. I’d like to figure out how it was done.”

“And I’m sure you will,” she said with a small sigh.

He gazed through the French doors, past the pepper and tomato plants wilted from the season’s first frost. (When was that? He couldn’t remember. Couldn’t seem to focus on the time factor.) Beyond the garden, beyond the pasture, his gaze rested on the red barn. The old McIntosh apple tree was just visible behind the corner of it, its fruit dotted here and there through the mass of foliage like droplets of impressionist paint. Into this tableau there intruded a nagging sense of something he ought to be doing. What was it? Of course! His week-old promise that he would fetch the extension ladder from the barn and pick the high fruit Madeleine couldn’t get to by herself. Such a small thing. So easy for him to do. A half-hour project at most.

As he rose from his chair, buoyed by good intentions, the phone rang. Madeleine picked it up, ostensibly because she was standing next to the table on which it rested, but that was not the real reason. Madeleine often answered the phone regardless of who was closer to it. It had less to do with logistics than with their respective desires for contact with other people. For her, people in general were a plus, a source of positive stimulation (with exceptions such as the predatory Sonya Reynolds). For Gurney, people in general were a minus, a drain on his energy (with exceptions such as the encouraging Sonya Reynolds).

“Hello?” said Madeleine in that pleasantly expectant way she greeted all callers-full of the promise of interest in whatever they might have to say. A second later her tone dropped into a less enthusiastic register.

“Yes, he is. Just a moment.” She waved the handset toward Gurney, laid it on the table, and left the room.

It was Mark Mellery, and his agitation level had risen.

“Davey, thank God you’re there. I just got home. I got another of those damn letters.”

“In today’s mail?”

The answer was yes, as Gurney assumed it would be. But the question had a purpose nonetheless. He had discovered over years of interviewing countless hysterical people-at crime scenes, in emergency rooms, in all sorts of chaotic situations-that the easiest way to calm them was to start by asking simple questions they could answer yes to.

“Does it look like the same handwriting?”

“Yes.”

“And the same red ink?”

“Yes, everything’s the same except the words. Shall I read it to you?”

“Go ahead,” he said. “Read it to me slowly and tell me where the line breaks are.”

The clear questions, clear instructions, and Gurney’s tranquil voice had the predictable effect. Mellery sounded like his feet were getting back on solid ground as he read aloud the peculiar, unsettling verse-with little pauses to indicate the ends of lines:

“I do what I’ve done

not for money or fun

but for debts to be paid,

amends to be made.

For blood that’s as red

as a painted rose.

So every man knows

he reaps what he sows.”

After jotting it down on the pad by the phone, Gurney reread it carefully, trying to get a sense of the writer-the peculiar personality lurking at the intersection of a vengeful intent and the urge to express it in a poem.

Mellery broke the silence. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking it may be time for you to go to the police.”

“I’d rather not do that.” The agitation was returning. “I explained that to you.”

“I know you did. But if you want my best advice, that’s it.”

“I understand what you’re saying. But I’m asking for an alternative.”

“The best alternative, if you can afford it, would be twenty-four-hour bodyguards.”

“You mean walk around my own property between a pair of gorillas? How on earth do I explain that to my guests?”

“‘Gorillas’ may be a bit of an exaggeration.”

“Look, the point is, I don’t tell lies to my guests. If one of them asked me who these new additions are, I’d have to admit that they are bodyguards, which would naturally lead to more questions. It would be unsettling-toxic to the atmosphere I try to generate here. Is there any other course of action you can suggest?”

“That depends. What would you want the action to achieve?”

Mellery answered with a sour little laugh. “Maybe you could discover who’s after me and what they want to do to me, and then keep them from doing it. Do you think you could do that?”

Gurney was about to say, “I’m not sure whether I can or not,” when Mellery added with sudden intensity, “Davey, for Chrissake, I’m scared shitless. I don’t know what the hell is going on. You’re the smartest guy I ever met. And you’re the only guy I trust not to make the situation worse.”

Just then Madeleine passed through the kitchen carrying her knitting bag. She picked up her straw gardening hat from the sideboard along with the current issue of Mother Earth News and went out through the French doors with a quick smile that seemed to be switched on by the bright sky.

“How much I can help you will depend on how much you help me,” said Gurney.

“What do you want me to do?”

“I already told you.”

“What? Oh… the lists…”

“When you’ve made progress, call me back. We’ll see where we go from there.”

“Dave?”

“Yes?”

“Thank you.”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“You’ve given me some hope. Oh, by the way, I opened that envelope today very carefully. Like they do on TV. So if there are fingerprints, they wouldn’t be destroyed. I used tweezers and latex gloves. I put the letter in a plastic bag.”

Chapter 7

Gurney wasn’t really comfortable with his agreement to get involved in Mark Mellery’s problem. Certainly he was attracted by its mystery, by the challenge of unraveling it. So why did he feel uneasy?

It popped into his mind that he should go to the barn to get the ladder to gather the promised apples, but that was replaced by the thought he should set up his next art project for Sonya Reynolds-at least enter the mug shot of the infamous Peter Piggert into his computer’s retouching program. He’d been looking forward to the challenge of capturing the inner life of that Eagle Scout who had not only murdered his father and fifteen years later his mother but had done so for sex-related motives that seemed more horrendous than the crimes themselves.

Gurney went to the room he had set up for his Cop Art avocation. Once the farmhouse pantry, it was now furnished as a den and was suffused with a shadowless, cool light from an expanded window on its north wall. He stared out at the bucolic view. A gap in the maple copse beyond the meadow formed a frame for the bluish hills that receded into the distance. It brought his mind back to the apples, and he returned to the kitchen.

As he stood entangled in indecision, Madeleine came in from her knitting.

“So what’s the next step with Mellery?” she asked.

“I haven’t decided.”

“Why not?”

“Well… it’s not the kind of thing you’d want me to get wound up in, is it?”

“That’s not the problem,” she said with the clarity that always impressed him.

“You’re right,” he conceded. “I think the problem actually is that I can’t put the normal labels on anything yet.”

She flashed a smile of understanding.

Encouraged, he went on, “I’m not a homicide cop anymore, and he’s not a homicide victim. I’m not sure what I am or what he is.”

“Old college buddy?”

“But what the hell is that? He recalls a level of comradeship between us that I never felt. Besides, he doesn’t need a buddy, he needs a bodyguard.”

“He wants Uncle Dave.”

“That’s not who I am.”

“You sure?”

He sighed. “Do you want me to get involved in this Mellery business or not?”

“You are involved. You may not have the labels sorted out yet. You’re not an official cop, and he’s not an official crime victim. But there’s a puzzle there, and by God, sooner or later you’re going to put the pieces together. That’s always going to be the bottom line, isn’t it?”

“Is that an accusation? You married a detective. I wasn’t pretending to be something else.”

“I thought there might be a difference between a detective and a retired detective.”

“I’ve been retired for over a year. What do I do that looks like detective work?”

She shook her head as if to say that the answer was painfully obvious. “What do you invest any time in that doesn’t look like detective work?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Everyone does portraits of murderers?”

“It’s a subject I know something about. You want me to draw pictures of daisies?”

“Daisies would be better than homicidal madmen.”

“It was you who got me involved in this art thing.”

“Oh, I see. It’s because of me that you spend your time on beautiful fall mornings staring into the eyes of serial killers?”

The barrette that was holding most of her hair up and away from her face seemed to be losing its grip, and several dark strands descended in front of her eyes, which she seemed not to notice, giving her a rare harried look that he found touching.

He took a deep breath. “What exactly are we fighting about?”

“You figure it out. You’re the detective.”

As he stood looking at her, he lost interest in carrying the weight of the argument any further. “I want to show you something,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

He left the room and returned a minute later with his handwritten copy of the nasty little poem Mellery had read to him over the phone.

“What do you make of this?”

She read it so rapidly that someone who didn’t know her might think she hadn’t read it at all. “Sounds serious,” she said, handing it back to him.

“I agree.”

“What do you think he’s done?”

“Ah, good question. You noticed that word?”

She recited the relevant couplet: “‘I do what I’ve done / not for money or fun.’”

If Madeleine didn’t have a photographic memory, thought Gurney, she had something close to it.

“So what exactly is it that he’s done, and what is he planning to do?” she went on in a rhetorical tone that invited no reply. “I’m sure you’ll find out. You might even end up with a murder to solve, from the sound of that note. Then you could collect the evidence, follow the leads, catch the murderer, paint his portrait, and give it to Sonya for her gallery. What’s that saying about turning lemons into lemonade?”

Her smile looked positively dangerous.

At times like this, the question that came to his mind was the one he least wanted to consider. Had moving to Delaware County been a great mistake?

He suspected that he’d gone along with her desire to live in the country to make up to her for all the crap she’d had to endure as a cop’s wife-always playing second fiddle to the job. She loved woods and mountains and meadows and open spaces, and he felt he owed her a new environment, a new life-and he made the assumption that he would be able to adjust to anything. Bit of pride there. Or maybe self-delusion. Perhaps a desire to get rid of his guilt through a grand gesture? Stupid, really. The truth was, he hadn’t adjusted well to the move. He wasn’t as flexible as he’d naïvely imagined. As he kept trying to find a meaningful place for himself in the middle of nowhere, he kept falling back instinctively on what he was good at-perhaps too good at, obsessively good at. Even in his struggles to appreciate nature. The damn birds, for example. Bird-watching. He’d managed to turn the process of observation and identification into a stakeout. Made notes on their comings and goings, habits, feeding patterns, flight characteristics. It might look to someone else like a newfound love of God’s little creatures. But it wasn’t that at all. It wasn’t love, it was analysis. Probing.

Deciphering.

Good God. Was he really that limited?

Was he, in fact, too limited-too small and rigid-in his approach to life to ever be able to give back to Madeleine what his devotion to his work had deprived her of? And as long as he was considering painful possibilities, maybe there were more things to make up for than just an excessive immersion in his profession.

Or maybe just one other thing.

The thing they found so hard to talk about.

The collapsed star.

The black hole whose terrible gravity had twisted their relationship.

Chapter 8

The sparkling autumn weather deteriorated that afternoon. The clouds, which in the morning had been joyful little cotton-ball clichés, darkened. Premonitory rumbles of thunder could be heard-so far in the distance that the direction from which they originated was unclear. They were more like an intangible presence in the atmosphere than the product of a specific storm-a perception that strengthened as they persisted over a period of hours, seeming neither to draw closer nor entirely cease.

That evening Madeleine went to a local concert with one of her new Walnut Crossing friends. It was not an event she expected Gurney to attend, so he didn’t feel defensive about his decision to stay home and work on his art project.

Shortly after her departure, he found himself sitting in front of his computer screen, gazing at the mug shot of Peter Possum Piggert. All he had done so far was to import the graphics file and set it up as a new project-to which he had given a wretchedly cute name: Oedipus Wrecks.

In the Sophocles version of the old Greek tale, Oedipus kills a man who turns out to be his father, marries a woman who turns out to be his mother, and sires two daughters with her, creating great misery for all concerned. In Freud’s psychology the Greek tale is a symbol for the developmental phase in the life of a male child during which he desires his father’s absence (disappearance, death) so that he may possess exclusively the affection of his mother. In the case of Peter Possum Piggert, however, there was neither exculpatory ignorance nor any question of symbolism. Knowing exactly what he was doing and to whom, Peter at the age of fifteen murdered his father, entered into a new relationship with his mother, and sired two daughters with her. But it did not stop there. Fifteen years later he murdered his mother in a dispute over a new relationship he had entered into with their daughters, then thirteen and fourteen.

Gurney’s involvement in the case had begun when half of Mrs. Iris Piggert’s body was discovered tangled in the rudder mechanism of a Hudson River day liner docked at a Manhattan pier, and it ended with the arrest of Peter Piggert in a desert compound of “traditionalist” Mormons in Utah, where he had gone to live as the husband of his two daughters.

Despite the depravity of the crimes, steeped in blood and family horror, Piggert remained a controlled and taciturn figure in all interrogations and throughout the criminal proceedings against him, keeping his Mr. Hyde well concealed and looking more like a depressed auto mechanic than a parricidal, incestuous polygamist.

Gurney stared at Piggert on the screen, and Piggert stared back. Ever since he first interrogated him, and even more so now, Gurney felt that the key quality of the man was a need (taken to bizarre lengths) to control his environment. People, even family-in fact, family most of all-were part of that environment, and making them do as he wished was essential. If he had to kill someone to establish his control, so be it. The sex, as big a driving force as it appeared to be, was more about power than lust.

As he searched the stolid face for a hint of the demon, a gust of wind picked up a swirl of dry leaves. They blew with the sound of a feathery broom across the patio; a few clicked lightly against the glass panes of the French doors. The restlessness of the leaves, plus the intermittent thunder, made it hard for him to concentrate. The idea of being alone for a few hours of progress on the portrait, free of raised eyebrows and unpleasant questions, had appealed to him. But now his mind was unsettled. He peered into Piggert’s eyes, heavy and dark-with none of the wild glare that animated the eyes of Charlie Manson, the tabloid prince of sex and slaughter-but again the wind and the leaves distracted him, and then the thunder. Out beyond the line of hills, there was a faint flashing in the murky sky. A couplet from one of Mellery’s threatening poems had been drifting in and out of his mind. Now it came again and stuck there.

What you took you will give

when you get what you gave.

It was at first an impossible riddle. The words were too general; they had too much and too little meaning; yet he could not get them out of his head.

He opened the desk drawer and removed the sequence of messages Mellery had given him. He shut down the computer and pushed the keyboard to the side of the desk so he could arrange the messages in order-beginning with the first note.

Do you believe in Fate? I do, because I thought I’d never see you again-and then one day, there you were. It all came back: how you sound, how you move-most of all, how you think. If someone told you to think of a number, I know what number you’d think of. You don’t believe me? I’ll prove it to you. Think of any number up to a thousand-the first number that comes to your mind. Picture it. Now see how well I know your secrets. Open the little envelope.

Although he’d done so earlier, he examined the outer envelope, inside and out, as well as the notepaper on which the message was written to be sure there was no faint trace anywhere of the number 658-not even a watermark-that could have suggested the number that seemed to come spontaneously to Mellery’s mind. There was no such trace. More definitive tests could be conducted later, but he was satisfied for now that whatever it was that enabled the writer to know that Mellery would choose 658, it wasn’t a subtle imprint in the paper.

The content of the message comprised a number of claims that Gurney enumerated on a lined yellow notepad:

1. I knew you in the past but lost contact with you.

2. I encountered you again, recently.

3. I recall a great deal about you.

4. I can prove I know your secrets by writing down and sealing in the enclosed envelope the next number that will enter your mind.

The tone struck him as creepily playful, and the reference to knowing Mellery’s “secrets” could be read as a threat-reinforced by the request for money in the smaller envelope.

Does it shock you that I knew you would pick 658?

Who knows you that well? If you want the answer,

you must first repay me the $289.87 it cost me to find you.

Send that exact amount to

P.O. Box 49449, Wycherly, CT 61010.

Send me CASH or a PERSONAL CHECK.

Make it out to X. Arybdis.

(That was not always my name.)

In addition to the inexplicable number prediction, the smaller note reiterated the claim of close personal knowledge and specified $289.87 as a cost incurred in locating Mellery (although the first half of the message made it sound like a chance encounter) and as a precondition to the writer’s revealing his identity; it offered a choice of paying the amount by check or cash; it gave the name for the check as “X. Arybdis,” offered an explanation of why Mellery would not recognize the name, and provided a Wycherly P.O. box address to send the money to. Gurney jotted all these facts down on his yellow pad, finding it helpful in organizing his thoughts.

Those thoughts centered on four questions: How could the number prediction be explained without hypothesizing some sort of Manchurian Candidate hypnosis or ESP? Did the other specific number in the note, $289.87, have any significance beyond the stated “cost to find you”? Why the cash-or-check option, which sounded like a parody of a direct-marketing ad? And what was it about that name, Arybdis, that kept tickling a dark corner of Gurney’s memory? He wrote these questions down alongside his other notes.

Next he laid out the three poems in the sequence of their envelope postmarks.

How many bright angels

can dance on a pin?

How many hopes drown in

a bottle of gin?

Did the thought ever come

that your glass was a gun

and one day you’d wonder,

God, what have I done?

What you took you will give

when you get what you gave.

I know what you think,

when you blink,

where you’ve been,

where you’ll be.

You and I have a date,

Mr. 658.

I do what I’ve done

not for money or fun

but for debts to be paid,

amends to be made.

For blood that’s as red

as a painted rose.

So every man knows

he reaps what he sows.

The first thing that struck him was the change in attitude. The toying tone of the two prose messages had become prosecutorial in the first poem, overtly menacing in the second, and vengeful in the third. Putting aside the question of how seriously it should be taken, the message itself was clear: The writer (X. Arybdis?) was saying that he intended to get even with (kill?) Mellery for a drinking-related misdeed in his past. As Gurney wrote the word kill in the notes he was making, his attention jumped back to the initial couplet in the second poem:

What you took you will give

when you get what you gave.

Now he knew exactly what the words meant, and the meaning was chillingly simple. For the life you took, you will give your life. What you did will be done to you.

He wasn’t sure whether the frisson he felt convinced him he was right or if knowing he was right created the frisson, but either way he had no doubt about it. This did not, however, answer his other questions. It only made them more urgent, and it gave rise to new ones.

Was the threat of murder just a threat, designed only to inflict the pain of apprehension-or was it a declaration of practical intent? To what was the writer referring when he said “I do what I’ve done” in the first line of the third poem? Had he previously done to someone else what he now proposed to do to Mellery? Might Mellery have done something in concert with someone else whom the writer had already dealt with? Gurney made a note to ask Mellery if any friend or associate of his had ever been killed, assaulted, or threatened.

Maybe it was the mood created by the flashes of light beyond the blackening foothills, or the eerie persistence of the low thunder, or his own exhaustion, but the personality behind the messages was emerging from the shadows. The detachment of the voice in those poems, bloody purpose and careful syntax, hatred and calculation-he had seen those qualities combined before to horrible effect. As he stared out the den window, surrounded by the unsettled atmosphere of the approaching storms, he could sense in those messages the iciness of a psychopath. A psychopath who called himself X. Arybdis.

Of course, it was possible that he was off base. It wouldn’t be the first time that a certain mood, particularly in the evening, particularly when he was alone, had generated in him convictions unsupported by the facts.

Still… what was it about that name? In what dusty box of memories was it faintly stirring?

He went to bed early that night, long before Madeleine returned home from her concert, determined that tomorrow he would return the letters to Mellery and insist that he go to the police. The stakes were too high, the danger too palpable. In bed, though, he found it impossible to lay the day to rest. His mind was a racecourse with no exits and no finish line. It was an experience he was familiar with-a price he paid (he’d come to believe) for the intense attention he devoted to certain kinds of challenges. Once his obsessed mind, instead of falling asleep, fell into this circular rut, there were only two options. He could let the process run its course, which could take three or four hours, or he could force himself out of bed and into his clothes.

Minutes later, dressed in jeans and a comfortable old cotton sweater, he was standing outside on the patio. A full moon behind the overcast sky created a faint illumination, making the barn visible. It was in that direction, along the rutted road through the pasture, that he decided to walk.

Past the barn was the pond. Halfway there he stopped and listened to the sound of a car coming up the road from the direction of the village. He estimated it to be about half a mile away. In that quiet corner of the Catskills, where the sporadic howling of coyotes was the loudest nighttime sound, a vehicle could be heard at a great distance.

Soon the headlights of Madeleine’s car swept over the tangle of dying goldenrod that bordered the pasture. She turned toward the barn, stopped on the crunchy gravel, and switched off the headlights. She got out and walked toward him-cautiously, her eyes adjusting to the semidarkness.

“What are you doing?” Her question sounded soft, friendly.

“Couldn’t sleep. Mind racing. Thought I’d take a walk around the pond.”

“Feels like rain.” A rumble in the sky punctuated her observation.

He nodded.

She stood next to him on the path and inhaled deeply.

“Wonderful smell. Come on, let’s walk,” she said, taking his arm.

As they reached the pond, the path broadened into a mowed swath. Somewhere in the woods, an owl screeched-or, more precisely, there was a familiar screech they thought might be an owl when they first heard it that summer, and each time after that they became more certain it was an owl. It was in the nature of Gurney’s intellect to realize that this process of increasing conviction made no logical sense, but he also knew that pointing it out, interesting though this trick of the mind might be to him, would bore and annoy her. So he said nothing, happy that he knew her well enough to know when to be quiet, and they ambled on to the far side of the pond in amiable silence. She was right about the smell-a wonderful sweetness in the air.

They had moments like this from time to time, moments of easy affection and quiet closeness, that reminded him of the early years of their marriage, the years before the accident. “The Accident”-that dense, generic label with which he wrapped the event in his memory to keep its razor-wire details from slicing his heart. The accident-the death-that eclipsed the sun, turning their marriage into a shifting mixture of habit, duty, edgy companionship, and rare moments of hope-rare moments when something bright and clear as a diamond would shoot back and forth between them, reminding him of what once was and might again be possible.

“You always seem to be wrestling with something,” she said, curling her fingers around the inside of his arm, just above his elbow.

Right again.

“How was the concert?” he finally asked.

“First half was baroque, lovely. Second half was twentieth century, not so lovely.”

He was about to chime in with his own low opinion of modern music but thought better of it.

“What kept you awake?” she asked.

“I’m not really sure.”

He sensed her skepticism. She let go of his arm. Something splashed into the pond a few yards ahead of them.

“I couldn’t get the Mellery business out of my mind,” he said.

She didn’t reply.

“Bits and pieces of it kept running around in my head-not getting anywhere-just making me uncomfortable-too tired to think straight.”

Again she offered nothing but a thoughtful silence.

“I kept thinking about that name on the note.”

“X. Arybdis?”

“How did you…? You heard us mention it?”

“I have good hearing.”

“I know, but it always surprises me.”

“It might not really be X. Arybdis, you know,” she said in that offhand way that he knew was anything but offhand.

“What?” he said, stopping.

“It might not be X. Arybdis.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was suffering through one of the atonal atrocities in the second half of the concert, thinking that some modern composers must really hate the cello. Why would you force a beautiful instrument to make such painful noises? Horrible scraping and whining.”

“And…?” he said gently, trying to keep his curiosity from sounding edgy.

“And I’d have left at that point, but I couldn’t because I’d given Ellie a ride there.”

“Ellie?”

“Ellie from the bottom of the hill-rather than take two cars? But she seemed to be enjoying it, God knows why.”

“Yes?”

“So I asked myself, what can I do to pass the time and keep from killing the musicians?”

There was another splash in the pond, and she stopped to listen. He half saw, half sensed her smile. Madeleine was fond of frogs.

“And?”

“And I thought to myself I could start figuring out my Christmas card list-it’s practically November-so I took out my pen and on the back of my program, at the top of the page, I wrote ‘Xmas Cards’-not the whole word Christmas but the abbreviation, X-M-A-S,” she said, spelling it out.

In the darkness he could feel more than see her inquiring look, as if she were asking whether he was getting the point.

“Go on,” he said.

“Every time I see that abbreviation, it reminds me of little Tommy Milakos.”

“Who?”

“Tommy had a crush on me in the ninth grade at Our Lady of Chastity.”

“I thought it was Our Lady of Sorrows,” said Gurney with a twinge of irritation.

She paused a beat to let her little joke register, then went on. “Anyway, one day Sister Immaculata, a very large woman, started screaming at me because I’d abbreviated Christmas as Xmas in a little quiz about Catholic holy days. She said anyone who wrote it that way was purposely ‘X-ing Christ out of Christmas.’ She was furious. I thought she was going to hit me. But right then Tommy-sweet little brown-eyed Tommy-jumped up out of his seat and shouted, ‘It’s not an X.’

“Sister Immaculata was shocked. It was the first time anyone had ever dared to interrupt her. She just stared at him, but he stared right back, my little champion. ‘It’s not an English letter,’ he said. ‘It’s a Greek letter. It’s the same as an English ch. It’s the first letter of Christ in Greek.’ And, of course, Tommy Milakos was Greek, so everybody knew he must be right.”

Dark as it was, he thought he could see her smiling softly at the recollection, even suspected he heard a little sigh. Maybe he was wrong about the sigh-he hoped so. And another distraction-had she betrayed a preference for brown eyes over blue? Get ahold of yourself, Gurney, she’s talking about the ninth grade.

She went on, “So maybe ‘X. Arybdis’ is really ‘Ch. Arybdis’? Or maybe ‘Charybdis’? Isn’t that something in Greek mythology?”

“Yes, it is,” he said, as much to himself as to her. “Between Scylla and Charybdis…”

“Like ‘between a rock and a hard place’?”

He nodded. “Something like that.”

“Which is which?”

He seemed not to hear the question, his mind racing now through the Charybdis implications, juggling the possibilities.

“Hmm?” He realized she’d asked him something.

“Scylla and Charybdis,” she said. “The rock and the hard place. Which is which?”

“It’s not a direct translation, just an approximation of the meaning. Scylla and Charybdis were actual navigational perils in the Strait of Messina. Ships had to navigate between them and tended to be destroyed in the process. In mythology, they were personalized into demons of destruction.”

“When you say navigational perils… like what?”

“Scylla was the name for a jagged outcropping of rocks that ships were battered against until they sank.”

When he didn’t immediately continue, she persisted, “And Charybdis?”

He cleared his throat. Something about the idea of Charybdis seemed especially disturbing. “Charybdis was a whirlpool. A very powerful whirlpool. Once a man was caught in it, he could never get out. It sucked him down and tore him to pieces.” He recalled with unsettling clarity an illustration he’d seen ages ago in an edition of the Odyssey, showing a sailor trapped in the violent eddy, his face contorted in horror.

Again came the screech from the woods.

“Come on,” said Madeleine. “Let’s get up to the house. It’s going to rain any minute.”

He stood still, lost in his racing thoughts.

“Come on,” she urged. “Before we get soaked.”

He followed her to her car, and they drove up slowly through the pasture to the house.

Before they got out, he turned to her and asked, “You don’t think of every x you see as a possible ch, do you?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why…?”

“Because ‘Arybdis’ sounded Greek.”

“Right. Of course.”

She looked across the front seat at him, her expression, abetted by the clouded night, unreadable.

After a while she said, with a small smile in her voice, “You never stop thinking, do you?”

Then, as she had promised, the rain began.

Chapter 9

After being stalled for several hours at the periphery of the mountains, a steep cold front swept through the area, bringing lashings of wind and rain. In the morning the ground was covered with leaves and the air was charged with the intense smells of autumn. Water droplets on the pasture grass fractured the sun into crimson sparks.

As Gurney walked to his car, the assault on his senses awakened something from his childhood, when the sweet smell of grass was the smell of peace and security. Then it was gone-erased by his plans for the day.

He was heading for the Institute for Spiritual Renewal. If Mark Mellery was going to resist getting the police involved, Gurney wanted to argue that decision with him face-to-face. It wasn’t that he intended to wash his own hands of the matter. In fact, the more he pondered it, the more curious he was about his old classmate’s prominent place in the world and how it might relate to who and what were now threatening him. As long as he was careful about boundaries, Gurney imagined there would be room in the investigation for both himself and the local police.

He’d called Mellery to let him know he was coming. It was a perfect morning for a drive through the mountains. The route to Peony took him first through Walnut Crossing, which, like many Catskill villages, had grown up in the nineteenth century around an intersection of locally important roads. The intersection, with diminished importance, remained. The eponymous nut tree, along with the region’s prosperity, was long gone. But the depressed economy, serious as it was, had a picturesque appearance-weathered barns and silos, rusted plows and hay wagons, abandoned hill pastures overgrown with fading goldenrod. The road from Walnut Crossing that led eventually to Peony wound its way through a postcard river valley where a handful of old farms were searching for innovative ways to survive. Abelard’s was one of these. Squeezed between the village of Dillweed and the nearby river, it was devoted to the organic cultivation of “Pesticide-Free Veggies,” which were then sold at Abelard’s General Store, along with fresh breads, Catskill cheeses, and very good coffee-coffee that Gurney felt an urgent need for as he pulled in to one of the little dirt parking spaces in front of the store’s sagging front porch.

Inside the door of the high-ceilinged space, against the right wall, stood a steaming array of coffeepots, which Gurney headed for. He filled a sixteen-ounce container, smiling at the rich aroma-better than Starbucks at half the price.

Unfortunately, the thought of Starbucks brought with it the image of a certain kind of young, successful Starbucks customer, and that immediately brought Kyle to mind, along with a little mental wince. It was his standard reaction. He suspected that it arose from a frustrated desire for a son who thought a smart cop was worth looking up to, a son more interested in seeking his guidance than Kyle was. Kyle-unteachable and untouchable in that absurdly expensive Porsche that his absurdly high Wall Street income had paid for at the absurdly young age of twenty-four. Still, he did owe the young man a return phone call, even if all the kid wanted to talk about was his latest Rolex or Aspen ski trip.

Gurney paid for his coffee and returned to his car. As he was thinking about the prospective call, his phone rang. He disliked coincidences and was relieved to discover that it was not Kyle but Mark Mellery.

“I just got today’s mail. I called you at home, but you’d gone out. Madeleine gave me your cell number. I hope you don’t mind me calling.”

“What’s the problem?”

“My check came back. The guy who has the post-office box in Wycherly where I sent the $289.87 check to Arybdis-he sent it back to me with a note saying there’s nobody there by that name, that I must have gotten the address wrong. But I checked it again. It was the right box number. Davey? Are you there?”

“I’m here. Just trying to make sense of that.”

“Let me read you the note. ‘I found the enclosed piece of mail in my post-office box. There must be a mistake in the address. There is no one here named X. Arybdis.’ And it’s signed ‘Gregory Dermott.’ The letterhead on the notepaper says ‘GD Security Systems,’ and there’s an address and phone number in Wycherly.”

Gurney was about to explain that it was now almost certain that X. Arybdis was not a real name but a curious play on the name of a mythological whirlpool, a whirlpool that tore its victims to pieces, but he decided that the issue was already disturbing enough. The revelation of this extra twist could wait until he got to the institute. He told Mellery he’d be there in an hour.

What the hell was going on? It made no sense. What could be the purpose of demanding a specific amount of money, having the check made out to an obscure mythological name, and then having it sent to the wrong address in the likelihood that it would be returned to the sender? Why such a complex and seemingly pointless preamble to the nasty poems that followed?

The baffling aspects of the case were increasing, and so was Gurney’s interest.

Chapter 10

Peony was a town twice removed from the history it sought to reflect. Adjacent to Woodstock, it pretended to the same tie-dyed, psychedelic, rock-concert past-while Woodstock in turn nourished its own ersatz aura through its name association with the pot-fogged concert that had actually been held fifty miles away on a farm in Bethel. Peony’s image was the product of smoke and mirrors, and upon this chimerical foundation had risen predictable commercial structures-New Age bookstores, tarot parlors, Wiccan and Druidical emporia, tattoo shops, performance-art spaces, vegan restaurants-a center of gravity for flower children approaching senility, Deadheads in old Volkswagen buses, and mad eclectics swathed in everything from leathers to feathers.

Of course, among these colorfully weird elements there were interspersed plenty of opportunities for tourists to spend money: stores and eateries whose names and decor were only a little outrageous and whose wares were tailored to the upscale visitors who liked to imagine they were exploring the cultural edge.

The loose web of roads radiating out from Peony’s business district led to money. Real-estate prices had doubled and tripled after 9/11, when New Yorkers of substantial means and galloping paranoia were captivated by the fantasy of a rural sanctuary. Homes in the hills surrounding the village grew in size and number, the SUVs morphed from Blazers and Broncos into Hummers and Land Rovers, and the people who came for country weekends wore what Ralph Lauren told them people in the country wore.

Hunters, firemen, and teachers gave way to lawyers, investment bankers, and women of a certain age whose divorce settlements financed their cultural activities, skin treatments, and mind-expanding involvements with gurus of this and that. In fact, Gurney suspected that the local population’s appetite for guru-based solutions to life’s problems may have persuaded Mark Mellery to set up shop there.

He turned off the county highway just before the village center, following his Google directions onto Filchers Brook Road-which snaked up a wooded hillside. This brought him eventually to a roadside wall of native slate, laid nearly four feet high. The wall ran parallel to the road, set back about ten feet, for at least a quarter of a mile. The setback was thick with pale blue asters. Halfway along the stretch of wall, there were two formal openings about fifty feet apart, the entrance and exit of a circular drive. Affixed to the wall at the first of these openings was a discreet bronze sign: MELLERY INSTITUTE FOR SPIRITUAL RENEWAL.

Turning in to the driveway brought the aesthetic of the place into sharper focus. Everywhere Gurney looked, he was given an impression of unplanned perfection. Beside the gravel drive, autumn flowers seemed to grow in haphazard freedom. Yet he was sure this casual image, not unlike Mellery’s, received careful tending. As in many haunts of the low-profile rich, the note intoned was one of meticulous informality, nature as it ought to be, with no wilting bloom left unpruned. Following the driveway brought Gurney’s car to the front of a large Georgian manor house, as gently groomed as the gardens.

Standing in front of the house and eyeing him with interest was an imperious man with a ginger beard. Gurney rolled down his window and asked where the parking area might be found. The man replied with a plummy British accent that he should follow the drive to its end.

Unfortunately, this led Gurney out through the other opening in the stone wall onto Filchers Brook Road. He drove back around through the entrance and followed the drive again to the front of the house, where the tall Englishman again regarded him with interest.

“The end of the drive took me to the public road,” said Gurney. “Did I miss something?”

“What a bloody fool I am!” the man cried with exaggerated chagrin that seemed in conflict with his natural bearing. “I think I know everything, but most of the time I’m wrong!”

Gurney had an inkling he might be in the presence of a madman. He also at that point noticed a second figure in the scene. Standing back in the shadow of a giant rhododendron, watching them intently, was a dark, stocky man who looked as if he might be waiting for a Sopranos audition.

“Ah,” cried the Englishman, pointing with enthusiasm farther along the drive, “there’s your answer! Sarah will take you under her protective wing. She’s the one for you!” Saying this with high theatricality, he turned and strode off, followed at some distance by the comic-book gangster.

Gurney drove on to where a woman stood by the driveway, solicitude writ large on her pudgy face. Her voice exuded empathy.

“Dear me, dear me, we’ve got you driving around in circles. That’s not a nice way to welcome you.” The level of concern in her eyes was alarming. “Let me take your car for you. Then you can go right into the house.”

“That’s not necessary. Could you just tell me where the parking area is?”

“Of course! Just follow me. I’ll make sure you don’t get lost this time.” Her tone made the task seem more daunting than one would imagine it to be.

She waved to Gurney to follow her. It was an expansive wave, as though she were commanding a caravan. In her other hand, at her side, she carried a closed umbrella. Her deliberate pace conveyed a concern that Gurney might lose sight of her. Reaching a break in the shrubbery, she stepped to the side, pointing Gurney into a narrow offshoot of the driveway that passed through the bushes. As he came abreast of her, she thrust the umbrella toward his open window.

“Take it!” she cried.

He stopped, nonplussed.

“You know what they say about mountain weather,” she explained.

“I’m sure I’ll be fine.” He continued past her into the parking area, a place that looked able to accommodate twice the cars currently there, which Gurney numbered at sixteen. The neat rectangular space was nestled amid the ubiquitous flowers and shrubs. A lofty copper beech at the far end separated the parking area from a three-story red barn, its color vivid in the slanting sunlight.

He chose a space between two gargantuan SUVs. While he was parking, he became aware of a woman watching the process from behind a low bed of dahlias. When he got out of the car, he smiled politely at her-a dainty violet of a woman, small-boned and delicate of feature, with an old-fashioned look about her. If she were an actress, thought Gurney, she’d be a natural to play Emily Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst.

“I wonder if you could tell me where I might find Mark-” But the violet interrupted him with her own question.

“Who the fuck said you could park there?”

Chapter 11

From the parking area, Gurney followed a cobblestone pathway around the Georgian mansion, which he guessed would be used as the institute’s business office and lecture center, to a smaller Georgian house about five hundred feet behind it. A small gold-lettered sign by the path read PRIVATE RESIDENCE.

Mark Mellery opened the door before Gurney knocked. He wore the same sort of costly-casual attire he’d worn on his visit to Walnut Crossing. Against the background of the institute’s architecture and landscape, the apparel lent him a squire-like aura.

“Good to see you, Davey!”

Gurney stepped into a spacious chestnut-floored entry hall furnished with antiques, and Mellery led the way to a comfortable study toward the rear of the house. A blaze crackling softly in the fireplace perfumed the room with a hint of cherry smoke.

Two wing chairs stood opposite each other to the right and left of the fireplace and, with the sofa that faced the hearth, formed a U-shaped sitting area. When they were settled in the chairs, Mellery asked whether he’d had any trouble finding his way around the property. Gurney recounted the three peculiar conversations he’d had, and Mellery explained that the three individuals were guests of the institute and their behavior constituted part of their self-discovery therapy.

“In the course of his or her stay,” Mellery explained, “each guest plays ten different roles. One day he might be the Mistake Maker-that sounds like the role Worth Partridge, the British chap, was playing when you came upon him. Another day he might be the Helper-that’s the role Sarah, who wanted to park your car, was playing. Another role is the Confronter. The last lady you encountered sounds like she was playing that part with extra relish.”

“What’s the point?”

Mellery smiled. “People act out certain roles in their lives. The content of the roles-the scripts, if you will-is consistent and predictable, although generally unconscious and rarely seen as a matter of choice.” He was warming to his subject, despite the fact he must have spoken these explanatory sentences hundreds of times. “What we do here is simple, although many of our guests consider it profound. We make them aware of the roles they unconsciously play, what the benefits and costs of those roles are, and how they affect others. Once our guests see their patterns of behavior in the light of day, we help them see that each pattern is a choice. They can retain or discard it. Then-this is the most important part-we provide them a program of action to replace damaging patterns with healthier ones.”

The man’s anxiety, Gurney noted, receded as he spoke. The subject had put an evangelical brightness in his eyes.

“By the way, all this might sound familiar to you. Pattern, choice, and change are the three most overused words in the whole shabby world of self-help. But our guests tell us that what we do here is different-the heart of it is different. Just the other day, one of them said to me, ‘This is the most perfect place on earth.’”

Gurney tried to keep skepticism out of his voice. “The therapeutic experience you provide must be very powerful.”

“Some find it so.”

“I’ve heard that some powerful therapies are quite confrontational.”

“Not here,” said Mellery. “Our approach is soft and welcoming. Our favorite pronoun is we, not you. We speak about our failings and fears and limitations. We never point at anyone and accuse them of anything. We believe that accusations are more likely to strengthen the walls of denial than to break them down. After you look through one of my books, you’ll understand the philosophy better.”

“I just thought things might occasionally happen on the ground, so to speak, that weren’t part of the philosophy.”

“What we say is what we do.”

“No confrontations at all?”

“Why do you belabor the point?”

“I was wondering if you’d ever kicked anyone hard enough in the balls to make him want to kick you back.”

“Our approach rarely makes anyone angry. Besides, whoever my pen pal is, he’s from a part of my life long before the institute.”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

A confused frown appeared on Mellery’s face. “He’s fixated on my drinking days, something I did drunk, so it has to be before I founded the institute.”

“On the other hand, it could be someone involved with you in the present who read about your drinking in your books and wants to scare you.”

As Mellery’s gaze wandered through a new array of possibilities, a young woman entered. She had intelligent green eyes and red hair pulled back in a ponytail.

“Sorry to intrude. I thought you might want to see your phone messages.”

She handed Mellery a small pile of pink message notes. His surprised expression gave Gurney the sense that he was not often interrupted this way.

“At least,” she said, raising an eyebrow significantly, “you might want to look at the one on top.”

Mellery read it twice, then bent forward and handed the message form across the table to Gurney, who also read it twice.

On the “To” line was written: Mr. Mellery.

On the “From” line was written: X. Arybdis.

In the space allocated to “Message” were the following lines of verse:

Of all the truths

you can’t remember,

here are the truest two:

Every act demands its price.

And every price comes due.

I’ll call tonight to promise you

I’ll see you in November

or, if not, in December.

Gurney asked the young woman if she herself had taken the message. She glanced at Mellery.

He said, “I’m sorry, I should have introduced you. Sue, this is an old and good friend of mine, Dave Gurney. Dave, meet my wonderful assistant, Susan MacNeil.”

“Nice to meet you, Susan.”

She smiled politely and said, “Yes, I was the one who took the message.”

“Man or woman?”

She hesitated. “Odd you should ask. My first impression was a man. A man with a high voice. Then I wasn’t sure. The voice changed.”

“How?”

“At first it sounded like a man trying to sound like a woman. Then I got the idea that it might be a woman trying to sound like a man. There was something unnatural about it, something forced.”

“Interesting,” said Gurney. “One more thing-did you write down everything this person said?”

She hesitated. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“It looks to me,” he said, holding up the pink slip, “like this message was dictated to you carefully, even the line breaks.”

“That’s right.”

“So he must have told you that the arrangement of the lines was important, that you should write them exactly as he dictated them.”

“Oh, I see. Yes, he did tell me where to start each new line.”

“Was anything else said that’s not actually written here?”

“Well… yes, he did say one other thing. Before he hung up, he asked if I worked at the institute directly for Mr. Mellery. I said yes, I did. Then he said, ‘You might want to look at new job opportunities. I’ve heard that spiritual renewal is a dying industry.’ He laughed. He seemed to think it was very funny. Then he told me to make sure Mr. Mellery got the message right away. That’s why I brought it over from the office.” She shot a worried look at Mellery. “I hope that was okay.”

“Absolutely,” said Mellery, imitating a man in control of a situation.

“Susan, I notice you refer to the caller as ‘he,’” said Gurney. “Does that mean that you’re pretty sure it was a man?”

“I think so.”

“Did he give any indication what time tonight he planned to call?”

“No.”

“Is there anything else you remember, anything at all, no matter how trivial?”

Her brow furrowed a little. “I got a sort of creepy feeling-a feeling that he wasn’t very nice.”

“He sounded angry? Tough? Threatening?”

“No, not that. He was polite, but…”

Gurney waited while she searched for the right words.

“Maybe too polite. Maybe it was the odd voice. I can’t say for sure what gave me the feeling. He scared me.”

After she left to go back to her office in the main building, Mellery stared at the floor between his feet.

“It’s time to go to the police,” said Gurney, picking this moment to make his point.

“The Peony police? God, it sounds like a gay cabaret act.”

Gurney ignored the shaky attempt at humor. “We’re not just dealing with a few crank letters and a phone call. We’re dealing with someone who hates you, who wants to get even with you. You’re in his sights, and he may be about to pull the trigger.”

“X. Arybdis?”

“More likely the inventor of the alias X. Arybdis.”

Gurney proceeded to tell Mellery what he had recalled, with Madeleine’s help, about the deadly Charybdis of Greek myth. Plus the fact that he had been unable to find a record of any X. Arybdis in Connecticut or any adjoining state through any online directory or search engine.

“A whirlpool?” asked Mellery uneasily.

Gurney nodded.

“Jesus,” said Mellery.

“What is it?”

“My worst phobia is about drowning.”

Chapter 12

Mellery stood at the fireplace with a poker, rearranging the burning logs.

“Why would the check come back?” he said, returning to the subject like a tongue to a sore tooth. “The guy seems so precise-Christ, look at the handwriting, like an accountant’s-not a guy who’d get an address wrong. So he did it on purpose. What purpose?” He turned from the fire. “Davey, what the hell is going on?”

“Can I see the note it came back with, the one you read me on the phone?”

Mellery went over to a small Sheraton desk on the other side of the room, carrying the poker with him, not noticing it until he was there. “Christ,” he muttered, looking around in frustration. He found a spot on the wall where he could lean it before taking an envelope from the desk drawer and bringing it to Gurney.

Inside a large outer envelope addressed to Mellery was the envelope Mellery had sent to X. Arybdis at P.O. Box 49449 in Wycherly, and inside that envelope was his personal check for $289.87. In the large outer envelope, there was a sheet of quality stationery with a GD SECURITY SYSTEMS letterhead including a phone number, with the brief typed message that Mellery had read over the phone to Gurney earlier. The letter was signed by Gregory Dermott, with no indication of his title.

“You haven’t spoken to Mr. Dermott?” asked Gurney.

“Why should I? I mean, if it’s the wrong address, it’s the wrong address. What’s it got to do with him?”

“Lord only knows,” said Gurney. “But it would make sense to talk to him. Do you have a phone handy?”

Mellery unclipped the latest-model BlackBerry from his belt and handed it over. Gurney entered the number from the letterhead. After two rings he was connected to a recording: “This is GD Security Systems, Greg Dermott speaking. Leave your name, number, the best time to return your call, and a brief message. You may begin now.” Gurney switched off the phone and passed it back to Mellery.

“Why I’m calling would be hard to explain in a message,” said Gurney. “I’m not your employee or legal representative or a licensed PI, and I’m not the police. Speaking of which, it’s the police you need-right here, right now.”

“But suppose that’s his goal-get me disturbed enough to call the cops, stir up a ruckus, embarrass my guests. Maybe having me call the cops and create a bunch of turmoil is what this sicko wants. Bring the bulls into the china shop and watch everything get smashed.”

“If that’s all he wants,” said Gurney, “be thankful.”

Mellery reacted as if he’d been slapped. “You really think he’s planning to… do something serious?”

“It’s quite possible.”

Mellery nodded slowly, as though the deliberateness of the gesture could keep a lid on his fear.

“I’ll talk to the police,” he said, “but not until we get the phone call tonight from Charybdis, or whatever he calls himself.”

Seeing Gurney’s skepticism, he went on, “Maybe the phone call will clear this thing up, let us know who we’re dealing with, what he wants. We may not have to involve the police after all, and even if we do, we’ll have more to tell them. Either way it makes sense to wait.”

Gurney knew that having the police present to monitor the actual call could be important, but he also knew that no rational argument at this point would budge Mellery. He decided to move on to a tactical detail.

“In the event that Charybdis does call tonight, it would be helpful to record the conversation. Do you have any kind of recording device-even a cassette player-that we could hook up to an extension phone?”

“We’ve got something better,” said Mellery. “All our phones have recording capability. You can record any call just by pushing a button.”

Gurney looked at him curiously.

“You’re wondering why we have such a system? We had a difficult guest a few years back. Some accusations were made, and we found ourselves being harassed by phone calls that were increasingly unhinged. To make a long story short, we were advised to tape the calls.” Something in Gurney’s expression stopped him. “Oh, no, I can see what you’re thinking! Believe me, that mess has nothing to do with what’s happening now. It was resolved long ago.”

“You sure of that?”

“The individual involved is dead. Suicide.”

“Remember the lists I asked you to work on? Lists of relationships involving serious conflicts or accusations?”

“I don’t have a single name I can write down in good conscience.”

“You just mentioned a conflict, at the end of which someone killed him- or herself. You don’t think that qualifies?”

“She was a troubled individual. There was no connection between her dispute with us, which was the product of her imagination, and her suicide.”

“How do you know that?”

“Look, it’s a complicated story. Not all of our guests are poster children for mental health. I’m not going to write down the name of every person who ever expressed a negative feeling in my presence. That’s crazy!”

Gurney leaned back in his chair and gently rubbed his eyes, which were starting to feel dry from the fire.

When Mellery spoke again, his voice seemed to come from a different place inside himself, a less guarded place. “There’s a word you used when you were describing the lists. You said I should write down the names of people with whom I had ‘unresolved’ problems. Well, I’ve been telling myself that the conflicts of the past have all been resolved. Maybe they haven’t. Maybe by ‘resolved’ I just mean I don’t think about them anymore.” He shook his head. “God, Davey, what’s the point of these lists, anyway? No offense, but what if some muscle-headed cop starts knocking on doors, stirring up old resentments? Christ! Did you ever feel the ground slipping from under your feet?”

“All we’re talking about is putting names on paper. It’s a way to get your feet on the ground. You don’t have to show the names to anyone if you don’t want to. Trust me, it’s a useful exercise.”

Mellery nodded in numb acquiescence.

“You said not all your guests are models of mental health.”

“I didn’t mean to imply that we’re running a psychiatric facility.”

“I understand that.”

“Or even that our guests have an unusual number of emotional problems.”

“So who does come here?”

“People with money, looking for peace of mind.”

“Do they get it?”

“I believe they do.”

“In addition to rich and anxious, what other words describe your clientele?”

Mellery shrugged. “Insecure, despite the aggressive personality that goes with success. They don’t like themselves-that’s the main thing we deal with here.”

“Which of your current guests do you think is capable of physically harming you?”

“What?”

“How much do you know for certain about each of the people currently staying here? Or the people who have reservations for the coming month?”

“If you’re talking about background checks, we don’t do them. What we know is what they tell us, or what the people who refer them tell us. Some of it is sketchy, but we don’t pry. We deal with what they are willing to tell us.”

“What sorts of people are here right now?”

“A Long Island real-estate investor, a Santa Barbara housewife, a man who may be the son of a man who may be the head of an organized-crime family, a charming Hollywood chiropractor, an incognito rock star, a thirty-something retired investment banker, a dozen others.”

“These people are here for spiritual renewal?”

“In one way or another, they’ve discovered the limitations of success. They still suffer from fears, obsessions, guilt, shame. They’ve found that all the Porsches and Prozac in the world won’t give them the peace they’re looking for.”

Gurney felt a little stab, being reminded of Kyle’s Porsche. “So your mission is to bring serenity to the rich and famous?”

“It’s easy to make it sound ridiculous. But I wasn’t chasing the smell of money. Open doors and open hearts led me here. My clients found me, not the other way around. I didn’t set out to be the guru of Peony Mountain.”

“Still, you have a lot at stake.”

Mellery nodded. “Apparently that includes my life.” He stared into the sinking fire. “Can you give me any advice about handling tonight’s phone call?”

“Keep him talking as long as you can.”

“So the call can be traced?”

“That’s not the way the technology works anymore. You’ve been watching old movies. Keep him talking because the more he says, the more he may reveal and the better chance you may have of recognizing his voice.”

“If I do, should I tell him I know who he is?”

“No. Knowing something he doesn’t think you know could be an advantage to you. Just stay calm and stretch out the conversation.”

“Will you be home tonight?”

“I plan to be-for the sake of my marriage, if nothing else. Why?”

“Because I just remembered that our phones have another fancy feature we never use. The trade name is ‘Ricochet Conferencing.’ What it lets you do is bring another party into a conference call after someone has called you.”

“So?”

“With ordinary teleconferencing, all the participants need to be dialed from one initiating source. But the Ricochet system gets around that. If someone calls you, you can add other participants by dialing them from your end without disconnecting the person who called you-in fact, without them even knowing you’re doing it. The way it was explained to me, the call to the party to be added goes out on a separate line, and after the connection is made, the two signals are combined. I’m probably botching up the technical explanation-but the point is, when Charybdis calls tonight, I can dial you into it and you can hear the conversation.”

“Good. I’ll definitely be home.”

“Great. I appreciate that.” He smiled like a man experiencing momentary relief from chronic pain.

Out on the grounds, a bell rang several times. It had the strong, brassy ring of an old ship’s bell. Mellery checked the slim gold watch on his wrist.

“I have to prepare for my afternoon lecture,” he said with a little sigh.

“What’s your topic?”

Mellery rose from his wing chair, brushed a few wrinkles out of his cashmere sweater, and set his face with some effort in a generic smile.

“The Importance of Honesty.”

The weather had remained blustery, never gaining any warmth. Brown leaves swirled over the grass. Mellery had gone to the main building after thanking Gurney again, reminding him to keep his phone line free that evening, apologizing for his schedule, and extending a last-minute invitation. “As long as you’re here, why don’t you look over the grounds, get a feel for the place.”

Gurney stood on Mellery’s elegant porch and zipped up his jacket. He decided to take the suggestion and head for the parking lot by a roundabout route, following the broad sweep of the gardens that surrounded the house. A mossy path brought him around the rear of the house to an emerald lawn, beyond which a maple forest fell away toward the valley. A low drystone wall formed a demarcating line between the grass and the woods. Out at the midpoint of the wall, a woman and two men seemed to be engaged in some sort of planting and mulching activity.

As Gurney strolled toward them across the wide lawn, he could see that the men, wielding spades, were young and Latino and that the woman, wearing knee-high green boots and a brown barn jacket, was older and in charge. Several bags of tulip bulbs, each a different color, lay open on a flat garden cart. The woman was eyeing her workers impatiently.

“Carlos!” she cried. “Roja, blanca, amarilla… roja, blanca, amarilla!” Then she repeated to no one in particular, “Red, white, yellow… red, white, yellow. Not such a difficult sequence, is it?”

She sighed philosophically at the ineptitude of servants, then beamed benignly as Gurney approached.

“I believe that a flower in bloom is the most healing sight on earth,” she announced in that tight-lipped, upper-class Long Island accent once known as Locust Valley Lockjaw. “Don’t you agree?”

Before he could answer, she extended her hand and said, “I’m Caddy.”

“Dave Gurney.”

“Welcome to heaven on earth! I don’t believe I’ve seen you before.”

“I’m just here for the day.”

“Really?” Something in her tone seemed to be demanding an explanation.

“I’m a friend of Mark Mellery.”

She frowned slightly. “Dave Gurney, did you say?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I’m sure he’s mentioned your name, it just doesn’t ring a bell. Have you known Mark long?”

“Since college. May I ask what it is that you do here?”

“What I do here?” Her eyebrows rose in amazement. “I live here. This is my home. I’m Caddy Mellery. Mark is my husband.”

Chapter 13

Although it was noon, the thickening clouds gave the enclosed valley the feeling of a winter dusk. Gurney turned on the car heater to take the chill off his hands. Each year his finger joints were becoming more sensitive, reminding him of his father’s arthritis. He flexed them open and shut on the steering wheel.

The identical gesture.

He remembered once asking that taciturn, unreachable man if there was pain in his swollen knuckles. “Just age, nothing to be done about it,” his father had replied, in a tone that prevented further discussion.

His mind drifted back to Caddy. Why hadn’t Mellery told him about his new wife? Didn’t he want him to talk to her? And if he left out having a wife, what else might he be leaving out?

And then, by some obscure mental linkage, he wondered why the blood was as red as a painted rose? He tried to recall the full text of the third poem: I do what I’ve done / not for money or fun / but for debts to be paid, / amends to be made. / For blood that’s as red / as a painted rose. / So every man knows / he reaps what he sows. A rose was a symbol of redness. What was he adding by calling it a painted rose? Was that supposed to make it sound more red? Or more like blood?

Gurney’s eagerness to get home was intensified by hunger. It was midafternoon, and his morning coffee from Abelard’s was all he’d had all day.

While too much time between meals made Madeleine nauseous, it made him judgmental-a state of mind not easy to recognize in oneself. Gurney had discovered some barometers for assessing his mood, and one of them was located on the westbound side of the road just outside Walnut Crossing. The Camel’s Hump was an art gallery that featured the work of local painters, sculptors, and other creative spirits. Its barometric function was simple. A glance at the window produced in him, in a good mood, appreciation of the eccentricity of his artistic neighbors, in a bad mood insight into their vacuity. Today was a vacuity day-fair warning, as he turned up the road toward hearth and wife, to think twice before voicing any strong opinions.

The residue of the morning flurries, long gone from the county highway and lower parts of the valley, was present in scattered patches along the dirt road that rose through a depression in the hills and ended at the Gurney barn and pasture. The slaty clouds gave the pasture a drab, wintry feel. He saw with a twinge of annoyance that the tractor had been driven up from the barn and parked by the shed that housed its attachments-the brush mower, the post-hole digger, the snow thrower. The shed door had been opened, hinting annoyingly at work to be done.

He entered the house through the kitchen door. Madeleine was sitting by the fireplace in the far corner of the room. The plate on the coffee table-with its apple core, grape stems and seeds, flecks of cheddar, and bread crumbs-suggested that a nice lunch had just been consumed, reminding him of his hunger and ratcheting his spring a bit tighter. She looked up from her book, offered him a small smile.

He went to the sink and let the water run until its temperature dropped to the frigid level he liked. He was aware of a feeling of aggression-a defiance of Madeleine’s opinion that drinking very cold water was not a good thing to do-followed by a feeling of embarrassment that he could be petty enough, hostile enough, infantile enough to savor such delusional combat. He had an urge to change the subject, then realized there was no subject to change. He spoke anyway.

“I see you drove the tractor up to the shed.”

“I wanted to attach the snow thrower to it.”

“Was there a problem?”

“I thought we might want it on before we get a real snowstorm.”

“I mean, was there a problem attaching it?”

“It’s heavy. I thought if I waited, you could help me.”

He nodded ambiguously, thinking, There you go again, pressuring me into a job by starting it yourself, knowing I’ll have to finish it. Aware of the perils of his mood, he thought it wise to say nothing. He filled his glass with the very cold water now coming from the tap and drank it unhurriedly.

Looking down at her book, Madeleine said, “That woman from Ithaca called.”

“Woman from Ithaca?”

She ignored the question.

“Do you mean Sonya Reynolds?” he asked.

“That’s right.” Her voice was as seemingly disinterested as his.

“What did she want?” he asked.

“Good question.”

“What do you mean, ‘good question’?”

“I mean she didn’t specify what she wanted. She said you could call her anytime before midnight.”

He detected a definite edge on the last word. “Did she leave a number?”

“Apparently she thinks you have it.”

He refilled his glass with icy water and drank it, taking ruminative pauses between mouthfuls. The Sonya situation was emotionally problematical, but he saw no way of dealing with that, short of abandoning the Mug Shot Art project that formed the basis of his connection with her gallery, and he wasn’t ready to do that.

Given some distance from these awkward exchanges with Madeleine, he found his awkwardness, his lack of confidence, perplexing. It was curious that a man as deeply rational as he was would get so hopelessly tangled up, so emotionally brittle. He knew from his hundreds of interviews with crime suspects that guilty feelings always lay at the root of that sort of tangle, that sort of confusion. But the truth was that he had done nothing to be guilty about.

Nothing to be guilty about. Ah, there was the problem-the absoluteness of that claim. Perhaps he had done nothing recently to feel guilty about-nothing substantial, nothing that came quickly to mind-but if the context were to be stretched back fifteen years, his protestation of innocence would ring painfully false.

He put his water glass down in the sink, dried his hands, walked to the French doors, and stared out at the gray world. A world between autumn and winter. Fine snow blew like sand across the patio. In a context that went back fifteen years, he could hardly claim to be guiltless, because that expanded world would include the accident. As if pressing down on an angry wound to judge the state of the infection, he forced himself to substitute for “the accident” the specific words he found so difficult:

The death of our four-year-old son.

He spoke the words ever so faintly, to himself, hardly more than a whisper. His voice in his own ears sounded eroded and hollow, like someone else’s voice.

He couldn’t bear the thoughts and feelings that came with the words, and he tried to push them away by seizing the nearest diversion.

Clearing his throat, turning from the glass door to Madeleine across the room, he said with an excess of enthusiasm, “How about we take care of the tractor before it gets dark?”

Madeleine looked up from her book. If she found the artificial cheeriness of his tone disturbing or revealing, she didn’t show it.

Mounting the snow thrower took an hour of heaving, banging, yanking, greasing, and adjusting-after which Gurney went on to spend a second hour splitting logs for the woodstove while Madeleine prepared a dinner of squash soup and pork chops braised in apple juice. Then they built a fire, sat side by side on the sofa in the cozy living room adjoining the kitchen, and drifted into the kind of drowsy serenity that follows hard work and good food.

He yearned to believe that these small oases of peace foreshadowed a return of the relationship they’d once had, that the emotional evasions and collisions of recent years were somehow temporary, but it was a belief he found hard to sustain. Even now this fragile hope was being supplanted, bit by bit, moment by moment, by the kind of thoughts his detective mind focused on more comfortably-thoughts about the anticipated Charybdis phone call and the teleconferencing technology that would let him listen in.

“Perfect night for a fire,” said Madeleine, leaning gently against him.

He smiled and tried to refocus himself on the orange flames and the simple, soft warmth of her arm. Her hair had a wonderful smell. He had a passing fancy that he could lose himself in it forever.

“Yes,” he answered. “Perfect.”

He closed his eyes, hoping that the goodness of the moment would counteract those mental energies that were always propelling him into puzzle solving. For Gurney, achieving even a little contentment was, ironically, a struggle. He envied Madeleine’s keen attachment to the fleeting instant and the pleasure she found in it. For him, living in the moment was always a swim upstream, his analytic mind naturally preferring the realms of probability, possibility.

He wondered if it was genetic or a learned form of escape. Probably both, mutually reinforcing. Possibly…

Jesus!

He caught himself in the absurd act of analyzing his propensity for analysis. He ruefully tried again to be present in the room. God help me to be here, he said to himself, even though he had little faith in prayer. He hoped he hadn’t said it aloud.

The phone rang. It felt like a reprieve, permission to take a break from the battle.

He heaved himself up from the couch and went to the den to answer it.

“Davey, it’s Mark.”

“Yes?”

“I was just speaking to Caddy, and she told me she met you in the meditation garden today.”

“Right.”

“Ah… well… the thing is, I feel kind of embarrassed, you know, for not introducing you earlier in the day.” He paused, as if awaiting a response, but Gurney said nothing.

“Dave?”

“I’m here.”

“Well… anyway, I wanted to apologize for not introducing you. That was thoughtless of me.”

“No problem.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“You don’t sound happy.”

“I’m not unhappy-just a bit surprised that you didn’t mention her.”

“Ah… yes… I guess with so much on my mind, it didn’t occur to me. Are you still there?”

“I’m here.”

“You’re right, it must seem peculiar I didn’t mention her. It just never crossed my mind.” He paused, then added with an awkward laugh, “I guess a psychologist would find that interesting-forgetting to mention I was married.”

“Mark, let me ask you something. Are you telling me the truth?”

“What? Why would you ask me that?”

“You’re wasting my time.”

There was an extended silence.

“Look,” said Mellery with a sigh, “it’s a long story. I didn’t want to involve Caddy in this… this mess.”

“What exact mess are we talking about?”

“The threats, the insinuations.”

“She doesn’t know about the letters?”

“There’s no point. It would just frighten her.”

“She must know about your past. It’s in your books.”

“To a degree. But these threats are something else. I just want to save her from worrying.”

That sounded almost plausible to Gurney. Almost.

“Is there any particular piece of your past you’re especially eager to keep from Caddy, or from the police, or from me?”

This time the indecisive pause before Mellery said “No” so patently contradicted the denial that Gurney laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“I don’t know if you’re the worst liar I’ve ever heard, Mark, but you’re in the finals.”

After another long silence, Mellery began to laugh, too-a soft, rueful laugh that sounded like muted sobbing. He said in a deflated voice, “When all else fails, it’s time to tell the truth. The truth is, shortly after Caddy and I were married, I had a brief affair with a woman who was a guest here. Pure lunacy on my part. It turned out badly-as any sane person could have predicted.”

“And?”

“And that was that. I recoil from the mere thought of it. It attaches me to all the ego, lust, and lousy judgment of my past.”

“Maybe I’m missing something,” said Gurney. “What’s that got to do with not telling me you were married?”

“You’re going to think I’m paranoid. But I got to thinking that the affair might in some way be connected to this Charybdis business. I was afraid that if you knew about Caddy, you’d want to talk to her and… the last thing on earth I want is for her to be exposed to anything that might be connected to my ridiculous, hypocritical affair.”

“I see. By the way, who owns the institute?”

“Owns? In what sense?”

“How many senses are there?”

“In spirit, I own the institute. The program is based on my books and tapes.”

“‘In spirit’?”

“Legally, Caddy owns everything-the real estate and other tangible assets.”

“Interesting. So you’re the star trapeze artist, but Caddy owns the circus tent.”

“You could say that,” Mellery replied coldly. “I should get off the phone now. The Charybdis call could come anytime.”

It came exactly three hours later.

Chapter 14

Madeleine had brought her bag of knitting to the sofa and was engrossed in one of the three projects she had in various stages of completion. Gurney had settled in an adjacent armchair and was leafing through the six-hundred-page user’s manual for his photo-manipulation software but was having a hard time concentrating on it. The logs in the woodstove had burned down into embers from which wisps of flame rose, wavered, and disappeared.

When the phone rang, Gurney hurried into the den and picked it up.

Mellery’s voice was low and nervous. “Dave?”

“I’m here.”

“He’s on the other line. The recorder is on. I’m going to switch you in. Ready?”

“Go ahead.”

A moment later Gurney heard a strange voice in midsentence.

“… away for a certain period of time. But I do want you to know who I am.” The pitch of the voice was high and strained, the speech rhythm awkward and artificial. There was an accent, foreign-sounding but nonspecific, as if the words were being mispronounced as a way of disguising the voice. “Earlier this evening I left something for you. Do you have it?”

“Have what?” Mellery’s voice was brittle.

“You don’t have it yet? You’ll get it. Do you know who I am?”

“Who are you?”

“Really want to know?”

“Of course. Where do I know you from?”

“The number six fifty-eight didn’t tell you who I am?”

“It doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“Really? But it was your choice-of all the numbers you could have chosen.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“There is one more number.”

“What??” Mellery’s voice rose in fear and exasperation.

“I said there is one more number.” The voice was amused, sadistic.

“I don’t understand.”

“Think of any number at all, other than six fifty-eight.”

“Why?”

“Think of any number other than six fifty-eight.”

“All right, fine. I thought of a number.”

“Good. We’re making progress. Now, whisper the number.”

“I’m sorry-what?”

“Whisper the number.”

“Whisper it?”

“Yes.”

“Nineteen.” Mellery’s whisper was loud and rasping.

It was greeted by a long humorless laugh. “Good, very good.”

“Who are you?”

“You still don’t know? So much pain, and you have no idea. I thought this might happen. I left something for you earlier. A little note. You sure you don’t have it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Ah, but you knew that the number was nineteen.”

“You said to think of a number.”

“But it was the right number, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t understand.”

“When did you last look in your mailbox?”

“My mailbox? I don’t know. This afternoon?”

“You better look again. Remember, I’ll see you in November or, if not, in December.” The words were followed by a soft disconnect sound.

“Hello!” cried Mellery. “Are you there? Are you there?” When he spoke again, he sounded exhausted. “Dave?”

“I’m here,” said Gurney. “Hang up, check your mailbox, call me back.”

No sooner had Gurney put the phone down when it rang again. He picked it up.

“Yes?”

“Dad?”

“Excuse me?”

“Is that you?”

“Kyle?”

“Right. You okay?”

“Fine. I’m just in the middle of something,”

“Is everything all right?”

“Yes. Sorry to be so abrupt. I’m waiting for a call that’s supposed to come within the next minute or two. Can I call you back?”

“No problem. Just wanted to bring you up to date with some stuff, some stuff that’s happened, stuff I’m doing. We haven’t spoken in a long time.”

“I’ll call you back as soon as I can.”

“Sure. Okay.”

“Sorry. Thanks. Talk to you soon.”

Gurney closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths. Christ, things had a way of piling up. Of course, it was his own fault for letting them pile up. His relationship with Kyle was an area of clear dysfunction in his life, full of avoidance and rationalization.

Kyle was the product of his first marriage, his short-lived marriage to Karen-the memory of which still, twenty-two years after the divorce, made Gurney uneasy. Their incompatibility was obvious from the beginning to everyone who knew them, but a defiant determination (or emotional disability, as he saw it in the wee hours of sleepless nights) had driven them into that unfortunate union.

Kyle looked like his mother, had her manipulative instincts and material ambition-and, of course, the name she had insisted on giving him. Kyle. Gurney had never been able to get comfortable with that. Despite the young man’s intelligence and precocious success in the financial world, Kyle still sounded to him like a self-absorbed pretty boy in a soap opera. Moreover, Kyle’s existence was a constant reminder of the marriage, a reminder that there was some powerful part of himself that he failed to understand-the part that had wanted to marry Karen to begin with.

He closed his eyes, depressed by his blindness to his own motivations and by his negative reaction to his own son.

The phone rang. He picked it up, afraid it would be Kyle again, but it was Mellery.

“Davey?”

“Yes.”

“There was an envelope in the mailbox. My name and address are typed on it, but there’s no postage or postmark. Must have been delivered by hand. Shall I open it?”

“Does it feel like there’s anything in it other than paper?”

“Like what?”

“Anything at all, anything more than just a letter.”

“No. It feels perfectly flat, like nothing at all. No foreign objects in it, if that’s what you mean. Shall I open it?”

“Go ahead, but stop if you see anything other than paper.”

“Okay. Got it open. Just one sheet. Typed. Plain, no letterhead.” There were a few seconds of silence. “What? What the hell…?”

“What is it?”

“This is impossible. There’s no way…”

“Read it to me.”

Mellery read in an incredulous voice, “‘I am leaving this note for you in case you miss my call. If you don’t know yet who I am, just think of the number nineteen. Does it remind you of anyone? And remember, I’ll see you in November or, if not, in December.’”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. That’s what it says-‘just think of the number nineteen.’ How the hell could he do that? It’s not possible!”

“But that’s what it says?”

“Yes. But what I’m saying is… I don’t know what I’m saying… I mean… it isn’t possible… Christ, Davey, what the hell is going on?”

“I don’t know. Not yet. But we’re going to find out.”

Something had clicked into place-not the solution, he was still far from that, but something inside him had moved. He was now committed 100 percent to the challenge. He looked up and saw Madeleine watching him from the den door with a poignant intensity, as though she could sense in the air the escalation of his commitment to the case. He could only guess at what she was feeling, but it looked something like a combination of awe and loneliness.

The intellectual challenge the new number mystery presented-and the surge of adrenaline it generated-kept Gurney awake well past midnight, although he’d been in bed since ten. He turned restlessly from side to side as his mind kept colliding with the problem, like a man in a dream who couldn’t find his key, circling a house, repeatedly trying each locked door and window.

Then he began retasting the nutmeg from the squash soup they’d had for dinner, and that added to the bad-dream feeling.

If you don’t know yet who I am, just think of the number nineteen. And that was the number Mellery thought of. The number he thought of before he opened the letter. Impossible. But it happened.

The nutmeg problem kept getting worse. Three times he got up for water, but the nutmeg refused to subside. And then the butter became a problem, too. Butter and nutmeg. Madeleine used a lot of both in her squash soup. He’d even mentioned it once to their therapist. Their former therapist. Actually, a therapist they’d seen only twice, back when they were wrestling over the issue of whether he should retire and thought (incorrectly, as it turned out) that a third party might bring a greater clarity to their deliberations. He tried to remember now how the soup issue had come up, what the context was, why he’d seen fit to mention something so picayune.

It was the session in which Madeleine had spoken about him as if he weren’t in the room. She’d started by talking about how he slept. She’d told the therapist that once he was asleep, he rarely awoke until morning. Ah, yes, that was it. That’s when he said that the only exception was on nights when she made squash soup and he kept tasting the butter and nutmeg. But she went on, ignoring his silly little interruption, addressing her comments to the therapist, as though they were adults discussing a child.

She said it didn’t surprise her that once Dave was asleep, he rarely woke till morning, because just being who he was seemed to involve such a strenuous daily effort. He was so devoid of common ease and comfort. He was such a good man, so decent, yet so full of guilt for being human. So tortured by his mistakes, imperfections. A peerless record of successes in his profession, obscured in his mind by a handful of failures. Always thinking. Thinking his way relentlessly through problems-one after another-like Sisyphus rolling the stone up the hill again, again, again. Grasping life as an awkward puzzle to be solved. But not everything in life was a puzzle, she’d said, looking at him, speaking at last to him instead of to the therapist. There were things to be embraced in other ways. Mysteries, not puzzles. Things to be loved, not deciphered.

Recalling her comments as he lay there in bed had a strange effect on him. He was wholly absorbed by the memory, both disturbed and exhausted by it. It finally faded, along with the tastes of butter and nutmeg, and he slipped into an uneasy sleep.

Toward morning he was half awakened by Madeleine getting out of bed. She blew her nose gently, quietly. For a second he wondered if she’d been crying, but it was a hazy thought, easily supplanted by the more likely explanation that she was suffering from one of her autumn allergies. He was dimly aware of her going to the closet and putting on her terry-cloth robe. A little while later, he heard or imagined-he wasn’t sure which-her footsteps on the basement stairs. Sometime after that she passed the bedroom door soundlessly. In the first touch of dawn light stretching across the bedroom into the hallway, she appeared, specterlike, to be carrying something, a box of some kind.

His eyes were still heavy with exhaustion, and he dozed for another hour.

Chapter 15

When he got up, it was not because he felt rested, or even fully awake, but because getting up seemed preferable to sinking back into a dream that had left him without any recollection of its details yet with a distinct feeling of claustrophobia. It was like one of the hangovers he’d experienced in his college days.

He forced himself into the shower, which slightly improved his mood, then dressed and went out to the kitchen. He was relieved to see that Madeleine had made enough coffee for both of them. She was sitting at the breakfast table, looking out thoughtfully through the French doors and holding her large spherical cup-with steam rising from it-in both hands as if to warm them. He poured a cup of coffee for himself and sat across the table from her.

“Morning,” he said.

She smiled a vague little smile in reply.

He followed her gaze out across the garden to the wooded hillside at the far edge of the pasture. An angry wind was stripping the trees of their few remaining leaves. High winds usually made Madeleine nervous-ever since a massive oak came crashing down across the road in front of her car the day they moved to Walnut Crossing-but this morning she seemed too preoccupied to notice.

After a minute or two, she turned toward him, and her expression sharpened as though something about his attire or demeanor had just struck her.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

He hesitated. “To Peony. To the institute.”

“Why?”

“Why?” His voice was raspy with irritation. “Because Mellery is still refusing to report his problem to the local police, and I want to push him a little harder in that direction.”

“You could do that on the phone.”

“Not as well as I can face-to-face. Plus, I want to pick up copies of all the written messages and a copy of his recording of last night’s phone call.”

“Isn’t that what FedEx is for?”

He stared at her. “What’s the problem with me going to the institute?”

“The problem isn’t where you’re going, it’s why you’re going.”

“To persuade him to go to the police? To pick up the messages?”

“You honestly believe that’s why you’re driving all the way to Peony?”

“Why the hell else?”

She gave him a long, almost pitying look before answering. “You’re going,” she said softly, “because you’ve grabbed onto this thing and you can’t let go. You’re going because you can’t stay away.” Then she closed her eyes slowly. It was like the fade-out at the end of a movie.

He didn’t know what to say. Every so often Madeleine would end an argument just this way-by saying or doing something that seemed to leapfrog over his train of thought and render him silent.

This time he thought he knew the reason for the effect on him, or at least part of the reason. In her tone he’d heard an echo of her speech to the therapist, the speech he’d so vividly recollected a few hours earlier. He found the coincidence unsettling. It was as though Madeleine present and Madeleine past were ganging up on him, one whispering in each ear.

He was quiet for a long time.

She eventually took the coffee cups to the sink and washed them. Then, rather than laying them in the dish drainer as she usually did, she dried them and put them back in the cabinet above the sideboard.

Continuing to look into the cabinet, as though she’d forgotten why she was standing there, she asked, “What time are you going?”

He shrugged and looked around the room as though a clue to the right answer might be on one of the walls. As he did so, his gaze was attracted by an object resting on the coffee table in front of the fireplace at the far end of the room. It was a cardboard box, of the size and shape one might get at a liquor store. But what really caught his eye and held it was the white ribbon encircling the box and fastened on the top with a simple white bow.

Dear God. That’s what she’d brought up from the basement.

Although the box seemed smaller than he remembered it from so many years ago and the cardboard a darker brown, the ribbon was unmistakable, unforgettable. The Hindus had definitely gotten it right: white, not black, was the natural color for mourning.

He felt a tugging emptiness in his lungs, as though gravity were dragging his breath, his soul, down into the earth. Danny. Danny’s drawings. My little Danny boy. He swallowed and looked away, looked away from such immense loss. He felt too weak to move. He looked out through the French doors, coughed, cleared his throat, tried to replace stirred memories with immediate sensations, tried to redirect his mind by saying something, hearing his own voice, breaking the dreadful silence.

“I don’t imagine I’ll be late,” he said. It took all his strength, all his will, to push himself up out of his chair. “I should be home in time for dinner,” he added meaninglessly, hardly knowing what he was saying.

Madeleine watched him with a wan smile, not really a smile in the normal sense of the word, said nothing.

“Better go,” he said. “Need to be on time for this thing.”

Blindly, almost staggering, he kissed her on the cheek and went out to the car, forgetting his jacket.

The landscape was different that morning, more like winter, with virtually all of autumn’s color gone from the trees. But he sensed this only dimly. He was driving automatically, almost unseeingly, consumed by the image of the box, his recollection of its contents, the significance of its presence on the table.

Why? Why now, after all these years? To what purpose? What was she thinking? He had driven through Dillweed, driven past Abelard’s without even noticing. He felt sick to his stomach. He had to focus on something else, had to get a grip.

Focus on where you’re going, why you’re going there. He tried to force his mind in the direction of the messages, the poems, the number nineteen. Mellery thinking of the number nineteen. Then finding it in the letter. How could that have been done? This was the second time Arybdis or Charybdis-or whatever his name was-had performed this impossible feat. There were certain differences between the two instances, but the second was as baffling as the first.

The image of the box on the coffee table pressed relentlessly against the edges of his concentration-and then the contents of the box, as he remembered them being packed away so long ago. Danny’s crayon scribbles. Oh, God. The sheet of little orange things that Madeleine had insisted were marigolds. And that funny little drawing that might have been a green balloon or maybe a tree, maybe a lollipop. Oh, Jesus.

Before he knew it, he was pulling in to the neatly graveled parking area at the institute, the drive hardly registering in his consciousness. He looked around at his surroundings, trying to center himself, trying to wrestle his mind into the same location as his body.

Gradually he relaxed, felt almost drowsy, the emptiness that so often followed intense emotion. He looked at his watch. Somehow he’d arrived exactly on time. Apparently that part of him operated without conscious intervention, like his autonomic nervous system. Wondering if the chill had driven the role players indoors, he locked the car and took the winding path to the house. The front door, as on his previous visit, was opened by Mellery before he knocked.

Gurney stepped in out of the wind. “Any new developments?”

Mellery shook his head and closed the heavy antique door, but not before half a dozen dead leaves skittered over the threshold.

“Come back to the den,” he said. “There’s coffee, juice…”

“Coffee would be fine,” said Gurney.

Again they chose the wing chairs by the fire. On the low table between them was a large manila envelope. Gesturing toward it, Mellery said, “Xeroxes of the written messages and a recording of the call. It’s all there for you.”

Gurney took the envelope and placed it on his lap.

Mellery eyed him expectantly.

“You should go to the police,” said Gurney.

“We’ve been through that already.”

“We need to go through it again.”

Mellery closed his eyes and massaged his forehead as though it ached. When he opened his eyes, he appeared to have made a decision.

“Come to my lecture this morning. It’s the only way you’ll understand.” He spoke quickly, as if to forestall objection. “What goes on here is very subtle, very fragile. We teach our guests about conscience, peace, clarity. Earning their trust is critical. We’re exposing them to something that can change their lives. But it’s like skywriting. In a calm sky, it’s legible. A few gusts and it’s all gibberish. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“Just come to the lecture,” pleaded Mellery.

It was exactly 10:00 A.M. when Gurney followed him into a large room on the ground floor of the main building. It resembled the sitting room of an expensive country inn. A dozen armchairs and half a dozen sofas were oriented in the general direction of a grand fireplace. Most of the twenty attendees were already seated. A few lingered at a sideboard on which stood a silver coffee urn and a tray of croissants.

Mellery walked casually to a spot in front of the fireplace and faced his audience. Those at the sideboard hurried to their seats, and all fell expectantly silent. Mellery motioned Gurney to an armchair by the fireplace.

“This is David,” announced Mellery with a smile in Gurney’s direction. “He wants to know more about what we do, so I’ve invited him to sit in on our morning meeting.”

Several voices offered pleasant greetings, and all the faces offered smiles, most of which looked genuine. He caught the eye of the birdlike woman who’d accosted him obscenely the day before. She looked demure, even blushed a little.

“The roles that dominate our lives,” Mellery began without preamble, “are the ones we’re unaware of. The needs that drive us most relentlessly are the ones we’re least conscious of. To be happy and free, we must see the roles we play for what they are, and bring our hidden needs into the light of day.”

He was speaking calmly and straightforwardly and had the complete attention of his audience.

“The first stumbling block in our search will be the assumption that we already know ourselves, that we understand our own motives, that we know why we feel the way we do about our circumstances and the people around us. In order to make progress, we will need to be more open-minded. To find out the truth about myself, I must stop insisting that I already know it. I’ll never remove the boulder from my path if I fail to see it for what it is.”

Just as Gurney was thinking that this last observation was expanding the envelope of New Age fog, Mellery’s voice rose sharply.

“You know what that boulder is? That boulder is your image of yourself, who you think you are. The person you think you are is keeping the person you really are locked up without light or food or friends. The person you think you are has been trying to murder the person you really are for as long as you both have lived.”

Mellery paused, seemingly overtaken by some desperate emotion. He stared at his audience, and they seemed hardly to breathe. When he resumed speaking, his voice had dropped to a conversational volume but was still full of feeling.

“The person I think I am is terrified of the person I really am, terrified of what others would think of that person. What would they do to me if they knew the person I really was? Better to be safe! Better to hide the real person, starve the real person, bury the real person!”

Again he paused, letting the erratic fire in his eyes subside.

“When does it all start? When do we become this set of dysfunctional twins-the invented person in our head and the real person locked up and dying? It starts, I believe, very early. I know in my own case the twins were well established, each in his own uneasy place, by the time I was nine. I’ll tell you a story. My apologies to those who’ve heard me tell it before.”

Gurney glanced around the room, noting among the attentive faces a few with smiles of recognition. The prospect of hearing one of Mellery’s stories for a second or third time, far from boring or annoying anyone, seemed only to increase their anticipation. It was like the response of a small child to the promised retelling of a favorite fairy tale.

“One day as I was leaving for school, my mother gave me a twenty-dollar bill to pick up some groceries on my way home that afternoon-a quart of milk and a loaf of bread. When I got out of school at three o’clock, I stopped at a little luncheonette next to the school yard to buy a Coke before I went to the grocery store. It was a place where some of the kids hung out after class. I put the twenty-dollar bill on the counter to pay for the Coke, but before the counterman took the bill to make change, one of the other kids came over and saw it. ‘Hey, Mellery,’ he said, ‘where’d you get the twenty bucks?’ Now, this kid happened to be the toughest kid in the fourth grade, which is the grade I was in. I was nine, and he was eleven. He’d been left back twice, and he was a scary kid-not someone I was supposed to be hanging around with, or even speaking to. He got in a lot of fights, and there were stories that he used to break in to people’s houses and steal things. When he asked me where I got the money, I was going to say that my mother gave it to me to buy milk and bread, but I was afraid he’d make fun of me, call me a mama’s boy, and I wanted to say something that would impress him, so I said that I stole it. He looked interested, which made me feel good. Then he asked me who I stole it from, and I said the first thing that came into my mind. I said that I stole it from my mother. He nodded and smiled and walked away. Well, I was sort of relieved and uncomfortable at the same time. By the next day, I’d forgotten about it. But a week later he came up to me in the school yard and said, ‘Hey, Mellery, you steal any more money from your mother?’ I said no, I hadn’t. And he said, ‘Why don’t you steal another twenty bucks?’ I didn’t know what to say. I just stared at him. Then he smiled a creepy little smile and said, ‘You steal another twenty bucks and give it to me, or I’ll tell your mother about the twenty you stole last week.’ I felt the blood drain out of me.”

“My God,” said a horse-faced woman in a burgundy armchair on the far side of the fireplace, as other murmurings of empathic anger rippled across the room.

“What a prick!” growled a thickly built man with murder in his eyes.

“It threw me into a panic. I could picture him going to my mother, telling her I had stolen twenty dollars from her. The absurdity of that-the unlikelihood of this little gangster going to my mother about anything-never occurred to me. My mind was too overloaded with fear-fear that he would tell her and she would believe him. I had no confidence whatever in the truth. So, in this state of mindless panic, I made the worst possible decision. I stole twenty dollars from my mother’s purse that night and gave it to him the next day. Of course, the next week he made the same demand. And the week after that. And so on, for six weeks, until I was finally caught in the act by my father-caught closing the top drawer of my mother’s bureau, with a twenty-dollar bill clutched in my hand. I confessed. I told my parents the whole horrible, shameful story. But it only got worse. They called our pastor, Monsignor Reardon, and took me to the church rectory to tell the story all over again. The next night the monsignor had us come back and sit down with the little blackmailer and his mother and father, and again I had to tell the story. Even that wasn’t the end of it. My parents cut off my allowance for a year to pay them back for the money I stole. It changed the way they looked at me. The blackmailer concocted a version of events to tell everyone in school that painted him as some kind of Robin Hood and me as a rat that snitched. And every once in a while, he’d give me an icy little smirk that suggested that someday soon I might get pushed off an apartment-house roof.”

Mellery paused in the recounting of his tale and massaged his face with the palms of his hands, as though easing muscles that had been tightened by his recollections.

The burly man shook his head grimly and said again, “What a prick!”

“That’s exactly what I thought,” said Mellery. “What a manipulative little prick! Whenever that mess came to mind, the next thought in my head was always, ‘What a prick!’ That’s all I could think.”

“You were right,” said the burly man in a voice that sounded used to being listened to. “That’s exactly what he was.”

“That’s exactly what he was,” Mellery agreed with rising intensity, “exactly what he was. But I never got past what he was, to ask myself what I was. It was so obvious what he was, I never asked myself what I was. Who on earth was this nine-year-old kid, and why did he do what he did? It’s not enough to say he was afraid. Afraid of what, exactly? And who did he think he was?”

Gurney found himself surprisingly caught up in this. Mellery had captured his attention as completely as anyone else’s in the room. Gurney had slipped from being an observer into being a participant in this sudden search for meaning, motive, identity. Mellery had begun pacing back and forth in front of the giant hearth as he spoke, as though driven by memories and questions that would not let him stand still. The words tumbled out of him.

“Whenever I thought of that boy-myself, at the age of nine-I thought of him as a victim, a victim of blackmail, a victim of his own innocent desire for love, admiration, acceptance. All he wanted was for the big kid to like him. He was a victim of a cruel world. Poor little kid, poor little sheep in the jaws of a tiger.”

Mellery stopped his pacing and spun around to face his audience. Now he spoke softly. “But that little boy was something else, as well. He was a liar and a thief.”

The audience was divided between those who looked like they wanted to object and those who nodded.

“He lied when he was asked where he got the twenty dollars. He claimed to be a thief to impress someone he assumed was a thief. Then, faced with the threat of his mother’s being told he was a thief, he actually became a thief rather than have her think he was one. What he cared about most was controlling what people thought of him. Compared to what they thought, it didn’t matter much to him whether he actually was a liar or a thief, or what effect his behavior had on the people he lied to and stole from. Let me put it this way: It didn’t matter enough to keep him from lying and stealing. It only mattered enough to eat away like acid at his self-esteem when he did lie and steal. It mattered just enough to make him hate himself and wish he was dead.”

Mellery fell silent for several seconds, letting his comments sink in, then continued, “Here’s what I want you to do. Make a list of people you can’t stand, people you’re angry at, people who’ve done you wrong-and ask yourself, ‘How did I get into that situation? How did I get into that relationship? What were my motives? What would my actions in the situation have looked like to an objective observer?’ Do not-I repeat, do not-focus on the terrible things the other person did. We are not searching for someone to blame. We did that all our lives, and it got us nowhere. All we got was a long, useless list of people to blame for everything that ever went wrong! A long, useless list! The real question, the only question that matters is ‘Where was I in all of this? How did I open the door that led into the room?’ When I was nine, I opened the door by lying to win admiration. How did you open the door?”

The little woman who had cursed Gurney was looking increasingly disconcerted. She raised her hand uncertainly and asked, “Doesn’t it sometimes happen that an evil person does something terrible to an innocent person, breaks in to their house and robs them, let’s say? That wouldn’t be the innocent person’s fault, would it?”

Mellery smiled. “Bad things happen to good people. But those good people do not then spend the rest of their lives gnashing their teeth and replaying over and over their resentful mental videotape of the burglary. The personal collisions that upset us the most, the ones we seem powerless to let go of, are those in which we played a role that we are unwilling to acknowledge. That’s why the pain lasts-because we refuse to look at its source. We cannot detach it, because we refuse to look at the point of attachment.”

Mellery closed his eyes, seemingly gathering strength to go on. “The worst pain in our lives comes from the mistakes we refuse to acknowledge-the things we’ve done that are so out of harmony with who we are that we can’t bear to look at them. We become two people in one skin, two people who can’t stand each other. The liar and the person who despises liars. The thief and the person who despises thieves. There is no pain like the pain of that battle, raging below the level of consciousness. We run from it, but it runs with us. Wherever we run, we take the battle with us.”

Mellery paced back and forth in front of the fireplace.

“Do what I said. Make a list of all the people you blame for the troubles in your life. The angrier you are with them, the better. Put down their names. The more convinced you are of your own blamelessness, the better. Write down what they did and how you were hurt. Then ask yourself how you opened the door. If your first thought is that this exercise is nonsense, ask yourself why you are so eager to reject it. Remember, this is not about absolving the other people of whatever blame is theirs. You have no power to absolve them. Absolution is God’s business, not yours. Your business comes down to one question: ‘How did I open the door?’”

He paused and looked around the room, making eye contact with as many of his guests as he could.

“‘How did I open the door?’ Your happiness for the rest of your life will depend on how honestly you answer that question.”

He stopped, seemingly exhausted, and announced a break, “for coffee, tea, fresh air, restrooms, et cetera.” As people rose from their couches and chairs and headed for the various options, Mellery looked inquiringly at Gurney, who’d remained seated.

“Did that help any?” he asked.

“It was impressive.”

“In what way?”

“You’re a hell of a good lecturer.”

Mellery nodded-neither modestly nor immodestly. “Did you see how fragile it all is?”

“You mean the rapport you establish with your guests?”

“I guess rapport is as good a word as any, as long as you mean a combination of trust, identification, connection, openness, faith, hope, and love-and as long as you understand how delicate those flowers are, especially when they first begin to bloom.”

Gurney was having a hard time making up his mind about Mark Mellery. If the man was a charlatan, he was the best he’d ever encountered.

Mellery raised his hand and called to a young woman by the coffeepot. “Ah, Keira, could you do me a huge favor and get Justin for me?”

“Absolutely!” she said without hesitation, pirouetted, and departed on her quest.

“Who’s Justin?” asked Gurney.

“A young man whom I am increasingly unable to do without. He originally came here as a guest when he was twenty-one-that’s the youngest we’ll take anyone. He returned three times, and the third time he never left.”

“What does he do?”

“I guess you could say he does what I do.”

Gurney gave Mellery a quizzical look.

“Justin, from his first visit here, was on the right wavelength-always picked up what I was saying, nuances and all. An acute young man, wonderful contributor to everything we do. The institute’s message was made for him, and he was made for the message. He has a future with us if he wants it.”

“Mark Jr.,” said Gurney, mostly to himself.

“Beg pardon?”

“Sounds like an ideal son. Absorbs and appreciates everything you have to offer.”

A trim, intelligent-looking young man entered the room and came toward them.

“Justin, I’d like you to meet an old friend, Dave Gurney.”

The young man extended his hand with a combination of warmth and shyness.

After they shook hands, Mellery took Justin to the side and spoke to him in a low voice. “I’d like you to take the next half-hour segment, give some examples of internal dichotomies.”

“Love to,” said the young man.

Gurney waited until Justin went to the sideboard for coffee, then said to Mellery, “If you have the time, there’s a call I’d like you to make before I leave.”

“We’ll go back to the house.” It was clear that Mellery wanted to put distance between his guests and anything that might be related to his current difficulties.

On the way, Gurney explained that he wanted him to call Gregory Dermott and ask for more details about the history and security of his post-office box and any additional recollections he might have concerning his receipt of the $289.87 check, made out to X. Arybdis, which he had returned to Mellery. Specifically, was there anyone else in Dermott’s company authorized to open the box? Was the key always in Dermott’s possession? Was there a second key? How long had he been the renter of that box? Had he ever before received mail misaddressed to that box? Had he ever received an unexplained check? Did the names Arybdis or Charybdis or Mark Mellery mean anything to him? Had anyone ever said anything to him about the Institute for Spiritual Renewal?

Just as Mellery was beginning to look overloaded, Gurney pulled an index card from his pocket and handed it to him. “The questions are all here. Mr. Dermott may not feel like answering them all, but it’s worth a try.”

As they walked on, amid beds of dead and dying flowers, Mellery seemed to be sinking deeper into his worries. When they reached the patio behind the elegant house, he stopped and spoke in the low tone of one fearful of prying ears.

“I didn’t sleep at all last night. That ‘nineteen’ business has been driving me completely out of my mind.”

“No connection occurred to you? No meaning it might have?”

“Nothing. Silly things. A therapist once gave me a twenty-question test to find out if I had a drinking problem, and I scored nineteen. My first wife was nineteen when we married. Stuff like that-random associations, nothing anyone could predict I’d think of, no matter how well they knew me.”

“Yet they did.”

“That’s what’s driving me crazy! Look at the facts. A sealed envelope is left in my mailbox. I get a phone call telling me it’s there and asking me to think of any number I wish. I think of nineteen. I go to the mailbox and get the envelope, and the letter in the envelope mentions the number nineteen. Exactly the number I thought of. I could have thought of seventy-two thousand nine hundred and fifty-one. But I thought of nineteen, and that was the number in the letter. You say ESP is bullshit, but how can you explain it any other way?”

Gurney replied in a tone as calm as Mellery’s was agitated. “Something is missing in our concept of what happened. We’re looking at the problem in a way that’s making us ask the wrong question.”

“What’s the right question?”

“When I figure it out, you’ll be the first to know. But I guarantee you it won’t have anything to do with ESP.”

Mellery shook his head, the gesture resembling a tremor more than a form of expression. Then he glanced up at the back of his house and down at the patio on which he was standing. His blank look said he wasn’t sure how he had gotten there.

“Shall we go inside?” Gurney suggested.

Mellery refocused himself and seemed to have a sudden recollection. “I forgot-I’m sorry-Caddy’s home this afternoon. I can’t… I mean, it might be better if… what I mean is, I won’t be able to make the call to Dermott right away. I’ll have to play it by ear.”

“But you will do it today?”

“Yes, yes, of course. I’ll just have to work out the right time. I’ll call you as soon as I speak to him.”

Gurney nodded, gazing into his companion’s eyes, seeing in them the fear of a collapsing life.

“One question before I leave. I heard you ask Justin to talk about ‘internal dichotomies.’ I was wondering what that referred to.”

“You don’t miss much,” said Mellery with a small frown. “‘Dichotomy’ refers to a division, a duality within something. I use it to describe the conflicts within us.”

“You mean Jekyll-and-Hyde stuff?”

“Yes, but it goes beyond that. Human beings are loaded with inner conflicts. They shape our relationships, create our frustrations, ruin our lives.”

“Give me an example.”

“I could give you a hundred. The simplest conflict is the one between the way we view ourselves and the way we view others. For example, if we were arguing and you screamed at me, I would see the cause as your inability to control your temper. However, if I screamed at you, I would see the cause not as my temper but your provocation-something in you to which my scream is an appropriate response.”

“Interesting.”

“We each seem to be wired to believe my situation causes my problems but your personality causes yours. This creates trouble. My desire to have everything my way seems to make sense, while your desire to have everything your way seems infantile. A better day would be a day during which I felt better and you behaved better. The way I see things is the way they are. The way you see things is warped by your agenda.”

“I get the point.”

“That’s just the beginning, hardly scratches the surface. The mind is a mass of contradictions and conflicts. We lie to make others trust us. We hide our true selves in the pursuit of intimacy. We chase happiness in ways that drive happiness away. When we’re wrong we fight the hardest to prove we’re right.”

Caught up in the content of his program, Mellery spoke with verve and eloquence. Even in the midst of his current stress, it had the power to focus his mind.

“I get the impression,” said Gurney, “that you’re talking about a personal source of pain, not just the general human condition.”

Mellery nodded slowly. “There’s no pain worse than having two people living in one body.”

Chapter 16

Gurney had an uncomfortable feeling. It had been with him on and off since Mellery’s initial visit to Walnut Crossing. Now he realized with chagrin that the feeling was a longing for the relative clarity of an actual crime; for a crime scene that could be combed and sifted, measured and diagrammed; for fingerprints and footprints, hairs and fibers to be analyzed and identified; for witnesses to be questioned, suspects to be located, alibis to be checked, relationships to be investigated, a weapon to be found, bullets for ballistics. Never before had he been so frustratingly engaged in a problem so legally ambiguous, with so many obstructions to normal procedure.

During the drive down the mountain from the institute to the village, he speculated on Mellery’s competing fears-on one side a malevolent stalker, on the other a client-alienating police intervention. Mellery’s conviction that the cure would be worse than the disease kept the situation in limbo.

He wondered if Mellery knew more than he was saying. Was he aware of something he’d done in the distant past that could be the cause of the current campaign of threat and innuendo? Did Dr. Jekyll know what Mr. Hyde had done?

Mellery’s lecture topic of two minds at war inside one body interested Gurney for other reasons. It resonated with his own perception over the years, reinforced now by his Mug Shot Art efforts, that divisions of the soul are often evident in the face, and most evident in the eyes. Time and again he had seen faces that were really two faces. The phenomenon was easiest to observe in a photograph. All you had to do was alternately cover each half of the face with a sheet of paper-along the center of the nose, so only one eye was visible each time. Then jot down a character description of the person you see on the left and another of the person you see on the right. It was amazing how different those descriptions could be. A man might appear peaceful, tolerant, wise on one side-and resentful, cold, manipulative on the other. In those faces whose blankness was pierced by a glint of the malice that led to murder, the glint often was present in one eye and absent from the other. Perhaps in real-life encounters our brains were wired to combine and average the disparate characteristics of two eyes, making the differences between them hard to see, but in photographs they were hard to miss.

Gurney remembered the photo of Mellery on the cover of his book. He made a mental note to take a closer look at the eyes when he arrived home. He also remembered that he needed to return the call from Sonya Reynolds-the one Madeleine had mentioned with a touch of ice. A few miles outside Peony, he pulled off onto a patch of weedy gravel separating the road from the Esopus Creek, took out his cell phone, and entered the number for Sonya’s gallery. After four rings her smooth voice invited him to leave as long a message as he wished.

“Sonya, it’s Dave Gurney. I know I promised you a portrait this week, and I hope to bring it to you Saturday, or at least e-mail you a graphics file you can print a sample from. It’s almost finished, but I’m not satisfied yet.” He paused, aware of the fact that his voice had dropped into that softer register triggered by attractive women-a habit Madeleine had once brought to his attention. He cleared his throat and continued, “The essence of this art is character. The face should be consistent with murder, especially the eyes. That’s what I’m working on. That’s what’s taking time.”

There was a click on the line, and Sonya’s voice broke in, breathlessly.

“David, I’m here. I couldn’t make it to the phone, but I heard what you said. And I understand perfectly your need to get it just right. But it would be really great if you could deliver it Saturday. There’s a festival Sunday, lots of gallery traffic.”

“I’ll try. It might be late in the day.”

“Perfect! I’ll be closing at six, but I’ll be here working for another hour. Come then. We’ll have time to talk.”

It struck him that Sonya’s voice could make anything sound like a sexual overture. Of course, he knew he was bringing too damn much receptivity and imagination to the situation. He also knew he was being pretty damn silly.

“Six o’clock sounds good,” he heard himself say-even as he remembered that Sonya’s office, with its large couches and plush rugs, was furnished more like an intimate den than a place of business.

He dropped the phone back into the glove box and sat gazing up the grassy valley. As usual, Sonya’s voice had disrupted his rational thoughts, and his mind was pinballing from object to object: Sonya’s too-cozy office, Madeleine’s uneasiness, the impossibility of anyone knowing in advance the number another person would think of, blood as red as a painted rose, you and I have a date Mr. 658, Charybdis, the wrong post-office box, Mellery’s fear of the police, Peter Piggert the mass-murdering motherfucker, the charming young Justin, the rich aging Caddy, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and so on, without rhyme or reason, around and around. He lowered the window on the passenger side of the car by the creek, leaned back, closed his eyes, and tried to focus on the sound of the water tumbling over the rocky streambed.

A knock at the closed window by his ear roused him. He glanced up at an expressionless rectangular face, eyes concealed behind mirrored sunglasses, shaded by the rigid circular brim of a trooper’s gray hat. He lowered the window.

“Everything all right, sir?” The question sounded more threatening than solicitous, the sir more perfunctory than polite.

“Yes, thank you, I just needed to close my eyes for a moment.” He glanced at the dashboard clock. The moment, he saw, had lasted fifteen minutes.

“Where are you heading, sir?”

“Walnut Crossing.”

“I see. Have you had anything to drink today, sir?”

“No, Officer, I haven’t.”

The man nodded and stepped back, looking over the car. His mouth, the only visible feature that might betray his attitude, was contemptuous-as though he considered Gurney’s drink denial a transparent lie and would soon find evidence to that effect. He walked with exaggerated deliberation around to the rear of the car, then up along the passenger side, around the front, and finally back to Gurney’s window. After a long, evaluative silence, he spoke with a contained menace more appropriate to a Harold Pinter play than a routine vehicle check.

“Were you aware that this is not a legal parking area?”

“I didn’t realize that,” said Gurney evenly. “I only intended to stop for a minute or two.”

“May I see your license and registration, please?”

Gurney produced them from his wallet and handed them out the window. It was not his habit in such situations to present evidence of his status as a retired NYPD detective first grade, with the connections that might imply, but he sensed, as the trooper turned to walk back to his patrol car, an arrogance that was off the scale and a hostility that would be expressed in an unjustifiable delay, at the very least. He reluctantly withdrew another card from his wallet.

“Just a moment, Officer, this might be helpful as well.”

The trooper took the card cautiously. Then Gurney saw the flicker of a change at the corners of his mouth, not in the direction of friendliness. It looked like a combination of disappointment and anger. Dismissively, he handed the card, license, and registration back through the window.

“Have a nice day, sir,” he said in a tone that conveyed the opposite sentiment, returned to his vehicle, made a rapid U-turn, and drove off in the direction he’d come from.

No matter how sophisticated the psychological testing had become, thought Gurney, no matter how high the educational requirements, no matter how rigorous the academy training, there would always be cops who shouldn’t be cops. In this case the trooper had committed no specific violation, but there was something hard and hateful in him-Gurney could feel it, see it in the lines in his face-and it was only a matter of time before it collided with its mirror image. Then something terrible would happen. In the meantime a lot of people would be delayed and intimidated to no good end. He was one of those cops who made people dislike cops.

Maybe Mellery had a point.

During the next seven days, winter came to the northern Catskills. Gurney spent most of his time in the den, alternating between the mug-shot project and a painstaking reexamination of the Charybdis communications-stepping deftly back and forth between those two worlds and repeatedly veering away from thoughts of Danny’s drawings and the inner chaos that came with them. The obvious thing would be to talk to Madeleine about it, find out why she’d decided to raise the issue now-literally to bring it up from the basement-and why she was waiting with such peculiar patience for him to say something. But he couldn’t seem to summon the necessary willingness. So he would push it out of his mind and return to the Charybdis matter. At least he could think about that without feeling lost, without his heart racing.

He frequently thought, for example, about the evening after his last visit to the institute. As promised, Mellery had called him at home that night and related the conversation he’d had with Gregory Dermott of GD Security Systems. Dermott had been obliging enough to answer all his questions-the ones Gurney had written out-but the information itself did not amount to much. The man had been renting the box for about a year, ever since he’d moved his consulting business from Hartford to Wycherly; there had never been a problem before, certainly no misaddressed letters or checks; he was the only person with access to the box; the names Arybdis, Charybdis, and Mellery meant nothing to him; he had never heard of the institute. Pressed on the question of whether anyone else in his company could have been using the box in some unauthorized way, Dermott had explained that it was impossible, since there wasn’t anyone else in his company. GD Security Systems and Gregory Dermott were one and the same. He was a security consultant to companies with sensitive databases that required protection against hackers. Nothing he said cast any light on the matter of the misdirected check.

Neither had the Internet background searches Gurney had conducted. The sources concurred on the main points: Gregory Dermott had a science degree from M.I.T., a solid reputation as a computer expert, and a blue-clip client roster. Neither he nor GD Security was linked to any lawsuit, judgment, lien, or bad press, past or present. In short, he was a squeaky-clean presence in a squeaky-clean field. Yet someone had, for some still impenetrable reason, appropriated his post office box number. Gurney kept asking himself the same baffling question: Why demand that a check be sent to someone who would almost certainly return it?

It depressed him to keep thinking about it, to keep walking down that dead-end street as if the tenth time he’d find something there that wasn’t there the ninth time. But it was better than thinking about Danny.

The first measurable snow of the season came the evening of the first Friday in November. From a few flakes drifting here and there at dusk, it increased over the next couple of hours, then tapered off, stopping around midnight.

As Gurney was coming to life over his Saturday-morning coffee, the pale disk of the sun was creeping over a wooded ridge a mile to the east. There had been no wind during the night, and everything outside from the patio to the roof of the barn was coated with at least three inches of snow.

He hadn’t slept well. He’d been trapped for hours in an endless loop of linked worries. Some, dissolving now in the daylight, involved Sonya. He had at the last minute postponed their planned after-hours meeting. The uncertainty of what might happen there-his uncertainty about what he wanted to happen-made him put it off.

He sat, as he had for the past week, with his back turned to the end of the room where the ribbon-tied carton of Danny’s drawings lay on the coffee table. He sipped his coffee and looked out at the blanketed pasture.

The sight of snow always brought to mind the smell of snow. On an impulse he went to the French doors and opened them. The sharp chill in the air touched off a chain of recollected moments-snowbanks shoveled up chest-high along the roads, his hands rosy and aching from packing snowballs, bits of ice stuck in the wool of his jacket cuffs, tree branches arcing down to the ground, Christmas wreaths on doors, empty streets, brightness wherever he looked.

It was a curious thing about the past-how it lay in wait for you, quietly, invisibly, almost as though it weren’t there. You might be tempted to think it was gone, no longer existed. Then, like a pheasant flushed from cover, it would roar up in an explosion of sound, color, motion-shockingly alive.

He wanted to surround himself with the smell of the snow. He pulled his jacket from the peg by the door, slipped it on, and went out. The snow was too deep for the ordinary shoes he was wearing, but he didn’t want to change them now. He walked in the general direction of the pond, closing his eyes, inhaling deeply. He had gone less than a hundred yards when he heard the kitchen door opening and Madeleine’s voice calling to him.

“David, come back!”

He turned and saw her halfway out the door, alarm on her face. He started back.

“What is it?”

“Hurry!” she said. “It’s on the radio-Mark Mellery is dead!”

“What?”

“Mark Mellery-he’s dead, it was just on the radio. He was murdered!” She stepped back inside.

“Jesus,” said Gurney, feeling a constriction in his chest. He ran the last few yards to the house, entering the kitchen without removing his snow-covered shoes. “When did it happen?”

“I don’t know. This morning, last night, I don’t know. They didn’t say.”

He listened. The radio was still on, but the announcer had gone on to another news item, something about a corporate bankruptcy.

“How?”

“They didn’t say. They just said it was an apparent homicide.”

“Any other information?”

“No. Yes. Something about the institute-where it happened. The Mellery Institute for Spiritual Renewal in Peony, New York. They said the police are on the scene.”

“That’s all?”

“I think. How awful!”

He nodded slowly, his mind racing.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

A rapid mental review of the options eliminated all but one.

“Inform the officer-in-charge of my connection to Mellery. What happens after that is up to him.”

Madeleine took a long breath and seemed to be attempting a brave smile, which fell a good deal short of success.