Peter Pan Must Die: A Novel

by John Verdon

  “The hell are you talking about?”

  “For me, that chat could be a smart tenth or eleventh step, not a first step.”

  “You’re making a bigger deal out of this than it needs to be.”

  Gurney gazed out the car’s side window. Over the ridge beyond the pond, a hawk was slowly circling. “Apart from getting Kay Spalter to put her name on the dotted line, what am I supposed to be bringing to this party?”

  “I told you already.”

  “Tell me again.”

  “You’re part of the strategy team. Part of the firepower. Part of the ultimate solution.”

  “That so?”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “If you want me to contribute, you need to let me do it my way.”

  “What are you, Frank fucking Sinatra?”

  “I can’t help you if you want me to put the tenth step ahead of the first.”

  Hardwick uttered what sounded like a bad-tempered sigh of surrender. “Fine. What do you want to do?”

  “I need to start at the beginning. In Long Falls. In the cemetery. In the building where the shooter stood. I need to be where it happened. I need to see it.”

  “What the fuck? You want to reinvestigate the whole goddamn thing?”

  “Doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.”

  “You don’t need to do that.”

  He was about to tell Hardwick that there was a bigger issue involved here than the pragmatic appeal goal. An issue of truth. Truth with a capital T. But the pretentious ring of that sentiment kept him from stating it. “I need to get grounded, literally.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Our focus is on Klemper’s fuck-ups, not the fucking graveyard.”

  They went back and forth for another ten minutes.

  In the end, Hardwick capitulated, shaking his head in exasperation. “Do whatever you want to do. Just don’t waste a shitload of time, okay?”

  “I don’t plan to waste any time.”

  “Whatever you say, Sherlock.”

  Gurney got out of the car. The heavy door closed with a louder impact than he’d heard from a car door in decades.

  Hardwick leaned over toward the open passenger-side window. “You’ll keep me informed, right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Don’t spend too much time in that graveyard. That is one seriously peculiar place.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough.” Scowling, Hardwick revved his obnoxiously loud engine, stirring it up from a bronchial rumble to a full roar. Then he eased out the clutch, turned the old red GTO around on the yellowing grass, and headed down the pasture trail.

  Gurney looked up again at the hawk, gliding with elegant ease above the ridge. Then he went into the house, expecting to see Madeleine or to hear the sound of cello practice upstairs. He called her name. The interior of the house, however, communicated only that odd sense of emptiness it always seemed to have when she was out.

  He thought about what day of the week it was—whether it was one of the three days she worked at the mental health clinic, but it wasn’t. He searched his memory for any trace of her mentioning one of her local board meetings, or yoga classes, or volunteer weeding sessions at the community garden, or shopping trips to Oneonta. But nothing came to mind.

  He went back outside, looked up and down the gently sloping terrain on both sides of the house. Three deer stood watching him from the top of the high pasture. The hawk was still gliding, now in a wide circle, making only small adjustments in the angle of its outstretched wings.

  He called out Madeleine’s name, this time loudly, and cupped his ears for a reply. There was none. But as he was listening, something caught his eye—below the low pasture, through the trees, a glimpse of fuchsia by the back corner of the little barn.

  There were only two fuchsia objects he could think of that belonged in their secluded end-of-the-road world: Madeleine’s nylon jacket and the seat of the new bicycle he’d bought her for her birthday —to replace the one lost in the fire that had destroyed their original barn.

  As he strode down, ever more curious, through the pasture, he called her name once more—sure now that what he was looking at was in fact her jacket. But again there was no reply. He passed through the informal row of saplings that bordered the pasture, and as he entered the open mowed area surrounding the barn, he saw Madeleine sitting on the grass at the far corner of the building. She appeared to be intent on something just out of his line of sight.

  “Madeleine, why didn’t you—” he began, his annoyance at her lack of response coming through clearly in his voice. Without looking at him, she raised one of her hands toward him in a gesture that meant he should either stop approaching or stop speaking.

  When he stopped both, she motioned him forward. He came up behind her and peered around the corner of the barn. And there he saw them—the four chickens, sitting placidly in the grass, their heads lowered, their feet tucked under their breasts. The rooster sat on one side of Madeleine’s outstretched legs, and the three hens sat on the other side. As Gurney stared down at this odd tableau, he could hear the chickens making the same low, peaceful cooing sounds they made on their roost when they were ready for sleep.

  Madeleine looked up at Gurney. “They need a little house and a safe fenced yard to run around in. So they can be out as much as they want in the air and be happy and safe. That’s all they want. So we have to do that for them.”

  “Right.” The reminder of the construction project ahead irritated him. He looked down at the chickens on the grass. “How are you going to get them back in the barn?”

  “It’s not a problem.” She smiled, more at the chickens than at him. “It’s not a problem,” she repeated in a whisper. “We’ll go into the barn soon. We just want to sit in the grass for a few more minutes.”

  Half an hour later, Gurney was sitting in front of his computer in the den, making his way through the website of the Cyberspace Cathedral, “Your Portal to a Joyful Life.” Predictably perhaps, given the name of the organization, he could find no physical address, no picture of any brick-and-mortar headquarters.

  The only option offered on the Contact page was email. When Gurney clicked on it, the actual email form that popped up was addressed to Jonah himself.

  Gurney thought about that for a while—the disarming, almost intimate suggestion that one’s comment, inquiry, or plea for help would go directly to the founder. That in turn made him wonder what sort of comments, inquiries, or pleas for help the website might be generating; looking for the answer kept him scrolling through the site for another twenty minutes.

  The eventual impression he got was that the promised joyful life was a vaguely New Age state of mind, full of soft-focus philosophy, pastel graphics, and sunny weather. The whole enterprise seemed to be proffering the sweetness and protection of baby powder. It was as if Hallmark had decided to start a religion.

  The object that held Gurney’s attention longest was a photograph of Jonah Spalter on the Welcome page. High-resolution and seemingly unretouched, it had a kind of directness that contrasted sharply with the surrounding fluff.

  There was something of Carl in the shape of Jonah’s face, the full dark hair with a slight wave, the straight nose, the strong jaw. But there all resemblance ended. While Carl’s eyes at the end were full of the most extreme despair, Jonah’s seemed to be fixed on a future of endless success. Like the classic masks of tragedy and comedy, their faces were remarkably similar and totally opposite. If these brothers had been locked in the kind of personal battle that Kay had indicated, and if Jonah’s photograph truly represented his current appearance, there was no doubt which brother had emerged victorious.

  In addition to Jonah’s picture, the Welcome page included a long clickable menu of topics. Gurney chose the one at the top of the list: “Only Human.” As a page with a border of entwined daisies came up on the screen, he heard Madeleine’s voice calling to him
from the other room.

  “Dinner’s on the table.”

  She was already seated at the small round table in the nook by the French doors—the one at which they ate all their meals, except when they had guests and used the long Shaker table instead. He sat across from her. On each of their plates were generous portions of sautéed haddock, carrots, and broccoli. He poked at a slice of carrot, speared it with his fork, began chewing it. He discovered he wasn’t very hungry. He continued eating anyway. He didn’t care much for the haddock. It reminded of the tasteless fish his mother used to serve.

  “Did you get them back in the barn?” he asked with more irritation than interest.

  “Of course.”

  He realized he’d lost track of the hour and glanced over at the clock on the far wall. It was six-thirty. He turned his head to look out the glass door and saw the sun glaring back at him from just above the western ridge. Far from any romantic notions of a pastoral sunset, it reminded him of a movie-cliché interrogation lamp.

  That association carried him back to the questions he’d posed at Bedford Hills just a few hours earlier, and to those uncannily steady green eyes that seemed more suited to a cat in a painting than a woman in prison.

  “You want to tell me about it?” Madeleine was watching him with that knowing look that sometimes made him wonder if he’d been unconsciously whispering his thoughts.

  “About …?”

  “Your day. The woman you went to see. What Jack wants. Your plan. Whether you believe she’s innocent.”

  It hadn’t occurred to him that he wanted to talk about that. But perhaps he did. He laid his fork down. “Bottom line, I don’t know what I believe. If she’s a liar, she’s a good one. Maybe the best I’ve ever seen.”

  “But you don’t think she’s a liar?”

  “I’m not sure. She seems to want me to believe she’s innocent, but she’s not going out of her way to persuade me. It’s as though she wants to make it difficult.”

  “Clever.”

  “Clever or … honest.”

  “Maybe both.”

  “Right.”

  “What else?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What else did you see in her?”

  He thought for a moment. “Pride. Strength. Willfulness.”

  “Is she attractive?”

  “I don’t think ‘attractive’ is the word I’d choose.”

  “What, then?”

  “Impressive. Intense. Determined.”

  “Ruthless?”

  “Ah. That’s a tough one. If you mean ruthless enough to kill her husband for money, I can’t say yet one way or the other.”

  Madeleine echoed the word “yet” so softly, he hardly heard her.

  “I intend to take at least one more step,” he said, but even as he was saying it he recognized its subtle dishonesty.

  If the skeptical glint in Madeleine’s eye was any indication, so did she. “And that step would be …?”

  “I want to look at the crime scene.”

  “Weren’t there pictures in the file Jack gave you?”

  “Crime scene photos and drawings capture maybe ten percent of the reality. You have to stand there, walk around, look around, listen, smell, get a feel for the place, a feel for the possibilities and limitations—the neighborhood, the traffic, a feel for what the victim might have seen, what the killer might have seen, how he might have arrived, where he might have gone, who might have seen him.”

  “Or her.”

  “Or her.”

  “So when are you going to do all this looking, listening, smelling, and feeling?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “You do remember our dinner?”

  “Tomorrow?”

  Madeleine produced a long-suffering smile. “The members of the yoga club. Here. For dinner.”

  “Oh, right, sure. That’s fine. No problem.”

  “You’re sure? You’ll be here?”

  “No problem.”

  She gave him a long look, then broke it off as though the subject was closed. She stood, opened the French doors, and took a long deep breath of the cool air.

  A moment later, from the woods beyond the pond came that strange lost cry they’d heard before, like an eerie note on a flute.

  Gurney rose from his chair and stepped out past Madeleine onto the stone patio. The sun had dipped below the ridge, and the temperature felt like it had dropped fifteen degrees. He stood quite still and listened for a repetition of that unearthly sound.

  All he could hear was a silence so deep it sent a shiver through his body.

  Chapter 12

  Willow Rest

  When Gurney came out to the kitchen the next morning, he was ravenously hungry.

  Madeleine was at the sink island, shredding bits of bread onto a large paper plate, half of which was already covered with chopped strawberries. Once a week she gave the chickens a plate of something special in addition to the packaged feed from the farm supply store.

  Gurney was reminded by her more-conservative-than-usual outfit that it was one of her work days at the clinic. He looked up at the clock. “Aren’t you running late?”

  “Hal is picking me up, so … no problem.”

  If he remembered rightly, Hal was the clinic director. “Why?”

  She stared at him.

  “Oh, right, yes, your car, in the shop. But how come Hal—?”

  “I mentioned my car problems at work the other day, and Hal said he passes our road anyway. Besides, if I’m late because he’s late, he can hardly complain. And speaking of being late, you won’t be, will you?”

  “Late? For what?”

  “Tonight. The yoga club.”

  “No problem.”

  “And you’ll think about calling Malcolm Claret?”

  “Today?”

  “Good a time as any.”

  At the sound of a car coming up the pasture lane, she went to the window. “He’s here,” she said breezily. “Got to go.” She hurried over to Gurney, kissed him, and then picked up her bag from the sideboard with one hand and the plate of bread and strawberries with the other.

  “You want me to take care of that chicken stuff for you?” asked Gurney.

  “No. Hal can stop at the barn for two seconds. I’ll take care of it. Ta-ta.” She headed through the hallway past the mudroom and out the back door.

  Gurney watched through the window as Hal’s gleaming black Audi crept slowly down toward the barn and around to the far side where the door was. He watched until the car reappeared from behind the barn a minute or two later and headed down the road.

  It was barely eight-fifteen in the morning, and already his day was congested with thoughts and emotions he’d rather not have.

  He knew from experience that the best remedy for dealing with an unsettled state of mind was to take some sort of action, to move forward.

  He went to the den, got the Spalter case file and the thick packet of documents describing Kay’s journey through the legal system after her arraignment—the pretrial motions, the trial transcript, copies of the prosecution’s visual aids and items of evidence, and the routine post-conviction appeal filed by the original defense attorney. Gurney carried it all out to his car, because he had no idea which specific items he might need to refer to in the course of the day.

  He went back in the house and got a plain gray sport jacket out of his closet, the one he’d worn hundreds of times on the job, but maybe only three times since he’d retired. That jacket with his dark slacks, blue shirt, and simple military style shoes screamed “cop” as loudly as any uniform. He was guessing that the image might prove useful in Long Falls. He made one last glance around, went out to his car again, and entered the address of the Willow Rest cemetery in the portable GPS on the dashboard.

  A minute later he was on his way—and feeling better already.

  Like so many old cities on rivers and canals of fading commercial utility, Long Falls seemed to be struggling
against a persistent current of decline.

  There were scattered signs of attempted revitalization. An abandoned fabric mill had been converted into professional offices; a cluster of small shops now occupied a former casket factory; a block-long building of sooty bricks the color of old scabs, with the name CLOVER-SWEET CREAMERY etched on a granite lintel over the entrance door, had been relabeled NORTHERN ART STUDIOS & GALLERIES on a wider and brighter sign affixed above the lintel.

  As he drove along the main artery, however, Gurney counted at least six derelict buildings from a more prosperous time. There were a lot of empty parking spaces, too few people on the streets. A thin teenager, wearing the loser’s uniform of sagging jeans and an oversized baseball hat worn sideways, stood on an otherwise deserted corner with a muscular dog on a short leash. As Gurney slowed for a red light, he could see that the young man’s anxious eyes were scanning the passing cars with an addict’s characteristic combination of hope and detachment.

  It sometimes seemed to Gurney that something in America had gone terribly wrong. A large segment of a generation had become infected with ignorance, laziness, and vulgarity. It no longer seemed unusual for a young woman to have, say, three small children by three different fathers, two of whom were currently in prison. And places like Long Falls, which once may have nurtured a simpler kind of life, were now depressingly similar to everywhere else.

  These thoughts were interrupted by his GPS announcing in an authoritative voice, “Arriving at destination on your right.”

  The sign, next to a spotless blacktop driveway, said only WILLOW REST—leaving the nature of the enterprise unspecified. Gurney turned in and followed the driveway through an open wrought-iron gate in a yellow brick wall. Well-tended landscape plantings on each side of the entrance conveyed the impression not of a cemetery but of an upscale residential development. The driveway led directly to a small, empty parking area in front of an English-style cottage.

  Window boxes overflowing with purple and yellow pansies below old-fashioned small-paned windows reminded him of the weird-cozy esthetic of a wildly popular painter whose name he could never recall. There was a VISITOR INFORMATION sign alongside a flagstone pathway that extended from the parking area to the cottage door.