Shut Your Eyes Tight

by John Verdon

  “Close enough.”

  “It’s not impossible.” Hardwick’s voice conjured the habitually skeptical expression that had etched permanent lines into his face. “But so what? What the hell difference does it make whether it’s true or not?”

  “I don’t know yet. But there’s something about the echo effect …”

  “One severed head and one smashed teacup, each in the middle of a table, one week apart?”

  “Something like that,” said Gurney, suddenly doubtful. Hardwick’s tone had a way of making other people’s ideas sound absurd. “But getting back to the mountain of crap you dumped in my lap, is there anyplace you’d like me to start?”

  “Start anywhere, ace. You won’t be disappointed. Just about every sheet of paper there has at least one weird twist. Never seen a weirder, twistier case. Or a weirder, twistier bunch of people. The message from my gut? Whatever the fuck’s going on ain’t what it seems to be.”

  “One more question, Jack. How come there’s no record of a follow-up interview with Withrow Perry regarding the teacup incident?”

  After a moment’s silence, Hardwick emitted a raspy bray, hardly a laugh at all. “Sharp, Davey, very sharp. Zeroed in on that super quick. There wasn’t any official interview because I was officially removed from the case the same day we discovered that the good doctor happened to own the perfect gun for putting a bullet through a teacup at three hundred yards. I’d call the failure to follow up on that fact a fucking stupid oversight on the part of the new CIO, wouldn’t you?”

  “I gather you didn’t go out of your way to remind him?”

  “Not allowed anywhere near the active investigation. I was warned off by no less than our revered captain.”

  “And you were taken off the case because …?”

  “I already told you. I spoke inappropriately to my superior. I informed him of the limitations of his approach. I may also have alluded to the limitations of his intelligence and general unsuitability for command.”

  A long ten seconds passed without either man speaking.

  “You sound like you hate him, Jack.”

  “Hate? Nah. I don’t hate him. I don’t hate anybody. I love the whole fucking world.”

  Chapter 14

  The lay of the land

  Having cleared just enough space for his laptop between a couple of document piles on the long table, Gurney went to the Google Earth website and entered Ashton’s Tambury address. He centered the image over the cottage and the thicket behind it, enlarging it to the maximum resolution available. With the help of the scale data attached to the image and the directional and distance information from the rear of the cottage shown in the case file, Gurney was able to narrow the location of the murder weapon’s discovery to a fairly small area in the thicket about a hundred feet from Badger Lane. So after leaving the cottage through the back window, Flores walked or ran out there, partially covered the blade of the still-bloody weapon with some dirt and leaves, and then … what? Managed to get to the road without leaving any further scent for the dogs to follow? Headed down the hill to Kiki Muller’s house? Or was she right there on the road in her car—waiting to help him escape, waiting to run off with him to a new life they’d been planning together?

  Or did Flores simply walk back to the cottage? Is that why the scent trail went no farther than the machete? Is it conceivable that Flores concealed himself in or around the cottage itself—concealed himself so effectively that a swarm of troopers, detectives, and crime-scene techs failed to discover him? That seemed unlikely.

  As Gurney looked up from his laptop screen, he was startled to see Madeleine sitting at the end of the table, watching him—so startled that he jumped in his seat.

  “Jesus! How long have you been there?”

  She shrugged, made no effort to answer.

  “What time is it?” he asked, and immediately saw the inanity of the question. The clock over the sideboard was in his line of sight, not hers. The time, 10:55 P.M., was also displayed on the computer screen in front of him.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. It sounded less a question than a challenge.

  He hesitated. “Just trying to make sense out of this … material.”

  “Hmm.” It was like one syllable of a humorless laugh.

  He tried to return her steady gaze, found it difficult.

  “What are you thinking?” he said.

  She smiled and frowned, almost at the same time.

  “I’m thinking life is short,” she said finally, in the way of someone who has come face-to-face with a sad truth.

  “And therefore …?”

  Just as he concluded she wasn’t going to answer him, she did. “Therefore we’re running out of time.” She cocked her head—or maybe it was a tiny, involuntary spasm—and regarded him curiously.

  “Time for what?” he was tempted to ask, feeling an urge to turn this untethered exchange into a more manageable argument, but something in her eyes stopped him. Instead he asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”

  She shook her head. “Life is short. That’s all. It’s something to consider.”

  Chapter 15

  Black and white

  Several times during the hour following Madeleine’s visit to the kitchen, Gurney was on the verge of going into the bedroom to pursue the significance of her comment.

  Madeleine did, from time to time, for brief periods, seem to view things through a bleak lens. It was as though the focus of her vision shifted to a barren spot in the landscape and saw in it a paradigm of the whole earth. But the shift had always been temporary; her focus widened again, her joy and pragmatism returned. It had happened that way before, so no doubt it would happen that way again. But for the moment her attitude disconcerted him, creating an anxious hollowness in his stomach—a feeling that he wanted to escape from. He went to the coatrack in the pantry, slipped on a light jacket, and stepped out through the side door into the starless night.

  Somewhere above the thick overcast, a partial moon made the darkness less than total. As soon as he could discern the outline of the path through the overgrown weeds, he followed it down the gentle pasture slope to the weathered bench that faced the pond. He sat, watching and listening, and his eyes slowly distinguished a few dim shapes, edges of objects, perhaps parts of trees, but nothing clearly enough to be identified for sure. Then, across the pond, maybe twenty degrees off his line of sight, he sensed a slight movement. When he looked directly at the spot, the dark shapes, indistinct at best—large bramble bushes, drooping branches, cattails growing up in tangled clumps at the edge of the water, and whatever else might be there—blended formlessly together. But when he looked away, just off to the side of where he thought the movement had been, he saw it again—almost certainly an animal of some kind, perhaps the size of a small deer or a large dog. His eyes darted back, and once again it disappeared.

  He understood the retinal-sensitivity phenomenon involved. It was the reason that one could often see a dim star by looking not directly at it but to the side of it. And the animal, if that’s what he’d seen, if he’d seen anything at all, was surely harmless. Even if it was a small bear, bears in the Catskills were no danger to anyone, much less to someone sitting quietly a hundred yards away. And yet at some primal level of perception, there was something eerie about an unidentifiable movement in the dark.

  The night was windless, soundless, had a dead stillness about it, but to Gurney it felt far from peaceful. He realized that this deficit resided more likely in his own mind than in the atmosphere around him, was attributable more to the tension in his marriage than to shadows in the woods.

  The tension in his marriage. His marriage was not perfect. It had twice been on the brink of fracturing. Fifteen years earlier, when their four-year-old son was killed in an accident for which Gurney held himself responsible, he had become an emotionally frozen mess, almost impossible to live with. And just ten months ago, his obsessive immersion in the Mellery case came close
to ending not only his marriage but his life.

  However, he liked to think that the difficulty between him and Madeleine was simple, or at least that he understood it. To begin with, they occupied radically different boxes on the Myers-Briggs personality grid. His instinctive route to understanding was primarily through thinking, hers was through feeling. He was fascinated by connecting the dots, she by the dots themselves. He was energized by solitude, drained by social engagement, and for her the reverse was true. For him, observing was just one tool to enable clearer judging; for her, judging was just one tool to enable clearer observing.

  Within the framework of traditional psychological testing, they had very little in common. Yet there was an electricity that often ran with a shocking joy through their shared perceptions of people or events, a shared sense of irony, a shared sense of what was touching, what was funny, what was precious, what was honest, and what was dishonest. A shared sense that the other was unique and more important than anyone else. An electricity that Gurney, in his warmer and fuzzier moments, believed to be the essence of love.

  So there it was—the contradiction that described their relationship. They were seriously, contentiously, sometimes miserably different in their hardwired inclinations, yet joined by powerful moments of common insight and affection. The problem was … since their move to Walnut Crossing, those moments had been few and far between. It had been a long time since they’d hugged each other, really hugged each other, as if each were holding the most precious object in the universe.

  Sitting there in the dark, lost in these thoughts, he had drifted inward, away from his surroundings. The yipping of coyotes brought him back.

  It was hard to pinpoint the location of the sharp, feral cries or the number of animals. He guessed it was a pack of three or four or five somewhere on the next ridge, a mile or so east of the pond. When the yipping stopped suddenly, it deepened the silence. Gurney pulled up his jacket zipper a few more inches.

  His mind was soon filling the sensory void with more ideas about his marriage. But he was aware that generalizations, as much as he was addicted to them, did little to solve problems on the ground. And the pressing problem on the ground right now was the need to make a decision, a decision about which he and Madeleine were obviously at odds: to accept the Perry case or not.

  He had a vivid sense of how Madeleine felt about it, not only from her latest comments but also from the low drumbeat of concern she’d been expressing at any police-related activity he’d gotten close to since retiring two years earlier. He assumed she would see the Perry case as a black-and-white issue. His acceptance of the case would prove that his obsession with solving murders, even in retirement, was intractable and that their future together would be clouded. His rejection of the case, on the other hand, would signal a change, the first step in his transformation from a workaholic detective into a bird-watching, kayak-paddling nature enthusiast. But, he argued in his imagination, as though she were present, black-and-white options are unrealistic and lead to lousy decisions, because by definition they exclude so many solutions. In this instance the most tenable course would surely lie in a middle ground between black and white.

  Following this general principle, he realized how the ideal compromise could be defined. He would accept the case, but with a strict time limitation—say, one week. Two weeks maximum. Within that circumscribed time period, he would delve into the evidence, pursue loose ends, perhaps reinterview some key people, follow the facts, find out what he could, offer his conclusions and recommendations, and …

  At that point the yipping of the coyotes started again as abruptly as it had ceased, seeming closer now, perhaps halfway down the wooded slope descending toward the barn. The sounds were jagged, shrill, excited. Gurney wasn’t sure whether they were actually drawing closer or just getting louder. Then nothing. Not the tiniest sound. A piercing silence. Ten slow seconds passed. Then, one by one, they began to howl. Gooseflesh spread up Gurney’s back and along the outside of his arms to the backs of his hands. Once more he thought he saw from the corner of his eye some hint of motion in the dark.

  There was the sound of a car door slamming. Then there were headlights coming down through the pasture, the beams waving erratically over the scrubby vegetation, the car traveling too fast for the uneven surface. It jounced and came to a halt at the end of a short sideways skid about ten feet from the bench.

  From the open driver’s window came Madeleine’s voice, uncharacteristically loud, even panicky. “David!” And again, even as he rose from the bench, moving toward the car in the peripheral glare of the headlights, her voice nearly screeching, “David!”

  Not until he was in the car and she was closing her window did he notice that the chorus of ghastly howling had stopped. She pressed the button that locked the doors and put her hands on the wheel. His eyes were now sufficiently adjusted to the darkness that he could see—perhaps partly see, partly imagine—the rigidity of her arms and grip, the tightness of the skin over her knuckles.

  “Didn’t … didn’t you hear them getting closer?” she asked, sounding out of breath.

  “I heard them. I assumed they were chasing something—a rabbit, maybe.”

  “A rabbit?” Her voice was hoarse, incredulous.

  Surely he could not have seen so much detail, but her face seemed to tremble with barely restrained emotion. Eventually she took a long, shaky breath, then another, opened her hands on the steering wheel, flexed the fingers.

  “What were you doing down here?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Just … thinking about things, trying to … figure out what to do.”

  After another long breath, a steadier one, she turned the ignition key, unaware that the engine was still running, producing a grating shriek of protest from the starter mechanism and an echoing burst of irritation from her own throat.

  She turned around in front of the barn and drove back up through the pasture to the house. She parked the car closer than usual to the side door.

  “And what was it you figured out?” she asked as he was about to get out.

  “Sorry?” He’d heard the question, wanted to postpone answering it.

  She seemed aware of all this, just turned her head partly toward him and waited.

  “I was just trying to figure a way … a way of approaching things reasonably.”

  “Reasonably.” She articulated the word in a tone that seemed to strip it of its meaning.

  “Maybe we could talk about it in the house,” he said, opening his door, wanting to escape, if only for a minute. As he started to step out, his foot caught on something like a bar or a pole on the car floor. He looked down and saw in the yellowish wash of the dome light the heavy wooden handle of the ax they normally kept in the wood bin by the side door.

  “What’s this?” he said.

  “An ax.”

  “I mean, what’s it doing in the car?”

  “It was the first thing I saw.”

  “You know, coyotes are not really—”

  “How the hell do you know that?” she interrupted furiously. “How the hell do you know that?” She jerked away as though he had reached for her arm. She got out of the car in a clumsy rush, slammed the door, ran into the house.

  Chapter 16

  A sense of order and purpose

  During the wee hours of the morning, the heavy overcast had been blown away by a fast-moving cold front of dry, autumnal air. At dawn the sky was a pale blue and by nine a deep azure. The day promised to be crisp and lucid, as bright and reassuring as the night before had been bleak and unnerving.

  Gurney sat at the breakfast table in a slanting rectangle of sunlight, gazing out through the French doors at the yellowish green asparagus ferns swaying in the breeze. As he raised his warm coffee mug to his lips, the world appeared to be a place of defined edges, of definable problems and appropriate responses—a world in which his planned two-week approach to the Perry matter made perfect sense.

  Th
e fact that Madeleine an hour earlier had greeted his presentation of the idea with a less-than-happy stare was not surprising. He hadn’t expected her to be thrilled. A black-and-white frame of mind naturally resists compromise, he told himself. But reality was on his side, and in time she would recognize the reasonableness of his approach. He was sure of it.

  In the meantime he wasn’t going to allow her doubts to paralyze him.

  When Madeleine went out to her garden to bring in the season’s final harvest of string beans, he went to the center drawer of the sideboard to get a yellow legal pad on which to start a list of priorities.

  Call Val Perry, discuss two-week commitment.

  Set hourly rate. Other fees, costs. E-mail follow-up.

  Inform Hardwick.

  Interview Scott Ashton—ask VP to expedite.

  Ashton background, associates, friends, enemies.

  Jillian background, associates, friends, enemies.