Shut Your Eyes Tight

by John Verdon

  Then he heard a car driving up the pasture lane, and it came back to him: her Friday-evening meeting with her knitting friends. But if that was her car, she was coming home a lot earlier than usual. As he headed for the kitchen window to check, the phone rang on the den desk behind him, and he went back to answer it.

  “Dave, so glad I caught you live on the phone, not your machine. I’ve got a couple of curveballs for you, but not to worry!” It was Sonya Reynolds, a dash of anxiety coloring her characteristic excitement.

  “I was going to call you—” Gurney began. He’d planned to ask more questions in order to get a more grounded feeling about the following evening’s dinner with Jykynstyl.

  Sonya cut him off. “Dinner is now lunch. Jay has to catch a plane for Rome. Hope that’s not a problem for you. If it is, you’ll have to make it not be. And curveball number two is that I won’t be there.” That was the part that obviously bothered her. “Did you hear what I said?” she asked after Gurney failed to react.

  “Lunch is not a problem for me. You can’t be there?”

  “I certainly could be there, would certainly like to be there, but … well, instead of trying to explain, why don’t I just tell you what he said. Let me preface this by reminding you how incredibly impressed he is with your work. He referred to it as potentially seminal. He’s very excited. But here’s what he said: ‘I want to see for myself who this David Gurney is, this incredible artist who happens to be a detective. I want to understand who I’m investing in. I want to be exposed to the mind and imagination of this man without the obstruction of a third party.’ I told him that was the first time in my life I’d ever been referred to as an obstruction. I told him I don’t think I like that very much, being told not to come. But for him I make an exception. I stay home. You’re very quiet, David. What are you thinking?”

  “I’m wondering if this man is a lunatic.”

  “This man is Jay Jykynstyl. Lunatic is not the word I would use. I would say that he is quite unusual.”

  Gurney heard the side door opening and shutting, followed by sounds from the mudroom off the kitchen.

  “David—why so quiet? More thinking?”

  “No, I just … I don’t know, what does he mean by ‘investing’ in me?”

  “Ah, that’s the really good news. That’s the biggest part of the reason I would have wanted to be there at dinner, or lunch, or whatever. Listen to this. This is life-changing information. He wants to own all of your work. Not one or two things. All of it. And he expects it to increase in value.”

  “Why would it?”

  “Everything Jykynstyl buys increases in value.”

  Gurney caught a movement out of the corner of his eye, turned, and saw Madeleine at the den door. She was frowning at him—a worried frown.

  “You still there, David?” Sonya’s voice was both bubbly and incredulous. “Are you always so quiet when someone offers you a million dollars to start with and sky’s the limit after that?”

  “I find it bizarre.”

  A little twist of annoyance was added to Madeleine’s worried frown, and she went back out to the kitchen.

  “Of course it’s bizarre!” cried Sonya. “Success in the art world is always bizarre. Bizarre is normal. You know what Mark Rothko’s colored squares sell for? Why should bizarre be a problem?”

  “Let me absorb this, okay? Can I call you later?”

  “You better call me later, David, my million-dollar baby. Tomorrow’s a big day. I need to get you ready for it. I can feel that you are thinking again. My God, David, what are you thinking now?”

  “I’m just having a hard time believing that any of this is real.”

  “David, David, David, you know what they tell you when you’re learning to swim? Stop fighting the water. Relax and float. Relax and breathe and let the water hold you up. Same thing here. Stop struggling with real, unreal, crazy, not crazy—all these words. Accept the magic. The magic Mr. Jykynstyl. And his magic millions. Ciao!”

  Magic? There was no concept on earth quite so alien to Gurney as magic. No concept quite so meaningless, so aggravatingly empty-headed.

  He stood by his desk gazing out through the west window. The sky above the ridge, so recently a bloody red, had faded to a murky pall of mauve and granite, and the grass of the high field behind the house had only the memory of green in it.

  There was a crash and a clatter in the kitchen, the sound of pot covers sliding from the overloaded dish drainer into the sink, then the sound of Madeleine restacking them.

  Gurney emerged from the darkened den into the lighted kitchen. Madeleine was wiping her hands on one of the dish towels.

  “What happened to the car?” she asked.

  “What? Oh. A deer collision.” The recollection was clear, sickening.

  She looked at him with alarm, pain.

  He went on. “Ran out of the woods. Right in front of me. No way to … to get out of the way.”

  She was wide-eyed, uttered a small gasp. “What happened to the deer?”

  “Dead. Instantly. I checked. No sign of life at all.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Do? What could I …?” His mind was suddenly swamped by the image of the fawn on the shoulder of the road, head twisted, unseeing eyes open—an image infused with emotions from long ago, from another accident, emotions that seized his heart with such frozen fingers it almost stopped.

  Madeleine watched him, seemed to know what he was thinking, reached out and touched his hand lightly. As he slowly recovered himself, he looked into her eyes and saw a sadness that was simply part of all the things she felt, even of joy. He knew that she had dealt long ago with the death of their son in a way he had not, in a way that he’d never been willing or able to. He knew that one day he would have to. But not yet, not now.

  Perhaps that was part of what stood between him and Kyle, his grown son from his first marriage. But theories like that had the feel of therapist-think, and for that he had no use at all.

  He turned to the French doors and stared out at the dusky evening, dark enough now that even the red barn was drained of its color.

  Madeleine turned to the sink and began drying the stacked pots. When she finally spoke, her question came from an unexpected direction. “So you plan to have it all wrapped up in another week—bad guy safely delivered to the good guys in a box with a bow?” He could hear it in her voice before he looked at her and saw it: the querying, humorless smile.

  “If that’s what I said, then that’s the plan.”

  She nodded, her skepticism unconcealed.

  There was a long silence as she continued to wipe the pots with more than her usual attention, moving the dried items to the pine sideboard, lining them up with a neatness that began to get on his nerves.

  “By the way,” he said, the question popping back into his mind, coming out more aggressively than he intended, “why are you home?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Isn’t this knitting night?”

  She nodded. “We decided to end a bit early.”

  He thought he heard something odd in her voice.

  “How come?”

  “There was a little problem.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well … actually … Marjorie Ann puked.”

  Gurney blinked. “What?”

  “She puked.”

  “Marjorie Ann Highsmith?”

  “That’s right.”

  He blinked again. “What do you mean, puked?”

  “What the hell do you think I mean?”

  “I mean, where? Right there at the table?”

  “No, not at the table. She got up from the table and ran for the bathroom and …”

  “And?”

  “And she didn’t quite make it.”

  Gurney noted that a certain almost imperceptible light had come back into Madeleine’s eyes, a flicker of the subtle humor with which she viewed almost everything, a humor that balanced her sadness—a light t
hat had lately been missing. He wanted so much, right then, at that moment, to fan the flame of that light but knew that if he tried too hard, he’d only succeed in blowing it out.

  “I guess there was a bit of a mess?”

  “Oh, yes. A bit of a mess. And it … uh … it didn’t stay in one place.”

  “Didn’t … what?”

  “Well, she didn’t just throw up on the floor. Actually, she threw up on the cats.”

  “Cats?”

  “We met tonight at Bonnie’s house. You remember Bonnie has two cats?”

  “Yes, sort of.”

  “The cats were lying down together in a cat bed that Bonnie keeps in the hall outside the bathroom.”

  Gurney started to laugh—a sudden giddiness taking hold of him.

  “Yes, well, Marjorie Ann made it as far as the cats.”

  “Oh, Jesus …” He was doubled over now.

  “And she threw up quite a bit. I mean, it was … substantial. Well, the cats sort of exploded out of the cat bed and came flying out into the living room.”

  “Covered …”

  “Oh, yes, covered with it. Racing around the room, over couches, chairs. It was … really something.”

  “Good God …” Gurney couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed so hard.

  “And of course,” Madeleine concluded, “after that no one could eat. And we couldn’t stay in the living room. Naturally, we wanted to help Bonnie clean up, but she wouldn’t let us.”

  After a short silence he asked, “Would you like to eat something now?”

  “No!” She shuddered. “Don’t mention food.”

  The image of the cats got him laughing again.

  His food suggestion, however, had seemed to trigger in Madeleine’s mind a delayed association that extinguished the sparkle in her eyes.

  When his laughter finally subsided, she asked, “So is it just you, Sonya, and the mad collector at dinner tomorrow night?”

  “No,” he said, glad for the first time that Sonya wasn’t going to be present. “Just the mad collector and me.”

  Madeleine raised a quizzical eyebrow. “I would’ve thought she’d kill to be at that dinner.”

  “Actually, dinner’s been switched to lunch.”

  “Lunch? Are you being downgraded already?”

  Gurney showed no reaction, but, absurdly, the comment stung.

  Chapter 40

  A faint yipping

  Once Madeleine had finished with the pots and pans and dishes, she made herself a cup of herbal tea and settled with her knitting bag into one of the overstuffed armchairs at the far end of the room. Gurney, with one of the Perry case folders in hand, soon followed to the armchair’s twin on the opposite side of the fireplace. They sat in companionable isolation, each in a separate pool of lamplight.

  He opened the folder and extracted the ViCAP crime report. Curious thing about that acronym. At the FBI it stood for the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. At New York’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation, it stood for the Violent Crime Analysis Program. But it was the same form, processed by the same computers and distributed to the same recipients. Gurney liked New York’s version better. It said what it was, made no promises.

  The thirty-six-page form itself was comprehensive, to say the least, but useful only to the extent that the officer filling it out had been accurate and thorough. One of its purposes was to uncover MO similarities to other crimes on file, but in this case there was no notation of any subsequent hits by the comparative-analysis program. Gurney was poring over the thirty-six pages to make sure he hadn’t overlooked anything significant the first time around.

  He was having a hard time focusing, kept thinking he should call Kyle, kept looking for excuses to put it off. The time difference between New York and Seattle had provided a convenient obstruction for the past three years, but now Kyle was back in Manhattan, enrolled at Columbia Law School, and Gurney’s procrastination had lost its enabler. Which is not to say that the procrastination had ceased, or even that its true causes had become transparent to him.

  Sometimes he dismissed it as the natural product of his cold Celtic genes. That was the most comfortable way of looking at it. Hardly any personal responsibility at all. Other times he was convinced it was related to one of his downward spirals of guilt: the guilt that was created by not calling, creating in turn an increasing resistance to calling, and more guilt. For as long as he could remember, he’d had an abundance of that gnawing rat of an emotion—an only child’s feeling of responsibility for his parents’ strained and staggering marriage. At still other times, he suspected that the problem was that he saw too much of his first wife in Kyle—too many reminders of too many ugly disagreements.

  And then there was the disappointment factor. In the midst of the stock-market meltdown, when Kyle announced he was leaving investment banking for law school, Gurney had entertained for a delusional moment the belief that the young man might have an interest in following him into law enforcement. But it soon became clear that Kyle was simply taking a new route to the old goal of material success.

  “Why don’t you just call him?” Madeleine was watching him, her knitting needles resting in her lap atop a half-finished orange scarf.

  He stared at her, a little startled but not so utterly amazed as he once would have been at this uncanny sensitivity.

  “It’s a certain look you get when you’re thinking about him,” she said, as if explaining something obvious. “Not a happy look.”

  “I will. I’ll call.”

  He began scanning the ViCAP form with a fresh urgency, like a man in a locked room searching for a hidden exit. Nothing emerged that seemed new or different from what he’d remembered. He shuffled through the other reports in the folder.

  One of several analyses of the wedding-reception DVD material concluded with this summary: “Locations of all persons present on the Ashton property during the time frame of the homicide have been verified through time-coded video imagery.” Gurney had a pretty good idea what this meant, recalling what Hardwick had told him the evening they watched the video, but given its critical significance, he wanted to be sure.

  He got his cell phone from the sideboard and called Hardwick’s number. He was shunted immediately into voice mail: “Hardwick. Leave a message.”

  “It’s Gurney. I have a question about the video.”

  Less than a minute after he left the message, his phone rang. He didn’t bother to check the caller ID. “Jack?”

  “Dave?” It was a woman’s voice—familiar, but he couldn’t immediately place it.

  “Sorry, I was expecting someone else. This is Dave.”

  “It’s Peggy Meeker. I got your e-mail, and I just e-mailed you back. Then I thought I should call you in case you might need to know this right away.” Her voice was racing with excitement.

  “What is it?”

  “You wanted to know about Edward Vallory’s play, plot, characters, whether anything was known about it. Well, you’re not going to believe this, but I called the English department at Wesleyan, and guess who’s still there—Professor Barkless, who taught the course.”

  “The course?”

  “The English course I took. The Elizabethan-drama course. I left a message, and he got back to me. Isn’t that amazing?”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “Well, that’s the really, really amazing part. Are you ready for this?”

  There was a call-waiting beep on Gurney’s phone, which he ignored. “Go ahead.”

  “Well, to begin with, the name of the play was The Spanish Gardener.” She paused for a reaction.

  “Go on.”

  “The name of the central character was Hector Flores.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “There’s more. It gets better and better. The plot, which was partially described by a contemporary critic, is one of those complicated things where people wear disguises and people in their own families don’t recognize th
em and all that kind of nonsense, but the basic story line”—there was another call-waiting beep—“which is pretty wild, is that Hector Flores was sent away from home by his mother, who killed his father and seduced his brother. Years later Hector returns, disguised as a gardener, and to make a long story short, he tricks his brother—through more disguises and mistaken identities—into cutting off his mother’s head. It was all pretty much over the top, which is maybe why all the copies of the play were destroyed after the first performance. It’s not clear if the plot was based on some ancient variant of the Oedipus myth or if it was just a piece of grotesquerie cooked up by Vallory. Or maybe it was somehow influenced by Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, which is kind of emotionally over the top, too, so who knows? But those are the basic facts—straight from Professor Barkless.”

  Gurney’s brain was racing faster than Peggy Meeker’s breathless voice.

  After a moment she asked, “You want me to go through that again?”

  Another beep.

  “You said it was all in an e-mail you sent me?”

  “Yes, all spelled out. And I put in my professor’s phone number, in case you want to call him directly. It’s so exciting, isn’t it? Does it give you, like, a whole new perspective on the case?”

  “Maybe more like a reinforcement of one of the existing perspectives. We’ll see how it plays out.”

  “Right. Okay. Let me know.”

  Beep.

  “Peggy, I seem to have a persistent caller here. Let me say good-bye for now. And thank you. This could be very helpful.”

  “Sure, glad to do it. Great. Let me know what else I can do.”

  “I will. Thank you again.”

  He switched to the other call.

  “Took you long enough to answer. Question mustn’t be too fucking urgent.”