Shut Your Eyes Tight (Dave Gurney, No. 2): A Novel (25 page)

“You’re talking about a frog?”

“Sorry.”

Gurney closed his eyes, more annoyed than he’d be willing to admit at Madeleine’s apparent disinterest in his windfall. “From what I know of the art world, it’s pretty much one giant mental hospital, but some of the patients have an awful lot of money. Apparently this guy is one of them.”

“What is it he wants for his hundred thousand dollars?”

“A print that only he would own. I’d have to take the prints I did last year, enhance them somehow, introduce a variation into each one that would make it different from anything the gallery sold to anyone else.”

“He’s for real?”

“So I’m told. I’m also told he may want more than one. Sonya’s imagining the possibility of a seven-figure sale.” He turned to see Madeleine’s reaction.

“Seven-figure sale? You mean some amount over a million dollars?”

“Yup.”

“Oh, my, that’s … certainly something.”

He stared at her. “Are you purposely trying to show as little reaction to this as possible?”

“What reaction should I have?”

“More curiosity? Happiness? Some thoughts about what we could do with a chunk of money that size?”

She frowned thoughtfully, then grinned. “We could spend a month in Tuscany.”

“That’s what you’d do with a million dollars?”

“What million dollars?”

“Seven figures, remember?”

“I heard that part. What I’m missing is the part where it becomes real.”

“According to Sonya, it’s real right now. I have a dinner meeting Saturday in the city with the collector, Jay Jykynstyl.”

“In the
city
?”

“You make it sound like I’m meeting him in a sewer.”

“What does he ‘collect’?”

“No idea. Apparently stuff he pays a lot for.”

“You find it credible that he wants to pay you hundreds of thousands of dollars for fancied-up mug shots of low-life scum? Do you even know who he is?”

“I’ll find out Saturday.”

“Are you listening to yourself?”

To the extent that he was capable of perceiving his own emotional tone and rhythm, he wasn’t entirely comfortable with it, but he wasn’t ready to admit it. “What’s your point?”

“You’re good at poking holes in things. Nobody better at it than you.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Don’t you? You can rip anything to shreds—‘an eye for discrepancy,’ you once called it. Well, if anything ever cried out for a little poking and ripping, this sounds like it. How come you’re not doing it?”

“Maybe I’m waiting to find out more, find out how real it is, get a sense of who this Jykynstyl character is.”

“Sounds reasonable.” She said this in such a reasonable way that he knew she meant the opposite. “By the way, what kind of name is that?”

“Jykynstyl? Sounds Dutch to me.”

She smiled. “Sounds to me like a monster in a fairy tale.”

W
hile Madeleine was creating a shrimp-and-pasta combination for dinner, Gurney was in the basement going through old copies of the Sunday
Times
that were being saved for a gardening project. (One of Madeleine’s friends had gotten her interested in a type of garden bed in which newspapers were used to create layers of mulch.) He was searching the magazine sections of the paper for the advertising spread he remembered seeing that featured the provocative photograph of Jillian. What he was ultimately looking for was the company name and photo credit. He was about to give up and call Ashton for the information when he found the most recent insertion of the ad—which he noted had appeared, by macabre coincidence, on the day of the murder.

Instead of just making a note of the credit line, “Karnala Fashion, Photo by Alessandro,” he decided to bring the magazine section upstairs. He laid it open on the table where Madeleine was setting their dinner plates. Apart from the credit line, there was only one sentence on the page, in very small, fashionably understated type: “Custom-designed wardrobes, starting at $100,000.”

She scowled at it. “What’s that?”

“An ad for expensive clothes. Insanely expensive. It’s also a picture of the victim.”

“The vic—You don’t mean …?”

“Jillian Perry.”

“The bride?”

“The bride.”

Madeleine looked closely at the ad.

“The two images in the photo are both of her,” Gurney explained.

Madeleine nodded quickly, meaning that this had already occurred to her. “That’s what she did for a living?”

“I don’t know yet whether it was a job or an occasional thing. When I first saw the photo hanging in Scott Ashton’s house, I was too amazed to ask.”

“He has
that
hanging in his home? He’s a widower, and that’s the picture he …” She shook her head, her voice fading.

“He talks about her the same way her mother talks about her—like she was some kind of uniquely brilliant, sick, seductive maniac. The thing of it is, the whole damn case is like that. Everyone connected with it is either a genius or a lunatic or … a pathological liar or … I don’t know what. Christ, Ashton’s next-door neighbor, whose wife presumably ran off with the murderer, is playing with a Lionel train set under a Christmas tree in his basement. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so goddamn adrift. It’s like the trail—the scent trail the K-9 team was able to follow that led to the murder weapon in the woods, but it didn’t go any farther, which suggests that the killer went back to the cottage and hid there—except there’s no place in the cottage to hide. One minute I think I know what’s going on, the next minute I realize I have no evidence at all for what I think. We have lots of interesting scenarios, but when you look under them, there’s nothing there.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that we need to come up with hard data, firsthand observations by credible witnesses. So far none of the narratives has any verifiable facts to support it. It’s too damn easy to get carried away by a good story. You can get so emotionally invested in a certain view of the case that you don’t notice it’s all wishful thinking. Let’s eat. Maybe food will help my brain.”

Madeleine put a large bowl of shrimp and pappardelle with a tomato-and-garlic sauce in the middle of the table, along with small bowls of shredded asiago and chopped basil, and they began eating.

After a few mouthfuls, Madeleine started toying with a shrimp. “The little apple didn’t fall far from the tree.”

“Hmm?”

“Mother and daughter have a lot in common.”

“Both a bit erratic, you mean?”

“That’s a way of putting it.”

There was another silence as Madeleine lightly tapped her shrimp with the tines of her fork. “You’re sure there was no place to hide?”

“Hide?”

“In the cottage.”

“Why do you ask?”

“There was a terrifying movie I saw a long time ago—about a landlord who had secret spaces between the walls of the apartments, and he’d watch his tenants through tiny pinholes.”

Their landline phone rang. “The cottage is pretty small, only three rooms,” he said as he stood to go and answer it.

She shrugged. “Just a thought. It still gives me the shivers.”

The phone was on his desk in the den. He got to it on the fourth ring. “Gurney here.”

“Detective Gurney?” The female voice was young, tentative.

“That’s right. Who am I speaking to?” He could hear the caller breathing, apparently in some distress. “You still there?”

“Yes, I … I shouldn’t be calling, but … I wanted to talk to you.”

“Who is this?”

The caller answered after another hesitation. “Savannah Liston.”

“What can I do for you?”

“Do you know who I am?”

“Should I?”

“I thought he might have mentioned my name.”

“Who might have mentioned it?”

“Dr. Ashton. I’m one of his assistants.”

“I see.”

“That’s why I’m calling. I mean, maybe that’s why I shouldn’t be calling, but … Is it true you’re a private detective?”

“Savannah, you need to tell me why you’re calling me.”

“I know. But you won’t tell anyone, will you? I’d lose my job.”

“Unless you’re planning to hurt someone, I can’t think of any legal reason I’d have to divulge anything.” That answer, which he’d
used a few hundred times in his career, was about as meaningless as it could be, but it seemed to satisfy her.

“Okay. I should just tell you. I overheard Dr. Ashton on the phone with you earlier today. It sounded like you wanted the names of girls in Jillian’s class that she hung out with, but he couldn’t give them to you?”

“Something like that.”

“Why do you want them?”

“I’m sorry, Savannah, but I’m not allowed to discuss that. But I would like to know more about the reason you’re calling me.”

“I could give you two names.”

“Of girls Jillian hung out with?”

“Yes. I know them because when I was a student here, once in a while we hung out together, which is kind of why I’m calling you. There’s this weird thing going on.” Her voice was getting shaky, like she was about to cry.

“What weird thing, Savannah?”

“The two girls Jillian hung out with—they’ve both disappeared since they graduated.”

“How do you mean, ‘disappeared’?”

“They both left home during the summer, their families haven’t seen them, nobody knows where they are. And there’s another horrible thing about it.” Her breathing now was so uneven it was more like quiet sobbing.

“What’s the horrible thing, Savannah?”

“They both talked about wanting to hook up with Hector Flores.”

B
y the time he got off the phone with Savannah Liston, he’d asked her a dozen questions and ended up with half a dozen useful answers, the names of the two girls, and one anxious request: that he not tell Dr. Ashton about the call.

Did she have some reason to be afraid of the doctor? No, of course not, Dr. Ashton was a saint, but it made her feel bad to be going behind his back, and she wouldn’t want him to think that she didn’t trust his judgment completely.

And did she trust his judgment completely? Of course she did—except maybe she was worried that he
wasn’t
worried about the missing girls.

So she’d told Ashton about the “disappearances”? Yes, of course she had, but he’d explained that Mapleshade graduates often made clean breaks for good reasons, and it wouldn’t be unusual for a family not to have contact with an adult daughter who wanted some breathing room.

How did the missing girls happen to know Hector? Because Dr. Ashton had brought him to Mapleshade sometimes to work on the flower beds. Hector was really hot, and some of the girls got very interested in him.

When Jillian was a student, was there anyone in particular on staff in whom she might have confided? There was a Dr. Kale who was in charge of a lot of things—Dr. Simon Kale—but he’d retired to Cooperstown. She’d found Gurney’s home phone number through the Internet, and he could probably find Kale’s number the
same way. Kale was a cranky old man. But he might know stuff about Jillian.

Why was she telling Gurney all this? Because he was a detective, and sometimes she lay awake at night and scared herself with questions about the missing girls. In the daylight she could see that Dr. Ashton was probably right, that a lot of the students had come from sick families—like her own—and it would make sense to get away from them. Get away and not leave any forwarding address. Maybe even change your name. But in the dark … other possibilities came to her mind. Possibilities that made it hard to sleep.

And oh, by the way, the missing girls had another thing in common besides both of them having shown a major interest in Hector with his shirt off working on the flower beds.

What was that?

After they’d graduated from Mapleshade, they’d both been hired to pose, just like Jillian, “for those really hot fashion ads.”

W
hen Gurney returned to the kitchen, to the table where they’d been eating when the phone rang, Madeleine was standing there with the
Times Magazine
open on the table. As he joined her, staring down at that unsettling depiction of rapacity and self-absorption, he could feel the hairs rising on the back of his neck.

She glanced at him curiously, which he interpreted as her way of asking if he wanted to tell her about the phone call.

Grateful for her interest, he recounted it in detail.

Her curiosity sharpened into concern. “Someone needs to find out why those girls are unreachable.”

“I agree.”

“Shouldn’t their local police departments be notified?”

“It’s not that simple. The girls Savannah is talking about were in Jillian’s class, presumably her age, so they’d be at least nineteen by now—all legal adults. If their relatives or other people who saw them regularly haven’t officially reported them as missing, there’s not much the police can do. However …” He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and entered Scott Ashton’s number.

It rang four times and was switching to voice mail when Ashton picked up and responded, apparently, to the caller-ID display. “Good evening, Detective Gurney.”

“Dr. Ashton, sorry to bother you, but something’s come up.”

“Progress?”

“I don’t know what to call it, but it’s important. I understand Mapleshade’s privacy policy, as you’ve explained, but we’ve got a situation that requires an exception—access to past enrollment records.”

“I thought I’d been clear about that. A policy to which exceptions are made is no policy at all. At Mapleshade privacy is
everything
. There are no exceptions. None.”

Gurney felt his adrenaline rising. “Do you have any interest in knowing what the problem is?”

“Tell me.”

“Suppose we had reason to believe that Jillian wasn’t the only victim.”