Shut Your Eyes Tight (Dave Gurney, No. 2): A Novel (26 page)

“What are you talking about?”

“Suppose we had reason to believe that Jillian was one of a number of Mapleshade graduates targeted by Hector Flores.”

“I fail to see …”

“There’s anecdotal evidence suggesting that some Mapleshade graduates who were friendly with Hector Flores are not locatable. Under the circumstances we should find out how many of Jillian’s classmates can be accounted for at this time and how many can’t.”

“God, do you realize what you’re saying? Where is this so-called anecdotal evidence coming from?”

“The source is not the issue.”

“Of course it’s an issue. It’s a matter of credibility.”

“It may also be a matter of saving lives. Think about it.”

“I’ll do that.”

“I’d suggest you think about it right now.”

“I don’t care for your tone, Detective.”

“You think my
tone
is the problem? Think about this instead: Think about the possibility that some of your graduates might die because of your precious privacy policy. Think about explaining that
to the police. And to the media. And to the parents. After you’ve thought about it, get back to me. I have other calls to make.” He broke the connection and took a deep breath.

Madeleine studied his face, smiled crookedly, and said, “Well, that’s one approach.”

“You have others?”

“Actually, I kind of liked yours. Shall I reheat the dinner?”

“Sure.” He took another deep breath, as though adrenaline could be exhaled away. “Savannah gave me the names and phone numbers of the families of the girls—the women, I should say—who she claims are missing. You think I should call them now?”

“Is that your job?” She picked up their pasta plates and carried them over to the microwave.

“Good point,” he conceded, sitting at the table. Something in Ashton’s attitude had gotten to him, was pushing him to respond impulsively. But how to pursue the issue of the “missing” Mapleshade graduates, as he forced himself to think about it calmly, was a question for the police. There were procedural requirements for the “missing person” designation and for the subsequent entry of the descriptive and last-sighting information into state and national databases. More important, it was a manpower issue. If, in fact, it turned out that the case involved multiple mis-pers with a suspicion of felony abduction or worse, a lone investigator was not the answer. The following day’s meeting with the district attorney and the promised BCI representative would provide an ideal forum for discussing Savannah’s call and for passing the matter on.

In the meantime, however, it might be interesting to speak to Alessandro.

Gurney got his laptop from the den and set it up where his plate had been.

A search of the Internet white pages for New York City turned up twelve individuals with that surname. Of course, “Alessandro” was far more likely to be a first name, or a professional name invented to convey a certain image. However, there were no business listings involving the name Alessandro in any of the categories that might relate to the
Times
ad: photography, advertising, marketing, graphics, design, fashion.

It seemed odd that a commercial photographer would be so elusive—unless he were so successful that the people who mattered knew already how to contact him and his invisibility to the masses was part of his appeal, like an “in” nightclub with no signage.

It occurred to Gurney that if Ashton had acquired his photo of Jillian directly from Alessandro, he’d have the man’s phone number, but this was not the best moment to ask for it. Conceivably, Val Perry would know something about it, might even know Alessandro’s full name. Either way the following day would be the appropriate time to pursue it. And, very important, he needed to keep an open mind. The fact that two former Mapleshade students whom Ashton’s assistant was having trouble contacting had posed for the same fashion photographer as Jillian might be a meaningless coincidence, even if they did have an eye for Hector. Gurney closed his laptop and laid it on the floor beside his chair.

Madeleine returned to the table with their plates, the shrimp and pasta steaming again, and sat across from him.

He picked up his fork, then put it down. He turned to look out through the French doors, but the dusk had deepened and the glass panes, instead of providing a view of the patio and garden, offered only a reflection of the two of them at the table. His eye was drawn to the stern lines on his face, the serious set of his mouth, a reminder of his father.

It set him off on a tangent of loosely linked bits of memories—images from long ago.

Madeleine was watching him. “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing. I don’t know. About my father, I guess.”

“What about him?”

He blinked, looked at her. “Did I ever tell you the rabbit story?”

“I don’t think so.”

He cleared his throat. “When I was a little kid—five, six, seven years old—I’d ask my father to tell me stories about the things he did when he was a little kid. I knew he grew up in Ireland, and I had an idea of what Ireland looked like from a calendar we got from a neighbor who went there on vacation—all very green, rocky, kind of wild. To me it was a strange, wonderful place—wonderful, I guess, because it was nothing like where we lived in the Bronx.”
Gurney’s distaste for his childhood neighborhood, or maybe for his childhood itself, showed in his face. “My father didn’t talk much, at least not to me or my mother, and getting him to tell me anything about how he grew up was almost impossible. Then finally, one day, maybe to stop me from pestering him, he told me this story. He said there was a field behind his father’s house—that’s what he called it, his
father’s
house, an odd way to put it, since he lived there, too—a big grassy field with a low stone wall separating it from an even bigger field with a stream running through it, and a distant hillside beyond that. The house was a beige cottage with a dark thatched roof. There were white ducks and daffodils. I’d lie in bed every night picturing it—the ducks, the daffodils, the field, the hill—wishing I were there, determined that someday I
would
be there.” His expression was a mixture of sourness and wistfulness.

“What was the story?”

“Hmm?”

“You said he told you a story.”

“He said that he and his friend Liam used to go hunting for rabbits. They had slingshots, and they’d go off into the fields behind his father’s house at dawn while the grass was still covered with dew, and they’d hunt for rabbits. The rabbits had narrow pathways through the tall grass, and he and Liam would follow the pathways. Sometimes the pathways ended in bramble patches, and sometimes they went under the stone wall. He described the size of the openings of the burrows the rabbits dug and how he and Liam would set snares for the rabbits along their pathways, or at their burrows, or at the holes they dug under the stone wall.”

“Did he tell you if they ever caught any?”

“He said if they did, they’d let them go.”

“And the slingshots?”

“A lot of near misses, he said.” Gurney fell silent.

“That’s the story?”

“Yes. The thing is, the images it painted in my mind became so real, and I thought so much about them, spent so much time imagining myself there, following those little narrow pathways in the grass, that those images became in some peculiar way the most vivid memories of my childhood.”

Madeleine frowned a little. “We all do that, don’t we? I have vivid memories of things I never actually saw—memories of scenes someone else described. I remember what I’ve pictured.”

He nodded. “There’s a piece of this I haven’t told you yet. Years later, decades later, when I was in my thirties and my father was sixty-something, I happened to bring it up on the phone with him. I said, ‘Remember the story you told me about you and Liam going out in the field at dawn with your slingshots?’ He didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. So I added all the other details: the wall, the brambles, the stream, the hillside, the rabbit paths. ‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘That was all bullshit. None of that ever happened.’ And he said it in that tone of his that seemed to imply I was a fool to ever have believed it.” There was a rare, barely perceptible tremor in Gurney’s voice. He coughed loudly as if trying to clear whatever obstruction had caused it.

“He made it all up?”

“He made it all up. Every speck of it. And the damnable part of it is, it’s the only thing he ever told me about his childhood.”

G
urney was leaning back in his chair, studying his hands. They were more creased and worn than he would have pictured them had he not been looking at them. His father’s hands.

As Madeleine cleared the table, she appeared deep in thought. When the dishes and pans were all in the sink and she’d covered them with hot, soapy water, she turned off the tap and spoke in a very matter-of-fact way. “So I guess he had a pretty awful childhood.”

Gurney looked up at her. “I would imagine so.”

“Do you realize that during the twelve years of our marriage that he was alive, I only saw him three times?”

“That’s the way we are.”

“You mean you and your father?”

He nodded vaguely, focusing on a memory. “The apartment where I grew up in the Bronx had four rooms—a small eat-in kitchen, a small living room, and two small bedrooms. There were four people—mother, father, grandmother, myself. And you know what? There was almost always just one person in each room, except for the times when my mother and grandmother would watch television together in the living room. Even then my father would stay in the kitchen and I’d be in one of the bedrooms.” He laughed, then stopped with an empty feeling, having heard in that sardonic sound an echo of his father.

“You remember those little toy magnets in the shape of Scottie dogs? If you aligned them one way, they attracted each other; the other way, they repelled each other. That’s what our family was like,
four little Scottie dogs aligned so we repelled one another into the four corners of our apartment. As far from one another as possible.”

Madeleine said nothing, just turned the water back on and busied herself washing the dinner things, rinsing them, stacking them in the drying rack next to the sink. When she was finished, she turned off the hanging light over the sink island and went to the opposite end of the long room. She sat in an armchair by the fireplace, switched on the lamp next to it, and withdrew her current knitting project, a woolly red hat, from a tote bag on the floor. She glanced every so often in Gurney’s direction but remained silent.

Two hours later she went to bed.

Gurney, in the meantime, had gotten the Perry case folders from the den, where they’d been piled since they were cleared from the main table when the Meekers came to dinner. He’d been reading the summaries of the interviews conducted in the field, as well as verbatims of those that had been conducted and recorded at BCI headquarters. It struck him as a lot of material that failed to paint a coherent picture.

Some of it made virtually no sense at all. There was, for example, the Naked in the Pavilion incident recounted by five Tambury residents. They said that Flores had been seen one month prior to the murder standing on one foot, eyes closed, hands clasped prayerfully in front of him in what was taken to be some sort of yoga pose, stark naked in the center of Ashton’s lawn pavilion. In each interview summary, the interviewing officer had noted that the individual describing the incident had not actually witnessed it but was presenting it as “common knowledge.” Each one reported hearing about it from other people. Some could remember who mentioned it to them, some couldn’t. None could remember when. Another widely reported incident concerned an argument between Ashton and Flores one summer afternoon on the main street of the village, but again none of the individuals reporting it, including two who described it in detail, had been present at the event.

Anecdotes were abundant, eyewitnesses in short supply.

Almost everyone interviewed saw the murder itself through the lens of one of a handful of paradigms: the Frankenstein Monster, the Revenge of a Jilted Lover, Inherent Mexican Criminality,
Homosexual Instability, the Poisoning of America by Media Violence.

No one had suggested a connection to Mapleshade’s sexual-abuser clientele or the possibility of a revenge motive arising out of Jillian’s past behavior—areas where Gurney believed that the key to the killing would eventually be found.

Mapleshade and Jillian’s past: two general headings under which he had many more question marks than facts. Maybe that retired therapist whom Savannah had mentioned could help with both. Simon Kale, easy name to remember. Simon Legree. Simon Says.
Simon Kale of Cooperstown. Went to jail and wore a gown
. Christ! He was slipping fast into the giddiness of total exhaustion.

He went to the sink and splashed cold water on his face. Coffee seemed like a good idea, then a bad idea. He went back to the table, set up his laptop again, and found Kale’s phone number and address in less than a minute through an Internet directory. Problem was, he’d been absorbed by the interview reports longer than he’d realized, and it was now 11:02
P.M
. To call or not to call? Now or in the morning? He was itchy to talk to the man, to follow a concrete lead, a route to some piece of the truth. If Kale was already in bed, the call would not be a welcome event. On the other hand, its very lateness and inconvenience could serve to emphasize the urgency of the issue. He made the call.

After three or four rings, an androgynous voice answered. “Yes?”

“Simon Kale, please.”

“Who is this?” The voice, still of uncertain gender though tending toward male, sounded anxious and irritated.

“David Gurney.”

“May I tell Dr. Kale the reason for your call?”

“Who am I speaking to?”

“You’re speaking to the person who answered the phone. And it is rather late. Now, would you please tell me why—” There was another voice in the background, a pause, the sound of the phone being handed over.