Shut Your Eyes Tight (Dave Gurney, No. 2): A Novel (33 page)

And of course she had given him her wry look. Madeleine was unimpressed by principled motives, or at least by the invocation of principles to win arguments.

Once he had disengaged from the debate, the truth would sneak up on him. The truth was that he was
drawn
, almost physically, to criminal mysteries and the process of exposing the people behind them. It was a far more primal and powerful force than whatever it was that pushed him toward weeding the asparagus patch. Murder investigations captured the fullness of his attention as nothing else in his life ever had.

That was the good news. It was also the bad news. Good because it was real, and some men went through life with nothing to excite them but their fantasies. Bad because it was a tidal force that drew him away from everything else in his life that mattered, including Madeleine.

He tried to remember where she was at that very moment and found that it had slipped his mind—displaced by God-knows-what. By Jay Jykynstyl and his hundred-thousand-dollar carrot? By the toxic rancor at BCI and its warping effect on the investigation? By
the teasing significance of Edward Vallory’s lost play? By the eagerness of Peggy, the spider man’s wife, to join the hunt? By the echo of Savannah Liston’s fearful voice, reporting the disappearance of her former classmates? The truth is, any of a score of items could easily have edged Madeleine’s whereabouts off his radar screen.

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 that 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.

O
nce 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.