John Verdon - Let the Devil Sleep

Gurney’s drive home was an uncomfortable one. He kept hearing the echo of his own sarcastic parting shot at Schiff. The more he turned it over in his mind, the more it appeared to fit a pattern-the pattern of petty combativeness that had dominated his thinking and behavior since his injuries.

He’d always had a habit of challenging the prevailing wisdom in any situation, as well as a talent for detecting discrepancies. But slowly he was becoming aware of something else going on inside him, something less objective. His intellectual bent for testing the logic of every opinion, every conclusion, had been infused with hostility-a hostility that ranged from a cranky contrariness to something verging on rage. He’d become increasingly isolated, increasingly defensive, increasingly resistant to any idea not his own. And he was convinced it had all begun six months earlier with the three bullets that had nearly killed him. Objectivity, once an asset he took for granted, was now a quality he needed to strive for. But he knew it was worth the effort. Without objectivity he had nothing.

A therapist had told him long ago, “Whenever you’re disturbed, try to identify the fear beneath the disturbance. The root is always fear, and unless we face it, we tend to act badly.” Now, taking a cool step back, Gurney asked himself what he was afraid of. The question occupied him for most of the remaining trip home. The clearest answer he could come up with was also the most embarrassing.

He was afraid of being wrong.

He parked next to Madeleine’s car by the side door of the farmhouse. The mountain air felt chilly. He went into the house, hung up his jacket in the mudroom, continued on into the kitchen, and called out, “I’m home.” There was no response. The place had an indescribable deadness about it-a peculiar sort of emptiness it had only when Madeleine was out.

He had to go to the bathroom, started in that direction, then remembered that he’d forgotten to bring in Kim’s blue folder from the car. He went back out for it, but before he got to the car, something bright and red to the right of the parking area caught his eye. It was in the middle of the raised garden bed where Madeleine had planted flowers the previous year-a fact that was responsible for his first impression: that it was some sort of red blossom atop a straight stem. A second later it occurred to him that the time of year would make any blossom unlikely. However, when he reached the bed and realized what he was actually looking at, the truth didn’t make any more sense than a rose in full bloom would have.

The straight stem was the shaft of an arrow. The arrow was sticking point-down into the soft wet earth, and the “blossom” was the fletching on the notched end-three scarlet half feathers, shining brilliantly in the angled sun.

Gurney gazed at it wonderingly. Had Madeleine put it there? If so, where had she gotten it? Was she using it as some sort of marker? It looked new, unweathered, so it couldn’t have been under the snow the whole winter. If Madeleine hadn’t put it there, who could have? Was it possible it wasn’t “put” there at all but shot there by someone with a bow? To have ended up embedded like this at a nearly vertical angle, though, it would have to have been shot nearly vertically into the air. When? Why? By whom? Standing where?

He stepped up onto the low bed, grasped the shaft close to the ground, and slowly extracted it. It was tipped with a four-pronged razor broadhead-making it the kind of arrow that a hunter with a serious bow can propel clear through a deer. As he studied the deadly projectile, he was struck by the improbable coincidence of coming upon two sharp weapons surrounded by troubling questions on the same day.

Of course, Madeleine might have a simple explanation for the arrow. He took it into the house, to the kitchen sink, and rinsed it clean under the running water. The broadhead appeared to be carbon steel, keen enough to shave with. Which brought his mind back to the knife in Kim’s basement, which reminded him that her folder was still in the car. He laid the arrow gently on the pine sideboard and headed out through the little hallway past the mudroom.

As he opened the side door, he came face-to-face with Madeleine, dressed in one of her startling color combinations-rose sweatpants, a lavender fleece jacket, and an orange baseball cap. She had that pleasantly exercised, slightly-out-of-breath look she always had when she returned from a hill walk. He stepped back to let her in.

She smiled. “It’s soooo beautiful! Did you see that amazing light on the hillside? With that blush in the buds-did you notice that?”

“What buds?”

“You didn’t see it? Oh, come here, come.” She led him outside by the arm, pointing happily to the trees beyond the upper pasture. “You only see it in the early spring-that hint of pink in the maples.”

Gurney saw what she was talking about but failed to share her blissful reaction. Instead the faint wash of color over the brownish gray background of the landscape jogged loose an old memory-one that sickened him: brownish gray water in a ditch next to an abandoned service road behind La Guardia Airport, a faint reddish tint in the fetid water. The tint was oozing from a machine-gunned body just below the surface.

She looked at him with concern. “Are you okay?”

“Tired, that’s all.”

“You want some coffee?”

“No.” He said it sharply, didn’t know why.

“Come inside,” she said, taking off her jacket and hat and hanging them in the mudroom. He followed her into the kitchen. She went to the sink and turned on the tap. “How did your trip to Syracuse work out?”

It occurred to him that the damn blue folder was still in his car. “I can’t hear you with the water running,” he said. That made… what? Three times he’d forgotten to bring it in? Three times in the past ten minutes? Jesus .

She filled a glass and turned off the water. “I asked about your trip to Syracuse.”

He sighed. “The trip was peculiar. Syracuse is pretty bleak. Hold on… I’ll tell you about it in a minute.” He went out to the car and this time returned with the object in hand.

Madeleine looked perplexed. “I’d heard that there were some very nice old neighborhoods. Maybe not in the part of town you were in?”

“Yes and no. Nice old neighborhoods interspersed with neighborhoods from hell.”

She glanced at the folder in his hand. “Is that Kim’s project?”

“What? Oh. Yes.” He looked around for a place to put it and noticed the arrow where he’d left it on the sideboard. He pointed to it. “What do you know about that ?”

“That?” She stepped closer, examined it without touching it. “Is that the thing I saw outside?”

“When did you see it?”

“I don’t know. When I went out. Maybe an hour ago?”

“You don’t know anything about it?”

“Only that it was sticking in the flower bed. I thought you’d put it there.” There was a long silence as he stared at the arrow and she stared at him. “You think someone is hunting up here?” she asked, her eyes narrowing.

“It’s not hunting season.”

“Maybe some drunk thinks it is.”

“Pleasant thought.”

She glared at the arrow, then shrugged. “You look exhausted. Come, sit down.” She gestured toward the table by the French doors. “Tell me about your day.”

When he had recounted everything he could remember, including Kim’s request to hire him to accompany her to two meetings the following day, he searched Madeleine’s face for a reaction. But instead of commenting on his narrative, she changed the subject.

“I had kind of a weighty day, too.” She leaned forward as she spoke, her elbows on the table, and pressed her palms together in front of her face, resting her chin on her thumbs. She closed her eyes and, for what seemed like a very long time, said nothing.