John Verdon - Think of a Number

“Hmm. You thinking this inquiry goes out to Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, maybe New Hampshire and Vermont?”

“I don’t know, Jack. You decide.”

“Time frame?”

“Last five years? Whatever you think.”

“Last five years is as good as anything else.” He made it sound as bad as anything else. “You all set for Captain R’s get-together?”

“Tomorrow? Sure, I’ll be there.”

There was a pause. “So you think this fucking lunatic has been at this for a while?”

“Looks like a possibility, doesn’t it?”

Another pause. “You getting anywhere on your end?”

Gurney gave Hardwick a summary of the facts and his new interpretation of them, ending with a suggestion. “I know that Mellery was in rehab fifteen years ago. You might want to check for any criminal or public-record data on him-anything involving alcohol. Ditto for Albert Rudden, ditto Richard Kartch. The homicide guys on the Rudden and Kartch cases are working on victim bios. They may have dug up something relevant. While you’re at it, it wouldn’t hurt to poke a little further into the background of Gregory Dermott. He’s entangled in this mess somehow. The killer chose that Wycherly post-office box for some reason, and now he’s threatening Dermott himself.”

“He’s what?”

Gurney told Hardwick about the “ Come one, come all. / Now all fools die” note taped to Dermott’s window and about his conversation with Lieutenant Nardo.

“What are you thinking we’ll find in the background checks?”

“Something that makes sense out of three facts. First, the killer is focused on victims with drinking histories. Second, there is no evidence that he knew any of them personally. Third, he selected victims who lived far apart geographically, which suggests some factor in their selection other than just excessive alcohol consumption-a factor that connects them to each other, to the killer, and probably to Dermott. I have no idea what it is, but I’ll know it when I see it.”

“Is that a fact?”

“See you tomorrow, Jack.”

Tomorrow came with a peculiar suddenness. After his conversation with Hardwick, Gurney had taken off his shoes and sprawled on the den couch. He slept deeply, without interruption, through the remainder of the afternoon and on through the night. When he opened his eyes, it was morning.

He stood, stretched, looked out the window. The sun was creeping up over the brown ridge on the eastern side of the valley, which he figured would make it about 7:00 A.M. He didn’t have to leave for his BCI meeting until 10:30. The sky was perfectly blue, and the snow glittered as though it had been mixed with shattered glass. The beauty and peace of the scene mingled with the aroma of fresh coffee to make life for the moment seem simple and fundamentally good. His long rest had been thoroughly restorative. He felt ready to make the phone calls he’d been postponing-to Sonya and to Kyle-and was stopped only by the realization that they’d both still be asleep. He lingered for a few seconds over the image of Sonya in bed, then went out to the kitchen, resolving to make the calls right after nine.

The house had the empty feeling it always had when Madeleine was out. Her absence was confirmed by the note he found on the countertop: “ Dawn. Sun about to come up. Incredibly beautiful. Snowshoeing to Carlson’s Ledge. Coffee in pot. M.” He went to the bathroom, washed, brushed his teeth. As he was combing his hair, the thought occurred to him that he could set out after her. Her reference to the imminent sunrise meant she’d left within the past ten minutes or so. If he used his cross-country skis and followed in her snowshoe tracks, he could probably overtake her in about twenty minutes.

He put ski pants and boots on over his jeans, pulled on a thick wool sweater, snapped on his skis, and stepped out the back door into a foot of powdery snow. The ridge, which offered a long view of the north valley and the rows of hills beyond it, was about a mile distant and reachable by an old logging trail that rose up a gentle incline starting at the back end of their property. It was impassible in summer with its tangles of wild raspberry bushes, but in late fall and winter the thorny undergrowth subsided.

A family of cautious crows, their harsh cries the only sound in the cold air, took flight from bare treetops a hundred yards ahead of him and soon disappeared over the ridge, leaving behind an even deeper silence.

As Gurney emerged from the woods onto the promontory above Carlson’s hillside farm, he saw Madeleine. She was sitting motionless on a stone slab, perhaps fifty feet from him, looking out over the rolling landscape that receded to the horizon with only two distant silos and a meandering road to suggest any human presence. He stopped, transfixed by the stillness of her pose. She seemed so… so absolutely solitary… yet so intensely connected to her world. A kind of beacon, beckoning him to a place just beyond his reach.

Without warning, without words to contain the feeling, the sight tore at his heart.

Dear God, was he having some kind of breakdown? For the third time in a week, his eyes filled with tears. He swallowed and wiped his face. Feeling light-headed, he moved his skis farther apart to steady himself.

Perhaps it was this motion at the corner of her vision, or the sound of the skis in the dry snow, that caused her to turn. She watched as he approached her. She smiled a little but said nothing. He had the rather peculiar feeling that she could see his soul as clearly as his body-peculiar, because “soul” was not a notion he’d ever found meaning in, not a term he ever used. He sat beside her on the flat boulder and stared out, unseeing, at the vista of hills and valleys. She took his arm in hers and held it against her.

He studied her face. He was at a loss for words to capture what he saw. It was as if all the radiance of the snow-covered landscape were reflected in her expression and the radiance of her expression were reflected in the landscape.

After a while-he couldn’t be sure how long it was-they headed back by a roundabout route to the house.

About halfway there he asked, “What are you thinking?”

“Not thinking at all. It gets in the way.”

“Of what?”

“The blue sky, the white snow.”

He didn’t speak again until they were back in the kitchen.

“I never did have that coffee you left for me,” he said.

“I’ll make a fresh pot.”

He watched as she got a bag of coffee beans out of the refrigerator and measured some into the electric grinder.

“Yes?” She regarded him curiously, her finger on the button.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just watching.”

She pressed the button. There was a sharp barrage of noise from the little machine, which grew softer as the beans were pulverized. She looked at him again.

“I’ll check the closet,” he said, feeling a need to do something.

He started upstairs, but before reaching the closet he stopped on the landing at the window that faced the rear field and the woods beyond it and the trail to the ledge. He pictured her sitting on the rock in her solitary peace, and that nameless emotional intensity filled him again, achingly. He struggled to identify the pain.

Loss. Separation. Isolation.

Each rang true, each a facet of the same sensation.

The therapist he’d seen in his late teens as the result of a panic attack-the therapist who’d told him that the panic arose from a deep hostility he carried toward his father and that his complete lack of any conscious emotion for his father was proof of the hidden strength and negativity of the emotion-that same therapist had one day confided to him what he believed to be the purpose of life.