John Verdon - Think of a Number

It popped into his mind that he should go to the barn to get the ladder to gather the promised apples, but that was replaced by the thought he should set up his next art project for Sonya Reynolds-at least enter the mug shot of the infamous Peter Piggert into his computer’s retouching program. He’d been looking forward to the challenge of capturing the inner life of that Eagle Scout who had not only murdered his father and fifteen years later his mother but had done so for sex-related motives that seemed more horrendous than the crimes themselves.

Gurney went to the room he had set up for his Cop Art avocation. Once the farmhouse pantry, it was now furnished as a den and was suffused with a shadowless, cool light from an expanded window on its north wall. He stared out at the bucolic view. A gap in the maple copse beyond the meadow formed a frame for the bluish hills that receded into the distance. It brought his mind back to the apples, and he returned to the kitchen.

As he stood entangled in indecision, Madeleine came in from her knitting.

“So what’s the next step with Mellery?” she asked.

“I haven’t decided.”

“Why not?”

“Well… it’s not the kind of thing you’d want me to get wound up in, is it?”

“That’s not the problem,” she said with the clarity that always impressed him.

“You’re right,” he conceded. “I think the problem actually is that I can’t put the normal labels on anything yet.”

She flashed a smile of understanding.

Encouraged, he went on, “I’m not a homicide cop anymore, and he’s not a homicide victim. I’m not sure what I am or what he is.”

“Old college buddy?”

“But what the hell is that? He recalls a level of comradeship between us that I never felt. Besides, he doesn’t need a buddy, he needs a bodyguard.”

“He wants Uncle Dave.”

“That’s not who I am.”

“You sure?”

He sighed. “Do you want me to get involved in this Mellery business or not?”

“You are involved. You may not have the labels sorted out yet. You’re not an official cop, and he’s not an official crime victim. But there’s a puzzle there, and by God, sooner or later you’re going to put the pieces together. That’s always going to be the bottom line, isn’t it?”

“Is that an accusation? You married a detective. I wasn’t pretending to be something else.”

“I thought there might be a difference between a detective and a retired detective.”

“I’ve been retired for over a year. What do I do that looks like detective work?”

She shook her head as if to say that the answer was painfully obvious. “What do you invest any time in that doesn’t look like detective work?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Everyone does portraits of murderers?”

“It’s a subject I know something about. You want me to draw pictures of daisies?”

“Daisies would be better than homicidal madmen.”

“It was you who got me involved in this art thing.”

“Oh, I see. It’s because of me that you spend your time on beautiful fall mornings staring into the eyes of serial killers?”

The barrette that was holding most of her hair up and away from her face seemed to be losing its grip, and several dark strands descended in front of her eyes, which she seemed not to notice, giving her a rare harried look that he found touching.

He took a deep breath. “What exactly are we fighting about?”

“You figure it out. You’re the detective.”

As he stood looking at her, he lost interest in carrying the weight of the argument any further. “I want to show you something,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

He left the room and returned a minute later with his handwritten copy of the nasty little poem Mellery had read to him over the phone.

“What do you make of this?”

She read it so rapidly that someone who didn’t know her might think she hadn’t read it at all. “Sounds serious,” she said, handing it back to him.

“I agree.”

“What do you think he’s done?”

“Ah, good question. You noticed that word?”

She recited the relevant couplet: “‘I do what I’ve done / not for money or fun.’”

If Madeleine didn’t have a photographic memory, thought Gurney, she had something close to it.

“So what exactly is it that he’s done , and what is he planning to do?” she went on in a rhetorical tone that invited no reply. “I’m sure you’ll find out. You might even end up with a murder to solve, from the sound of that note. Then you could collect the evidence, follow the leads, catch the murderer, paint his portrait, and give it to Sonya for her gallery. What’s that saying about turning lemons into lemonade?”

Her smile looked positively dangerous.

At times like this, the question that came to his mind was the one he least wanted to consider. Had moving to Delaware County been a great mistake?

He suspected that he’d gone along with her desire to live in the country to make up to her for all the crap she’d had to endure as a cop’s wife-always playing second fiddle to the job. She loved woods and mountains and meadows and open spaces, and he felt he owed her a new environment, a new life-and he made the assumption that he would be able to adjust to anything. Bit of pride there. Or maybe self-delusion. Perhaps a desire to get rid of his guilt through a grand gesture? Stupid, really. The truth was, he hadn’t adjusted well to the move. He wasn’t as flexible as he’d naïvely imagined. As he kept trying to find a meaningful place for himself in the middle of nowhere, he kept falling back instinctively on what he was good at-perhaps too good at, obsessively good at. Even in his struggles to appreciate nature. The damn birds, for example. Bird-watching. He’d managed to turn the process of observation and identification into a stakeout. Made notes on their comings and goings, habits, feeding patterns, flight characteristics. It might look to someone else like a newfound love of God’s little creatures. But it wasn’t that at all. It wasn’t love, it was analysis. Probing.

Deciphering.

Good God. Was he really that limited?

Was he, in fact, too limited-too small and rigid-in his approach to life to ever be able to give back to Madeleine what his devotion to his work had deprived her of? And as long as he was considering painful possibilities, maybe there were more things to make up for than just an excessive immersion in his profession.

Or maybe just one other thing.

The thing they found so hard to talk about.

The collapsed star.

The black hole whose terrible gravity had twisted their relationship.

The sparkling autumn weather deteriorated that afternoon. The clouds, which in the morning had been joyful little cotton-ball clichés, darkened. Premonitory rumbles of thunder could be heard-so far in the distance that the direction from which they originated was unclear. They were more like an intangible presence in the atmosphere than the product of a specific storm-a perception that strengthened as they persisted over a period of hours, seeming neither to draw closer nor entirely cease.

That evening Madeleine went to a local concert with one of her new Walnut Crossing friends. It was not an event she expected Gurney to attend, so he didn’t feel defensive about his decision to stay home and work on his art project.

Shortly after her departure, he found himself sitting in front of his computer screen, gazing at the mug shot of Peter Possum Piggert. All he had done so far was to import the graphics file and set it up as a new project-to which he had given a wretchedly cute name: Oedipus Wrecks .