“Hello?” said Gurney with a definite edge. “Anybody there?
“Just a minute, please.”
The voices that he found so abrasively empty-headed continued in the background. He was about to hang up when the receptionist’s voice returned.
“Dr. Huffbarger’s office, can I help you?”
“Yes. This is David Gurney. I have an appointment I want to cancel.”
“The date?”
“A week from today at eleven-forty A.M.”
“Spell your name, please.”
He was about to question how many people had appointments on that same day at 11:40, but he spelled his name instead.
“And when do you wish to reschedule it?”
“I don’t. I’m just canceling it.”
“You’ll need to reschedule it.”
“What?”
“I can reschedule Dr. Huffbarger’s appointments, not cancel them.”
“But the fact is-”
She interrupted, sounding exasperated. “An existing appointment can’t be removed from the system without inserting a revised date. That’s the doctor’s policy.”
Gurney could feel his lips tightening with anger, way too much anger. “I don’t really care much about his system or his policy,” he said slowly, stiffly. “Consider my appointment canceled.”
“There will be a missed-appointment charge.”
“No there won’t. And if Huffbarger has a problem with that, tell him to call me.” He hung up, tense, feeling a twinge of chagrin at his childish twisting of the neurologist’s name.
He stared out the den window at the high pasture without really seeing it.
A jab of pain in his right side offered a partial answer. It also reminded him that he’d been on his way to the medicine cabinet when he’d made his appointment-canceling detour.
He returned to the bathroom. He didn’t like the look of the man who looked back at him from the mirror on the cabinet door. His forehead was lined with worry, his skin colorless, his eyes dull and tired.
Christ.
He knew he had to get back to his daily exercise regimen-the sets of push-ups, chin-ups, sit-ups that had once kept him in better shape than most men half his age. But now the man in the mirror was looking every bit of forty- eight, and he wasn’t happy about it. He wasn’t happy about the daily messages of mortality his body was sending him. He wasn’t happy about his descent from mere introversion into isolation. He wasn’t happy about… anything.
He took the ibuprofen bottle from its shelf, tapped three of the little brown pills into his hand, frowned at them, popped them into his mouth. As he was running the water, waiting for it to get cold, he heard the phone ringing in the den. Huffbarger, he thought. Or Huffbarger’s office. He made no move to answer it.
Then he heard Madeleine’s footsteps coming down from upstairs. A few moments later, she picked up the phone, just as the call was switching over to their ancient answering machine. He could hear her voice but couldn’t make out the words. He half-filled a small plastic cup with water and washed down the three pills that were starting to dissolve on his tongue.
He assumed that Madeleine was dealing with the Huffbarger problem. Which was fine with him. But then he heard her footsteps coming across the hall and into the bedroom. She walked through the open bathroom door, extending the phone handset toward him.
“For you,” she said, handing it to him and leaving the room.
Anticipating some unpleasantness from Huffbarger or one of his malcontent receptionists, Gurney’s tone was defensively curt. “Yes?”
There was a second of silence before the caller spoke.
“David?” The bright female voice was certainly familiar, but his memory failed to attach a name or a face to it.
“Yes,” he said, more pleasantly this time. “I’m sorry, but I can’t quite place-”
“Oh, how could you forget? Oh, I am so hurt,
“Connie. Jesus. Connie Clarke. It’s been a while.”
“Six years, to be exact.”
“Six years. Jesus.” The number didn’t mean much to him, didn’t surprise him, but he didn’t know what else to say.
He remembered their connection with mixed feelings. A freelance journalist, Connie Clarke had written a laudatory article about him for
“So how are things up there in peaceful retirement land?”
He could hear the grin in her question and assumed she knew about his unofficial involvement in the Mellery and Perry cases. “Sometimes more peaceful than other times.”
“Wow! Yeah! I guess that’s one way of putting it. You retire from the NYPD after twenty-five years, you’re up in the sleepy Catskills for about ten minutes, and all of a sudden you’re in the middle of one murder case after another. Seems to me you’re kind of a major-crime magnet. Wow! How does Madeleine feel about that?”
“You just had her on the phone. You should have asked her.”
Connie laughed as though he’d said something wonderfully witty.
“So between murder cases what’s your typical day like?”
“There’s not much to tell. It’s pretty uneventful. Madeleine stays busier than I do.”
“I’m having such a hard time picturing you in the middle of some kind of Norman Rockwell America. Dave making maple syrup. Dave making apple cider. Dave getting eggs from the henhouse.”
“I’m afraid not. No syrup, cider, or eggs.” What came to his mind was quite a different scenario describing the past six months.
“So what
“To be absolutely truthful with you, Connie, damn little. At most I’ll walk around the edges of the fields, maybe pick up some of the branches that blew down during the winter, maybe rake some fertilizer into the garden beds. Stuff like that.”
“Doesn’t sound so bad to me. I know people who’d give a lot to trade places with you.”
He didn’t answer, just let the silence drag out, thinking it might force her to get to the point of the call. There had to be a point. He remembered Connie as a cordial and talky woman, but she always had a purpose. Her mind, under that windblown blond mane, was always working.
“You’re wondering why I called you,” she said. “Right?”
“The question did cross my mind.”
“I called you because I want to ask you for a favor. A
Gurney thought for a moment, then laughed.
“What’s the joke?” She sounded momentarily off balance.
“You once told me that it’s always better to ask for a big favor than a small one, because small ones are easier to refuse.”