jounced and came to a halt at the end of a short sideways skid about ten feet from the bench.
From the open driver’s window came Madeleine’s voice, uncharacteristically loud, even panicky. “David!” And again, even as he rose from the bench, moving toward the car in the peripheral glare of the headlights, her voice nearly screeching, “David!”
Not until he was in the car and she was closing her window did he notice that the chorus of ghastly howling had stopped. She pressed the button that locked the doors and put her hands on the wheel. His eyes were now sufficiently adjusted to the darkness that he could see-perhaps partly see, partly imagine-the rigidity of her arms and grip, the tightness of the skin over her knuckles.
“Didn’t… didn’t you hear them getting closer?” she asked, sounding out of breath.
“I heard them. I assumed they were chasing something-a rabbit, maybe.”
“A rabbit?” Her voice was hoarse, incredulous.
Surely he could not have seen so much detail, but her face seemed to tremble with barely restrained emotion. Eventually she took a long, shaky breath, then another, opened her hands on the steering wheel, flexed the fingers.
“What were you doing down here?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Just… thinking about things, trying to… figure out what to do.”
After another long breath, a steadier one, she turned the ignition key, unaware that the engine was still running, producing a grating shriek of protest from the starter mechanism and an echoing burst of irritation from her own throat.
She turned around in front of the barn and drove back up through the pasture to the house. She parked the car closer than usual to the side door.
“And what was it you figured out?” she asked as he was about to get out.
“Sorry?” He’d heard the question, wanted to postpone answering it.
She seemed aware of all this, just turned her head partly toward him and waited.
“I was just trying to figure a way… a way of approaching things reasonably.”
“Reasonably.” She articulated the word in a tone that seemed to strip it of its meaning.
“Maybe we could talk about it in the house,” he said, opening his door, wanting to escape, if only for a minute. As he started to step out, his foot caught on something like a bar or a pole on the car floor. He looked down and saw in the yellowish wash of the dome light the heavy wooden handle of the ax they normally kept in the wood bin by the side door.
“What’s this?” he said.
“An ax.”
“I mean, what’s it doing in the car?”
“It was the first thing I saw.”
“You know, coyotes are not really-”
“How the hell do you know that?” she interrupted furiously. “How the hell do you know that?” She jerked away as though he had reached for her arm. She got out of the car in a clumsy rush, slammed the door, ran into the house.
Chapter 16
During the wee hours of the morning, the heavy overcast had been blown away by a fast-moving cold front of dry, autumnal air. At dawn the sky was a pale blue and by nine a deep azure. The day promised to be crisp and lucid, as bright and reassuring as the night before had been bleak and unnerving.
Gurney sat at the breakfast table in a slanting rectangle of sunlight, gazing out through the French doors at the yellowish green asparagus ferns swaying in the breeze. As he raised his warm coffee mug to his lips, the world appeared to be a place of defined edges, of definable problems and appropriate responses-a world in which his planned two-week approach to the Perry matter made perfect sense.
The fact that Madeleine an hour earlier had greeted his presentation of the idea with a less-than-happy stare was not surprising. He hadn’t expected her to be thrilled. A black-and-white frame of mind naturally resists compromise, he told himself. But reality was on his side, and in time she would recognize the reasonableness of his approach. He was sure of it.
In the meantime he wasn’t going to allow her doubts to paralyze him.
When Madeleine went out to her garden to bring in the season’s final harvest of string beans, he went to the center drawer of the sideboard to get a yellow legal pad on which to start a list of priorities.
It occurred to Gurney that agreeing with Val Perry on the terms of their arrangement took priority over extending his list of things to do. He put down his pen and picked up his cell phone. He was routed directly into her voice mail. He left his number and a brief message referring to “possible next steps.”
She called back less than two minutes later. There was a childish elation in her voice, plus the kind of intimacy that sometimes results from the lifting of a great burden. “Dave! It was so good to hear your voice just now! I was afraid you wouldn’t want anything to do with me after the way I behaved yesterday. I’m sorry about that. I hope I didn’t scare you off. I didn’t, did I?”
“Don’t worry about it. I just wanted to get back to you and let you know what I’d be willing to do.”
“I see.” Apprehension had taken her elation down a notch.
“I’m still not sure how helpful I can be.”
“I’m positive you could be
“I appreciate your confidence, but the fact is-”
“Excuse me a second,” she broke in, then spoke away from the phone. “Could you wait just a minute? I’m on the phone… What?… Oh, shit! All right. I’ll look at it. Where is it? Show it to me… That’s it?… Fine!… Yes, it’s fine. Yes!” Then, back on the phone, to Gurney, “God! You hire someone to do something and it turns into a full-time job for you, too. Don’t people realize that you’re hiring them in order to have
“Two weeks,” he said. “I’ll work on it for two weeks. I’ll look into the case, do what I can, make whatever progress I can in that period of time.”
“Why only two weeks?” Her voice was strained, as though she were consciously trying to practice the alien virtue of patience.
Why indeed? Until she asked this obvious question, he had not recognized the difficulty of articulating a sensible answer. The real answer, of course, involved his desire to mitigate Madeleine’s reaction to his involvement in the case, not the nature of the case itself.
“Because… in two weeks I’ll either have made significant progress or… I’ll have demonstrated that I’m not the right guy for the job.”
“I see.”
“I’ll maintain a daily log and bill you weekly at the rate of a hundred dollars an hour, plus out-of-pocket expenses.”
“Fine.”
