Shut Your Eyes Tight

“Unless by myself.” He turned toward the patio. “There’s that table you wanted to see.” He led Gurney through an opening in the low stone wall to an iron table with a pair of matching chairs near the back door of the house.

“Did you want to sit here?” Once again it was a question, not an invitation.

Gurney had settled into the chair that gave him the best view of the areas he remembered from the video when a slight movement drew his attention to the far side of the patio. There, on a small bench against the sunny back wall of the house, sat an elderly man in a brown cardigan with a twig in his hand. He was rocking his hand from side to side, making the twig resemble a metronome. The man had thinning gray hair, sallow skin, and a dazed look.

“My father,” said Ashton, sitting in the chair opposite Gurney.

“Here for a visit?”

Ashton paused. “Yes, a visit.”

Gurney responded with a curious look.

“He’s been in a private nursing home for about two years as the result of progressive dementia and aphasia.”

“He can’t speak?”

“Hasn’t been able to for at least a year now.”

“You brought him here for a visit?”

Ashton’s eyes narrowed as though he might be about to tell Gurney it was none of his business, but then his expression softened. “Jillian’s… death created… a kind of loneliness.” He seemed confused by the word and hesitated. “I think it was a week or two after her death that I decided to bring my father here for a while. I thought that being with him, taking care of him…” Again he fell silent.

“How do you manage that, going to Mapleshade every day?”

“He comes with me. Surprisingly, it’s not a problem. Physically, he’s fine. No difficulty walking. No difficulty with stairs. No difficulty eating. He can tend to his… hygiene requirements. In addition to the speech issue, the deficit is mainly in orientation. He’s generally confused about where he is, thinks he’s back in the Park Avenue apartment where we lived when I was a child.”

“Nice neighborhood.” Gurney glanced across the patio at the old man on the bench.

“Nice enough. He was a bit of a financial genius. Hobart Ashton. Trusted member of a social class in which all the men’s names sounded like boys’ prep schools.”

It was an old witticism and sounded stale. Gurney smiled politely.

Ashton cleared his throat. “You didn’t come here to talk about my father. And I don’t have much time. So what can I do for you?”

Gurney put his hands on the table. “Is this where you were sitting the day of the gunshot?”

“Yes.”

“It doesn’t make you nervous to be in the same spot?”

“A lot of things make me nervous.”

“I’d never know it, looking at you.”

There was a long silence, broken by Gurney. “Did you think the shooter hit what he was aiming at?”

“Yes.”

“What makes you so sure he wasn’t aiming at you and missed?”

“Did you see Schindler’s List? There is a scene in which Schindler attempts to talk the camp commandant into sparing the lives of Jews whom he would normally shoot for minor offenses. Schindler tells him that being able to shoot them, having a perfect right to shoot them, and then choosing in a godlike way to spare them, would be the greatest proof of his power over them.”

“That’s what you think Flores was doing? Proving, by sparing you and smashing the teacup, that he has the power to kill you?”

“It’s a reasonable hypothesis.”

“Assuming that the shooter was Flores.”

Ashton held Gurney’s gaze. “Who else did you have in mind?”

“You told the original investigating officer that Withrow Perry had a rifle of the same caliber as the bullet fragments gathered from this patio.”

“Have you ever met him or spoken to him?”

“Not yet.”

“Once you do, I think you’ll find the notion of Dr. Withrow Perry crawling around in those woods with a sniperscope utterly ridiculous.”

“But not so ridiculous for Hector Flores?”

“Hector has proven himself capable of anything.”

“That scene you mentioned from Schindler’s List? As I think about it, I seem to remember that the commandant doesn’t take the advice for very long. He doesn’t have the patience for it, and he very quickly goes back to shooting Jews who aren’t behaving the way he wants them to.”

Ashton did not reply. His gaze drifted toward the wooded hillside behind the pavilion and rested there.

Most of Gurney’s decisions were conscious and well calculated, with one conspicuous exception: deciding when it was time to switch the tone of an interview. That was a gut call, and right then it felt like the right time. He leaned back in his iron chair and said, “Marian Eliot is quite a fan of yours.”

The signs were subtle; maybe Gurney was imagining them, but he got the impression from the odd look Ashton gave him that for the first time in their conversation he’d been thrown off stride. He recovered quickly.

“Marian is easy to charm,” he said in his smooth psychiatrist’s voice, “as long as you don’t try to be charming.”

Gurney realized that that had been his own perception, precisely. “She thinks you’re a genius.”

“She has her enthusiasms.”

Gurney tried another twist. “What did Kiki Muller think of you?”

“I have no idea.”

“You were her psychiatrist?”

“Very briefly.”

“A year doesn’t seem that brief.”

“A year? More like two months, not even two months.”

“When did the two months end?”

“I can’t tell you that. Confidentiality restrictions. I shouldn’t even have said two months.”

“Her husband told me that she had an appointment with you every Tuesday up until the week she disappeared.”

Ashton offered only an incredulous frown and shook his head.

“Let me ask you something, Dr. Ashton. Without improperly divulging anything Kiki Muller might have told you during the time she was seeing you, can you tell me why her treatment period ended so quickly?”

He considered this, seemed uncomfortable answering. “I discontinued it.”

“Can you tell me why you did that?”

He closed his eyes for a few seconds, then seemed to make a decision. “I discontinued her therapy because in my opinion she wasn’t interested in therapy. She was only interested in being here.”

“Here? On your property?”

“She’d show up half an hour early for her appointments, then linger afterward, supposedly fascinated by the landscaping, the flowers, whatever. The fact is, wherever Hector was, that’s where her attention was. But she wouldn’t admit it. Which made her communications with me dishonest and pointless. So I stopped seeing her after six or seven sessions. I’m taking a risk in telling you this, but it seems an important fact if she was lying about the duration of her treatment. The truth is, she ceased being my patient at least nine months prior to her disappearance.”

“Might she have been seeing Hector secretly all that time, telling her husband she was coming here for her appointments with you?”

Ashton took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’d hate to think something so blatant was going on under my nose, right there in that damned cottage. But it’s consistent with the two of them running off together… afterward.”