Shut Your Eyes Tight

“Do you?”

He closed his eyes. “I think so. I really do. And it won’t happen again.”

The fact was, he’d almost been killed at the end of the last investigation he’d volunteered his way into. A full year into his retirement, he’d come closer to his own death than he ever had in over twenty years as an NYPD homicide detective. He thought it was probably that aspect of it that had hit Madeleine the hardest-not just the danger, but that it had actually increased at the very point in their lives when she’d imagined that it would go away.

A long silence passed between them.

She finally sighed, withdrew the finger she was using as a bookmark, and pushed the book away from her. “You know, Dave, what I want is not all that complicated. Or maybe it is. I’d thought when we left our careers behind we’d discover a different kind of life together.”

He smiled weakly. “All that damn asparagus is pretty different.”

“And your bulldozer is different. And my flower garden is different. But we seem to have trouble with the ‘life together’ part.”

“Don’t you think we’re together more now than when we were in the city?”

“I think we’re in the same house at the same time more often. But it’s obvious now that I was more willing to leave that other life behind us than you were. So that’s my mistake, thinking we were on the same page. My mistake,” she repeated, speaking softly with anger and sadness in her eyes.

He sat back in his chair, looked up at the ceiling. “A therapist once told me that an expectation is nothing but a resentment waiting to be born.” As soon as he said this, he wished he hadn’t. Jesus, he thought, if he’d been as clumsy in his undercover work as he was in speaking to his own wife, he’d have been sliced and diced a decade ago.

“Nothing but a resentment waiting to be born? Cute,” snapped Madeleine. “Very cute. What about hope? Did he have something equally clever and dismissive to say about hope?” The anger was moving from her eyes into her voice. “What about progress? Did he have anything to say about progress? Or closeness? What did he say about that?”

“Sorry,” Gurney said. “Just another stupid comment on my part. I seem to be full of them. Let me start over. All I wanted to say was that-”

She cut in, “That you’ve decided to sign on for a two-week tour of duty, working for a crazy woman, searching for a psychotic murderer?” She stared at him, apparently daring him to try restating the proposition in milder terms. “Okay, David. Fine. Two weeks. What can I say? You’re going to do what you’re going to do. And by the way, I know that what you do takes great strength, great courage, great honesty, and a superb mind. I really do know what a remarkable man you are. You truly are one in a million. I’m in awe of you, David. But you know what? I’d like to be a little less in awe of you and a little more with you. Do you think that would be possible? That’s all I want to know. Do you think we could be a little bit closer?”

His mind went nearly blank.

Then he muttered softly, “God, Maddie, I hope so.”

It started to rain on the way to Tambury. An intermittent-wiper sort of rain, more like a light drizzle. Gurney stopped along the way in Dillweed for a second cup of coffee-not at a gas station but at Abelard’s organic-produce market, where the coffee was freshly ground, freshly made, and very good.

He sat with the coffee in his parked car in front of the market, thumbing through the case notes, finding the page he wanted: a record supplied by the phone company of the dates and times of text-message exchanges between the cell phones of Jillian Perry and Hector Flores during the three weeks leading up to the murder-thirteen from Flores to Perry, twelve from Perry to Flores. On a separate sheet, stapled to the record, was a report from the state police computer lab, indicating that all messages had been deleted from Jillian Perry’s phone, with the exception of the final “Edward Vallory” message, received approximately one hour prior to the fourteen-minute window within which the murder was committed. The report also noted the fact that the phone company retains date, duration, originating and receiving cell numbers, and transmitting-cell-tower data on all calls, but no content data. So once those texts had been erased from Jillian’s phone, there was no method of retrieval, unless Hector had saved the message strings on his phone and its memory could be accessed in the future-not possibilities to be optimistic about.

Gurney put the sheets back into their folder, finished his coffee, and continued on through the gray, wet morning to his eight-thirty appointment with Scott Ashton.

The door swung open before Gurney had a chance to knock. Ashton was dressed as before in expensively casual clothes, the sort he might have ordered from a catalog with a Cotswold stone house on the cover.

“Come in, let’s get to it,” he said with a perfunctory smile. “We don’t have a great deal of time.” He led the way through a large center hall into a sitting room on the right that seemed to have been furnished in an earlier century. The upholstered chairs and settees were mostly Queen Anne. The tables, the mantel above the fireplace, the chair legs, and other wood surfaces had an ancient, softly lustrous patina.

Among the predictable grace notes one might expect to find in an upper-class English-style country home, there was one startling discordance. On the wall above the dark chestnut mantel hung a very large framed photograph in the horizontal orientation and the approximate size of a two-page spread in the magazine section of the Sunday Times.

Then Gurney realized why that particular size comparison came readily to mind: The photograph was one he’d actually seen in that very publication. It fit into that overpriced-fashion-ad genre in which the models gaze at each other or at the world in general with an arrogant, druggy sensuality. Even among its kind, however, this example was striking in its communication of something profoundly unwell. The composition consisted of two very young women, surely not yet out of their teens, sprawled on what appeared to be a bedroom floor, eyeing each other’s body with a combination of exhaustion and insatiable sexual hunger. They were naked except for a couple of adroitly placed silk scarves, presumably the products of the fashion house sponsoring the ad.

When Gurney looked closer, he saw that it was a manipulated photograph-in fact, two differently posed photographs of the same model positioned and retouched in a way that made them appear to be gazing at each other, adding a dimension of narcissism to the already ample pathology of the scene. It was, in a way, an impressive work of art-a depiction of pure decadence worthy of illustrating Dante’s Inferno. Gurney turned toward Ashton, his curiosity evident in his expression.

“Jillian,” said Ashton flatly. “My late wife.”

Gurney was speechless.

The picture raised so many questions that he didn’t know which to ask first.

He had the feeling that Ashton was not only observing but enjoying his confusion. Which raised more questions. Finally he thought of something to say, something he’d completely forgotten about during their first meeting. “I’m terribly sorry for your tragic loss. And I’m sorry for not saying so yesterday.”

A heaviness, a cloud of depression and weariness, seemed to draw all of Ashton’s features downward. “Thank you.”

“I’m surprised you’ve been able to stay in this house-seeing that cottage out in back every day, knowing what happened there.”

“It will be torn down,” said Ashton, almost brutally. “Torn down, crushed, burned. As soon as the police give their permission. They still have some lingering jurisdiction over it as a crime scene. But the day will come. The cottage will cease to exist.”

Ashton took a deep breath, and the display of emotion slowly faded. “So where shall be begin?” He gestured toward a pair of burgundy velvet wing chairs with a small, square table between them. The tabletop consisted of a hand-carved intarsia chessboard, but there were no chess pieces in sight.

Gurney decided to address the elephant in the room, the sensationally tawdry picture of Jillian, head-on. “I’d never have guessed that the girl in that photo on the wall was the bride I saw in the video.”

“The flowing white gown, demure makeup, et cetera?” Ashton looked almost amused.

“None of that seems consistent with this,” said Gurney, staring at the photo.

“Would it make more sense if you knew that her traditional bridal getup was Jillian’s idea of a joke?”

“A joke?”

“This may strike you as crude and unfeeling, Detective, but we haven’t much time, so let me tell you quickly about Jillian. Some of this you might have heard from her mother and some not. Jillian’s personality was irritable,