hemlock on his left and flew over the road and over the pond. As he watched the rising bird disappear above the far treetops, he glimpsed Madeleine sitting on a weathered bench at the pond’s edge, half hidden by a clump of cattails. He stopped the car by the old red barn, got out, and waved.
She responded with what seemed to be a small smile. He couldn’t be sure at that distance. He wanted to talk to her, felt he needed to talk to her. As he followed the curving path around the grassy margin of the pond to the bench, he began to feel the stillness of the place. “Okay if I sit with you for a bit?”
She nodded gently, as if a larger response would disturb the peace.
He sat and gazed out over the quiet surface of the pond, seeing in it the upside-down reflection of the sugar maples on the opposite side, some of their leaves turning toward muted versions of their autumn colors. He looked at her and was overcome by the strange notion that the tranquillity in her at that moment was not the product of her surroundings but that, in some fantastical reversal, her surroundings were absorbing that very quality from a reservoir within her. He’d had that idea about her before, but that part of his mind that scorned the sentimental had always brushed it aside.
“I need your help,” he heard himself saying, “to sort out some things.” When she didn’t answer, he went on, “I’ve had a confusing day. More than confusing.”
She gave him one of those looks of hers that either communicated a great deal-in this instance that a confusing day would be a predictable result of getting involved in the Perry case-or that simply presented him with a blank slate on which his uneasy mind might write that message.
In any event he kept talking. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so overloaded. You found the note I left for you this morning?”
“About meeting your friend from Ithaca?”
“She’s not what I would call a friend.”
“Your ‘adviser’?”
He resisted an urge to debate the terminology, to defend his innocence. “The Reynolds Gallery has been approached by a wealthy art collector who’s interested in the mug-shot art portraits I was doing last year.”
Madeleine raised a mocking eyebrow at his substituting the name of the business for the name of the person.
He went on, dropping his bombshell calmly. “He’ll give me a hundred thousand dollars each for unique one-off prints.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Sonya insists the guy is serious.”
“What mental hospital did he escape from?”
There was a loud splash on the far side of the cattail clump. She smiled. “Big one.”
“You’re talking about a frog?”
“Sorry.”
Gurney closed his eyes, more annoyed than he’d be willing to admit at Madeleine’s apparent disinterest in his windfall. “From what I know of the art world, it’s pretty much one giant mental hospital, but some of the patients have an awful lot of money. Apparently this guy is one of them.”
“What is it he wants for his hundred thousand dollars?”
“A print that only he would own. I’d have to take the prints I did last year, enhance them somehow, introduce a variation into each one that would make it different from anything the gallery sold to anyone else.”
“He’s for real?”
“So I’m told. I’m also told he may want more than one. Sonya’s imagining the possibility of a seven-figure sale.” He turned to see Madeleine’s reaction.
“Seven-figure sale? You mean some amount over a million dollars?”
“Yup.”
“Oh, my, that’s… certainly something.”
He stared at her. “Are you purposely trying to show as little reaction to this as possible?”
“What reaction should I have?”
“More curiosity? Happiness? Some thoughts about what we could do with a chunk of money that size?”
She frowned thoughtfully, then grinned. “We could spend a month in Tuscany.”
“That’s what you’d do with a million dollars?”
“What million dollars?”
“Seven figures, remember?”
“I heard that part. What I’m missing is the part where it becomes real.”
“According to Sonya, it’s real right now. I have a dinner meeting Saturday in the city with the collector, Jay Jykynstyl.”
“In the
“You make it sound like I’m meeting him in a sewer.”
“What does he ‘collect’?”
“No idea. Apparently stuff he pays a lot for.”
“You find it credible that he wants to pay you hundreds of thousands of dollars for fancied-up mug shots of low-life scum? Do you even know who he is?”
“I’ll find out Saturday.”
“Are you listening to yourself?”
To the extent that he was capable of perceiving his own emotional tone and rhythm, he wasn’t entirely comfortable with it, but he wasn’t ready to admit it. “What’s your point?”
“You’re good at poking holes in things. Nobody better at it than you.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Don’t you? You can rip anything to shreds-‘an eye for discrepancy,’ you once called it. Well, if anything ever cried out for a little poking and ripping, this sounds like it. How come you’re not doing it?”
“Maybe I’m waiting to find out more, find out how real it is, get a sense of who this Jykynstyl character is.”
“Sounds reasonable.” She said this in such a reasonable way that he knew she meant the opposite. “By the way, what kind of name is that?”
“Jykynstyl? Sounds Dutch to me.”
She smiled. “Sounds to me like a monster in a fairy tale.”
Chapter 29
While Madeleine was creating a shrimp-and-pasta combination for dinner, Gurney was in the basement going through old copies of the Sunday
Instead of just making a note of the credit line, “Karnala Fashion, Photo by Alessandro,” he decided to bring the magazine section upstairs. He laid it open on the table where Madeleine was setting their dinner plates. Apart from the credit line, there was only one sentence on the page, in very small, fashionably understated type: “Custom- designed wardrobes, starting at $100,000.”
She scowled at it. “What’s that?”
“An ad for expensive clothes. Insanely expensive. It’s also a picture of the victim.”
“The vic-You don’t mean…?”
