“Nothing. I don’t know. About my father, I guess.”
“What about him?”
He blinked, looked at her. “Did I ever tell you the rabbit story?”
“I don’t think so.”
He cleared his throat. “When I was a little kid-five, six, seven years old-I’d ask my father to tell me stories about the things he did when he was a little kid. I knew he grew up in Ireland, and I had an idea of what Ireland looked like from a calendar we got from a neighbor who went there on vacation-all very green, rocky, kind of wild. To me it was a strange, wonderful place-wonderful, I guess, because it was nothing like where we lived in the Bronx.” Gurney’s distaste for his childhood neighborhood, or maybe for his childhood itself, showed in his face. “My father didn’t talk much, at least not to me or my mother, and getting him to tell me anything about how he grew up was almost impossible. Then finally, one day, maybe to stop me from pestering him, he told me this story. He said there was a field behind his father’s house-that’s what he called it, his
“What was the story?”
“Hmm?”
“You said he told you a story.”
“He said that he and his friend Liam used to go hunting for rabbits. They had slingshots, and they’d go off into the fields behind his father’s house at dawn while the grass was still covered with dew, and they’d hunt for rabbits. The rabbits had narrow pathways through the tall grass, and he and Liam would follow the pathways. Sometimes the pathways ended in bramble patches, and sometimes they went under the stone wall. He described the size of the openings of the burrows the rabbits dug and how he and Liam would set snares for the rabbits along their pathways, or at their burrows, or at the holes they dug under the stone wall.”
“Did he tell you if they ever caught any?”
“He said if they did, they’d let them go.”
“And the slingshots?”
“A lot of near misses, he said.” Gurney fell silent.
“That’s the story?”
“Yes. The thing is, the images it painted in my mind became so real, and I thought so much about them, spent so much time imagining myself there, following those little narrow pathways in the grass, that those images became in some peculiar way the most vivid memories of my childhood.”
Madeleine frowned a little. “We all do that, don’t we? I have vivid memories of things I never actually saw- memories of scenes someone else described. I remember what I’ve pictured.”
He nodded. “There’s a piece of this I haven’t told you yet. Years later, decades later, when I was in my thirties and my father was sixty-something, I happened to bring it up on the phone with him. I said, ‘Remember the story you told me about you and Liam going out in the field at dawn with your slingshots?’ He didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. So I added all the other details: the wall, the brambles, the stream, the hillside, the rabbit paths. ‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘That was all bullshit. None of that ever happened.’ And he said it in that tone of his that seemed to imply I was a fool to ever have believed it.” There was a rare, barely perceptible tremor in Gurney’s voice. He coughed loudly as if trying to clear whatever obstruction had caused it.
“He made it all up?”
“He made it all up. Every speck of it. And the damnable part of it is, it’s the only thing he ever told me about his childhood.”
Chapter 31
Gurney was leaning back in his chair, studying his hands. They were more creased and worn than he would have pictured them had he not been looking at them. His father’s hands.
As Madeleine cleared the table, she appeared deep in thought. When the dishes and pans were all in the sink and she’d covered them with hot, soapy water, she turned off the tap and spoke in a very matter-of-fact way. “So I guess he had a pretty awful childhood.”
Gurney looked up at her. “I would imagine so.”
“Do you realize that during the twelve years of our marriage that he was alive, I only saw him three times?”
“That’s the way we are.”
“You mean you and your father?”
He nodded vaguely, focusing on a memory. “The apartment where I grew up in the Bronx had four rooms-a small eat-in kitchen, a small living room, and two small bedrooms. There were four people-mother, father, grandmother, myself. And you know what? There was almost always just one person in each room, except for the times when my mother and grandmother would watch television together in the living room. Even then my father would stay in the kitchen and I’d be in one of the bedrooms.” He laughed, then stopped with an empty feeling, having heard in that sardonic sound an echo of his father.
“You remember those little toy magnets in the shape of Scottie dogs? If you aligned them one way, they attracted each other; the other way, they repelled each other. That’s what our family was like, four little Scottie dogs aligned so we repelled one another into the four corners of our apartment. As far from one another as possible.”
Madeleine said nothing, just turned the water back on and busied herself washing the dinner things, rinsing them, stacking them in the drying rack next to the sink. When she was finished, she turned off the hanging light over the sink island and went to the opposite end of the long room. She sat in an armchair by the fireplace, switched on the lamp next to it, and withdrew her current knitting project, a woolly red hat, from a tote bag on the floor. She glanced every so often in Gurney’s direction but remained silent.
Two hours later she went to bed.
Gurney, in the meantime, had gotten the Perry case folders from the den, where they’d been piled since they were cleared from the main table when the Meekers came to dinner. He’d been reading the summaries of the interviews conducted in the field, as well as verbatims of those that had been conducted and recorded at BCI headquarters. It struck him as a lot of material that failed to paint a coherent picture.
Some of it made virtually no sense at all. There was, for example, the Naked in the Pavilion incident recounted by five Tambury residents. They said that Flores had been seen one month prior to the murder standing on one foot, eyes closed, hands clasped prayerfully in front of him in what was taken to be some sort of yoga pose, stark naked in the center of Ashton’s lawn pavilion. In each interview summary, the interviewing officer had noted that the individual describing the incident had not actually witnessed it but was presenting it as “common knowledge.” Each one reported hearing about it from other people. Some could remember who mentioned it to them, some couldn’t. None could remember when. Another widely reported incident concerned an argument between Ashton and Flores one summer afternoon on the main street of the village, but again none of the individuals reporting it, including two who described it in detail, had been present at the event.
Anecdotes were abundant, eyewitnesses in short supply.
Almost everyone interviewed saw the murder itself through the lens of one of a handful of paradigms: the Frankenstein Monster, the Revenge of a Jilted Lover, Inherent Mexican Criminality, Homosexual Instability, the Poisoning of America by Media Violence.
No one had suggested a connection to Mapleshade’s sexual-abuser clientele or the possibility of a revenge motive arising out of Jillian’s past behavior-areas where Gurney believed that the key to the killing would eventually be found.
