Shut Your Eyes Tight

was the sound of a man being stretched out of shape, stretched like a rubber band too small to encompass everything it was given to hold-a man whose constitution lacks the flexibility to absorb the accidental elements of his own life.

Which set Gurney to wondering: Are there really any accidental elements? Don’t we, in some undeniable way, place ourselves in the positions in which we find ourselves? Don’t our choices, our priorities, make all the difference? He felt sick to his stomach, and suddenly he knew the reason. He was identifying with Rodriguez: the career-obsessed cop, the father without a clue.

And then-as though the turmoil of this realization were not enough, as though some malignant god were seeking to contrive the perfect external disaster to match the collision of emotions within him-he hit the deer.

He had just passed the sign that read ENTERING BROWNVILLE. There was no village, just the overgrown remnants of a long-abandoned river-valley farm on the left and a forested upslope on the right. A medium-size doe had emerged from the woods, hesitated, then dashed across the road far enough ahead of him that there was hardly any need to brake. But then her fawn followed her, it was too late to brake, and although he swerved as far to the left as he could, he heard and felt the terrible thump.

He pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped. He looked into his rearview mirror, hoping to see nothing, hoping that it was one of those fortunate collisions from which the remarkably resilient deer ran off into the woods with only superficial damage. But that was not the case. A hundred feet behind him, a small brown body lay sprawled at the edge of the roadside drainage ditch.

He got out of the car and walked back along the shoulder, holding on to a faint hope that the fawn was only stunned and would at any moment stagger to its feet. As he got closer, the twisted position of the head and the empty stare of the open eyes took that hope away. He stopped and looked around helplessly. He saw the doe standing in the ruined farm field, watching, waiting, motionless.

There was nothing he could do.

He was sitting in his car with no recollection of having walked back to it, his breathing interrupted by small sobs. He was halfway to Walnut Crossing before he thought of checking the damage to the front end, but even then he continued on, pierced by regret, wanting only to get home.

Chapter 38

The eyes of Peter Piggert

The house had that peculiarly empty feeling it had when Madeleine was out. On Fridays she had dinner with three of her friends, to talk about knitting and sewing, things they were making and things they were doing, and everyone’s health, and the books they were reading.

He had the idea, formed at the emotional nadir of the drive from Brownville to Walnut Crossing, that he would follow Madeleine’s prodding and call Kyle-have an actual conversation with his son instead of another exchange of those carefully drafted, antiseptic e-mails that provided them both with the illusion of communication. Reading the edited descriptions of life’s events on the screen of a laptop bore little resemblance to hearing them related in a living voice without the smoothing process of rewrites and deletions.

He went into the den with good intentions but decided to check his voice mail and e-mail before making the call. There was one message in each format. They were both from Peggy Meeker, social-worker wife of the spider man.

On voice mail she sounded excited, almost bouncy. “Dave, Peggy Meeker. After you mentioned Edward Vallory the other night, the name kept gnawing at me. I knew that I knew it from somewhere. Well, I found it! I remembered it from a college English course. Elizabethan drama. Vallory was a dramatist, but none of his dramas survive, which is why almost no one has ever heard of him. All that exists is the prologue to one play. But get this-his stuff was all supposedly misogynistic. He absolutely hated women! In fact, the play that this prologue was part of was reputedly about a man who killed his ownmother! I e-mailed you the existing prologue. Does this have something to do with the Perry case? I was wondering, because you were talking about that earlier in the evening. I thought about that when I read Vallory’s prologue, and it gave me the chills. Look at the e-mail. Let me know if it helps. And let me know if there’s anything more I can do for you. This is soooo exciting. Talk to you soon. Bye. Oh, and hello to Madeleine.”

Gurney opened her e-mail and scanned down quickly to get to the Vallory quote:

There is on earth no woman chaste. There is

no purity in her. Her aspect, speech,

and heart sing never three as one. She seems

but this, and seems but that, and seeming’s all.

With slipp’ry oils and powders bright

she colours o’er her dark designs, and paints

upon herself a portrait we might love.

But where’s the honest heart that with

a single note doth ring its true content?

Fie! Ask her not for pure, direct,

and honest music. Purity’s no part of her.

She drew from Eden’s serpent all its wiles

into her serpent heart that she might spew

o’er every man a slime of lies and trickery.

Gurney read it several times, trying to absorb the intended meaning and purpose of it.

It was the prologue to a play about a man who killed his own mother. A prologue written centuries ago by a playwright famous for his hatred of women. The playwright whose name was appended to the text message sent from Hector’s cell phone to Jillian’s the morning she was killed-and sent again, just two days ago, to Ashton. A text message that read simply, FOR ALL THE REASONS I HAVE WRITTEN.

And the reasons given in his only extant writing seemed to add up to this: Women are impure, seductive, deceptive, satanic creatures-spewing, like monsters, a slime of lies and trickery. The more closely he read Vallory’s words, the more he sensed in them a twisted sexual nightmare.

Gurney prided himself on his caution, his balance, but it was difficult not to conclude that the quotation constituted a demented justification for Jillian Perry’s murder. And possibly for other murders as well.

Of course there was nothing certain about it. No way of proving that Edward Vallory, the purported seventeenth-century women hater, was the Edward Vallory whose name was appropriated for the text messages. No proof that Edward Vallory was a pseudonym for Hector Flores-although the fact that the messages came from Flores’s cell phone made it a fair assumption.

It did all seem to fit together, did seem to make a kind of awful sense. The Vallory prologue offered the first motive hypothesis that wasn’t based entirely on speculation. For Gurney it was a motive that held the additional attraction of being compatible with his own growing sense that Jillian’s murder was driven by revenge for past sexual offenses-either hers or those of Mapleshade students in general. Moreover, the receipt of the Vallory message by Scott Ashton supported a view of the murder as part of a complex enterprise-an enterprise that seemed to be ongoing.

Maybe Gurney was reading too much into it, but it suddenly occurred to him that the fact that the surviving snippet of Vallory’s play was its prologue might have more than accidental significance. Might it, in addition to being the prologue to a lost drama, also be intended as a prologue to future events-a hint of murders yet to come? Exactly how much was Hector Flores telling them?

He clicked “reply” on Peggy Meeker’s e-mail and asked, “What else is known about the play? Plot line? Characters? Any surviving comments from Vallory’s contemporaries?”

For the first time in the case, Gurney felt an undeniable excitement-and an irresistible urge to call Sheridan Kline, hoping he’d still be in the office.

He placed the call.

“He’s in conference.” Ellen Rackoff spoke with the confidence of a powerful gatekeeper.