Shut Your Eyes Tight

time difference between New York and Seattle had provided a convenient obstruction for the past three years, but now Kyle was back in Manhattan, enrolled at Columbia Law School, and Gurney’s procrastination had lost its enabler. Which is not to say that the procrastination had ceased, or even that its true causes had become transparent to him.

Sometimes he dismissed it as the natural product of his cold Celtic genes. That was the most comfortable way of looking at it. Hardly any personal responsibility at all. Other times he was convinced it was related to one of his downward spirals of guilt: the guilt that was created by not calling, creating in turn an increasing resistance to calling, and more guilt. For as long as he could remember, he’d had an abundance of that gnawing rat of an emotion-an only child’s feeling of responsibility for his parents’ strained and staggering marriage. At still other times, he suspected that the problem was that he saw too much of his first wife in Kyle-too many reminders of too many ugly disagreements.

And then there was the disappointment factor. In the midst of the stock-market meltdown, when Kyle announced he was leaving investment banking for law school, Gurney had entertained for a delusional moment the belief that the young man might have an interest in following him into law enforcement. But it soon became clear that Kyle was simply taking a new route to the old goal of material success.

“Why don’t you just call him?” Madeleine was watching him, her knitting needles resting in her lap atop a half- finished orange scarf.

He stared at her, a little startled but not so utterly amazed as he once would have been at this uncanny sensitivity.

“It’s a certain look you get when you’re thinking about him,” she said, as if explaining something obvious. “Not a happy look.”

“I will. I’ll call.”

He began scanning the ViCAP form with a fresh urgency, like a man in a locked room searching for a hidden exit. Nothing emerged that seemed new or different from what he’d remembered. He shuffled through the other reports in the folder.

One of several analyses of the wedding-reception DVD material concluded with this summary: “Locations of all persons present on the Ashton property during the time frame of the homicide have been verified through time-coded video imagery.” Gurney had a pretty good idea what this meant, recalling what Hardwick had told him the evening they watched the video, but given its critical significance, he wanted to be sure.

He got his cell phone from the sideboard and called Hardwick’s number. He was shunted immediately into voice mail: “Hardwick. Leave a message.”

“It’s Gurney. I have a question about the video.”

Less than a minute after he left the message, his phone rang. He didn’t bother to check the caller ID. “Jack?”

“Dave?” It was a woman’s voice-familiar, but he couldn’t immediately place it.

“Sorry, I was expecting someone else. This is Dave.”

“It’s Peggy Meeker. I got your e-mail, and I just e-mailed you back. Then I thought I should call you in case you might need to know this right away.” Her voice was racing with excitement.

“What is it?”

“You wanted to know about Edward Vallory’s play, plot, characters, whether anything was known about it. Well, you’re not going to believe this, but I called the English department at Wesleyan, and guess who’s still there- Professor Barkless, who taught the course.”

“The course?”

“The English course I took. The Elizabethan-drama course. I left a message, and he got back to me. Isn’t that amazing?”

“What did he tell you?”

“Well, that’s the really, really amazing part. Are you ready for this?”

There was a call-waiting beep on Gurney’s phone, which he ignored. “Go ahead.”

“Well, to begin with, the name of the play was The Spanish Gardener.” She paused for a reaction.

“Go on.”

“The name of the central character was Hector Flores.”

“You’re serious?”

“There’s more. It gets better and better. The plot, which was partially described by a contemporary critic, is one of those complicated things where people wear disguises and people in their own families don’t recognize them and all that kind of nonsense, but the basic story line”-there was another call-waiting beep-“which is pretty wild, is that Hector Flores was sent away from home by his mother, who killed his father and seduced his brother. Years later Hector returns, disguised as a gardener, and to make a long story short, he tricks his brother-through more disguises and mistaken identities-into cutting off his mother’s head. It was all pretty much over the top, which is maybe why all the copies of the play were destroyed after the first performance. It’s not clear if the plot was based on some ancient variant of the Oedipus myth or if it was just a piece of grotesquerie cooked up by Vallory. Or maybe it was somehow influenced by Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, which is kind of emotionally over the top, too, so who knows? But those are the basic facts-straight from Professor Barkless.”

Gurney’s brain was racing faster than Peggy Meeker’s breathless voice.

After a moment she asked, “You want me to go through that again?”

Another beep.

“You said it was all in an e-mail you sent me?”

“Yes, all spelled out. And I put in my professor’s phone number, in case you want to call him directly. It’s so exciting, isn’t it? Does it give you, like, a whole new perspective on the case?”

“Maybe more like a reinforcement of one of the existing perspectives. We’ll see how it plays out.”

“Right. Okay. Let me know.”

Beep.

“Peggy, I seem to have a persistent caller here. Let me say good-bye for now. And thank you. This could be very helpful.”

“Sure, glad to do it. Great. Let me know what else I can do.”

“I will. Thank you again.”

He switched to the other call.

“Took you long enough to answer. Question mustn’t be too fucking urgent.”

“Ah, yes. Jack. Thanks for getting back.”

“And the question is…?”

Gurney smiled. Hardwick made a fetish of brusqueness, when he wasn’t too busy making a fetish of vulgarity. “How sure are you about the location of every individual at the reception during the time Jillian was in the cottage?”

“Sure enough.”

“How do you know?”

“The way the cameras were set up, there were no blind spots. Guests, catering staff, musicians-they were all on tape, all the time.”

“Except for Hector.”

“Except for Hector, who was in the cottage.”

“Who you think was in the cottage.”

“What’s your point?”

“Just trying to sort out what we know from what we think we know.”

“Who the fuck else would be in there?”

“I don’t know, Jack. And neither do you. By the way, thanks for the heads-up on that rehab jam-up.”

There was a long silence. “Fuck told you about that?”

“You sure as hell didn’t.”

“Fuck’s that got to do with anything?”

“I’m a big fan of full disclosure, Jack.”