She recited the relevant couplet: “‘I do what I’ve done / not for money or fun.’”
If Madeleine didn’t have a photographic memory, thought Gurney, she had something close to it.
“So what exactly is it that he’s
Her smile looked positively dangerous.
At times like this, the question that came to his mind was the one he least wanted to consider. Had moving to Delaware County been a great mistake?
He suspected that he’d gone along with her desire to live in the country to make up to her for all the crap she’d had to endure as a cop’s wife-always playing second fiddle to the job. She loved woods and mountains and meadows and open spaces, and he felt he owed her a new environment, a new life-and he made the assumption that he would be able to adjust to anything. Bit of pride there. Or maybe self-delusion. Perhaps a desire to get rid of his guilt through a grand gesture? Stupid, really. The truth was, he hadn’t adjusted well to the move. He wasn’t as flexible as he’d naively imagined. As he kept trying to find a meaningful place for himself in the middle of nowhere, he kept falling back instinctively on what he was good at-perhaps too good at, obsessively good at. Even in his struggles to appreciate nature. The damn birds, for example. Bird-watching. He’d managed to turn the process of observation and identification into a stakeout. Made notes on their comings and goings, habits, feeding patterns, flight characteristics. It might look to someone else like a newfound love of God’s little creatures. But it wasn’t that at all. It wasn’t love, it was analysis. Probing.
Deciphering.
Good God. Was he really that limited?
Was he, in fact, too limited-too small and rigid-in his approach to life to ever be able to give back to Madeleine what his devotion to his work had deprived her of? And as long as he was considering painful possibilities, maybe there were more things to make up for than just an excessive immersion in his profession.
Or maybe just one other thing.
The thing they found so hard to talk about.
The collapsed star.
The black hole whose terrible gravity had twisted their relationship.
Chapter 8
The sparkling autumn weather deteriorated that afternoon. The clouds, which in the morning had been joyful little cotton-ball cliches, darkened. Premonitory rumbles of thunder could be heard-so far in the distance that the direction from which they originated was unclear. They were more like an intangible presence in the atmosphere than the product of a specific storm-a perception that strengthened as they persisted over a period of hours, seeming neither to draw closer nor entirely cease.
That evening Madeleine went to a local concert with one of her new Walnut Crossing friends. It was not an event she expected Gurney to attend, so he didn’t feel defensive about his decision to stay home and work on his art project.
Shortly after her departure, he found himself sitting in front of his computer screen, gazing at the mug shot of Peter Possum Piggert. All he had done so far was to import the graphics file and set it up as a new project-to which he had given a wretchedly cute name:
In the Sophocles version of the old Greek tale, Oedipus kills a man who turns out to be his father, marries a woman who turns out to be his mother, and sires two daughters with her, creating great misery for all concerned. In Freud’s psychology the Greek tale is a symbol for the developmental phase in the life of a male child during which he desires his father’s absence (disappearance, death) so that he may possess exclusively the affection of his mother. In the case of Peter Possum Piggert, however, there was neither exculpatory ignorance nor any question of symbolism. Knowing exactly what he was doing and to whom, Peter at the age of fifteen murdered his father, entered into a new relationship with his mother, and sired two daughters with her. But it did not stop there. Fifteen years later he murdered his mother in a dispute over a new relationship he had entered into with their daughters, then thirteen and fourteen.
Gurney’s involvement in the case had begun when half of Mrs. Iris Piggert’s body was discovered tangled in the rudder mechanism of a Hudson River day liner docked at a Manhattan pier, and it ended with the arrest of Peter Piggert in a desert compound of “traditionalist” Mormons in Utah, where he had gone to live as the husband of his two daughters.
Despite the depravity of the crimes, steeped in blood and family horror, Piggert remained a controlled and taciturn figure in all interrogations and throughout the criminal proceedings against him, keeping his Mr. Hyde well concealed and looking more like a depressed auto mechanic than a parricidal, incestuous polygamist.
Gurney stared at Piggert on the screen, and Piggert stared back. Ever since he first interrogated him, and even more so now, Gurney felt that the key quality of the man was a need (taken to bizarre lengths) to control his environment. People, even family-in fact, family most of all-were part of that environment, and making them do as he wished was essential. If he had to kill someone to establish his control, so be it. The sex, as big a driving force as it appeared to be, was more about power than lust.
As he searched the stolid face for a hint of the demon, a gust of wind picked up a swirl of dry leaves. They blew with the sound of a feathery broom across the patio; a few clicked lightly against the glass panes of the French doors. The restlessness of the leaves, plus the intermittent thunder, made it hard for him to concentrate. The idea of being alone for a few hours of progress on the portrait, free of raised eyebrows and unpleasant questions, had appealed to him. But now his mind was unsettled. He peered into Piggert’s eyes, heavy and dark-with none of the wild glare that animated the eyes of Charlie Manson, the tabloid prince of sex and slaughter-but again the wind and the leaves distracted him, and then the thunder. Out beyond the line of hills, there was a faint flashing in the murky sky. A couplet from one of Mellery’s threatening poems had been drifting in and out of his mind. Now it came again and stuck there.
It was at first an impossible riddle. The words were too general; they had too much and too little meaning; yet he could not get them out of his head.
He opened the desk drawer and removed the sequence of messages Mellery had given him. He shut down the computer and pushed the keyboard to the side of the desk so he could arrange the messages in order-beginning with the first note.
Although he’d done so earlier, he examined the outer envelope, inside and out, as well as the notepaper on which the message was written to be sure there was no faint trace anywhere of the number 658-not even a watermark-that could have suggested the number that seemed to come spontaneously to Mellery’s mind. There was no such trace. More definitive tests could be conducted later, but he was satisfied for now that whatever it was that enabled the writer to know that Mellery would choose 658, it wasn’t a subtle imprint in the paper.
The content of the message comprised a number of claims that Gurney enumerated on a lined yellow notepad:
1. I knew you in the past but lost contact with you.
2. I encountered you again, recently.
