“Come on,” she urged. “Before we get soaked.”
He followed her to her car, and they drove up slowly through the pasture to the house.
Before they got out, he turned to her and asked, “You don’t think of every
“Of course not.”
“Then why…?”
“Because ‘Arybdis’ sounded Greek.”
“Right. Of course.”
She looked across the front seat at him, her expression, abetted by the clouded night, unreadable.
After a while she said, with a small smile in her voice, “You never stop thinking, do you?”
Then, as she had promised, the rain began.
Chapter 9
After being stalled for several hours at the periphery of the mountains, a steep cold front swept through the area, bringing lashings of wind and rain. In the morning the ground was covered with leaves and the air was charged with the intense smells of autumn. Water droplets on the pasture grass fractured the sun into crimson sparks.
As Gurney walked to his car, the assault on his senses awakened something from his childhood, when the sweet smell of grass was the smell of peace and security. Then it was gone-erased by his plans for the day.
He was heading for the Institute for Spiritual Renewal. If Mark Mellery was going to resist getting the police involved, Gurney wanted to argue that decision with him face-to-face. It wasn’t that he intended to wash his own hands of the matter. In fact, the more he pondered it, the more curious he was about his old classmate’s prominent place in the world and how it might relate to who and what were now threatening him. As long as he was careful about boundaries, Gurney imagined there would be room in the investigation for both himself and the local police.
He’d called Mellery to let him know he was coming. It was a perfect morning for a drive through the mountains. The route to Peony took him first through Walnut Crossing, which, like many Catskill villages, had grown up in the nineteenth century around an intersection of locally important roads. The intersection, with diminished importance, remained. The eponymous nut tree, along with the region’s prosperity, was long gone. But the depressed economy, serious as it was, had a picturesque appearance-weathered barns and silos, rusted plows and hay wagons, abandoned hill pastures overgrown with fading goldenrod. The road from Walnut Crossing that led eventually to Peony wound its way through a postcard river valley where a handful of old farms were searching for innovative ways to survive. Abelard’s was one of these. Squeezed between the village of Dillweed and the nearby river, it was devoted to the organic cultivation of “Pesticide-Free Veggies,” which were then sold at Abelard’s General Store, along with fresh breads, Catskill cheeses, and very good coffee-coffee that Gurney felt an urgent need for as he pulled in to one of the little dirt parking spaces in front of the store’s sagging front porch.
Inside the door of the high-ceilinged space, against the right wall, stood a steaming array of coffeepots, which Gurney headed for. He filled a sixteen-ounce container, smiling at the rich aroma-better than Starbucks at half the price.
Unfortunately, the thought of Starbucks brought with it the image of a certain kind of young, successful Starbucks customer, and that immediately brought Kyle to mind, along with a little mental wince. It was his standard reaction. He suspected that it arose from a frustrated desire for a son who thought a smart cop was worth looking up to, a son more interested in seeking his guidance than Kyle was. Kyle-unteachable and untouchable in that absurdly expensive Porsche that his absurdly high Wall Street income had paid for at the absurdly young age of twenty-four. Still, he did owe the young man a return phone call, even if all the kid wanted to talk about was his latest Rolex or Aspen ski trip.
Gurney paid for his coffee and returned to his car. As he was thinking about the prospective call, his phone rang. He disliked coincidences and was relieved to discover that it was not Kyle but Mark Mellery.
“I just got today’s mail. I called you at home, but you’d gone out. Madeleine gave me your cell number. I hope you don’t mind me calling.”
“What’s the problem?”
“My check came back. The guy who has the post-office box in Wycherly where I sent the $289.87 check to Arybdis-he sent it back to me with a note saying there’s nobody there by that name, that I must have gotten the address wrong. But I checked it again. It was the right box number. Davey? Are you there?”
“I’m here. Just trying to make sense of that.”
“Let me read you the note. ‘I found the enclosed piece of mail in my post-office box. There must be a mistake in the address. There is no one here named X. Arybdis.’ And it’s signed ‘Gregory Dermott.’ The letterhead on the notepaper says ‘GD Security Systems,’ and there’s an address and phone number in Wycherly.”
Gurney was about to explain that it was now almost certain that X. Arybdis was not a real name but a curious play on the name of a mythological whirlpool, a whirlpool that tore its victims to pieces, but he decided that the issue was already disturbing enough. The revelation of this extra twist could wait until he got to the institute. He told Mellery he’d be there in an hour.
What the hell was going on? It made no sense. What could be the purpose of demanding a specific amount of money, having the check made out to an obscure mythological name, and then having it sent to the wrong address in the likelihood that it would be returned to the sender? Why such a complex and seemingly pointless preamble to the nasty poems that followed?
The baffling aspects of the case were increasing, and so was Gurney’s interest.
Chapter 10
Peony was a town twice removed from the history it sought to reflect. Adjacent to Woodstock, it pretended to the same tie-dyed, psychedelic, rock-concert past-while Woodstock in turn nourished its own ersatz aura through its name association with the pot-fogged concert that had actually been held fifty miles away on a farm in Bethel. Peony’s image was the product of smoke and mirrors, and upon this chimerical foundation had risen predictable commercial structures-New Age bookstores, tarot parlors, Wiccan and Druidical emporia, tattoo shops, performance-art spaces, vegan restaurants-a center of gravity for flower children approaching senility, Deadheads in old Volkswagen buses, and mad eclectics swathed in everything from leathers to feathers.
Of course, among these colorfully weird elements there were interspersed plenty of opportunities for tourists to spend money: stores and eateries whose names and decor were only a little outrageous and whose wares were tailored to the upscale visitors who liked to imagine they were exploring the cultural edge.
The loose web of roads radiating out from Peony’s business district led to money. Real-estate prices had doubled and tripled after 9/11, when New Yorkers of substantial means and galloping paranoia were captivated by the fantasy of a rural sanctuary. Homes in the hills surrounding the village grew in size and number, the SUVs morphed from Blazers and Broncos into Hummers and Land Rovers, and the people who came for country weekends wore what Ralph Lauren told them people in the country wore.
Hunters, firemen, and teachers gave way to lawyers, investment bankers, and women of a certain age whose divorce settlements financed their cultural activities, skin treatments, and mind-expanding involvements with gurus of this and that. In fact, Gurney suspected that the local population’s appetite for guru-based solutions to life’s problems may have persuaded Mark Mellery to set up shop there.
He turned off the county highway just before the village center, following his Google directions onto Filchers
