earlier.”
He stared at her silently.
“I said you’d get back to him.”
“Why didn’t you call me?” he asked, more testily than he intended. His son didn’t call often.
“I asked him if I should get you. He said he didn’t want to disturb you, it wasn’t really urgent.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“No.”
She turned and walked across the thick, moist grass toward the house. When she reached the side door and put her hand on the knob, she seemed to remember something else, looked back at him, and spoke with exaggerated bafflement. “According to the book jacket, your old classmate seems to be a saint, perfect in every way. A guru of good behavior. It’s hard to imagine why he’d need to consult a homicide detective.”
“A
But she’d already gone in and neglected to cushion the slam of the door.
Chapter 3
The following day was more exquisite than the day before. It was the picture of October in a New England calendar. Gurney rose at 7:00 A.M., showered and shaved, put on jeans and a light cotton sweater, and was having his coffee in a canvas chair on the bluestone patio outside their downstairs bedroom. The patio and the French doors leading to it were additions he’d made to the house at Madeleine’s urging.
She was good at that sort of thing, had a sensitive eye for what was possible, what was appropriate. It revealed a lot about her-her positive instincts, her practical imagination, her unfailing taste. But when he got tangled in their areas of contention-the mires and brambles of the expectations each privately cultivated-he found it difficult to focus on her remarkable strengths.
He must remember to return Kyle’s call. He would have to wait three hours because of the time difference between Walnut Crossing and Seattle. He settled deeper into his chair, cradling his warm coffee mug in both hands.
He glanced at the slim folder he’d brought out with his coffee and tried to imagine the appearance of the college classmate he hadn’t seen for twenty-five years. The photo that appeared on the book jackets that Madeleine printed out from a bookstore website refreshed his recollection not only of the face but of the personality-complete with the vocal timbre of an Irish tenor and a smile that was improbably charming.
When they were undergraduates at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus in the Bronx, Mark Mellery was a wild character whose spurts of humor and truth, energy and ambition were colored by something darker. He had a tendency to walk close to the edge-a sort of careening genius, simultaneously reckless and calculating, always on the brink of a downward spiral.
According to his website bio, the direction of the spiral, which had taken him down rapidly in his twenties, had been reversed in his thirties by some sort of dramatic spiritual transformation.
Balancing his coffee mug on the narrow wooden arm of the chair, Gurney opened the folder on his lap, extracted the e-mail he’d received from Mellery a week earlier, and went over it again, line by line.
The promised call had come two days later. Gurney had immediately recognized the voice, eerily unchanged except for a distinct tremor of anxiety.
After some self-deprecating remarks about his failure to stay in touch, Mellery got to the point. Could he see Gurney within the next few days? The sooner the better, since the “situation” was urgent. Another “development” had occurred. It really was impossible to discuss over the phone, as Gurney would understand when they met. There were things Mellery had to show him. No, it wasn’t a matter for the local police, for reasons he’d explain when he came. No, it wasn’t a legal matter, not yet, anyway. No crime had been committed, nor was one being specifically threatened-not that he could prove. Lord, it was so difficult to talk about it this way; it would be so much easier in person. Yes, he realized that Gurney was not in the private-investigation business. But just half an hour-could he have half an hour?
With the mixed feelings he’d had from the beginning, Gurney agreed. His curiosity often got the better of his reticence; in this instance he was curious about the hint of hysteria lurking in the undertone of Mellery’s mellifluous voice. And, of course, a puzzle to be deciphered attracted him more powerfully than he cared to admit.
After rereading the e-mail a third time, Gurney put it back in the folder and let his mind wander over the recollections it stirred up from the back bins of his memory: the morning classes in which Mellery had looked hungover and bored, his gradual coming to life in the afternoon, his wild Irish jabs of wit and insight in the wee hours fueled by alcohol. He was a natural actor, undisputed star of the college dramatic society-a young man who, however full of life he might be at the Shamrock Bar, was doubly alive on the stage. He was a man who depended on an audience-a man who was drawn up to his full height only in the nourishing light of admiration.
Gurney opened the folder and glanced through the e-mail yet again. He was bothered by Mellery’s depiction of their relationship. The contact between them had been less frequent, less significant, less friendly than Mellery’s words suggested. But he got the impression that Mellery had chosen his words carefully-that despite its simplicity, the note had been written and rewritten, pondered and edited-and that the flattery, like everything else in the letter, was purposeful. But what was the purpose? The obvious one was to ensure Gurney’s agreement to a face- to-face meeting and to engage him in the solution of whatever “mystery” had arisen. Beyond that, it was hard to say. The problem was clearly important to Mellery-which would explain the time and attention he had apparently lavished on getting the flow and feeling of his sentences just right, on conveying a certain mix of warmth and distress.
