in, not a term he ever used. He sat beside her on the flat boulder and stared out, unseeing, at the vista of hills and valleys. She took his arm in hers and held it against her.
He studied her face. He was at a loss for words to capture what he saw. It was as if all the radiance of the snow-covered landscape were reflected in her expression and the radiance of her expression were reflected in the landscape.
After a while-he couldn’t be sure how long it was-they headed back by a roundabout route to the house.
About halfway there he asked, “What are you thinking?”
“Not thinking at all. It gets in the way.”
“Of what?”
“The blue sky, the white snow.”
He didn’t speak again until they were back in the kitchen.
“I never did have that coffee you left for me,” he said.
“I’ll make a fresh pot.”
He watched as she got a bag of coffee beans out of the refrigerator and measured some into the electric grinder.
“Yes?” She regarded him curiously, her finger on the button.
“Nothing,” he said. “Just watching.”
She pressed the button. There was a sharp barrage of noise from the little machine, which grew softer as the beans were pulverized. She looked at him again.
“I’ll check the closet,” he said, feeling a need to do something.
He started upstairs, but before reaching the closet he stopped on the landing at the window that faced the rear field and the woods beyond it and the trail to the ledge. He pictured her sitting on the rock in her solitary peace, and that nameless emotional intensity filled him again, achingly. He struggled to identify the pain.
Loss. Separation. Isolation.
Each rang true, each a facet of the same sensation.
The therapist he’d seen in his late teens as the result of a panic attack-the therapist who’d told him that the panic arose from a deep hostility he carried toward his father and that his complete lack of any conscious emotion for his father was proof of the hidden strength and negativity of the emotion-that same therapist had one day confided to him what he believed to be the purpose of life.
“The purpose of life is to get as close as we can to other people.” He’d said it in a surprisingly straightforward way, as though he were pointing out that trucks were for transportation.
On another occasion he revealed, in the same matter-of-fact tone, the corollary: “An isolated life is a wasted life.”
At the age of seventeen, Gurney hadn’t been sure what the man was talking about. It sounded deep, but its depth was shadowy, and he couldn’t see anything in it. He still didn’t entirely grasp it at the age of forty-seven-at least not the way he grasped the purpose of trucks.
Forgetting about the closet, he went back down to the kitchen. Entering from the darker hallway, he found the room intensely bright. The sun, now well above the trees in a cloudless sky, shone directly through the southeast- facing French doors. The pasture had been transformed by the new snow into a dazzling reflector, throwing light up into corners of the room rarely illuminated.
“Your coffee is ready,” said Madeleine. She was carrying a balled-up sheet of newspaper and a handful of kindling to the woodstove. “The light is so magical. Like music.”
He smiled and nodded. Sometimes he envied her ability to be enthralled by nature’s glittering bits and pieces. Why, he wondered, had such a woman, such an enthusiast, such a natural aesthete in the admirable sense of the word, a woman so in touch with the
They made an odd couple, he thought, but surely no odder than his parents. His mother with all her artistic inclinations, all her little flight-of-fancy hobbies-papier-mache sculpture, fantastical watercolor painting, origami-had married his father, a man whose essential drabness was interrupted only by sparks of sarcasm, whose attention was always elsewhere, whose passions were unknown, and whose departure for work in the morning seemed to please him far more than did his return home in the evening. A man who in his quest for peace was forever
“What time do you have to leave for your meeting?” asked Madeleine, displaying her impossibly precise sensitivity to his passing thoughts.
Chapter 44
Deja vu.
The sign-in procedure was the same as it had been before. The building’s reception area-ironically designed to repel-was as antiseptic as a morgue but less peaceful. There was a new guard in the security booth, but the lighting gave him the same chemotherapy pallor as it had the last one. And, once again, Gurney’s guide to the claustrophobic conference room was the hair-gelled, charming-as-dirt Investigator Blatt.
He preceded Gurney into the room, which was as Gurney remembered it, except it seemed shabbier. There were stains he hadn’t noticed before on the colorless carpeting. The clock, not quite vertical and too small for the wall, read twelve noon. As usual, Gurney was exactly on time-less a virtue than a neurosis. Earliness and lateness both made him uncomfortable.
Blatt took a seat at the table. Wigg and Hardwick were already there in the same chairs they’d had in the first meeting. A woman with an edgy expression was standing by the coffee urn in the corner, obviously unhappy that Gurney hadn’t been accompanied by whomever she was waiting for. She looked so much like Sigourney Weaver that Gurney wondered if she was making a conscious effort.
The three chairs nearest the center of the oblong table had been tilted against it, as before. As Gurney headed for the coffee, Hardwick grinned like a shark.
“Detective First Class Gurney, I’ve got a question for you.”
“Hello, Jack.”
“Or, better yet, I’ve got an answer for you. Let’s see if you can guess what the question is. The answer is ‘a defrocked priest in Boston.’ To win the grand prize, all you got to do is figure out the question.”
Instead of responding, Gurney picked up a cup, noticed it wasn’t quite clean, put it back, tried another, then a third, then went back to the first.
Sigourney was tapping her foot and checking her Rolex, a parody of impatience.
“Hi,” he said, resignedly filling his stained cup with what he hoped was antiseptically hot coffee. “I’m Dave Gurney.”
“I’m Dr. Holdenfield,” she said, as if she were laying down a straight flush to his pair of deuces. “Is Sheridan on his way?”
Something complex in her tone got his attention. And “Holdenfield” rang a bell.
“I wouldn’t know.” He wondered what sort of relationship might exist between the DA and the doctor. “If you don’t mind my asking, what sort of doctor are you?”
“Forensic psychologist,” she said absently, looking not at him but at the door.
“Like I said, Detective,” said Hardwick, too loudly for the size of the room, “if the answer is a defrocked Boston priest, what’s the question?”
Gurney closed his eyes. “For Christ’s sake, Jack, why don’t you just tell me?”
Hardwick wrinkled his face in distaste. “Then I’d have to explain it twice-for you and for the executive committee.” He tilted his head at the tilted chairs.
The doctor looked again at her watch. Sergeant Wigg looked at whatever was happening on her laptop screen in response to the keys she was tapping. Blatt looked bored. The door opened, and Kline entered, looking
