Pendergast smiled. 'I happen to know that a vacancy opened up not three weeks ago.'
Felder looked at him. 'It did?'
Pendergast nodded. 'As the committing psychiatrist, you could jump the queue, so to speak, and get her in.
'I'll... I'll look into it.'
'You will do more than look into it. In return, I will share with you what I know about Constance--which is a great deal indeed, and which will exceed even your most fervent dreams in psychiatric interest. Whether the information is actually publishable or not will be up to you--and your capacity for discretion.'
Felder found his heart accelerating. 'Thank you.'
'I thank
Felder watched as the agent stepped out of the office and silently closed the door. Strange--he, too, seemed to have stepped out of the nineteenth century. And then Felder asked himself, for the first time, who exactly had orchestrated the meeting he'd so carefully arranged--and whose agenda had been satisfied.
EPILOGUE
JUDSON ESTERHAZY RECLINED IN THE LIBRARY of his house on Whitfield Square. It was a surprisingly chilly May evening, and a small fire lay dying in the hearth, scenting the room with the aroma of burning birch.
Taking a sip of a fine Highland malt he had pulled out of his cellar, he rolled the peaty beverage around in his mouth before swallowing. But the drink was bitter, as bitter as his feelings at that moment.
Pendergast had killed Slade. They said it was suicide, but he knew that was a lie. Somehow, some way, Pendergast had managed it. Bad as the last ten years had been, the old man's final moments must have been awful, an unimaginable mental agony. He had seen Pendergast's manipulations of other people and he had no doubt the man had taken advantage of Slade in his dementia. It was murder--worse than murder.
The glass, trembling in his hand, shook out some drops on the table, and he placed it down hard. At least he knew with complete confidence that Slade hadn't betrayed him. The old man loved him like a son and--even in his madness and pain--would have kept his secret to the last. Some things transcend even lunacy.
He had once loved Slade, too, but that feeling had died twelve years ago. He had seen a flash of another side of Slade that was just a little too close for comfort; a little too reminiscent of his own brutal father and the rather diabolical research of his that Judson was only too aware of. Maybe that was the fate of all fathers and father figures--to disappoint, to betray, to shrink in stature as one grew older and wiser.
He shook his head. What a mistake it had all been; what a terrible, tragic mistake. And how ironic, upon reflection: when Helen had originally brought the idea to him, an idea she had literally stumbled on through her interest in Audubon, it had seemed almost miraculous--to him as well as to her.
And now he was gone, thanks to Pendergast. Pendergast, who had stirred up the past, reopened old wounds, and--directly or indirectly--caused several deaths.
He grasped the glass and drained it in one rough motion, swallowing the whiskey without even tasting it. The side table that held the bottle and small glass also sported a brochure. Esterhazy took it up and thumbed through it. A grim feeling of satisfaction displaced his anger. The tasteful brochure advertised the refined pleasures of an establishment known as the Kilchurn Shooting Lodge in the Highlands of Scotland. It was a great stone manor house on a windswept fell overlooking the Loch Duin and the Grampian Mountains. One of the most picturesque and isolated in Scotland, the lodge offered excellent grouse and partridge shooting, salmon fishing, and stalking of red deer. They took only a select few guests, prided themselves on their privacy and discretion; the shooting could be guided or not, depending on preference.
Naturally, he would prefer the self-guided shooting.
Ten years before, Esterhazy and Pendergast had spent a week at Kilchurn. The lodge sat in the middle of a vast and wild estate of forty thousand acres, once the private hunting preserve of the lairds of Atholl. Esterhazy had been deeply impressed by the empty, rugged landscape, the deep lochs hidden in the folds of the land, the swift streams bursting with trout and salmon, the windswept moorlands and the forbidding Foulmire, the heather braes and wooded glens. A man could disappear forever in a land like that, his bones left to molder, unseen, lashed by wind and rain until nothing was left.
Taking another lazy sip of the single-malt, which had now warmed in his cradling palm, he felt calmer. All was not lost by any means. In fact, things had taken a turn for the better--for the first time in a long while. He laid the brochure aside and took up a short note, written in an old-fashioned copperplate hand on cream-colored, heavy laid paper.
AUTHORS' NOTE
While most towns and other locations in
All persons, locales, police departments, corporations, institutions, museums, and governmental agencies mentioned in this novel are either fictitious or used fictitiously.
