“Well, aside from the general malaise of the grounds-grounds you won’t tend or have tended only erratically- there’s the way you put out that cigarette. Practically anyone else would have dropped it on the ground and crushed it. But you even put the butt in your pocket.”
Wide-eyed, she shook her head slowly. “Are you always finding big things inside small ones?”
They were rounding the other side of the house when she said, “I must say it’s good of you to give over your time to a case that’s not even yours.”
“I’m on leave; it doesn’t matter.”
“I’m sure it matters a great deal to
“He thought you might know more about Dan Ryder. I’m having the devil’s own time pulling together a picture of him. Family members are often mistaken about one another.”
“I see. Look, why don’t you stay for dinner? It’s lamb.”
Jury smiled. “Thanks, but I’ll need to be getting back to London. A drink would be nice, though.”
She gave him a whiskey and excused herself to look into how the lamb was doing and to fix up some sort of drink food.
He sat with his whiskey, sipping it and looking round the room. The air stirred. To throw off (but should he?) the weight of this feeling, he rose and began a circuit of the room. He stopped to look again at the pictures on the mantel and touched the lusters on one of the candleholders, which started up a glassy tinkle. He moved past sideboard and chest to a kneehole desk in the corner. French, he thought, because of its delicacy. The lightness and airiness of French furniture always made him feel he could pick it up with two fingers. The sides and front were inlaid with a delicate design of birds and flowers; the writing surface was of green hide. Beside a pen holder sat a mirrored picture frame, the subject here a dark-haired man, squinting slightly against too-strong light. Around his neck was a striped scarf and what looked like goggles. And that was a clue to who he was: Sara Hunt’s ex-husband.
Jury looked at the picture, wondering why she would keep a photograph prominently displayed of a husband she had divorced, certainly not on the best of terms. He slipped out the dark brown moire backing and removed first a piece of flimsy cardboard needed to keep the picture in place, and then another photograph.
Dan Ryder. Hardly difficult to recognize from seeing the wall of photographs in his father’s office. What occurred to Jury at that moment was not that Sara had been lying to him-he knew she’d been lying-but that the act of hiding the picture behind another picture was so adolescent it made him smile. A rather ill-concealed trick that anyone could sort out. Or was it? Was it instead a sign that she was determined to keep him, that she wouldn’t be budged? He replaced both photos and the backing and set the frame, carefully, where it had been. There was a small key with a tassel inserted in the single desk drawer. He turned it, pulled the drawer out and found, among the pencils and papers, more snapshots. There were a few of Sara herself, a few more, no doubt taken at the same racecourses as the pictures on the mantel, showing Sara standing in the background of the winner’s circle. Dan Ryder was up on Criminal Type in two of them. At the bottom was a four- by-six enlargement of Dan by himself. He took this one, one of Sara and one of the winner’s circle and slipped them in his pocket when he heard her approaching footsteps and her voice, already apologizing.
“I’m sorry it took so long.” She set down a large plate of raw vegetables and some sort of dip. The kind of food that Jury hated.
Smiling, he said, “Not at all,” and picked up a celery stick.
“You’re welcome to stay for dinner, you know.”
Jury thanked her again and again said he’d have to get back to London.
She looked disappointed, and he wondered what ground, between them, they had struck. It was no longer, certainly, a slippery slope. He watched her face, its expressiveness. She’d never have made a good liar. Her face would give it all away.
“You’re staring, Superintendent.”
“Hm. Make that Richard. I’m not here in my official capacity.”
“All right, Richard, and you’re still staring.” She smiled.
That smile, he reminded himself, could be trouble. “I’m still turning it over in my mind.”
“Turning what over?”
“The nature of obsession.”
She sighed and dipped a piece of cauliflower and sighed again. “You’re tenacious.”
Again he felt that stir of air. What was it? He looked behind him.
“Something wrong?”
“Nothing. So you think we’re all capable of it?”
She frowned a question.
“Obsessive behavior.”
“I know
“Oh?”
“You’re obsessive about obsession.”
He laughed and picked up his drink. “What do you understand by ‘obsessive’?”
She thought for a minute. “I suppose loving or wanting someone too much, I mean to the extent he or she, well, takes over.” She shrugged.
“Are you familiar with the feeling?” He smiled, trying to defuse the question of any danger she might see in it.
Impatiently, she swept her hand through the air like a necromancer who wanted to be rid of the room. “No. At least… well, how would I know if you can’t define it?” She shrugged. “Anyway, I thought I knew.”
“What?”
“Obsession is love-we
“I don’t think it is. It’s more like love turned inside out.”
She thought about this. “Well, then, loving someone too much.”
“You can never love someone too much.”
She sat back with a lurch. “My God, but you’re romantic!”
“Perhaps, but that’s irrelevant. It’s the very nature of love that it can’t be too much; it protects you even from yourself; it patrols its own ramparts, has its own spyglass.”
“I suppose I mean the sort of feeling that has you always thinking about the other person, always wanting to be with him, wanting to know everything about him, where he is, what he’s doing, where he’s going…” She shrugged. Her list ended weakly.
Jury liked Vernon Rice’s list much better than Sara Hunt’s.
THIRTY-EIGHT
“T urn here and go down that old road,” said Nell, pointing the way.
They hadn’t passed the stud farm or at least not any part Vernon could see. “None of this looks familiar, Nellie.”
“I know. It’s the land behind our farm. I mean, it’s our land but a
