John Verdon

Dave Gurney stood just inside the French doors of his farm-style kitchen, looking out over the garden and the mowed lawn that separated the big house from the overgrown pasture that sloped down to the pond and the old red barn. He was vaguely uncomfortable and unfocused, his attention drifting between the asparagus patch at the end of the garden and the small yellow bulldozer beside the barn. He sipped sourly at his morning coffee, which was losing its warmth in the dry air.

Understanding this process, Gurney discovered, does not provide a magic key to reversing it—with the result that a kind of halfheartedness was the best attitude toward the bucolic life that he could muster. It was an attitude that put him out of sync with his wife. It also made him wonder whether anyone could ever really change or, more to the point, whether he could ever change. In his darker moments, he was disheartened by the arthritic rigidity of his own way of thinking, his own way of being.

As he stood at the glass doors, uncomfortably recalling her comment, hearing its gently exasperated tone in his mind’s ear, her actual voice intruded from somewhere behind him.

“Any chance you’ll get to my bike brakes before tomorrow?”

“I said I would.” He took another sip of his coffee and winced. It was unpleasantly cold. He glanced at the old regulator clock over the pine sideboard. He had nearly an hour free before he had to leave to deliver one of his occasional guest lectures at the state police academy in Albany.

“You should come with me one of these days,” she said, as though the idea had just occurred to her.

“I will,” he said—his usual reply to her periodic suggestions that he join her on one of her bike rides through the rolling farmland and forest that constituted most of the western Catskills. He turned toward her. She was standing in the doorway of the dining area in worn tights, a baggy sweatshirt, and a paint-stained baseball hat. Suddenly he couldn’t help smiling.

“What?” she said, cocking her head.

“Nothing.” Sometimes her presence was so instantly charming that it emptied his mind of every tangled, negative thought. She was that rare creature: a very beautiful woman who seemed to care very little about how she looked. She came over and stood next to him, surveying the outdoors.

Twitchy, quick, aggressive in their movements, they seemed motivated by an obsessive rodent hunger, an avariciously concentrated desire to consume every available speck of food.

His smile evaporating, Gurney watched them with a low-level edginess that in his more objective moments he suspected was becoming his reflexive reaction to too many things—an edginess that arose from and highlighted the fault lines in his marriage. Madeleine would describe the squirrels as fascinating, clever, resourceful, awe-inspiring in their energy and determination. She seemed to love them as she loved most things in life. He, on the other hand, wanted to shoot them.

Well, not shoot them, exactly, not actually kill or maim them, but maybe thwack them with an air pistol hard enough to knock them off the finch feeders and send them fleeing into the woods where they belonged.

He became aware that Madeleine was watching him with that curious, appraising look of hers—probably guessing from the tightness in his jaw his thoughts about the squirrels. In response to her apparent clairvoyance, he wanted to say something that would justify his hostility to the fluffy-tailed rats, but the ringing of the phone intervened—in fact, the ringing of two phones intervened simultaneously, the wired phone in the den and his own cell phone on the kitchen sideboard. Madeleine headed for the den. Gurney picked up the cell.

What do you want, Jack?”

“Why the hell would I want anything? Can’t one old buddy just call another old buddy for old times’ sake?”

“Shove the ‘old buddy’ crap, Jack, and tell me why you’re calling.”

Again the braying laugh. “That’s so cold, Gurney, so cold.”

“Look. I haven’t had my second cup of coffee yet. You don’t get to the point in the next five seconds, I hang up. Five … four … three … two … one …”

“Debutante bride got whacked at her own wedding. Thought you might be interested.”

Debutante bride got whacked at her own wedding. Thought you might be interested.”

Should’ve said ‘hacked.’ Murder weapon was a machete.”

Hardwick jumped back into his characteristic carnival-barker-with-throat-cancer oratorical style.

“Ungrateful bastard! All right, here’s what I got for you. Sensational murder committed four months ago. Spoiled little rich girl marries hotshot celebrity psychiatrist. An hour later at the wedding reception on the psychiatrist’s fancy estate, his demented gardener decapitates her with a machete and escapes.”