“Quite a child. You’re going there alone?”
“Yes and no.”
She looked at him curiously.
“Maybe with some simple electronic backup.”
“You mean you’re going to be wired?”
“Not like on television, with a van full of electronics geeks and satellite equipment sitting around the corner. I’m thinking a low-tech substitute. Are you going to be home tomorrow or at the clinic?”
“I’m working in the afternoon. I should be here most of the morning. Why?”
“What I’m thinking is this. When I get to Venus Lake, before I go into the house itself, I could call our landline from my cell phone. When you pick up and confirm that it’s me, you just switch on the recorder. I’ll leave my phone on, in my shirt pocket. It may not transmit everything with ideal clarity, but it’ll provide some record of what’s said in my meeting with her, which might turn out to be useful.”
Madeleine looked doubtful. “That’s fine for later, to prove whatever you want to prove, but … it’s not exactly protection while you’re there. In the two minutes Alyssa was on the phone with me, I did get a strong impression that she might be nuts. Dangerously nuts.”
“Yeah, I know. But—”
She cut him off. “Don’t tell me how many dangerously nutty people you had to deal with in the city. That was then, this is now.” She paused, as if questioning the reality of the then/now distinction. “How much do you know about this person?”
He thought about it. Kay had said plenty about Alyssa. But how much of it was true was another question.
“How much do I know about her for sure? Almost nothing. Her stepmother claims she’s a drug addict and a liar. She may have had sex with her father. She may have had sex with Mick Klemper to influence the outcome of the investigation. She may have framed her stepmother for murder. She may have been stoned out of her mind on the phone with me just now. Or she may have been putting on a bizarre act—for God only knows what reason.”
“Do you know anything positive about her?”
“I can’t say that I do.”
“Well … it’s your decision.” She closed the silverware drawer a little more firmly than necessary. “But I think that meeting with her in her house by yourself is a terrible idea.”
“I wouldn’t do it if we couldn’t set up the phone thing for protection.”
Madeleine nodded ever so slightly, somehow managing to convey with that restrained gesture a clear message: It’s far too risky, but I know I can’t stop you.
Then she added something, aloud. “Have you made that appointment yet?”
He realized that she’d switched subjects, and that the segue itself was fraught with meaning, which he pretended not to grasp. “What appointment?”
She stood there by the sink, her hands resting on the rim of it, fixing him with a patient, disbelieving stare.
“Are you talking about Malcolm Claret?” he asked.
“Yes. Who did you think?”
He shook his head in a kind of helpless gesture. “There’s a limit to the number of things I can keep in my mind at once.”
“What time are you leaving tomorrow?”
He sensed another change of direction. “For Venus Lake? Maybe nine or so. I doubt that Miss Alyssa gets up very early. Why?”
“I want to work on the chicken house. I thought maybe if you had a few free minutes you could explain the next steps so I could make a little progress before I go to the clinic. It’s supposed to be a nice morning.”
Gurney sighed. He tried to focus on the chicken project—the basic geometry, how far they’d gotten with their measurements, the materials that needed to be purchased, what had to happen next—but he couldn’t wrap his mind around it. It was as if the Spalter issues and the chicken issues required two different brains. And then there was the Hardwick situation. Each time his mind went back to it, he regretted his decision to do as the man had asked.
He promised Madeleine he’d deal later with the chicken house issue, went into the den, and called Hardwick’s cell number.
Unsurprisingly—and frustratingly—it went directly to voice mail.
“Hardwick—leave a message.”
“Hey, Jack, what’s happening out there? Where are you? Let me know. Please.”
Finally realizing that his brain had reached a useless point of exhaustion, Gurney joined Madeleine in bed. But sleep, when it eventually came, was hardly sleep at all. His mind was stuck in one of those feverish, shallow, circular ruts—in which the ID and the directive, “Hardwick—leave a message,” kept recurring in all sorts of twisted permutations.
Chapter 30. Beautiful Poison
Gurney waited until the following morning to tell Madeleine about the power-line drama at Hardwick’s house. When he completed his much abridged rendition of the incident, she sat quietly watching him, as if waiting for the other shoe to fall.
The other shoe was the one he was afraid to drop, but felt he had to. “I think, as a precaution—” he began, but she finished his thought for him.
“I should move out of the house for a while. Is that what you were going to say?”
“It’s just to be on the safe side. Just for a few days. My feeling is that this guy made his point and isn’t likely to repeat the performance, but still … I want you to be away from any possible danger until the issue is resolved.”
Anticipating the same angry reaction she’d had to a similar suggestion he’d made a year earlier during the unnerving Jillian Perry case, he was caught off-balance by her evident lack of objection. Her first question was surprisingly practicaclass="underline" “How many days are we talking about?”
“I’d only be guessing. But … maybe three, four? Depends on how soon we can eliminate the problem.”
“Three or four days starting when?”
“Hopefully by tomorrow night? I was thinking maybe you could invite yourself to your sister’s place down in—”
“I’ll be at the Winklers’.”
“You’ll be where?”
“I knew you wouldn’t remember. The Winklers. At their farm. In Buck Ridge.”
It rang a distant bell in his memory.
“The people with the odd animals?”
“Alpacas. And you also remember that I offered to go there to help them take care of things during the fair?”
A second distant bell. “Ah. Yes. Right.”
“And that the fair starts this weekend?”
A third distant bell. “Right.”
“So that’s where I’ll be. At the fair with them and at their farm. I was going to go the day after tomorrow, but I’m sure they won’t mind me coming a day early. In fact, they had invited me to stay the whole week. I was going to take a few days off from the clinic. You know, we did discuss this when they first brought it up.”
“I have a vague recollection. I guess it just seemed so far away at the time. But that’s fine—a lot more convenient than going down to your sister’s or something like that.”
Her easy manner stiffened. “But what about you? If it makes sense for me not to be here …”
“I’ll be fine. Like I said, the shooter was delivering a message. He seems to know that Hardwick is responsible for stirring up the Spalter case, so it makes sense that he addressed his nasty little message to him. Besides, in the highly unlikely event that he wants to make his presence known a second time, I may be able to take advantage of that.”
Her face was full of anxious confusion, as if she were wrestling with a major contradiction.