At the thought of Bincher, his gaze drifts to a shadowy corner of the garage-like room. To a blue and white plastic picnic cooler. He smiles. But the smile quickly fades.
The smile fades because the nightmare keeps returning to his mind, more vividly than ever. The nightmare’s images are with him almost continually now—ever since he caught sight of that Ferris wheel at the fairgrounds.
The Ferris wheel has insinuated itself into his nightmare—enmeshed with the merry-go-round music, the terrible laughter. The hideous, stinking, wheezing clown. The low, vibrating growl of the tiger.
And now Hardwick and Gurney.
Swirling around him, closing in.
The spiral tightening, the final confrontation inevitable.
It would be a great risk, but there could be a great reward. A great relief.
The nightmare might at last be extinguished.
He goes to the darkest corner of the room, to a small table. On the table are a large candle and a pack of matches. He picks up the matches and lights the candle.
He lifts the candle and gazes at the flame. He loves its shape, its purity, its power.
He imagines the confrontation—the conflagration.
His smile returns. He goes back to his cell phone—goes back to entering the special numbers.
The blackbirds are shrieking. The crows are perching uneasily on the dead black treetops.
Chapter 54. Cornered
Gurney put no stock in dreams. If he did, that night’s marathon could have occupied a week of nonstop analysis. But he held a solidly pragmatic view—and generally low opinion—of these outlandish processions of images and events.
He’d long believed they were nothing more than by-products of the nightly filing and indexing process the brain employs in the movement of recorded experience from short-term to long-term memory. Bits of visual and aural data are stirred up and mashed together, narrative strings are triggered, vignettes are constructed—but with no more meaning than a suitcase of old photos, love letters, or term papers shredded and reassembled by a monkey.
The one practical effect of a night of discomfiting dreams was a lingering need for more sleep—which resulted in Gurney’s rising an hour later than usual, with a mild headache. When he was finally taking his first sip of coffee, the sun, rendered pallid by a thin overcast, had already risen well above the eastern ridge. The sense he’d had the night before of an unsettling quietness after the eerie sound in the woods was still with him.
He felt cornered. Cornered by his unwillingness to drop out of the game in time. Cornered by his appetite for control, coherence, completion. Cornered by his own “plan” to break the case open by provoking the shooter into taking a foolish and fatal risk. Pulled forward and backward by alternating currents that seemed one minute to lead to success and the next to defeat, Gurney decided to seek the comfort that came with taking action.
Hardwick would be returning that evening from Scranton Surveillance Survival with the video cameras they needed, and they would have the following morning, Sunday, to install the units in a way to ensure that anyone approaching within half a mile of Gurney’s house would be detected. Strategic placement was a crucial factor, and pre-selection of the sites would save precious time Sunday morning.
He went to the mudroom and pulled on a pair of knee-high rubber boots—protection against thistles, brambles, and wild raspberry thorns. Noticing a remnant of odor from the rooster carcass, he opened the mudroom window to let in fresh air, then went out to the pile of henhouse construction materials, from which he borrowed a metal tape measure, a ball of yellow cord, and a jackknife. With these items in hand he set off for the woods on the far side of the pond to begin identifying and marking key video locations.
The goal was to select the spots from which an array of motion-activated cameras and wireless transmitters could provide full coverage of the woods and fields around his home. According to Hardwick, each camera would generate its own GPS coordinates, displaying this information along with its video on a receiving monitor inside the house, so the location of Peter Pan—or any intruder—would be known immediately.
Contemplating the technical capability of the equipment, Gurney experienced if not quite optimism at least some relief from the fear that the plan was too flimsy to succeed. The logical process of measuring angles and distances also had a positive effect. With a fair degree of discipline and determination, he completed his site-selection project in a little more than four hours.
He’d arranged his progress around his fifty-acre property and the relevant sections of his neighbors’ properties so that he would complete his circuit at the top of Barrow Hill. He was convinced that this was the spot Panikos would choose. Therefore, this was the place, with its various trails and access points, that he wanted to commit most carefully to memory.
When he finally made his way back to the house, it was mid-afternoon and the morning overcast had thickened into a featureless gray sky. There was no movement in the air, but there was no peace in this stillness. As he stopped in the mudroom to remove his boots, the sight of the sink brought to mind the question of how and when to let Madeleine know about the cause of the rooster’s death. Whether to tell her was not the issue. She had an innate preference for candor over evasion, and significant omissions could have a high price. After considering the when and how options, he decided to tell her as soon as possible and in person.
The half-hour drive to the Winkler mini-farm was filled with a low-level foreboding. Although the need to reveal the truth was clear, that reality did not change how he felt.
A quarter mile from his destination, it occurred to him that he should have called ahead. What if they were all at the fairgrounds? Or what if the Winklers were at the house and Madeleine was at the fairgrounds? But as soon as he pulled into their driveway he saw Madeleine. She was standing in a fenced pen, gazing down at a small goat.
He parked next to the house. As he approached the pen, she showed no surprise at his arrival—just gave him a brief smile and a longer assessing gaze.
“Communing with the goat?” he asked.
“They’re supposedly quite intelligent.”
“I’ve heard that rumor.”
“What’s on your mind?”
“You mean, what am I doing here?”
“No, I mean, you look like you have something on your mind. I’m wondering what it is.”
He sighed, tried to relax. “The Spalter case.”
She was petting the goat’s head gently. “Anything in particular about it?”
“Couple of things.” He chose to speak about what seemed a less fraught issue first. “The case keeps bringing to mind an old auto crash investigation.”
“Is there a connection?”
“I don’t know.” He made a face. “Jesus.”
“What’s the matter?”
“This place stinks of manure.”
She nodded. “I kind of like it.”
“You like it?”
“It’s a natural farm smell. Nothing wrong with it.”
“Jesus.”
“So what about this auto crash?”