Hammond looked bewildered. “Killed? If he talked about getting a recommendation to see me?”
“So he said at the time. Does that mean anything to you?”
“Nothing at all.”
“Did you ever go to summer camp?”
“What?”
“Summer camp. Did you ever go to one? As a kid, as a counselor? In any capacity at all?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“It’s a long story. But if you’ve never been to camp, it’s irrelevant.”
“If you say so.” His tone conveyed the petulance of a man accustomed to being the one who decided what was relevant. “Any more questions?”
“Just a comment. I think the case is beginning to open up. I can’t say the end is in sight, but I don’t think it will look like the picture being painted by Gil Fenton.”
Jane, who’d been silently observing the conversation, spoke up. “Thank you! I’ve never had any doubt about your ability to uncover the truth, but it’s good to hear you say it.”
“I have a question.” Madeleine was addressing Hammond in a tone clearly arising from a private train of thought. “It’s about a memory I have of something that happened long ago, not far from here. I thought that coming here would help me deal with it. But it’s not working. In fact, it’s gotten worse. The memory is out of its box. But I don’t know what to do with it. I can’t get rid of it. And I can’t tolerate it. I don’t know what to do.”
“And your question is . . .?” Hammond was smiling, his voice soft.
“Have you ever helped someone with a problem like this?”
“As I started to explain before, I often help people come to terms with past events.”
“And you think you could help me?”
Gurney was barely able to restrain an impulse to interrupt, to derail her request.
But he said nothing, fearing the rawness of his emotion. He stood there in stony silence, astounded at her desire to bare her soul to a man who might be implicated in four murders.
Madeleine and Hammond arranged to meet at the chalet at 9:00 AM the following day, and some minutes later they all said their good-nights. Hammond wandered over to the hearth, picked up a poker, and began stirring the crumbling coals. Jane walked with Gurney and Madeleine out onto the chalet’s deck-like porch.
The sleet had stopped, but the air was frigid.
“Are you all right?”
So caught up was Gurney in his own rattled thoughts, it took a few seconds for him to realize Jane’s question was directed to him.
“Oh . . . yes . . . fine.”
Noting disbelief in her eyes, but unwilling to discuss what was really bothering him, Madeleine’s proposed meeting with Richard, he searched for another explanation.
“This may seem like a strange question, Jane, but I was intrigued by that green finial on one of your lamps. Do you know the one I mean?”
“The bloodstone? Green with red specks?”
“Yes. That one. Did it come with the lamp, or was it something special you got somewhere else?”
“It was always part of the lamp, as far as I know. Some things here are Richard’s, but the lamps and furniture belong to the lodge. Do you have a reason for asking?”
“I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
“It is unusual.” She hesitated. “It’s funny you should ask about that particular item.”
“Why?”
“About a year ago it disappeared. A couple of days later it reappeared.”
“You never discovered the reason?”
“No. I asked around, of course. The maintenance people, the cleaning people, no one knew anything. I even mentioned it to Austen. No one had any idea how or why something like that could happen.” She looked at Gurney expectantly, as if he might offer a solution.
When he said nothing, she went on. “And now it’s happened again.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just a month or so ago. I noticed because it’s my favorite lamp. I use it every night.”
“The same thing happened? The same way?”
“Yes. I noticed one evening it was gone. Two days later it was back.”
“This was around the time of the first suicide?”
“Before any of that. Before our world turned upside down.”
“You’re sure about the timing? That it was before the date of the first suicide?”
“Absolutely sure.”
“Around the beginning of November, then?”
“Yes.”
“And when it happened the first time? You said it was about a year ago. Also at the beginning of November?”
“Yes. It must have been. I remember Austen making some silly joke about poltergeists being stirred up by Halloween.”
CHAPTER 32
During their drive back to the lodge, instead of immediately challenging her plan to meet with Hammond, Gurney tried to focus on why it bothered him so much.
Perhaps it was his sense that she was changing. Or the more disturbing possibility that she wasn’t changing at all—that the Madeleine in his brain was a fiction, and he was only now seeing the real person. He’d imagined her to be a tower of strength and good judgment. Now she seemed frightened and erratic, willing to put her trust in a therapist who might be a murderer.
As he was parking the Outback under the lodge portico, his bleak musings were cut short by the ringing of his phone.
Jack Hardwick started speaking the instant Gurney picked up.
“Got a hot lead for you—a man you need to meet tomorrow morning. Just down the road in Otterville.”
It took Gurney a moment to refocus. “Otterville’s a good three hours ‘down the road’ from here. Who’s this man and why does he matter?”
“The man is Moe Blumberg. Former owner and director of Camp Brightwater, which no longer exists. He converted it into some kind of bungalow colony, which he named Brightwater Cabins. But back when it was Camp Brightwater, it was the camp Steven Pardosa attended. Moe’s leaving tomorrow afternoon for Israel, where he spends his winters, so it’s got to be tomorrow morning, unless you want to track him down in Tel Aviv.”
“You don’t want to follow up on it yourself?”
“I’d do it with pleasure—but tomorrow morning I’ll be down in Teaneck, New Jersey. Friend of a friend set me up with the detective who caught the Leo Balzac suicide case. Man won’t talk to me on the phone, so I gotta make the trip. I figure I do him, you do Moe. Fair’s fair. What do you say, Sherlock?”
Before he could answer, his attention was diverted by Madeleine getting out of the car.
“I’m freezing,” she said. “I’m going inside.”
The air coming into the car through the open door was bitterly cold.
She closed the door and walked quickly into the lodge.
Her tone of voice brought back all the negative thoughts he’d been stewing in before Hardwick’s call. He got back on the phone and tried to force his mind to the matter at hand. “Have you actually spoken to this Blumberg guy?”
“Briefly. But first I spoke to the Pardosas. Face-to-face in Floral Park. Lot of grief. Lot of fantasy. They’re telling themselves that their Steven was finally turning things around. Embarking on a new life. Big prospects for the future. Can’t fathom that he’d kill himself. So much to look forward to. Et cetera. I think telling me that was their way of making it seem true. You keep saying something, it starts to sound real. They kept talking, and I kept nodding and shaking my head sadly and smiling at the right moments—all that empathic bullshit.”
“Jesus, Jack . . .”
“Anyway, the more I nodded the more they talked. The whole thing took a funny turn, though, when I asked if Steven had ever gone away to summer camp. Conversation got chilly. Obviously not their favorite topic. Seems he only went one year. Thirteen years ago. Some weird shit happened that summer, which they refused to discuss. But with a little nudging—actually, more than a little—they gave me Moe Blumberg’s phone number and address, which turned out to be his bungalow colony, which used to be his camp. You following?”