Think Of a Number (2010) (5 page)

Gurney shrugged. “Most crank letters are just crank letters. The unpleasant message itself is the assault weapon, so to speak. However …”

“These are different?”

“These may be different.”

Mellery’s eyes widened. “I see. You will take another look at them?”

“Yes. And you’ll get started on those lists?”

“It won’t do any good, but yes, I’ll try.”

I
n the absence of an invitation to stay for lunch, Mellery had reluctantly departed, driving a meticulously restored powder blue Austin-Healey—a classic open sports car on a perfect driving day to which the man seemed miserably oblivious.

Gurney returned to his Adirondack chair and sat there for a long while, nearly an hour, hoping that the tangle of facts would start to arrange themselves in some kind of order, some sensible concatenation. However, the only thing that became clear to him was that he was hungry. He got up, went into the house, made a sandwich of havarti and roasted peppers, and ate alone. Madeleine seemed to be missing, and he wondered if he’d forgotten some plan she might have told him about. Then, as he was rinsing his plate and gazing idly out the window, he caught sight of her meandering up the field from the orchard, her canvas tote full of apples. She had that look of bright serenity that was so often for her an automatic consequence of being in the open air.

She entered the kitchen and laid the apples down by the sink with a loud, happy sigh. “God, what a day!” she exclaimed. “On a day like this, being indoors a minute longer than you have to be is a sin!”

It wasn’t that he disagreed with her, at least not aesthetically, maybe not at all, but the difficult personal fact for him was that his natural inclinations tilted him inward in a variety of ways, with the result that, left to his own devices, he spent more time in the consideration of action than in action, more time in his head than in the
world. This had never been a problem in his profession; in truth, it was the very thing that seemed to make him so good at it.

In any event, he had no immediate desire to go out, nor was it something he felt like talking about, arguing about, or feeling guilty about. He raised a diversionary subject.

“What was your impression of Mark Mellery?”

She answered without looking up from the fruit she was transferring from her bag to the countertop, or even pausing to consider the question.

“Full of himself and scared to death. An egomaniac with an inferiority complex. Afraid the bogeyman is coming to get him. Wants Uncle Dave to protect him. By the way, I wasn’t purposely eavesdropping. His voice carries well. I bet he’s a great public speaker.” She made this sound like a dubious asset.

“What did you think of the number business?”

“Ah,” she said with dramatic affectation. “‘The Case of the Mind-Reading Stalker.’”

He stifled his irritation. “Do you have any idea how it might have been done—how the writer knew what number Mellery would choose?”

“Nope.”

“You don’t seem perplexed by it.”

“But you are.” Again she spoke with her eyes on her apples. The tiny ironic grin, increasingly present these days, tugged at the corner of her mouth.

“You have to admit it’s quite a puzzle,” he insisted.

“I suppose.”

He repeated the key facts with the edginess of a man who cannot understand why he is not being understood. “A person gives you a sealed envelope and tells you to picture a number in your mind. You picture six fifty-eight. He tells you to look in the envelope. You look in the envelope. The note inside says six fifty-eight.”

It was clear that Madeleine was not as impressed as she ought to be. He went on, “That’s a remarkable feat. It would appear to be impossible. Yet it was done. I’d like to figure out how it was done.”

“And I’m sure you will,” she said with a small sigh.

He gazed through the French doors, past the pepper and tomato plants wilted from the season’s first frost. (When was that? He couldn’t remember. Couldn’t seem to focus on the time factor.) Beyond the garden, beyond the pasture, his gaze rested on the red barn. The old McIntosh apple tree was just visible behind the corner of it, its fruit dotted here and there through the mass of foliage like droplets of impressionist paint. Into this tableau there intruded a nagging sense of something he ought to be doing.
What was it?
Of course! His week-old promise that he would fetch the extension ladder from the barn and pick the high fruit Madeleine couldn’t get to by herself. Such a small thing. So easy for him to do. A half-hour project at most.

As he rose from his chair, buoyed by good intentions, the phone rang. Madeleine picked it up, ostensibly because she was standing next to the table on which it rested, but that was not the real reason. Madeleine often answered the phone regardless of who was closer to it. It had less to do with logistics than with their respective desires for contact with other people. For her, people in general were a plus, a source of positive stimulation (with exceptions such as the predatory Sonya Reynolds). For Gurney, people in general were a minus, a drain on his energy (with exceptions such as the encouraging Sonya Reynolds).

“Hello?” said Madeleine in that pleasantly expectant way she greeted all callers—full of the promise of interest in whatever they might have to say. A second later her tone dropped into a less enthusiastic register.

“Yes, he is. Just a moment.” She waved the handset toward Gurney, laid it on the table, and left the room.

It was Mark Mellery, and his agitation level had risen.

“Davey, thank God you’re there. I just got home. I got another of those damn letters.”

“In today’s mail?”

The answer was yes, as Gurney assumed it would be. But the question had a purpose nonetheless. He had discovered over years of
interviewing countless hysterical people—at crime scenes, in emergency rooms, in all sorts of chaotic situations—that the easiest way to calm them was to start by asking simple questions they could answer yes to.

“Does it look like the same handwriting?”

“Yes.”

“And the same red ink?”

“Yes, everything’s the same except the words. Shall I read it to you?”

“Go ahead,” he said. “Read it to me slowly and tell me where the line breaks are.”

The clear questions, clear instructions, and Gurney’s tranquil voice had the predictable effect. Mellery sounded like his feet were getting back on solid ground as he read aloud the peculiar, unsettling verse—with little pauses to indicate the ends of lines:

After jotting it down on the pad by the phone, Gurney reread it carefully, trying to get a sense of the writer—the peculiar personality lurking at the intersection of a vengeful intent and the urge to express it in a poem.

Mellery broke the silence. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking it may be time for you to go to the police.”

“I’d rather not do that.” The agitation was returning. “I explained that to you.”

“I know you did. But if you want my best advice, that’s it.”

“I understand what you’re saying. But I’m asking for an alternative.”

“The best alternative, if you can afford it, would be twenty-four-hour bodyguards.”

“You mean walk around my own property between a pair of gorillas? How on earth do I explain that to my guests?”

“‘Gorillas’ may be a bit of an exaggeration.”

“Look, the point is, I don’t tell lies to my guests. If one of them asked me who these new additions are, I’d have to admit that they are bodyguards, which would naturally lead to more questions. It would be unsettling—toxic to the atmosphere I try to generate here. Is there any other course of action you can suggest?”

“That depends. What would you want the action to achieve?”

Mellery answered with a sour little laugh. “Maybe you could discover who’s after me and what they want to do to me, and then keep them from doing it. Do you think you could do that?”

Gurney was about to say, “I’m not sure whether I can or not,” when Mellery added with sudden intensity, “Davey, for Chrissake, I’m scared shitless. I don’t know what the hell is going on. You’re the smartest guy I ever met. And you’re the only guy I trust not to make the situation worse.”

Just then Madeleine passed through the kitchen carrying her knitting bag. She picked up her straw gardening hat from the sideboard along with the current issue of
Mother Earth News
and went out through the French doors with a quick smile that seemed to be switched on by the bright sky.

“How much I can help you will depend on how much you help me,” said Gurney.

“What do you want me to do?”

“I already told you.”

“What? Oh … the lists …”

“When you’ve made progress, call me back. We’ll see where we go from there.”

“Dave?”

“Yes?”

“Thank you.”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“You’ve given me some hope. Oh, by the way, I opened that envelope today very carefully. Like they do on TV. So if there are fingerprints, they wouldn’t be destroyed. I used tweezers and latex gloves. I put the letter in a plastic bag.”

G
urney wasn’t really comfortable with his agreement to get involved in Mark Mellery’s problem. Certainly he was attracted by its mystery, by the challenge of unraveling it. So why did he feel uneasy?

It popped into his mind that he should go to the barn to get the ladder to gather the promised apples, but that was replaced by the thought he should set up his next art project for Sonya Reynolds—at least enter the mug shot of the infamous Peter Piggert into his computer’s retouching program. He’d been looking forward to the challenge of capturing the inner life of that Eagle Scout who had not only murdered his father and fifteen years later his mother but had done so for sex-related motives that seemed more horrendous than the crimes themselves.

Gurney went to the room he had set up for his Cop Art avocation. Once the farmhouse pantry, it was now furnished as a den and was suffused with a shadowless, cool light from an expanded window on its north wall. He stared out at the bucolic view. A gap in the maple copse beyond the meadow formed a frame for the bluish hills that receded into the distance. It brought his mind back to the apples, and he returned to the kitchen.

As he stood entangled in indecision, Madeleine came in from her knitting.

“So what’s the next step with Mellery?” she asked.

“I haven’t decided.”

“Why not?”

“Well … it’s not the kind of thing you’d want me to get wound up in, is it?”

“That’s not the problem,” she said with the clarity that always impressed him.

“You’re right,” he conceded. “I think the problem actually is that I can’t put the normal labels on anything yet.”

She flashed a smile of understanding.

Encouraged, he went on, “I’m not a homicide cop anymore, and he’s not a homicide victim. I’m not sure what I am or what he is.”

“Old college buddy?”

“But what the hell is that? He recalls a level of comradeship between us that I never felt. Besides, he doesn’t need a buddy, he needs a bodyguard.”

“He wants Uncle Dave.”

“That’s not who I am.”

“You sure?”

He sighed. “Do you want me to get involved in this Mellery business or not?”

“You
are
involved. You may not have the labels sorted out yet. You’re not an official cop, and he’s not an official crime victim. But there’s a puzzle there, and by God, sooner or later you’re going to put the pieces together. That’s always going to be the bottom line, isn’t it?”

“Is that an accusation? You married a detective. I wasn’t pretending to be something else.”

“I thought there might be a difference between a detective and a retired detective.”

“I’ve been retired for over a year. What do I do that looks like detective work?”

She shook her head as if to say that the answer was painfully obvious. “What do you invest any time in that
doesn’t
look like detective work?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Everyone does portraits of murderers?”

“It’s a subject I know something about. You want me to draw pictures of daisies?”

“Daisies would be better than homicidal madmen.”

“It was you who got me involved in this art thing.”

“Oh, I see. It’s because of me that you spend your time on beautiful fall mornings staring into the eyes of serial killers?”

The barrette that was holding most of her hair up and away from her face seemed to be losing its grip, and several dark strands descended in front of her eyes, which she seemed not to notice, giving her a rare harried look that he found touching.

He took a deep breath. “What exactly are we fighting about?”

“You figure it out. You’re the detective.”

As he stood looking at her, he lost interest in carrying the weight of the argument any further. “I want to show you something,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

He left the room and returned a minute later with his handwritten copy of the nasty little poem Mellery had read to him over the phone.

“What do you make of this?”

She read it so rapidly that someone who didn’t know her might think she hadn’t read it at all. “Sounds serious,” she said, handing it back to him.

“I agree.”

“What do you think he’s
done?”

“Ah, good question. You noticed that word?”

She recited the relevant couplet: “‘I do what I’ve done / not for money or fun.’”

If Madeleine didn’t have a photographic memory, thought Gurney, she had something close to it.

“So what exactly is it that he’s
done
, and what is he planning to
do?”
she went on in a rhetorical tone that invited no reply. “I’m sure you’ll find out. You might even end up with a murder to solve, from the sound of that note. Then you could collect the evidence, follow the leads, catch the murderer, paint his portrait, and give it to Sonya for her gallery. What’s that saying about turning lemons into lemonade?”