Think Of a Number (2010) (7 page)

Soon the headlights of Madeleine’s car swept over the tangle of dying goldenrod that bordered the pasture. She turned toward the barn, stopped on the crunchy gravel, and switched off the headlights. She got out and walked toward him—cautiously, her eyes adjusting to the semidarkness.

“What are you doing?” Her question sounded soft, friendly.

“Couldn’t sleep. Mind racing. Thought I’d take a walk around the pond.”

“Feels like rain.” A rumble in the sky punctuated her observation.

He nodded.

She stood next to him on the path and inhaled deeply.

“Wonderful smell. Come on, let’s walk,” she said, taking his arm.

As they reached the pond, the path broadened into a mowed swath. Somewhere in the woods, an owl screeched—or, more precisely, there was a familiar screech they thought might be an owl when they first heard it that summer, and each time after that they became more certain it was an owl. It was in the nature of Gurney’s intellect to realize that this process of increasing conviction made no logical sense, but he also knew that pointing it out, interesting though this trick of the mind might be to him, would bore and annoy her. So he said nothing, happy that he knew her well enough to know when to be quiet, and they ambled on to the far side of the pond in amiable silence. She was right about the smell—a wonderful sweetness in the air.

They had moments like this from time to time, moments of easy affection and quiet closeness, that reminded him of the early years of their marriage, the years before the accident. “The Accident”—that dense, generic label with which he wrapped the event in his memory to keep its razor-wire details from slicing his heart. The accident—the death—that eclipsed the sun, turning their marriage into a shifting mixture of habit, duty, edgy companionship, and rare moments of hope—rare moments when something bright and clear as a diamond would shoot back and forth between them, reminding him of what once was and might again be possible.

“You always seem to be wrestling with something,” she said, curling her fingers around the inside of his arm, just above his elbow.

Right again.

“How was the concert?” he finally asked.

“First half was baroque, lovely. Second half was twentieth century, not so lovely.”

He was about to chime in with his own low opinion of modern music but thought better of it.

“What kept you awake?” she asked.

“I’m not really sure.”

He sensed her skepticism. She let go of his arm. Something splashed into the pond a few yards ahead of them.

“I couldn’t get the Mellery business out of my mind,” he said.

She didn’t reply.

“Bits and pieces of it kept running around in my head—not getting anywhere—just making me uncomfortable—too tired to think straight.”

Again she offered nothing but a thoughtful silence.

“I kept thinking about that name on the note.”

“X. Arybdis?”

“How did you …? You heard us mention it?”

“I have good hearing.”

“I know, but it always surprises me.”

“It might not really be X. Arybdis, you know,” she said in that offhand way that he knew was anything but offhand.

“What?” he said, stopping.

“It might not be X. Arybdis.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was suffering through one of the atonal atrocities in the second half of the concert, thinking that some modern composers must really hate the cello. Why would you force a beautiful instrument to make such painful noises? Horrible scraping and whining.”

“And …?” he said gently, trying to keep his curiosity from sounding edgy.

“And I’d have left at that point, but I couldn’t because I’d given Ellie a ride there.”

“Ellie?”

“Ellie from the bottom of the hill—rather than take two cars? But she seemed to be enjoying it, God knows why.”

“Yes?”

“So I asked myself, what can I do to pass the time and keep from killing the musicians?”

There was another splash in the pond, and she stopped to listen. He half saw, half sensed her smile. Madeleine was fond of frogs.

“And?”

“And I thought to myself I could start figuring out my Christmas card list—it’s practically November—so I took out my pen and on the back of my program, at the top of the page, I wrote ‘Xmas Cards’—not the whole word
Christmas
but the abbreviation, X-M-A-S,” she said, spelling it out.

In the darkness he could feel more than see her inquiring look, as if she were asking whether he was getting the point.

“Go on,” he said.

“Every time I see that abbreviation, it reminds me of little Tommy Milakos.”

“Who?”

“Tommy had a crush on me in the ninth grade at Our Lady of Chastity.”

“I thought it was Our Lady of Sorrows,” said Gurney with a twinge of irritation.

She paused a beat to let her little joke register, then went on. “Anyway, one day Sister Immaculata, a very large woman, started screaming at me because I’d abbreviated
Christmas
as
Xmas
in a little quiz about Catholic holy days. She said anyone who wrote it that way was purposely ‘X-ing Christ out of Christmas.’ She was furious. I thought she was going to hit me. But right then Tommy—sweet little brown-eyed Tommy—jumped up out of his seat and shouted, ‘It’s not an
X
.’

“Sister Immaculata was shocked. It was the first time anyone
had ever dared to interrupt her. She just stared at him, but he stared right back, my little champion. ‘It’s not an English letter,’ he said. ‘It’s a Greek letter. It’s the same as an English
ch
. It’s the first letter of
Christ
in Greek.’ And, of course, Tommy Milakos was Greek, so everybody knew he must be right.”

Dark as it was, he thought he could see her smiling softly at the recollection, even suspected he heard a little sigh. Maybe he was wrong about the sigh—he hoped so. And another distraction—had she betrayed a preference for brown eyes over blue?
Get ahold of yourself, Gurney, she’s talking about the ninth grade
.

She went on, “So maybe ‘X. Arybdis’ is really ‘Ch. Arybdis’? Or maybe ‘Charybdis’? Isn’t that something in Greek mythology?”

“Yes, it is,” he said, as much to himself as to her.
“Between Scylla and Charybdis …”

“Like ‘between a rock and a hard place’?”

He nodded. “Something like that.”

“Which is which?”

He seemed not to hear the question, his mind racing now through the Charybdis implications, juggling the possibilities.

“Hmm?” He realized she’d asked him something.

“Scylla and Charybdis,” she said. “The rock and the hard place. Which is which?”

“It’s not a direct translation, just an approximation of the meaning. Scylla and Charybdis were actual navigational perils in the Strait of Messina. Ships had to navigate between them and tended to be destroyed in the process. In mythology, they were personalized into demons of destruction.”

“When you say navigational perils … like what?”

“Scylla was the name for a jagged outcropping of rocks that ships were battered against until they sank.”

When he didn’t immediately continue, she persisted, “And Charybdis?”

He cleared his throat. Something about the idea of Charybdis seemed especially disturbing. “Charybdis was a whirlpool. A very powerful whirlpool. Once a man was caught in it, he could never get
out. It sucked him down and tore him to pieces.” He recalled with unsettling clarity an illustration he’d seen ages ago in an edition of the
Odyssey
, showing a sailor trapped in the violent eddy, his face contorted in horror.

Again came the screech from the woods.

“Come on,” said Madeleine. “Let’s get up to the house. It’s going to rain any minute.”

He stood still, lost in his racing thoughts.

“Come on,” she urged. “Before we get soaked.”

He followed her to her car, and they drove up slowly through the pasture to the house.

Before they got out, he turned to her and asked, “You don’t think of every
x
you see as a possible
ch
, do you?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why …?”

“Because ‘Arybdis’ sounded Greek.”

“Right. Of course.”

She looked across the front seat at him, her expression, abetted by the clouded night, unreadable.

After a while she said, with a small smile in her voice, “You never stop thinking, do you?”

Then, as she had promised, the rain began.

A
fter being stalled for several hours at the periphery of the mountains, a steep cold front swept through the area, bringing lashings of wind and rain. In the morning the ground was covered with leaves and the air was charged with the intense smells of autumn. Water droplets on the pasture grass fractured the sun into crimson sparks.

As Gurney walked to his car, the assault on his senses awakened something from his childhood, when the sweet smell of grass was the smell of peace and security. Then it was gone—erased by his plans for the day.

He was heading for the Institute for Spiritual Renewal. If Mark Mellery was going to resist getting the police involved, Gurney wanted to argue that decision with him face-to-face. It wasn’t that he intended to wash his own hands of the matter. In fact, the more he pondered it, the more curious he was about his old classmate’s prominent place in the world and how it might relate to who and what were now threatening him. As long as he was careful about boundaries, Gurney imagined there would be room in the investigation for both himself and the local police.

He’d called Mellery to let him know he was coming. It was a perfect morning for a drive through the mountains. The route to Peony took him first through Walnut Crossing, which, like many Catskill villages, had grown up in the nineteenth century around an intersection
of locally important roads. The intersection, with diminished importance, remained. The eponymous nut tree, along with the region’s prosperity, was long gone. But the depressed economy, serious as it was, had a picturesque appearance—weathered barns and silos, rusted plows and hay wagons, abandoned hill pastures overgrown with fading goldenrod. The road from Walnut Crossing that led eventually to Peony wound its way through a postcard river valley where a handful of old farms were searching for innovative ways to survive. Abelard’s was one of these. Squeezed between the village of Dillweed and the nearby river, it was devoted to the organic cultivation of “Pesticide-Free Veggies,” which were then sold at Abelard’s General Store, along with fresh breads, Catskill cheeses, and very good coffee—coffee that Gurney felt an urgent need for as he pulled in to one of the little dirt parking spaces in front of the store’s sagging front porch.

Inside the door of the high-ceilinged space, against the right wall, stood a steaming array of coffeepots, which Gurney headed for. He filled a sixteen-ounce container, smiling at the rich aroma—better than Starbucks at half the price.

Unfortunately, the thought of Starbucks brought with it the image of a certain kind of young, successful Starbucks customer, and that immediately brought Kyle to mind, along with a little mental wince. It was his standard reaction. He suspected that it arose from a frustrated desire for a son who thought a smart cop was worth looking up to, a son more interested in seeking his guidance than Kyle was. Kyle—unteachable and untouchable in that absurdly expensive Porsche that his absurdly high Wall Street income had paid for at the absurdly young age of twenty-four. Still, he did owe the young man a return phone call, even if all the kid wanted to talk about was his latest Rolex or Aspen ski trip.

Gurney paid for his coffee and returned to his car. As he was thinking about the prospective call, his phone rang. He disliked coincidences and was relieved to discover that it was not Kyle but Mark Mellery.

“I just got today’s mail. I called you at home, but you’d gone out.
Madeleine gave me your cell number. I hope you don’t mind me calling.”

“What’s the problem?”

“My check came back. The guy who has the post-office box in Wycherly where I sent the $289.87 check to Arybdis—he sent it back to me with a note saying there’s nobody there by that name, that I must have gotten the address wrong. But I checked it again. It was the right box number. Davey? Are you there?”

“I’m here. Just trying to make sense of that.”

“Let me read you the note. ‘I found the enclosed piece of mail in my post-office box. There must be a mistake in the address. There is no one here named X. Arybdis.’ And it’s signed ‘Gregory Dermott.’ The letterhead on the notepaper says ‘GD Security Systems,’ and there’s an address and phone number in Wycherly.”

Gurney was about to explain that it was now almost certain that X. Arybdis was not a real name but a curious play on the name of a mythological whirlpool, a whirlpool that tore its victims to pieces, but he decided that the issue was already disturbing enough. The revelation of this extra twist could wait until he got to the institute. He told Mellery he’d be there in an hour.

What the hell was going on? It made no sense. What could be the purpose of demanding a specific amount of money, having the check made out to an obscure mythological name, and then having it sent to the wrong address in the likelihood that it would be returned to the sender? Why such a complex and seemingly pointless preamble to the nasty poems that followed?

The baffling aspects of the case were increasing, and so was Gurney’s interest.

P
eony was a town twice removed from the history it sought to reflect. Adjacent to Woodstock, it pretended to the same tie-dyed, psychedelic, rock-concert past—while Woodstock in turn nourished its own ersatz aura through its name association with the pot-fogged concert that had actually been held fifty miles away on a farm in Bethel. Peony’s image was the product of smoke and mirrors, and upon this chimerical foundation had risen predictable commercial structures—New Age bookstores, tarot parlors, Wiccan and Druidical emporia, tattoo shops, performance-art spaces, vegan restaurants—a center of gravity for flower children approaching senility, Deadheads in old Volkswagen buses, and mad eclectics swathed in everything from leathers to feathers.